19367	----	Transcribed from the 1916 Princeton University Press edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION ROMANCE TWO LECTURES BY SIR WALTER RALEIGH M.A., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, MAY 4TH AND 6TH, 1915 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1916 Copyright, 1916, by PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Published October, 1916 THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE The period of English political history which falls between Pitt's acceptance of office as prime minister, in 1783, and the passing of the Reform Bill, in 1832, is a period rich in character and event. The same period of fifty years is one of the most crowded epochs of our national literature. In 1783 William Blake produced his _Poetical Sketches_, and George Crabbe published _The Village_. In 1832 Scott died, not many months after the death of Goethe. Between these two dates a great company of English writers produced a literature of immense bulk, and of almost endless diversity of character. Yet one dominant strain in that literature has commonly been allowed to give a name to the whole period, and it is often called the Age of the Romantic Revival. We do not name other notable periods of our literature in this fashion. The name itself contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a new philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It attempts to describe as well as to name, and attaches significance not to kings, or great authors, but to the kind of writing which flourished conspicuously in that age. A less ambitious and much more secure name would have been the Age of George III; but this name has seldom been used, perhaps because the writers of his time who reverenced King George III were not very many in number. The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate, and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. The thing that struck the first observer is proved to be less important than he thought it. Scientific names, for all their air of learned universality, are merely fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of a single aspect. The decorous obscurity of the ancient languages is used to conceal an immense diversity of principle. Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon, cryptogam,--all these terms, which, if they were translated into the language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations, yet do lend a kind of formal majesty to ignorance. So it is with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then the freshness wears off it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a label that serves only to recall the memory of past travel. What was created for the needs of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only to save thinking. The best way to restore the habit of thinking is to do away with the names. The word Romantic loses almost all its meaning and value when it is used to characterize whole periods of our literature. Landor and Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; Steele and Sterne wrote prose in an age which set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet there is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in English verse which cannot be exemplified from the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there are not very many characteristics of Romantic prose which find no illustration in the writings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the very name of romance has wielded such a power in human affairs, and has so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history--Middle Ages, Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance--are very often invoked as if they were something ultimate, as if the names themselves were a sufficient explanation of all that they include. So an imperfect terminology is used to gain esteem for an artificial and rigid conception of things which were as fluid as life itself. The Renaissance, for instance, in its strict original meaning, is the name for that renewed study of the classical literatures which manifested itself throughout the chief countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Italy, where the movement had its origin, no single conspicuous event can be used to date it. The traditions inherited from Greece and Rome had never lost their authority; but with the increase of wealth and leisure in the city republics they were renewed and strengthened. From being remnants and memories they became live models; Latin poetry was revived, and Italian poetry was disciplined by the ancient masters. But the Renaissance, when it reached the shores of England, so far from giving new life to the literature it found there, at first degraded it. It killed the splendid prose school of Malory and Berners, and prose did not run clear again for a century. It bewildered and confused the minds of poets, and blending itself with the national tradition, produced the rich lawlessness of the English sixteenth century. It was a strong tributary to the stream of our national literature; but the popular usage, which assigns all that is good in the English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a mysterious event called the Renaissance, is merely absurd. Modern scholars, if they are forced to find a beginning for modern literature, would prefer to date it from the wonderful outburst of vernacular poetry in the latter part of the twelfth century, and, if they must name a birthplace, would claim attention for the Court of King Henry II. In some of its aspects, the Romantic revival may be exhibited as a natural consequence of the Renaissance. Classical scholarship at first scorned the vernacular literatures, and did all its work of criticism and imitation in the Latin tongue. By degrees the lesson was widened, and applied to the modern languages. Study; imitation in Latin; extension of classical usages and principles to modern literature,--these were the regular stages in the progress of the classical influence. When the poets of France and England, to name no others, had learned as much as they were able and willing to learn from the masters of Greece and Rome, the work of the Renaissance was done. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was no notable kind of Greek or Latin literature--historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, ode, satire--which had not worthy disciples and rivals in the literatures of France and England. Nothing remained to do but to go further afield and seek for new masters. These might easily have been found among the poets and prophets of the East, and not a few notable writers of the time began to forage in that direction. But the East was too remote and strange, and its languages were too little known, for this attempt to be carried far; the imitation of Chinese and Persian models was practised chiefly by way of fantasy and joke. The study of the neglected and forgotten matter of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was undertaken by serious scholars. The progress of the mediaeval influence reproduced very exactly the successive phases of the Classical Renaissance. At first there was study; and books like Sainte Palaye's _Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry_, and Paul Henri Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_, enjoyed a European reputation. Then followed the period of forgery and imitation, the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy. Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter Scott, Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the sceptic, in the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival; and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth century was the rebellion of a child against its parents. It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance. In the mathematical sciences definitions are all-important, because with them the definition is the thing. When a mathematician asks you to describe a circle, he asks you to create one. But the man who asks you to describe a monkey is less exacting; he will be content if you mention some of the features that seem to you to distinguish a monkey from other animals. Such a description must needs be based on personal impressions and ideas; some features must be chosen as being more significant than the rest. In the history of literature there are only two really significant things--men, and books. To study the ascertained facts concerning men and books is to study biography and bibliography, two sciences which between them supply the only competent and modest part of the history of literature. To discern the significance of men and books, to classify and explain them, is another matter. We have not, and we never shall have, a calculus sufficient for human life even at its weakest and poorest. Let him who conceives high hopes from the progress of knowledge and the pertinacity of thought tame and subdue his pride by considering, for a moment, the game of chess. That game is played with thirty-two pieces, of six different kinds, on a board of sixty-four squares. Each kind of piece has one allotted mode of action, which is further cramped by severe limitations of space. The conditions imposed upon the game are strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those who have made of chess a life- long study are ready to confess their complete ignorance of the fundamental merits of particular moves; one game does not resemble another; and from the most commonplace of developments there may spring up, on the sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are like miracles. If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess- board, how shall we set a limit to the possibilities of human life, which is chess, with variety and uncertainty many million times increased? It is prudent, therefore, to say little of the laws which govern the course of human history, to avoid, except for pastime, the discussion of tendencies and movements, and to speak chiefly of men and books. If an author can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes (and I do not deny that some authors can plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue as an author. He thought of himself as a cause, a surprising intruder upon the routine of the world, an original creator. I think that he is right, and that the profitable study of a man is the study which regards him as an oddity, not a quiddity. A general statement of the law that governs literary history may perhaps be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts--the art of dress. One of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of literary history. If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be written, it would illuminate the literary problem. The motives at work are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors, it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage. But these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his historical essays, are precisely the authors who do not count. An author who respects himself is not content if his work is mistaken for another's, even if that other be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase old verdicts? The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead, when the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to pass away. Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort, but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker. Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing. Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, who are nearest to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular regularity. The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for it in modern controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of the conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language on half Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The dialectical, provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peoples, became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the new literature which grew up among these peoples from the ninth century onwards,--or from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their language but felt the full influence of Christianity, be taken into the account. The chief thing to be noted concerning Romance literature is that it was a Christian literature, finding its background and inspiration in the ideas to which the Christian Church gave currency. While Rome spread her conquests over Europe, at the very heart of her empire Christianity took root, and by slow process transformed that empire. During the Middle Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of the Roman Emperors. This startling change possessed Gibbon's imagination, and is the theme of his great work. But the whole of Gibbon's history was anticipated and condensed by Hobbes in a single sentence--"If a man considers the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power." Here, then, is the answer to a question which at once suggests itself. How do we get this famous opposition between the older Latin literature and the literature of those countries which had inherited or accepted the Latin tradition? Why did not the Romans hand over their literature and teach it, as they handed over and taught their law? They did teach it in their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of the chief subjects of a liberal education, were purely literary studies, based on the work of the literary masters of Rome. Never was there an education so completely literary as the organized education of Rome and of her provinces. How came it that there was any breach between the old and the new? A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal system of education, which takes for its material the work of great poets and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers, employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated in the England of to-day. The officials responsible for education, whatever they may uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of their work to encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a warehouse of second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully explain the mind of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and balancing faults against merits. But Roman education throughout the Empire had further difficulties to encounter. To understand these it must be remembered what Latin literature was. The Latins, when we first discern them in the dim light of the past, were a small, strenuous, political people, with a passion for government and war. They first subdued Italy, and no very serious culture-problem resulted from that conquest. The Etruscans certainly contributed much to Latin civilization, but their separate history is lost. No one knows what the Etruscans thought. The Romans do not seem to have cared. They welded Italy together, and thereafter came into contact with the older, richer civilizations of the Mediterranean shores. The chief of these, in its influence, was the Greek civilization, as it had developed in that famous group of free city states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted to life. In Athens, at the time of her glory, life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even the conservative Romans were infected. They fell under the sway of Greek thought. When a practical man of business becomes intimate with an artist, he is never the same man again. The thought of that disinterested mode of life haunts his dreams. So Rome, though she had paid little regard to the other ancient peoples with whom she had had traffic and war, put herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted the Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods and goddesses, and translated and adopted Greek culture. The real Roman religion was a religion of the homestead, simple, pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments. So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and practical--laws and rustic proverbs--but they set themselves to produce a new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus copied Menander; and Roman literature took on that secondary and reminiscent character which it never lost. It was a literature of culture, not of creed. This people had so practical a genius that they could put the world in harness; for the decoration of the world they were willing to depend on foreign loans. In so far as Latin literature was founded on the Greek, that is, in so far as it was a derivative and imitative literature, it was not very fit for missionary purposes. One people can give to another only what is its own. The Greek gods were useless for export. An example may be taken from the English rule in India. We can give to the peoples of India our own representative institutions. We can give them our own authors, Shakespeare, Burke, Macaulay. But we cannot give them Homer and Virgil, who nevertheless continue to play an appreciable part in training the English mind; and we can hardly give them Milton, whose subtlest beauties depend on the niceties of the Latin speech. The trial for Latin literature came when obscurely, in the purlieus and kennels of Rome, like a hidden fermentation, Christianity arose. The earliest Christians were for the most part illiterate; but when at last Christianity reached the high places of the government, and controlled the Empire, a problem of enormous difficulty presented itself for solution. The whole elaborate educational system of the Romans was founded on the older literature and the older creeds. All education, law, and culture were pagan. How could the Christians be educated; and how, unless they were educated, could they appeal to the minds of educated men? So began a long struggle, which continued for many centuries, and swayed this way and that. Was Christianity to be founded barely on the Gospel precepts and on a way of life, or was it to seek to subdue the world by yielding to it? This, the religious problem, is the chief educational problem in recorded history. There were the usual parties; and the fiercest, on both sides, counselled no surrender. Tertullian, careful for the purity of the new religion, held it an unlawful thing for Christians to become teachers in the Roman schools. Later, in the reign of Julian the Apostate, an edict forbade Christians to teach in the schools, but this time for another reason, lest they should draw away the youth from the older faith. In the end the result was a practical compromise, arranged by certain ecclesiastical politicians, themselves lovers of letters, between the old world and the new. It was agreed, in effect, that the schools should teach humane letters and mythology, leaving it to the Church to teach divine doctrine and the conduct of life. All later history bears the marks of this compromise. Here was the beginning of that distinction and apportionment between the secular and the sacred which is so much more conspicuous in Christian communities than ever it has been among the followers of other religions. Here also was the beginning of that strange mixture, familiar to all students of literature, whereby the Bible and Virgil are quoted as equal authorities, Plato is set over against St. Paul, the Sibyl confirms the words of David, and, when a youth of promise, destined for the Church, is drowned, St. Peter and a river-god are the chief mourners at his poetic obsequies. This mixture is not a fantasy of the Renaissance; it has been part and parcel, from the earliest times, of the tradition of the Christian church. History is larger than morality; and a wise man will not attempt to pass judgment on those who found themselves in so unparalleled a position. A new religion, claiming an authority not of this world, prevailed in this world, and was confronted with all the resources of civilization, inextricably entangled with the ancient pagan faiths. What was to be done? The Gospel precepts seemed to admit of no transaction. "They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is an heavenly." The material prosperity and social order which Law and Politics take such pains to preserve and increase are no part of their care. They are strangers and pilgrims in the country where they pitch their tent for a night. How dare they spend time on cherishing the painted veil called Life, when their desires are fixed on what it conceals? When Tacitus called the Christian religion "a deadly superstition," he spoke as a true Roman, a member of the race of Empire- builders. His subtle political instinct scented danger from those who looked with coldness on the business and desire of this world. The Christian faith, which presents no social difficulties while it is professed here and there by a lonely saint or seer, is another thing when it becomes the formal creed of a nation. The Christians themselves knew that to cut themselves off from the country of their birth would have been a fatal choice, so far as this world is concerned. Their ultimate decision was to accept Roman civilization and Roman culture, and to add Christianity to it. Then followed an age-long attempt to Christianize Latin literature, to supply believers with a new poetry, written in polished and accomplished verse, and inspired by Christian doctrine. Of those who attempted this task, Prudentius is perhaps the greatest name. The attempt could never have been very successful; those who write in Latin verse must submit to be judged, not by the truth of their teaching, but by the formal beauties of their prosody, and the wealth of their allusive learning. Even Milton, zealot though he be, is esteemed for his manner rather than for his matter. But the experiment was cut short by the barbarian invasions. When the Empire was invaded, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Prudentius and Symmachus, Claudian and Paulinus of Nola, were all alive. These men, in varying degrees, had compounded and blended the two elements, the pagan and the Christian. The two have been compounded ever since. The famous sevententh century controversy concerning the fitness of sacred subjects for poetic treatment is but a repetition and an echo of that older and more vital difference. The two strains could never be perfectly reconciled, so that a certain impurity and confusion was bequeathed to modern European literature, not least to English literature. Ours is a great and various literature, but its rarest virtue is simplicity. Our best ballads and lyrics are filled with the matter of faith, but as often as we try the larger kinds of poetry, we inevitably pass over into reminiscence, learning, criticism,--in a word, culture. The barbarians seized, or were granted, land; and settled down under their chiefs. They accepted Christianity, and made it into a warlike religion. They learned and "corrupted" the Latin language. In their dialects they had access neither to the literature of ancient Rome, nor to the imitative scholarly Christian literature, poetry and homily, which competed with it. Latin continued to be the language of religion and law. It was full of terms and allusions which meant nothing to them. They knew something of government,--not of the old republic, but of their own men and estates. They believed wholly and simply in Christianity, especially the miraculous part of it. To them (as to all whom it has most profoundly influenced) it was not a philosophy, but a history of marvellous events. When, by the operation of society, their dialect had formed itself, a new literature, unlike anything that had flourished in ancient Rome, grew up among them. This was Romance, the great literary form of the Middle Ages. It was a sincere literature, expressive of their pride in arms and their simple religious faith. The early songs and ballads, chanted in the Romance speech, have all perished. From a later time there have come down to us the _Chansons de Geste_, narrative poems composed by the professional caste of poets to celebrate the deeds and adventures of the knights who fought the battles of Charlemagne against the Saracen invader. The note of this Romance literature is that it was actual, modern, realistic, at a time when classical literature had become a remote convention of bookish culture. It was sung in the banqueting-hall, while Latin poetry was read in the cells of monks. It flourished enormously, and extended itself to all the matter of history and legend, to King Arthur, Theseus, Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who were brought alive again in the likeness of knights and emperors. Its triumph was so complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. Like the creatures that live in the blood of man, literary forms and species commonly die of their own excess. Romances were multiplied, and imitated; professional poets, not content with marvels that had now become familiar, sought for a new sensation in extravagant language and incident. The tales became more and more sophisticated, elaborate, grotesque, and unreal, until, in the fourteenth century, a stout townsman, who ticketed bales in a custom- house, and was the best English poet of his time, found them ridiculous. In _Sir Thopas_ Chaucer parodies the popular literature of his day. Sir Thopas is a great reader of romances; he models himself on the heroes whose deeds possess his imagination, and scours the English countryside, seeking in vain for the fulfilment of his dreams of prowess. So Romance declined; and by the end of the seventeenth century the fashion is completely reversed; the pendulum has swung back; now it is the literature inspired by the old classical models that is real, and handles actual human interests, while Romantic literature has become remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not mean that the men of the later seventeenth century believed in the gods and Achilles, but not in the saints and Arthur. It means that classical literature was found best to imitate for its form. The greater classical writers had described the life of man, as they saw it, in direct and simple language, carefully ordered by art. After a long apprenticeship of translation and imitation, modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with modern matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used allegorically and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with some traditional ornament and fable, became the matter of poetry. A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question is involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man--books, and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach whole generations to interpret the world. Because they throw light on the life of man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up in a position of authority. Then they generate other books; and literature, receding further and further from the source of truth, becomes bookish and conventional, until those who have been taught to see nature through the spectacles of books grow uneasy, and throw away the distorting glasses, to look at nature afresh with the naked eye. They also write books, it may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who produce a literature no less servile than the literature it supplants. This movement of the sincere and independent human mind is found in the great writers of all periods, and is called the Return to Nature. It is seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in _The Rape of the Lock_ no less than in _Peter Bell_. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The _Iliad_ is the story of a quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the immediate cause? The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an Italian city; the shifting of a reading-desk from one position to another in a French church; the playful theft of a lock of hair by an amorous young English nobleman--these were enough, in point of fact, to set whole communities by the ears, and these are the events celebrated in _The Rape of the Bucket_, _The Rape of the Lectern_, _The Rape of the Lock_. How foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They are to be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While the late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models--to elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a professional rhetoric--there arose a new school, intent on making literature real and modern. These were the Romance poets. If they pictured Theseus as a duke, and Jason as a wandering knight, it was because they thought of them as live men, and took means to make them live for the reader or listener. The realism of the early literature of the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old Irish. The monk bewails the lawlessness of his wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of beauty and pleasure during the hour of divine service. The hermit in the wood describes, with loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. Never was there a fresher or more spontaneous poetry than the poetry of this early Christian people. But it is not in the direct line of descent, for it was written in the Celtic speech of a people who did not achieve the government of Europe. The French romances inherited the throne, and passed through all the stages of elaboration and decadence. They too, in their turn, became a professional rhetoric, false and tedious. When they ceased to be a true picture of life, they continued in esteem as a school of manners and deportment for the fantastic gallantry of a court. Yet through them all their Christian origin shines. Their very themes bear witness to the teaching of Christian asceticism and Christian idealism. The quest of a lady never seen; the temptations that present themselves to a wandering knight under the disguise of beauty and ease;--these, and many other familiar romantic plots borrow their inspiration from the same source. Not a few of the old fairy stories, preserved in folk-lore, are full of religious meaning--they are the Christian literature of the Dark Ages. Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins of later Romantic poetry. Pope's morality has little enough of the religious character: Know then this truth (enough for Man to know), Virtue alone is Happiness below. But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the language of Christianity: He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all. The like contrast holds between Dryden and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly fair to take an example from Dryden's poems on religion; they are rational arguments on difficult topics, after this fashion: In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way To learn what unsuspected ancients say; For 'tis not likely we should higher soar In search of heaven than all the church before. When Dryden writes in his most fervent and magnificent style, he writes like this: I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes, For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes? But of King _David's_ Foes be this the Doom, May all be like the Young-man _Absalom_; And for my Foes may this their Blessing be, To talk like _Doeg_ and to write like Thee. Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires into comparison with these splendors. When Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he writes: To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory. Some of the great poets of the Romantic Revival took mediaeval literature for their model, but they did more than that. They returned to the cult of wild nature; they reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance. Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the language. A description by any professional reporter of any Royal wedding is further from the truth to-day than it was in the eighteenth century. The average writer is looser and more unprincipled. The word Romance supplies no very valuable instrument of criticism even in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century. Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may call him a Romantic. He told of adventures--the adventures of the mind. He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what is derived from other books. His theme is man, nature, and human life. Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that came his way. He described his own country and his own people with loving care, and he loved also the melodrama of historical fiction and supernatural legend. "His romance and antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false." Certainly, _The Heart of Midlothian_ and _The Antiquary_ are better than _Ivanhoe_. Scott's love for the knighthood and monkery was real, but it was playful. His heart was with Fielding. There is nothing inconsistent in the best of the traditions of the two parties. The Classical school taught simplicity, directness, and modesty of speech. They are right: it is the way to tell a ghost story. The Romantic school taught a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious analysis of the human mind. They also are right: it is the way to investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times, with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All literature, except the strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless matter--the conventional epithet, the grandiose phrase, the outworn classical quotation, the self-conscious apology, the time-honored joke. But there are only two schools of literature--the good, and the bad. As for national legend, its growth is the same in all ages. The Greeks told tales of Achilles, the Romans of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne, the British of Arthur. It is a part of the same process, and an expression of the same humanity. I have tried to show that the Renaissance bears the same relation to classical literature as the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval literature, and that the whole history of the literature of Europe is an oscillation between Christian and Pagan ideals during that long and wavering process whereby Christianity was partially established as the creed and way of life of a group of diverse nations. The historical meaning of the word Romance is exact and easy to define. But in common usage the word means something much vaguer than this. It is a note, an atmosphere, a kind of feeling that is awakened not only by literature but by the behavior of men and the disposition of material objects. John Evelyn, the diarist, enjoys the reputation of having been the first to speak of a "romantic site,"--a phrase which leads the way to immeasurable possibilities in the application of the word. Accuracy in the definition of this larger meaning is unattainable; and would certainly be false, for the word has taken its meaning from centuries of usage by inaccurate thinkers. A whole cluster of feelings, impressions, and desires, dimly recognized as cognate, has grown around the word, which has now been a centre of critical discussion and controversy for the better part of a century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Romantic School, takes the Christianity of the Middle Ages as his starting-point, and relates everything to that. Perhaps he makes too much of allegory and symbolism, which have always been dear to the church, but are not conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impatient of the wistful intensities of youth, said that the Classical is health, and the Romantic disease. Much has been made, by many critics, of the statue and the picture, as types of ancient and modern art, the one complete in itself, the other suggesting more than it portrays. Mr. Walter Pater, borrowing a hint from a sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of Romance in the addition of strangeness to beauty, of curiosity to desire. It would be easy to multiply these epigrammatic statements, which are all not obscurely related to the fundamental changes wrought on the world by Christian ideas. No single formula can hope to describe and distinguish two eras, or define two tempers of mind. If I had to choose a single characteristic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I think I should choose Distance, and should call Romance the magic of Distance. What is the most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the line which describes the ghosts, staying for waftage on the banks of the river, and stretching out their hands in passionate desire to the further shore: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore. Scott expounds the harmonizing power of distance in his _Journal_, where he describes the funeral of his friend Laidlaw's infant: I saw the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness, softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the spectators,--the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when it becomes brutal and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the whine and the scream, should be all blended in that deep and distant sound, which rising and falling like the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral: the few mourners on horseback with their plaids wrapped around them--the father heading the procession as they enter the river, and pointing out the ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last long road--not one of the subordinate figures in discord with the general tone of the incident--seeming just accessories, and no more--this _is_ affecting. The same idea is the subject of T. E. Brown's poem, _The Schooner_: Just mark that schooner westward far at sea-- 'Tis but an hour ago When she was lying hoggish at the quay, And men ran to and fro, And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed and swore, And ever and anon, with crapulous glee, Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore. * * * * * And now, behold! a shadow of repose Upon a line of gray, She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose-- She sleeps, and dreams away, Soft blended in a unity of rest All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes, 'Neath the broad benediction of the West. Shelley finds the suggestion of distance in beautiful music: Though the sound overpowers, Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing A tone Of some world far from ours, Where music and moonlight and feeling Are one. Wordsworth hears it in the song of the Highland Girl: Will no one tell me what she sings?-- Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago. These quotations are enough to show what a width of view is given to modern Romantic poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen in a wide setting of the mountains and the sea than close at hand in the street. But the romantic effect of distance may delude and conceal as well as glorify and liberate. The weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that he must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it. He rejects the authority, and many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of society. He looks out from his window on the men fighting in the plain, and sees them transfigured under the rays of the setting sun. He enjoys the battle, but not as the fighters enjoy it. He nurses himself in all the luxury of philosophic sensation. He does not help to bury the child, or to navigate the schooner, or to discover the Fortunate Islands. The business of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not action. But the epic poet holds his reader fast by strong moral bonds of sympathy with the actors in the poem. "I should have liked to do that" is what the reader says to himself. He is asked to think and feel as a man, not as a god. The weakness of revived Romance found the most searching of its critics in Tennyson, who was fascinated, when he was shaping his own poetic career, by the picture and the past, yet could not feel satisfied with the purely aesthetic attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he returns to the question, Is poetry an escape from life? Must it lull the soul in a selfish security? The struggle that went on in his mind has left its mark on _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The Voyage_, _The Vision of Sin_, _The Lotos-Eaters_, and others of his poems. The Lady of Shalott lives secluded in her bower, where she weaves a magic web with gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall on her if she looks out on the world and down to the city of Camelot. She sees the outer world only in a mirror, and In her web she still delights To weave the mirror's magic sights --villages, market-girls, knights riding two and two, funerals, or pairs of lovers wandering by. At last she grows half-sick of seeing the world only in shadows and reflections. Then a sudden vivid experience breaks up this life of dream. Sir Lancelot rides past, in shining armor, singing as he rides. She leaves her magic web and mirror, and looks upon the real world. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott. She goes into the world, and there she meets her death. The poem is not an allegory, but there is no mistaking the thought that generated it. The mirror and the web are the emblems of Romantic art. The feelings which stir the heart to action, which spring to meet the occasion or the object, are contrasted, in the poem, with the more pensive feelings which are excited by the sight of the object in a mirror, and the suggestions of color and design which are to be transferred to the embroidery. The mirror is a true and subtle symbol. When Shakespeare treated the same problem, he made King Richard II, the most romantically minded of all his kings, call for a mirror. The thing that it is easiest for a man to see in a mirror is himself; egotism in its many forms, self-pity, self-cultivation, self-esteem, dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The desire to be the spectator of your own life, to see yourself in all kinds of heroic and pathetic attitudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry in many of its later developments. Yet life must be arrested and falsified before the desire can be fulfilled. No one has ever seen himself in a mirror as he is seen by others. He cannot catch himself looking away, self-forgetful, intent on something outward; yet only when he is in these attitudes does his true character show itself in his face. Nor, if he could so see himself, would he be a witness of the truth. The sensation of drowning, or of leading an assault in war, is very unlike the sentiment which is aroused in the spectator of either of these adventures. Romanticism, in its decline, confuses the sentiment with the sensation, and covets the enjoyment of life on the easy terms of a by- stander. These faults and failings of late Romance are far enough removed from the simple heroism of the death of Roland in the pass of Roncesvalles. Later Romance is known everywhere by its derivative, secondary, consciously literary character. Yet it draws sometimes from the original source of inspiration, and attains, by devious ways, to poetic glories not inferior to the old. IMITATION AND FORGERY Romance is a perennial form of modern literature, and has passed through many phases. No period has been without it, though the esteem in which it is held has varied a good deal from age to age. English literature is strong in romance; there is something in the English temper which makes scepticism ungrateful to it, and disposes it to treat even dreams seriously. Chaucer, who laughed at the romantic writers of his day, yet gave a new lease of life to Romance in _Troilus and Cressida_ and _The Knightes Tale_. Many of the poets of the seventeenth century chose romantic themes for their most serious work; if Davenant and Chamberlayne and others had been as successful as they were ambitious, they would have anticipated the Revival of Romance. Even in the age of Pope, the old romance subjects were still popular, though they were celebrated in books which have long been forgotten. Everyone who has studied the Troy legend of the Middle Ages knows how great a share in the popularization of the legend belongs to the Sicilian lawyer, Guido delle Colonne, who summarized, in the dull style of a Latin chronicle, and without acknowledgment, the brilliant _Roman de Troie_ which the French poet, Benoit de Sainte-More had written for Queen Eleanor of England. Guide's matter-of-fact compilation had an enormous vogue; Chaucer, Lydgate, and Shakespeare treated it as an authority; and Caxton translated it into English prose. Through all the changes of fashion Caxton's version continued in esteem; it was repeatedly revised and reissued; and, in the very age of Pope, found what was doubtless a large public under the title _The Destruction of Troy_, _In Three Books . . . With many Admirable Acts of Chivalry and Martial Prowess_, _effected by Valiant Knights_, _in the Defence and Love of distressed Ladies. The Thirteenth Edition_, _Corrected and much Amended_. London, _Printed for Eben. Tracey_, _at the Three Bibles on London-Bridge_. _1708_. In the underworld of literature Romance never died out. The Revival of Romance took its special character from a gradual and powerful reaction against Dryden and Pope and all those masters of Classical method who, during half a century, had legislated for English poetry. It began very early in the eighteenth century, long before the death of Pope. No sooner did a dynasty of moralists and satirists claim possession of the high places, and speak in the name of English literature, than all the other interests and kinds, which survived among the people, began to range themselves in opposition, and to assert their right to be heard. The supremacy of Dryden and Pope was the most despotic rule that English poetry has ever known, and the revolt was strong in proportion. Satire and morality very easily becomes tedious, especially when they are in close alliance. Despotism may be tempered by epigrams, and so become tolerable, but it is important that the epigrams should not be made by the despot. Outside the charmed circle of his friendships, Pope was ready enough to use his wit against any pretender. The change began gradually, and in very innocent fashion. Poetry had been taught to be scholarly, self-conscious, experimental; and it showed its skill in half-playful imitations of the older English masters. Pope himself imitated Chaucer and Spenser in burlesque fashion. John Philips, in _The Splendid Shilling_, used Milton's heightened style to describe the distresses of an impecunious poet. William Shenstone in _The School- mistress_, parodied Spenser, yet the parody is in no way hostile, and betrays an almost sentimental admiration. Spenser, like Milton, never lost credit as a master, though his fame was obscured a little during the reign of Dryden. His style, it must be remembered, was archaic in his own time; it could not grow old, for it had never been young. Addison, in _An Account of the Greatest English Poets_, says that Spenser's verse Can charm an understanding age no more; The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below. But the _Account_ is a merely juvenile work; its dogma is not the sword of judgment, but the shield of ignorance. "The character he gives of Spenser," said Pope, "is false; and I have heard him say that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it." As for Pope himself, among the English poets Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were his childhood's favorites, in that order; and the year before his death he said to Spence--"I don't know how it is; there is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the Faerie Queene, when I was about twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over, about a year or two ago." The lyrical Milton and the romantic Spenser found disciples among poets in the early half of the eighteenth century. Two of these disciples may be mentioned, both born about the year 1700, only twelve years later than Pope. John Dyer, the son of a solicitor in Wales, was bred to the law, but gave it up to study painting under Jonathan Richardson. His earlier and better poems were written while he wandered about South Wales in pursuit of his art. _Grongar Hill_, the most notable of them, was published in 1726. Love of the country is what inspires his verses, which have a very winning simplicity, only touched here and there by the conventions deemed proper for poetry: Grass and flowers Quiet treads, On the meads and mountain-heads, Along with Pleasure, close ally'd, Ever by each other's side; And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush, while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill. The truth of his observation endeared him to Wordsworth; and his moral, when he finds a moral, is without violence: How close and small the hedges lie! What streaks of meadows cross the eye! A step methinks may pass the stream, So little distant dangers seem; So we mistake the Future's face, Ey'd thro' Hope's deluding glass; As yon summits soft and fair, Clad in colours of the air, Which, to those who journey near, Barren, and brown, and rough appear, Still we tread tir'd the same coarse way, The present's still a cloudy day. It takes a good poet to strike a clear note, with no indecision, in the opening lines of his poem, as Dyer does in _The Country Walk_: I am resolv'd, this charming day, In the open fields to stray; And have no roof above my head But that whereon the Gods do tread. His landscapes are delicately etched, and are loved for their own sake: And there behold a bloomy mead, A silver stream, a willow shade, Beneath the shade a fisher stand, Who, with the angle in his hand, Swings the nibbling fry to land. It would be absurd to speak solemnly of Dyer's debt to Milton; he is an original poet; but the writer of the lines quoted above can never have been blind to the beauties of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_. His two arts brought him little material prosperity; in 1740 he took orders in the Church of England, and in his later years did harm to his fame by a long industrial poem called _The Fleece_, which has on it none of the dew that glistens on his youthful verses. James Thomson, who won a great reputation in his own age, was the son of a parish minister in Scotland. He was educated in Edinburgh, and came to London to seek his fortune. All Thomson's work shows the new tendencies in poetry struggling with the accepted fashions. His language in _The Seasons_ is habitually rhetorical and stilted, yet there is hardly a page without its vignettes of truth and beauty. When he forgets what he has learned in the Rhetoric class, and falls back on his own memories and likings, the poet in him reappears. In _The Castle of Indolence_, published just before his death in 1748, he imitates Spenser. One stanza of this poem is more famous than all the rest; it is pure and high romance: As when a shepherd of the Hebrid-Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main, (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, Or that aerial beings sometimes deign To stand embodied to our senses plain), Sees on the naked hill, or valley low, The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast assembly moving to and fro; Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show. Many who are familiar with this simile have never been at the pains to remember, or enquire, what it illustrates. Indeed its appearance in the poem is almost startling, as if it were there for no purpose but to prophesy of the coming glories of English poetry. The visitors to the Castle of Indolence are met at the gate by the porter, who supplies them with dressing-gowns and slippers, wherein to take their ease. They then stroll off to various parts of the spacious grounds, and their disappearance is the occasion for this wonderful verse. Thomson cared no more than his readers for the application of the figure; what possessed him was his memory of the magic twilight on the west coast of Scotland. Pope and Prior were metropolitan poets; it is worth noting that Dyer belonged to Wales, and Thomson to Scotland. It is even more significant that Dyer was by profession a painter, and that Thomson's poems were influenced by memories of the fashionable school of landscape painting. The development of Romantic poetry in the eighteenth century is inseparably associated with pictorial art, and especially with the rise of landscape painting. Two great masters of the seventeenth century, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain, are more important than all the rest. We have here to do not with the absolute merits of painting, nor with its technical beauties and subtleties, but with its effect on the popular imagination, which in this matter does not much differ from the poetic imagination. The landscapes of Salvator Rosa and Claude were made familiar to an enormous public by the process of engraving, and poetry followed where painting led. There are exquisite landscapes in the backgrounds of the great Italian masters; Leonardo, Titian, and others; but now the background became the picture, and the groups of figures were reduced to serve as incidents in a wider scheme. Exactly the same change, the same shift of the centre of interest, may be seen in Thomson's poetry compared with Spenser's. No doubt it would be difficult to balance the creditor and debtor account as between poetry and painting; the earlier pictorial landscapes borrowed some hints from the older romances; but in England, at least, landscapes of wild rocks, and calm lakes, and feudal castles lit up by the glow of the setting sun were familiar before the reaction in poetry set in. Romance, in its modern development, is largely a question of background. A romantic love-affair might be defined as a love-affair in other than domestic surroundings. Who can use the word "romantic" with more authority than Coleridge? In _Kubla Khan_, a poem which some would choose as the high-water mark of English romantic poetry, he gets his effect from the description of a landscape combining the extremes of beauty and terror: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, * * * * * It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! Romance demands scenery; and it should never be forgotten that the age of Pope, the age of symmetry and correctness in poetry, was an age when the taste for wild scenery in painting and in gardening was at its height. If the house was set in order, the garden broke into a wilderness. Addison in the _Spectator_ (No. 414) praises the new art of landscape gardening: There is generally in nature something more grand and august, than what we meet with in the curiosities of art. When, therefore, we see this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more accurate productions of art. On this account our _English_ gardens are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in _France_ and _Italy_, where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country. Addison would have hesitated to apply this doctrine to poetry; indeed the orthodoxy of that age favored the highest possible contrast between the orderly works of man, and the garden, which it chose to treat as the outpost of rebellious nature. Pope was a gardener as well as a poet, and his gardening was extravagantly romantic. He describes his ideal garden in the _Epistle to the Earl of Burlington_: Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd, Where half the skill is decently to hide. He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds. Consult the genius of the place in all; That tells the waters or to rise, or fall; Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the vale; Calls in the country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades; Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could in his garden at Twickenham, where he attempted to compress every variety of scenic effect within the space of five acres, so that it became a kind of melodramatic peep-show. The professional landscape-gardeners worked on a larger scale; the two chief of them perhaps were Bridgeman, who invented the haha for the purpose of concealing the bounds; and William Kent, Pope's associate and contemporary, who disarranged old gardens, and designed illustrations for Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. Kent was an architect and bad painter, much favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield compares him to Apelles, who alone was permitted to paint the portrait of Alexander: Equal your varied wonders! save This difference we see, One would no other painter have-- No other would have thee. From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Burlington. He helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid, St. Augustine's cave (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the Saxon Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves, persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his neighbors. "In time," says Johnson, "his expenses brought clamours about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies." The chief of Kent's successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called "Capability Brown" from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis--"It has capabilities; it has capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture,--"Thames! Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me." He certainly imposed himself upon his own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. Brown," said Richard Owen Cambridge, "I very earnestly wish that I may die before you." "Why so?" said Brown with some surprise. "Because," said he, "I should like to see Heaven before you had improved it." Among the romantic writers who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford. After the practice came the theory. The painters and landscape-gardeners were followed by a school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these, Thomas Whately, whose _Observations on Modern Gardening_ appeared in 1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been carried. "In wild and romantic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced a ruined stone bridge, of which some arches may be still standing, and the loss of those which are fallen may be supplied by a few planks, with a rail, thrown over the vacancy. It is a picturesque object: it suits the situation; and the antiquity of the passage, the care taken to keep it still open, though the original building is decayed, the apparent necessity which thence results for a communication, give it an imposing air of reality." The context of this passages shows that the bridge leads nowhither. On the management of rocks Whately is a connoisseur. "Their most distinguished characters," he says, "are _dignity_, _terror_, and _fancy_: the expressions of all are constantly wild; and sometimes a rocky scene is only wild, without pretensions to any particular character." But ruins are what he likes best, and he recommends that they shall be constructed on the model of Tintern Abbey. They must be obvious ruins, much dilapidated, or the visitors will examine them too closely. "An appendage evidently more modern than the principal structure will sometimes corroborate the effect; the shed of a cottager amidst the remains of a temple, is a contrast both to the former and the present state of the building." It seems almost impossible that this should have been offered as serious advice; but it was the admired usage of the time. Whately's book was a recognized authority, and ran through several editions. He is also known as a Shakespeare critic, of no particular mark. A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them was entitled _Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty_ (1782). Others, which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In _The Prelude_ he tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic art." He calls this habit "a strong infection of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself "with meagre novelties of colour and proportion." In another passage he speaks of similar melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study of poetry. The dignities of plain occurrence then Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him-- I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever. Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur teaching did leave its mark on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from Wordsworth's early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey, the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands--these were the favored places of the apostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places in our poetic history. All these gardeners and aesthetic critics who busied themselves with wild nature were aiming at an ideal which had been expressed in many painted landscapes, and had been held up as the top of admiration by one of the greatest English poets. The influence of Milton on the new landscape interest must be held to be not less than the influence of his contemporaries, Salvator Rosa and Claude. His descriptions of Paradise did more than any painting to alter the whole practice of gardening. They are often appealed to, even by the technical gardeners. In garden-lore Milton was a convinced Romantic. He has two descriptions of the Garden of Eden; the slighter of the two occurs on the occasion of Raphael's entry, and merely resumes the earlier and fuller account: Their glittering tents they passed, and now is come Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe, And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme; A Wilderness of Sweets; for Nature here Wantoned as in her prime and plaid at will Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, Wilde above rule or art; enormous bliss. Coleridge has some remarks, in his _Table Talk_, on Milton's disregard of painting. There are only two pictures, he says, in Milton; Adam bending over the sleeping Eve, and the entrance of Dalilah, like a ship under full sail. Certainly the above lines are no picture; but they are more exciting than any clear delineation could be; they are full of scent, and air, and the emotions of ease and bliss. The other passage has more of architectural quality in it, and describes what first met Satan's gaze, when he entered the Garden and sat, perched like a cormorant, upon the Tree of Life. The crisped Brooks With mazie error under pendant shades Ran Nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon Poured forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierc't shade Imbround the noontide Bowers: Thus was this place, A happy rural seat of various view: Groves whose rich Trees wept odorous Gumms and Balme, Others whose fruit burnisht with Golden Rinde Hung amiable, _Hesperian_ Fables true, If true, here onely, and of delicious taste: Betwixt the Lawns, or level Downs, and Flocks Grasing the tender herb, were interpos'd, Or palmie hilloc, or the flourie lap Of some irriguous Valley spread her store, Flours of all hue, and without Thorn the Rose: Another side, umbrageous Grots and Caves Of coole recess, o'er which the mantling Vine Layes forth her purple Grape, and gently creeps Luxuriant; mean while murmuring waters fall Down the slope hills, disperst, or in a Lake, That to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd, Her chrystall mirror holds, unite their streams. The Birds their quire apply; aires, vernal aires, Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune The trembling leaves, while Universal _Pan_ Knit with the _Graces_ and the _Hours_ in dance Led on th' Eternal Spring. Here is all the variety of hill and valley, wood and lawn, rock and meadow, waterfall and lake, rose and vine, which the landscape artists also loved to depict, and which, together with ruined temples and castles, unknown in Paradise, became the cherished ideal of landscape gardening. By the influence of _Paradise Lost_ upon the gardeners, no less than by the influence of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ upon the poets, Milton may claim to be regarded as one of the forefathers of the Romantic Revival. There is no need to distinguish carefully between poetry and painting in discussing their contributions to Romance. A great outcry was raised, in the last age, against literary criticism of pictures. But in this question we are concerned with this effect of pictures on the normal imagination, which is literary, which cares for story, and suggested action, and the whole chain of memories and desires that a picture may set in motion. Do not most of those who look at a romantic landscape imagine themselves wandering among the scenes that are portrayed? And are not men prone to admire in Nature what they have been taught by Art to notice? The landscape art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries taught them to imagine themselves in lonely scenes, among old ruins or frowning rocks, by the light of sunrise or sunset, cast on gleaming lakes. These were the theatre of Romance; and the emotions awakened by scenes like these played an enormous part in the Revival. It was thus that poets were educated to find that exaltation in the terrors of mountainous regions which Gray expressed when he said: "Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry." The weaker side of modern Romance, the play-acting and pretence that has always accompanied it, may be seen in the gardening mania. It was not enough to be a country gentleman; the position must be improved by the added elegances of a hermit's cell and an Egyptian pyramid. It is like children's play; the day is long, the affairs of our elders are tedious, we are tired of a life in which there is no danger and no hunger; let us pretend that we are monks, or ancient Romans. The mature imagination interprets the facts; this kind of imagination escapes from the facts into a world of make-believe, where the tyranny and cause and effect is no longer felt. It is not a hard word to call it childish; the imagination of these early Romantics had a child's weakness and a child's delightful confidence and zest. The same play activity expressed itself in literature, where an orgy of imitation ushered in the real movement. The antiquarian beginnings of Romantic poetry may be well illustrated by the life and works of Thomas Warton. He passed his life as a resident Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and devoted his leisure, which was considerable, to the study of English poetry and Gothic architecture. He was not yet thirty when, in 1757, he was elected Professor of Poetry, a post which he held for ten years. During this time he planned a complete History of English Poetry, a task which Pope and Gray in turn had contemplated and abandoned. The historical interest which is so conspicuous in early Romanticism owed not a little, it may be remarked in passing, to the initiative of Pope, who must therefore be given a place in any full genealogy of the Romantic family. Warton's _History_, so far as it was completed, was published between 1774 and 1781, when he relaxed his efforts, and took up lesser tasks. In 1785 he was made Poet Laureate on the strength of his early poems and later scholarship. He died in 1790. Warton's poems are a curious study. Spenser and Milton are his masters, and he is a docile pupil. His poetry is all derivative, and might be best described as imitation poetry. Christopher North said of him that "the gods had made him poetical, but not a poet," a saying which contains the whole truth. He puts together a mosaic of phrases borrowed from his teachers, and frames them in a sentimental setting of his own. Here are some passages from _The Pleasures of Melancholy_, which, though he wrote it at the age of seventeen, does not differ in method or inspiration from the rest of his poetical work: Beneath yon ruin'd abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, Where thro' some western window the pale moon Pours her long-levell'd rule of streaming light; While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone screech-owl's note, who builds his bow'r Amid the mould'ring caverns dark and damp, Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green Invests some wasted tow'r. . . . Then, when the sullen shades of ev'ning close, Where thro' the room a blindly-glimm'ring gleam The dying embers scatter, far remote From Mirth's mad shouts, that thro' th' illumin'd roof Resound with festive echo, let me sit, Blest with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . . O come then, Melancholy, queen of thought! O come with saintly look, and steadfast step, From forth thy cave embower'd with mournful yew, Where ever to the curfeu's solemn sound List'ning thou sitt'st, and with thy cypress bind Thy votary's hair, and seal him for thy son. Melancholy seems not to have answered these advances. In later life Warton was a short, squat, red-faced man, fond of ale, and a cheerful talker, with a thick utterance, so that he gobbled like a turkey-cock. Some of his verses are cheerful. This is from the _Ode on the Approach of Summer_: Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand With thee lead a buxom band; Bring fantastic-footed Joy, With Sport, that yellow-tressed boy: Leisure, that through the balmy sky Chases a crimson butterfly. Bring Health, that loves in early dawn To meet the milk-maid on the lawn; Bring Pleasure, rural nymph, and Peace, Meek, cottage-loving shepherdess! It is all like this, fluent and unnecessary. Perhaps no verses in English were ever made so exactly in the approved fashion of modern Latin verses. Warton writes pleasantly, his cento of reminiscences is skilful, and his own epithets are sometimes happy, yet nothing comes of it. His work suggests the doubt whether any modern Latin verse, even the best, would deceive an intelligent citizen of ancient Rome. The strange thing about the Romantic Revival is that an epidemic of this sort of imitation at last produced real poetry and real romance. The industrious simulation of the emotions begot the emotions simulated. Is there not a story told of a young officer who, having dressed himself in a sheet to frighten his fellows, was embarrassed by the company of a real ghost, bent on the same errand; and retired from the enterprise, leaving it wholly to the professional? That, at any rate, is very much what happened to the Romantic impersonators. Another parallel may perhaps be found in the power of vulgarity to advance civilization. Take, for instance, the question of manners. Politeness is a codification of the impulses of a heart that is moved by good will and consideration for others. If the impulses are not there, the politeness is so far unreal and insincere--a cheap varnish. Yet it is insisted on by society, and enforced by fear and fashion. If the forms are taught, the soul of them may be, and sometimes is, breathed in later. So this imitative and timid artifice, this conformity to opinions the ground and meaning of which is not fully understood, becomes a great engine of social progress. Imitation and forgery, which are a kind of literary vulgarity, were the school of Romanticism in its nonage. Some of the greater poets who passed this way went on to express things subtler and more profound than had found a voice in the poetry that they imitated. The long debate on the so-called poems of Ossian is now ended. They are known to be a not very skilful forgery by James Macpherson. Yet their importance in literary history remains undiminished, and the life of Macpherson has a curious kind of pathos. He was the creature and victim of the Romantic movement, and was led, by almost insensible degrees, into supplying fraudulent evidence for the favorite Romantic theory that a truer and deeper vein of poetry is to be found among primitive peoples. Collins's _Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland_ and Gray's _Bard_ show the literary world prepared to put itself to school to Celtic tradition. Macpherson supplied it with a body of poetry which exactly fulfilled its expectations. The crucial date in his history is his meeting in 1759 with John Home, the author of the once famous tragedy of _Douglas_. In the summer of that year Home was drinking the waters at Moffat, and among the visitors assembled there found Thomas Graham, afterwards Lord Lynedoch, then a boy of ten, and his tutor, James Macpherson, a young Highlander, shy and ambitious, who had been educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and had dabbled in verse. Home, full of the literary gossip of the hour, seized upon the opportunity to question Macpherson concerning the poems that were rumored to have survived among the Gaelic-speaking population of Scotland. In the light of what we now know it is not difficult to understand the genesis of this great European fraud. Macpherson was proud of his race, which he had celebrated in an heroic poem called _The Highlander_. He had interested himself in Gaelic poetry, though his knowledge of the tongue was not good, and he had by him some fragments of genuine Gaelic poems. He was flattered by Home's appeal to him, and, feeling perhaps that the few and slight genuine poems which he could produce would hardly warrant the magnificence of his allusions to Gaelic literature, he forged a tale in poetic prose, called _The Death of Oscar_, and presented it to Home as a translation from the Gaelic. The poem was much admired, and Macpherson, unable now to retrace his steps without declaring himself a cheat, soon produced others from the same source. These were submitted to the literary society of Edinburgh, with the great Dr. Blair at its head, and were pronounced to be the wonder of the world. From this point onward, during a long and melancholy life, poor Macpherson was enslaved to the fraud which had its beginning in the shyness and vanity of his own character. He was bound now to forge or to fail; and no doubt the consciousness that it was his own work which called forth such rapturous applause supported him in his labors and justified him to his own conscience. A subscription was easily raised in Edinburgh to enable him to travel and collect the remains of Celtic poetry. For a few months he perambulated the western highlands and islands, and returned to Edinburgh bringing with him _Fingal_, a complete epic poem in six books. This was followed by _Temora_, in eight books, also attributed to the great Gaelic bard Ossian; and the new Celtic fashion was established. These poems had an immense success. Everyone knows how they influenced the youth of Goethe, and captured the imagination of Napoleon. It is less surprising that they enraptured the poet Gray, and were approved by the professor Blair, for they were exactly modelled on the practice and theory of these two critics. All the fashionable doctrine of that age concerning the history of poetry was borne out by these works. Poetry, so it was held, is to be found in its perfection only in primitive society, before it is overlaid by the complexities of modern civilization. Its most perfect, and therefore its earliest, form, is the epic; and Dr. Blair must have been delighted to find that the laws of the epic, which he so often explained to his class in Edinburgh University, were minutely observed by the oldest of Scottish bards. He died without suspecting that the inspiration of the Ossianic poems had come partly from himself. The belief that Celtic literature is essentially and eternally melancholy,--a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded of many simples, and extracted from works that were held in high esteem in the eighteenth century--Young's _Night Thoughts_, Blair's _Grave_, Gray's _Bard_, and the soliloquies of Milton's Satan. Macpherson was soon challenged, and his whole life was passed in a brawl of controversy. Two famous men dismissed him contemptuously. Dr. Johnson, who knew what honesty means among scholars, treated him as an impudent impostor. Wordsworth, who knew what simplicity means in poetry, declared that all the imagery of the poems is false and spurious. But the whole question early became a national quarrel, and the honor of Scotland was involved in it. There are signs that Macpherson would gladly have escaped from the storm he had raised. Aided by his early literary success, he became a prosperous man, held a well-paid post at court, entered Parliament, and was pensioned by the government. Still the controversy persisted. He had found it easy to take up a haughty attitude towards those hostile critics who had doubted his good faith and had asked him to produce his Gaelic originals. But now the demand for the originals came from his champions and friends, who desired to place the fame of Scotland's oldest and greatest poet on a sure foundation. He wriggled on the hook, and more than once timidly hinted that the poems owed not a little to the poetic genius of the translator. But this half- hearted attempt to rob the great Ossian of a part of his fame stirred the Caledonian enthusiasts to a frenzy of indignation. At last, when he was no longer able to restrain his supporters, the wretched Macpherson found no escape but one. In middle age, some twenty years after his first appearance on the poetic horizon, he sat down, with a heavy heart and an imperfect knowledge of the Gaelic tongue, to forge the originals. In 1807, eleven years after his death, these were at last published. The progress of genuine Celtic scholarship during the succeeding century did the rest; and the old blind bard rejoined the mists and vapors which were the inspiration of his Muse. {78} The poems of Ossian are only one, though perhaps the most signal, instance of the forgeries which prevailed like an epidemic at the time of the Romantic Revival. Some of these, like Ireland's Shakespeare forgeries, were little better than cold-blooded mercenary frauds. Others, like Chatterton's Rowley Poems and Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, are full of the zest and delight of play-acting. Even Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_, though it is free from the reproach of forgery, is touched by the same spirit. The severe morality of scholarship had not yet been applied to mediaeval or modern matter. Scholars are the trustees of poets; but where this trust is undertaken by men who are poets themselves, there is usually a good deal of gaiety and exuberance in its performance. I have now traced some of the neglected sources of revived Romance, and have shown how in this movement, more notably, perhaps, than in any other great movement in literature, it was not the supply which created the demand, but the demand which created the supply. The Romantic change was wrought, not by the energy of lonely pioneers, but by a shift in public taste. Readers of poetry knew what it was they wanted, even before they knew whether it existed. Writers were soon at hand to prove that it had existed in the past, and could still be made. The weakness of vague desire is felt everywhere in the origins of the change. Out of the weakness came strength; the tinsel Gothic castle of Walpole was enlarged to house the magnanimous soul of Scott; the Sorrows of Werther gave birth to _Faust_. The weakness of the Romantic movement, its love of mere sensation and sentiment, is well exhibited in its effect upon the sane and strong mind of Keats. He was a pupil of the Romantics; and poetry, as he first conceived of it, seemed to open to him boundless fields of passive enjoyment. His early work shows the struggle between the delicious swoon of reverie and the growing pains of thought. His verse, in its beginnings, was crowded with "luxuries, bright, milky, soft, and rosy." He was a boy at the time of England's greatest naval glory, but he thinks more of Robin Hood than of Nelson. If Robin Hood could revisit the forest, says Keats, He would swear, for all his oaks Fallen beneath the dockyard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas. His use of a word like "rich," as Mr. Robert Bridges has remarked, is almost inhuman in its luxurious detachment from the human situation. Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave. By his work in this kind Keats became the parent and founder of the Aesthetic School of poetry, which is more than half in love with easeful death, and seeks nothing so ardently as rest and escape from the world. The epilogue to the Aesthetic movement was written by William Morris before ever he broke out from those enchanted bowers: So with this earthly paradise it is, If ye will read aright, and pardon me Who strive to build a shadowy isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea, Where tossed about all hearts of men must be, Whose ravening monsters mighty men must slay, Not the poor singer of an empty day. Yet there is another side to the work of Keats, more wonderful in its broken promise than all the soft perfections of his tender Muse. He grew tired of imitation and ease. Weakness may exclude the world by forgetting it; only strength can conquer the world. What if this law be also the law of beauty? The thought inspires his last great attempt, the fragment of _Hyperion_. Men have their dynasties and revolutions; but the immortals also, whom men worship, must change to live. So on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty. And this power cannot be won by those who shirk the challenge of ugly facts. O folly! for to bear all naked truths, And to envisage circumstance, all calm, That is the top of sovereignty. As if to enforce his thought by repetition, Keats made an allegorical framework for his revised version of the poem. There he exhibits himself as wandering among the delights of the garden of this life, and indulging himself to the point of drunkenness. Awaked from his swoon, he finds himself at the steps of the temple of fame. He is told he must climb or die. After an agony of struggle he mounts to the top, and has speech there with a veiled figure, who tells him that this temple is all that has been spared in the war between the rival houses of the Gods. When he asks why he has been saved from death, the veiled figure makes reply: "None can usurp this height," return'd that shade, "But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest." * * * * * "Are there not thousands in the world," said I, Encourag'd by the sooth voice of the shade, "Who love their fellows even to the death, Who feel the giant agony of the world, And more, like slaves to poor humanity, Labour for mortal good? I sure should see Other men here, but I am here alone." "Those whom thou spakest of are no visionaries," Rejoined that voice; "they are no dreamers weak; They seek no wonder but the human face, No music but a happy-noted voice: They come not here, they have no thought to come; And thou art here, for thou art less than they. What benefit canst thou do, or all thy tribe, To the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself: think of the earth; What bliss, even in hope, is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home, Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Whether his labours be sublime or low-- The pain alone, the joy alone, distinct: Only the dreamer venoms all his days, Bearing more woe than all his sins deserve." In this, which is almost his last deliberate utterance, Keats expresses his sense of the futility of romance, and seems to condemn poetry itself. A condemnation of the expression of profound thought in beautiful forms would come very ill from Keats, but this much he surely had learned, that poetry, the real high poetry, cannot be made out of dreams. The worst of dreams is that you cannot discipline them. Their tragedy is night-mare; their comedy is nonsense. Only what can stand severe discipline, and emerge the purer and stronger for it, is fit to endure. For all its sins of flatness and prosiness the Classical School has always taught discipline. No doubt it has sometimes trusted too absolutely to discipline, and has given us too much of the foot-rule and the tuning- fork. But one discipline, at least, poetry cannot afford to neglect--the discipline of facts and life. The poetry that can face this ordeal and survive it is rare. Some poets are tempted to avoid the experience and save the dream. Others, who were poets in their youth, undergo the experience and are beaten by it. But the poetry which can bear all naked truth and still keep its singing voice is the only immortal poetry. Footnotes: {78} For some of the facts in this account of Ossian I am indebted to Mr. J. S. Smart's fascinating book, _James Macpherson_, _an Episode in Literature_ (David Nutt, 1905). 
15931	----	A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY by HENRY A. BEERS Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Yale_, etc. New York Henry Holt and Company 1918 ROMANCE My love dwelt in a Northern land. A grey tower in a forest green Was hers, and far on either hand The long wash of the waves was seen, And leagues on leagues of yellow sand, The woven forest boughs between. And through the silver Northern light The sunset slowly died away, And herds of strange deer, lily-white, Stole forth among the branches grey; About the coming of the light, They fled like ghosts before the day. I know not if the forest green Still girdles round that castle grey; I know not if the boughs between The white deer vanish ere the day; Above my love the grass is green, My heart is colder than the clay. ANDREW LANG. PREFACE. The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the footnotes to "Volume I." are to that work. The difficulties of this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all educated readers. As I had anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my definition of _romanticism_. But every writer has a right to make his own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English literature"; nor of the "renaissance of wonder"; nor of the "emancipation of the ego." Why not have called the book, then, "A History of the Mediaeval Revival in England"? Because I have a clear title to the use of _romantic_ in one of its commonest acceptations; and, for myself, I prefer the simple dictionary definition, "pertaining to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages," to any of those more pretentious explanations which seek to express the true inwardness of romantic literature by analysing it into its elements, selecting one of these elements as essential, and rejecting all the rest as accidental. M. Brunetière; for instance, identifies romanticism with lyricism. It is the "emancipation of the ego." This formula is made to fit Victor Hugo, and it will fit Byron. But M. Brunetière would surely not deny that Walter Scott's work is objective and dramatic quite as often as it is lyrical. Yet what Englishman will be satisfied with a definition of _romantic_ which excludes Scott? Indeed, M. Brunetière himself is respectful to the traditional meaning of the word. "Numerous definitions," he says, "have been given of Romanticism, and still others are continually being offered; and all, or almost all of them, contain a part of the truth. Mme. de Staël was right when she asserted in her 'Allemagne' that Paganism and Christianity, the North and the South, antiquity and the Middle Ages, having divided between them the history of literature, Romanticism in consequence, in contrast to Classicism, was a combination of chivalry, the Middle Ages, the literatures of the North, and Christianity. It should be noted, in this connection, that some thirty years later Heinrich Heine, in the book in which he will rewrite Mme. de Staël's, will not give such a very different idea of Romanticism." And if, in an analysis of the romantic movement throughout Europe, any single element in it can lay claim to the leading place, that element seems to me to be the return of each country to its national past; in other words, mediaevalism. A definition loses its usefulness when it is made to connote too much. Professor Herford says that the "organising conception" of his "Age of Wordsworth" is romanticism. But if Cowper and Wordsworth and Shelley are romantic, then almost all the literature of the years 1798-1830 is romantic. I prefer to think of Cowper as a naturalist, of Shelley as an idealist, and of Wordsworth as a transcendental realist, and to reserve the name romanticist for writers like Scott, Coleridge, and Keats; and I think the distinction a serviceable one. Again, I have been censured for omitting Blake from my former volume. The omission was deliberate, not accidental, and the grounds for it were given in the preface. Blake was not discovered until rather late in the nineteenth century. He was not a link in the chain of influence which I was tracing. I am glad to find my justification in a passage of Mr. Saintsbury's "History of Nineteenth Century Literature" (p. 13): "Blake exercised on the literary _history_ of his time no influence, and occupied in it no position. . . . The public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, and less of reading his books. . . . He was practically an unread man." But I hope that this second volume may make more clear the unity of my design and the limits of my subject. It is scarcely necessary to add that no absolute estimate is attempted of the writers whose works are described in this history. They are looked at exclusively from a single point of view. H. A. B. APRIL, 1901. TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. WALTER SCOTT II. COLERIDGE, BOWLES, AND THE POPE CONTROVERSY III. KEATS, LEIGH HUNT, AND THE DANTE REVIVAL IV. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY V. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN FRANCE VI. DIFFUSED ROMANTICISM IN THE LITERATURE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY VII. THE PRE-RAPHAELITES VIII. TENDENCIES AND RESULTS A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM. CHAPTER I. Walter Scott.[1] It was reserved for Walter Scott, "the Ariosto of the North," "the historiographer royal of feudalism," to accomplish the task which his eighteenth-century forerunners had essayed in vain. He possessed the true enchanter's wand, the historic imagination. With this in his hand, he raised the dead past to life, made it once more conceivable, made it even actual. Before Scott no genius of the highest order had lent itself wholly or mainly to retrospection. He is the middle point and the culmination of English romanticism. His name is, all in all, the most important on our list. "Towards him all the lines of the romantic revival converge." [2] The popular ballad, the Gothic romance, the Ossianic poetry, the new German literature, the Scandinavian discoveries, these and other scattered rays of influence reach a focus in Scott. It is true that his delineation of feudal society is not final. There were sides of mediaeval life which he did not know, or understand, or sympathize with, and some of these have been painted in by later artists. That his pictures have a coloring of modern sentiment is no arraignment of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism. Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets. He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from 1805 to 1830. The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour. But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history, legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript ballads. His education in romance dated from the cradle. His lullabies were Jacobite songs; his grandmother told him tales of moss-troopers, and his Aunt Janet read him ballads from Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany," upon which his quick and tenacious memory fastened eagerly. The ballad of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt--the last I shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society." A little later Percy's "Reliques" fell into his hands, with results that have already been described.[3] As soon as he got access to the circulating library in Edinburgh, he began to devour its works of fiction, characteristically rejecting love stories and domestic tales, but laying hold upon "all that was adventurous and romantic," and in particular upon "everything which touched on knight-errantry." For two or three years he used to spend his holidays with his schoolmate, John Irving, on Arthur's Seat or Salisbury Crags, where they read together books like "The Castle of Otranto" and the poems of Spenser and Ariosto; or composed and narrated to each other "interminable tales of battles and enchantments" and "legends in which the martial and the miraculous always predominated." The education of Edward Waverley, as described in the third chapter of Scott's first novel, was confessedly the novelist's own education. In the "large Gothic room" which was the library of Waverley Honour, the young book-worm pored over "old historical chronicles" and the writings of Pulci, Froissart, Brantome, and De la Noue; and became "well acquainted with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful imagination." Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies. "To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I had always added the study of history, especially as connected with military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me." Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to fix upon his juvenile drama "Götz von Berlichingen." Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning." Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death. He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the classical student. It will be remembered that just the contrary of this was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture. But when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on "through brake and maze With harpers rude, of barbarous days," and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice. "Nay, Erskine, nay--On the wild hill Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . . Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale, Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!" [8] Scott's letters to Erskine, Ellis, Leyden, Ritson, Miss Seward, and other literary correspondents are filled with discussions of antiquarian questions and the results of his favourite reading in old books and manuscripts. He communicates his conclusions on the subject of "Arthur and Merlin" or on the authorship of the old metrical romance of "Sir Tristram." [9] He has been copying manuscripts in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In 1791 he read papers before the Speculative Society on "The Origin of the Feudal System," "The Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," "The Origin of the Scandinavian Mythology." Lockhart describes two note-books in Scott's hand-writing, with the date 1792, containing memoranda of ancient court records about Walter Scott and his wife, Dame Janet Beaton, the "Ladye" of Branksome in the "Lay"; extracts from "Guerin de Montglave"; copies of "Vegtam's Kvitha" and the "Death-Song of Regner Lodbrog," with Gray's English versions; Cnut's verses on passing Ely Cathedral; the ancient English "Cuckoo Song," and other rubbish of the kind.[10] When in 1803 he began to contribute articles to the _Edinburgh Review_, his chosen topics were such as "Amadis of Gaul," Ellis' "Specimens of Ancient English Poetry," Godwin's "Chaucer," Sibbald's "Chronicle of Scottish Poetry," Evans' "Old Ballads," Todd's "Spenser," "The Life and Works of Chatterton," Southey's translation of "The Cid," etc. Scott's preparation for the work which he had to do was more than adequate. His reading along chosen lines was probably more extensive and minute than any man's of his generation. The introductions and notes to his poems and novels are even overburdened with learning. But this, though important, was but the lesser part of his advantage. "The old-maidenly genius of antiquarianism" could produce a Strutt[11] or even perhaps a Warton; but it needed the touch of the creative imagination to turn the dead material of knowledge into works of art that have delighted millions of readers for a hundred years in all civilised lands and tongues. The key to Scott's romanticism is his intense local feeling.[12] That attachment to place which, in most men, is a sort of animal instinct, was with him a passion. To set the imagination at work some emotional stimulus is required. The angry pride of Byron, Shelley's revolt against authority, Keats' almost painfully acute sensitiveness to beauty, supplied the nervous irritation which was wanting in Scott's slower, stronger, and heavier temperament. The needed impetus came to him from his love of country. Byron and Shelley were torn up by the roots and flung abroad, but Scott had struck his roots deep into native soil. His absorption in the past and reverence for everything that was old, his conservative prejudices and aristocratic ambitions, all had their source in this feeling. Scott's Toryism was of a different spring from Wordsworth's and Coleridge's. It was not a reaction from disappointed radicalism; nor was it the result of reasoned conviction. It was inborn and was nursed into a sentimental Jacobitism by ancestral traditions and by an early prepossession in favour of the Stuarts--a Scottish dynasty--reinforced by encounters with men in the Highlands who had been out in the '45. It did not interfere with a practical loyalty to the reigning house and with what seems like a somewhat exaggerated deference to George IV. Personally the most modest of men, he was proud to trace his descent from "auld Wat of Harden" [13] and to claim kinship with the bold Buccleuch. He used to make annual pilgrimages to Harden Tower, "the _incunabula_ of his race"; and "in the earlier part of his life," says Lockhart, "he had nearly availed himself of his kinsman's permission to fit up the dilapidated _peel_ for his summer residence." Byron wrote: "I twine my hope of being remembered in my line with my land's language." But Scott wished to associate his name with the land itself. Abbotsford was more to him than Newstead could ever have been to Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14] comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness. If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal. It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the national, historic past. The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid, picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of Edinburgh--"mine own romantic town "--from Blackford Hill; "Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent: As if to give his rapture vent, The spur he to his charger lent, And raised his bridle-hand, And, making demi-volte in air, Cried, 'Where's the coward that would not dare To fight for such a land?'" and the still more familiar opening of the sixth canto in the "Lay"--"Breathes there the man," etc.: "O Caledonia! stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child! Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires! what mortal hand Can e'er untie the filial band That knits me to thy rugged strand?" In such a mood geography becomes poetry and names are music.[15] Scott said to Washington Irving that if he did not see the heather at least once a year, he thought he would die. Lockhart tells how the sound that he loved best of all sounds was in his dying ears--the flow of the Tweed over its pebbles. Significant, therefore, is Scott's treatment of landscape, and the difference in this regard between himself and his great contemporaries. His friend, Mr. Morritt of Rokeby, testifies; "He was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery when he could not connect it with some local legend." Scott had to the full the romantic love of mountain and lake, yet "to me," he confesses, "the wandering over the field of Bannockburn was the source of more exquisite pleasure than gazing upon the celebrated landscape from the battlements of Stirling Castle. I do not by any means infer that I was dead to the feeling of picturesque scenery. . . . But show me an old castle or a field of battle and I was at home at once." And again: "The love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins or remains of our fathers' piety[16] or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion." It was not in this sense that high mountains were a "passion" to Byron, nor yet to Wordsworth. In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott wrote of popular poetry: "Much of its peculiar charm is indeed, I believe, to be attributed solely to its _locality_. . . . In some verses of that eccentric but admirable poet Coleridge[17] he talks of "'An old rude tale that suited well The ruins wild and hoary.' "I think there are few who have not been in some degree touched with this local sympathy. Tell a peasant an ordinary tale of robbery and murder, and perhaps you may fail to interest him; but, to excite his terrors, you assure him it happened on the very heath he usually crosses, or to a man whose family he has known, and you rarely meet such a mere image of humanity as remains entirely unmoved. I suspect it is pretty much the same with myself." Scott liked to feel solid ground of history, or at least of legend, under his feet. He connected his wildest tales, like "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," with definite names and places. This Antaeus of romance lost strength, as soon as he was lifted above the earth. With Coleridge it was just the contrary. The moment his moonlit, vapory enchantments touched ground, the contact "precipitated the whole solution." In 1813 Scott had printed "The Bridal of Triermain" anonymously, with a preface designed to mislead the public; having contrived, by way of a joke, to fasten the authorship of the piece upon Erskine. This poem is as pure fantasy as Tennyson's "Day Dream," and tells the story of a knight who, in obedience to a vision and the instructions of an ancient sage "sprung from Druid sires," enters an enchanted castle and frees the Princess Gyneth, a natural daughter of King Arthur, from the spell that has bound her for five hundred years. But true to his instinct, the poet lays his scene not _in vacuo_, but near his own beloved borderland. He found, in Burns' "Antiquities of Westmoreland and Cumberland" mention of a line of Rolands de Vaux, lords of Triermain, a fief of the barony of Gilsland; and this furnished him a name for his hero. He found in Hutchinson's "Excursion to the Lakes" the description of a cluster of rocks in the Vale of St. John's, which looked, at a distance, like a Gothic castle, this supplied him with a hint for the whole adventure. Meanwhile Coleridge had been living in the Lake Country. The wheels of his "Christabel" had got hopelessly mired, and he now borrowed a horse from Sir Walter and hitched it to his own wagon. He took over Sir Roland de Vaux of Triermain and made him the putative father of his mysterious Geraldine, although, in compliance with Scott's romance, the embassy that goes over the mountains to Sir Roland's castle can find no trace of it. In Part I. Sir Leoline's own castle stood nowhere in particular. In Part II. it is transferred to Cumberland, a mistake in art almost as grave as if the Ancient Mariner had brought his ship to port at Liverpool. Wordsworth visited the "great Minstrel of the Border" at Abbotsford in 1831, shortly before Scott set out for Naples, and the two poets went in company to the ruins of Newark Castle. It is characteristic that in "Yarrow Revisited," which commemorates the incident, the Bard of Rydal should think it necessary to offer an apology for his distinguished host's habit of romanticising nature--that nature which Wordsworth, romantic neither in temper nor choice of subject, treated after so different a fashion. "Nor deem that localised Romance Plays false with our affections; Unsanctifies our tears--made sport For fanciful dejections: Ah no! the visions of the past Sustain the heart in feeling Life as she is--our changeful Life, With friends and kindred dealing." The apology, after all, is only half-hearted. For while Wordsworth esteemed Scott highly and was careful to speak publicly of his work with a qualified respect, it is well known that, in private, he set little value upon it, and once somewhat petulantly declared that all Scott's poetry was not worth sixpence. He wrote to Scott, of "Marmion": "I think your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be aware." He had visited Scott at Lasswade as early as 1803, and in recording his impressions notes that "his conversation was full of anecdote and averse from disquisition." The minstrel was a _raconteur_ and lived in the past, the bard was a moralist and lived in the present. There are several poems of Wordsworth's and Scott's touching upon common ground which serve to contrast their methods sharply and to illustrate in a striking way the precise character of Scott's romanticism. "Helvellyn" and "Fidelity" were written independently and celebrate the same incident. In 1805 a young man lost his way on the Cumberland mountains and perished of exposure. Three months afterwards his body was found, his faithful dog still watching beside it. Scott was a lover of dogs--loved them warmly, individually; so to speak, personally; and all dogs instinctively loved Scott.[18] Wordsworth had a sort of tepid, theoretical benevolence towards the animal creation in general. Yet as between the two poets, the advantage in depth of feeling is, as usual, with Wordsworth. Both render, with perhaps equal power, though in characteristically different ways, the impression of the austere and desolate grandeur of the mountain scenery. But the thought to which Wordsworth leads up is the mysterious divineness of instinct ". . . that strength of feeling, great Above all human estimate:"-- while Scott conducts his story to the reflection that Nature has given the dead man a more stately funeral than the Church could have given, a comparison seemingly dragged in for the sake of a stanzaful of his favourite Gothic imagery. "When a Prince to the fate of the Peasant has yielded, The tapestry waves dark round the dim-lighted hall; With 'scutcheons of silver the coffin is shielded, And pages stand mute by the canopied pall: Through the courts at deep midnight the torches are gleaming, In the proudly arched chapel the banners are beaming, Far adown the long aisle sacred music is streaming, Lamenting a chief of the people should fall." Wordsworth and Landor, who seldom agreed, agreed that Scott's most imaginative line was the verse in "Helvellyn": "When the wind waved his garment how oft didst thou start!" In several of his poems Wordsworth handled legendary subjects, and it is most instructive here to notice his avoidance of the romantic note, and to imagine how Scott would have managed the same material. In the prefatory note to "The White Doe of Rylstone," Wordsworth himself pointed out the difference. "The subject being taken from feudal times has led to its being compared to some of Sir Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same age and state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir Walter pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything that is attempted by the principal personages in 'The White Doe' fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds." This poem is founded upon "The Rising in the North," a ballad given in the "Reliques," which recounts the insurrection of the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland against Elizabeth in 1569. Richard Norton of Rylstone, with seven stalwart sons, joined in the rising, carrying a banner embroidered with a red cross and the five wounds of Christ. The story bristled with opportunities for the display of feudal pomp, and it is obvious upon what points in the action Scott would have laid the emphasis; the muster of the tenantry of the great northern Catholic houses of Percy and Neville; the high mass celebrated by the insurgents in Durham Cathedral; the march of the Nortons to Brancepeth; the eleven days' siege of Barden Tower; the capture and execution of Marmaduke and Ambrose; and--by way of episode--the Battle of Neville's Cross in 1346.[19] But in conformity to the principle announced in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"--that the feeling should give importance to the incidents and situation, not the incidents and situation to the feeling--Wordsworth treats all this outward action as merely preparatory to the true purpose of his poem, a study of the discipline of sorrow, of ruin and bereavement patiently endured by the Lady Emily, the only daughter and survivor of the Norton house. "Action is transitory--a step, a blow. . . . Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And has the nature of infinity. Yet through that darkness (infinite though it seem And irremoveable) gracious openings lie. . . . Even to the fountain-head of peace divine." With the story of the Nortons the poet connects a local tradition which he found in Whitaker's "History of the Deanery of Craven"; of a white doe which haunted the churchyard of Bolton Priory. Between this gentle creature and the forlorn Lady of Rylstone he establishes the mysterious and soothing sympathy which he was always fond of imagining between the soul of man and the things of nature.[20] Or take again the "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," an incident in the Wars of the Roses. Lord Clifford, who had been hidden away in infancy from the vengeance of the Yorkists and reared as a shepherd, is restored to the estates and honours of his ancestors. High in the festal hall the impassioned minstrel strikes his harp and sings the triumph of Lancaster, urging the shepherd lord to emulate the warlike prowess of his forefathers. "Armour rusting in his halls On the blood of Clifford calls; 'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance-- Bear me to the heart of France Is the longing of the Shield." Thus far the minstrel, and he has Sir Walter with him; for this is evidently the part of the poem that he liked and remembered, when he noted in his journal that "Wordsworth could be popular[21] if he would--witness the 'Feast at Brougham Castle'--'Song of the Cliffords,' I think, is the name." But the exultant strain ceases and the poet himself speaks, and with the transition in feeling comes a change in the verse; the minstrel's song was in the octosyllabic couplet associated with metrical romance. But this Clifford was no fighter--none of Scott's heroes. Nature had educated him. "In him the savage virtue of the Race" was dead. "Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills." Once more, consider the pronounced difference in sentiment between the description of the chase in "Hartleap Well" and the opening passage of "The Lady of the Lake": "The stag at eve had drunk his fill. Where danced the moon on Monan's rill," etc.[22] Scott was a keen sportsman, and his sympathy was with the hunter.[23] Wordsworth's, of course, was with the quarry. The knight in his poem--who bears not unsuggestively the name of "Sir Walter"--has outstripped all his companions, like Fitz James, and is the only one in at the death. To commemorate his triumph he frames a basin for the spring whose waters were stirred by his victim's dying breath; he plants three stone pillars to mark the creature's hoof-prints in its marvellous leap from the mountain to the springside; and he builds a pleasure house and an arbour where he comes with his paramour to make merry in the summer days. But Nature sets her seal of condemnation upon the cruelty and vainglory of man. "The spot is curst"; no flowers or grass will grow there; no beast will drink of the fountain. Part I. tells the story without enthusiasm but without comment. Part II. draws the lesson "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." The song of Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" derives a pensive sorrow from "old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long ago." But to Scott the battle is not far off, but a vivid and present reality. When he visited the Trosachs glen, his thought plainly was, "What a place for a fight!" And when James looks down on Loch Katrine his first reflection is, "What a scene were here . . . "For princely pomp or churchman's pride! On this bold brow a lordly tower; In that soft vale a lady's bower; On yonder meadow, far away, The turrets of a cloister grey," etc. The most romantic scene was not romantic enough for Scott till his imagination had peopled it with the life of a vanished age. The literary forms which Scott made peculiarly his own, and in which the greater part of his creative work was done, are three: the popular ballad, the metrical romance, and the historical novel in prose. His point of departure was the ballad.[24] The material amassed in his Liddesdale "raids"--begun in 1792 and continued for seven successive years--was given to the world in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (Vols. I. and II. in 1802; Vol. III. in 1803), a collection of ballads historical, legendary, and romantic, with an abundant apparatus in the way of notes and introductions, illustrating the history, antiquities, manners, traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. "From among a hundred corruptions," says Lockhart, "he seized, with instinctive tact, the primitive diction and imagery, and produced strains in which the unbroken energy of half-civilised ages, their stern and deep passions, their daring adventures and cruel tragedies, and even their rude wild humour are reflected with almost the brightness of a Homeric mirror." In the second volume of the "Minstrelsy" were included what Scott calls his "first serious attempts in verse," viz., "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," which had been already printed in Lewis' "Tales of Wonder." Both pieces are purely romantic, with a strong tincture of the supernatural; but the first--Scott himself draws the distinction--is a "legendary poem," and the second alone a proper "ballad." "Glenfinlas," [25] founded on a Gaelic legend, tells how a Highland chieftain while hunting in Perthshire, near the scene of "The Lady of the Lake," is lured from his bothie at night and torn to pieces by evil spirits. There is no attempt here to preserve the language of popular poetry; stanzas abound in a diction of which the following is a fair example: "Long have I sought sweet Mary's heart, And dropp'd the tear and heaved the sigh: But vain the lover's wily art Beneath a sister's watchful eye." "The Eve of St. John" employs common ballad stuff, the visit of a murdered lover's ghost to his lady's bedside-- "At the lone midnight hour, when bad spirits have power"-- but the poet, as usual, anchors his weird nightmares firmly to real names and times and places, Dryburgh Abbey, the black rood of Melrose, the Eildon-tree, the bold Buccleuch, and the Battle of Ancram Moor (1545). The exact scene of the tragedy is Smailholme Tower, the ruined keep on the crags above his grandfather's farm at Sandynowe, which left such an indelible impression on Scott's childish imagination.[26] "The Eve" is in ballad style and verse: "Thou liest, thou liest, thou little foot page, Loud dost thou lie to me! For that knight is cold, and low laid in the mould, All under the Eildon tree." In his "Essay on the Imitation of Popular Poetry," Scott showed that he understood the theory of ballad composition. When he took pains, he could catch the very manner as well as the spirit of ancient minstrelsy; but if his work is examined under the microscope it is easy to detect flaws. The technique of the Pre-Raphaelites and other modern balladists, like Rossetti and Morris, is frequently finer, they reproduce more scrupulously the formal characteristics of popular poetry: the burden, the sing-song repetitions, the quaint turns of phrase, the imperfect rimes, the innocent, childlike air of the mediaeval tale-tellers. Scott's vocabulary is not consistently archaic, and he was not always careful to avoid locutions out of keeping with the style of _Volkspoesie_.[27] He was by no means a rebel against eighteenth-century usages.[28] In his prose he is capable of speaking of a lady as an "elegant female." In his poetry he will begin a ballad thus: "The Pope he was saying the high, high mass All on St. Peter's day"; and then a little later fall into this kind of thing: "There the rapt poet's step may rove, And yield the muse the day: There Beauty, led by timid Love, May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29] It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his. The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray; "The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life"; "Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in "Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley. And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics touched always with the light of history or legend. The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands. "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and somewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh at it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution. Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than grammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second. When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de la vie_ which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happily invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle. The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he thoroughly enjoys.[31] The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas. With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so universally known as to make any review of them here individually an impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet "Such as it had In the ages glad, Long ago." The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static department--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the need-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the "Agamemnon." In the series of long poems which followed the "Lay," Scott deserted the Border and brought in new subjects of romantic interest, the traditions of Flodden and Bannockburn, the manners of the Gaelic clansmen, and the wild scenery of the Perthshire Highlands, the life of the Western Islands, and the rugged coasts of Argyle. Only two of these tales are concerned with the Middle Ages, strictly speaking: "The Lord of the Isles" (1813), in which the action begins in 1307; and "Harold the Dauntless" (1817), in which the period is the time of the Danish settlements in Northumbria. "Rokeby" (1812) is concerned with the Civil War. The scene is laid in Yorkshire, "Marmion" (1808), and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), like "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," had to do with the sixteenth century, but the poet imported mediaeval elements into all of these by the frankest anachronisms. He restored St. Hilda's Abbey and the monastery at Lindisfarne, which had been in ruins for centuries, and peopled them again with monks and nuns, He revived in De Wilton the figure of the palmer and the ancient custom of pilgrimage to Palestine. And he transferred "the wondrous wizard, Michael Scott" from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth. But, indeed, the state of society in Scotland might be described as mediaeval as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. It was still feudal, and in great part Catholic. Particularly in the turbulent Borderland, a rude spirit of chivalry and a passion for wild adventure lingered among the Eliots, Armstrongs, Kerrs, Rutherfords, Homes, Johnstons, and other marauding clans, who acknowledged no law but march law, and held slack allegiance to "the King of Lothian and Fife." Every owner of a half-ruinous "peel" or border keep had a band of retainers within call, like the nine-and-twenty knights of fame who hung their shields in Branksome Hall; and he could summon them at short notice, for a raid upon the English or a foray against some neighbouring proprietor with whom he was at feud. But the literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for "Romola," "Hypatia," "Henry Esmond," and "The Cloister and the Hearth." In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. "Waverley" is not only vastly superior to "Thaddeus of Warsaw" (1803) and "The Scottish Chiefs" (1809); it is something quite different in kind.[34] The Waverley Novels, twenty-nine in number, appeared in the years 1814-31. The earlier numbers of the series, "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Black Dwarf," "Rob Roy," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," "The Bride of Lammermoor," and "A Legend of Montrose," were Scotch romances of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In "Ivanhoe" (1819) the author went to England for his scene, and back to the twelfth century for his period. Thenceforth he ranged over a wide region in time and space; Elizabethan England ("Kenilworth"), the France and Switzerland of Louis XI. and Charles the Bold ("Quentin Durward" and "Anne of Geierstein"), Constantinople and Syria ("Count Robert of Paris," "The Betrothed," and "The Talisman") in the age of the Crusades. The fortunes of the Stuarts, interested him specially and engaged him in "Woodstock," "The Fortunes of Nigel," "The Monastery," and its sequel, "The Abbot." He seems to have had, in the words of Mr. R. H. Hutton, "something very like personal experience of a few centuries." Scott's formula for the construction of a historical romance was original with himself, and it has been followed by all his successors. His story is fictitious, his hero imaginary. Richard I. is not the hero of "Ivanhoe," nor Louis XI. of "Quentin Durward." Shakspere dramatised history; Scott romanticised it. Still it is history, the private story is swept into the stream of large public events, the fate of the lover or the adventurer is involved with battles and diplomacies, with the rise and fall of kings, dynasties, political parties, nations. Stevenson says, comparing Fielding with Scott, that "in the work of the latter . . . we become suddenly conscious of the background. . . . It is curious enough to think that 'Tom Jones' is laid in the year '45, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers in his hero's way." [35] And it is this background which is, after all, the important thing in Scott--the leading impression; the broad canvas, the swarm of life, the spirit of the age, the reconstitution of an extinct society. This he was able to give with seeming ease and without any appearance of "cram." Chronicle matter does not lie about in lumps on the surface of his romance, but is decently buried away in the notes. In his comments on "Queenhoo Hall" he adverts to the danger of a pedantic method, and in his "Journal" (October 18th, 1826) he writes as follows of his own numerous imitators: "They have to read old books and consult antiquarian collections, to get their knowledge. I write because I have long since read such works and possess, thanks to a strong memory, the information which they have to seek for. This leads to a dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute description of events which do not affect its progress." Of late the recrudescence of the historical novel has revived the discussion as to the value of the _genre_. It may be readily admitted that Scott's best work is realistic, and is to be looked for in such novels as "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and in characters like Andrew Fairservice, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Dandie Dinmont, Dugald Dalgetty, Jeanie Deans, Edie Ochiltrie, which brought into play his knowledge of men, his humour, observation of life, and insight into Scotch human nature. Scott knew these people; he had to divine James I., Louis XI., and Mary Stuart. The historical novel is a _tour de force_. Exactly how knights-templars, burgomasters, friars, Saracens, and Robin Hood archers talked and acted in the twelfth century, we cannot know. But it is just because they are strange to our experience that they are dear to our imagination. The justification of romance is its unfamiliarity--"strangeness added to beauty"--"the pleasure of surprise" as distinguished from "the pleasure of recognition." Again and again realism returns to the charge and demands of art that it give us the present and the actual; and again and again the imagination eludes the demand and makes an ideal world for itself in the blue distance. Two favourite arts, or artifices, of all romantic schools, are "local colour" and "the picturesque." "Vers l'an de grâce 1827," writes Prosper Mérimée, "j'étais _romantique_. Nous disions aux _classiques_; vos Grecs ne sont pas des Grecs, vos Romains ne sont pas des Romains; vous ne savez pas donner à vos compositions la _couleur locale_. Point de salut sans la _couleur locale_." [36] As to the picturesque--a word that connotes, in its critical uses, some quality in the objects of sense which strikes us as at once novel, and characteristic in its novelty--while by no means the highest of literary arts, it is a perfectly legitimate one.[37] Creçy is not, at bottom, a more interesting battle than Gettysburg because it was fought with bows and arrows, but it is more picturesque to the modern imagination just for that reason. Why else do the idiots in "MacArthur's Hymn" complain that "steam spoils romance at sea"? Why did Ruskin lament when the little square at the foot of Giotto's Tower in Florence was made a stand for hackney coaches? Why did our countryman Halleck at Alnwick Towers resent the fact that "the Percy deals in salt and hides, the Douglas sells red herring"? And why does the picturesque tourist, in general, object to the substitution of naphtha launches for gondolas on the Venetian canals? Perhaps because the more machinery is interposed between man and the thing he works on, the more impersonal becomes his relation to nature. Carlyle, in his somewhat grudging estimate of Scott, declares that "much of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not by slashed breeches, steeple hats, buff belts, or antiquated speech can romance-heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely, in the long run, by being _men_. Buff belts and all manner of jerkins and costumes are transitory; man alone is perennial." [38] Carlyle's dissatisfaction with Scott arises from the fact that he was not a missionary nor a transcendental philosopher, but simply a teller of stories. Heine was not troubled in the same way, but he made the identical criticism, "Like the works of Walter Scott, so also do Fouqué's romances of chivalry[40] remind us of the fantastic tapestries known as Gobelins, whose rich texture and brilliant colors are more pleasing to our eyes than edifying to our souls. We behold knightly pageantry, shepherds engaged in festive sports, hand-to-hand combats, and ancient customs, charmingly intermingled. It is all very pretty and picturesque, but shallow; brilliant superficiality. Among the imitators of Fouqué, as among the imitators of Walter Scott, this mannerism of portraying--not the inner nature of men and things, but merely the outward garb and appearance--was carried to still greater extremes. This shallow art and frivolous style is still [1833] in vogue in Germany as well as in England and France. . . . In lieu of a knowledge of mankind, our recent novelists evince a profound acquaintance with clothes." [39] Elsewhere Heine acknowledges a deeper reason for the popularity of the Scotch novels. "Their theme . . . is the mighty sorrow for the loss of national peculiarities swallowed up in the universality of the newer culture--a sorrow which is now throbbing in the hearts of all peoples. For national memories lie deeper in the human breast than is generally thought." But whatever rank may be ultimately assigned to the historical novel as an art form, Continental critics are at one with the British in crediting its invention to Scott. "It is an error," says Heine, "not to recognise Walter Scott as the founder of the so-called historical romance, and to endeavour to trace it to German imitation." He adds that Scott was a Protestant, a lawyer and a Scotchman, accustomed to action and debate, in whose works the aristocratic and democratic elements are in wholesome balance; "whereas our German romanticists eliminated the democratic element entirely from their novels, and returned to the ruts of those crazy romances of knight-errantry that flourished before Cervantes." [41] "Quel est Fouvrage littéraire," asks Stendhal in 1823,[42] "qui a le plus réussi en France depuis dix ans? Les romans de Walter Scott. . . . On s'est moqué à Paris pendant vingt ans du roman historique; l'Académie a prouvé doctement le ridicule de ce genre; nous y croyions tous, lorsque Walter Scott a paru, son Waverley à la main; et Balantyne, son libraire vient de mourir millionaire." [43] Lastly the service of the Waverley Novels to history was an important one. Palgrave says that historical fiction is the mortal enemy of history, and Leslie Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious of life. Their spirit was general and abstract; they were in search of philosophical formulas. Gibbon covers his subject with a lava-flood of stately rhetoric which stiffens into a uniform stony coating over the soft surface of life. Scott is primarily responsible for that dramatic, picturesque treatment of history which we find in Michelet and Carlyle. "These historical novels," testifies Carlyle, "have taught all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was as good as unknown to writers of history and others, till so taught; that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men. . . . It is a great service, fertile in consequences, this that Scott has done; a great truth laid open by him." [44] In France, too, historians like Barante and Augustin Thierry, were Scott's professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquête d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist "le plus grand maître qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divination historique." [45] Scott apprehended the Middle Ages on their spectacular, and more particularly, their military side. He exhibits their large, showy aspects: battles, processions, hunts, feasts in hall, tourneys,[46] sieges, and the like. The motley mediaeval world swarms in his pages, from the king on his throne down to the jester with his cap and bells. But it was the outside of it that he saw; the noise, bustle, colour, stirring action that delighted him. Into its spiritualities he did not penetrate far; its scholasticisms, strange casuistries, shuddering faiths, grotesque distortions of soul, its religious mysticisms, asceticisms, agonies; the ecstactic reveries of the cloister, terrors of hell, and visions of paradise. It was the literature of the knight, not of the monk, that appealed to him. He felt the awfulness and the beauty of Gothic sacred architecture and of Catholic ritual. The externalities of the mediaeval church impressed him, whatever was picturesque in its ceremonies or august in its power. He pictured effectively such scenes as the pilgrimage to Melrose in the "Lay"; the immuring of the renegade nun in "Marmion"; the trial of Rebecca for sorcery by the Grand Master of the Temple in "Ivanhoe." Ecclesiastical figures abound in his pages, jolly friars, holy hermits, lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional and viewed _ab extra_. He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet _par excellence_ of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought. "The plan" of the "Divine Comedy," "appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting." Scott's genius was antipathetic to Dante's; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry. Though conservative, he was not reactionary after the fashion of the German "throne-and-altar" romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] "Creeds are data in his novels," says Bagehot; "people have different creeds but each keeps his own." Scott's interest in popular superstitions was constant. As a young man--in his German ballad period--they affected his imagination with a "pleasing horror." But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet than as a student of _Cultur geschichte_. A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs--a rational smile at their absurdity--such is the tone of his "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so very different from Addison's, allowing for the distance in time and place, and for Scott's livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann's "Tales" and Maturin's "Fatal Revenge" [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief. His own management of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole's or Mrs. Radcliffe's, has not the subtle art of Coleridge. The White Lady of Avenel, _e.g._, in "The Abbot," is a notorious failure. There was too much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home. "The shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses"; the "night side of things"; the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe. Walter Pater[51] says that Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Märchen" are the shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic. Scott's dealing with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck. He does not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he does over his "Charlie over the water" Jacobites.[52] Again Scott's apprehension of the spirit of chivalry, though less imperfect than his apprehension of the spirit of mediaeval Catholicism, was but partial. Of the themes which Ariosto sang-- "Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori, Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto"-- the northern Ariosto sang bravely the _arme_ and the _audaci imprese_; less confidently the _amori_ and the _cortesie_. He could sympathise with the knight-errant's high sense of honour and his love of bold emprise; not so well with his service of dames. Mediaeval courtship or "love-drurye," the trembling self-abasement of the lover before his lady, the fantastic refinements and excesses of gallantry, were alien to Scott's manly and eminently practical turn of mind. It is hardly possible to fancy him reading the "Roman de la Rose" with patience--he thought "Troilus and Creseyde" tedious, which Rossetti pronounces the finest of English love poems; or selecting for treatment the story of Heloise or Tristram and Iseult, or of "Le Chevalier de la Charette"; or such a typical mediaeval life as that of Ulrich von Liechtenstein.[53] These were quite as truly beyond his sphere as a church legend like the life of Saint Margaret or the quest of the Sangreal. In the "Talisman" he praises in terms only less eloquent than Burke's famous words, "that wild spirit of chivalry which, amid its most extravagant and fantastic nights, was still pure from all selfish alloy--generous, devoted, and perhaps only thus far censurable, that it proposed objects and courses of action inconsistent with the frailties and imperfections of man." In "Ivanhoe," too, there is something like a dithyrambic lament over the decay of knighthood--"The 'scutcheons have long mouldered from the walls," etc.; but even here, enthusiasm is tempered by good sense, and Richard of the Lion Heart is described as an example of the "brilliant but useless character of a knight of romance." All this is but to say that the picture of the Middle Age which Scott painted was not complete. Still it was more nearly complete than has yet been given by any other hand; and the artist remains, in Stevenson's phrase, "the king of the Romantics." APPENDIX A. "Jamais homme de génie n'a eu l'honneur et le bonheur d'être imité par plus d'hommes de genié, si tous les grands écrivains de l'époque romantique depuis Victor Hugo jusqu'à Balzac et depuis Alfred de Vigny jusqu'à Mérimée, lui doivent tous et se sont tous glorifiés de lui devoir quelque chose. . . . Il doit nous suffire pour l'instant d'affirmer que l'influence de Walter Scott est à la racine même des grandes oeuvres qui ont donné au nouveau genre tant d'éclat dans notre littérature; que c'est elle qui les a inspirées, suscitées, fait éclore; que sans lui nous n'aurions ni 'Hans d'Islande,' ni 'Cinq-Mars,' ni 'Les Chouans,' ni la 'Chronique de Charles IX.,' ni 'Notre Dame de Paris,' . . . Ce n'est rien moins que le romantisme lui-même dont elle a hâté l'incubation, facilité l'eclosion, aidé le développement."--MAIGRON, "Le Roman Historique," p. 143. "Il nous faut d'abord constater que c'est véritablement de Walter Scott, et de Walter Scott seul, que commence cette fureur des choses du moyen âge, cette manie de couleur locale qui sévit avec tant d'intensité quelque temps avant et longtemps après 1830, et donc qu'il reste, au moins pour ce qui est de la description, le principal initiateur de la génération nouvelle. Sans doute et de toute part, cette résurrection du moyen âge était des long-temps préparée. Le 'Génie du Christianisme,' le 'Cours de litterature dramatique' de Schlegel, l''Allemagne' de Mme. de Staël avaient fait des moeurs chrétiennes et chevaleresques le fondement et la condition de renouvellement de l'art français. Et, en effet, dès 1802, le moyen âge était découvert, la cathédrale gothique restaurée, l'art chretien remis à la place éminente d'où il aurait fallu ne jamais le laisser choir. Mais où sont les oeuvres exécutées d'après ce modèle et ces principes? S'il est facile d'apercevoir et de déterminer la cathédrale religieuse de Chateaubriand, est il donc si aisé de distinguer sa cathédrale poétique? . . . Un courant vigoureux, que le 'Genie du Christianisme' et les 'Martyrs' ont puissamment contribué à detérminer, fait dériver les imaginations vers les choses gothiques; volontiers, l'esprit français se retourne alors vers le passé comme vers la seule source de poésie; et voici qu'un étranger vient se faire son guide et fait miroiter, devant tous les yeux éblouis, la fantasmagorie du moyen âge, donjons et créneaux, cuirasses et belles armures, haquenées et palefrois, chevaliers resplendissants et mignonnes et délicates chatelaines. . . . Sur ses traces, on se précipita avec furie dans la voie qu'il venait subitement d'élargir. Ce moyen age, jusqu'à lui si convoité et si infécond, devinait enfin une source inépuisable d'émotions et de productions artistiques. La 'cathédrale' était bien restaurée cette fois. Elle le fut même trop, et borda trop obstinement tous les sentiers littéraires. Mais de cet excès, si vite fatigant, c'est Walter Scott et non Chateaubriand, quoi qu'il en ait pu dire, qui reste le grand coupable. Il fit plus que découvrir le moyen âge; il le mit à la mode parmi les Français."--_Ibid_., pp. 195 _ff_. APPENDIX B. "The magical touch and the sense of mystery and all the things that are associated with the name romance, when that name is applied to 'The Ancient Mariner,' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' or 'The Lady of Shalott,' are generally absent from the most successful romances of the great mediaeval romantic age. . . . The true romantic interest is very unequally distributed over the works of the Middle Ages, and there is least of it in the authors who are most representative of the 'age of chivalry.' There is a disappointment prepared for any one who looks in the greater romantic authors of the twelfth century for the music of 'The Faery Queene' or 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.' . . . The greater authors of the twelfth century have more affinity to the 'heroic romance' of the school of the 'Grand Cyrus' than to the dreams of Spenser or Coleridge. . . . The magic that is wanting to the clear and elegant narrative of Benoit and Chrestien will be found elsewhere; it will be found in one form in the mystical prose of the 'Queste del St. Graal'--a very different thing from Chrestien's 'Perceval'--it will be found, again and again, in the prose of Sir Thomas Malory; it will be found in many ballads and ballad burdens, in 'William and Margaret,' in 'Binnorie,' in the 'Wife of Usher's Well,' in the 'Rime of the Count Arnaldos,' in the 'Königskinder'; it will be found in the most beautiful story of the Middle Ages, 'Aucassin and Nicolette,' one of the few perfectly beautiful stories in the world."--"Epic and Romance," W. P. Ker, London, 1897, p. 371 _ff_. [1] Scott's translations from the German are considered in the author's earlier volume, "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century." Incidental mention of Scott occurs throughout the same volume; and a few of the things there said are repeated, in substance though not in form, in the present chapter. It seemed better to risk some repetition than to sacrifice fulness of treatment here. [2] "The Development of the English Novel," by Wilbur L. Cross, p. 131. [3] Vol. i., p. 300. [4] The sixth canto of the "Lay" closes with a few lines translated from the "Dies Irae" and chanted by the monks in Melrose Abbey. [5] Vol. i., pp. 389-404. [6] Vol. i., pp. 48-49. [7] "Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any classical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather."--Ruskin, "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 317. [8] "Marmion": Introduction to Canto third. In the preface to "The Bridal of Triermain," the poet says: "According to the author's idea of Romantic Poetry, as distinguished from Epic, the former comprehends a fictitious narrative, framed and combined at the pleasure of the writer; beginning and ending as he may judge best; which neither exacts nor refuses the use of supernatural machinery; which is free from the technical rules of the _Epée_. . . . In a word, the author is absolute master of his country and its inhabitants." [9] Scott's ascription of "Sir Tristram" to Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas of Erceldoune, was doubtless a mistake. His edition of the romance was printed in 1804. In 1800 he had begun a prose tale, "Thomas the Rhymer," a fragment of which is given in the preface to the General Edition of the Waverley Novels (1829). This old legendary poet and prophet, who flourished _circa_ 1280, and was believed to have been carried off by the Queen of Faerie into Eildon Hill, fascinated Scott's imagination strongly. See his version of the "True Thomas'" story in the "Minstrelsy," as also the editions of this very beautiful romance in Child's "Ballads," in the publications of the E. E. Text So.; and by Alois Brandl, Berlin: 1880. [10] See vol. i., p. 390. [11] See the General Preface to the Waverley Novels for some remarks on "Queenhoo Hall" which Strutt began and Scott completed. [12] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 344. [13] "I am therefore descended from that ancient chieftain whose name I have made to ring in many a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of Yarrow--no bad genealogy for a Border minstrel." [14] "He neither cared for painting nor sculpture, and was totally incapable of forming a judgment about them. He had some confused love of Gothic architecture because it was dark, picturesque, old and like nature; but could not tell the worst from the best, and built for himself probably the most incongruous and ugly pile that gentlemanly modernism ever devised."--Ruskin. "Modern Painters," vol. iii., p. 271. [15] See vol. i., p. 200. [16] The _Abbey_ of Tintern was irrelevant to Wordsworth.--Herford. "The Age of Wordsworth," Int., p. xx. [17] "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious, opposites in this:--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; . . . whereas, for myself . . . I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--Coleridge, "Table Talk," August 4, 1833. [18] See the delightful anecdote preserved by Carlyle about the little Blenheim cocker who hated the "genus acrid-quack" and formed an immediate attachment to Sir Walter. Wordsworth was far from being an acrid quack, or even a solemn prig--another genus hated of dogs--but there was something a little unsympathetic in his personality. The dalesmen liked poor Hartley Coleridge better. [19] Scott could scarcely have forborne to introduce the figure of the Queen of Scots, to insure whose marriage with Norfolk was one of the objects of the rising. [20] For a full review of "The White Doe" the reader should consult Principal Shairp's "Aspects of Poetry," 1881. [21] Scott averred that Wordsworth offended public taste on system. [22] This is incomparable, not only as a masterpiece of romantic narrative, but for the spirited and natural device by which the hero is conducted to his adventure. R. L. Stevenson and other critics have been rather hard upon Scott's defects as an artist. He was indeed no stylist: least of all a _precieux_. There are no close-set mosaics in his somewhat slip-shod prose, and he did not seek for the right word "with moroseness," like Landor. But, in his large fashion, he was skilful in inventing impressive effects. Another instance is the solitary trumpet that breathed its "note of defiance" in the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, which has the genuine melodramatic thrill--like the horn of Hernani or the bell that tolls in "Venice Preserved." [23] See the "Hunting Song" in his continuation of "Queenhoo Hall"-- "Waken, lords and ladies gay, On the mountain dawns the day." [24] See vol. i., pp. 277 and 390. [25] The Glen of the Green Women. [26] "And still I thought that shattered tower The mightiest work of human power; And marvelled as the aged hind With some strange tale bewitched my mind, Of foragers who, with headlong force, Down from that strength had spurred their horse, Their Southern rapine to renew, Far in the distant Cheviots blue; And, home returning, filled the hall With revel, wassail-rout and brawl."--"Marmion." Introduction to Canto Third. See Lockhart for a description of the view from Smailholme, _à propos_ of the stanza in "The Eve of St. John": "That lady sat in mournful mood; Looked over hill and vale: O'ver Tweed's fair flood, and Mertoun's wood, And all down Teviot dale." [27] See vol. i., pp. 394-395. [28] Scott's verse "is touched both with the facile redundance of the mediaeval romances in which he was steeped, and with the meretricious phraseology of the later eighteenth century, which he was too genuine a literary Tory wholly to put aside."--"The Age of Wordsworth," C. H. Herford, London. 1897. [29] "The Gray Brother" in vol. iii. of the "Minstrelsy." [30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood, Decoy young border-nobles through the wood, And skip at every step, Lord knows how high, And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why." [31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight To tell you of the approaching fight."--Canto Fifth, xiii. [32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it down on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets." [33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remind one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"? [34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consult Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114. [35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Stevenson. Article, "Victor Hugo's Romances." [36] "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur l'influence de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331, _note_. And _ibid_., p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforçaient toujours, à travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, d'atteindre à ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de permanent, d'immuable et d'éternel, c'est au contraire à l'expression de l'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leur art. Plus simplement, à la place de la vérité humaine, ils devaient mettre la vérité locale." Professor Herford says that what Scott "has in common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121. [37] De Quincey defines _picturesque_ as "the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are picturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of the wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms and of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones--that, even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and shades (i., 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown (see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124): especially the clump, the belt and regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with uniformly sloping banks--all as insipidly formal, in their way, as the old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced. [38] "Essay on Walter Scott." [39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of the series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris," _circa_ 1090 A.D.; "The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman," 1193; "Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470; "Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77. [40] "The Romantic School in Germany," p. 187. _Cf._ Stendhal, "Walter Scott et la Princesse de Clèves." "Mes reflexions seront mal accueilles. Une immense troupe de littérateurs est intéressée à porter aux nues Sir Walter Scott et sa maniere. L'habit et le collier de cuivre d'un serf du moyen âge sont plus facile à décrire que les mouvements du coeur humain. . . . N'oublions pas un autre avantage de l'école de Sir Walter Scott: la description d'un costume et la _pose_ d'un personnage . . . prennent au moins deux pages. Les mouvements de l'âme fourniraient à peine quelques lignes. Ouvrez au hazard un cies volumes de la 'Princesse de Clèves,' prenez dix pages au hasard, et ensuite comparez les aux dix pages d'Ivanhoe' ou de 'Quentin Durward': ces derniers ouvrages ont un _mérite historique_. Ils apprennent quelques petites choses sur l'histoire aux gens qui l'ignorent ou qui le savent mal. Ce mérite historique a causé un grand plaisir: je ne le nie pas, mais c'est ce mérite historique qui se fanera le premier. . . . Dans 146 ans, Sir Walter Scott ne sera pas à la hauteur où Corneille nous apparait 146 ans après sa mort." "To write a modern romance of chivalry." says Jeffrey, in his review of "Marmion" in the _Edinburgh_, "seems to be much such a phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda. . . . [Scott's] genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought chivalry again into temporary favor. Fine ladies and gentlemen now talk, indeed, of donjons, keeps, tabards, 'scutcheons, tressures, caps of maintenance, portcullises, wimples, and we know not what besides; just as they did, in the days of Dr. Darwin's popularity, of gnomes, sylphs, oxygen, gossamer, polygynia, and polyandria. That fashion, however, passed rapidly away, and Mr. Scott should take care that a different sort of pedantry," etc. [41] For an exhaustive review of Scott's influence on the evolution of historical fiction in France, consult Maigron, "Le Roman Historique," etc. A longish passage from this work will be found at the end of the present chapter. For English imitators and successors of the Waverley Novels, see Cross, "Development of the English Novel," pp. 136-48. See also De Quincey's "Literary Reminiscences," vol. iii., for an amusing account of "Walladmor" (1824), a pretended German translation of a non-existent Waverley novel. [42] "Racine et Shakespeare." [43] "Don Quixote." [44] "Sir Walter Scott." [45] "Dix ans d'études historiques": preface. [46] Walter Bagehot says that "Ivanhoe" "describes the Middle Ages as we should have wished them to be," ignoring their discomforts and harsh barbarism. "Every boy has heard of tournaments and has a firm persuasion that in an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial society where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances," etc. ("The Waverley Novels"). [47] "Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely. . . . I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character" (R. H. Hutton: "Sir Walter Scott," p. 126). [48] "Unopposed, the Catholic superstition may sink to dust, with all its absurd ritual and solemnities. Still it is an awful risk. The world is in fact as silly as ever, and a good competence of nonsense will always find believers." ("Diary" for 1829). [49] See vol. i., p. 42. "We almost envy the credulity of those who in the gentle moonlight of a summer night in England, amid the tangled glades of a deep forest, or the turfy swell of her romantic commons, could fancy they saw the fairies tracing their sportive ring. But it is in vain to regret illusions which, however engaging, must of necessity yield their place before the increase of knowledge, like shadows at the advance of morn." ("Demonology." p. 183). "Tales of ghosts and demonology are out of date at forty years of age and upward. . . . If I were to write on the subject at all, it should have been during a period of life when I could have treated it with more interesting vivacity. . . . Even the present fashion of the world seems to be ill-suited for studies of this fantastic nature: and the most ordinary mechanic has learning sufficient to laugh at the figments which in former times were believed by persons far advanced in the deepest knowledge of the age." (_Ibid_., p. 398). [50] See vol. i., pp. 249 and 420. [51] "Postscript" to "Appreciations." [52] For the rarity of the real romantic note in mediaeval writers see vol. i., pp. 26-28, and Appendix B to the present chapter. [53] See "Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature," by Edward T. McLaughlin, p. 34. CHAPTER II. Coleridge, Bowles, and the Pope Controversy. While Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and translating German ballads,[1] two other young poets, far to the south, were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV. "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . . for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other poems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt." Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious. Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in the history of English thought, he influenced his own and the following generation on so many sides, that his romanticism shows like a mere incident in his intellectual history. His blossoming time was short at the best, and ended practically with the century. After his return from Germany in 1799 and his settlement at Keswick in 1800, he produced little verse of any importance beyond the second part of "Christabel" (written in 1800, published in 1816). His creative impulse failed him, and he became more and more involved in theology, metaphysics, political philosophy, and literary criticism. It appears, therefore, at first sight, a little odd that Coleridge's German biographer, Professor Brandl, should have treated his subject under this special aspect,[3] and attributed to him so leading a place in the romantic movement. Walter Scott, if we consider his life-long and wellnigh exclusive dedication of himself to the work of historic restoration--Scott, certainly, and not Coleridge was the "high priest of Romanticism." [4] Brandl is dissatisfied with the term Lake School, or Lakers, commonly given to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, and proposes instead to call them the Romantic School, Romanticists (_Romantiker_), surely something of a misnomer when used of an eclectic versifier like Southey, or a poet of nature, moral reflection, and humble life like Wordsworth. Southey, in casting about him for a theme, sometimes became for the nonce and so far as subject goes, a romancer; as in "Joan of Arc" (1799), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick the Goth" (1814); not to speak of translations like "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and "The Chronicle of the Cid." But these were not due to the compelling bent of his genius, as in Scott. They were miscellaneous jobs, undertaken in the regular course of his business as a manufacturer of big, irregular epics, Oriental, legendary, mythological, and what not; and as an untiring biographer, editor, and hack writer of all descriptions. Southey was a mechanical poet, with little original inspiration, and represents nothing in particular. Wordsworth again, though innovating in practice and theory against eighteenth-century tradition, is absolutely unromantic in contrast with Scott and Coleridge. But it will be fair to let the critic defend his own nomenclature; and the passage which I shall quote will serve not only as another attempt to define romanticism, but also to explain why Brandl regards the Lake poets as our romantic school _par excellence_. "'Lake School' is a name, but no designation. This was felt in England, where many critics have accordingly fallen into the opposite extreme, and maintained that the members of this group of poets had nothing in common beyond their personal and accidental conditions. As if they had only lived together, and not worked together! In truth they were bound together by many a strong tie, and above all by one of a polemical kind, namely, by the aversion for the monotony that had preceded them, and by the struggle against merely dogmatic rules. Unbending uniformity is death! Let us be various and individual as life itself is. . . . Away with dry Rationalism! Let us fight it with all the powers we possess; whether by bold Platonism or simple Bible faith; whether by enthusiastic hymns, or dreamy fairy tales; whether by the fabulous world of distant times and zones, or by the instincts of the children in the next village. Let us abjure the ever-recommended nostrum of imitation of the old masters in poetry, and rather attach ourselves to homely models, and endeavour, with their help, lovingly and organically to develop their inner life. These were the aims of Walter Scott and his Scotch school, only with such changes as local differences demanded. Individuality in person, nationality, and subject, and therefore the emphasis of all natural unlikeness, was the motto on both sides of the Tweed. And, as these men, when confronted by elements peculiar, rare, and marvellous, designated such elements as 'romantic,' so may they themselves be justly called the 'Romantic School.' But the term is much misused, and requires a little elucidation. Shakespeare is usually called a romantic poet. He, however, never used the expression, and would have been surprised if any one had applied it to him. The term presupposes opposition to the classic style, to rhetorical deduction, and to measured periods, all of which were unknown in the time of the Renaissance, and first imported in that of the French Revolution. On the other hand, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Lamb, and Walter Scott's circle all branched off from the classical path with a directness and consistency which sharply distinguish them from their predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Their predecessors had not broken with the Greek and Latin school, nor with the school of Pope; Chatterton copied Homer; Cowper translated him; Burns in his English verses, and Bowles in his sonnets, adhered to what is called the 'pig-tail period'! The principal poems composed in the last decennium of the eighteenth century . . . adhered still more to classic tradition. In London the satires of Mathias and Gifford renewed the style of the 'Dunciad,' and the moral poems of Rogers that of the 'Essay on Man.' Landor wrote his youthful 'Gebir' in the style of Virgil, and originally in Latin itself. The amateur in German literature, William Taylor of Norwich, and Dr. Sayers, interested themselves especially for those works by Goethe which bear an antique character--for 'Iphigenia,' 'Proserpina,' 'Alexis and Dora.' Only when the war with France drew near was the classical feeling interrupted. Campbell, the Scotchman, and Moore, the Irishman, both well schooled by translations from the Greek, recalled to mind the songs of their own people, and rendered them popular with the fashionable world--though only by clothing them in classic garb. How different to the 'artificial rust' of 'Christabel'; to the almost exaggerated homeliness of 'We Are Seven'; and to the rude 'Lay of the Last Minstrel'! When at last, with the fall of Napoleon, the great stars--Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later the mature Landor--rose in the hemisphere, they had all imbibed from the Romantic school a warmer form of thought and feeling, and a number of productive impulses; though, Euphorion-like, they still regarded the antique as their parent. They expressed much appreciation of the Romantic school, but their hearts were with Aeschylus and Pindar. They contended for national character, but only took pleasure in planting it on classic soil. Byron's enthusiasm for Pope was not only caprice; nor was it mere chance that Byron should have died in Greece, and Shelley and Keats in Italy. Compared with what we may call these classical members of the Romantic school, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott . . . may be said to have taken nothing, whether in the form of translation or imitation, from classical literature; while they drew endless inspiration from the Middle Ages. In their eyes Pope was only a lucid, able, and clever journeyman. It is therefore fair to consider them, and them alone, as exponents of the Romantic school." [5] As to Byron and Shelley this criticism may do; as to Chatterton and Keats it is misleading. Wordsworth more romantic than Chatterton! More romantic than Keats, because the latter often, and Wordsworth seldom, treats subjects from the antique! On the contrary, if "the name is graven on the workmanship," "Michael" and "The Brothers" are as classical as "Hyperion" or "Laodamia" or "The Hamadryad"; "bald as the bare mountain-tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur." Bagehot expressly singles Wordsworth out as an example of pure or classic art, as distinguished from the ornate art of such poets as Keats and Tennyson. And Mr. Colvin hesitates to classify him with Landor only because of his "suggestive and adumbrative manner"--not, indeed, he acknowledges, a romantic manner, and yet "quite distinct from the classical"; i.e., because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner," creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic movement. Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry, Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray, Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little pleasure. . . . I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form. . . . The matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry." Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace, "glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of ". . . Thy image on her wing Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring" he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction, but they were cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785). It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to receive. Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy. Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs. His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins, Warton, and the whole "Il Penseroso" school, but with a more personal note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom "Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles, Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . . "This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry." Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9] or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where "Pity, at the dark and stormy hour Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high, Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower." In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers," whose ". . . muse most lamentably tells What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10] Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that ". . . we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11] A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's "To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12] Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Joseph Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine. Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley Abbey: "The beam Of evening smiles on the gray battlement, And yon forsaken tower that time has rent." His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the "elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream," the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques. The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry: "Though now no more proud chivalry recalls The tourneys bright and pealing festivals; Though now on high her idle spear is hung, Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13] The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy, "Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall; Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme; Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime, Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale, Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!" Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy; imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14] Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to burlesque his own besetting sins, a "doleful egotism," an affected simplicity, and the use of "elaborate and swelling language and imagery." He never attained much success in the use of the sonnet form. A series of twelve sonnets in his first collection opens with one to Bowles: "My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring," etc. More important to our inquiries than the poetry of Bowles is the occasion which he gave to the revival, under new conditions, of the Pope controversy. For it was over the body of Pope that the quarrel between classic and romantic was fought out in England, as it was fought out in France, a few years later, over the question of the dramatic unities and the mixture of tragedy and comedy in the _drame_. In 1806, just a half century after Joseph Warton published the first volume of his "Essay on Pope," Bowles' edition of the same poet appeared. In the life of Pope which was prefixed, the editor made some severe strictures on Pope's duplicity, jealousy, and other disagreeable traits, though not more severe than have been made by Pope's latest editor, Mr. Elwin, who has backed up his charges with an array of evidence fairly overwhelming. The edition contained likewise an essay on "The Poetical Character of Pope," in which Bowles took substantially the same ground that had been taken by his master, Joseph Warton, fifty years before. He asserted in brief that, as compared with Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, Pope was a poet of the second order; that in his descriptions of nature he was inferior to Thomson and Cowper, and in lyrical poetry to Dryden and Gray; and that, except in his "Eloisa" and one or two other pieces, he was the poet of artificial manners and of didactic maxims, rather than of passions. Bowles' chief addition to Warton's criticism was the following paragraph, upon which the controversy that ensued chiefly hinged: "All images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art, and they are therefore _per se_ (abstractedly) more poetical. In like manner those passions of the human heart, which belong to nature in general, are _per se_ more adapted to the higher species of poetry than those derived from incidental and transient manners." The admirers of Pope were not slow in joining issue with his critic, not only upon his general estimate of the poet, but upon the principle here laid down. Thomas Campbell, in his "Specimens of the British Poets" (1819), defended Pope both as a man and a poet, and maintained that "exquisite descriptions of artificial objects are not less characteristic of genius than the description of simple physical appearances." He instanced Milton's description of Satan's spear and shield, and gave an animated picture of the launching of a ship of the line as an example of the "sublime objects of artificial life." Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on "The Invariable Principles of Poetry." He claimed that it was the appearances of nature, the sea and the sky, that lent sublimity to the launch of the ship, and asked: "If images derived from art are as beautiful and sublime as those derived from nature, why was it necessary to bring your ship off the stocks?" He appealed to his adversary whether the description of a game of ombre was as poetical as that of a walk in the forest, and whether "the sylph of Pope, 'trembling over the fumes of a chocolate pot,' be an image as poetical as that of delicate and quaint Ariel, who sings 'Where the bee sucks, there lurk (_sic_) I.'" Campbell replied in the _New Monthly Magazine_, of which he was editor, and this drew out another rejoinder from Bowles. Meanwhile Byron had also attacked Bowles in two letters to Murray (1821), to which the indefatigable pamphleteer made elaborate replies. The elder Disraeli, Gifford, Octavius Gilchrist, and one Martin M'Dermot also took a hand in the fight--all against Bowles--and William Roscoe, the author of the "Life of Lorenzo de Medici," attacked him in an edition of Pope which he brought out in 1824. The rash detractor of the little Twitnam nightingale soon found himself engaged single-handed against a host; but he was equal to the occasion, in volubility if not in logic, and poured out a series of pamphlets, covering in all some thousand pages, and concluding with "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public" (1825), followed by "more last words of Baxter," in the shape of "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe" (1825). The opponents of Bowles maintained, in general, that in poetry the subject is nothing, but the execution is all; that one class of poetry has, as such, no superiority over another; and that poets are to be ranked by their excellence as artists, and not according to some imaginary scale of dignity in the different orders of poetry, as epic, didactic, satiric, etc. "There is, in fact," wrote Roscoe, "no poetry in any subject except what is called forth by the genius of the poet. . . . There are no great subjects but such as are made so by the genius of the artist." Byron said that to the question "whether 'the description of a game of cards be as poetical, supposing the execution of the artists equal, as a description of a walk in a forest,' it may be answered that the materials are certainly not equal, but that the _artist_ who has rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two. But all this 'ordering' of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles. There may or may not be, in fact, different 'orders' of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art." Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water. "What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? They might have seen the poetical 'calm water' at Wapping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin." Without natural accessories--the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind--Bowles had said, the ship's properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles. "So they are," admits Byron, "and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy. . . . Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . . Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other unenclosed down. . . . There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the canals? . . . Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? . . . Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . . . There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington." There was something futile about this whole discussion. It was marked with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England. In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope's rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question. There is no such essential distinction as was attempted to be drawn between "natural objects" and "objects of artificial life," as material for poetry. In a higher synthesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned: "Nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature made: the art itself is nature." Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, _i.e._, with the life of man in society, but how differently! The reason why Pope's poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his subjects--so far Campbell and Byron were right--but in his mood; in his imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of the poet's soul. I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron's own quiver. To prove how much poetry may be associated with "a simple, household, 'indoor,' artificial, and ordinary image," he cites the famous stanza in Cowper's poem to Mrs. Unwin: "Thy needles, once a shining store, For my sake restless heretofore. Now rust disused and shine no more, My Mary." Let us contrast with this a characteristic passage from "The Rape of the Lock," which also contains an artificial image: "On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore Which Jews might kiss and infidels adore." What is the difference? It is in the feeling of the poet Pope's couplet is very charming, but it is merely gallantry, a neatly turned compliment, playful, only half sincere, a spice of mockery lurking under the sugared words; while in Cowper's lines the humble domestic implement is made sacred by the emotions of pity, sorrow, gratitude, and affection with which it is associated. The reason why Pope is not a high poet--or perhaps a poet at all in the best sense of the word--is indicated by Coleridge with his usual acuteness and profundity in a sentence already quoted; that Pope's poetry both in matter and diction was "characterised not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts _translated_ into the language of poetry." Bowles, on the whole, had hold of the right end of the controversy; his instinct was correct, but he was a wretched controversialist. As a poet in the minor key, he was tolerable, but as a prose writer, he was a very dull person and a bore. He was rude and clumsy; he tried to be sarcastic and couldn't, he had damnable iteration. Lowell speaks of his "peculiarly helpless way," and says: "Bowles, in losing his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, in a vague way, aesthetically right, contrived always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the scholarship nor the critical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, especially from Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of polemic prose." Indeed, the most interesting feature of the Pope controversy is Byron's part in it and the light which it sheds on his position in relation to the classic and romantic schools. Before the definite outbreak of the controversy, Byron had attacked Bowles for his depreciation of Pope, in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" (1809), in a passage in which he wished that Bowles had lived in Pope's time, so that Pope might have put him into the "Dunciad." It seems at first sight hard to reconcile Byron's evidently sincere admiration for Pope with the ultra-romantic cast of his own poetry--romantic, as Pater says, in mood if not in subject. In his early fondness for Ossian, his intense passion, his morbid gloom, his exaltation in wild and solitary places, his love of night and storm, of the desert and the ocean, in the careless and irregular outpour of his verse, in his subjectivity, the continual presence of the man in the work--in all these particulars Byron was romantic and would seem to have had little in common with Pope. But there was another side to Byron--and William Rossetti thinks his most characteristic side--viz., his wit and understanding; and this side sympathised heartily with Pope. It is well known that when Byron came back from the East he had in his trunk besides the manuscript of "Childe Harold," which he thought little of, certain "Hints from Horace" which the world thinks less of, but which he was eager to have published, while Dallas was urging him to print "Childe Harold." "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" is a thoroughly Popeian satire, and "The Vision of Judgment," though not in couplets but in _ottava rima_, is one of the best personal satires in English. It has all of Pope's malicious wit, with a sweep and glow, which belonged to Byron as a poet rather than as a satirist, and which Pope never had. Lowell thinks, too, that what Byron admired in Pope was "that patience in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most of his contemporaries." With all this there probably mingled something of perversity and exaggeration in Byron's praises of Pope. He hated the Lakers, and he delighted to use Pope against them as a foil and a rod. He at least was everything that they were not. Doubtless in the Pope controversy, his "object was mainly mischief," as Lowell says. Byron loved a fight; he thought the Rev. W. L. Bowles an ass, and he determined to have some fun with him. Besides the two letters to Murray in 1821, an open letter of Byron's to Isaac Disraeli, dated March 15, 1820, and entitled "Some Observations upon an article in _Blackwood's Magazine_," [15] contains a long passage in vindication of Pope and in denunciation of contemporary poetry--a passage which is important not only as showing Byron's opinions, but as testifying to the very general change in taste which had taken place since 1756, when Joseph Warton was so discouraged by the public hostility to his "Essay on Pope" that he withheld the second volume for twenty-six years. "The great cause of the present deplorable state of English poetry," writes Byron, "is to be attributed to that absurd and systematic depreciation of Pope in which, for the last few years, there has been a kind of epidemical concurrence. Men of the most opposite opinions have united upon this topic." He then goes on to praise Pope and abuse his own contemporaries, especially the Lake poets, both in the most extravagant terms. Pope he pronounces the most perfect and harmonious of poets. "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge," he says, "had all of them a very natural antipathy to Pope . . . but they have been joined in it by . . . the whole heterogeneous mass of living English poets excepting Crabbe, Rogers, Gifford, and Campbell, who, both by precept and practice, have proved their adherence; and by me, who have shamefully deviated in practice, but have ever loved and honoured Pope's poetry with my whole soul." There is ten times more poetry, he thinks, in the "Essay on Man" than in the "Excursion"; and if you want passion, where is to be found stronger than in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard"? To the sneer that Pope is only the "poet of reason" Byron replies that he will undertake to find more lines teeming with _imagination_ in Pope than in any two living poets. "In the mean time," he asks, "what have we got instead? . . . The Lake school," and "a deluge of flimsy and unintelligible romances imitated from Scott and myself." He prophesies that all except the classical poets, Crabbe, Rogers, and Campbell, will survive their reputation, acknowledges that his own practice as a poet is not in harmony with his principles, and says; "I told Moore not very long ago, 'We are all wrong except Rogers, Crabbe, and Campbell.'" In the first of his two letters to Murray, Byron had taken himself to task in much the same way. He compared the romanticists to barbarians who had "raised a mosque by the side of a Grecian temple of the purest architecture"; and who were "not contented with their own grotesque edifice unless they destroy the prior and purely beautiful fabric which preceded, and which shames them and theirs for ever and ever. I shall be told that amongst those I _have_ been (or it may be still _am_) conspicuous--true, and I am ashamed of it. I _have_ been amongst the builders of this Babel . . . but never among the envious destroyers of the classic temple of our predecessor." "Neither time nor distance nor grief nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence. The delight of my boyhood, the study of my manhood, perhaps he may be the consolation of my age. His poetry is the Book of Life." [16] Strange language this from the author of "Childe Harold" and "The Corsair"! But the very extravagance of Byron's claims for Pope makes it plain that he was pleading a lost cause. When Warton issued the first volume of his "Essay on Pope," it was easy for leaders of literary opinion, like Johnson and Goldsmith, to pooh-pooh the critical canons of the new school. But when Byron wrote, the aesthetic revolution was already accomplished. The future belonged not to Campbell and Gifford and Rogers and Crabbe, but to Wordsworth and Scott and Coleridge and Shelley and Keats; to Byron himself, the romantic poet, but not to Byron the _laudator temporis acti_. The victory remained with Bowles, not because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and changed probably once and for all.[17] Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included his masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven "fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and alliteration: "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea"; varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist" or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._ is the simplicity of the following: "The moving moon went up the sky And nowhere did abide: _Softly she was going up_." "Day after day, day after day _We stuck_." "The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of the calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival." In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree the mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with the story. The hermit who shrives the mariner, and the little vesper bell which biddeth him to prayer are Catholic touches, and so are the numerous pious oaths and ejaculations; "By him who died on cross": "Heaven's mother send us grace": "The very deep did rot. O Christ That ever this should be!" The albatross is hung about the mariner's neck instead of the crucifix, and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able to pray. The sleep which refreshes him is sent by "Mary Queen" from heaven. The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval property. The loud bassoon and the bride's garden bower and the procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are straight out of the old land of balladry. One cannot fancy the wedding guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in miniature paintings of the fifteenth century. And it is thus that illustrators of the poem have depicted him. Place is equally indefinite with time. What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or seek to know; only the use of the word _kirk_ implies that it was somewhere in "the north countree"--the proper home of ballad poetry. Coleridge's romances were very differently conceived from Scott's. He wove them out of "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis' "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and surmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistle by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the crew, and had since been navigated by spirits. But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19] There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20] Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_ after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner' unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new qualities." In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs. Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of "Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself "character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether. If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e.g._, "O wedding guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.-- where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell." The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800; and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816. Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone "Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book, As spectacled she sits in chimney nook." "Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and its great gate . . . "ironed within and without, Where an army in battle array had marched out": a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden. If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _roman d'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this: "They passed the hall that echoes still, Pass as lightly as you will. The brands were flat, the brands were dying Amid their own white ashes lying; But when the lady passed, there came A tongue of light, a fit of flame; And Christabel saw the lady's eye, And nothing else saw she thereby, Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. O softly tread, said Christabel, My father seldom sleepeth well." When, after the hurrying anapaests, the verse returns to the strict iambic measure in the last couplet, the effect is a hush, in harmony with the meaning of the words.[21] "Christabel" is not so unique and perfect a thing as "The Ancient Mariner," but it has the same haunting charm, and displays the same subtle art in the use of the supernatural. Coleridge protested that it "pretended to be nothing more than a common fairy tale." [22] But Lowell asserts that it is "tantalising in the suggestion of deeper meanings than were ever there." There is, in truth, a hint of allegory, like that which baffles and fascinates in Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market"; a hint so elusive that the comparison often made between Geraldine and Spenser's Duessa, is distressing to a reader of sensitive nerves. That mystery which is a favourite weapon in the romanticist armoury is used again here with consummate skill. What was it that Christabel saw on the lady's bosom? We are left to conjecture. It was "a sight to dream of, not to tell," [23] and the poet keeps his secret. Lamb, whose taste was very fine in these matters, advised Coleridge never to finish the poem. Brandl thinks that the idea was taken from the curtained picture in the "Mysteries of Udolpho"; and he also considers that the general situation--the castle, the forest, the old father and his young daughter, and the strange lady--are borrowed from Mrs. Radcliffe's "Romance of the Forest"; and that Bürger's "Lenore," Lewis' "Alonzo," and some of the Percy ballads contributed a detail here and there. But _Quellenforschungen_ of this kind are very unimportant. It is more important to note the superior art with which the poet excites curiosity and suspends--not simply, like Mrs. Radcliffe, postpones--the gratification of it to the end, and beyond the end, of the poem. Was Geraldine really a witch, or did she only seem so to Christabel? The angry moan of the mastiff bitch and the tongue of flame that shot up as the lady passed--were they omens, or accidents which popular superstition interprets into omens? Was the malignant influence which Geraldine exerted over the maiden supernatural possession, or the fascination of terror and repugnance? Did she really utter the words of a charm, or did her sweet bedfellow dream them? And once more, what was that upon her breast--"that bosom old--that bosom cold"? Was it a wound, or the mark of a serpent, or some foul and hideous disfigurement--or was it only the shadows cast by the swinging lamp? That isolation and remoteness, that preparation of the reader's mind for the reception of incredible things, which Coleridge secured in "The Ancient Mariner" by cutting off his hero from all human life amid the solitude of the tropic sea, he here secured--in a less degree, to be sure--by the lonely midnight in Sir Leoline's castle. Geraldine and her victim are the only beings awake except the hooting owls. There is dim moonlight in the wood, dim firelight in the hall, and in Christabel's chamber "the silver lamp burns dead and dim." The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, "witchery by daylight." But there were other reasons. Three years had passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in "Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his "Farewell" to Lady Byron: "Alas! they had been friends in youth," etc. But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears. The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of "Christabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay" Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet "The seething pitch and molten lead Reeked like a witch's caldron red." is, of course, from Coleridge's "The water, like a witch's oils, Burned green and blue and white." In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which "The elvish light Fell off in hoary flakes." The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the passage in the older poem: "The moon shines dim in the open air, And not a moonbeam enters here. But they without its light can see The chamber carved so curiously, Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain, For a lady's chamber meet: The lamp with twofold silver chain Is fastened to an angel's feet." The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25] The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to "Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest." There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse": "And at evening evermore, In a chapel on the shore, Shall the chanters sad and saintly-- Yellow tapers burning faintly-- Doleful masses chant for thee, _Miserere Domine_!" or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "Kubla Khan"--the "deep romantic chasm": "A savage place, as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover." Or the well-known ending of "The Knight's Grave": "The knight's bones are dust, And his good sword rust; His soul is with the saints, I trust." In taking account of Coleridge's services to the cause of romanticism, his critical writings should not be overlooked. Matthew Arnold declared that there was something premature about the burst of creative activity in English literature at the opening of the nineteenth century, and regretted that the way had not been prepared, as in Germany, by a critical movement. It is true that the English romantics put forth no body of doctrine, no authoritative statement of a theory of literary art. Scott did not pose as the leader of a school, or compose prefaces and lectures like Hugo and Schlegel.[26] As a contributor to the reviews on his favourite topics, he was no despicable critic; shrewd, good-natured, full of special knowledge, anecdote, and illustration. But his criticism was never polemic, and he had no quarrel with the classics. He cherished an unfeigned admiration for Dryden, whose life he wrote and whose works he edited. Doubtless he would cheerfully have admitted the inferiority of his own poetry to Dryden's and Pope's. He had no programme to announce, but just went ahead writing romances; in practice an innovator, but in theory a literary conservative. Coleridge, however, was fully aware of the scope of the new movement. He represented, theoretically as well as practically, the reaction against eighteenth-century academicism, the Popean tradition[27] in poetry, and the maxims of pseudo-classical criticism. In his analysis and vindication of the principles of romantic art, he brought to bear a philosophic depth and subtlety such as had never before been applied in England to a merely belletristic subject. He revolutionised, for one thing, the critical view of Shakspere, devoting several lecture courses to the exposition of the thesis that "Shakspere's judgment was commensurate with his genius." These lectures borrowed a number of passages from A. W. von Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur," delivered at Vienna in 1808, but engrafted with original matter of the highest value. Compared with these Shakspere notes, with the chapters on Wordsworth in the "Biographia Literaria," and with the _obiter dicta_, sown through Coleridge's prose, all previous English criticism appears crude and superficial, and the contemporary squabble over Pope like a scolding match in the nursery. Coleridge's acute and sympathetic insight into the principles of Shaksperian drama did not save him from producing his abortive "Zapolya" in avowed imitation of the "Winter's Tale." What curse is on the English stage that men who have done work of the highest grade in other departments, as soon as they essay playwriting, become capable of failures like "The Borderers" and "John Woodville" and "Manfred" and "Zapolya"? As for "Remorse," with its Moorish sea-coasts, wild mountains, chapel interiors with painted windows, torchlight and moonlight, dripping caverns, dungeons, daggers and poisoned goblets, the best that can be said of it is that it is less bad than "Zapolya." And of both it may be said that they are romantic not after the fashion of Shakspere, but of those very German melodramas which Coleridge ridiculed in his "Critique on Bertram." [28] [1] For Coleridge's relations with German romance, see vol. i., pp. 419-21. For his early interest in Percy, Ossian, and Chatterton, ibid., pp. 299, 328, 368-70. [2] "There is as much difference between Coleridge's brief poem 'Christabel' and all the narrative poems of Walter Scott . . . as between a precious essence and a coarse imitation of it got up for sale." (Leigh Hunt's "Autobiography," p. 197). [3] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik," Alois Brandl, Berlin, 1886. [4] It is in view of his critical attitude, not of his poetry, that Saintsbury applies this title to Coleridge. "The attitude was that of a mediaevalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, repreaching it even to Germany, from which it had partly come." ("A Short History of English Literature," by George Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 656). [5] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic School," by Alois Brandl. Lady Eastlake's translation, London, 1887, pp. 219-23. [6] See vol. i., pp. 160-61. [7] "Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots." Bath, 1789. [8] "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," p. 37. _Cf._ Wordsworth's Sonnets "Upon Westminster Bridge" (1802) and "Scorn Not the Sonnet." [9] _Cf._ vol. i., p. 182. [10] See Sonnet xvii., "On Revisiting Oxford." See also Sonnet xi., "At Ostend:" "The mournful magic of their mingled chimes First waked my wondrous childhood into tears." And _Cf._ Francis Mahony's "The Bells of Shandon"-- "Whose sounds so wild would, in the days of childhood, Fling round my cradle their magic spells." And Moore's "Those Evening Bells." The twang of the wind-harp also resounds through Bowles' Sonnets. See for the Aeolus' harp, vol. i., p. 165. and _Cf._ Coleridge's poem, "The Eolian Harp." [11] "Dejection: An Ode" (1802). [12] SONNET XX. _November, 1792_. "There is strange music in the stirring wind When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone Whose ancient trees, on the rough slope reclined, Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear. If in such shades, beneath their murmuring, Thou late hast passed the happier hours of spring, With sadness thou wilt mark the fading year; Chiefly if one with whom such sweets at morn Or eve thou'st shared, to distant scenes shall stray. O Spring, return! return, auspicious May! But sad will be thy coming, and forlorn, If she return not with thy cheering ray, Who from these shades is gone, gone far away." [13] _Cf._ Scott's "Harp of the North, that mouldering long hast hung," etc. "Lady of the Lake," Canto I. [14] "Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here, To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?" --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." [15] No. xxix., August, 1819, "Remarks on Don Juan." [16] "Time was, ere yet in these degenerate days Ignoble themes obtained mistaken praise. When sense and wit with poesy allied, No fabled graces, nourished side by side. . . . Then, in this happy isle, a Pope's pure strain Sought the rapt soul to charm, nor sought in vain; A polished nation's praise aspired to claim, And raised the people's, as the poet's fame. . . . [But] Milton, Dryden, Pope, alike forgot, Resign their hallowed bays to Walter Scott." --"English Bards and Scotch Reviewers." [17] For the benefit of any reader who may wish to follow up the steps of the Pope controversy, I give the titles of Bowles' successive pamphlets. "The Invariable Principles of Poetry: A Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq.," 1819. "A Reply to an 'Unsentimental Sort of Critic,'" Bath, 1820. [This was in answer to a review of "Spence's Anecdotes" in the _Quarterly_ in October, 1820.] "A Vindication of the Late Editor of Pope's Works," London, 1821, second edition. [This was also a reply to the _Quarterly_ reviewer and to Gilchrist's letters in the _London Magazine_, and was first printed in vol. xvii., Nos. 33, 34, and 35 of the _Pamphleteer_.] "An Answer to Some Observations of Thomas Campbell, Esq., in his Specimens of British Poets" (1822). "An Address to Thomas Campbell, Esq., Editor of the _New Monthly Magazine_, in Consequence of an Article in that Publication" (1822). "Letters to Lord Byron on a Question of Poetical Criticism," London, 1822. "A Final Appeal to the Literary Public Relative to Pope, in Reply to Certain Observations of Mr. Roscoe," London, 1823. "Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq., with Further Lessons in Criticism to a Quarterly Reviewer," London, 1826. Gilchrist's three letters to Bowles were published in 1820-21. M'Dermot's "Letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles in Reply to His Letter to Thomas Campbell, Esq., and to His Two Letters to Lord Byron," was printed at London, in 1822. [18] "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, We could not laugh nor wail," etc. "With throats unslaked, with black lips baked, Agape they heard me call," etc. "Are those her sails that glance in the sun Like restless gossamers? Are those her ribs," etc. _Cf._ "Christabel": "Is the night chilly and dark? The night is chilly, but not dark." And see vol. i., p. 271. [19] "Anima Poetae," 1895, p. 5. This recent collection of marginalia has an equal interest with Coleridge's well-known "Table Talk." It is the English equivalent of Hawthorne's "American Note Books," full of analogies, images, and reflections--topics and suggestions for possible development in future romances and poems. In particular it shows an abiding prepossession with the psychology of dreams, apparitions, and mental illusions of all sorts. [20] "Jesu Crist and Seint Benedight Blisse this hous from every wicked wight, Fro the nightes mare, the white Pater Noster; Where wonest thou, Seint Peter's suster." --"The Miller's Tale." [21] _Vide supra_, p. 27. [22] "Biographia Literaria," chap. xxiv. [23] Keats quotes this line in a letter about Edmund Kean. Forman's ed., vol. iii., p. 4. [24] _Vide supra_, p. 14. [25] Brandl thinks that this furnished Keats with a hint or two for his "Belle Dame sans Merci." Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode" is headed with a stanza from "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence." [26] "The English Romantic critics did not form a school. Like everything else in the English Romantic movement, its criticism was individual, isolated, sporadic, unsystematised. It had no official mouthpiece, like Sainte-Beuve and the _Globe_; its members formed no compact phalanx like that which, towards the close of our period, threw itself upon the 'classiques' of Paris. Nor did they, with the one exception of Coleridge, approach the Romantic critics of Germany in range of ideas, in grasp of the larger significance of their own movement. It was only in Germany that the ideas implicit in the great poetic revival were explicitly thought out in all their many-sided bearing upon society, history, philosophy, religion; and that the problem of criticism, in particular, was presented in its full depth and richness of meaning. . . . As English Romanticism achieved greater things on its creative than on its critical side, so its criticism was more remarkable on that side which is akin to creation--in the subtle appreciation of literary quality--than in the analysis of the principles on which its appreciation was founded." (C. H. Herford: "The Age of Wordsworth," p. 50). [27] See "Biographia Literaria." chap. i. "From the common opinion that the English style attained its greatest perfection in and about Queen Anne's reign, I altogether dissent." (Lecture "On Style," March 13, 1818). [28] See vol. i., p. 421 ff. CHAPTER III. Keats, Leigh Hunt, and the Dante Revival. In the interchange of literary wares between England and Germany during the last years of the eighteenth century, it is observable that the English romantics went no further back than to their own contemporaries for their knowledge of the _Deutsche Vergangenheit_. They translated or imitated robber tragedies, chivalry tales, and ghost ballads from the modern restorers of the Teutonic _Mittelalter_; but they made no draughts upon the original storehouse of German mediaeval poetry. There was no such reciprocity as yet between England and the Latin countries. French romanticism dates, at the earliest, from Chateaubriand's "Genie du Christianisme" (1802), and hardly made itself felt as a definite force, even in France, before Victor Hugo's "Cromwell" (1828). But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Spain, and France began to contribute material to the English movement in the shape of translations like Cary's "Divine Comedy" (1814), Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824); Southey's "Amadis of Gaul" (1803), "Palmerin of England" (1807), and "The Chronicle of the Cid" (1808); and Rose's[1] "Partenopex of Blois" (1807). By far the most influential of these was Cary's "Dante." Hitherto the Italian Middle Age had impressed itself upon the English imagination not directly but through the richly composite art of the Renaissance schools of painting and poetry; through Raphael and his followers; through the romances of Ariosto and Tasso and their English scholar, Spenser. Elizabethan England had been supplied with versions of the "Orlando Furioso" [2] and the "Gierusalemme Liberata," by Harrington and Fairfax--the latter still a standard translation and a very accomplished piece of versification. Warton and Hurd and other romanticising critics of the eighteenth century were perpetually upholding Ariosto and Tasso against French detraction: "In face of all his foes, the Cruscan quire, And Boileau, whose rash envy could allow No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, That whetstone of the teeth--monotony in wire!" [3] Scott's eager championship of Ariosto has already been mentioned.[4] But the stuff of the old Charlemagne epos is sophisticated in the brilliant pages of Ariosto, who follows Pulci and Boiardo, if not in burlesquing chivalry outright, yet in treating it with a half irony. Tasso is serious, but submits his romantic matter--Godfrey of Boulogne and the First Crusade--to the classical epic mould. It was pollen from Italy, but not Italy of the Middle Ages, that fructified English poetry in the sixteenth century. Two indeed of _gli antichi_, "the all Etruscan three," communicated an impulse both earlier and later. Love sonneteering, in emulation of Petrarca, began at Henry VIII.'s court. Chaucer took the substance of "Troilus and Creseyde" and "The Knightes Tale" from Boccaccio's "Filostrato" and "Teseide"; and Dryden, who never mentions Dante, versified three stories from the "Decameron." But Petrarch and Boccaccio were not mediaeval minds. They represent the earlier stages of humanism and the new learning. Dante was the genuine _homme du moyen âge_, and Dante was the latest of the great revivals. "Dante," says Carlyle, "was the spokesman of the Middle Ages; the thought they lived by stands here in everlasting music." The difficulty, not to say obscurity, of the "Divine Comedy"; its allusive, elliptical style; its scholasticism and allegorical method; its multitudinous references to local politics and the history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, _arbiter elegantiarum_, felt with a shiver of repulsion, "How grim the master was of Tuscan song." "I estimate highly," wrote Voltaire to an Italian correspondent, "the courage with which you have dared to say that Dante was a madman[6] and his work a monster. . . . There are found among us and in the eighteenth century, people who strive to admire imaginations so stupid and barbarous." A French translation of the "Divine Comedy" had been printed by the Abbé Grangier[7] at Paris in 1596; but Rivarol, whose "Inferno" was published in 1783, was the first Frenchman, says Lowell, to divine Dante's greatness. The earliest German version was Bachenschwanz's prose translation of the "Commedia" (Leipsic, 1767-69),[8] but the German romantic school were the first to furnish a sympathetic interpretation of Dante to their countrymen. Chaucer was well acquainted with the work of "the grete poet of Florence," and drew upon him occasionally, though by no means so freely as upon Boccaccio. Thus in "The Monkes Tale" he re-tells, in a very inferior fashion, the tragedy of Ugolino. In "The Parliament of Foules" and "The Hous of Fame" there are distinct imitations of Dante. A passage from the "Purgatory" is quoted in the "Wif of Bathes Tale," etc. Spenser probably, and Milton certainly, knew their Dante. Milton's sonnet to Henry Lawes mentions Dante's encounter with the musician Casella "in the milder shades of Purgatory." Here and there a reference to the "Divine Comedy" occurs in some seventeenth-century English prose writer like Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor. It is thought that the description of Hell in Sackville's "Mirror for Magistrates" shows an acquaintance with the "Inferno." But Dante had few readers in England before the nineteenth century. He was practically unknown there and in all of Europe outside of Italy. "His reputation," said Voltaire, "will go on increasing because scarce anybody reads him." And half a century later Napoleon said the same thing in the same words: "His fame is increasing and will continue to increase because no one ever reads him." In the third volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1781), Thomas Warton had spoken of the "Divine Comedy" as "this wonderful compound of classical and romantic fancy, of pagan and Christian theology, of real and fictitious history, of tragical and comic incidents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical and sublime poetry. But the grossest improprieties of this poem discover an originality of invention, and its absurdities often border on sublimity. We are surprised that a poet should write one hundred cantos on hell, paradise, and purgatory. But this prolixity is partly owing to the want of art and method, and is common to all early compositions, in which everything is related circumstantially and without rejection, and not in those general terms which are used by modern writers." Warton is shocked at Dante's "disgusting fooleries" and censures his departure from Virgilian grace. Milton "avoided the childish or ludicrous excesses of these bold inventions . . . but rude and early poets describe everything." But Warton felt Dante's greatness. "Hell," he wrote, "grows darker at his frown." He singled out for special mention the Francesca and Ugolino episodes. If Warton could write thus it is not surprising to discover among classical critics either a total silence as to Dante, or else a systematic depreciation. Addison does not mention him in his Italian travels; and in his "Saturday papers" misses the very obvious chance for a comparison between Dante and Milton such as Macaulay afterwards elaborated in his essay on Milton. Goldsmith, who knew nothing of Dante at first hand, wrote of him with the usual patronising ignorance of eighteenth-century criticism as to anything outside of the Greek and Latin classics: "He addressed a barbarous people in a method suited to their apprehension, united purgatory and the river Styx, St. Paul and Virgil, heaven and hell together; and shows a strange mixture of good sense and absurdity. The truth is, he owes most of his reputation to the obscurity of the times in which he lived." [1] In 1782, William Hayley, the biographer of Cowper and author of that very mild poem "The Triumphs of Temper," published a verse "Essay on Epic Poetry" in five epistles. In his notes to the third epistle, he gave an outline of Dante's life with a translation of his sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti and of the first three cantos of the "Inferno." "Voltaire," he says, has spoken of Dante "with that precipitate vivacity which so frequently led the lively Frenchman to insult the reputation of the noblest writers." He refers to the "judicious and spirited summary" of the "Divine Comedy" in Warton, and adds, "We have several versions of the celebrated story of Ugolino; but I believe no entire canto of Dante has hitherto appeared in our language. . . . The author has been solicited to execute an entire translation of Dante, but the extreme inequality of this poet would render such a work a very laborious undertaking; and it appears very doubtful how far such a version would interest our country. Perhaps the reception of these cantos may discover to the translator the sentiments of the public." Hayley adopted "triple rhyme," _i.e._, the _terza rima_, and said that he did not recollect it had ever been used before in English. His translation is by no means contemptible--much better than Boyd's,--but fails entirely to catch Dante's manner or to keep the strange precision and picturesqueness of his phrase. Thus he renders "Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco," "Whose voice was like the whisper of a lute"; and the poet is made to address Beatrice--O donna di virtu--as "bright fair," as if she were one of the belles in "The Rape of the Lock." In this same year a version of the "Inferno" was printed privately and anonymously by Charles Rogers, a book and art collector and a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But the first complete translation of the "Comedy" into English was made by Henry Boyd, a clergyman of the Irish Church; the "Inferno" in 1785 (with a specimen from Ariosto); the whole in 1802. Boyd was a quite obscure person, author among other things of a Spenserian poem entitled "The Woodman's Tale," and his translation attracted little notice. In his introduction he compares Dante with Homer, and complains that "the venerable old bard . . . has been long neglected"; perhaps, he suggests, because his poem could not be tried by Aristotle's rules or submitted to the usual classical tests. "Since the French, the restorers of the art of criticism, cast a damp upon original invention, the character of Dante has been thrown under a deeper shade. That agreeable and volatile nation found in themselves an insuperable aversion to the gloomy and romantic bard, whose genius, ardent, melancholy, and sublime, was so different from their own." Boyd used a six-lined stanza, a singularly ill chosen medium for rendering the _terza rima_; and his diction was as wordy and vague as Dante's is concise and sharp of edge. A single passage will illustrate his manner: "So full the symphony of grief arose, My heart, responsive to the lovers' woes, With thrilling sympathy convulsed my breast. Too strong at last for life my passion grew, And, sickening at the lamentable view, I fell like one by mortal pangs oppressed." [10] The first opportunity which the mere English reader had to form any real notion of Dante, was afforded by Henry Francis Cary's translation in blank verse (the "Inferno," with the Italian text in 1805; the entire "Commedia" in 1814, with the title "The Vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise"). This was a work of talent, if not of genius; and in spite of the numerous versions in prose and verse that have since appeared, it continues the most current and standard Dante in England, if not in America, where Longfellow naturally challenges precedence. The public was as yet so unprepared to appreciate Dante that Cary's work received little attention until brought into notice by Coleridge; and the translator was deeply chagrined by the indifference, not to say hostility, with which his labours were acknowledged. In the memoir[11] of Cary by his son there is a letter from Anne Seward--the Swan of Lichfield--which throws a singular light upon the critical taste of the "snug coterie and literary lady" of the period. She writes: "How can you profess to be charmed with the few faint outlines of landscape painting in Dante, who are blind to the beautiful, distinct, and profuse scenery in the pages of Ossian?" She goes on to complain that the poem, in its English dress, is vulgar and obscure. Coleridge devoted to Dante a part of his series of lectures given at London in 1818, reading copious selections from Cary's version. The translator had claimed, in his introduction, that the Florentine poet "leaves to Homer and Shakespeare alone the power of challenging the preeminence or equality." Coleridge emphasized the "endless, subtle beauties of Dante"; the vividness, logical connection, strength, and energy of his style. In this he pronounced him superior to Milton; and in picturesqueness he affirmed that he surpassed all other poets ancient or modern. With characteristic penetration he indicated the precise position of Dante in mediaeval literature; his poetry is "the link between religion and philosophy"; it is "christianized, but without the further Gothic accession of proper chivalry"; it has that "inwardness which . . . distinguishes all the classic from all the modern poetry." It was perhaps in consequence of Coleridge's praise that Cary's translation went into its second edition in 1819, the year following this lecture course. A third was published in 1831. Italians used to complain that the foreign reader's knowledge of the "Divine Comedy" was limited to the "Inferno," and generally to the Ugolino and Francesca passages. Coleridge's quotations are all from the "Inferno," and Lowell thinks that he had not read beyond it. He testified that the Ugolino and Francesca stories were already "so well known and admired that it would be pedantry to analyse them." Sir Joshua Reynolds had made a painting of the former subject. In 1800 William Blake produced a series of seven engravings in illustration of the "Inferno." In 1817 Flaxman began his illustrations of the whole "Commedia," extending to a hundred plates.[12] In 1819-20 Byron was living at Ravenna, the place of Dante's death and burial[13] and of the last years of his exile. He used to ride for hours together through Ravenna's "immemorial wood," [14] and the associations of the scene prompted him to put into English (March, 1820) the Francesca episode, that "thing woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal black." In the letter to Murray, sent with his translation, he wrote: "Enclosed you will find, line for line, in third rhyme (_terza rima_), of which your British blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married and slain, from Cary, Boyd, and such people." In his diary, Byron commented scornfully on Frederick Schlegel's assertions that Dante had never been a favourite with his own countrymen; and that his main defect was a want of gentle feelings. "_Not_ a favourite! Why they talk Dante--write Dante--and think and dream Dante at this moment (1821) to an excess which would be ridiculous, but that he deserves it. . . . Of gentle feelings!--and Francesca of Rimini--and the father's feelings in Ugolino--and Beatrice--and 'La Pia'! Why there is a gentleness in Dante beyond all gentleness." Byron had not the patience to be a good translator. His rendering is closer and, of course, more spirited than Hayley's; but where long search for the right word was needed, and a delicate shading of phrase to reproduce without loss the meaning of this most meaning and least translatable of masters, Byron's work shows haste and imperfection. "Love, who to none beloved to love again Remits." is neither an idiomatic nor in any way an adequate englishing of "Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona." Nor does "_Accursed_ was the book and he who wrote," fully give the force of the famous "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse." [15] The year before Byron had composed "The Prophecy of Dante," an original poem in four cantos, in _terza rima_, ". . . imitative rhyme, Harsh Runic copy of the Soutb's sublime." [16] The poem foretells "the fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries," and is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. _He_ is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is Lady Byron-- "That fatal she, Their mother, the cold partner who hath brought Destruction for a dowry--this to see And feel and know without repair, hath taught A bitter lesson; but it leaves me free: I have not vilely found nor basely sought, They made an exile not a slave of me." Dante's bitter and proud defiance found a response in Byron's nature, but his spirit, as a whole, the English poet was not well fitted to interpret. In the preface to "The Prophecy," Byron said that he had not seen the _terza rima_ tried before in English, except by Hayley, whose translation he knew only from an extract in the notes to Beckford's "Vathek." Shelley's knowledge and appreciation of Dante might be proved from isolated images and expressions in many parts of his writings. He translated the sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti with greater freedom and elegance than Hayley, and wrote a short copy of verses on the Hunger Tower at Pisa, the scene of Ugolino's sufferings. In the preface to "Epipsychidion" he cites the "Vita Nuova" as the utterance of an idealised and spiritualised love like that which his own poem records. In the "Defence of Poetry" he pays a glowing tribute to Dante as the second of epic poets and "the first awakener of entranced Europe." His poetry is the bridge "which unites the modern and the ancient world." Contrary to the prevailing critical tradition, Shelley preferred the "Purgatory" and the "Paradise" to the "Hell." Shelley also employed _terza rima_ in his fragmentary pieces, "Prince Athanase," "The Triumph of Life," "The Woodman and the Nightingale," and in one of his best lyrics, the "Ode to the West Wind," [17] written in 1819 "in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence." This linked measure, so difficult for the translator and which gives a hampered movement to Byron's and Hayley's specimens of the "Inferno," Shelley may be said to have really domesticated in English verse by his splendid handling of it in original work: "Make me thy lyre even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling, like its own? The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!" Shelley expressed to Medwin his dissatisfaction with all English renderings from Dante--even with Cary--and announced his intention, or desire, to translate the whole of the "Divine Comedy" in _terza rima_. Two specimens of this projected version he gave in "Ugolino," and "Matilda Gathering Flowers" ("Purg.," xxviii., 1-51). He also made a translation of the first canzone of the "Convito." After the appearance of Cary's version, critical comprehension of Dante grew rapidly. In the same year when Coleridge gave his lectures, Hallam published his "Middle Ages," which contained a just though somewhat coldly worded estimate of the great Italian. This was amplified in his later work, "The Literature of Europe" (1838-39). Hallam said that Dante was the first name in the literature of the Middle Ages, the creator of his nation's poetry, and the most original of all writers, and the most concise. But he blamed him for obscurity, forced and unnatural turns of expression, and barbarous licenses of idiom. The "Paradise" seemed to him tedious, as a whole, and much of the "Purgatory" heavy. Hallam repeated, if he did not originate that nice bit of discernment, that in his "Paradise" Dante uses only three leading ideas--light, music, and motion. Then came Macaulay's essay "Milton," in the _Edinburgh_ for 1825, with the celebrated parallel between the "Divine Comedy" and the "Paradise Lost," and the contrast between Dante's "picturesque" and Milton's "imaginative" method. Macaulay's analysis has been questioned by Ruskin and others; some of his positions were perhaps mistaken, but they were the most advanced that English Dante criticism had as yet taken up. And finally came Carlyle's vivid piece of portrait painting in "Hero Worship" (1841). The first literal prose translation of any extent from the "Commedia" was the "Inferno" by Carlyle's brother John (1849). Since the middle of the century Dante study and Dante literature in English-speaking lands have waxed enormously. Dante societies have been founded in England and America. Almost every year sees another edition, a new commentary or a fresh translation in prose, in blank verse, in _terza rima_, or in some form of stanza. It is not exaggerating to say that there is more public mention of Dante now in a single year than in all the years of the eighteenth century together. It would be interesting, if it were possible, to count the times that Dante's name occurs in English writings of the eighteenth and then of the nineteenth century; afterwards to do the same with Ariosto and Tasso and compare the results. It would be found that, while the eighteenth century set no very high value on Ariosto and Tasso, it ignored Dante altogether; and that the nineteenth has put aside the superficial mediaevalism of the Renaissance romancers and gone back to the great religious romancer of the Italian Middle Age. There is no surer plummet than Dante's to sound the spiritual depth of a time. It is in the nineteenth century first that Shakspere and Dante took possession of the European mind. In 1800 Shakspere was an English, or at most an English and German poet, and Dante exclusively an Italian. In 1900 they had both become world poets. Shakspere's foreign conquests were the earlier and are still the wider, as wide perhaps as the expanse-- "That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne." But the ground that Dante has won he holds with equal secureness. Not that he will ever be popular, in Shakspere's way; and yet it is far gone when the aesthete in a comic opera is described as a "Francesca da Rimini young man." As a stimulus to creative work the influence of Dante, though not entirely absent, is not conspicuous in the first half of the century. It is not until the time of the Rossettis in England and of Longfellow and Dr. Parsons in America that any poetry of a really Dantesque inspiration and, at the same time, of high original value was added to our literature.[18] The first fruits of the Dante revival in England, in the shape of original production, was Leigh Hunt's "Story of Rimini" (1816)--"Mr. Hunt's smutty story of Rimini," as the Tory wits of _Blackwood_ were fond of calling it in their onslaughts upon the Cockney school. This was a romaunt in four cantos upon the already familiar episode of Francesca, that "lily in the mouth of Tartarus." Hunt took Dryden's "Fables" as his model in versification, employing the heroic couplet with the frequent variation of the triplet and the alexandrine. The poem is not at all Dantesque in its lax and fluent sweetness, and in that colloquial, familiar manner which is constant in all Hunt's writing, both prose and verse; reminding one, at its best, of Chaucer, who was, indeed, one of his favourite masters. Hunt softens the ferocity of the tale as given by Boccaccio, according to whom the husband Giovanni Malatesta was a cripple, and killed the lovers _in flagrante delicto_. Hunt makes him a personable man, though of proud and gloomy temper. He slays his brother Paolo in chivalrous fashion and in single combat, and Francesca dies of a broken heart. The descriptive portions of the "Story of Rimini" are charming: the feudal procession with trumpeters, heralds, squires, and knights, sent to escort home the bride, the pine forest outside Ravenna, and the garden at Rimini in which the lovers used to meet-- "Places of nestling green for poets made." Hunt had a quick eye for colour; a fondness, not altogether free from affectation, for dainty phrases; and a feminine love of little niceties in dress, tapestry, needlework, and furnishings. The poem was written mostly in prison where its author spent two years for a libel on the Prince Regent. Byron used to visit him there and bring him books bearing on Francesca's history. Hunt brought into the piece romantic stuff from various sources, including a summary of the book which betrayed the lovers to their fatal passion, the romance of "Lancelot du Lac." And Giovanni speaks to his dying brother a paraphrase of the celebrated eulogy pronounced over Lancelot by Sir Ector in the "Morte Darthur": "And, Paulo, thou wert the completest knight That ever rode with banner to the fight; And thou wert the most beautiful to see, That ever came in press of chivalry: And of a sinful man thou wert the best That ever for his friend put spear in rest; And thou wert the most meek and cordial That ever among ladies eat in hall; And thou wert still, for all that bosom gored, The kindest man that ever struck with sword." Hunt makes the husband discover his wife's infidelity by overhearing her talking in her sleep. In many other particulars he enfeebles, dandifies, and sentimentalises Dante's fierce, abrupt tragedy; holding the reader by the button while he prattles in his garrulous way of Paulo's "taste"-- "The very nose, lightly yet firmly wrought, Showed taste"-- and of "The two divinest things in earthly lot, A lovely woman in a rural spot!" a couplet which irresistibly suggests suburban picnics. Yet no one in his generation did more than Leigh Hunt to familiarise the English public with Italian romance. He began the study of Italian when he was a schoolboy at Christ Hospital, being attracted to Ariosto by a picture of Angelica and Medoro, in West's studio. Like his friend Keats, on whose "Eve of St. Agnes" he wrote an enthusiastic commentary,[19] Hunt was eclectic in his choice of material, drawing inspiration impartially from the classics and the romantics; but, like Keats, he became early a declared rebel against eighteenth-century traditions and asserted impulse against rule. "In antiquarian corners," he says, in writing of the influences of his childish days, "Percy's 'Reliques' were preparing a nobler age both in poetry and prose." At school he fell passionately in love with Collins and Gray, composed a "Winter" in imitation of Thomson, one hundred stanzas of a "Fairy King" in emulation of Spenser, and a long poem in Latin inspired by Gray's odes and Malet's "Northern Antiquities." In 1802 [aetate 18] he published a volume of these _juvenilia_--odes after Collins and Gray, blank verse after Thomson and Akenside, and a "Palace of Pleasure" after Spenser's "Bower of Bliss." [20] It was in this same year that on a visit to Oxford, he was introduced to Kett, the professor of poetry, who expressed a hope that the youthful bard might be inspired by "the muse of Warton," whom Hunt had never read. There had fallen in Hunt's way when he was a young man, Bell's edition of the poets, which included Chaucer and Spenser. "The omission of these in Cooke's edition," he says, "was as unpoetical a sign of the times as the present familiarity with their names is the reverse. It was thought a mark of good sense; as if good sense, in matters of literature, did not consist as much in knowing what was poetical poetry, as brilliant wit." Of his "Feast of the Poets" (1814) he writes:[21] "I offended all the critics of the old or French school, by objecting to the monotony of Pope's versification, and all the critics of the new or German school by laughing at Wordsworth." In the preface to his collected poems [1832] occurs the following interesting testimony to the recentness of the new criticism. "So long does fashion succeed in palming its petty instincts upon the world for those of a nation and of nature, that it is only of late years that the French have ceased to think some of the most affecting passages in Shakespeare ridiculous. . . . Yet the English themselves, no great while since, half blushed at these criticisms, and were content if the epithet 'bizarre' ('_votre bizarre Shakespeare_') was allowed to be translated into 'a wild, irregular genius.' Everything was wild and irregular except rhymesters in toupees. A petty conspiracy of decorums took the place of what was becoming to humanity." In the summer of 1822 Hunt went by sailing vessel through the Mediterranean to Italy. The books which he read chiefly on board ship were "Don Quixote," Ariosto, and Berni; and his diary records the emotion with which he coasted the western shores of Spain, the ground of Italian romance, where the Paynim chivalry used to land to go against Charlemagne: the scene of Boiardo's "Orlando Inamorato" and Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso." "I confess I looked at these shores with a human interest, and could not help feeling that the keel of our vessel was crossing a real line, over which knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and fabulous; the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely less real. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a lover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever--forever gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flowery islands and reposing beneath its moon." Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close association with Byron and Shelley, enabled him to _préciser_ his knowledge of the Italian language and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of "Stories from the Italian Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose of the "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, "with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and critical notices of the lives and genius of the authors." Like our own romanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh Hunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius; and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval literatures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a French fabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight whose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in the lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harsh imposure, went to the altar with her faithful champion, wearing only the same bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn which Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending. There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, the Latin drinking song attributed to Walter Map-- Mihi est propositum in taberna mori-- and Andrea de Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness of the human frame in decay. In the preface to his "Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of "how widely Dante has re-attracted of late the attention of the world." He pronounces him "the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived," and complains that his metrical translators have failed to render his "passionate, practical, and creative style--a style which may be said to write things instead of words." Hunt's introduction is a fine piece of critical work. His alert, sparkling, and nimble intellect--somewhat lacking in concentration and seriousness--but sensitive above all things to the picturesque, was keenly awake to Dante's poetic greatness. On the other hand, his cheerful philosophy and tolerant, not to say easy-going moral nature, was shocked by the Florentine's bitter pride, and by what he conceives to be his fanaticism, bigotry, superstition, and personal vindictiveness, when "Hell he peoples with his foes, Dark scourge of many a guilty line." Hunt was a Universalist, and Dante was a Catholic Calvinist. There was a determined optimism about Hunt, and a buoyancy as of a cork or other light body, sometimes a little exasperating to men of less sanguine temperament.[22] He ends by protesting that Dante is a semi-barbarian and his "Divine Comedy" too often an infernal tragedy. "Such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacal savage." It was some years before this, in his lecture on "The Hero as Poet," delivered in 1840, that a friend of Leigh Hunt, of a temperament quite the opposite of his, had spoken a very different word touching this cruel scorn--this _saeva indignatio_ of Dante's. Carlyle, like Hunt, discovered _intensity_ to be the prevailing character of Dante's genius, emblemed by the pinnacle of the city of Dis; that "red-hot cone of iron glowing through the dim immensity of gloom." Hunt, the Universalist, said of Dante, "when he is sweet-natured once he is bitter a hundred times." "Infinite pity," says Carlyle, the Calvinist, "yet also infinite rigour of law, it is so nature is made; it is so Dante discerned that she was made. What a paltry notion is that of his 'Divine Comedy's' being a poor splenetic, impotent terrestrial libel; putting those into hell whom he could not be avenged upon on earth! I suppose if ever pity tender as a mother's was in the heart of any man, it was in Dante's. But a man who does not know rigour cannot pity either. His very pity will be cowardly, egoistic--sentimentality, or little better. . . . Morally great above all we must call him; it is the beginning of all. His scorn, his grief are as transcendent as his love; as, indeed, what are they but the _inverse_ or _converse_ of his love?" It is interesting to note that, antipathetic as Hunt's nature was, in many ways, not only to the individual Dante but to the theological thought of which he was the spokesman, in his view of the sacred art of the Italian Middle Age he anticipated the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern interpreters of Dante. Here is a part of what he says of the paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa: "The best idea, perhaps, which I can give an Englishman of the general character of the painting is by referring him to the engravings of Albert Durer and the serious parts of Chaucer. There is the same want of proper costume--the same intense feeling of the human being, both in body and soul--the same bookish, romantic, and retired character--the same evidences, in short, of antiquity and commencement, weak (where it is weak) for want of a settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness--the set limbs of the warriors on horseback--the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments--the people of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares to destroy them--the other rows of elders and doctors of the Church, forming part of the array of heaven--the uplifted hand of Christ denouncing the wicked at the day of judgment--the daring satires occasionally introduced against monks and nuns--the profusion of attitudes, expressions, incidents, broad draperies, ornaments of all sorts, visions, mountains, ghastly looking cities, fiends, angels, sibylline old women, dancers, virgin brides, mothers and children, princes, patriarchs, dying saints, it would be simply blind injustice to the superabundance and truth of conception in all this multitude of imagery not to recognize the real inspirers as well as harbingers of Raphael and Michael Angelo, instead of confining the honour to the Masaccios and Peruginos, [who] . . . are no more to be compared with them than the sonneteers of Henry VIII.'s time are to be compared with Chaucer. Even in the very rudest of the pictures, where the souls of the dying are going out of their mouths, in the shape of little children, there are passages not unworthy of Dante and Michael Angelo. . . . Giotto, be thou one to me hereafter, of a kindred brevity, solidity, and stateliness with that of thy friend, Dante!" [23] Among all the writers of his generation, Keats was most purely the poet, the artist of the beautiful. His sensitive imagination thrilled to every touch of beauty from whatever quarter. That his work is mainly retrospective and eclectic in subject is because a young poet's mind responds more readily to books than to life, and this young poet did not outlive his youth. In the Greek mythology he found a world of lovely images ready to his hand, in the poetry of Spenser, Chaucer, and Ariosto, he found another such world. Arcadia and Faeryland--"the realms of gold"--he rediscovered them both for himself, and he struck into the paths that wound through their enchanted thickets with the ardour of an explorer. This was the very mood of the Renaissance--this genial heat which fuses together the pagan and the Christian systems--this indifference of the creative imagination to the mere sources and materials of its creations. Indeed, there is in Keats' style a "natural magic" which forces us back to Shakspere for comparison, a noticeable likeness to the diction of the Elizabethans, when the classics were still a living spring of inspiration, and not a set of copies held _in terrorem_ over the head of every new poet. Keats' break with the classical tradition was early and decisive. In his first volume (1817) there is a piece entitled "Sleep and Poetry," composed after a night passed at Leigh Hunt's cottage near Hampstead, which contains his literary declaration of faith. After speaking of the beauty that fills the universe, and of the office of Imagination to be the minister and interpreter of this beauty, as in the old days when "here her altar shone, even in this isle," and "the muses were nigh cloyed with honours," he asks: "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, Made great Apollo blush for this, his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories: with a puling infant's force, They swayed about upon a rocking horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah, dismal-souled! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolled Its gathering waves--ye felt it not. The blue Bowed its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer night collected still, to make The morning precious. Beauty was awake! Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead To things ye knew not of--were closely wed To musty laws, lined out with wretched rule And compass vile: so that ye taught a school Of dolts to smooth, inlay and clip and fit; Till, like the certain wands of Jacob's wit, Their verses tallied. Easy was the task: A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race! That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face, And did not know it,--no, they went about, Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, The name of one Boileau!" This complaint, so far as it relates to the _style_ of the rule-ridden eighteenth-century poetry, had been made before: by Cowper, by Wordsworth, by Coleridge. But Keats, with his instinct for beauty, pierces to the core of the matter. It was because of Pope's defective sense of the beautiful that the doubt arose whether he was a poet at all. It was because of its ". . . forgetting the great end Of Poetry, that it should be a friend To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man," that the poetry of the classical school was so unsatisfying. This is one of the very few passages of Keats that are at all doctrinal[24] or polemic; and as such it has been repeatedly cited by biographers and essayists and literary historians. Lowell quotes it, in his essay on Dryden, and adds; "Keats was the first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan authority save Milton." Mr. Gosse quotes it and says, "in these lines he has admirably summed up the conceptions of the first half of the present century with regard to classical poetry." [25] The passage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before he is so positive on the subject, and then compare what he will have _then_ written, and what he has now written, with the humblest and earliest compositions of Pope, produced in years still more youthful than those of Mr. Keats when he invented his new 'Essay on Criticism,' entitled 'Sleep and Poetry' (an ominous title) from whence the above canons are taken." In a manuscript note on this passage made after Keats' death, Byron wrote: "My indignation at Mr. Keats' depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius. . . . He is a loss to our literature, and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language," Keats made a study of Dryden's versification before writing "Lamia"; but had he lived to the age of Methusaleh, he would not have "reformed his style" upon any such classical models as Lord Byron had in mind. Classical he might have become, in the sense in which "Hyperion" is classical; but in the sense in which Pope was classical--never. Pope's Homer he deliberately set aside for Chapman's-- "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." [27] Keats had read Virgil, but seemingly not much Latin poetry besides, and he had no knowledge of Greek. He made acquaintance with the Hellenic world through classical dictionaries and a study of the casts in the British Museum. But his intuitive grasp of the antique ideal of beauty stood him in as good stead as Landor's scholarship. In such work as "Hyperion" and the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" he mediates between the ancient and the modern spirit, from which Landor's clear-cut marbles stand aloof in chill remoteness. As concerns his equipment, Keats stands related to Scott in romance learning much as he does to Landor in classical scholarship. He was no antiquary, and naturally made mistakes of detail. In his sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," he makes Cortez, and not Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific. _À propos_ of a line in "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- "And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor"-- Leigh Hunt called attention to the fact that rushes and not carpets covered the floors in the Middle Ages. In the same poem, Porphyro sings to his lute an ancient ditty, "In Provençe called 'La Belle Dame sans Merci.'" The ditty was by Alain Chartier, who was not a troubadour, but a Norman by birth and a French court poet of the fifteenth century. The title, which Keats found in a note in an edition of Chaucer, pleased his fancy and suggested his ballad,[28] of the same name, which has nothing in common with Chartier's poem. The latter is a conventional love _estrif_ in the artificial taste of the time. But errors of this sort, which any encyclopaedia can correct, are perfectly unimportant. Byron's sneer at Keats, as "a tadpole of the Lakes," was ridiculously wide of the mark. He was nearly of the second generation of romantics; he was only three years old when "The Ancient Mariner" was published; "Christabel" and Scott's metrical romances had all been issued before he put forth his first volume. But though he owes much to Coleridge[29] and more perhaps to Chatterton, he took no imprint from Wordsworth, and cared nothing for Scott. Keats, like his friend Hunt, turned instinctively away from northern to southern Gothic; from rough border minstrelsy to the mythology and romance of the races that dwelt about the midland sea. Keats' sensuous nature longed for "a beaker full of the warm South." "I have tropical blood in my veins," wrote Hunt, deprecating "the criticism of a Northern climate" as applied to his "Story of Rimini." Keats' death may be said to have come to him from Scotland, not only by reason of the brutal attacks in _Blackwood's_--to which there is some reason for believing that Scott was privy--but because the hardships and exposure of his Scotch tour laid the foundation of his fatal malady. He brought back no literary spoils of consequence from the North, and the description of the journey in his letters makes it evident that his genius could not find itself there. This uncomfortable feeling of alienation is expressed in his "Sonnet on Visiting the Tomb of Burns." The Scotch landscape seems "cold--strange." "The short-lived paly Summer is but won From Winter's ague." And in the letter from Dumfries, enclosing the sonnet he writes: "I know not how it is, the clouds, the sky, the houses, all seem anti-Grecian and anti-Charlemagnish." _Charlemagnish_ is Keats' word for the true mediaeval-romantic. It is noteworthy that Keats avoided Scott's favourite verse forms. "La Belle Dame sans Merci" is not in the minstrel ballad measure; and when Keats uses the eight-syllabled couplet, he uses it very differently from Scott, without the alternate riming which prevails in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" and all the rest of the series. A spark from Spenser kindled the flame of poetry in Keats. His friend, Cowden Clarke, read him the "Epithalamium" one day in 1812 in an arbour in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faëry Queene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of a spirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp through "The Faëry Queene." There even runs a story that a certain professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damn Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an "Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him are frequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and a number of "Spenserian Stanzas." But his only really important experiment in the measure of "The Faëry Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." It was with fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy on Keats in "Adonais." Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the "Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"-- and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemble most closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in 1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It is inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser. There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and over-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessential beauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word effects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes": "Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one": "_Buttressed_ from moonlight": "The music, _yearning_ like a God in pain": "The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion." Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. He admired the "Story of Rimini," [31] and he adopted in his early verse epistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the couplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt had practised in the poem itself and advocated in the preface. Many passages in "Rimini" and in Keats' couplet poems anticipate, in their easy flow, the relaxed versification of "The Earthly Paradise." This was the Elizabethan type of heroic couplet, and its extreme instance is seen in William Chamberlayne's "Pharonnida" (1659). There is no proof of Keats' alleged indebtedness to Chamberlayne, though he is known to have been familiar with another specimen of the type, William Browne's "Britannia's Pastorals." Hunt also confirmed Keats in the love of Spenser, and introduced him to Ariosto whom he learned to read in the Italian, five or six stanzas at a time. Dante he read in Cary's translation, a copy of which was the only book that he took with him on his Scotch trip. "The fifth canto of Dante," he wrote (March, 1819), "pleases me more and more; it is that one in which he meets with Paulo and Francesca." He afterwards dreamed of the story and wrote a sonnet upon his dream, which Rossetti thought "by far the finest of Keats' sonnets" next to that on Chapman's "Homer." [32] Mr. J. M. Robertson thinks that the influence of Gary's "Dante" is visible in "Hyperion," especially in the recast version "Hyperion: A Vision." [33] And Leigh Hunt suggests that in the lines in "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- "The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze, Emprisoned in black, purgatorial rails: Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat'ries, He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails"-- the germ of the thought is in Dante.[34] Keats wished that Italian might take the place of French in English schools. To Hunt's example was also due, in part, that fondness for neologisms for which the latter apologises in the preface to "Rimini," and with which Keats was wont to enrich his diction, as well as with Chattertonian archaisms, Chapmanese compounds, "taffeta phrases, silken terms precise" from Elizabethan English, and coinages like _poesied_, _jollying_, _eye-earnestly_--licenses and affectations which gave dire offence to Gifford and the classicals generally. In the 1820 volume, which includes Keats' maturest work, there was a story from the "Decameron," "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil," which tells how a lady exhumes the body of her murdered lover, cuts off the head and buries it in a pot of sweet basil, which she keeps in her chamber and waters with her tears. It was perhaps symptomatic of a certain morbid sensibility in Keats to select this subject from so cheerful a writer as Boccaccio. This intensity of love surviving in face of leprosy, torment, decay, and material horrors of all kinds; this passionate clinging of spirit to body, is a mediaeval note, and is repeated in the neo-romantic school which derives from Keats; in Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, O'Shaughnessy, Marzials, and Paine. Think of the unshrinking gaze which Dante fixes upon the tortures of the souls in pain; of the wasted body of Christ upon the cross; of the fasts, flagellations, mortifications of penitents; the unwashed friars, the sufferings of martyrs. Keats apologises for his endeavour "to make old prose in modern rime more sweet," and for his departure from the even, unexcited narrative of his original: "O eloquent and famed Boccaccio, Of thee we now should ask forgiving boon. . . . For venturing syllables that ill beseem The quiet glooms of such a piteous theme. . . . "Ah! wherefore all this wormy circumstance? Why linger at the yawning tomb so long? O for the gentleness of old Romance, The simple plaining of the minstrel's song." But it is just this wormy circumstance that rivets the poet's attention; his imagination lingers over Isabella kissing the dead face, pointing each eyelash, and washing away the loam that disfigures it with her tears; over the basil tufts growing rankly from the mouldering head, "The thing was vile with green and livid spot," but Keats' tenderness pierces the grave. It is instructive to compare "Isabella" with Dryden's "Sigismonda and Guiscardo," also from the "Decameron" and surcharged with the physically horrible. In this tale Tancred sends his daughter her lover's heart in a golden goblet. She kisses the heart, fills the cup with poison, drinks, and dies. The two poems are typical examples of romantic and classical handling, though neither is quite a masterpiece in its kind. The treatment in Dryden is cool, unimpassioned, objective--like Boccaccio's, in fact. The story is firmly told, with a masculine energy of verse and language. Sigismonda and Tancred are characters, confronted wills, as in drama, and their speeches are like _tirades_ from a tragedy of Racine. But here Dryden's rhetorical habit and his fondness for reasoning in rime run away with him, and make his art inferior to Boccaccio's. Sigismonda argues her case like counsel for the defendant. She even enjoys her own argument and carries it out with a gusto into abstractions. "But leaving that: search we the secret springs, And backward trace the principles of things; There shall we find, that when the world began One common mass composed the mould of man," etc. Dryden's grossness of taste mars his narrative at several points. The satirist in him will not let him miss the chance for a sneer at priests and another at William III.'s standing army. He makes his heroine's love ignobly sensual. She is a widow, who having "tasted marriage joys," is unwilling to live single. Dryden's _bourgeois_ manner is capable even of ludicrous descents. "The sudden bound awaked the sleeping sire, And showed a sight no parent can desire." In Keats' poem there are no characters dramatically opposed. Lorenzo and Isabella have no individuality apart from their love; passion has absorbed character. The tale is not evolved firmly and continuously, but with lyrical outbursts, a poignancy of sympathy at the points of highest tragic tensity and a swooning sensibility all through, that sometimes breaks into weakness. There can be no question, however, which poem is the more _felt_; no question, either, as to which method is superior--at least as between these two artists, and as applied to subjects of this particular kind. "Isabella" is in _ottava rima_, "The Eve of St. Agnes" in the Spenserian stanza. This exquisite creation has all the insignia of romantic art and has them in a dangerous degree. It is brilliant with colour, richly ornate, tremulous with emotion. Only the fine instinct of the artist saved it from the overladen decoration and cloying sweetness of "Endymion," and kept it chaste in its warmth. As it is, the story is almost too slight for its descriptive mantle "rough with gems and gold." Such as it is, it is of Keats' invention and of the "Romeo and Juliet" variety of plot. A lover who is at feud with his mistress' clan ventures into his foemen's castle while a revel is going on, penetrates by the aid of her nurse to his lady's bower, and carries her off while all the household are sunk in drunken sleep. All this in a night of wild weather and on St. Agnes' Eve, when, according to popular belief, maidens might see their future husbands in their dreams, on the performance of certain conditions. The resemblance of this poem to "Christabel" at several points, has already been mentioned,[35] and especially in the description of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent. Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an unequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences. In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious, shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous than Coleridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholic elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architectural details are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead in the chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall pillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale, _latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp: "The carven angels ever eager-eyed" that "Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests, With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts." Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazed knight in Coleridge's "Love," who is haunted by a fiend in the likeness of an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad strain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of this poet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety and purity of expression. The famous picture of the painted "casement, high and triple-arched" in Madeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly enriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened," [37] should be compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel of Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate a distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic ruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in the country of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to aid the lovers' flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the "Shadows haunting fairily The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay Of old Romance." In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to "leave the world unseen. And with thee fade away into the forest dim." [39] Keats cared no more for history than he did for contemporary politics. Courthope[40] quotes a passage from "Endymion" to illustrate his indifference to everything but art; "Hence, pageant history! Hence, gilded cheat! . . . Many old rotten-timbered boats there be Upon thy vaporous bosom, magnified To goodly vessels, many a sail of pride, And golden-keeled, is left unlaunched and dry. But wherefore this? What care, though owl did fly About the great Athenian admiral's mast? What care though striding Alexander past The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? . . . Juliet leaning Amid her window-flowers,--sighing,--weaning Tenderly her fancy from its maiden snow, Doth more avail than these: the silver flow Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den, Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of empires." This passage should be set beside the complaint in "Lamia" of the disenchanting touch of science: "There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," etc. Keats is the poet of romantic emotion, as Scott of romantic action. Professor Gates says that Keats' heroes never _do_ anything.[41] It puzzles the reader of "The Eve of St. Agnes" to know just why Porphyro sets out the feast of cates on the little table by Madeline's bedside unless it be to give the poet an opportunity for his luscious description of "the lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon" and other like delicacies. In the early fragment "Calidore," the hero--who gets his name from Spenser--does nothing in some hundred and fifty lines but assist two ladies to dismount from their palfreys. To revert, as before, to Ariosto's programme, it was not the _arme_ and _audaci imprese_ which Keats sang, but the _donne_, the _amori_, and the _cortesie_. Feudal war array was no concern of his, but the "argent revelry" of masque and dance, and the "silver-snarling trumpets" in the musicians' gallery. He was the poet of the lute and the nightingale, rather than of the shock of spear in tourney and crusade. His "Specimen of an Induction to a Poem" begins "Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry." But he never tells it. The piece evaporates in visions of pure loveliness; "large white plumes"; sweet ladies on the worn tops of old battlements; light-footed damsels standing in sixes and sevens about the hall in courtly talk. Meanwhile the lance is resting against the wall. "Ah! shall I ever tell its cruelty, When the fire flashes from a warrior's eye, And his tremendous hand is grasping it?" "No," answers the reader, "I don't think you ever will. Leave that sort of thing to Walter Scott, and go on and finish your charming fragment of 'The Eve of St. Mark,' which stops provokingly just where Bertha was reading the illuminated manuscript, as she sat in her room of an April evening, when "'On the western window panes, The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold.'" [42] This quaintly attractive fragment of Keats was written while he was living in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester. "Some time since," he writes to his brother George, September, 1819, "I began a poem called 'The Eve of St. Mark,' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will give you the sensation of walking about an old country town in a coolish evening." The letter describes the maiden-lady-like air of the side streets, with doorsteps fresh from the flannel, the doors themselves black, with small brass handles and lion's head or ram's head knockers, seldom disturbed. He speaks of his walks through the cathedral yard and two college-like squares, grassy and shady, dwelling-places of deans and prebendaries, out to St. Cross Meadows with their Gothic tower and Alms Square. Mr. Colvin thinks that Keats "in this piece anticipates in a remarkable degree the feeling and method of the modern pre-Raphaelite schools"; and that it is "perfectly in the spirit of Rossetti (whom we know that the fragment deeply impressed and interested)." Mr. Forman, indeed, quotes Rossetti's own _dictum_ (works of John Keats, vol. ii., p. 320) that the poem "shows astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred as an artist." It is in the Pre-Raphaelites that Keats' influence on our later poetry is seen in its most concentrated shape. But it is traceable in Tennyson, in Hood, in the Brownings, and in many others, where his name is by no means written in water. "Wordsworth," says Lowell, "has influenced most the ideas of succeeding poets; Keats their forms." [1] Scott's friend, William Stewart Rose--to whom the first verse epistle in "Marmion" is addressed. He also translated the "Orlando Furioso" (1823-31). His "Partenopex" was made from a version in modern French. [2] A new translation of the "Orlando," by Hoole, appeared in 1773-83; of Tasso's "Jerusalem" in 1763; and of Metastasio's dramas in 1767. These were in the heroic couplets of Pope. [3] "Childe Harold," Canto iv., xxxviii. And _Cf._ vol. i., pp. 25, 49, 100, 170, 219, 222-26. [4] _Vide supra_, p. 5. [5] _Vide supra_, p. 40. Goethe pronounced the "Inferno" abominable, the "Purgatorio" doubtful, and the "Paradise" tiresome (Plumptre's "Dante," London, 1887, vol. ii., p. 484). [6] See Walpole's opinion, vol. i., p. 235. [7] For early manuscript renderings see "Les Plus Anciennes Traductions Françaises de la Divine Comédie," par C. Morel, Paris, 1897. [8] Lowell says Kannegiesser's, 1809. [9] "Present State of Polite Learning" (1759). [10] "Mentre che l'uno spirto questo disse, L'altro piangeva sì, che di pietade I venni men, così com' io morisse: E cadde come corpo morte cade." --"Inferno," Canto v. [11] Vol. i., p. 236. [12] Plumptre's "Dante," vol. ii., p. 439. [13] "Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried, by the upbraiding shore." --"Childe Harold," iv., 57. [14] See vol. i., p. 49; and "Purgatorio," xxviii., 19-20. "Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie Per la pineta in sal lito di Chiassi." [15] He did better in free paraphrase than in literal translation. _Cf._ Stanza cviii., in "Don Juan," Canto iii.-- "Soft hour! which wakes the wish and melts the heart"-- with its original in the "Purgatorio," viii., 1-6. [16] Dedication to La Guiccioli. [17] But in this poem each thirteenth and fourteenth line make a couplet, thus breaking up the whole into a series of loose sonnets. [18] T. W. Parsons' "Lines on a Bust of Dante" appeared in the Boston _Advertiser_ in 1841. His translation of the first ten cantos of the "Inferno" was published in 1843: later instalments in 1867 and 1893. Longfellow's version of the "Divine Comedy" with the series of sonnets by the translator came out in 1867-70. For the Dante work of the Rossettis, _vide infra_, pp. 282 ff. [19] "The Seer." [20] He named a daughter, born while he was in prison, after Spenser's Florimel. [21] "Autobiography," p. 200 (ed. of 1870). [22] See Dickens' caricature of him as Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House." [23] "When I was last at Haydon's," wrote Keats to his brother George in 1818-19, "I looked over a book of prints taken from the fresco of the church at Milan, the name of which I forget. In it were comprised specimens of the first and second age of art in Italy. I do not think I ever had a greater treat out of Shakespeare; full of romance and the most tender feeling; magnificence of drapery beyond everything I ever saw, not excepting Raphael's--but grotesque to a curious pitch--yet still making up a fine whole, even finer to me than more accomplished works, as there was left so much room for imagination." [24] Against the hundreds of maxims from Pope, Keats furnishes a single motto--the first line of "Endymion"-- "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." [25] "From Shakespeare to Pope." See also Sidney Colvin's "Keats." New York, 1887, pp. 61-64. [26] _Vide supra_, p. 70. [27] That he knew Pope's version is evident from a letter to Haydon of May, 1817, given in Lord Houghton's "Life." [28] He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature; yet there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaelite school which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romantic spirit--the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and make no small figure in mediaeval theology--as does the short piece of 'La Belle Dame sans Merci'. (Saintsbury: "A Short History of English Literature," p. 673). [29] _Vide supra_, p. 85. And for Keats' interest in Chatterton see vol. i., pp. 370-72. [30] The Dict. Nat. Biog. mentions doubtfully an earlier edition in 1795. [31] See "Sonnet on Leigh Hunt's Poem 'The Story of Rimini.'" Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 229. [32] See Forman's ed., vol. ii., p. 334. [33] "New Essays toward a Critical Method," London, 1897, p. 256. [34] "Come, per sostentar solaio o tetto, Per mensola talvolta una figura Si vede giunger le ginocchia al petto, La qual fa del non ver vera rancura Nascere in chi la vede." --"Purgatorio," Canto x., 130-34. [35] _Vide supra_, p. 85. [36] Rossetti, Colvin, Gates, Robertson, Forman, and others. [37] Leigh Hunt. It has been objected to this passage that moonlight is not strong enough to transmit _colored_ rays, like sunshine (see Colvin's "Keats," p. 160). But the mistake--if it is one--is shared by Scott. "The moonbeam kissed the holy pane And threw on the pavement a bloody stain." --"Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto ii., xi. [38] It is interesting to learn that the line "For o'er the Southern moors I have a home for thee" read in the original draught "Over the bleak Dartmoor," etc. Dartmoor was in sight of Teignmouth where Keats once spent two months; but he cancelled the local allusion in obedience to a correct instinct. [39] "Ode to a Nightingale," [40] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," London, 1885, p. 181. [41] "Studies and Appreciations." Lewis G. Gates. New York, 1890, p. 17. [42] See vol. i., p. 371, and for Cumberland's poem, on the same superstition, _ibid._, 177. CHAPTER IV. The Romantic School in Germany.[1] Cross-fertilization, at least in these modern eras, is as necessary in the life of a literature as in that of an animal or a plant. English romanticism, though it started independently, did not remain an isolated phenomenon; it was related to the general literary movement in Europe. Even Italy had its romantic movement; Manzoni began, like Walter Scott, by translating Bürger's "Lenore" and "Wild Huntsman", and afterwards, like Schlegel in Germany and Hugo in France, attacked the classical entrenchments in his "Discourse of the Three Unities." It is no part of our undertaking to write the history of the romantic schools in Germany and France. But in each of those countries the movement had points of likeness and unlikeness which shed light upon our own; and an outline sketch of the German and French schools will help the reader better to understand both what English romanticism was, and what it was not. In Germany, as in England, during the eighteenth century, the history of romanticism is a history of arrested development. Romanticism existed in solution, but was not precipitated and crystallised until the closing years of the period. The current set flowing by Bürger's ballads and Goethe's "Götz," was met and checked by a counter-current, the new enthusiasm for the antique promoted by Winckelmann's[2] works on classic art, by the neo-paganism of Goethe's later writings, and by the influence of Lessing's[3] clear, rationalising, and thoroughly Protestant spirit.[4] We may note, at the outset, the main features in which the German romanticism differed from the English. First, then, it was more definitely a _movement_. It was organised, self-conscious, and critical. Indeed, it was in criticism and not in creative literature that its highest successes were won. Coleridge, Scott, and Keats, like their English forerunners in the eighteenth century,[5] worked independently of one another. They did not conspire to a common end; had little personal contact--were hardly acquaintances, and in no sense a "school." But the German romanticists constituted a compact group with coherent aims. They were intimate friends and associates; travelled, lived, and worked together; edited each other's books and married each other's sisters.[6] They had a theory of art, a programme, and a propaganda, were aggressive and polemical, attacking their adversaries in reviews, and in satirical tales,[7] poems, and plays. Their headquarters were at Jena, "the central point," says Heine, "from which the new aesthetic dogma radiated. I advisedly say dogma, for this school began with a criticism of the art productions of the past, and with recipes for the art works of the future." Their organ was the _Athenaeum_, established by Friedrich Schlegel at Berlin in 1798, the date of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads," and the climacteric year of English and German romanticism. The first number of the _Athenaeum_ contained the manifesto of the new school, written by Friedrich Schlegel, the seminal mind of the coterie. The terms of this pronunciamento are somewhat rapt and transcendental; but through its mist of verbiage, one discerns that the ideal of romantic art is announced to be: beauty for beauty's sake, the union of poetry and life, and the absolute freedom of the artist to express himself. "Romantic poetry," says Schlegel--"and, in a certain sense, all poetry ought to be romantic--should, in representing outward objects, also represent itself." There is nothing here to indicate the precise line which German romantic poetry was to take, but there is the same rejection of authority, the same assertion of the right of original genius to break a path for itself, which was made, in their various ways, by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the "Lyrical Ballads," by Keats in "Sleep and Poetry," and by Victor Hugo in the preface to "Cromwell." A second respect in which German romanticism differed from English was in its thoroughgoing character. It is the disposition of the German mind to synthesise thought and life, to carry out theory into practice. Each of those imposing systems of philosophy, Kant's, Fichte's, Schelling's, Hegel's, has its own _aesthetik_ as well as its own _ethik_. It seeks to interpret all human activities from a central principle; to apply its highest abstractions to literature, government, religion, the fine arts, and society. The English mind is practical rather than theoretical. It is sensible, cautious, and willing to compromise; distrusting alike the logical habit of the French to push out premises into conclusions at all hazards; and the German habit of system-building. The Englishman has no system, he has his whim, and is careless of consistency. It is quite possible for him to have an aesthetic liking for the Middle Ages, without wishing to restore them as an actual state of society. It is hard for an Englishman to understand to what degree a literary man, like Schiller, was influenced in his writings by the critical philosophy of Kant; or how Schelling's transcendental idealism was used to support Catholicism, and Hegel made a prop to Protestant orthodoxy and Junkerism. "Tragedies and romances," wrote Mme. de Staël, "have more importance in Germany than in any other country. They take them seriously there; and to read such and such a book, or see such and such a play, has an influence on the destiny and the life. What they admire as art, they wish to introduce into real life; and poetry, philosophy, the ideal, in short, have often an even greater empire over the Germans than nature and the passions." In proof of this, she adduces the number of young Germans who committed suicide in consequence of reading "Werther"; or took to highway robbery in emulation of "Die Räuber." In England, accordingly, romanticism was a merely literary revolution and kept strictly within the domain of art. Scott's political conservatism was indeed, as we have seen, not unrelated to his antiquarianism and his fondness for the feudal past; but he remained a Protestant Tory. And as to his Jacobitism, if a Stuart pretender had appeared in Scotland in 1815, we may be sure that the canny Scott would not have taken arms in his behalf against the Hanoverian king. Coleridge's reactionary politics had nothing to do with his romanticism; though it would perhaps be going too far to deny that his reverence for what was old and tested by time in the English church and constitution may have had its root in the same temper of mind which led him to compose archaic ballad-romances like "Christabel" and "The Dark Ladye." But in Germany "throne and altar" became the shibboleth of the school; half of the romanticists joined the Catholic Church, and the new literature rallied to the side of aristocracy and privilege. A third respect in which the German movement differed from the English is partly implied in what has been said above. In Germany the romantic revival was contemporaneous with a great philosophical development which influenced profoundly even the lighter literature of the time. Hence the mysticism which is found in the work of many of the romanticists, and particularly in the writings of Novalis. Novalis was a disciple of Schelling, and Schelling the continuator of Fichte. Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" (1794) is the philosophical corner-stone of the German romantic school. The freedom of the fancy from the thraldom of the actual world; the right of the Ego to assert itself fully; the principle formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, that "the caprice of the poet knows no law"; all these literary doctrines were corollaries of Fichte's objective idealism.[8] It is needless to say that, while romantic art usually partakes of the mysterious, there is nothing of this philosophical or transcendental mysticism in the English romanticists. If we were to expect it anywhere it would be in Coleridge, who became the mediator between German and English thought. But Coleridge's poetry was mainly written before he visited Germany and made acquaintance with the systems of Kant and Schelling; and in proportion as his speculative activity increased, his creative force declined. There is enough of the marvellous and the unexplained in "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner"; but the "mystic ruby" and the "blue flower" of the Teutonic symbolists are not there. The German romantic school, in the limited and precise sense of the term, consisted of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Johann Dietrich Gries, Tieck's friend Wackenroder, and--at a distance--Zacharias Werner, the dramatist; besides a few others, their associates or disciples, whose names need not here be mentioned. These were, as has been said, personal friends, they began to be heard of about 1795; and their quarters were at Jena and Berlin. A later or younger group (_Spätromantiker_) gathered in 1808 about the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, published at Heidelberg. These were Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Görres, and the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Arnim, Brentano, and Görres were residing at the time at Heidelberg; the others contributed from a distance. Arnim edited the _Einsiedler_; Görres was teaching in the university. There were, of course, many other adherents of the school, working individually at different times and places, scattered indeed all over Germany, and of various degrees of importance or unimportance, of whom I need mention only Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the popular novelist and author of "Undine." The history of German romanticism has been repeatedly told. There are exhaustive treatments of the subject by Julian Schmidt, Koberstein, Hettner ("Die Romantische Schule," Braunschweig, 1850); Haym ("Die Romantische Schule," Berlin, 1870); by the Danish critic, Georg Brandes ("Den Romantiske Skole i Tydskland"). But the most famous review of this passage of literary history is the poet Heine's brilliant little book, "Die Romantische Schule," [9] published at Paris in 1833. This was written as a kind of supplement to Mme. de Staël's "L'Allemagne" (1813), and was intended to instruct the French public as to some misunderstandings in Mme. de Staël's book, and to explain what German romanticism really was. Professor Boyesen cautions us to be on our guard against the injustice and untrustworthiness of Heine's report. The warning is perhaps not needed, for the animus of his book is sufficiently obvious. Heine had begun as a romantic poet, but he had parted company with the romanticists because of the reactionary direction which the movement took. He had felt the spell, and he renders it with wonderful vividness in his history of the school. But, at the same time, the impatience of the political radical and the religious sceptic--the "valiant soldier in the war for liberty"--and the bitterness of the exile for opinion's sake, make themselves felt. His sparkling and malicious wit turns the whole literature of romanticism into sport; and his abuse of his former teacher, A. W. Schlegel, is personal and coarse beyond description. Twenty years ago, he said, when he was a lad, what overflowing enthusiasm he would have lavished upon Uhland! He used to sit on the ruins of the old castle at Düsseldorf declaiming Uhland's poem "A wandering shepherd young and fair Beneath the royal castle strayed." "But so much has happened since then! What then seemed to me so grand; all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the 'Miserere'; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!" And--of Fouqué's romances--"But our age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . . This reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of the feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . this everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, wearied us." It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance should have been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romantic ballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been the one in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten Dass ich so traurig bin." The "Loreley" is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere. In Germany it is a really national song. And yet the tale on which it is founded is not an ancient folk legend--"ein Mährchen aus alten Zeiten"--but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first published it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels: "Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt' eine Zauberin: Sie war so schön und feine Und riss viel Herzen hin." A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out of it in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the mournful air in which it is now universally familiar. It has been mentioned that Heine's "Romantische Schule" was a sort of continuation and correction of Mme. de Staël's "L'Allemagne." That very celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady's residence in Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France. It has been compared in its purpose to the "Germania" of Tacitus, in which the historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson and a warning to corrupt Rome. Mme. de Staël had arranged to publish her book in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had already been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four hours. All this, of course, was at the instance of Napoleon, who was by no means above resenting the hostility of a lady author. But the Minister of Police, General Savary, assumed the responsibility of the affair; and to Mme. de Staël's remonstrance he wrote in reply: "It appeared to me that the air of this country did not agree with you, and we are not yet reduced to seek for models amongst the people you admire [the Germans]. Your last work is not French." It was not, accordingly, until 1813 that Mme. de Staël's suppressed work on Germany saw the light. The only passages in it that need engage our attention are those in which the author endeavours to interpret to a classical people the literature of a Gothic race. In her chapter entitled "Of Classic and Romantic Poetry," she says: "The word romantic has been lately introduced in Germany to designate that kind of poetry which is derived from the songs of the troubadours; that which owes its birth to the union of chivalry and Christianity." She mentions the comparison--evidently derived from Schlegel's lectures which she had attended--of ancient poetry to sculpture and modern to painting; explains that the French incline towards classic poetry, and the English--"the most illustrious of the Germanic nations"--towards "that which owes its birth to chivalry and romance." "The English poets of our times, without entering into concert with the Germans, have adopted the same system. Didactic poetry has given place to the fictions of the Middle Ages." She observes that simplicity and definiteness, that a certain corporeality and externality--or what in modern critical dialect we would call objectivity--are notes of antique art; while variety and shading of colour, and a habit of self-reflection developed by Christianity [subjectivity], are the marks of modern art. "Simplicity in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. Honour and love, valour and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes--that romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied." Mme. de Staël's analysis here does not go very deep, and her expression is lacking in precision; but her meaning will be obvious to those who have well considered the various definitions and expositions of these contrasted terms with which we set out. Without deciding between the comparative merits of modern classic and romantic work, Mme. de Staël points out that the former must necessarily be imitative. "The literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous. . . . The literature of romance is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire fresh life; it expresses our religion; it recalls our history." Hence she notes the fact that while the Spaniards of all classes know by heart the verses of Calderon; while Shakspere is a popular and national poet among the English; and the ballads of Goethe and Bürger are set to music and sung all over Germany, the French classical poets are quite unknown to the common people, "because the arts in France are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed." In her review of German poetry she gives a brief description, among other things, of the "Nibelungen Lied," and a long analysis of Bürger's "Leonora" and "Wilde Jäger." She says that there are four English translations of "Leonora," of which William Spenser's is the best. "The analogy between the English and German allows a complete transfusion of the originality of style and versification of Bürger. . . . It would be difficult to obtain the same result in French, where nothing strange or odd seems natural." She points out that terror is "an inexhaustible source of poetical effect in Germany. . . . Stories of apparitions and sorcerers are equally well received by the populace and by men of more enlightened minds." She notes the fondness of the new school for Gothic architecture, and describes the principles of Schlegelian criticism. She transcribes A. W. Schlegel's praises of the ages of faith and the generous brotherhood of chivalry, and his lament that "the noble energy of ancient times is lost," and that "our times alas! no longer know either faith or love." The German critics affirm that the best traits of the French character were effaced during the reign of Louis XIV.; that "literature, in ages which are called classical, loses in originality what it gains in correctness"; that the French tragedies are full of pompous affectation; and that from the middle of the seventeenth century, a constrained and affected manner had prevailed throughout Europe, symbolised by the wig worn by Louis XIV. in pictures and bas-reliefs, where he is portrayed sometimes as Jupiter and sometimes as Hercules clad only in his lion's skin--but always with the perruque. Heine complains that Mme. de Staël fell into the hands of the Schlegels, when in Germany, and that her account of German literature was coloured by their prejudices; that William Schlegel, in particular, became her escort at all the capitals of Europe and won great _éclat_ thereby Schlegel's elegiac lament over the decay of chivalry may remind the English reader of the famous passage in Burke[10] about Marie Antoinette. "Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." [11] But Burke's reaction against the levelling spirit of French democracy was by no means so thoroughgoing as the romanticist protest in Germany. It was manifestly impossible to revive the orders of chivalry, as a practical military system; or to recreate the feudal tenures in their entirety. Nor did even the most romantic of the German romanticists dream of this. They appealed, however, to the knightly principles of devotion to church and king, of honour, of religious faith, and of personal loyalty to the suzerain and the nobility. It was these political and theological aspects of the movement that disgusted Heine. He says that just as Christianity was a reaction against Roman materialism; and the Renaissance a reaction against the extravagances of Christian spiritualism; and romanticism in turn a reaction against the vapid imitations of antique classic art, "so also do we now behold a reaction against the re-introduction of that Catholic, feudal mode of thought, of that knight-errantry and priestdom, which were being inculcated through literature and the pictorial arts. . . . For when the artists of the Middle Ages were recommended as models . . . the only explanation of their superiority that could be given was that these men believed in that which they depicted. . . . Hence the artists who were honest in their devotion to art, and who sought to imitate the pious distortions of those miraculous pictures, the sacred uncouthness of those marvel-abounding poems, and the inexplicable mysticisms of those olden works . . . made a pilgrimage to Rome, where the vicegerent of Christ was to re-invigorate consumptive German art with asses' milk." A number of the romanticists were Catholic by birth. There was Joseph von Eichendorff, _e.g._, who had a strong admiration for the Middle Ages, wrote sacred poetry, and published in 1815 a novel entitled "Ahnung und Gegenwart," the hero of which ends by retiring to a monastery. And Joseph Görres, who published a work on German _Volksbücher_[12] (1807); a follower of Schelling and editor of _Der Rheinische Merkur_, a violent anti-Gallican journal during the war of liberation. Görres, according to Heine, "threw himself into the arms of the Jesuits," and became the "chief support of the Catholic propaganda at Munich"; lecturing there on universal history to an audience consisting chiefly of pupils from the Romish seminaries. Another _Spätromantiker_, born Catholic, was Clemens Brentano, whom Heine describes in 1833 as having lived at Frankfort for the last fifteen years in hermit-like seclusion, as a corresponding member of the propaganda. For six years (1818-24) Brentano was constantly at the bedside of the invalid nun, Anna Katharina Emmerich, at Dülmen. She was a "stigmatic," afflicted, _i.e._, with a mysterious disease which impressed upon her body marks thought to be miraculous counterfeits of the wounds of Christ. She had trances and visions, and uttered revelations which Brentano recorded and afterwards published in several volumes, that were translated into French and Italian and widely circulated among the faithful. As adherents of the romantic school who were born and bred Protestants, but became converts to the Catholic faith, Heine enumerates Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis, Werner, Schütz, Carové, Adam Müller, and Count Stolberg. This list, he says, includes only authors, "the number of painters who in swarms simultaneously abjured Protestantism and reason was much larger." But Tieck and Novalis never formally abjured Protestantism. They detested the Reformation and loved the mediaeval Church, but looked upon modern Catholicism as a degenerate system. Their position here was something like that of the English Tractarians in the earlier stages of the Oxford movement. Novalis composed "Marienlieder." Tieck complained of the dryness of Protestant ritual and theology, and said that in the Middle Ages there was a unity (_Einheit_) which ought to be again recovered. All Europe was then one fatherland with a single faith. The period of the Arthursage was the blossoming time of romance, the vernal season of love, religion, chivalry, and--sorcery! He pleaded for the creation of a new Christian, Catholic mythology. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel became a Roman Catholic--or, as Heine puts it--"went to Vienna, where he attended mass daily and ate broiled fowl." His wife, a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, a Jewess by race, followed her husband into the Catholic Church. Zacharias Werner, author of a number of romantic melodramas, the heroes of which are described as monkish ascetics, religious mystics, and "spirits who wander on earth in the guise of harp-players"--Zacharias Werner also went to Vienna and joined the order of Ligorians. This conversion made a prodigious noise in Germany. It occurred at Rome in 1811, and the convert afterwards witnessed the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples, that annual miracle in which Newman expresses so firm a belief. Werner then spent two years in the study of theology, visited Our Lady's Chapel at Loretto in 1813; was ordained priest at Aschaffenburg in 1814; and preached at St. Stephen's Church, Vienna, on the vanity of worldly pleasures, with fastings many, with castigations and mortifications of the flesh. The younger Voss declared that Werner's religion was nothing but a poetic coquetting with God, Mary, the wounds of Christ, and the holy carbuncle (_Karfunkelstein_). He had been a man of dissolute life and had been divorced from three wives. "His enthusiasm for the restoration of the Middle Ages," says Heine, "was one-sided; it applied only to the hierarchical, Catholic phase of mediaevalism; feudalism did not so strongly appeal to his fancy. . . . Pater Zacharias died in 1823, after sojourning for fifty-four years in this wicked, wicked world." Carlyle contributed to the _Foreign Review_ in 1828 an essay on "Werner's Life and Writings," with translations of passages from his drama, "The Templars in Cyprus." But the conversion which caused the greatest scandal was that of Count Friedrich Stolberg, whose apostasy was denounced by his early friend Voss, the translator of Homer, in a booklet entitled "Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier?" Voss showed, says Heine, that "Stolberg had secretly joined an association of the nobility which had for its purpose to counteract the French ideas of liberty; that these nobles entered into a league with the Jesuits; that they sought, through the re-establishment of Catholicism, to advance also the interests of the nobility." [13] The German literary historians agree that the fresh outbreak of romanticism in the last decade of the eighteenth century was the resumption of an earlier movement which had been interrupted; that it was furthered by the new feeling of German nationality aroused by the Bonapartist tyranny; and finally that it was a protest against the flat mediocrity which ruled in the ultra-evangelical circle headed by Nicolai, the Berlin bookseller and editor. Into this mere Philistinism had narrowed itself the nobler rationalism of Lessing, with its distrust of _Träumerei_ and _Schwärmerei_--of superstition and fanaticism. "Dry light is best," says Bacon, but the eye is hungry for colour, that has looked too steadily on the _lumen siccum_ of the reason; and then imagination becomes the prism which breaks the invisible sunbeam into beauty. Hence the somewhat extravagant romantic love of colour, and the determination to believe, at all hazards and even in the teeth of reason. Hence the imperfectly successful attempt to force back the modern mind into a posture of child-like assent to the marvellous. Tieck's "Mährchen" and the Grimm brothers' nursery tales belong to this "renascence of wonder," like Lewis' "Tales of Terror," Scott's "Demonology," and Coleridge's "Christabel" in England. "The tendencies of 1770 to 1780," says Scherer, "which had now quite disappeared, asserted themselves with new and increased force. The nations which were groaning under Napoleon's oppression sought comfort in the contemplation of a fairer and grander past. Patriotism and mediaevalism became for a long time the watchwords and the dominating fashion of the day." Allowing for the differences mentioned, the romantic movements in England and Germany offer, as might be expected, many interesting parallels. Carlyle, writing in 1827,[14] says that the recent change in German literature is only a part of a general change in the whole literature of Europe. "Among ourselves, for instance, within the last thirty years, who has not lifted up his voice with double vigour in praise of Shakespeare and nature, and vituperation of French taste and French philosophy? Who has not heard of the glories of old English literature; the wealth of Queen Elizabeth's age; the penury of Queen Anne's; and the inquiry whether Pope was a poet? A similar temper is breaking out in France itself, hermetically sealed as that country seemed to be against all foreign influences; and doubts are beginning to be entertained, and even expressed, about Corneille and the three unities. It seems to be substantially the same thing which has occurred in Germany, and been attributed to Tieck and his associates; only that the revolution which is here proceeding, and in France commencing, appears in Germany to be completed." In Germany, as in England--in Germany more than in England--other arts beside literature partook of the new spirit. The brothers Boisserée agitated for the completion of the "Kölner Dom," and collected their famous picture gallery to illustrate the German, Dutch, and Flemish art of the fifteenth century; just as Gothic came into fashion in England largely in consequence of the writings of Walpole, Scott, and Ruskin. Like our own later Pre-Raphaelite group, German art critics began to praise the naive awkwardness of execution and devout spirituality of feeling in the old Florentine painters, and German artists strove to paint like Fra Angelico. Friedrich Schlegel gave a strong impulse to the study of mediaeval art, and Heine scornfully describes him and his friend Joseph Görres, rummaging about "among the ancient Rhine cities for the remains of old German pictures and statuary which were superstitiously worshipped as holy relics." Tieck and his friend Wackenroder brought back from their pilgrimage to Dresden in 1796 a devotion, a kind of sentimental Mariolatry, to the celebrated Madonnas of Raphael and Holbein in the Dresden gallery; and from their explorations in Nürnberg, that _Perle des Mittelalters_, an enthusiasm for Albrecht Dürer. This found expression in Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders"; and in Tieck's novel, "Sternbald's Wanderungen," in which he accompanies a pupil of Dürer to Rome. Wackenroder, like Tieck's other friend, Novalis, was of a consumptive, emotional, and somewhat womanish constitution of mind and body, and died young. Tieck edited his remains, including letters on old German art. The standard editions of their joint writings are illustrated by engravings after Dürer, one of which in particular, the celebrated "Knight, Death, and the Devil," symbolizes the mysterious terrors of Tieck's own tales, and of German romance in general. The knight is in complete armour, and is riding through a forest. On a hilltop in the distance are the turrets of a castle; a lean hound follows the knight; on the ground between his horse's hoofs sprawls a lizard-like reptile; a figure on horseback approaches from the right, with the face half obliterated or eaten away to the semblance of a skull, and snakes encircling the temples. Behind comes on a demon or goblin shape, with a tall curving horn, which is "neither man nor woman, neither beast nor human," but one of those grotesque and obscene monsters which the mediaeval imagination sculptured upon the cathedrals. This famous copperplate prompted Fouqué's romance, "Sintram and his Companions." He had received a copy of it for a birthday gift, and brooded for years over its mysterious significance; which finally shaped itself in his imagination into an allegory of the soul's conflict with the powers of darkness. His whole narrative leads up to the description of Dürer's picture, which occupies the twenty-seventh and climacteric chapter. The school of young German Pre-Raphaelite art students, associated at Rome in 1810 under the leadership of Overbeck and Cornelius, was considerably influenced by Wackenroder's "Herzensergiessungen." Music, too, and particularly church music, was affected by the new taste. The ancient music of the "Dies Irae" and other Latin hymns was revived; and it would not be far wrong to say that the romantic school sowed the seed of Wagner's great music-dramas, profoundly Teutonic and romantic in their subject matter and handling and in their application of the united arts of poetry, music, and scene-painting to old national legends such as "Parzival," "Tannhäuser," [15] "The Knight of the Swan," and the "Nibelungen Hoard." History, too, and Germanic philology took impulse from this fresh interest in the past. Johannes Müller, in his "History of the Swiss Confederation" (1780-95), drew the first appreciative picture of mediaeval life, and caught, in his diction, something of the manner of the old chroniclers. As in England ancient stores of folklore and popular poetry were gathered and put forth by Percy, Ritson, Ellis, Scott, and others, so in Germany the Grimm brothers' universally known collections of fairy tales, legends, and mythology began to appear.[16] Tieck published in 1803 his "Minnelieder aus dem Schwabischen Zeitalter." Karl Simrock made modern versions of Middle High German poetry. Uhland, whose "Walther von der Vogelweide," says Scherer, "gave the first complete picture of an old German singer," carried the war into Africa by going to Paris in 1810 and making a study of the French Middle Age. He introduced the old French epics to the German public, and is regarded, with A. W. Schlegel, as the founder of romance philology in Germany. A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a complete edition of the "Nibelungenlied" in 1784-85. The romantic school now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, unequalled in sublimity and natural power. Uhland gave a great deal of study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2. Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der Hagen, inspired by the former's lectures, published four editions of it, and a version in modern German. "For a long time," testifies Heine, "the 'Nibelungenlied' was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . . It is difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of the language in which it is written. It is a language of stone, and the verses are, as it were, blocks of granite." By way of giving his French readers a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on some vast plain, and adds, "But no! even then you can form no conception of the chief characters of the 'Nibelungenlied'; no steeple is so high, no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde." Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy's "Reliques," as the "Nibelungenlied" with Macpherson's "Ossian," was "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (The Boy's Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe. This was a three-volume collection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy's, and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was already well under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of an initial kind, like that of Percy's collection in England; still its importance was very great. It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the Romantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland. "I cannot sufficiently extol this book," says Heine. "It contains the sweetest flowers of German poesy. . . . On the title page . . . is the picture of a lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views this picture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and homesickness steals over him. . . . In these ballads one feels the beating of the German popular heart. Here is revealed all its sombre merriment, all its droll wit. Here German wrath beats furiously the drum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses. Here we behold the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears." The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by _motifs_ drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse mythology and from Spanish romance. Percy's translation of Malet: Gray's versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian: Southey's "Chronicles of the Cid" and Lockhart's translations of the Spanish ballads are paralleled in Germany by William Schlegel's, and Uhland's, and others' studies in old Norse mythology and poetry; by Tieck's translation of "Don Quixote" [18] and by Johann Dietrich Gries' of Calderon. The romanticists, indeed, and especially Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, were most accomplished translators. Schlegel's great version of Shakspere is justly esteemed one of the glories of the German tongue. Heine affirms that it was undertaken solely for polemical purposes and at a time (1797) when the enthusiasm for the Middle Ages had not yet reached an extravagant height, "Later, when this did occur, Calderon was translated and ranked far above Shakespeare. . . . For the works of Calderon bear most distinctly the impress of the poetry of the Middle Ages, particularly of the two principal epochs, knight-errantry and monasticism. The pious comedies of the Castilian priest-poet, whose poetical flowers had been besprinkled with holy water and canonical perfumes . . . were now set up as models, and Germany swarmed with fantastically pious, insanely profound poems, over which it was the fashion to work one's self into a mystic ecstasy of admiration, as in 'The Devotion to the Cross'; or to fight in honour of the Madonna, as in 'The Constant Prince.' . . . Our poetry, said the Schlegels, is superannuated. . . . Our emotions are withered; our imagination is dried up. . . . We must seek again the choked-up springs of the naive, simple poetry of the Middle Ages, where bubbles the elixir of youth." Heine adds that Tieck, following out this prescription, drank so deeply of the mediaeval folk tales and ballads that he actually became a child again and fell to lisping. There is a suggestive analogy between the position of the Warton brothers in England and the Schlegel brothers in Germany. The Schlegels, like the Wartons, were leaders in the romantic movement of their time and country, and were the inspirers of other men. The two pairs were alike also in that their best service was done in the field of literary history, criticism, and exposition, while their creative work was imitative and of comparatively small value. Friedrich Schlegel's scandalous romance "Lucinde" is of much less importance than his very stimulating lectures on the "History of Literature" and the "Wisdom and Languages of India";[19] and his elder brother, though an accomplished metrist and translator, was not successful in original verse. But this resemblance between the Wartons and the Schlegels must not be pressed too far. Here, as at many other points, the German movement had greater momentum. The Wartons were men of elegant scholarship after their old-fashioned kind, a kind which joined the usual classical culture of the English universities to a liberal--and in their century somewhat paradoxical--enthusiasm in antiquarian pursuits. But the Schlegels were men of really wide learning and of depth in criticism. Compared with their scientific method and grasp of principles, the "Observations" and "Essays" of the Wartons are mere dilettantism. To the influence of the Schlegels is not unfairly attributed the origin in Germany of the sciences of comparative philology and comparative mythology, and the works of scholars like Bopp, Diez, and the brothers Grimm. Herder[20] had already traced the broad cosmopolitan lines which German literary scholarship was to follow, with German thoroughness and independence. And Heine acknowledges that "in reproductive criticism, where the beauties of a work of art were to be brought out clearly; where a delicate perception of individualities was required; and where these were to be made intelligible, the Schlegels were far superior to Lessing." The one point at which the English movement outweighed the German was Walter Scott, whose creative vigour and fertility made an impact upon the mind of Europe to which the romantic literature of the Continent affords no counterpart. The principles of the Schlegelian criticism were first communicated to the English public by Coleridge; who, in his lectures on Shakspere and other dramatists, helped himself freely to William Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [21] Heine denounces the shallowness of these principles and their failure to comprehend the modern mind. "When Schlegel seeks to depreciate the poet Bürger, he compares his ballads with the old English ballads of the Percy collection, and he shows that the latter are more simple, more naïve, more antique, and consequently more poetical. . . . But death is not more poetical than life. The old English ballads of the Percy collection exhale the spirit of their age, and Bürger's ballads breathe the spirit of _our_ time. The latter, Schlegel never understood. . . . What increased Schlegel's reputation still more was the sensation which he excited in France, where he also attacked the literary authorities of the French, . . . showed the French that their whole classical literature was worthless, that Molière was a buffoon and no poet, that Racine likewise was of no account . . . that the French are the most prosaic people of the world, and that there is no poetry in France." It is well known that Coleridge detested the French, as "a light but cruel race", that he undervalued their literature and even affected an ignorance of the language. The narrowness of Schlegelian criticism was only the excess of Teutonism reacting against the previous excesses of Gallic classicism. The deficiency of creative imagination in the Schlegels was supplied by their disciple Ludwig Tieck, who made the "Mährchen," or popular traditionary tale, his peculiar province. It was Wackenroder who first drew his attention to "those old, poorly printed _Volksbücher_, with their coarse wood-cuts which had for centuries been circulating among the peasantry, and which may still be picked up at the book-stalls of the Leipzig fairs." [22] Tieck's volume of "Volksmährchen" (1797) gave reproductions of a number of these old tales, such as the "Haimonskinder," the "Schöne Magelone," "Tannhäuser," and the "Schildbürger." His "Phantasus" (1812) contained original tales conceived in the same spirit. Scherer says that Tieck uttered the manifesto of German romanticism in the following lines from the overture of his "Kaiser Octavianus": "Mondbeglänzte Zaubernacht, Die den Sinn gefangen hält, Wundervolle Mährchenwelt, Steig auf in der alten Pracht!" "Forest solitude" [_Waldeinsamkeit_], says Boyesen,[23] "churchyards at midnight, ruins of convents and baronial castles; in fact, all the things which we are now apt to call romantic, are the favourite haunts of Tieck's muse. . . . Tieck was excessively fond of moonlight and literally flooded his tales with its soft, dim splendour; therefore moonlight is now romantic. . . . He never allows a hero to make a declaration of love without a near or distant accompaniment of a bugle (_Schalmei_ or _Waldhorn_); accordingly the bugle is called a romantic instrument." "The true tone of that ancient time," says Carlyle,[24] "when man was in his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no wall of adamant from the universe without, and the forms of the Spirit mingled and dwelt in trustful sisterhood with the forms of the Sense, was not easy to seize and adapt with any fitness of application to the feelings of modern minds. It was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination, where human passion and action are reflected in dim and fitful, but deeply significant resemblances, and to copy these with the guileless, humble graces which alone can become them. . . . The ordinary lovers of witch and fairy matter will remark a deficiency of spectres and enchantments, and complain that the whole is rather dull. Cultivated free-thinkers, again, well knowing that no ghosts or elves exist in this country, will smile at the crack-brained dreamer, with his spelling-book prose and doggerel verse, and dismiss him good-naturedly as a German Lake poet." "In these works," says Heine, "there reigns a mysterious intenseness, a peculiar sympathy with nature, especially with the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The reader feels himself transported into an enchanted forest; he hears the melodious gurgling of subterranean waters; at times he seems to distinguish his own name in the rustling of the trees. Ever and anon a nameless dread seizes upon him as the broad-leaved tendrils entwine his feet; strange and marvellous wild flowers gaze at him with their bright, languishing eyes; invisible lips mockingly press tender kisses on his cheeks; gigantic mushrooms, which look like golden bells, grow at the foot of the trees; large silent birds sway to and fro on the branches overhead, put on a sapient look and solemnly nod their heads. Everything seems to hold its breath; all is hushed in awed expectation; suddenly the soft tones of a hunter's horn are heard, and a lovely female form, with waving plumes on head and falcon on wrist, rides swiftly by on a snow-white steed. And this beautiful damsel is so exquisitely lovely, so fair; her eyes are of the violet's hue, sparkling with mirth and at the same time earnest, sincere, and yet ironical; so chaste and yet so full of tender passion, like the fancy of our excellent Ludwig Tieck. Yes, his fancy is a charming, high-born maiden, who in the forests of fairyland gives chase to fabulous wild beasts; perhaps she even hunts the rare unicorn, which may only be caught by a spotless virgin." In 1827 Carlyle[25] published translations of five of Tieck's "Mährchen," viz.: "The Fair-Haired Eckbert," "The Trusty Eckart," "The Elves," "The Runenberg," and "The Goblet." He mentioned that another tale had been already Englished--"The Pictures" (Die Gemälde). This version was by Connop Thirwall, who had also rendered "The Betrothal" in 1824. In spite of Carlyle's recommendations, Tieck's stories seem to have made small impression in England. Doubtless they came too late, and the romantic movement, by 1827, had spent its first force in a country already sated with Scott's poems and novels. Sarah Austin, a daughter of William Taylor of Norwich, went to Germany to study German literature in this same year 1827. In her "Fragments from German Prose Writers" (1841), she speaks of the small success of Tieck's stories in England, but testifies that A. W. Schlegel's dramatic lectures had been translated early and the translation frequently reprinted. Another of the Norwich Taylors--Edgar--was the translator of Grimm's "Haus- und Kinder-Mährchen." Julius Hare, who was at school at Weimar in the winter of 1804-5, rendered three of Tieck's tales, as well as Fouqué's "Sintram" (1820). It is interesting to note that Tieck was not unknown to Hawthorne and Poe. The latter mentions his "Journey into the Blue Distance" in his "Fall of the House of Usher", and in an early review of Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales" (1842) and "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846), at a time when their author was still, in his own words, "the obscurest man of letters in America." Poe acutely pointed out a resemblance between Hawthorne and Tieck; "whose manner," he asserts, "in some of his works, is absolutely identical with that _habitual_ to Hawthorne." One finds a confirmation of this _aperçu_--or finds, at least, that Hawthorne was attracted by Tieck--in passages of the "American Note-Books," where he speaks of grubbing out several pages of Tieck at a sitting, by the aid of a German dictionary. Colonel Higginson ("Short Studies"), _à propos_ of Poe's sham learning and his habit of mystifying the reader by imaginary citations, confesses to having hunted in vain for this fascinatingly entitled "Journey into the Blue Distance"; and to having been laughed at for his pains by a friend who assured him that Poe could scarcely read a word of German. But Tieck did really write this story, "Das Alte Buch: oder Reise ins Blaue hinein," which Poe misleadingly refers to under its alternate title. There is, indeed, a hint of allegory in Tieck's "Mährchen"--which are far from being mere fairy tales--that reminds one frequently of Hawthorne's shadowy art--of such things as "Ethan Brand," or "The Minister's Black Veil," or "The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains." There is, _e.g._, "The Elves," in which a little girl does but step across the foot-bridge over the brook that borders her father's garden, to find herself in a magic land where she stays, as it seems to her, a few hours, but returns home to learn that she has been absent seven years. Or there is "The Runenberg," where a youth wandering in the mountains, receives from a sorceress, through the casement of a ruined castle, a wondrous tablet set with gems in a mystic pattern; and years afterward wanders back into the mountains, leaving home and friends to search for fairy jewels, only to return again to his village, an old and broken-down man, bearing a sackful of worthless pebbles which appear to him the most precious stones. And there is the story of "The Goblet," where the theme is like that of Hawthorne's "Shaker Bridal," a pair of lovers whose union is thwarted and postponed until finally, when too late, they find that only the ghost or the memory of their love is left to mock their youthful hope. But the mystic, _par excellence_, among the German romanticists was Novalis, of whose writings Carlyle gave a sympathetic account in the _Foreign Review_ for 1829. Novalis' "Hymns to the Night," written in Ossianic prose, were perhaps not without influence on Longfellow ("Voices of the Night"), but his most significant work was his unfinished romance "Heinrich von Ofterdingen." The hero was a legendary poet of the time of the Crusades, who was victor in a contest of minstrelsy on the Wartburg. But in Novalis' romance there is no firm delineation of mediaeval life--everything is dissolved in a mist of transcendentalism and allegory. The story opens with the words: "I long to see the blue flower; it is continually in my mind, and I can think of nothing else." Heinrich falls asleep, and has a vision of a wondrous cavern and a fountain, beside which grows a tall, light blue flower that bends towards him, the petals showing "like a blue spreading ruff in which hovered a lovely face." This blue flower, says Carlyle, is poetry, "the real object, passion, and vocation of young Heinrich." Boyesen gives a subtler interpretation. "This blue flower," he says, "is the watchword and symbol of the school. It is meant to symbolise the deep and nameless longings of a poet's soul. Romantic poetry invariably deals with longing; not a definite formulated desire for some attainable object, but a dim mysterious aspiration, a trembling unrest, a vague sense of kinship with the infinite,[26] a consequent dissatisfaction with every form of happiness which the world has to offer. The object of the romantic longing, therefore, so far as it has any object, is the ideal. . . . The blue flower, like the absolute ideal, is never found in this world, poets may at times dimly feel its nearness, and perhaps even catch a brief glimpse of it in some lonely forest glade, far from the haunts of men, but it is in vain to try to pluck it. If for a moment its perfume fills the air, the senses are intoxicated and the soul swells with poetic rapture." [27] It would lead us too far afield to follow up the traces of this mystical symbolism in the writings of our New England transcendentalists. One is often reminded of Novalis' blue flower in such a poem as Emerson's "Forerunners," or Lowell's "Footpath," or Whittier's "Vanishers," or in Thoreau's little parable about the horse, the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking. And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says: "I had seen the red election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades' strings and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest." Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of history, and the spirit of the Orient. At Augsburg he meets the poet Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full development). With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of the blue flower. Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and disappear in the waters of a river. Then he encounters her in a strange land and asks where the river is. "Seest thou not its blue waves above us?" she answers. "He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly over their heads." "This image of Death, and of the river being the sky in that other and eternal country" [28]--does it not once more remind us of the well-known line in Channing's "A Poet's Hope"-- "If my bark sink, 'tis to another sea"; or of Emerson's "Two Rivers": "Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, Repeats the music of the rain, But sweeter rivers pulsing flit Through thee, as thou through Concord plain"? But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, once published at Concord, took for its motto a sentence from his "Blüthenstaub" (Flower-pollen): "Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality." [29] Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England. Brentano's most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the title, "Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl: With an Introduction and Biographical Notice" (London, 1847). The same story was rendered into French in the _Correspondant_ for 1859 ("Le Brave Kasperl et la Belle Annerl"). Three tales of Arnim were translated by Théophile Gautier, as "Contes Bizarres" (Paris, 1856). Arnim's best romance is "Die Kronenwächter" (1817). Scherer testifies that this "combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power"; and adds: "It was Walter Scott's great example which, in the second decade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and study of details the rule in historical novel-writing." Longfellow's "German Poets and Poetry" (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano. Nor did Thomas Roscoe's "German Novelists" (four volumes), nor George Soane's "Specimens of German Romance," both of which appeared in 1826. The most popular of the German romanticists was Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué, the descendant of a family exiled from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and himself an officer in the Prussian army in the war of liberation. Fouqué's numerous romances, in all of which he upholds the ideal of Christian knighthood, have been, many of them, translated into English. "Aslauga's Knight" appeared in Carlyle's "Specimens of German Romance" (1827); "Sintram," "Undine," and "Der Zauberring" had been translated even earlier. "Thiodolf the Icelander" and others have also been current in English circulating libraries. Carlyle acknowledges that Fouqué's notes are few, and that he is possessed by a single idea. "The chapel and the tilt yard stand in the background or the foreground in all the scenes of his universe. He gives us knights, soft-hearted and strong-armed; full of Christian self-denial, patience, meekness, and gay, easy daring; they stand before us in their mild frankness, with suitable equipment, and accompaniment of squire and dame. . . . Change of scene and person brings little change of subject; even when no chivalry is mentioned, we feel too clearly the influence of its unseen presence. Nor can it be said that in this solitary department his success is of the very highest sort. To body forth the spirit of Christian knighthood in existing poetic forms; to wed that old _sentiment_ to modern _thoughts_, was a task which he could not attempt. He has turned rather to the fictions and machinery of former days." Heine says that Fouqué's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a hundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouqué's "Undine" (1811) is in its way a masterpiece and a classic. This story of the lovely water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight, and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to the conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." Coleridge was greatly fascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once the American translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being a literal _creation_. But in general Fouqué's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's, have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher spirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with a right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make the Middle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their ladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouqué the Middle Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our imaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and enchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion Heart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moonshine lies all over the world of the Fouqué romances, like the magic light which illumines the Druda's castle in "Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side," wrote Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbücher_ for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the common weal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something." Another _Spätromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literary consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of the romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse sagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the Spanish romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated motives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was the ballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads are favourites with English readers, through excellent translations. Sarah Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar: "Many a year is in its grave Since I crossed this restless wave," etc. Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," "The Luck of Edenhall," and "The Castle by the Sea." It is to be feared that the last-named belongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full of sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles and golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, monks, and nuns play a great part." But it has a haunting beauty, and a dreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein König in Thule." The mocking Heine, who stigmatises Fouqué's knights as combinations of iron and sentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude, powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears in their eyes, _i.e._, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers." Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795 to 1810, in the days of Bürger and "Götz," and "The Robbers," and Monk Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Staël's book was the precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintance by his articles in the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_, and by his translations from German romance. But he found among English readers an invincible prejudice against German mysticism and German sentimentality. The romantic _chiaroscuro_, which puzzled Southey even in "The Ancient Mariner," became dimmest twilight in Tieck's "Mährchen" and midnight darkness in the visionary Novalis. The _Weichheit_, _Wehmuth_, and _Sehnsucht nach der Unendlichkeit_ of the German romanticists were moods not altogether unfamiliar in English poetry. "Now stirs the feeling infinite," sings Byron. "Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain," cries Keats. But when Novalis, in his _Todessehnsucht_, exclaims, "Death is the romance of life," the sentiment has an alien sound. There was something mutually repellent between the more typical phases of English and German romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels, we know, cared little for Scott. We are told that Scott read the _Zeitung für Einsiedler_, but we are not told what he thought of it. Perhaps romanticism, like transcendentalism, found a more congenial soil in New than in Old England. Longfellow spent the winter of 1835-36 in Heidelberg, calling on A. W. Schlegel at Bonn, on his way thither. "Hyperion" (1839) is saturated with German romance. Its hero, Paul Flemming, knew "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" almost by heart. No other German book had ever exercised such "wild and magic influence upon his imagination." [1] Besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, the materials used in this chapter are drawn mainly from the standard histories of German literature; especially from Georg Brandes' "Hauptströmungen in der Litteratur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" (1872-76); Julian Schmidt's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" (Berlin, 1890); H. J. T. Hettner's "Litteraturgeschichte" (Braunschweig, 1872); Wilhelm Scherer's "History of German Literature" (Conybeare's translation, New York, 1886); Karl Hillebrand's "German Thought" (trans., New York, 1880); Vogt und Koch's "Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur" (Leipzig and Wien, 1897). My own reading in the German romantics is by no means extensive. I have read, however, a number of Tieck's "Märchen" and of Fouqué's romances; Novalis' "Hymns to the Night" and "Heinrich von Ofterdingen"; A. W. Schlegel's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature" and F. Schlegel's "Lucinde"; all of Uhland's ballads and most of Heine's writings in verse and prose; a large part of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and the selections from Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, and Joseph Görres contained in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur," 146 Band (Stuttgart, 1891). These last include Brentano's "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," "Kasperl und Annerl," "Gockel und Hinkerl," etc., and Arnim's "Kronenwächter," a scene from "Die Päpstin Johanna," etc. I have, of course, read Madame de Staël's "L'Allemagne"; all of Carlyle's papers on German literature, with his translations; the Grimm fairy tales and the like. [2] "Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst," 1755. "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums," 1764. [3] "Laocoon," 1766. [4] See vol. i., chap. xi.; and particularly pp. 383-87. [5] See vol. i., pp. 422-23. [6] Novalis' and Wackenroder's remains were edited by Tieck and F. Schlegel. Arnim married Brentano's sister Bettina--Goethe's Bettina. [7] _E.g._, Tieck's "Der Gestiefelte Kater," against Nicolai and the _Aufklarung_. [8] As to the much-discussed romantic irony, the theory of which played a part in the German movement corresponding somewhat to Hugo's doctrine of the grotesque, it seems to have made no impression in England. I can discover no mention of it in Coleridge. Carlyle, in the first of his two essays on Richter (1827), expressly distinguishes true humour from irony, which he describes as a faculty of caricature, consisting "chiefly in a certain superficial distortion or reversal of objects"--the method of Swift or Voltaire. That is, Carlyle uses irony in the common English sense; the Socratic irony, the irony of the "Modest Proposal." The earliest attempt that I have encountered to interpret to the English public what Tieck and the Schlegels meant by "irony" is an article in _Blackwood's_ for September, 1835, on "The Modern German School of Irony"; but its analysis is not very _eingehend_. [9] An English translation was published in this country in 1882. See also H. H. Boyesen's "Essays on German Literature" (1892) for three papers on the "Romantic School in Germany." [10] Gentz, "The German Burke," translated the "Reflections on the Revolution in France" into German in 1796. [11] See also in the same tract, Burke's tribute to the value of hereditary nobility, and remember that these were the words of a Whig statesman. [12] Dream books, medicine books, riddle books, almanacs, craftsmen's proverbs, fabulous travels, prophecies, legends, romances and the like, hawked about at fairs. [13] For Stolberg see also vol. i., pp. 376-77. [14] "Ludwig Tieck": Introductions to "German Romance." [15] Brentano's fragment "Die Erfindung des Rosenkranzes," begun in 1803, deals with the Tannhäuser story. [16] "Kinder and Hausmährchen" (1812-15). "Deutsche Sagen" (1816). "Deutsche Mythologie" (1835). [17] See vol. i., pp. 375-76. [18] "If Cervantes' purpose," says Heine, "was merely to describe the fools who sought to restore the chivalry of the Middle Ages, . . . then it is a peculiarly comic irony of accident that the romantic school should furnish the best translation of a book in which their own folly is most amusingly ridiculed." [19] F. Schlegel's declamations against printing and gun powder in his Vienna lectures of 1810 foretoken Ruskin's philippics against railways and factories. [20] See vol. i., pp. 300, 337, 416. [21] _Vide supra_, p. 88. A. W. Schlegel was in England in 1823. Tieck met Coleridge in England in 1818, having made his acquaintance in Italy some ten years before. [22] Boyesen: "Aspects of the Romantic School." [23] _Ibid_. [24] "Ludwig Tieck," in "German Romance." [25] "German Romance," four vols., Edinburgh. [26] A. W. Schlegel says that romantic poetry is the representation (_Darstellung_) of the infinite through symbols. [27] "Novalis and the Blue Flower." [28] Carlyle. [29] Selections from Novalis in an English translation were published at London in 1891. CHAPTER V. The Romantic Movement in France.[1] French romanticism had aspects of its own which distinguished it from the English and the German alike. It differed from the former and agreed with the latter in being organised. In France, as in Germany, there was a romantic school, whose members were united by common literary principles and by personal association. There were sharply defined and hostile factions of classics and romantics, with party cries, watchwords, and shibboleths; a propaganda carried on and a polemic waged in pamphlets, prefaces, and critical journals. Above all there was a leader. Walter Scott was the great romancer of Europe, but he was never the head of a school in his own country in the sense in which Victor Hugo was in France, or even in the sense in which the Schlegels were in Germany. Scott had imitators, but Hugo had disciples. One point in which the French movement differed from both the English and the German was in the suddenness and violence of the outbreak. It was not so much a gradual development as a revolution, an explosion. The reason of this is to be found in the firmer hold which academic tradition had in France, the fountainhead of eighteenth-century classicism. Romanticism had a special work to do in the land of literary convention in asserting the freedom of art and the unity of art and life. Everything that is in life, said Hugo, is, or has a right to be in art. The French, in political and social matters the most revolutionary people of Europe, were the most conservative in matters of taste. The Revolution even intensified the reigning classicism by giving it a republican turn. The Jacobin orators appealed constantly to the examples of the Greek and Roman democracies. The Goddess of Reason was enthroned in place of God, Sunday was abolished, and the names of the months and of the days of the week were changed. Dress under the Directory was patterned on antique modes--the liberty cap was Phrygian--and children born under the Republic were named after Roman patriots, Brutus, Cassius, etc. The great painter of the Revolution was David,[2] who painted his subjects in togas, with backgrounds of Greek temples. Voltaire's classicism was monarchical and held to the Louis XIV. tradition; David's was republican. And yet the recognised formulae of taste and criticism were the same in 1800 as in 1775, or in 1675. A second distinction of the French romanticism was its local concentration at Paris. The centripetal forces have always been greater in France than in England and Germany. The earlier group of German _Romantiker_ was, indeed, as we have seen, united for a time at Jena and Berlin; and the _Spätromantiker_ at Heidelberg. But this was dispersion itself as compared with the intense focussing of intellectual rays from every quarter of France upon the capital. In England, I hardly need repeat, there was next to no cohesion at all between the widely scattered men of letters whose work exhibited romantic traits. In one particular the French movement resembled the English more nearly than the German. It kept itself almost entirely within the domain of art, and did not carry out its principles with German thoroughness and consistency into politics and religion. It made no efforts towards a practical restoration of the Middle Ages. At the beginning, indeed, French romanticism exhibited something analogous to the Toryism of Scott, and the reactionary _Junkerism_ and neo-Catholicism of the Schlegels. Chateaubriand in his "Génie du Christianisme" attempted a sort of aesthetic revival of Catholic Christianity, which had suffered so heavily by the deistic teachings of the last century and the atheism of the Revolution. Victor Hugo began in his "Odes et Ballades" (1822) as an enthusiastic adherent of monarchy and the church. "L'histoire des hommes," he wrote, "ne présente de poésie que jugée du haut des idées monarchiques et religieuses." But he advanced quite rapidly towards liberalism both in politics and religion. And of the young men who surrounded him, like Gautier, Labrunie, Sainte-Beuve, Musset, De Vigny, and others, it can only be affirmed that they were legitimist or republican, Catholic or agnostic, just as it happened and without affecting their fidelity to the literary canons of the new school.[3] The German romanticism was philosophical; the French was artistic and social. The Parisian _ateliers_ as well as the Parisian _salons_ were nuclei of revolt against classical traditions. "This intermixture of art with poetry," says Gautier,[4] "was and remains one of the characteristic marks of the new school, and enables us to understand why its earliest recruits were found more among artists than among men of letters. A multitude of objects, images, comparisons, which were believed to be irreducible to words, entered into the language and have stayed there. The sphere of literature was enlarged, and now includes the sphere of art in its measureless circle." "At that time painting and poetry fraternised. The artists read the poets and the poets visited the artists. Shakspere, Dante, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott were to be found in the studio as in the study. There were as many splotches of colour as of ink on the margins of those beautiful volumes that were so incessantly thumbed. Imaginations, already greatly excited by themselves, were heated to excess by the reading of those foreign writings of a colouring so rich, of a fancy so free and so strong. Enthusiasm mounted to delirium. It seemed as if we had discovered poetry, and that was indeed the truth. Now that this fine flame has cooled and that the positive-minded generation which possesses the world is preoccupied with other ideas, one cannot imagine what dizziness, what _éblouissement_ was produced in us by such and such a picture or poem, which people nowadays are satisfied to approve by a slight nod of the head. It was so new, so unexpected, so lively, so glowing!" [5] The romantic school in France had not only its poets, dramatists, and critics, but its painters, architects, sculptors, musical composers, and actors. The romantic artist _par excellence_ was Eugène Delacroix, the painter of "The Crusaders Entering Jerusalem." "The Greeks and Romans had been so abused by the decadent school of David that they fell into complete disrepute at this time. Delacroix's first manner was purely romantic, that is to say, he borrowed nothing from the recollections or the forms of the antique. The subjects that he treated were relatively modern, taken from the history of the Middle Ages, from Dante, Shakspere, Goethe, Lord Byron, or Walter Scott." He painted "Hamlet," "The Boat of Dante," "Tasso in Bedlam," "Marino Faliero," "The Death of Sardanapalus," "The Combat of the Giaour and the Pasha," "The Massacre of the Bishop of Liége," and similar subjects. Goethe in his conversations with Eckerman expressed great admiration of Delacroix's interpretations of scenes in "Faust" (the brawl in Auerbach's cellar, and the midnight ride of Faust and Mephistopheles to deliver Margaret from prison). Goethe hoped that the French artist would go on and reproduce the whole of "Faust," and especially the sorceress' kitchen and the scenes on the Brocken. Other painters of the romantic school were Camille Roqueplan, who treated motives drawn from "The Antiquary" and other novels of Walter Scott;[6] and Eugène Devéria, whose "Birth of Henry IV.," executed in 1827, when the artist was only twenty-two years of age, was a masterpiece of colouring and composition. The house of the Devéria brothers was one of the rallying points of the Parisian romanticists. And then there was Louis Boulanger, who painted "Mazeppa" and "The Witches' Sabbath" ("La Ronde du Sabbat" [7]); and the water-colour painter and engraver, Celestin Nanteuil, who furnished innumerable designs for vignettes, frontispieces, and book illustrations to the writers of the romantic school. "Of all the arts," says Gautier, "the one that lends itself least to the expression of the romantic idea is certainly sculpture. It seems to have received from antiquity its definitive form. . . . What can the statuary art do without the gods and heroes of mythology who furnish it with plausible pretexts for the nude, and for such drapery as it needs; things which romanticism prescribes, or did at least prescribe at that time of its first fervour? Every sculptor is of necessity a classic." [8] Nevertheless, he says that the romantic school was not quite unprovided of sculptors. "In our inner circle (_cénacle_), Jehan du Seigneur represented this art, austere and rebellious to the fancy. . . . Jehan du Seigneur--let us leave in his name of Jean this mediaeval _h_ which made him so happy and made him believe that he wore the apron of Ervein of Steinbach at work on the sculptures of Strasburg minster." Gautier mentions among the productions of this Gothic-minded statuary an "Orlando Furioso," a bust of Victor Hugo, and a group from the latter's romance, "Notre Dame de Paris," the gipsy girl Esmeralda giving a drink to the humpback Quasimodo. It was the endeavour of the new school, in the arts of design as well as in literature, to introduce colour, novelty, picturesqueness, character. They studied the great Venetian and Flemish colourists, neglected under the reign of David, and "in the first moments of their fury against _le poncif classique_, they seemed to have adopted the theory of art of the witches in 'Macbeth'--Fair is foul and foul is fair",[9] _i.e._, they neglected a traditional beauty in favour of the _characteristic_. "They sought the true, the new, the picturesque perhaps more than the ideal; but this reaction was certainly permissible after so many Ajaxes, Achilleses, and Philocteteses." It is not quite so easy to understand what is meant by romanticism in music as in literature. But Gautier names a number of composers as adhering to the romantic school, among others, Hippolyte Monpon, who set to music "the leaping metres, the echo-rimes, the Gothic counter-points of Hugo's 'Odes et Ballades' and songs like Musset's 'L'Andalouse'-- "'Avez vous vu dans Barcelone,' "He believed like us in serenades, alcaldes, mantillas, castinets; in all that Italy and that Spain, a trifle conventional, which was brought into fashion by the author of 'Don Paëz,' of 'Portia,' and of the 'Marchioness of Amalgui,' . . . 'Gastibelza, the Man with the Carabine,' and that guitar, so profoundly Spanish, of Victor Hugo, had inspired Monpon with a savage, plaintive air, of a strange character, which long remained popular, and which no romanticist--if any such is left--has forgotten." A greater name than Monpon was Hector Berlioz, the composer of "Romeo and Juliette" and "The Damnation of Faust." Gautier says that Berlioz represented the romantic idea in music, by virtue of his horror of common formulas, his breaking away from old models, the complex richness of his orchestration, his fidelity to local colour (whatever that may mean in music), his desire to make his art express what it had never expressed before, "the tumultuous and Shaksperian depth of the passions, reveries amorous or melancholy, the longings and demands of the soul, the indefinite and mysterious feelings which words cannot render." Berlioz was a passionate lover of German music and of the writings of Shakspere, Goethe, and Scott. He composed overtures to "Waverley," "King Lear," and "Rob Roy"; a cantata on "Sardanapalus," and music for the ghost scene in "Hamlet" and for Goethe's ballad, "The Fisher." He married an English actress whom he had seen in the parts of Ophelia, Portia, and Cordelia. Berlioz _en revanche_ was better appreciated in Germany than in France, where he was generally considered mad; where his "Symphonic fantastique" produced an effect analogous to that of the first pieces of Richard Wagner; and where "the symphonies of Beethoven were still thought barbarous, and pronounced by the classicists not to be music, any more than the verses of Victor Hugo were poetry, or the pictures of Delacroix painting." And finally there were actors and actresses who came to fill their roles in the new romantic dramas, of whom I need mention only Madame Dorval, who took the part of Hugo's Marion Delorme. What Gautier tells us of her is significant of the art that she interpreted, that her acting was by sympathy, rather than calculation; that it was intensely emotional; that she owed nothing to tradition; her tradition was essentially modern, dramatic rather than tragic.[10] Romanticism in France was, in a more special sense than in Germany and England, an effort for freedom, passion, originality, as against rule, authority, convention. "Romanticism," says Victor Hugo,[11] "so many times poorly defined, is nothing else than _liberalism_ in literature. . . . Literary liberty is the child of political liberty. . . . After so many great things which our fathers have done and which we have witnessed, here we are, issued forth from old forms of society; why should we not issue out of the old forms of poetry? A new people, a new art. While admiring the literature of Louis XIV., so well adapted to his monarchy, France will know how to have its own literature, peculiar, personal, and national--this actual France, this France of the nineteenth century to which Mirabeau has given its freedom and Napoleon its power." And again:[12] "What I have been pleading for is the liberty of art as against the despotism of systems, codes, and rules. It is my habit to follow at all hazards what I take for inspiration, and to change the mould as often as I change the composition. Dogmatism in the arts is what I avoid above all things. God forbid that I should aspire to be of the number of those, either romantics or classics, who make works _according to their system_; who condemn themselves never to have more than one form in mind, to always be _proving_ something, to follow any other laws than those of their organization and of their nature. The artificial work of such men as those, whatever talents they may possess, does not exist for art. It is a theory, not a poetry." It is manifest that a literary reform undertaken in this spirit would not long consent to lend itself to the purposes of political or religious reaction, or to limit itself to any single influence like mediaevalism, but would strike out freely in a multitude of directions; would invent new forms and adapt old ones to its material, and would become more and more modern, various, and progressive. And such, in fact, was the history of Victor Hugo's intellectual development and of the whole literary movement in France which began with him and with De Stendhal (Henri Beyle). This assertion of the freedom of the individual artist was naturally accompanied with certain extravagances. "To develop freely all the caprices of thought," says Gautier,[13] "even if they shocked taste, convention, and rule, to hate and repel to the utmost what Horace calls the _profanum vulgus_, and what the moustached and hairy _rapins_ call grocers, philistines, or bourgeois; to celebrate love with warmth enough to burn the paper (that they wrote on); to set it up as the only end and only means of happiness; to sanctify and deify art, regarded as a second creator; such are the _données_ of the programme which each sought to realise according to his strength; the ideal and the secret postulations of the young romanticists." Inasmuch as the French romantic school, even more than the English and the German, was a breach with tradition and an insurrection against existing conditions, it will be well to notice briefly what the particular situation was which the romanticists in France confronted. "To understand what this movement was and what it did," says Saintsbury,[14] "we must point out more precisely what were the faults of the older literature, and especially of the literature of the late eighteenth century. They were, in the first place, an extremely impoverished vocabulary, no recourse being had to the older tongue for picturesque archaisms, and little welcome being given to new phrases, however appropriate and distinct. In the second place, the adoption, especially in poetry, of an exceedingly conventional method of speech, describing everything where possible by an elaborate periphrasis, and avoiding direct and simple terms. Thirdly, in all forms of literature, but especially in poetry and drama, the acceptance for almost every kind of work of cut-and-dried patterns,[15] to which it was bound to conform. We have already pointed out that this had all but killed the tragic drama, and it was nearly as bad in the various accepted forms of poetry, such as fables, epistles, odes, etc. Each piece was expected to resemble something else, and originality was regarded as a mark of bad taste and insufficient culture. Fourthly, the submission to a very limited and very arbitrary system of versification, adapted only to the production of tragic alexandrines, and limiting even that form of verse to one monotonous model. Lastly, the limitation of the subject to be treated to a very few classes and kinds." If to this description be added a paragraph from Gautier's "Histoire du Romantisme," we shall have a sufficient idea of the condition of French literature and art before the appearance of Victor Hugo's "Odes et Ballades" (1826). "One cannot imagine to what a degree of insignificance and paleness literature had come. Painting was not much better. The last pupils of David were spreading their wishywashy colours over the old Graeco-Roman patterns. The classicists found that perfectly beautiful; but in the presence of these masterpieces, their admiration could not keep them from putting their hands before their mouths to cover a yawn; a circumstance, however, that failed to make them any more indulgent to the artists of the new school, whom they called tattooed savages and accused of painting with a drunken broom." One is reminded by Mr. Saintsbury's summary of many features which we have observed in the English academicism of the eighteenth century; the impoverished vocabulary, _e.g._, which makes itself evident in the annotations on the text of Spenser and other old authors; the horror of common terms, and the constant abuse of the periphrasis--the "gelid cistern," the "stercoraceous heap," the "spiculated palings," and the "shining leather that encased the limb." And the heroic couplet in English usage corresponds very closely to the French alexandrine. In their dissatisfaction with the paleness and vagueness of the old poetic diction, and the monotony of the classical verse, the new school innovated boldly, introducing archaisms, neologisms, and all kinds of exotic words and popular locutions, even _argot_ or Parisian slang; and trying metrical experiments of many sorts. Gautier mentions in particular one Théophile Dondey (who, after the fashion of the school, anagrammatised his name into Philothée O'Neddy) as presenting this _caractère d'outrance et de tension_. "The word _paroxyste_, employed for the first time by Nestor Roqueplan, seems to have been invented with an application to Philothée. Everything is _poussé_ in tone, high-coloured, violent, carried to the utmost limits of expression, of an aggressive originality, almost dripping with the unheard-of (_ruissilant d'inouïsme_); but back of the double-horned paradoxes, sophistical maxims, incoherent metaphors, swoln hyperboles, and words six feet long, are the poetic feeling of the time and the harmony of rhythm." One hears much in the critical writings of that period, of the _mot propre_, the _vers libre_, and the _rime brisé_. It was in tragedy especially that the periphrasis reigned most tyrannically, and that the introduction of the _mot propre_, _i.e._, of terms that were precise, concrete, familiar, technical even, if needful, horrified the classicists. It was beneath the dignity of the muse--the elegant muse of the Abbé Delille--Hugo tells us, to speak naturally. "She underlines," in sign of disapprobation, "the old Corneille for his way of saying crudely "'Ah, ne me brouillez pas avec la république.' "She still has heavy on her heart his _Tout beau, monsieur_. And many a _seigneur_ and many a _madame_ was needed to make her forgive our admirable Racine his _chiens_ so monosyllabic. . . . History in her eyes is in bad tone and taste. How, for example, can kings and queens who swear be tolerated? They must be elevated from their royal dignity to the dignity of tragedy. . . . It is thus that the king of the people (Henri IV.) polished by M. Legouvé, has seen his _ventre-saint-gris_ shamefully driven from his mouth by two sentences, and has been reduced, like the young girl in the story, to let nothing fall from this royal mouth, but pearls, rubies, and sapphires--all of them false, to say the truth." It seems incredible to an Englishman, but it is nevertheless true that at the first representations of "Hernani" in 1830, the simple question and answer "Est il minuit?--Minuit bientot" raised a tempest of hisses and applause, and that the opposing factions of classics and romantics "fought three days over this hemistich. It was thought trivial, familiar, out of place; a king asks what time it is like a common citizen, and is answered, as if he were a farmer, _midnight_. Well done! Now if he had only used some fine periphrasis, _e.g._: "----l'heure Atteindra bientot sa dernière demeure.[16] "If they could not away with definite words in the verse, they endured very impatiently, too, epithets, metaphors, comparisons, poetic words--lyricism, in short; those swift escapes into nature, those soarings of the soul above the situation, those openings of poetry athwart drama, so frequent in Shakspere, Calderon, and Goethe, so rare in our great authors of the eighteenth century." Gautier gives, as one reason for the adherence of so many artists to the romantic school, the circumstance that, being accustomed to a language freely intermixed with technical terms, the _mot propre_ had nothing shocking for them; while their special education as artists having put them into intimate relation with nature, "they were prepared to feel the imagery and colours of the new poetry and were not at all repelled by the precise and picturesque details so disagreeable to the classicists. . . . You cannot imagine the storms that broke out in the parterre of the Théâtre Français, when the 'Moor of Venice,' translated by Alfred de Vigny, grinding his teeth, reiterated his demands for that handkerchief (_mouchoir_) prudently denominated _bandeau_ (head-band, fillet) in the vague Shakspere imitation of the excellent Ducis. A bell was called 'the sounding brass'; the sea was 'the humid element,' or 'the liquid element,' and so on. The professors of rhetoric were thunderstruck by the audacity of Racine, who in the 'Dream of Athalie' had spoken of dogs as dogs--molossi would have been better--and they advised young poets not to imitate this license of genius. Accordingly the first poet who wrote bell (_cloche_) committed an enormity; he exposed himself to the risk of being cut by his friends and excluded from society." [17] As to the alexandrine, the recognised verse of French tragedy, Victor Hugo tells us,[18] that many of the reformers, wearied by its monotony, advocated the writing of plays in prose. He makes a plea, however, for the retention of the alexandrine, giving it greater richness and suppleness by the displacement of the caesura, and the free use of _enjambement_ or run-over lines; just as Leigh Hunt and Keats broke up the couplets of Pope into a freer and looser form of verse. "Hernani" opened with an _enjambement_ "Serait ce déja lui? C'est bien à l'escalier Dérobé." This was a signal of fight--a challenge to the classicists--and the battle began at once, with the very first lines of the play.[19] In his dramas Hugo used the alexandrine, but in his lyric poems, his wonderful resources as a metrist were exhibited to the utmost in the invention of the most bizarre, eccentric, and original verse forms. An example of this is the poem entitled "The Djinns" included in "Les Orientales" (1829). The coming and going of the flying cohort of spirits is indicated by the crescendo effect of the verse, beginning with a stanza in lines of two syllables, rising gradually to the middle stanza of the poem in lines of ten syllables, and then dying away by exactly graded diminutions to the final stanza: "On doute La nuit-- J'écoute Tout fuit, Tout passe: L'espace Efface Le bruit." [20] But the earlier volume of "Odes et Ballades" (1826) offers many instances of metrical experiments hardly less ingenious. In "La Chasse du Burgrave" every rime is followed by an echo word, alike in sound but different in sense: "Il part, et Madame Isabelle, Belle, Dit gaiement du haut des remparts: 'Pars!' Tous las chasseurs sont dans la plaine, Pleine D'ardents seigneurs, de sénéchaux Chauds." The English reader is frequently reminded by Hugo's verses of the queer, abrupt, and _outré_ measures, and fantastic rimes of Robert Browning. Compare with the above, _e.g._, his "Love among the Ruins." "Where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles Miles and miles On the solitary pastures where our sheep, Half asleep," etc. From the fact, already pointed out, that the romantic movement in France was, more emphatically than in England and Germany, a breach with the native literary tradition, there result several interesting peculiarities. The first of these is that the new French school, instead of fighting the classicists with weapons drawn from the old arsenal of mediaeval France, went abroad for allies; went especially to the modern writers of England and Germany. This may seem strange when we reflect that French literature in the Middle Ages was the most influential in Europe; and that, from the old heroic song of Roland in the eleventh century down to the very popular court allegory, the "Roman de la Rose", in the fourteenth, and to the poems of Villon in the fifteenth, it afforded a rich treasure-house of romantic material in the shape of chronicles, _chansons de geste_, _romans d'aventures_, _fabliaux_, _lais_, legends of saints, homilies, miracles, songs, farces, _jeuspartis_, _pastourelles_, _ballades_--of all the literary forms in fact which were then cultivated. Nor was this mass of work entirely without influence on the romanticists of 1830. Théophile Dondey, wrote a poem on Roland, and Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie) hunted up the old popular songs and folklore of Touraine and celebrated their naïveté and truly national character. Attention was directed to the Renaissance group of poets who preceded the Louis XIV. writers--to Ronsard and "The Pleiade." Later the Old French Text Society was founded for the preservation and publication of mediaeval remains. But in general the innovating school sought their inspiration in foreign literatures. Antony Deschamps translated the "Inferno"; Alfred de Vigny translated "Othello" as the "Moor of Venice" (1829), and wrote a play on the story of Chatterton,[21] and a novel, "Cinq Mars," which is the nearest thing in French literature to the historical romances of Scott.[22] Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo were both powerfully impressed by Macpherson's "Ossian." Gérard de Nerval made, at the age of eighteen, a translation of "Faust" (1828), which Goethe read with admiration, and wrote to the translator, saying that he had never before understood his own meaning so well. "It was a difficult task at that time," says Gautier, "to render into our tongue, which had become excessively timid, the bizarre and mysterious beauties of this ultra-romantic drama. . . . From his familiarity with Goethe, Uhland, Bürger and L. Tieck, Gérard retained in his turn of mind a certain dreamy tinge which sometimes made his own works seem like translations of unknown poets beyond the Rhine. . . . The sympathies and the studies of Gérard de Nerval drew him naturally towards Germany, which he often visited and where he made fruitful sojourns; the shadow of the old Teutonic oak hovered more than once above his brow with confidential murmurs; he walked under the lindens with their heart-shaped leaves; on the margin of fountains he saluted the elf whose white robe trails a hem bedewed by the green grass; he saw the ravens circling around the mountain of Kyffhausen; the kobolds came out before him from the rock clefts of the Hartz, and the witches of the Brocken danced their grand Walpurgisnight round about the young French poet, whom they took for a Jena student. . . . He knows how to blow upon the postillion's horn,[23] the enchanted melodies of Achim von Arnim and Clement Brentano; and if he stops at the threshold of an inn embowered in hop vines, the _Schoppen_ becomes in his hands the cup of the King of Thule." Among the French romanticists of Hugo's circle there was a great enthusiasm for wild German ballads like Bürger's "Lenore" and Goethe's "Erl-King." The translation of A. W. Schlegel's "Vorlesungen über Dramatische Kunst und Litteratur," by Madame Necker de Saussure, in 1814, was doubtless the first fruits of Madame de Staël's "Allemagne," published the year before. Gautier himself and his friend Augustus Mac-Keat (Auguste Maguet) collaborated in a drama founded on Byron's "Parisina." "Walter Scott was then in the full flower of his success. People were being initiated into the mysteries of Goethe's 'Faust,' . . . and discovering Shakspere under the translation, a little dressed up, of Letourneur; and the poems of Lord Byron, 'The Corsair,' 'Lara,' 'The Giaour,' 'Manfred,' 'Beppo,' 'Don Juan,' were coming to us from the Orient, which had not yet grown commonplace." Gautier said that in _le petit cénacle_--the inner circle of the initiated--if you admired Racine more than Shakspere and Calderon, it was an opinion that you would do well to keep to yourself. "Toleration is not the virtue of neophytes." As for himself, who had set out as a painter--and only later deviated into letters--he was all for the Middle Ages: "An old iron baron, feudal, ready to take refuge from the encroachments of the time, in the castle of Goetz von Berlichingen." Of Bouchardy, the extraordinary author of "Le Sonneur de Saint Paul," who "was to Hugo what Marlowe was to Shakspere"--and who was playfully accused of making wooden models of the plots of his melodramas--Gautier says that he "planned his singular edifice in advance, like a castle of Anne Radcliffe, with donjon, turrets, underground chambers, secret passages, corkscrew stairs, vaulted halls, mysterious closets, hiding places in the thickness of the walls, oubliettes, charnel-houses, crypts where his heroes and heroines were to meet later on, to love, hate, fight, set ambushes, assassinate, or marry. . . . He cut masked doors in the walls for his expected personage to appear through, and trap doors in the floor for him to disappear through." The reasons for this resort to foreign rather than native sources of inspiration are not far to seek. The romantic movement in France was belated; it was twenty or thirty years behind the similar movements in England and Germany. It was easier and more natural for Stendhal or Hugo to appeal to the example of living masters like Goethe and Scott, whose works went everywhere in translation and who held the ear of Europe, than to revive an interest all at once in Villon or Guillaume de Lorris or Chrestien de Troyes. Again, in no country had the divorce between fashionable and popular literature been so complete as in France; in none had so thick and hard a crust of classicism overlain the indigenous product of the national genius. It was not altogether easy for Bishop Percy in 1765 to win immediate recognition from the educated class for Old English minstrelsy; nor for Herder and Bürger in 1770 to do the same thing for the German ballads. In France it would have been impossible before the Bourbon restoration of 1815. In England and in Germany, moreover, the higher literature had always remained more closely in touch with the people. In both of those countries the stock of ballad poetry and folklore was much more extensive and important than in France, and the habit of composing ballads lasted later. The only French writers of the classical period who produced anything at all analogous to the German "Mährchen" were Charles Perrault, who published between 1691-97 his famous fairy tales, including "Blue Beard," "The Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding-Hood," "Cinderella," and "Puss in Boots"; and the Countess d'Aulnoy (died 1720), whose "Yellow Dwarf" and "White Cat" belong to the same department of nursery tales.[24] A curious feature of French romanticism was the way in which the new-found liberty of art asserted itself in manners, costume, and personal habits. Victor Hugo himself was scrupulously correct and subdued in dress, but his young disciples affected bright colours and rich stuffs. They wore Spanish mantillas, coats with large velvet lapels, pointed doublets or jerkins of satin or damask velvet in place of the usual waistcoat, long hair after the Merovingian fashion, and pointed beards. We have seen that Shenstone was regarded as an eccentric, and perhaps somewhat dangerous, person when at the university, because he wore his own hair instead of a wig. In France, half a century later, not only the _perruque_, but the _menton glabre_ was regarded as symptomatic of the classicist and the academician; while the beard became a badge of romanticism. At the beginning of the movement, Gautier informs us, "there were only two full beards in France, the beard of Eugène Devéria and the beard of Petrus Borel. To wear them required a courage, a coolness, and a contempt for the crowd truly heroic. . . . It was the fashion then is the romantic school to be pale, livid, greenish, a trifle cadaverous, if possible. It gave one an air of doom, Byronic, _giaourish_, devoured by passion and remorse." It will be remembered that the rolling Byronic collar, open at the throat, was much affected at one time by young persons of romantic temperament in England; and that the conservative classes, who adhered to the old-fashioned stock and high collar, looked askance upon these youthful innovators as certainly atheists and libertines, and probably enemies to society--would-be corsairs or banditti. It is interesting, therefore, to discover that in France, too, the final touch of elegance among the romantics was not to have any white linen in evidence; the shirt collar, in particular, being "considered as a mark of the grocer, the bourgeois, the philistine." A certain _gilet rouge_ which Gautier wore when he led the _claque_ at the first performance of "Hernani" has become historic. This flamboyant garment--a defiance and a challenge to the academicians who had come to hiss Hugo's play--was, in fact, a _pourpoint_ or jerkin of cherry-coloured satin, cut in the shape of a Milanese cuirass, pointed, busked, and arched in front, and fastened behind the back with hooks and eyes. From the imperturbable disdain with which the wearer faced the opera-glasses and laughter of the assembly it was evident that it would not have taken much urging to induce him to come to the second night's performance decked in a daffodil waistcoat.[25] The young enthusiasts of _le petit cénacle_ carried their Byronism so far that, in imitation of the celebrated revels at Newstead, they used to drink from a human skull in their feasts at _le Petit Moulin Rouge_. It had belonged to a drum-major, and Gérard de Nerval got it from his father, who had been an army surgeon. One of the neophytes, in his excitement, even demanded that it be filled with sea water instead of wine, in emulation of the hero of Victor Hugo's novel, "Han d'Islande," who "drank the water of the seas in the skull of the dead." Another _caput mortuum_ stood on Hugo's mantelpiece in place of a clock.[26] "If it did not tell the hour, at least it made us think of the irreparable flight of time. It was the verse of Horace translated into romantic symbolism." There was a decided flavour of Bohemianism about the French romantic school, and the spirit of the lives which many of them led may best be studied in Merger's classic, "La Vie de Boheme." [27] As another special feature of French romanticism, we may note the important part taken by the theatre in the history of the movement. The stage was the citadel of classical prejudice, and it was about it that the fiercest battles were fought. The climacteric year was 1830, in which year Victor Hugo's tragedy, "Hernani, or Castilian Honour," was put on at the Theatre Français on February 25th, and ran for thirty nights. The representation was a fight between the classics and the romantics, and there was almost a mob in the theatre. The dramatic censorship under Charles X., though strict, was used in the interest of political rather than aesthetic orthodoxy. But it is said that some of the older Academicians actually applied to the king to forbid the acting of "Hernani." Gautier has given a mock-heroic description of this famous literary battle _quorum pars magna fuit_. He had received from his college friend, Gérard de Nerval--who had been charged with the duty of drumming up recruits for the Hugonic _claque_--six tickets to be distributed only to tried friends of the cause--sure men and true. The tickets themselves were little squares of red paper, stamped in the corner with a mysterious countersign--the Spanish word _hierro_, iron, not only symbolizing the hero of the drama, but hinting that the ticket-holder was to bear himself in the approaching fray frankly, bravely, and faithfully like the sword. The proud recipient of these tokens of confidence gave two of them to a couple of artists--ferocious romantics, who would gladly have eaten an Academician, if necessary; two he gave to a brace of young poets who secretly practised _la rime riche_, _le mot propre_, and _la metaphore exacte_: the other two he reserved for his cousin and himself. The general attitude of the audience on the first nights was hostile, "two systems, two parties, two armies, two civilizations even--it is not saying too much--confronted one another, . . . and it was not hard to see that yonder young man with long hair found the smoothly shaved gentleman opposite a disastrous idiot; and that he would not long be at pains to conceal his opinion of him." The classical part of the audience resented the touches of Spanish local colour in the play, the mixture of pleasantries and familiar speeches with the tragic dialogue, and of heroism and savagery in the character of Hernani, and they made all manner of fun of the species of pun--_de ta suite, j'en suis_--which terminated the first act. "Certain lines were captured and recaptured, like disputed redoubts, by each army with equal obstinacy. On one day the romantics would carry a passage, which the enemy would retake the next day, and from which it became necessary to dislodge them. What uproar, what cries, cat-calls, hisses, hurricanes of bravos, thunders of applause! The heads of parties blackguarded each other like Homer's heroes before they came to blows. . . . For this generation 'Hernani' was what the 'Cid' was for the contemporaries of Corneille. All that was young, brave, amorous, poetic, caught the inspiration of it. Those fine exaggerations, heroic, Castilian, that superb Spanish emphasis; that language so proud and high even in its familiarity, those images of a dazzling strangeness, threw us into an ecstasy and intoxicated us with their heady poetry." The victory in the end was with the new school. Musset, writing in 1838, says that the tragedies of Corneille and Racine had disappeared from the French stage for ten years. Another triumphant battlefield--a veritable _fête romantique_--was the first representation in 1831 of Alexandre Dumas' "Anthony." "It was an agitation, a tumult, an effervescence. . . . The house was actually delirious; it applauded, sobbed, wept, shouted. A certain famous green coat was torn from the author's back and rent into shreds by his too ardent admirers, who wanted pieces of it for memorabilia." [28] The English reader who hears of the stubborn resistance offered to the performance of 'Hernani' will naturally suppose that there must have been something about it contrary to public policy--some immorality, or some political references, at least, offensive to the government; and he will have a difficulty in understanding that the trouble was all about affairs purely literary. "Hernani" was fought because it violated the unities of place and time; because its hero was a Spanish bandit; because in the dialogue a spade was called a spade, and in the verse the lines overlap. The French are often charged with frivolity in matters of conduct, but to the discussion of matters of art they bring a most serious conscience. The scene in "Hernani" shifts from Saragossa to the castle of Don Ruy Gomez de Silva in the mountains of Arragon, and to the tomb of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle. The time of the action, though not precisely indicated, covers at least a number of months. The dialogue is, in many parts, nervous, simple, direct, abrupt; in others running into long _tirades_ and soliloquies, rich with all the poetic resources of the greatest poet who has ever used the French tongue. The spirit of the drama, as well as its form, is romantic. The point of honour is pushed to a fantastic excess; all the characters display the most delicate chivalry, the noblest magnanimity, the loftiest Castilian pride. Don Ruy Gomez allows the King to carry off his bride, rather than yield up the outlaw who has taken refuge in his castle; and that although he has just caught this same outlaw paying court to this same bride, whose accepted lover he is. Hernani, not to be outdone in generosity, offers his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the _dramatis personae_ strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their poses---melodramatic, in fact--and do unlikely things. But this fault is the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the heroes of these plays, "Hernani," "Marion Delorme," "Le Roi d'Amuse," loom and stalk across the scene like epic demigods of more than mortal stature and mortal passions. But Hugo was not only a great dramatist and a great poet, but a most clever playwright. "Hernani" is full of effective stage devices, crises in the action which make an audience hold its breath or shudder; moments of intense suspense like that in the third act, where the old hidalgo pauses before his own portrait, behind which the outlaw is hidden; or that in the fifth, where Hernani hears at first, faint and far away, the blast of the fatal horn that summons him to leave his bride at the altar and go to his death. The young romantics of the day all got "Hernani" by heart and used to rehearse it at their assemblies, each taking a part; and the famous trumpet, the _cor d'Hernani_, became a symbol and a rallying call. No such scene would have been possible in an English playhouse as that which attended the first representation of "Hernani" at the Théâtre Français. For not only is an English audience comparatively indifferent to rules of art and canons of taste, but the unities had never prevailed in practice in England, though constantly recommended in theory. The French had no Shakspere, and the English no Academy. We may construct an imaginary parallel to such a scene if we will suppose that all reputable English tragedies from 1600 down to 1830 had been something upon the model of Addison's "Cato" and Johnson's "Irene", or better still upon the model of Dryden's heroic plays in rimed couplets; and that then a drama like "Romeo and Juliet" had been produced upon the boards of Drury Lane, and a warm spurt of romantic poetry suddenly injected into the icy current of classic declamation. Having considered the chief points in which the French romantic movement differed from the similar movements in England and Germany, let us now glance at the history of its beginnings, and at the work of a few of its typical figures. The presentation of "Hernani" in 1830 was by no means the first overt act of the new school. Discussion had been going on for years in the press. De Stendhal says that the classicists had on their side two-thirds of the Académie Française, and all of the French journalists; that their leading organ, however, was the very influential _Journal des Débats_ and its editor, M. Dussant, the general-in-chief of the classical party. The romanticists, however, were not without organs of their own; among which are especially mentioned _Le Conservateur Littéraire_, begun in 1819, _Le Globe_ in 1824, and the _Annales Romantiques_ in 1823, the last being "practically a kind of annual of the Muse Française (1823-24), which had pretty nearly the same contributors." All of these journals were Bourboniste, except _Le Globe_, which was liberal in politics.[29] The Academy denounced the new literary doctrine as a heresy and its followers as a sect, but it made head so rapidly that as early as 1829, a year before "Hernani" was acted, a "Histoire du Romantisme en France" appeared, written by a certain M. de Toreinx.[30] It agrees with other authorities in dating the beginning of the movement from Chateaubriand's "Le Génie du Christianisme" (1802). "Chateaubriand," says Gautier, "may be regarded as the grandfather, or, if you prefer it, the sachem of romanticism in France. In the 'Genius of Christianity' he restored the Gothic cathedral, in the 'Natchez' he reopened the sublimity of nature, which had been closed, in 'René' he invented melancholy and modern passion." Sprung from an ancient Breton family, Chateaubriand came to America in 1790 with the somewhat singular and very French idea of travelling overland to the northwest passage. He was diverted from this enterprise, however, fell in with an Indian tribe and wandered about with them in the wilderness. He did not discover the north-west passage, but, according to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"--in short, the _maladie du siécle_--since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in Sénancour's "Obermann." In one of the chapters[31] of "Le Génie du Christianisme" he gives an analysis of this modern melancholy, this Byronic satiety and discontent, which he says was unknown to the ancients. "The farther nations advance in civilization, the more this unsettled state of the passions predominates, for then our imagination is rich, abundant, and full of wonders; but our existence is poor, insipid, and destitute of charms. With a full heart we dwell in an empty world." "Penetrate into those forests of America coeval with the world; what profound silence pervades these retreats when the winds are husht! What unknown voices when they begin to rise! Stand still and everything is mute; take but a step and all nature sighs. Night approaches, the shades thicken; you hear herds of wild beasts passing in the dark; the ground murmurs under your feet; the pealing thunder rebellows in the deserts; the forest bows, the trees fall, an unknown river rolls before you. The moon at length bursts forth in the east; as you proceed at the foot of the trees, she seems to move before you on their tops and solemnly to accompany your steps. The wanderer seats himself on the trunk of an oak to await the return of day; he looks alternately at the nocturnal luminary, the darkness, and the river; he feels restless, agitated, and in expectation of something extraordinary; a pleasure never felt before, an unusual fear, cause his heart to throb, as if he were about to be admitted to some secret of the Divinity; he is alone in the depth of the forests, but the mind of man is equal to the expanse of nature, and all the solitudes of the earth are not too vast for the contemplations of his heart. There is in man an instinctive melancholy, which makes him harmonise with the scenery of nature. Who has not spent whole hours seated on the bank of a river, contemplating its passing waves? Who has not found pleasure on the seashore in viewing the distant rock whitened by the billows? How much are the ancients to be pitied, who discovered in the ocean naught but the palace of Neptune and the cavern of Proteus; it was hard that they should perceive only the adventures of the Tritons and the Nereids in the immensity of the seas, which seems to give an indistinct measure of the greatness of our souls, and which excites a vague desire to quit this life, that we may embrace all nature and taste the fulness of joy in the presence of its Author." [32] The outbreak of the Revolution recalled Chateaubriand to France. He joined the army of the _emigrées_ at Coblentz, was wounded at the siege of Thionville, and escaped into England where he lived (1793-1800) until the time of the Consulate, when he made his peace with Napoleon and returned to France. He had been a free-thinker, but was converted to Christianity by a dying message from his mother who was thrown into prison by the revolutionists. "I wept," said Chateaubriand, "and I believed." "Le Génie du Christianisme" was an expression of that reactionary feeling which drove numbers of Frenchmen back into the Church, after the blasphemies and horrors of the Revolution. It came out just when Napoleon was negotiating his _Concordat_ with the Pope, and was trying to enlist the religious and conservative classes in support of his government; and it reinforced his purposes so powerfully that he appointed the author, in spite of his legitimism, to several diplomatic posts. "Le Génie du Christianisme" is indeed a plea for Christianity on aesthetic grounds--an attempt, as has been sneeringly said, to recommend Christianity by making it look pretty. Chateaubriand was not a close reasoner; his knowledge was superficial and inaccurate; his character was weakened by vanity and shallowness. He was a sentimentalist and a rhetorician, but one of the most brilliant of rhetoricians; while his sentiment, though not always deep or lasting, was for the nonce sufficiently sincere. He had in particular a remarkable talent for pictorial description; and his book, translated into many tongues, enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. The English version, made in 1815, was entitled "The Beauties of Christianity." For Chateaubriand undertook to show that the Christian religion had influenced favorably literature and the fine arts; that it was more poetical than any other system of belief and worship. He compared Homer and Vergil with Dante, Tasso, Milton, and other modern poets, and awarded the palm to the latter in the treatment of the elementary relations and stock characters, such as husband and wife, father and child, the priest, the soldier, the lover, etc.; preferring Pope's Eloisa, _e.g._, to Vergil's Dido, and "Paul and Virginia" to the idyls of Theocritus. He pronounced the Christian mythology--angels, devils, saints, miracles--superior to the pagan; and Dante's Hell much more impressive to the imagination than Tartarus. He dwelt eloquently upon the beauty and affecting significance of Gothic church architecture, of Catholic ritual and symbolism, the dress of the clergy, the crucifix, the organ, the church bell, the observances of Christian festivals, the monastic life, the orders of chivalry, the country churchyards where the dead were buried, and even upon the superstitions which the last century had laughed to scorn; such as the belief in ghosts, the adoration of relics, vows to saints and pilgrimages to holy places. In his chapter on "The Influence of Christianity upon Music," he says that the "Christian religion is essentially melodious for this single reason, that she delights in solitude"; the forests are her ancient abode, and her musician "ought to be acquainted with the melancholy notes of the waters and the trees; he ought to have studied the sound of the winds in cloisters, and those murmurs that pervade the Gothic temple, the grass of the cemetery, and the vaults of death." He repeats the ancient fable that the designers of the cathedrals were applying forest scenery to architecture; "Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the chapels resembling grottoes, the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word everything in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood, everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity." The birds perch upon the steeples and towers as if they were trees, and "the Christian architect, not content with building forests, has been desirous to retain their murmurs, and by means of the organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds and the thunders that roll in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from the bosom of the stones and sigh in every corner of the vast cathedral. The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl; loud-tongued bells swing over your head; while the vaults of death under your feet are profoundly silent." He praises the ideals of chivalry; gives a sympathetic picture of the training and career of a knight-errant, and asks: "Is there then nothing worthy of admiration in the times of a Roland, a Godfrey, a Coucey, and a Joinville; in the times of the Moors and the Saracens; . . . when the strains of the Troubadours were mingled with the clash of arms, dances with religious ceremonies, and banquets and tournaments with sieges and battles?" Chateaubriand says that the finest Gothic ruins are to be found in the English lake country, on the Scotch mountains, and in the Orkney Islands; and that they are more impressive than classic ruins because in the latter the arches are parallel with the curves of the sky, while in the Gothic or pointed architecture the arches "form a contrast with the circular arches of the sky and the curvatures of the horizon. The Gothic being, moreover, entirely composed of _voids_, the more readily admits of the decoration of herbage and flowers than the fulness of the Grecian orders. The clustered columns, the domes carved into foliage, or scooped out in the form of a fruit-basket, offered so many receptacles into which the winds carry, with the dust, the seeds of vegetables. The house-leek fixes itself in the mortar, the mosses cover rugged masses with their elastic coating; the thistle projects its brown burrs from the embrasure of a window; and the ivy creeping along the northern cloisters falls in festoons over the arches." All this is romantic enough; we have the note of Catholic mediaevalism and the note of Ossianic melancholy combined; and this some years before "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and when Byron was a boy of fourteen and still reading his Ossian.[33] But we are precluded from classifying Chateaubriand among full-fledged romanticists. His literary taste was by no means emancipated from eighteenth-century standards. In speaking of Milton, _e.g._, he says that if he had only been born in France in the reign of Louis XIV., and had "combined with the native grandeur of his genius the taste of Racine and Boileau," the "Paradise Lost" might have equalled the "Iliad." Chateaubriand never called himself a romantic. It is agreed upon all hands that the expressions _romantisme_ and _littérature romantique_ were first invented or imported by Madame de Staël in her "L'Allemagne" (1813), "pour exprimer l'affranchissement des vieilles formes littéraires." [34] Some ten years later, or by 1823, when Stendhal published his "Racine et Shakspere," the issue between the schools had been joined and the question quite thoroughly agitated in the Parisian journals. Stendhal announced himself as an adherent of the new, but his temper was decidedly cool and unromantic. I have quoted his epigrammatic definition of romanticism.[35] In this _brochure_ Stendhal announces that France is on the eve of a literary revolution and that the last hour of classicism has struck, although as yet the classicists are in possession of the theatres, and of all the salaried literary positions under government; and all the newspapers of all shades of political opinion are shut to the romanticists. A company of English actors who attempted to give some of Shakspere's plays at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1822 were mobbed. "The hisses and cat-calls began before the performance, of which it was impossible to hear a single word. As soon as the actors appeared they were pelted with apples and eggs, and from time to time the audience called out to them to talk French, and shouted, '_À bas Shakspere! c'est un aide de camp du duc de Wellington_.'" It will be remembered that in our own day the first representations of Wagner's operas at Paris were interrupted with similar cries: "_Pas de Wagner_!," "_À bas les Allemands_!," etc. In 1827 Kemble's company visited Paris and gave, in English, "Hamlet," "Romeo and Juliet," "Othello," and "The Merchant of Venice." Dumas went to see them and described the impression made upon him by Shakspere, in language identical with that which Goethe used about himself.[36] He was like a man born blind and suddenly restored to sight. Dumas' "Henry III." (1829), a _drame_ in the manner of Shakspere's historical plays, though in prose, was the immediate result of this new vision. English actors were in Paris again in 1828 and 1829; and in 1835 Macready presented "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Henry IV." with great success. Previous to these performances, the only opportunities that the French public had to judge of Shakspere's dramas as acting plays were afforded by the wretched adaptations of Ducis and other stage carpenters. Ducis had read Shakspere only in Letourneur's very inadequate translation (revised by Guizot in 1821). His "Hamlet" was played in 1769; "Macbeth," 1784, "King John," 1791; "Othello" (turned into a comedy), 1792. Mercier's "Timon" was given in 1794; and Dejaure's "Imogènes"--an "arrangement" of "Cymbeline"--in 1796. The romanticists labored to put their countrymen in possession of better versions of Shakspere. Alfred de Vigny rendered "Othello" (1827), and Emile Deschamps, "Romeo and Juliet" and "Macbeth." Stendhal interviewed a director of one of the French theatres and tried to persuade him that there would be money in it for any house which would have the courage to give a season of romantic tragedy. But the director, who seemed to be a liberal-minded man, assured him that until some stage manager could be found rich enough to buy up the dramatic criticism of the _Constitutionnel_ and two or three other newspapers, the law students and medical students, who were under the influence of those journals, would never suffer the play to get as far as the third act. "If it were otherwise," he said, "don't you suppose that we would have tried Schiller's 'William Tell'? The police would have cut out a quarter of it; one of our adapters another quarter; and what was left would reach a hundred representations, _provided it could once secure three_." To this the author replied that the immense majority of young society people had been converted to romanticism by the eloquence of M. Cousin. "Sir," said the director, "your young society people don't go into the parterre to engage in fisticuffs [_faire le coup de poing_], and at the theatre, as in politics, we despise philosophers who don't fight." Stendhal adds that the editors of influential journals found their interest in this state of things, since many of them had pieces of their own on the stage, written of course in alexandrine verse and on the classic model; and what would become of these masterpieces if Talma should ever get permission to play in a prose translation of "Macbeth," abridged, say, one-third? "I said one day to one of these gentlemen, 28,000,000 men, _i.e._, 18,000,000 in England and 10,000,000 in America, admire 'Macbeth' and applaud it a hundred times a year. 'The English,' he answered me with great coolness, 'cannot have real eloquence or poetry truly admirable; the nature of their language, which is not derived from the Latin, makes it quite impossible.'" A great part of "Racine et Shakspere" is occupied with a refutation of the doctrine of the unities of time and place, and with a discussion of the real nature of dramatic illusion, on which their necessity was supposed to rest. Stendhal maintains that the illusion is really stronger in Shakspere's tragedies than in Racine's. It is not essential here to reproduce his argument, which is the same that is familiar to us in Lessing and in Coleridge, though he was an able controversialist, and his logic and irony give a freshness to the treatment of this hackneyed theme which makes his little treatise well worth the reading. To illustrate the nature of _real_ stage illusion, he says that last year (August, 1822) a soldier in a Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello about to kill Desdemona, cried out, "It shall never be said that a damned nigger killed a white woman in my presence," and at the same moment fired his gun and broke an arm of the actor who was playing Othello. "_Eh bien_, this soldier had illusion: he believed that the action which was passing on the stage was true." Stendhal proposes the following as a definition of romantic tragedy: "It is written in prose; the succession of events which it presents to the eyes of the spectators lasts several months, and they happen in different places." He complains that the French comedies are not funny, do not make any one laugh; and that the French tragic dialogue is epic rather than dramatic. He advises his readers to go and see Kean in "Richard" and "Othello"; and says that since reading Schlegel and Dennis (!) he has a great contempt for the French critics. He appeals to the usages of the German and English stage in disregarding the rules of Aristotle, and cites the great popularity of Walter Scott's romances, which, he says, are nothing more than romantic tragedies with long descriptions interspersed, to support his plea for a new kind of French prose-tragedy; for which he recommends subjects taken from national history, and especially from the mediaeval chroniclers like Froissart. Nevertheless, he does not advise the direct imitation of Shakspere. He blames Schiller for copying Shakspere, and eulogizes Werner's "Luther" as nearer to the masterpieces of Shakspere than Schiller's tragedies are. He wants the new French drama to resemble Shakspere only in dealing freely with modern conditions, as the latter did with the conditions of his time, without having the fear of Racine or any other authority before its eyes. In 1824 the Academy, which was slowly constructing its famous dictionary of the French language, happened to arrive at the new word _romanticism_ which needed defining. This was the signal for a heated debate in that venerable body, and the director, M. Auger, was commissioned to prepare a manifesto against the new literary sect, to be read at the meeting of the Institute on the 24th of April next. It was in response to this manifesto that Stendhal wrote the second part of his "Racine et Shakspere" (1825), attached to which is a short essay entitled "Qu'est ce que le Romanticisme?" [37] addressed to the Italian public, and intended to explain to them the literary situation in France, and to enlist their sympathies on the romantic side. "Shakspere," he says, "the hero of romantic poetry, as opposed to Racine, the god of the classicists, wrote for strong souls; for English hearts which were what Italian hearts were about 1500, emerging from that sublime Middle Age _questi tempi della virtu sconosciutta_." Racine, on the contrary, wrote for a slavish and effeminate court. The author disclaims any wish to impose Shakspere on the Italians. The day will come, he hopes, when they will have a national tragedy of their own; but to have that, they will do better to follow in the footprints of Shakspere than, like Alfieri, in the footprints of Racine. In spite of the pedants, he predicts that Germany and England will carry it over France; Shakspere, Schiller, and Lord Byron will carry it over Racine and Boileau. He says that English poetry since the French Revolution has become more enthusiastic, more serious, more passionate. It needed other subjects than those required by the witty and frivolous eighteenth century, and sought its heroes in the rude, primitive, inventive ages, or even among savages and barbarians. It had to have recourse to time or countries when it was permitted to the higher classes of society to have passions. The Greek and Latin classics could give no help; since most of them belonged to an epoch as artificial, and as far removed from the naïve presentation of the passions, as the eighteenth century itself. The court of Augustus was no more natural than that of Louis XIV. Accordingly the most successful poets in England, during the past twenty years, have not only sought deeper emotions than those of the eighteenth century, but have treated subjects which would have been scornfully rejected by the age of _bel esprit_. The anti-romantics can't cheat us much longer. "Where, among the works of our Italian pedants, are the books that go through seven editions in two months, like the romantic poems that are coming out in London at the present moment? Compare, _e.g._, the success of Moore's 'Lalla Rookh,' which appeared in June, 1817, and the eleventh edition of which I have before me, with the success of the 'Camille' of the highly classical Mr. Botta!'" In 1822, a year before the appearance of Stendhal's "Racine et Shakspere," Victor Hugo had published his "Odes et Poésies Diverses," and a second collection followed in 1824. In the prefaces to these two volumes he protests against the use of the terms classic and romantic, as _mots de guerre_ and vague words which every one defines in accordance with his own prejudices. If romanticism means anything, he says, it means the literature of the nineteenth century, and all the anathemas launched at the heads of contemporary writers reduce themselves to the following method of argument. "We condemn the literature of the nineteenth century because it is romantic. And why is it romantic? Because it is the literature of the nineteenth century." As to the false taste which disfigured the eighteenth-century imitations of Racine and Boileau, he would prefer to distinguish that by the name _scholastic_, a style which is to the truly classic what superstition and fanaticism are to religion. The intention of these youthful poems of Hugo was partly literary and partly political and religious: "The history of mankind affords no poetry," he says, "except when judged from the vantage-ground of monarchical ideas and religious beliefs. . . . He has thought that . . . in substituting for the outworn and false colours of pagan mythology the new and truthful colours of the Christian theogony, one could inject into the ode something of the interest of the drama, and could make it speak, besides, that austere, consoling, and religious language which is needed by an old society that issues still trembling from the saturnalia of atheism and anarchy. . . . The literature of the present, the actual literature, is the expression, by way of anticipation, of that religious and monarchical society which will issue, doubtless, from the midst of so many ancient debris, of so many recent ruins. . . . If the literature of the great age of Louis XIV. had invoked Christianity in place of worshipping heathen gods . . . the triumph of the sophistical doctrines of the last century would have been much more difficult, perhaps even impossible. . . . But France had not that good fortune; its national poets were almost all pagan poets, and our literature was rather the expression of an idolatrous and democratic, than of a monarchical and Christian society." The prevailing note, accordingly, in these early odes is that of the Bourbon Restoration of 1815-30, and of the Catholic reaction against the sceptical Éclaircissement of the eighteenth century. The subjects are such as these: "The Poet in the Times of Revolution"; "La Vendée"; "The Maidens of Verdun," which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the _emigres_; "Quibiron," where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads by the Convention soldiery; "Louis XVII."; "The Replacement of the Statue of Henry IV."; "The Death of the Duke of Berry"; "The Birth of the Duke of Bourdeaux" and his "Baptism"; "The Funeral of Louis XVIII."; "The Consecration of Charles X."; "The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil," the royalist heroine who saved her father's life by drinking a cupful of human blood in the days of the Terror; and "La Bande Noire," which denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins of feudal times: "O murs! ô créneaux! ô tourelle! Remparts, fossés aux ponts mouvants! Lourds faisceaux de colonnes frêles! Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents! Cloîtres poudreux, salles antiques, Où gémissaient les saints cantiques, Où riaient les banquets joyeux! Lieux où le coeur met ses chimères! Églises où priaient nos mères Tours où combattaient nos aïeux!" In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the language or verse forms. But in the "Odes et Ballades" of 1826, "the romantic challenge," says Saintsbury, "is definitely thrown down. The subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had regarded as barbarous. The metres and rhythm are studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms." This description applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as "La Ronde du Sabbat," "La Légende de la Nonne," "La Chasse du Burgrave," and "Le Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean" are mediaeval studies in which the lawless _grotesquerie_ of Gothic art runs riot. "The author, in composing them," says the preface, "has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment with their songs." To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other English romanticists of the eighteenth century. There is as much order, he asserts, in the forest as in the garden, but it is a live order, not a dead regularity. "Choose then," he exclaims, "between the masterpiece of gardening and the work of nature; between that which is beautiful by convention and that which is beautiful without rule; between an artificial literature and an original poetry. . . . In two words--and we shall not object to have judgment passed in accordance with this observation on the two kinds of literature that are called _classic_ and _romantic_,--regularity is the taste of mediocrity, order is the taste of genius. . . . It will be objected to us that the virgin forest hides in its magnificent solitudes a thousand dangerous animals, while the marshy basins of the French garden conceal at most a few harmless creatures. That is doubtless a misfortune; but, taking it all in all, we like a crocodile better than a frog; we prefer a barbarism of Shakspere to an insipidity of Campistron." But above all things--such is the doctrine of this preface--do not imitate anybody--not Shakspere any more than Racine. "He who imitates a _romantic_ poet becomes thereby a _classic_, and just because he imitates." In 1823 Hugo had published anonymously his first prose romance, "Han d'Islande," the story of a Norwegian bandit. He got up the local colour for this by a careful study of the Edda and the Sagas, that "poésie sauvage" which was the admiration of the new school and the horror of the old. But it was in the preface to "Cromwell," published in 1827, that Hugo issued the full and, as it were, official manifesto of romanticism. The play itself is hardly actable. It is modelled, in a sense, upon the historical plays of Shakspere, but its Cromwell is a very melodramatic person, and its Puritans and Cavaliers strike the English reader with the same sense of absurdity produced by the pictures of English society in "L'Homme qui Rit." But of the famous preface Gautier says: "The Bible among Protestants, the Koran among Mahometans are not the object of a deeper veneration. It was, indeed, for us the book of books, the book which contained the pure doctrine." It consisted in great part of a triumphant attack upon the unities, and upon the verse and style which classic usage had consecrated to French tragedy. I need not repeat the argument here. It is already familiar, and some sentences[38] from this portion of the essay I have quoted elsewhere. The preface also contained a plea for another peculiarity of the romantic drama, its mixture, viz., of tragedy and comedy. According to Hugo, this is the characteristic trait, the fundamental difference, which separates modern from ancient art, romantic from classical literature. Antique art, he says, rejected everything which was not purely beautiful, but the Christian and modern spirit feels that there are many things in creation besides that which is, humanly speaking, beautiful; and that everything which is in nature is--or has the right to be--in art. It includes in its picture of life the ugly, the misshapen, the monstrous. Hence results a new type, the grotesque, and a new literary form, romantic comedy. He proceeds to illustrate this thesis with his usual wealth of imaginative detail and pictorial language. The Middle Ages, more than any other period, are rich in instances of that intimate blending of the comic and the horrible which we call the grotesque; the witches' Sabbath, the hoofed and horned devil, the hideous figures of Dante's hell; the Scaramouches, Crispins, Harlequins of Italian farce; "grimacing silhouettes of man, quite unknown to grave antiquity"; and "all those local dragons of our legends, the gargoyle of Rouen, the Taras of Tarascon, etc. . . . The contact of deformity has given to the modern sublime something purer, grander, more sublime, in short, than the antique beauty. . . . Is it not because the modern imagination knows how to set prowling hideously about our churchyards, the vampires, the ogres, the erl-kings, the _psylles_, the ghouls, the _brucolaques_, the _aspioles_, that it is able to give its fays that bodiless form, that purity of essence which the pagan nymphs approach so little? The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has spread over the figures of Jean Goujon that graceful, strange, airy elegance? What has given them that unfamiliar character of life and grandeur, unless it be the neighbourhood of the rude and strong carvings of the Middle Ages? . . . The grotesque imprints its character especially upon that wonderful architecture which in the Middle Ages takes the place of all the arts. It attaches its marks to the fronts of the cathedrals; enframes its hells and purgatories under the portal arches, and sets them aflame upon the windows; unrolls its monsters, dogs, demons around the capitals, along the friezes, on the eaves." We find this same bizarre note in the mediaeval laws, social usages, church institutions, and popular legends, in the court fools, in the heraldic emblems, the religious processions, the story of "Beauty and the Beast." It explains the origin of the Shaksperian drama, the high-water mark of modern art. Shakspere does not seem to me an artist of the grotesque. He is by turns the greatest of tragic and the greatest of comic artists, and his tragedy and comedy lie close together, as in life, but without that union of the terrible and the ludicrous in the same figure, and that element of deformity which is the essence of the proper grotesque. He has created, however, one specimen of true grotesque, the monster Caliban. Caliban is a comic figure, but not purely comic; there is something savage, uncouth, and frightful about him. He has the dignity and the poetry which all rude, primitive beings have: which the things of nature, rocks and trees and wild beasts have. It is significant, therefore, that Robert Browning should have been attracted to Caliban. Browning had little comic power, little real humour; in him the grotesque is an imperfect form of the comic. The same criticism applies to Hugo. He gave a capital example of the grotesque in the four fools in the third act of "Cromwell" and in Triboulet, the Shaksperian jester of "Le Roi s'Amuse." Their songs and dialogues are bizarre and fantastic in the highest degree, but they are not funny; they do not make us laugh like the clowns of Shakspere--they are not comic, but merely queer. Hugo's defective sense of humour is shown in the way in which he frequently takes that one step which, Napoleon said, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--exaggerating character and motive till the heroic passes into melodrama and melodrama into absurdity. This fault is felt in his great prose romance "Notre-Dame de Paris" (1831), a picture of mediaeval Paris, in which the humpback Quasimodo affords an exact illustration of what the author meant by the grotesque; another of the same kind is furnished by the hero of his later romance "L'Homme qui Rit." Gautier has left a number of sketches, written in a vein lovingly humorous, of some of the eccentrics--the _curiosités romantiques_--whose oddities are perhaps even more instructive as to the many directions which the movement took, than the more ordered enthusiasm of the less extreme votaries. There was the architect Jule Vabre, _e.g._, whose specialty was Shakspere. Shakspere "was his god, his idol, his passion, a wonder to which he could never grow accustomed." Vabre's life-project was a French translation of his idol, which should be absolutely true to the text, reproducing the exact turn and movement of the phrase, following the alternations of prose, rime, and blank verse in the original, and shunning neither its euphemistic subtleties nor its barbaric roughnesses. To fit himself for this task, he went to London and lived there, striving to submit himself to the atmosphere and the _milieu_, and learning to think in English; and there Gautier encountered him about 1843, in a tavern at High-Holborn, drinking stout and eating _rosbif_ and speaking French with an English accent. Gautier told him that all he had to do now, to translate Shakspere, was to learn French. "I am going to work at it," he answered, more struck with the wisdom than the wit of the suggestion. A few years later Vabre turned up in France with a project for a sort of international seminary. "He wanted to explain 'Hernani' to the English and 'Macbeth' to the French. It made him tired to see the English learning French in 'Telemaque,' and the French learning English in the 'Vicar of Wakefield.'" Poor Vabre's great Shakspere translation never materialised; but François-Victor Hugo, the second son of the great romancer, carried out many of Vabre's principles of translation in his version of Shakspere. Another curious figure was the water-colour painter, Célestin Nanteuil, who suggested to Gautier the hero of an early piece of his own, written to accompany an engraving in an English keepsake, representing the Square of St. Sebald at Nuremberg. This hero, Elias Wildman-stadius, or l'Homme Moyen-âge, was "in a sort, the Gothic genius of that Gothic town"--a _retardataire_ or man born out of his own time--who should have been born in 1460, in the days of Albrecht Dürer. Célestin Nanteuil "had the air of one of those tall angels carrying a censer or playing on the _sambucque_, who inhabit the gable ends of cathedrals; and he seemed to have come down into the city among the busy townsfolk, still wearing his nimbus plate behind his head in place of a hat, and without having the least suspicion that it is not perfectly natural to wear one's aureole in the street." He is described as resembling in figure "the spindling columns of the church naves of the fifteenth century. . . . The azure of the frescoes of Fiesole had furnished the blue of his eyes; his hairs, of the blond of an aureole, seemed painted one by one, with the gold of the illuminators of the Middle Ages. . . . One would have said, that from the height of his Gothic pinnacle Célestin Nanteuil overlooked the actual town, hovering above the sea of roofs, regarding the eddying blue smoke, perceiving the city squares like a checkerboard, the streets like the notches of a saw in a stone bench, the passers-by like mice; but all that confusedly athwart the haze, while from his airy observatory he saw, close at hand and in all their detail, the rose windows, the bell towers bristling with crosses, the kings, patriarchs, prophets, saints, angels of all the orders, the whole monstrous army of demons or chimeras, nailed, scaled, tushed, hideously winged; _guivres_, taresques, gargoyles, asses' heads, apes' muzzles, all the strange bestiary of the Middle Age." Nanteuil furnished illustrations for the books of the French romanticists. "Hugo's' Notre-Dame de Paris' was the object of his most fervent admiration, and he drew from it subjects for a large number of designs and aquarelles." Gautier mentions, as among his rarest vignettes, the frontispiece of "Albertus," recalling Rembrandt's manner; and his view of the Palazzo of San Marc in Royer's "Venezia la bella." Gautier says that one might apply to Nanteuil's aquarelles what Joseph Delorme[39] said of Hugo's ballads, that they were Gothic window paintings. "The essential thing in these short fantasies is the carriage, the shape, the clerical, monastic, royal, seignorial _awkwardness_ of the figures and their high colouring. . . . Célestin had made his own the angular anatomy of coats-of-arms, the extravagant contours of the mantles, the chimerical or monstrous figures of heraldry, the branchings of the emblazoned skirts, the lofty attitude of the feudal baron, the modest air of the chatelaine, the sanctimonious physiognomy of the big Carthusian Carmelite, the furtive mien of the young page with parti-coloured pantaloons. . . . He excelled also in setting the persons of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. . . . Nothing resembled less the clock face and troubadour Middle Age which flourished about 1825. It is one of the main services of the romantic school to have thoroughly disembarrassed art from this." Gautier describes also a manuscript piece of Nerval, for which he furnished a prologue, and which was an imitation of one of the _Diableries_, or popular farces of the Middle Ages, in which the devil was introduced. It contained a piece within the piece, in the fashion of an old mystery play, with scenery consisting of the mouth of hell, painted red and surmounted by a blue paradise starred with gold. An angel came down to play at dice with the devil for souls. In his excess of zeal, the angel cheated and the devil grew angry and called him a "big booby, a celestial fowl," and threatened to pull his feathers out ("Le Prince des Sots"). In France, as in England and Germany, the romantic revival promoted and accompanied works of erudition like Raynouard's researches in Provençal and old French philology and the poetry of the troubadours (1816); Creuzé de Lesser's "Chevaliers de la Table Ronde"; Marchangy's "La Gaule Poétique." History took new impulse from that _sens du passé_ which romanticism did so much to awaken. Augustin Thierry's obligations to Scott have already been noticed. It was the war chant of the Prankish warriors in Chateaubriand's "Les Martyrs"-- "Pharamond! Pharamond! nous avons combattu avec l'épée"-- which first excited his historical imagination and started him upon the studies which issued in the "Récits Mérovingiens" and the "Conquéte d'Angleterre." Barante's "Ducs de Bourgogne" (1814-28) confessedly owes much of its inception to Scott. Michaud's "History of the Crusades" (1811-22) and the "History of France" (1833-67) by that most romantic of historians, Michelet, may also be credited to the romantic movement. The end of the movement, as a definite period in the history of French literature, is commonly dated from the failure upon the stage of Victor Hugo's "Les Burgraves" in 1843. The immediate influence of the French romantic school upon English poetry or prose was slight. Like the German school, it came too late. The first generation of English romantics was drawing to its close. Scott died two years after "Hernani" stormed the French theatre. Two years later still died Coleridge, long since fallen silent--as a poet--and always deaf to Gallic charming. We shall find the first impress of French romance among younger men and in the latter half century. In France itself the movement passed on into other phases. Many early adherents of Hugo's _cénacle_ and _entourage_ fell away from their allegiance and, like Sainte-Beuve and Musset, took up a critical or even antagonistic attitude. Musset's "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet" [40] turns the whole romantic contention into mockery. Yet no work more fantastically and gracefully romantic, more Shaksperian in quality, was produced by any member of the school than Musset produced in such dramas as "Fantasio" and "Lorenzaccio." [1] It is scarcely necessary to say that no full-length picture of the French romantic movement is attempted in this chapter, but only such a sketch as should serve to illustrate its relation to English romanticism. For the history of the movement, besides the authorities quoted or referred to in the text, I have relied principally upon the following: Petit de Julleville: "Histoire de la Littérature Française," Tome vii., Paris, 1899. Brunetière: "Manual of the History of French Literature" (authorized translation), New York, 1898. L. Bertrand; "La Fin du Classicisme," Paris, 1897. Adolphe Jullien: "Le Romantisme et L'Editeur Renduel," Paris, 1897. I have also read somewhat widely, though not exhaustively, in the writings of the French romantics themselves, including Hugo's early poems and most of his dramas and romances; Nodier's "Contes en prose et en verse "; nearly all of Musset's works in prose and verse; ditto of Théophile Gautier's; Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme," "Le Rouge et le Noir," "Racine et Shakespeare," "Lord Byron en Italie," etc.; Vigny's "Chatterton," "Cinq-Mars," and many of his Scriptural poems; Balzac's "Les Chouans"; Mérimée's "Chronique de Charles IX.," and most of his "Nouvelles "; Chateaubriand's "Le Genie du Christianisme"; some of Lamartine's "Meditations"; most of George Sand's novels, and a number of Dumas'; many of Sainte-Beuve's critical writings; and the miscellanies of Gérard de Nerval (Labrunie). Of many of these, of course, no direct use or mention is made in the present chapter. [2] "Il a pour l'art du moyen âge, un mepris voisin de la demence et de la frénésie. . . . Voir le discours où il propose de mutiler les statues des rois de la facade de Notre-Dame, pour en former un piédestal à la statue du peuple français." Bertrand: "La Fin du Classicisme," pp. 302-3 and _note_. [3] But see, for the Catholic reaction in France, the writings of Joseph de Maistre, especially "Du Pape" (1819). [4] "Histoire du Romantisme" (1874). [5] _ibid._, 210. [6] Heine counted, in the Salon of 1831, more than thirty pictures inspired by Scott. [7] Also "Le Roi Lear" (Salon of 1836) and "La Procession du Pape des Fous" (aquarelle) for Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris." [8] Recall Schlegel's saying that the genius of the classic drama was plastic and that of the romantic picturesque. [9] Gautier, 192. [10] This is a distinction more French than English: _la tragédie_ vs. _le drame_. [11] Preface to "Hernani." [12] Preface to "Cromwell." [13] "Histoire du Romantisme," p. 64. [14] "Primer of French Literature," p. 115. [15] One of the principles of the romanticists was the _mélange des genres_, whereby the old lines between tragedy and comedy, _e.g._, were broken down, lyricism admitted into the drama, etc. [16] Stendhal, writing in 1823 ("Racine et Shakspere"), complains that "it will soon be thought bad form to say, on the French stage, 'Fermez cette fenêtre' [window]: we shall have to say, 'Fermez cette croisée' [casement]. Two-thirds of the words used in the parlours of the best people (_du meilleur ton_) cannot be reproduced in the theatre. M. Legouvé, in his tragedy 'Henri IV.,' could not make use of the patriot king's finest saying, 'I could wish that the poorest peasant in my kingdom might, at the least, have a chicken in his pot of a Sunday.' English and Italian verse allows the poet to say everything; and this good French word _pot_ would have furnished a touching scene to Shakspere's humblest pupil. But _la tragédie racinienne_, with its _style noble_ and its artificial dignity, has to put it thus,--in four alexandrines: "'Je veux enfin qu'au jour marqué pour le repos, L'hôte laborieux des modestes hameaux, Sur sa table moins humble, ait, par ma bienfaisance, Quelques-uns de ces mets réservés à l'aisance.'" It was Stendhal (whose real name was Henri Beyle) who said that Paris needed a chain of mountains on its horizon. [17] Gautier, 188. [18] "Cromwell," 1827, [19] Gautier, 107. [20] Musset's fantastic "Ballade à la Lune," exaggerates the romantic so decidedly as to seem ironical. It is hard to say whether it is hyperbole or parody. See Petit de Julleville, vol. vii., p. 652. [21] See vol. i., pp. 372-73. [22] Gautier, 163. [23] "Des Knaben Wunderhorn." [24] Charles Nodier vindicated the literary claims of Perrault. [25] Gautier, 93. [26] Rue Jean-Gougon, where the _cénacle_ met often. [27] Nerval hanged himself at Paris, in January, 1855, in the rue de la Vielle Lanterne. [28] Gautier, 167. [29] The romanticism of the _Globe_ was of a more conservative stripe than that of the Muse Française, which was the organ of the group of young poets who surrounded Hugo. The motto of the latter was _Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto_. The _Globe_ defined romanticism as Protestantism in letters. The critical battle was on as early as 1824. On April 24, in that year, Auger, director of the Academy, read at the annual session of the Institute a discourse on romanticism, which he denounced as a literary schism. The prospectus of the _Globe_, an important document on the romantic side, dates from the same year. The _Constitutionnel_, the most narrowly classical of the opposing journals, described romanticism as an epidemic malady. To the year 1825, when the _Cénacle_ had its headquarters at Victor Hugo's house, belong, among others, the following manifestoes on both sides of the controversy; "Les Classiques Vengés," De la Touche; "Le Temple du Romantisme," Morel; "Le Classique et le Romantique" (a satirical comedy in the classical interest), Baour-Lormian. Cyprien Desmarais' "Essais sur les classiques et les romantiques" had appeared at Paris in 1823. At Rouen was printed in 1826 "Du Classique et du Romantique," a collection of papers read at the Rouen Academy during the year, rather favorable, on the whole, to the new movement. [30] This is now a somewhat rare book; I have never seen a copy of it; but it was reviewed in The Saturday Review (vol. lxv., p. 369). [31] Part ii., Book iii., chap ix. [32]Part ii., Book iv., chap. i. [33] For Chateaubriand and Ossian see vol. i., pp. 332-33. He made translations from Ossian, Gray, and Milton. [34] "Victor Hugo," par Paul Boudois, p. 32. [35] Vol. i., p. 10. [36] See vol. i., p. 379. [37] The use of this form instead of _romantisme_ is perhaps worth noticing. [38] See vol. i., pp. 19-20. [39] Sainte-Beuve's "Confessions de Joseph Delorme," 1829. [40] See vol. i., pp. 18-23. CHAPTER VI. Diffused Romanticism in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Most of the poetry of the century that has just closed has been romantic in the wider or looser acceptation of the term. Emotional stress, sensitiveness to the picturesque, love of natural scenery, interest in distant times and places, curiosity of the wonderful and mysterious, subjectivity, lyricism, intrusion of the ego, impatience of the limits of the _genres_, eager experiment with new forms of art--these and the like marks of the romantic spirit are as common in the verse literature of the nineteenth century as they are rare in that of the eighteenth. The same is true of imaginative prose, particularly during the first half of the century, the late Georgian and early Victorian period. In contrast with Addison, Swift, and Goldsmith, De Quincey, Carlyle, and Ruskin are romanticists. In contrast with Hume, Macaulay is romantic, concrete, pictorial. The critical work of Hazlitt and Lamb was in line with Coleridge's. They praised the pre-Augustan writers, the Elizabethan dramatists, the seventeenth-century humorists and moralists, the Sidneian amourists and fanciful sonneteers, at the expense of their classical successors. But in the narrower sense of the word--the sense which controls in these inquiries--the great romantic generation ended virtually with the death of Scott in 1832. Coleridge followed in 1834, Wordsworth in 1850. Both had long since ceased to contribute anything of value to imaginative literature. Byron, Shelley, and Keats had died some years before Coleridge; Leigh Hunt survived until 1859. The mediaevalism of Coleridge, Scott, and Keats lived on in dispersed fashion till it condensed itself a second time, and with redoubled intensity, in the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which belongs to the last half of the century. The direct line of descent was from Keats to Rossetti; and the Pre-Raphaelites bear very much such a relation to the elder group, as the romantic school proper in Germany bears to Bürger and Herder, and to Goethe and Schiller in their younger days. That is to say, their mediaevalism was more concentrated, more exclusive, and more final. We have come to a point in the chronology of our subject where the material is so abundant that we must narrow the field of study to creative work, and to work which is romantic in the strictest meaning. Henceforth we may leave out of account all works of mere erudition as such; all those helps which the scholarship of the century has furnished to a knowledge of the Middle Ages; histories, collections, translations, reprints of old texts, critical editions. Middle English lexicons and grammars, studies of special subjects, such as popular myths or miracle plays or the Arthurian legends, and the like. Numerous and valuable as these publications have been, they concern us only indirectly. They have swelled the material available for the student; they have not necessarily stimulated the imagination of the poet; which sometimes--as in the case of Chatterton and of Keats--goes off at a touch and carries but a light charge of learning. In literary history it is the beginnings that count. Child's great ballad collection is, beyond comparison, more important from the scholar's point of view than Percy's "Reliques." But in the history of romanticism it is of less importance, because it came a century later. Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" has been long since superseded, and the means now accessible in English for a study of Norse mythology are infinitely greater than when Gray read and Percy translated the "Northern Antiquities." But it is not the history of the revival of the _knowledge_ of mediaeval life that we are following here; it is rather the history of that part of our modern creative literature which has been kindled by contact--perhaps a very slight and casual contact--with the transmitted _image_ of mediaeval life. Nor need we concern ourselves further with literary criticism or the history of opinion. This was worth considering in the infancy of the movement, when Warton began to question the supremacy of Pope; when Hurd asserted the fitness for the poet's uses of the Gothic fictions and the institution of chivalry; and when Percy ventured to hope that cultivated readers would find something deserving attention in old English minstrelsy. It was still worth considering a half-century later, when Coleridge explained away the dramatic unities, and Byron once more took up the lost cause of Pope. But by 1832 the literary revolution was complete. Romance was in no further need of vindication, when all Scott's library of prose and verse stood back of her, and "High-piled books in charactery Held, like rich garners, the full-ripened grain." As to Scott's best invention, the historical romance, I shall not pursue its fortunes to the end. The formula once constituted, its application was easy, whether the period chosen was the Middle Ages or any old period B.C. or A.D. Here and there an individual stands forth from the class, either for its excellent conformity with the Waverley type or for its originality in deviation. Of the former kind is Charles Reade's "The Cloister and the Hearth" (1861); and of the latter Mr. Maurice Hewlett's "The Forest Lovers" (1898). The title page of Reade's novel describes the book as "a matter-of-fact romance." It is as well documented as any of Scott's, and reposes especially upon the "Colloquies" of Erasmus, the betrothal of whose parents, with their subsequent separation by the monastic vow of celibacy, is the subject of the story. This is somewhat romanticised, but keeps a firm grip upon historical realities. The period of the action is the fifteenth century, yet the work is as far as possible from being a chivalry tale, like the diaphanous fictions of Fouqué. "In that rude age," writes the novelist, "body prevailing over mind, all sentiments took material forms. Man repented with scourges, prayed by bead, bribed the saints with wax tapers, put fish into the body to sanctify the soul, sojourned in cold water for empire over the emotions, and thanked God for returning health in 1 cwt, 2 stone, 7 lbs., 3 oz., 1 dwt. of bread and cheese." There is no lack in "The Cloister and the Hearth" of stirring incident and bold adventure; encounters with bears and with bandits, sieges, witch trials, gallows hung with thieves, archery with long bow and arbalest--everywhere fighting enough, as in Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. Less after the manner of the Waverley novels, and more after that of "Hypatia," "Romola," and "Fathers and Sons," it depicts the intellectual unrest of the time, the conflicting ideals of the old and new generations. The printing-press is being set up, and the hero finds his art of calligraphy, learned in the scriptorium, no longer in request. The Pope and many of the higher clergy are infected with the religious scepticism and humanitarian enthusiasm of the Renaissance. The child Erasmus is the new birth of reason, destined to make war on monkery and superstition and thereby avenge his parents' wrongs. Of quite another fashion of mediaevalism is Mr. Hewlett's story--sheer romance. The wonderful wood of Morgraunt, with its charcoal burners and wayside shrines, black meres frowned over by skeleton castles, and gentle hinds milked by the heroine to get food for her wounded lover, is of no time or country, but almost as unreal as Spenser's fairy forest. Through its wild ways Isoult la Desirous and Prosper le Gai go adventuring like Una and her Red Cross knight, or Enid and Geraint. Or, again, Isoult in her page's dress, and forsaken by her wedded lord, is like Viola or Imogen or Rosalind, or Constance in "Marmion," or any lady of old romance. Or sometimes again she is like a wood spirit, or an elemental creature such as was Undine. The invented place names, High March, Wanmeeting, Market Basing, etc., with their transparent air of actuality, sound an echo from William Morris' prose romances, like "The House of the Wolfings" and "The Sundering Flood." As in the last named, and in Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native," the reader's imagination is assisted by a map of the Morgraunt forest and the river Wan. Mr. Hewlett has evidently profited, too, by recent romances of various schools: by "Prince Otto," _e.g._, and "The Prisoner of Zenda," and possibly by others. His Middle Ages are not the Middle Ages of history, but of poetic convention; a world where anything may happen and where the facts of any precise social state are attenuated into "atmosphere" for the use of the imagination. "The Forest Lovers" is nearer to "Christabel" or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" than to "Ivanhoe": is, indeed, a prose poem, though not quite an allegory like "Sintram and his Companions." Among Scott's contemporaries, Byron and Shelley, profoundly romantic in temper, were not retrospective in their habit of mind; and the Middle Ages, in particular, had little to say to them. Scott stood for the past; Byron--a man of his time, a modern man--for the present; Shelley--a visionary, with a system of philosophical perfectionism--for the future. Memory, Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, was the nurse of Scott's genius. Byron lived intensely in the world which he affected to despise. Shelley prophesied, with eyes fixed upon the coming age. We have found, in Byron's contributions to the Pope controversy, one expression of his instinctive sympathy with the classical and contempt for the Gothic. Shelley, too, was a Hellenist; and to both, in their angry break with authority and their worship of liberty, the naked freedom, the clear light, the noble and harmonious forms of the antique were as attractive as the twilight of the "ages of faith," with their mysticism, asceticism, and grotesque superstitions, were repulsive. Remote as their own feverish and exuberant poetry was from the unexcited manner of classical work, the latter was the ideal towards which they more and more inclined. The points at which these two poets touch our history, then, are few. Byron, to be sure, cast "Childe Harold" into Spenserian verse, and gave it a ballad title.[1] In the first canto there are a few archaisms; words like _fere_, _shent_, and _losel_ occur, together with Gothic properties, such as the "eremite's sad cell" and "Paynim shores" and Newstead's "monastic dome." The ballad "Adieu, adieu my native shore," was suggested by "Lord Maxwell's Good-Night" in the "Border Minstrelsy," and introduces some romantic appurtenances: the harp, the falcon, and the little foot-page. But this kind of falsetto, in the tradition of the last-century Spenserians, evidently hampered the poet; so he shook himself free from imitation after the opening stanzas, and spoke in his natural voice.[2] "Lara" is a tale of feudal days, with a due proportion of knights, dames, vassals, and pages; and an ancestral hall with gloomy vaults and portrait galleries, where "--the moonbeam shone Through the dim lattice o'er the floor of stone, And the high fretted roof and saints that there O'er Gothic windows knelt in pictured prayer. . . . The waving banner and the clapping door, The rustling tapestry and the echoing floor; The long dim shadows of surrounding trees, The flapping bats, the night-song of the breeze, Aught they behold or hear their thought appalls, As evening saddens o'er the dark grey walls." But these things are unimportant in Byron--mere commonplaces of description inherited from Scott and Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. Neither is it of importance that "Parisina" is a tale of the year 1405, and has an echo in it of convent bells and the death chant of friars; nor that the first scene of "Manfred" passes in a "Gothic gallery," and includes an incantation of spirits upon the model of "Faust"; nor that "Marino Faliero" and "The Two Foscari" are founded on incidents of Venetian history which happened in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries respectively; nor yet that Byron translated the Spanish ballad "Woe is me Alhama" and a passage from Pulci's "Morgante Maggiore." [3] Similarly Shelley's experimental versions of the "Prolog im Himmel," and "Walpurgisnacht" in "Faust," and of scenes from Calderon's "Magico Prodigioso" are felt to be without special significance in comparison with the body of his writings. "Faust" impressed him, as it did Byron, and he urged Coleridge to translate it, speaking of the current English versions as wretched misrepresentations of the original. But in all of Shelley's poetry the scenery, architecture, and imagery in general are sometimes Italian, sometimes Asiatic, often wholly fantastic, but never mediaeval. Their splendour is a classic splendour, and not what Milton contemptuously calls "a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness." His favourite names are Greek: Cythna, Ianthe, and the like. The ruined cathedral in "Queen Mab"--a poem only in its title romantic--is coupled with the ruined dungeon, in whose courts the children play; both alike "works of faith and slavery," symbols of the priestcraft and kingcraft which Shelley hated, now made harmless by the reign of Reason and Love in a regenerated universe. How different is the feeling which the empty cathedral inspires in Lowell; once thronged with worshippers, now pathetically lonely--a cliff, far inland, from which the sea of faith has forever withdrawn! At the time when "Queen Mab" was written, Coleridge, Southey, and Landor's "Gebir" were Shelley's favourite reading. "He was a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature," says Mrs. Shelley, in her notes on the poem; "but had not fostered these tastes at their genuine sources--the romances and chivalry of the Middle Ages--but in the perusal of such German works as were current in those days.[4] . . . Our earlier English poetry was almost unknown to him." "Queen Mab" begins with a close imitation of the opening lines of Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer." The third member of the Lake School is a standing illustration of Mr. Colvin's contention that the distinction between classic and romantic is less in subject than in treatment. Southey regarded himself as, equally with Wordsworth and Coleridge, an innovator and a rebel against poetic conventions. His big Oriental epics, "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama," are written in verse purposely irregular, but so inferior in effect to the irregular verse of Coleridge and Scott as to prove that irregularity, as such, is only tolerable when controlled by the subtly varying lyric impulse--not when it is adopted as a literary method. Southey's worth as a man, his indefatigable industry, his scholarship, and his excellent work in prose make him an imposing figure in our literature. But his poetical reputation has faded more rapidly than that of his greater contemporaries. He ranged widely in search of subjects and experimented boldly in forms of verse; but his poems are seldom inspired; they are manufactures rather than creations, and to-day Southey, the poet, represents nothing in particular. But, like Taylor of Norwich, Southey, by his studies in foreign literature, added much to the romantic material constantly accumulating in the English tongue. In his two visits to the Peninsula he made acquaintance with Spanish and Portuguese; and afterwards by his translations and otherwise, helped his countrymen to a knowledge of the old legendary poetry of Spain, the country above all others of chivalry and romance. Mention has already been made of his versions of "Amadis of Gaul," "Palmerin of England," and the "Chronicle of the Cid." The last named was not a translation from any single source, but was put together from the "Poem of the Cid," which the translator considered to be "unquestionably the oldest poem in the language" and probably by a writer contemporary with the great Campeador himself; from the prose "Chronicle" assigned to the thirteenth century; and from the ballads, which Southey thought mainly worthless, _i.e._, from the historical point of view. Southey's long blank verse poems on mediaeval subjects, partly historical, partly legendary, "Joan of Arc" (1795), "Madoc" (1805), and "Roderick, the Last of the Goths" (1814), like his friend Landor's "Gebir," are examples of romantic themes with classical or, at least, unromantic handling. The last of them was the same in subject, indeed, with Landor's drama, "Count Julian." I have spoken of "Thalaba" and "The Curse of Kehama" as epics; but Southey rejected "the degraded title of epic" and scouted the rules of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the best qualities of these blank verse narratives are of the classic-epic kind. The story is not badly told; the measure is correct if not distinguished; and the style is simple, clear, and in pure taste. But the spell of romance, the witchery of Coleridge and Keats is absent; and so are the glow and movement of Scott. Southey got up his history and local colour conscientiously, and his notes present a formidable array of authorities. While engaged upon "Madoc," he went to Wales to verify the scenery and even came near to leasing a cottage and taking up his residence there. "The manners of the poem," he asserted, "will be found historically true." The hero of "Madoc" was a legendary Welsh prince of the twelfth century who led a colony to America. The _motif_ of the poem is therefore nearly the same as in William Morris's "Earthly Paradise," and it is curious to compare the two. In Southey's hands the blank verse, which in the last century had been almost an ear-mark of the romanticising schools, is far more classical than the heroic couplet which Morris writes. In the Welsh portion of "Madoc" the historical background is carefully studied from Giraldus Cambrensis, Evans' "Specimens," the "Triads of Bardism," the "Cambrian Biography," and similar sources, and in the Aztec portion, from old Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Mexico and the journals of modern travellers in America. In "The Earthly Paradise" nothing is historical except the encounter with Edward III.'s fleet in the channel. Over all, the dreamlike vagueness and strangeness of romance. Yet the imaginative impression is more distinct, not an impression of reality, but as of a soft, bright miniature painting in an old manuscript. In common with his literary associates, Southey was prompted by Percy's "Reliques" to try his hand at the legendary ballad and at longer metrical tales like "All for Love" and "The Pilgrim to Compostella." Most of these pieces date from the last years of the century. One of them, "St. Patrick's Purgatory," was inserted by Lewis in his "Tales of Wonder." Another of the most popular, and a capital specimen of grotesque, "The Old Woman of Berkeley," was upon a theme which was also undertaken by Taylor of Norwich and Dr. Sayers of the same city, when Southey was on a visit to the former in 1798. The story, told by Olaus Magnus as well as by William of Malmesbury, was of a witch whose body was carried off by the devil, though her coffin had been sprinkled with holy water and bound with a triple chain. For material Southey drew upon Spanish chronicles, French _fabliaux_, the "Acta Sanctorum," Matthew of Westminster, and many other sources. His ballads do not compare well with those of Scott and Coleridge. They abound in the supernatural--miracles of saints, sorceries, and apparitions; but the matter-of-fact narrative, common-place diction, and jog-trot verse are singularly out of keeping with the subject matter. The most wildly romantic situations become tamely unromantic under Southey's handling. Though in better taste than Lewis' grisly compositions, yet, as in Lewis, the want of "high seriousness" or any finer imagination in these legendary tales makes them turn constantly towards the comic; so that Southey was scandalised to learn that Mr. Payne Collier had taken his "Old Woman of Berkeley" for a "mock ballad" or parody. He affected especially a stanza which he credited to Lewis' invention: "Behind a wide column, half breathless with fear She crept to conceal herself there; That instant the moon o'er a dark cloud shone clear, And she saw in the moonlight two ruffians appear, And between them a corpse did they bear." [5] Southey employs no archaisms, no refrains, nor any of the stylistic marks of ancient minstrelsy. His ballads have the metrical roughness and plain speech of the old popular ballads, but none of their frequent, peculiar beauties of thought and phrase, Spain, no less than Germany and Italy, was laid under contribution by the English romantics. Southey's work in this direction was followed by such things as Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads" (1824), Irving's "Alhambra," and Bryant's and Longfellow's translations from Spanish lyrical poetry. But these exotics did not stimulate original creative activity in England in equal degree with the German and Italian transplantings. They were imported, not appropriated. Of all European countries Spain had remained the most Catholic and mediaeval. Her eight centuries of struggle against the Moors had given her a rich treasure of legendary song and story. She had a body of popular ballad poetry larger than either England's or Germany's.[6] But Spain had no modern literature to mediate between the old and new; nothing at all corresponding with the schools of romance in Germany, from Herder to Schlegel, which effected a revival of the Teutonic Middle Age and impressed it upon contemporary England and France. Neither could the Spanish Middle Age itself show any such supreme master as Dante, whose direct influence on English poetry has waxed with the century. There was a time when, for the greater part of a century, England and Spain were in rather close contact, but it was mainly a hostile contact, and its tangential points were the ill-starred marriage of Philip and Mary, the Great Armada of 1588, and the abortive "Spanish Marriage" negotiations of James I.'s reign. Readers of our Elizabethan literature, however, cannot fail to remark a knowledge of, and interest in, Spanish affairs now quite strange to English writers. The dialogue of the old drama is full of Spanish phrases of convenience like _bezo los manos_, _paucas palabras_, etc., which were evidently quite as well understood by the audience as was later the colloquial French--_savoir faire_, _coup de grâce_, etc.--which began to come in with Dryden, and has been coming ever since. The comedy Spaniard, like Don Armado in "Love's Labour's Lost," was a familiar figure on the English boards. Middleton took the double plot of his "Spanish Gipsy" from two novels of Cervantes; and his "Game of Chess," a political allegorical play, aimed against Spanish intrigues, made a popular hit and was stopped, after a then unexampled run, in consequence of the remonstrances of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. Somewhat later the Restoration stage borrowed situations from the Spanish love-intrigue comedy, not so much directly as by way of Molière, Thomas Corneille, and other French playwrights; and the duenna and the _gracioso_ became stock figures in English performances. The direct influence of Calderon and Lope de Vega upon our native theatre was infinitesimal. The Spanish national drama, like the English, was self-developed and unaffected by classical rules. Like the English, it was romantic in spirit, but was more religious in subject and more lyrical in form. The land of romance produced likewise the greatest of all satires upon romance. "Don Quixote," of course, was early translated and imitated in England; and the _picaro_ romances had an important influence upon the evolution of English fiction in De Foe and Smollett; not only directly through books like "The Spanish Rogue," but by way of Le Sage.[7] But upon the whole, the relation between English and Spanish literature had been one of distant respect rather than of intimacy. There was never any such inrush of foreign domination from this quarter as from Italy in the sixteenth century, or from France in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and latter half of the seventeenth. The unequalled wealth of Spanish literature in popular ballads is partially explained by the facility with which such things were composed. The Spanish ballad, or _romance_, was a stanza (_redondilla_, roundel) of four eight-syllable lines with a prevailing trachaic movement--just the metre, in short, of "Locksley Hall." Only the second and fourth lines rimed, and the rime was merely assonant or vowel rime. Given the subject and the lyrical impulse, and verses of this sort could be produced to order and in infinite number by poets of the humblest capacity. The subjects were furnished mainly by Spanish history and legend, the exploits of national heroes like the Cid (Ruy Diaz de Bivar), the seven Princes of Lara, Don Fernán Gonzalez, and Bernaldo del Carpio, the leader in the Spanish versions of the great fight by Fontarabbia "When Rowland brave and Olivier, And every paladin and peer On Roncesvalles died." Southey thought the Spanish ballads much inferior to the English and Scotch, a judgment to which students of Spanish poetry will perhaps hardly agree.[8] The Spanish ballads, like the British, are partly historical and legendary, partly entirely romantic or fictitious. They record not only the age-long wars against the Saracen, the common enemy, but the internecine feuds of the Spanish Christian kingdoms, the quarrels between the kings and their vassals, and many a dark tale of domestic treachery or violence. In these respects their resemblance to the English and Scotch border ballads is obvious; and it has been pointed out that they sprang from similar conditions, a frontier war for national independence, maintained for centuries against a stubborn foe. The traditions concerning Wallace and the Bruce have some analogy with the chronicles of the Cid; but as to the border fights celebrated in Scott's "Minstrelsy," they were between peoples of the same race, tongue, and faith; and were but petty squabbles in comparison with that epic crusade in which the remnants of the old Gothic conquerors slowly made head against, and finally overthrew and expelled, an Oriental religion, a foreign blood, and a civilisation in many respects more brilliant than anything which Europe could show. The contrast between Castile and Granada is more picturesque than the difference between Lothian and Northumberland. The Spanish ballads have the advantage, then, of being connected with imposing passages of history. In spirit they are intensely national. Three motives animate them all: loyalty to the king, devotion to the cross, and the _pundonor_: that sensitive personal honour--the "Castilian pride" of "Hernani,"--which sometimes ran into fantastic excess. A rude chivalry occasionally softens the ferocity of feudal manners in Northern ballad-poetry, as in the speech of Percy over the dead Douglas in "Chevy Chase." But in the Spanish _romances_ the knightly feeling is all-pervading. The warriors are _hidalgos_, gentlemen of a lofty courtesy; the Moorish chieftains are not "heathen hounds," but chivalrous adversaries, to be treated, in defeat, with a certain generosity. This refinement and magnanimity are akin to that ideality of temper which makes Don Quixote at once so noble and so ridiculous, and which is quite remote from the sincere realism of the British minstrelsy. In style the Spanish ballads are simple, forcible, and direct, but somewhat monotonous in their facility. The English and Scotch have a wider range of subject; the best of them have a condensed energy of expression and a depth of tragic feeling which is more potent than the melancholy grace of the Spanish. Women take a more active part in the former, the Christians of the Peninsula having caught from their Saracen foes a prejudice in favour of womanly seclusion and retirement. There is also a wilder imagination in Northern balladry; a much larger element of the mythological and supernatural. Ghosts, demons, fairies, enchanters are rare in the Spanish poems. Where the marvellous enters into them at all, it is mostly in the shape of saintly miracles. St. James of Compostella appears on horseback among the Christian hosts battling with the Moors, or even in the army of the Conquistadores in Mexico--an incident which Macaulay likens to the apparition of the "great twin Brethren" in the Roman battle of Lake Regillus. The mediaeval Spaniards were possibly to the full as superstitious as their Scottish contemporaries, but their superstitions were the legends of the Catholic Church, not the inherited folklore of Gothic and Celtic heathendom. I will venture to suggest, as one reason of this difference, the absence of forests in Spain. The shadowy recesses of northern Europe were the natural haunts of mystery and unearthly terrors. The old Teutonic forest, the Schwarzwald and the Hartz, were peopled by the popular imagination with were-wolves, spectre huntsmen, wood spirits, and all those nameless creatures which Tieck has revived in his "Mährchen" and Hauptmann in the Rautendelein of his "Versunkene Glocke." The treeless plateaus of Spain, and her stony, denuded sierras, all bare and bright under the hot southern sky, offered no more shelter to such beings of the mind than they did to the genial life of Robin Hood and his merry men "all under the greenwood tree." And this mention of the bold archer of Sherwood recalls one other difference--the last that need here be touched upon--between the ballads of Spain and of England. Both constitute a body of popular poetry, _i.e._, of folk poetry. They recount the doings of the upper classes, princes, nobles, knights, and ladies, as seen from the angle of observation of humble minstrels of low degree. But the people count for much more in the English poems. The Spanish are more aristocratic, more public, less domestic, and many of them composed, it is thought, by lordly makers. This is perhaps, in part, a difference in national character; and, in part, a difference in the conditions under which the social institutions of the two countries were evolved. Spain collected her ballads early in numerous songbooks--_cancioneros_, _romanceros_--the first of which, the "Cancionero" of 1510, is "the oldest collection of popular poetry, properly so-called, that is to be found in any European literature." [9] But modern Spain had gone through her classic period, like England and Germany. She had submitted to the critical canons of Boileau, and was in leading-strings to France till the end of the eighteenth century. Spain, too, had her romantic movement, and incidentally her ballad revival, but it came later than in England and Germany, later even than in France. Historians of Spanish literature inform us that the earliest entry of French romanticism into Spain took place in Martinez de la Rosa's two dramas, "The Conspiracy of Venice" (1834) and "Aben-Humeya," first written in French and played at Paris in 1830; and that the representation of Duke de Rivas' play, "Don Alvaro" (1835), was "an event in the history of the modern Spanish drama corresponding to the production of 'Hernani' at the Theatre Francais" in 1830.[10] Both of these authors had lived in France and had there made acquaintance with the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, and Walter Scott. Spain came in time to have her own Byron and her own Scott, the former in José de Espronceda, author of "The Student of Salamanca," who resided for a time in London; the latter in José Zorrilla, whose "Granada," "Legends of the Cid," etc., "were popular for the same reason that 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake' were popular; for their revival of national legends in a form both simple and picturesque." [11] Scott himself is reported to have said that if he had come across in his younger days Perez de Hita's old historical romance, "The Civil Wars of Granada" (1595), "he would have chosen Spain as the scene of a Waverley novel." [12] But when Lockhart, in 1824, set himself to "--relate In high-born words the worth of many a knight From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate"-- her ballad poetry had fallen into disfavour at home, and "no Spanish Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson," he complains, "has arisen to perform what no one but a Spaniard can entertain the smallest hope of achieving." [13] Meanwhile, however, the German romantic school had laid eager hands upon the old romantic literature of Spain. A. W. Schlegel (1803) and Gries had made translations from Calderon in assonant verse; and Friedrich Schlegel--who exalted the Spanish dramatist above Shakspere, much to Heine's disgust--had written, also in _asonante_, his dramatic poem "Conde Alarcos" (1802), founded on the well-known ballad. Brentano and others of the romantics went so far as to practise assonance in their original as well as translated work. Jacob Grimm (1815) and Depping (1817) edited selections from the "Romancero" which Lockhart made use of in his "Ancient Spanish Ballads." With equal delight the French romanticists--Hugo and Musset in particular--seized upon the treasures of the "Romancero"; but this was somewhat later. Lockhart's "Spanish Ballads," which were bold and spirited paraphrases rather than close versions of the originals, enjoyed a great success, and have been repeatedly reprinted. Ticknor pronounced them undoubtedly a work of genius, as much so as any book of the sort in any literature with which he was acquainted.[14] In the very same year Sir John Bowring published his "Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain." Hookham Frere, that most accomplished of translators, also gave specimens from the "Romancero." Of late years versions in increasing numbers of Spanish poetry of all kinds, ancient and modern, by Ormsby, Gibson, and others too numerous to name, have made the literature of the country largely accessible to English readers. But to Lockhart belongs the credit of having established for the English public the convention of romantic Spain--the Spain of lattice and guitar, of mantilla and castanet, articles now long at home in the property room of romance, along with the gondola of Venice, the "clock-face" troubadour, and the castle on the Rhine. The Spanish brand of mediaevalism would seem, for a number of years, to have substituted itself in England for the German, and doubtless a search through the annuals and gift books and fashionable fiction and minor poetry generally, of the years from 1825 to 1840, would disclose a decided Castilian colouring. To such effect, at least, is the testimony of the Edinburgh reviewer--from whom I have several times quoted--reviewing in January, 1841, the new and sumptuously illustrated edition of "Ancient Spanish Ballads." "Mr. Lockhart's success," he writes, "rendered the subject fashionable; we have, however, no space to bestow on the minor fry who dabbled in these . . . fountains. Those who remember their number may possibly deprecate our re-opening the floodgates of the happily subsided inundation." The popular ballad, indeed, is, next after the historical romance, the literary form to which the romantic movement has given, in the highest degree, a renewal of prosperous life. Every one has written ballads, and the "burden" has become a burden even as the grasshopper is such. The very parodists have taken the matter in hand. The only Calverley made excellent sport of the particular variety cultivated by Jean Ingelow. And Sir Frederick Pollock, as though actuated by Lowell's hint, about "a declaration of love under the forms of a declaration in trover," cast the law reports into ballad phrase in his "Leading Cases Done into English (1876): "It was Thomas Newman and five his feres (Three more would have made them nine), And they entered into John Vaux's house, That had the Queen's Head to sign. The birds on the bough sing loud and sing low, What trespass shall be _ab initio_." Of course the great majority of these poems in the ballad form, whether lyric or narrative, or a mixture of both, are in no sense romantic. They are like Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads," idyllic; songs of the affections, of nature, sentiment, of war, the sea, the hunting field, rustic life, and a hundred other moods and topics. Neither are the historical or legendary ballads, deriving from Percy and reinforced by Scott, prevailingly romantic in the sense of being mediaeval. They are such as Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," in which--with ample acknowledgment in his introduction both to Scott and to the "Reliques"--he applies the form of the English minstrel ballad to an imaginative re-creation of the lost popular poetry of early Rome. Or they continue Scott's Jacobite tradition, like "Aytoun's Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers," Browning's "Cavalier Tunes," Thornbury's "Songs of the Cavaliers and Roundheads" (1857), and a few of Motherwell's ditties. These last named, except Browning, were all Scotchmen and staunch Tories; as were likewise Lockhart and Hogg; and, for obvious reasons, it is in Scotland that the simpler fashion of ballad writing, whether in dialect or standard English, and more especially as employed upon martial subjects, has flourished longest. Artifice and ballad preciosity have been cultivated more sedulously in the south, with a learned use of the repetend, archaism of style, and imitation of the quaint mediaeval habit of mind. Of the group most immediately connected with Scott and who assisted him, more or less, in his "Minstrelsy" collection, may be mentioned the eccentric John Leyden, immensely learned in Border antiquities and poetry, and James Hogg, the "Ettrick Shepherd." The latter was a peasant bard, an actual shepherd and afterward a sheep farmer, a self-taught man with little schooling, who aspired to become a second Burns, and composed much of his poetry while lying out on the hills, wrapped in his plaid and tending his flocks like any Corydon or Thyrsis. He was a singular mixture of genius and vanity, at once the admiration and the butt of the _Blackwood's_ wits, who made him the mouthpiece of humour and eloquence which were not his, but Christopher North's. The puzzled shepherd hardly knew how to take it; he was a little gratified and a good deal nettled. But the flamboyant figure of him in the _Noctes_ will probably do as much as his own verses to keep his memory alive with posterity. Nevertheless, Hogg is one of the best of modern Scotch ballad poets. Having read the first two volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," he was dissatisfied with some of the modern ballad imitations therein and sent his criticisms to Scott. They were sound criticisms, for Hogg had an intimate knowledge of popular poetry and a quick perception of what was genuine and what was spurious in such compositions. Sir Walter called him in aid of his third volume and found his services of value. As a Border minstrel, Hogg ranks next to Scott--is, in fact, a sort of inferior Scott. His range was narrower, but he was just as thoroughly saturated with the legendary lore of the countryside, and in some respects he stood closer to the spirit of that peasant life in which popular poetry has its source. As a ballad poet, indeed, he is not always Scott's inferior, though even his ballads are apt to be too long and without the finish and the instinct for selection which marks the true artist. When he essayed metrical romances in numerous cantos, his deficiencies in art became too fatally evident. Scott, in his longer poems, is often profuse and unequal, but always on a much higher level than Hogg. The latter had no skill in conducting to the end a fable of some complexity, involving a number of varied characters and a really dramatic action. "Mador of the Moor," _e.g._, is a manifest and not very successful imitation of "The Lady of the Lake"; and it requires a strong appetite for the romantic to sustain a reader through the six parts of "Queen Hynde" and the four parts of "The Pilgrims of the Sun." By general consent, the best of Hogg's more ambitious poems is "The Queen's Wake," and the best thing in it is "Kilmeny." "The Queen's Wake" (1813) combines, in its narrative plan, the framework of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" with the song competition in its sixth canto. Mary Stuart, on landing in Scotland, holds a Christmas wake at Holyrood, where seventeen bards contend before her for the prize of song. The lays are in many different moods and measures, but all enclosed in a setting of octosyllabic couplets, closely modelled upon Scott, and the whole ends with a tribute to the great minstrel who had waked once more the long silent Harp of the North. The thirteenth bard's song--"Kilmeny"--is of the type of traditionary tale familiar in "Tarn Lin" and "Thomas of Ercildoune," and tells how a maiden was spirited away to fairyland, where she saw a prophetic vision of her country's future (including the Napoleonic wars) and returned after a seven years' absence. "Late, late in a gloamin' when all was still, When the fringe was red on the westlin hill, The wood was sere, the moon i' the wane, The reek o' the cot hung o'er the plain, Like a little wee cloud in the world its lane; When the ingle lowed wi' an eiry leme, Late, late in the gloamin' Kilmeny came hame." The Ettrick Shepherd's peculiar province was not so much the romance of national history as the field of Scottish fairy lore and popular superstition. It was he, rather than Walter Scott, who carried out the suggestions long since made to his countryman, John Home, in Collins' "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." His poems are full of bogles, kelpies, brownies, warlocks, and all manner of "grammarie." "The Witch of Fife" in "The Queen's Wake," a spirited bit of grotesque, is repeatedly quoted as authority upon the ways of Scotch witches in the notes to Croker's "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." Similar themes engaged the poet in his prose tales. Some of these were mere modern ghost stories, or stories of murder, robbery, death warnings, etc. Others, like "The Heart of Eildon," dealt with ancient legends of the supernatural. Still others, like "The Brownie of Bodsbeck: a Tale of the Covenanters," were historical novels of the Stuart times. Here Hogg was on Scott's own ground and did not shine by comparison. He complained, indeed, that in the last-mentioned tale, he had been accused of copying "Old Mortality", but asserted that he had written his book the first and had been compelled by the appearance of Sir Walter's, to go over his own manuscript and substitute another name for Balfour of Burley, his original hero. Nanny's songs, in "The Brownie of Bodsbeck," are among Hogg's best ballads. Others are scattered through his various collections--"The Mountain Bard," "The Forest Minstrel," "Poetical Tales and Ballads," etc. Another Scotch balladist was William Motherwell, one of the most competent of ballad scholars and editors, whose "Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern," was issued at Glasgow in 1827, and led to a correspondence between the collector and Sir Walter Scott.[15] In 1836 Motherwell was associated with Hogg in editing Burns' works. His original ballads are few in number, and their faults and merits are of quite an opposite nature from his collaborator's. The shepherd was a man of the people, and lived, so far as any modern can, among the very conditions which produced the minstrel songs. He inherited the popular beliefs. His great-grandmother on one side was a notorious witch; his grandfather on the other side had "spoken with the fairies." His poetry, such as it is, is fluent and spontaneous. Motherwell's, on the contrary, is the work of a ballad fancier, a student learned in lyric, reproducing old modes with conscientious art. His balladry is more condensed and skilful than Hogg's, but seems to come hard to him. It is literary poetry trying to be _Volkspoesie_, and not quite succeeding. Many of the pieces in the southern English, such as "Halbert the Grim," "The Troubadour's Lament," "The Crusader's Farewell," "The Warthman's Wail," "The Demon Lady," "The Witches' Joys," and "Lady Margaret," have an echo of Elizabethan music, or the songs of Lovelace, or, now and then, the verse of Coleridge or Byron. "True Love's Dirge," _e.g._, borrows a burden from Shakspere--"Heigho! the Wind and Rain." Others, like "Lord Archibald: A Ballad," and "Elfinland Wud: An Imitation of the Ancient Scottish Romantic Ballad," are in archaic Scotch dialect with careful ballad phrasing. Hogg employs the broad Scotch, but it is mostly the vernacular of his own time. A short passage from "The Witch of Fife" and one from "Elfin Wud" will illustrate two very different types of ballad manner: "He set ane reid-pipe till his muthe And he playit se bonnileye, Till the gray curlew and the black-cock flew To listen his melodye. "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, That the nycht-winde lowner blew: And it soupit alang the Loch Leven, And wakenit the white sea-mew. "It rang se sweit through the grim Lommond, Se sweitly but and se shill, That the wezilis laup out of their mouldy holis, And dancit on the mydnycht hill." "Around her slepis the quhyte muneschyne, (Meik is mayden undir kell), Hir lips bin lyke the blude reid wyne; (The rois of flouris hes sweitest smell). "It was al bricht quhare that ladie stude, (Far my luve fure ower the sea). Bot dern is the lave of Elfinland wud, (The Knicht pruvit false that ance luvit me). "The ladie's handis were quhyte als milk, (Ringis my luve wore mair nor ane). Hir skin was safter nor the silk; (Lilly bricht schinis my luve's halse bane)." Upon the whole, the most noteworthy of Motherwell's original additions to the stores of romantic verse were his poems on subjects from Norse legend and mythology, and particularly the three spirited pieces that stand first in his collection (1832)--"The Battle-Flag of Sigurd," "The Wooing Song of Jarl Egill Skallagrim," and "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Randi." These stand midway between Gray's "Descent of Odin" and the later work of Longfellow, William Morris and others. Since Gray, little or nothing of the kind had been attempted; and Motherwell gave perhaps the first expression in English song of the Berserkir rage and the Viking passion for battle and sea roving. During the nineteenth century English romance received new increments of heroic legend and fairy lore from the Gaelic of Ireland. It was not until 1867 that Matthew Arnold, in his essay "On the Study of Celtic Literature," pleading for a chair of Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the attention of the English public to those elements in the national literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably defined fairly enough the distinctive traits of the Celtic genius. He attributes to a Celtic source much of the turn of English poetry for style, much of its turn for melancholy, and nearly all its turn for "natural magic." "The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now, of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts." In 1825 T. Crofton Croker published the first volume of his delightful "Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland." It was immediately translated into German by the Grimm brothers, and was received with enthusiasm by Walter Scott, who was introduced to the author in London in 1826, and a complimentary letter from whom was printed in the preface to the second edition. Croker's book opened a new world of romance, and introduced the English reader to novel varieties of elf creatures, with outlandish Gaelic names; the Shefro; the Boggart; the Phooka, or horse-fiend; the Banshee, a familiar spirit which moans outside the door when a death impends; the Cluricaune,[16] or cellar goblin; the Fir Darrig (Red Man); the Dullahan, or Headless Horseman. There are stories of changelings, haunted castles, buried treasure, the "death coach," the fairy piper, enchanted lakes which cover sunken cities, and similar matters not unfamiliar in the folk-lore of other lands, but all with an odd twist to them and set against a background of the manners and customs of modern Irish peasantry. The Celtic melancholy is not much in evidence in this collection. The wild Celtic fancy is present, but in combination with Irish gaiety and light-heartedness. It was the day of the comedy Irishman--Lover's and Lever's Irishman--Handy Andy, Rory O'More, Widow Machree and the like. It took the famine of '49 and the strenuous work of the Young Ireland Party which gathered about the _Nation_ in 1848, to displace this traditional figure in favour of a more earnest and tragical national type. But a single quotation will illustrate the natural magic of which Arnold speaks: "The Merrow (mermaid) put the comb in her pocket, and then bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath of wind rippling along, and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?' "'It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me.'" Except for its lack of "high seriousness," this is the imagination that makes myths. Catholic Ireland still cherishes popular beliefs which in England, and even in Scotland, have long been merely antiquarian curiosities. In her poetry the fairies are never very far away. "Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men." [17] Irish critics, to be sure, tell us that Allingham's fairies are English fairies, and that he had no Gaelic, though he knew and loved his Irish countryside. He was a Protestant and a loyalist, and lived in close association with the English Pre-Raphaelites--with Rossetti especially, who made the illustration for "The Maids of Elfin-Mere" in Allingham's volume "The Music Master" (1855). The Irish fairies, it is said, are beings of a darker and more malignant breed than Shakspere's elves. Yet in Allingham's poem they stole little Bridget and kept her seven years, till she died of sorrow and lies asleep on the lake bottom; even as in Ferguson's weird ballad, "The Fairy Thorn," the good people carry off fair Anna Grace from the midst of her three companions, who "pined away and died within the year and day." To the latter half of the century belongs the so-called Celtic revival, which connects itself with the Nationalist movement in politics and is partly literary and partly patriotic. It may be doubted whether, for practical purposes, the Gaelic will ever come again into general use. But the concerted endeavour by a whole nation to win back its ancient, wellnigh forgotten speech is a most interesting social phenomenon. At all events, both by direct translations of the Gaelic hero epics and by original work in which the Gaelic spirit is transfused through English ballad and other verse forms, a lost kingdom of romance has been recovered and a bright green thread of Celtic poetry runs through the British anthology of the century. The names of the pioneers and leading contributors to this movement are significant of the varied strains of blood which compose Irish nationality. James Clarence Mangan was a Celt of the Celts; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Aubrey de Vere were of Norman-Irish stock, and the former was the son of a dean of the Established Church, and himself the editor of a Tory newspaper; Sir Samuel Ferguson was an Ulster Protestant of Scotch descent; Dr. George Sigerson is of Norse blood; Whitley Stokes, the eminent Celtic scholar, and Dr. John Todhunter, author of "Three Bardic Tales" (1896), bear Anglo-Saxon surnames; the latter is the son of Quaker parents and was educated at English Quaker schools. Mangan's paraphrases from the Gaelic, "Poets and Poetry of Munster," appeared posthumously in 1850. They include a number of lyrics, wildly and mournfully beautiful, inspired by the sorrows of Ireland: "Dark Rosaleen," "Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tir-Connell," "O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," etc. The ballad form was not practised by the ancient Gaelic epic poets. In choosing it as the vehicle for their renderings from vernacular narrative poetry, the modern Irish poets have departed widely from the English and Scottish model, employing a variety of metres and not seeking to conform their diction to the manner of the ballads in the "Reliques" or the "Border Minstrelsy." Ferguson's "Lays of the Western Gael" (1865) is a series of historical ballads, original in effect, though based upon old Gaelic chronicles. "Congal" (1872) is an epic, founded on an ancient bardic tale, and written in Chapman's "fourteener" and reminding the reader frequently of Chapman's large, vigorous manner, his compound epithets and spacious Homeric similes. The same epic breadth of manner was applied to the treatment of other hero legends, "Conary," "Deirdré," etc., in a subsequent volume (1880). "Deirdré," the finest of all the old Irish stories, was also handled independently by the late Dr. R. D. Joyce in the verse and manner of William Morris' "Earthly Paradise." [18] Among other recent workers in this field are Aubrey de Vere, a volume of selections from whose poetry appeared at New York in 1894, edited by Prof. G. E. Woodberry; George Sigerson, whose "Bards of the Gael and the Gall," a volume of translations from the Irish in the original metres, was issued in 1897; Whitley Stokes, an accomplished translator, and the joint editor (with Windisch) of the "Irische Texte "; John Todhunter, author of "The Banshee and Other Poems" (1888) and "Three Bardic Tales" (1896); Alfred Perceval Graves, author of "Irish Folk Songs" (1897), and many other volumes of national lyrics; and William Larminie--"West Irish Folk Tales and Romances" (1893), etc. The Celtism of this Gaelic renascence is of a much purer and more genuine character than the Celtism of Macpherson's "Ossian." Yet with all its superiority in artistic results, it is improbable that it will make any such impression on Europe or England as Macpherson made. "Ossian" was the first revelation to the world of the Celtic spirit: sophisticated, rhetorical, yet still the first; and it is not likely that its success will be repeated. In the very latest school of Irish verse, represented by such names as Lionel Johnson, J. B. Yeats, George W. Russell, Nora Hopper, the mystical spirit which inhabits the "Celtic twilight" turns into modern symbolism, so that some of their poems on legendary subjects bear a curious resemblance to the contemporary work of Maeterlinck: to such things as "Aglivaine et Salysette" or "Les Sept Princesses." [19] The narrative ballad is hardly one of the forms of high art, like the epic, the tragedy, the Pindaric ode. It is simple and not complex like the sonnet: not of the aristocracy of verse, but popular--not to say plebeian--in its associations. It is easy to write and, in its commonest metrical shape of eights and sixes, apt to run into sing-song. Its limitations, even in the hands of an artist like Coleridge or Rossetti, are obvious. It belongs to "minor poetry." The ballad revival has not been an unmixed blessing and is responsible for much slip-shod work. If Dr. Johnson could come back from the shades and look over our recent verse, one of his first comments would probably be: "Sir, you have too many ballads." Be it understood that the romantic ballad only is here in question, in which the poet of a literary age seeks to catch and reproduce the tone of a childlike, unself-conscious time, so that his art has almost inevitably something artificial or imitative. Here and there one stands out from the mass by its skill or luck in overcoming the difficulty. There is Hawker's "Song of the Western Men," which Macaulay and others quoted as historical, though only the refrain was old: "And shall Trelawney die? Here's twenty thousand Cornish men Will know the reason why!" [20] There is Sydney Dobell's "Keith of Ravelston," [21] which haunts the memory with the insistent iteration of its refrain:-- "The murmur of the mourning ghost That keeps the shadowy kine; Oh, Keith of Ravelston, The sorrows of thy line!" And again there is Robert Buchanan's "Ballad of Judas Iscariot" which Mr. Stedman compares for "weird impressiveness and power" with "The Ancient Mariner." The mediaeval feeling is most successfully captured in this poem. It recalls the old "Debate between the Body and Soul," and still more the touches of divine compassion which soften the rigours of Catholic theology in the legends of the saints. It strikes the keynote, too, of that most modern ballad mode which employs the narrative only to emphasize some thought of universal application. There is salvation for all, is the thought, even for the blackest soul of the world, the soul that betrayed its Maker.[22] Such, though after a fashion more subtly intellectual, is the doctrinal use to which this popular form is put by one of the latest English ballad makers, Mr. John Davidson. Read, e.g., his "Ballad of a Nun," [23] the story of which was told in several shapes by the Spanish poet Alfonso the Learned (1226-84). A runaway nun returns in penitence to her convent, and is met at the gate by the Virgin Mary, who has taken her likeness and kept her place for her during the years of her absence. Or read "A New Ballad of Tannhäuser," [24] which contradicts "the idea of the inherent impurity of nature" by an interpretation of the legend in a sense quite the reverse of Wagner's. Tannhäuser's dead staff blossoms not as a sign of forgiveness, but to show him that "there was no need to be forgiven." The modern balladist attacks the ascetic Middle Age with a shaft from its own quiver. But it is time to turn from minor poets to acknowledged masters; and above all to the greatest of modern English artists in verse, the representative poet of the Victorian era. Is Tennyson to be classed with the romantics? His workmanship, when most truly characteristic, is romantic in the sense of being pictorial and ornate, rather than classically simple or severe. He assimilated the rich manner of Keats, whose influence is perceptible in his early poems. His art, like Keats', is eclectic and reminiscent, choosing for its exercise with equal impartiality whatever was most beautiful in the world of Grecian fable or the world of mediaeval legend. But unlike Keats, he lived to add new strings to his lyre; he went on to sing of modern life and thought, of present-day problems in science and philosophy, of contemporary politics, the doubt, unrest, passion, and faith of his own century. To find work of Tennyson's that is romantic throughout, in subject, form, and spirit alike, we must look among his earlier collections (1830, 1832, 1842). For this was a phase which he passed beyond, as Millais outgrew his youthful Pre-Raphaelitism, or as Goethe left behind him his "Götz" and "Werther" period and widened out into larger utterance. Mr. Stedman speaks of the "Gothic feeling" in "The Lady of Shalott," and in ballads like "Oriana" and "The Sisters," describing them as "work that in its kind is fully up to the best of those Pre-Raphaelites who, by some arrest of development, stop precisely where Tennyson made his second step forward, and censure him for having gone beyond them." [25] This estimate may be accepted so far as it concerns "The Lady of Shalott," which is known to have worked strongly upon Rossetti's imagination; but surely "The Sisters" and "Oriana" do not rank with the best Pre-Raphaelite work. The former is little better than a failure; and the latter, which provokes a comparison, not to Tennyson's advantage, with the fine old ballad, "Helen of Kirkconnell," is a weak thing. The name Oriana has romantic associations--it is that of the heroine of "Amadis de Gaul"--but the damnable iteration of it as a ballad burden is irritating. Mediaeval _motifs_ are rather slightly handled in "The Golden Supper" (from the "Decameron," 4th novel, 10th day); "The Beggar Maid" (from the ballad of "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid" in the "Reliques"); and more adequately in "Godiva," a blank-verse rendering of the local legend of Coventry, in which an attempt is made to preserve something of the antique roughness under the smooth Vergilian elegance of Tennyson's diction. "The Day Dream" was a recasting of one of Perrault's fairy tales, "The Sleeping Beauty," under which title a portion of it had appeared in the "Poems Chiefly Lyrical" of 1830. Tennyson has written many greater poems than this, but few in which the special string of romance vibrates more purely. The tableau of the spellbound palace, with all its activities suspended, gave opportunity for the display of his unexampled pictorial power in scenes of still life; and the legend itself supplied that charmed isolation from the sphere of reality which we noticed as so important a part of the romantic poet's stock-in-trade in "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes"-- "The hall-door shuts again and all is still." Poems like "The Day Dream" and "The Princess" make it evident that Scott and Coleridge and Keats had so given back the Middle Ages to the imagination that any future poet, seeking free play in a realm unhampered by actual conditions--"apart from place, withholding time"--was apt to turn naturally, if not inevitably, to the feudal times. The action of "The Day Dream" proceeds no-where and no-when. The garden--if we cross-examine it--is a Renaissance garden: "Soft lustre bathes the range of urns On every slanting terrace-lawn: The fountain to its place returns, Deep in the garden lake withdrawn." The furnishings of the palace are a mixture of mediaeval and Louis Quatorze--clocks, peacocks, parrots, golden mantle pegs:-- "Till all the hundred summers pass, The beams that through the oriel shine Make prisms in every carven glass And beaker brimm'd with noble wine." But the impression, as a whole, is of the Middle Age of poetic convention, if not of history; the enchanted dateless era of romance and fairy legend. "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," its masculine counterpart, sound the old Catholic notes of saintly virginity and mystical, religious rapture, the _Gottesminne_ of mediaeval hymnody. Not since Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Saint Theresa" had any English poet given such expression to those fervid devotional moods which Sir Thomas Browne describes as "Christian annihilation, ecstasies, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the spouse, gustation of God and ingression into the divine shadow." This vein, we have noticed, is wanting in Scott. On the other hand, it may be noticed in passing, Tennyson's attitude towards nature is less exclusively romantic--in the narrow sense--than Scott's. He, too, is conscious of the historic associations of place. In Tennyson, as in Scott,-- "The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story"--[26] but, in general, his treatment of landscape, in its human relations, is subtler and more intimate. "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad" are monologues, but lyric and not dramatic in Browning's manner. There is a dramatic falsity, indeed, in making Sir Galahad say of himself-- "My strength is as the strength of ten Because my heart is pure," and the poem would be better in the third person. "St. Simeon Stylites" is a dramatic monologue more upon Browning's model, _i.e._, a piece of apologetics and self-analysis. But in this province Tennyson is greatly Browning's inferior. "The Princess" (1847) is representative of that "splendid composite of imagery," and that application of modern ideas to legendary material, or to invented material arbitrarily placed in an archaic setting, which are characteristic of this artist. The poem's sub-title is "A Medley," because it is "--made to suit with time and place, A Gothic ruin and a Grecian house, A talk of college and of ladies' rights, A feudal knight in silken masquerade, And, yonder, shrieks and strange experiments." The problem is a modern one--the New Woman. No precise historic period is indicated. The female university is full of classic lore and art, but withal there are courts of feudal kings, with barons, knights, and squires, and shock of armoured champions in the lists. But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"), or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his "Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in 1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take Vergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how much chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of Albion, where "Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne Relieve the toil they suffered on the main; But what more cheered them than their meats and wine, Was wise instruction and discourse divine From Godlike Arthur's mouth." There is no need, in taking a summary view of Tennyson's "Idylls," to go into the question of sources, or to inquire whether Arthur was a historical chief of North Wales, or whether he signified the Great Bear (Arcturus) in Celtic mythology, and his Round Table the circle described by that constellation about the pole star.[28] Tennyson went no farther back for his authority than Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte Darthur," printed by Caxton in 1485, a compilation principally from old French Round Table romances. This was the final mediaeval shape of the story in English. It is somewhat wandering and prolix as to method, but written in delightful prose. The story of "Enid," however (under its various titles and arrangements in successive editions), he took from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Welsh "Mabinogion" (1838-49). Before deciding upon the heroic blank verse and a loosely epic form, as most fitting for his purpose, Tennyson had retold passages of Arthurian romance in the ballad manner and in various shapes of riming stanza. The first of these was "The Lady of Shalott" (1832), identical in subject with the later idyll of "Lancelot and Elaine," but fanciful and even allegorical in treatment. Shalott is from Ascalot, a variant of Astolat, in the old _metrical_ romance--not Malory's--of the "Morte Arthur." The fairy lady, who sees all passing sights in her mirror and weaves them into her magic web, has been interpreted as a symbol of art, which has to do properly only with the reflection of life. When the figure of Lancelot is cast upon the glass, a personal emotion is brought into her life which is fatal to her art. She is "sick of shadows," and looks through her window at the substance. Then her mirror cracks from side to side and the curse is come upon her. Other experiments of the same kind were "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere" (both in 1842). The beauty of all these ballad beginnings is such that one is hardly reconciled to the loss of so much romantic music, even by the noble blank verse and the ampler narrative method which the poet finally adopted. They stand related to the "Idylls" very much as Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" stands to his "Earthly Paradise." Thoroughly romantic in content, the "Idylls of the King" are classical in form. They may be compared to Tasso's "Gierusalemme Liberata," in which the imperfectly classical manner of the Renaissance is applied to a Gothic subject, the history of the Crusades. The first specimen given was the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842, set in a framework entitled "The Epic," in which "the poet, Everard Hall," reads to his friends a fragment from his epic, "King Arthur," in twelve books. All the rest he has burned. For-- "Why take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine Were faint Homeric echoes." The "fragment" is thus put forward tentatively and with apologies--apologies which were little needed; for the "Morte d'Arthur," afterwards embedded in "The Passing of Arthur," remains probably the best, and certainly the most Homeric passage in the "Idylls." Tennyson's own quality was more Vergilian than Homeric, but the models which he here remodels were the Homeric epics. He chose for his measure not the Spenserian stanza, nor the _ottava rima_ of Tasso, nor the octosyllables of Scott and the chivalry romances, but the heroic blank verse which Milton had fixed as the vehicle of English classical epic. He adopts Homer's narrative practices: the formulated repetitions of phrase, the pictorial comparisons, the conventional epithets (in moderation), and his gnomic habit-- "O purblind race of miserable men," etc. The original four idylls were published in 1859.[29] Thenceforth the series grew by successive additions and rearrangements up to the completed "Idylls" of 1888, twelve in number--besides prologue and epilogue--according to the plan foreshadowed in "The Epic." The story of Arthur had thus occupied Tennyson for over a half century. Though modestly entitled "Idylls," by reason of the episodic treatment, the poem when finished was, in fact, an epic; but an epic that lacked the formal unity of the "Aeneid" and the "Paradise Lost," or even of the "Iliad." It resembled the Homeric heroic poems more than the literary epics of Vergil and Milton, in being not the result of a single act of construction, but a growth from the gradual fitting together of materials selected from a vast body of legend. This legendary matter he reduced to an epic unity. The adventures in Malory's romance are of very uneven value, and it abounds in inconsistencies and repetitions. He also redistributed the ethical balance. Lancelot is the real hero of the old "Morte Darthur," and Guinivere--the Helen of romance--goes almost uncensured. Malory's Arthur is by no means "the blameless king" of Tennyson, who makes of him a nineteenth-century ideal of royal knighthood, and finally an allegorical type of Soul at war with Sense. The downfall of the Round Table, that order of spiritual knight-errantry through which the king hopes to regenerate society, happens through the failure of his knights to rise to his own high level of character; in a degree, also, because the emprise is diverted from attainable practical aims to the fantastic quest of the Holy Grail. The sin of Lancelot and the Queen, drawing after it the treachery of Modred, brings on the tragic catastrophe. This conception is latent in Malory, but it is central in Tennyson; and everywhere he subtilises, refines, elevates, and, in short, modernises the _Motivirung_ in the old story. Does he thereby also weaken it? Censure and praise have been freely bestowed upon Tennyson's dealings with Malory. Thus it is complained that his Arthur is a prig, a curate, who preaches to his queen and lectures his court, and whose virtue is too conscious; that the harlot Vivien is a poor substitute for the damsel of the lake who puts Merlin to sleep under a great rock in the land of Benwick; that the gracious figure of Gawain suffers degradation from the application of an effeminate moral standard to his shining exploits in love and war, that modern _convenances_ are imposed upon a society in which they do not belong and whose joyous, robust _naïveté_ is hurt by them.[30] The allegorical method tried in "The Lady of Shalott," but abandoned in the earlier "Idylls," creeps in again in the later; particularly in "Gareth and Lynette" (1872), in the elaborate symbolism of the gates of Camelot, and in the guardians of the river passes, whom Gareth successively overcomes, and who seem to represent the temptations incident to the different ages of man. The whole poem, indeed, has been interpreted in a parabolic sense, Merlin standing for the intellect, the Lady of the Lake for religion, etc. Allegory was a favourite mediaeval mode, and the Grail legend contains an element of mysticism which invites an emblematic treatment. But the attraction of this fashion for minds of a Platonic cast is dangerous to art: the temptation to find a meaning in human life more esoteric than any afforded by the literal life itself. A delicate balance must be kept between that presentation of the concrete which makes it significant by making it representative and typical, and that other presentation which dissolves the individual into the general, by making it a mere abstraction. Were it not for Dante and Hawthorne and the second part of "Faust," one would incline to say that no creative genius of the first order indulges in allegory. Homer is never allegorical except in the episode of Circe; Shakspere never, with the doubtful exception of "The Tempest." The allegory in the "Idylls of the King" is not of the obvious kind employed in the "Faëry Queene"; but Tennyson, no less than Spenser, appeared to feel that the simple retelling of an old chivalry tale, without imparting to it some deeper meaning, was no work for a modern poet. Tennyson has made the Arthur Saga, as a whole, peculiarly his own. But others of the Victorian poets have handled detached portions of it. William Morris' "Defence of Guenevere" (1858) anticipated the first group of "Idylls." Swinburne's "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882) dealt at full length, and in a very different spirit, with an epicyclic legend which Tennyson touched incidentally in "The Last Tournament." Matthew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult" was a third manipulation of the legend, partly in dramatic, partly in narrative form, and in changing metres. It follows another version of Tristram's death, and the story of Vivian and Merlin which Iseult of Brittany tells her children is quite distinct from the one in the "Idylls." Iseult of Brittany--not Iseult of Cornwall--is the heroine of Arnold's poem. Thomas Westwood's "Quest of the Sancgreall" is still one more contribution to Arthurian poetry of which a mere mention must here suffice. For our review threatens to become a catalogue. To such a degree had mediaevalism become the fashion, that nearly every Georgian and Victorian poet of any pretensions tried his hand at it. Robert Browning was not romantic in Scott's way, nor in Tennyson's. His business was with the soul. The picturesqueness of the external conditions in which soul was placed was a matter of indifference. To-day was as good as yesterday. Now and then occurs a title with romantic implications--"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," _e.g._, borrowed from a ballad snatch sung by the Fool in "Lear" (Roland is Roland of the "Chanson"). But the poem proves to be a weird study in landscape symbolism and the history of some dark emprise, the real nature of which is altogether undiscoverable. "Count Gismond," again, is the story of a combat in the lists at Aix in Provence, in which a knight vindicates a lady's honour with his lance, and slays her traducer at her feet. But this is a dramatic monologue like any other, and only accidentally mediaeval. "The Heretic's Tragedy: A Middle Age Interlude," is mediaeval without being romantic. It recounts the burning, at Paris, A.D. 1314, of Jacques du Bourg-Molay, Grand Master of the Templars; and purports to be a sort of canticle, with solo and chorus, composed two centuries after the event by a Flemish canon of Ypres, to be sung at hocktide and festivals. The childishness and devout buffoonery of an old miracle play are imitated here, as in Swinburne's "Masque of Queen Bersabe." This piece and "Holy Cross Day" are dramatic, or monodramatic, grotesques; and in their apprehension of this trait of the mediaeval mind are on a par with Hugo's "Pas d'armes du Roi Jean" and "La Chasse du Burgrave." But Browning's mousings in the Middle Ages after queer freaks of conscience or passion were occasional. If any historical period, more than another, had special interest for him, it was the period of the Italian Renaissance. Yet Ruskin said: "Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages." Among Mrs. Browning's poems, which, it needs hardly be said, are not prevailingly "Gothic," there are three interesting experiments in ballad romance: "The Romaunt of the Page," "The Lay of the Brown Rosary," and "The Rime of the Duchess May." In all of these she avails herself of the mediaeval atmosphere, simply to play variations on her favourite theme, the devotedness of woman's love. The motive is the same as in poems of modern life like "Bertha in the Lane" and "Aurora Leigh." The vehemence of this nobly gifted woman, her nervous and sometimes almost hysterical emotionalism, are not without a disagreeable quality. With greater range and fervour, she had not the artistic poise of the Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Christina Rossetti. In these romances, as elsewhere, she is sometimes shrill and often mannerised. "The Romaunt of the Page" is the tale of a lady who attends her knight to the Holy Land, disguised as a page, and without his knowledge. She saves his life several times, and finally at the cost of her own. A prophetic accompaniment or burden comes in ever and anon in the distant chant of nuns over the dead abbess. "Beati! beati mortui." "The Lay of the Brown Rosary" is a charming but uneven piece, in four parts and a variety of measures, about a girl who, while awaiting her lover's return from the war, learns in a dream that she must die, and purchases seven years of life from the ghost of a wicked nun whose body has been immured in an old convent wall. The spirit gives the bride a brown rosary which she wears under her dress, but her kiss kills the bridegroom at the altar. The most spirited and well-sustained of these ballad poems is "The Rime of the Duchess May," in which the heroine rides off the battlements with her husband. "Toll slowly," runs the refrain. Mrs. Browning employs some archaisms, such as _chapélle_, _chambére_, _ladié_. The stories are seemingly of her own invention, and have not quite the genuine accent of folk-song. Even Matthew Arnold and Thomas Hood, representatives in their separate spheres of anti-romantic tendencies, made occasional forays into the Middle Ages. But who thinks of such things as "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" or "The Two Peacocks of Bedfont" when Hood is mentioned; and not rather of "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt"? Or who, in spite of "Balder Dead" and "Tristram and Iseult," would classify Arnold's clean-cut, reserved, delicately intellectual work as romantic? Hood was an artist of the terrible as well as of the comic; witness his "Last Man," "Haunted House," and "Dream of Eugene Aram." If he could have welded the two moods into a more intimate union, and applied them to legendary material, he might have been a great artist in mediaeval grotesque--a species of Gothic Hoffman perhaps. As it is, his one romantic success is the charming lyric "Fair Ines." His longer poems in this kind, in modifications of _ottava rima_ or Spenserian stanza, show Keats' influence very clearly. The imagery is profuse, but too distinct and without the romantic _chiaroscuro_. "The Water Lady" is a manifest imitation of "La Belle Dame sans Merci," and employs the same somewhat unusual stanza form. Hood--incorrigible punster--who had his jest at everything, jested at romance. He wrote ballad parodies--"The Knight and the Dragon," etc.--and an ironical "Lament for the Decline of Chivalry": "Well hast thou cried, departed Burke, All chivalrous romantic work Is ended now and past! That iron age--which some have thought Of mettle rather overwrought-- Is now all overcast." And finally, "The Saint's Tragedy" (1848) of Charles Kingsley affords a case in which mediaeval biography is made the pretext for an assault upon mediaeval ideas. It is a _tendenz_ drama in five acts, founded upon the "Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary," as narrated by her contemporary, Dietrich the Thuringian. Its militant Protestantism is such as might be predicted from Kingsley's well-known resentment of the Romanist attitude towards marriage and celibacy; from his regard for freedom of thought; and from that distrust and contempt of Popish priestcraft which involved him in his controversy with Newman. "The Middle Age," says the Introduction, "was, in the gross, a coarse, barbarous, and profligate age. . . . It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the mediaeval saints. . . . So rough and common a life-picture of the Middle Age will, I am afraid, whether faithful or not, be far from acceptable to those who take their notions of that period principally from such exquisite dreams as the fictions of Fouqué, and of certain moderns whose graceful minds . . . are, on account of their very sweetness and simplicity, singularly unfitted to convey any true likeness of the coarse and stormy Middle Age. . . . But really, time enough has been lost in ignorant abuse of that period, and time enough also, lately, in blind adoration of it. When shall we learn to see it as it was?" Polemic in its purpose and anti-Catholic in temper, "The Saint's Tragedy" then seeks to dispel the glamour which romance had thrown over mediaeval life. Kingsley's Middle Age is not the holy Middle Age of the German "throne-and-altar" men; nor yet the picturesque Middle Age of Walter Scott. It is the cruel, ignorant, fanatical Middle Age of "The Amber Witch" and "The Succube." But Kingsley was too much of a poet not to feel those "last enchantments" which whispered to Arnold from Oxford towers, maugre his "strong sense of the irrationality of that period." The saintly, as well as the human side, of Elizabeth's character is portrayed with sympathy, though poetically the best thing in the drama are the songs of the Crusaders. Kingsley, in effect, was always good at a ballad. His finest work in this kind is modern, "The Last Buccaneer," "The Sands of Dee," "The Three Fishers," and the like. But there are the same fire and swing in many of his romantic ballads on historical or legendary subjects, such as "The Swan-Neck," "The Red King," "Ballad of Earl Haldan's Daughter," "The Song of the Little Baltung," and a dozen more. Without the imaginative witchery of Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti, in the ballad of action Kingsley ranks very close to Scott. The same manly delight in outdoor life and bold adventure, love of the old Teutonic freedom and strong feeling of English nationality inspire his historical romances, only one of which, however, "Hereward the Wake" (1866), has to do with the period of the Middle Ages. [1] "It is almost superfluous to mention that the appellation 'Childe,' as 'Childe Waters,' 'Childe Childers,' etc., is used as more consonant with the old structure of versification which I have adopted."--Preface to "Childe Harold." Byron appeals to a letter of Beattie relating to "The Minstrel," to justify his choice of the stanza. [2] See vol. i., p. 98. [3] For Byron's and Shelley's dealings with Dante, _vide supra_, pp. 99-102. [4] For the type of prose romance essayed by Shelley, see Vol. i., p. 403. [5] "Mary, the Maid of the Inn." [6] Duran's great collection, begun in 1828, embraces nearly two thousand pieces. [7] It is hardly necessary to mention early English translations of "Palmerin of England" (1616) and "Amadis de Gaul" (1580), or to point out the influence of Montemayor's "Diana Enamorada" upon Sidney, Shakspere, and English pastoral romance in general. [8] "The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal violence and coarseness prevailed which did not, indeed, prevent the poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of tenderness; but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty--a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on the Cid and Bernardo de Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom O'Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or, what would be better than either, if we should sit down to the 'Romancero General,' with its poetical confusion of Moorish splendours and Christian loyalty, just when we have come fresh from Percy's 'Reliques' or Scott's 'Minstrelsy'." ("History of Spanish Literature," George Ticknor, vol. i., p. 141, third American ed., 1866). The "Romancero General" was the great collection of some thousand ballads and lyrics published in 1602-14. [9] "The Ancient Ballads of Spain." R. Ford, in Edinburgh Review, No. 146. [10] "A History of Spanish Literature." By James Fitz-Maurice Kelly, New York, 1898, pp. 366-67. [11] _Ibid._, pp. 368-73. [12] Kelly, p. 270. [13] The collection of Sanchez (1779) is described as an imitation of the "Reliques" (Edinburgh Review, No. 146). [14] He preferred, however, Sir Edmund Head's rendering of the ballad "Lady Alda's Dream" to Lockhart's version. [15] Scott and Motherwell never met in person. [16] Mr. Churton Collins thinks that the lines in "Guinevere"-- "Down in the cellars merry bloated things Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts While the wine ran"-- was suggested by Croker's description of the Cluricaune. ("Illustrations of Tennyson" (1891), p. 152.) [17] "The Fairies." William Allingham. [18] See vol. i., p. 314. Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident of Boston, where his "Ballads of Irish Chivalry" were published in 1872. His "Deirdré" received high praise from J. R. Lowell. Tennyson's "Voyage of Maeldune" (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce's "Old Celtic Romances" (1879) (Collins' "Illustrations of Tennyson," p. 163). Swinburne pronounced Ferguson's "Welshmen of Tirawley" one of the best of modern ballads. [19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader is referred to "A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue." Edited by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900). There are a quite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in this collection, though some of the editors' claims seem excessive; as, _e.g._, that Mr. Yeats is "the first of living writers in the English language." [20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near "wild Tintagil by the Cornish Sea," where Tennyson visited him in 1848. Hawker himself made contributions to Arthurian poetry, "Queen Gwynnevar's Round" and "The Quest of the Sangreal" (1864). He was converted to the Roman Catholic faith on his death-bed. [21] Given in Palgrave's "Golden Treasury," second series. Rossetti wrote of Dobell's ballad in 1868: "I have always regarded that poem as being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking with Keats' 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and the other masterpieces of the condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds." The use of the family name Keith in Rossetti's "Rose Mary" was a coincidence. His poem was published (1854) some years before Dobell's. He thought of substituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him, and so retained it. [22] _Cf._ Matthew Arnold's "St. Brandan," suggested by a passage in the old Irish "Voyage of Bran." The traitor Judas is allowed to come up from hell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he had once given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa. [23] "Ballads and Songs," London, 1895. [24] "New Ballads," London, 1897. [25] "Victorian Poets." By E. C. Stedman. New York, 1886 (tenth ed.), p. 155. [26] This famous lyric, one of the "inserted" songs in "The Princess," was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney. [27] See vol. i., pp. 146-47. Dryden, like Milton, had designs upon Arthur. See introduction to the first canto of "Marmion": "--Dryden, in immortal strain, Had raised the Table Round again, But that a ribald king and court Bade him toil on, to make them sport." [28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography of Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer's scholarly reprint and critical edition of "Le Morte Darthur. By Syr Thomas Malory," three vols., London, 1889-91. [29] Two of them, however, had been printed privately in 1857 under the title of "Enid and Nimuë": the true and the false. "Nimuë" was the first form of Vivien. [30] Matthew Arnold writes in one of his letters; "I have a strong sense of the irrationality of that period [the Middle Ages] and of the utter folly of those who take it seriously and play at restoring it; still it has poetically the greatest charm and refreshment possible for me. The fault I find with Tennyson, in his 'Idylls of the King,' is that the peculiar charm of the Middle Age he does not give in them. There is something magical about it, and I will do something with it before I have done." CHAPTER VII. The Pre-Raphaelites. In the latter half of the century the Italian Middle Age and Dante, its great exemplar, found new interpreters in the Rossetti family; a family well fitted by its mixture of bloods and its hereditary aptitudes, literary and artistic, to mediate between the English genius and whatever seemed to it alien or repellant in Dante's system of thought. The father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political refugee, who held the professorship of Italian in King's College, London, from 1831 to 1845, and was the author of a commentary on Dante which carried the politico-allegorical theory of the "Divine Comedy" to somewhat fantastic lengths. The mother was half English and half Italian, a sister of Byron's travelling companion, Dr. Polidori. Of the four children of the marriage, Dante Gabriel and Christina became poets of distinction. The eldest sister, Maria Francesca, a religious devotee who spent her last years as a member of a Protestant sisterhood, was the author of that unpretentious but helpful piece of Dante literature, "A Shadow of Dante." The younger brother, William Michael, is well known as a biographer, _littérateur_, and art critic, as an editor of Shelley and of the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Other arts besides the literary art had partaken in the romantic movement. The eighteenth century had seen the introduction of the new, or English, school of landscape gardening; and the premature beginnings of the Gothic revival in architecture, which reached a successful issue some century later.[1] Painting in France had been romanticised in the thirties _pari passu_ with poetry and drama; and in Germany, Overbeck and Cornelius had founded a school of sacred art which corresponds, in its mediaeval spirit, to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In England painting was the last of the arts to catch the new inspiration. When the change came, it evinced that same blending of naturalism and Gothicism which defined the incipient romantic movement of the previous century. Painting, like landscape gardening, returned to nature; like architecture, it went back to the past. Like these, and like literature itself, it broke away from a tradition which was academic, if not precisely classic in the way in which David was classic. In 1848 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was established by three young painters, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. The name expresses their admiration of the early Italian--and notably the early Florentine--religious painters, like Giotto, Ghiberti, Bellini, and Fra Angelica. In the work of these men they found a sweetness, depth, and sincerity of devotional feeling, a self-forgetfulness and humble adherence to truth, which were absent from the sophisticated art of Raphael and his successors. Even the imperfect command of technique in these "primitives" had a charm. The stiffness and awkwardness of their figure painting, their defects of drawing, perspective, and light and shade, their lack of anatomical science were like the lispings of childhood or the artlessness of an old ballad. The immediate occasion of the founding of the Brotherhood was a book of engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais' house, from the frescoes by Gozzoli, Orcagna, and others in the Campo Santo, at Pisa; the same frescoes, it will be remembered, which so strongly impressed Leigh Hunt and Keats. Holman Hunt--though apparently not his associates--had also read with eager approval the first volume of Ruskin's "Modern Painters," in which the young artists of England are advised to "go to nature in all singleness of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing." Pre-Raphaelitism was a practical, as "Modern Painters" was a theoretical, protest against the academic traditions which kept young artists making school copies of Raphael, instructed them that a third of the canvas should be occupied with a principal shadow, and that no two people's heads in the picture should be turned the same way, and asked, "Where are you going to put your brown tree?" The three original members of the group associated with themselves four others: Thomas Woolner, the sculptor; James Collinson, a painter; F. G. Stephens, who began as an artist and ended as an art critic; and Rossetti's brother William, who was the literary man of the movement. Woolner was likewise a poet, and contributed to _The Germ_[2] his two striking pieces, "My Beautiful Lady" and "Of My Lady in Death." Among other artists not formally enrolled in the Brotherhood, but who worked more or less in the spirit and principles of Pre-Raphaelitism, were Ford Madox Brown, an older man, in whose studio Rossetti had, at his own request, been admitted as a student; Walter Deverell, who took Collinson's place when the latter resigned his membership in order to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood; and Arthur Hughes.[3] But the main importance of the Pre-Raphaelite movement to romantic literature resides in the poetry of Rossetti, and in the inspiration which this communicated to younger men, like Morris and Swinburne, and through them to other and still younger followers. The history of English painting is no part of our subject, but Rossetti's painting and his poetry so exactly reflect each other, that some definition or brief description of Pre-Raphaelitism seems here to be called for, ill qualified as I feel myself to give any authoritative account of the matter.[4] And first as to methods: the Pre-Raphaelites rejected the academic system whereby the canvas was prepared by rubbing in bitumen, and the colours were laid upon a background of brown, grey, or neutral tints. Instead of this, they spread their colours directly upon the white, unprepared canvas, securing transparency by juxtaposition rather than by overlaying. They painted their pictures bit by bit, as in frescoes or mosaic work, finishing each portion as they went along, until no part of the canvas was left blank. The Pre-Raphaelite theory was sternly realistic. They were not to copy from the antique, but from nature. For landscape background, they were to take their easels out of doors. In figure painting they were to work, if possible, from a living model and not from a lay figure. A model once selected, it was to be painted as it was in each particular, and without imaginative deviation. "Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background," wrote Ruskin, "is painted, to the last touch, in the open air from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a true portrait of some living person. Every minute accessory is painted in the same manner." [5] In this fashion their earliest works were executed. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," exhibited in 1849, the figure of St. Anne is a portrait of the artist's mother; the Virgin, of his sister Christina; and Joseph, of a man-of-all-work employed in the family. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella"--a subject from Keats--Isabella's brother, her lover, and one of the guests, are portraits of Deverell, Stephens, and the two Rossettis. But this severity of realism was not long maintained. It was a discipline, not a final method. Even in Rossetti's second painting, "Ecce Ancilla Domini," the faces of the Virgin and the angel Gabriel are blendings of several models; although, in its freedom from convention, its austere simplicity, and endeavour to see the fact as it happened, the piece is in the purest Pre-Raphaelite spirit. Ruskin insisted that, while composition was necessarily an affair of the imagination, the figures and accessories of a picture should be copies from the life. In the early days of the Brotherhood there was an ostentatious conscientiousness in observing this rule. We hear a great deal in Rossetti's correspondence about the brick wall at Chiswick which he copied into his picture "Found," and about his anxious search for a white calf for the countryman's cart in the same composition. But all the Pre-Raphaelites painted from the lay figure as well as from the living model, and Rossetti, in particular, relied quite as much on memory and imagination as upon the object before him. W. B. Scott thinks that his most charming works were the small water-colours on Arthurian subjects; "done entirely without nature and a good deal in the spirit of illuminated manuscripts, with very indifferent drawing and perspective nowhere." As for Millais, he soon departed from rigidly Pre-Raphaelite principles, and became the most successful and popular of British artists in genre. In natural talent and cleverness of execution he was the most brilliant of the three; in imaginative intensity and originality he was Rossetti's inferior--as in patience and religious earnestness he was inferior to Hunt. It was Hunt who stuck most faithfully to the programme of Pre-Raphaelitism. He spent laborious years in the East in order to secure the exactest local truth of scenery and costume for his Biblical pieces: "Christ in the Shadow of Death," "Christ in the Temple," and "The Scapegoat." While executing the last-named, he pitched his tent on the shores of the Dead Sea and painted the desert landscape and the actual goat from a model tied down on the edge of the sea. Hunt's "Light of the World" was one of the masterpieces of the school, and as it is typical in many ways, may repay description. Ruskin pronounced it "the most perfect instance of expressional purpose with technical power which the world has yet produced." In this tall, narrow canvas the figure of Christ occupies nearly half the space. He holds a lantern in his hand and knocks at a cottage door. The face--said to be a portrait of Venables, curate of St. Paul's, Oxford--is quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It is masculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with an expression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose as he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds, emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break. The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in the lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall. Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, with its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New Testaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which new leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has its meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light in this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every moonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. While working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in a curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the window to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite pains to secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic praise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light of the World," and said that all the Academy critics and painters together could not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the picture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merry over the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's "Christ in the House of his Parents," a composition which was ferociously ridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words." The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of the World" is common to all the Pre-Raphaelite art. It is a mediaeval note, and Rossetti learned it from Dante. Symbolism runs through the "Divine Comedy" in such touches as the rush, emblem of humility, with which Vergil girds Dante for his journey through Purgatory; the constellation of four stars-- "Non viste mai fuor ch' alla prima gente"-- typifying the cardinal virtues; the three different coloured steps to the door of Purgatory;[6] and thickening into the elaborate apocalyptic allegory of the griffin and the car of the church, the eagle and the mystic tree in the last cantos of the "Purgatorio." In Hunt's "Christ in the Shadow of Death," the young carpenter's son is stretching his arms after work, and his shadow, thrown upon the wall, is a prophecy of the crucifixion. In Millais' "Christ in the House of his Parents," the boy has wounded the palm of his hand upon a nail, another foretokening of the crucifixion. In Rossetti's "Girlhood of Mary Virgin," Joseph is training a vine along a piece of trellis in the shape of the cross; Mary is copying in embroidery a three-flowered white lily plant, growing in a flower-pot which stands upon a pile of books lettered with the names of the cardinal virtues. The quaint little child angel who tends the plant is a portrait of a young sister of Thomas Woolner. Similarly, in "Ecce Ancilla Domini," the lily of the annunciation which Gabriel holds is repeated in the piece of needlework stretched upon the 'broidery frame at the foot of Mary's bed. In "Beata Beatrix" the white poppy brought by the dove is the symbol at once of chastity and of death; and the shadow upon the sun-dial marks the hour of Beatrice's beatification. Again, in "Dante's Dream," poppies strew the floor, emblems of sleep and death; an expiring lamp symbolises the extinction of life; and a white cloud borne away by angels is Beatrice's departing soul. Love stands by the couch in flame-coloured robes, fastened at the shoulder with the scallop shell which is the badge of pilgrimage. In Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" the salt-box is overturned upon the table, signifying that peace is broken between Isabella's brothers and their table companion. Doves are everywhere in Rossetti's pictures, embodiments of the Holy Ghost and the ministries of the spirit, Rossetti labelled his early manuscript poems "Poems of the Art Catholic"; and the Pre-Raphaelite heresy was connected by unfriendly critics with the Anglo-Catholic or Tractarian movement at Oxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst of Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potent participant," and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death of Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came when a thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxford movement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art, and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements were in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual representations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven, one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, which was fraught with such important results, was the outcome of the widespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome of the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent in strengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern Painters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times.' Primarily the Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival; and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and Rossetti . . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and Keble, it is indubitably so." [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his young friends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a man of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. He painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled the feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out of their places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. In fact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him to clean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They did not want him as a priest; they were already getting tired of that species of convert; so he left, turned to painting again, and disappeared." [9] M. de la Sizeranne is rather scornful of these metaphysical definitions of Pre-Raphaelitism; "for to characterise a Pre-Raphaelite picture by saying that it was inspired by the Oxford movement, is like attempting to explain the mechanism of a lock by describing the political opinions of the locksmith." [10] He himself proposes, as the distinguishing characteristics of Pre-Raphaelite art, originality of gesture and vividness of colouring. This is the professional point of view; but the student of literature is less concerned with such technical aspects of the subject than with those spiritual aspects which connect the work of the Pre-Raphaelites with the great mediaeval or romantic revival. When Ruskin came to the rescue of the P.-R. B. in 1851, in those letters to the _Times_, afterwards reprinted in pamphlet form under the title "Pre-Raphaelitism," he recognised the propriety of the name, and the real affinity between the new school and the early Italian schools of sacred art. Mediaeval art, he asserted,[11] was religious and truthful, modern art is profane and insincere. "In mediaeval art, thought is the first thing, execution is the second; in modern art, execution is the first thing and thought is the second. And again, in mediaeval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second." Ruskin denied that the Pre-Raphaelites were unimaginative, though he allowed that they had a disgust for popular forms of grace and prettiness. And he pointed out a danger in the fact that their principles confined them to foreground work, and called for laborious finish on a small scale. In "Modern Painters" he complained that the Pre-Raphaelites should waste a whole summer in painting a bit of oak hedge or a bed of weeds by a duck pond, which caught their fancy perhaps by reminding them of a stanza in Tennyson. Nettles and mushrooms, he said, were good to make nettle soup and fish sauce; but it was too bad that the nobler aspects of nature, such as the banks of the castled Rhine, should be left to the frontispieces in the Annuals. Ruskin, furthermore, denied that the drawing of the Pre-Raphaelites was bad or their perspective false; or that they imitated the _errors_ of the early Florentine painters, whom they greatly excelled in technical accomplishment. Meanwhile be it remarked that the originality of gesture in Pre-Raphaelite figure painting, which M. de la Sizeranne notices, was only one more manifestation of the romantic desire for individuality and concreteness as against the generalising academicism of the eighteenth century.[12] As poets, the Pre-Raphaelites derive from Keats rather than from Scott, in their exclusive devotion to beauty, to art for art's sake; in their single absorption in the passion of love; and in their attraction towards the more esoteric side of mediaeval life, rather than towards its broad, public, and military aspects.[13] Rossetti's position in the romantic literature of the last half of the ninetenth century is something like Coleridge's in the first half. Unlike Coleridge, he was the leader of a school, the master of a definite group of artists and poets. His actual performance, too, far exceeds Coleridge's in amount, if not in value. But like Coleridge, he was a seminal mind, a mind rich in original suggestions, which inspired and influenced younger men to carry out its ideas, often with a fluency of utterance and a technical dexterity both in art and letters which the master himself did not possess. Holman Hunt, Millais, and Burne-Jones among painters, Morris and Swinburne among poets, were disciples of Rossetti who in some ways outdid him in execution. His pictures were rarely exhibited, and no collection of his poems was published till 1870. Meanwhile, however, many of these had circulated in manuscript, and "secured a celebrity akin in kind and almost equal in extent to that enjoyed by Coleridge's 'Christabel' during the many years preceding 1816 in which it lay in manuscript. Like Coleridge's poem in another important particular, certain of Rossetti's ballads, while still unknown to the public, so far influenced contemporary poetry that when they did at length appear, they had all the seeming to the uninitiated of work imitated from contemporary models, instead of being, as in fact they were, the primary source of inspiration for writers whose names were earlier established." [14] William Morris, _e.g._, had printed four volumes of verse in advance of Rossetti, and the earliest of these, "The Defence of Guenevere," which contains his most intensely Pre-Raphaelite work and that most evidently done in the spirit of Rossetti's teachings, saw the light (1858) twelve years before Rossetti's own. Swinburne, too, had published three volumes of poetry before 1870, including the "Poems and Ballads" of 1866, in which Rossetti's influence is plainly manifest; and he had already secured a wide fame at a time when the elder poet's reputation was still esoteric and mainly confined to the _cénacle_. William M. Rossetti, in describing the literary influences which moulded his brother's tastes, tells us that "in the long run he perhaps enjoyed and revered Coleridge beyond any other modern poet whatsoever." [15] It is worth while to trace these literary influences with some detail, since they serve to link the neo-romantic poetry of our own time to the product of that older generation which had passed away before Rossetti came of age. It is interesting to find then, that at the age of fifteen (1843) he taught himself enough German to enable him to translate Bürger's "Lenore," as Walter Scott had done a half-century before. This devil of a poem so haunts our history that it has become as familiar a spirit as Mrs. Radcliffe's bugaboo apparitions, and our flesh refuses any longer to creep at it. It is quite one of the family. It would seem, indeed, as if Bürger's ballad was set as a school copy for every young romanticist in turn to try his 'prentice hand upon. Fortunately, Rossetti's translation has perished, as has also his version--some hundred lines--of the earlier portion of the "Nibelungenlied." But a translation which he made about the same time of the old Swabian poet, Hartmann von Aue's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Henry the Leper) is preserved, and was first published in 1886. This poem, it will be remembered, was the basis of Longfellow's "Golden Legend" (1851). Rossetti did not keep up his German, and in later years he never had much liking for Scandinavian or Teutonic literature. He was a Latin, and he made it his special task to interpret to modern Protestant England whatever struck him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic Middle Age. The only Italian poet whom he "earnestly loved" was Dante. He did not greatly care for Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso--the Renaissance poets--though in boyhood he had taken delight in Ariosto, just as he had in Scott and Byron. But that was a stage through which he passed; none of these had any ultimate share in Rossetti's culture. At fifteen he wrote a ballad entitled "Sir Hugh the Heron," founded on a tale of Allan Cunningham, but taking its name and motto from the lines in "Marmion"-- "Sir Hugh the Heron bold, Baron of Twisell and of Ford, And Captain of the Hold." A few copies of this were printed for family circulation by his fond grandfather, G. Polidori. Among French writers he had no modern favourites beyond Hugo, Musset, and Dumas. But like all the neo-romanticists, he was strongly attracted by François Villon, that strange Parisian poet, thief, and murderer of the fifteenth century. He made three translations from Villon, the best known of which is the famous "Ballad of Dead Ladies" with its felicitous rendering of the refrain-- "But where are the snows of yester year?" (Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?) There are at least three good English verse renderings of this ballad of Villon; one by Andrew Lang; one by John Payne, and doubtless innumerable others, unknown to me or forgotten. In fact, every one translates it nowadays, as every one used to translate Bürger's ballad. It is the "Lenore" of the neo-romanticists. Rossetti was a most accomplished translator, and his version of Dante's "Vita Nuova" and of the "Early Italian Poets" (1861)--reissued as "Dante and His Circle" (1874)--is a notable example of his skill. There are two other specimens of old French minstrelsy, and two songs from Victor Hugo's "Burgraves" among his miscellaneous translations; and William Sharp testifies that Rossetti at one time thought of doing for the early poetry of France what he had already done for that of Italy, but never found the leisure for it.[16] Rossetti had no knowledge of Greek, and "the only classical poet," says his brother, "whom he took to in any degree worth speaking of was Homer, the 'Odyssey' considerably more than the 'Iliad.'" This, I presume, he knew only in translation, but the preference is significant, since, as we have seen, the "Odyssey" is the most romantic of epics. Among English poets, he preferred Keats to Shelley, as might have been expected. Shelley was a visionary and Keats was an artist; Shelley often abstract, Keats always concrete. Shelley had a philosophy, or thought he had; Keats had none, neither had Rossetti. It is quite comprehensible that the sensuous element in Keats would attract a born colourist like Rossetti beyond anything in the English poetry of that generation; and I need not repeat that the latest Gothic or romantic schools have all been taking Keats' direction rather than Scott's, or even than Coleridge's. Rossetti's work, I should say, _e.g._, in such a piece as "The Bride's Prelude," is a good deal more like "Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes" than it is like "The Ancient Mariner" or "Christabel" or "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." Rossetti got little from Milton and Dryden, or even from Chaucer and Spenser. Wordsworth he valued hardly at all. In the last two or three years of his life he came to have an exaggerated admiration for Chatterton. Rossetti's taste, like his temperament, was tinctured with morbidness. He sought the intense, the individual, the symbolic, the mystical. These qualities he found in a supreme degree in Dante. Probably it was only his austere artistic conscience which saved him from the fantastic--the merely peculiar or odd--and kept him from going astray after false gods like Poe and Baudelaire. Chaucer was a mediaeval poet and Spenser certainly a romantic one, but their work was too broad, too general in its appeal, too healthy, one might almost say, to come home to Rossetti.[17] William Rossetti testifies that "any writing about devils, spectres, or the supernatural generally . . . had always a fascination for him." Sharp remarks that work more opposite than Rossetti's to the Greek spirit can hardly be imagined. "The former [the Greek spirit] looked to light, clearness, form in painting, sculpture, architecture; to intellectual conciseness and definiteness in poetry; the latter [Rossetti] looked mainly to diffused colour, gradated to almost indefinite shades in his art, finding the harmonies thereof more akin than severity of outline and clearness of form; while in his poetry the Gothic love of the supernatural, the Gothic delight in sensuous images, the Gothic instinct of indefiniteness and elaboration, carried to an extreme, prevailed. . . . He would take more pleasure in a design by . . . William Blake . . . than in the more strictly artistic drawing of some revered classicist; more enjoyment in the weird or dramatic Scottish ballad than in Pindaric or Horatian ode; and he would certainly rather have had Shakspere than Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides put together." Rossetti's office in the later and further development of romantic art was threefold: First, to revive and express, both in painting and poetry, the religious spirit of the early Florentine schools; secondly, to give a more intimate interpretation of Dante to the English public, and especially of Dante's life and personality and of his minor poetry, like the "Vita Nuova," which had not yet been translated; thirdly, to afford new illustrations of mediaeval life and thought, partly by treating legendary matter in the popular ballad form, and partly by treating romantic matter of his own invention with the rich colour and sensuous imagery which belonged to his pictorial art. "Perhaps," writes Mr. Caine,[18] "Catholicism is itself essentially mediaeval, and perhaps a man cannot possibly be a 'mediaeval artist, heart and soul,' without partaking of a strong religious feeling that is primarily Catholic--so much were the religion and art of the Middle Ages knit each to each. . . . Rossetti's attitude towards spiritual things was exactly the reverse of what we call Protestant. . . . He constantly impressed me during the last days of his life with the conviction that he was by religious bias of nature a monk of the Middle Ages." All this is true in a way, yet Rossetti strikes one as being Catholic, without being religious; as mediaeval rather than Christian. He was agnostic in his belief and not devout in his practice; so that the wish that he suddenly expressed in his last illness, to confess himself to a priest, affected his friends as a singular caprice. It was the romantic quality in the Italian sacred art of the Middle Ages that attracted him; and it attracted him as a poet and painter, not as a devotee. There was little in Rossetti of the mystical and ascetic piety of Novalis or Zacharias Werner; nor of the steady religious devotion of his friend Holman Hunt, or his own sister Christina. Rossetti, by the way, was never in Italy, though he made several visits to France and Belgium. A glance at the list of his designs--extending to some four hundred titles--in oil, water-colour, crayon, pen and ink, etc., will show how impartially his interest was distributed over the threefold province mentioned above. There are sacred pieces like "Mary Magdalen at the Door of Simon the Pharisee," "St. Cecily," a "Head of Christ," a "Triptych for Llandaff Cathedral"; Dante subjects such as "Paolo and Francesca," "Beata Beatrix," "La Donna della Finestra," "Giotto Painting the Portrait of Dante"; and, in greater number, compositions of a purely romantic nature--"Fair Rosamond," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "The Chapel before the Lists," "Michael Scott's Wooing," "Meeting of Sir Tristram and Yseult," "Lady Lilith," "The Damozel of the Sanct Grail," "Death of Breuse sans Pitié," and the like. It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round Table romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he had abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott" to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in painting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favourite books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_ element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays through his 'Idylls.'" [19] The five wood-engravings from designs furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in Avalon," and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." "Interwoven as were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement," writes Mr. Sharp, "it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian idyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'The Relation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in the cycle of early English legend." It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "Morte Darthur." [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic disciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur," to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark's Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's contribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before the Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult," an incident which he also treated in his poetry. Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise contributed. Scott says that these paintings were interesting as designs; that they were "poems more than pictures, being large illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner." But he adds that not one of the band knew anything about wall painting. They laid their water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall, merely whitewashed. They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible. A co-partnership in subjects, a duplication of treatment, or interchange between the arts of poetry and painting characterise Pre-Raphaelite work. For example, Morris' poems, "The Blue Closet" and "The Tune of Seven Towers" were inspired by the similarly entitled designs of Rossetti. They are interpretations in language of pictorial suggestions--"word-paintings" in a truer meaning than that much-abused piece of critical slang commonly bears. In one of these compositions--a water-colour, a study in colour and music symbolism--four damozels in black and purple, white and green, scarlet and white, and crimson, are singing or playing on a lute and clavichord in a blue-tiled room; while in front of them a red lily grows up through the floor. To this interior Morris' "stunning picture"--as his friend called it--adds an obscurely hinted love story: the burden of a bell booming a death-knell in the tower overhead; the sound of wind and sea; and the Christmas snows outside. Conversely Rossetti's painting, "Arthur's Tomb," was suggested by Morris' so-named poem in his 1858 volume. Or, again, compare Morris' poem, "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," with the following description of Rossetti's aquarelle, "How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; but Sir Percival's sister died by the way": "On the right is painted the altar, and in front of it the damsel of the Sanc Grael giving the cup to Sir Galahad, who stoops forward to take it over the dead body of Sir Percival's sister, who lies calm and rigid in her green robe and red mantle, and near whose feet grows from the ground an aureoled lily, while, with his left hand, the saintly knight leads forward his two companions, him who has lost his sister, and the good Sir Bors. Behind the white-robed damsel at the altar, a dove, bearing the sacred casket, poises on outspread pinions; and immediately beyond the fence enclosing the sacred space, stands a row of nimbused angels, clothed in white and with crossed scarlet or flame-coloured wings." [21] Rossetti's powerful ballad, "The King's Tragedy," was suggested by the mural paintings (encaustic) with which William Bell Scott decorated the circular staircase of Penkill Castle in 1865-68. These were a series of scenes from "The Kinges Quair" once attributed to James I. of Scotland. The photogravure reproduction, from a painting by Arthur Hughes of a section of the Penkill Castle staircase, represents the king looking from the window of his prison in Windsor Castle at Lady Jane Beaufort walking with her handmaidens in a very Pre-Raphaelite garden. At the left of the picture, Cupid aims an arrow at the royal lover. Rossetti, Hunt, and Millais were all great lovers of Keats. Hunt says that his "Escape of Madeline and Prospero" was the first subject from Keats ever painted, and was highly acclaimed by Rossetti. At the formation of the P.-R B. in 1848, it was agreed that the first work of the Brotherhood should be in illustration of "Isabella," and a series of eight subjects was selected from the poem. Millais executed at once his "Lorenzo and Isabella," but Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" was not finished till 1867, and Rossetti's part of the programme was never carried out. Rossetti's "La Belle Dame sans Merci," Mr. J. M. Strudwick's "Madness of Isabella," Arthur Hughes' triptych of "The Eve of St. Agnes," and Millais' great painting, "St. Agnes' Eve," were other tributes of Pre-Raphaelite art to the young master of romantic verse. Whether this interpenetration of poetry and painting is of advantage to either, may admit of question. Emerson said to Scott: "We [Americans] scarcely take to the Rossetti poetry; it does not come home to us; it is exotic." The sonnets of "The House of Life" have appeared to many readers obscure and artificial, the working out in language of conceptions more easily expressible by some other art; expressed here, at all events, through imagery drawn from a special and even technical range of associations. Such readers are apt to imagine that Rossetti suffers from a hesitation between poetry and painting; as Sidney Lanier is thought by some to have been injured artistically by halting midway between music and verse. The method proper to one art intrudes into the other; everything that the artist does has the air of an experiment; he paints poems and writes pictures. A department of Rossetti's verse consists of sonnets written for pictures, pictures by Botticelli, Mantegna, Giorgione, Burne-Jones, and others, and in many cases by himself, and giving thus a double rendering of the same invention. But even when not so occasioned, his poems nearly always suggest pictures. Their figures seem to have stepped down from some fifteenth-century altar piece bringing their aureoles and golden backgrounds with them. This is to be pictorial in a very different sense from that in which Tennyson is said to be a pictorial poet. Hall Caine informs us that Rossetti "was no great lover of landscape beauty." His scenery does not, like Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, carry an impression of life, of the real outdoors. Nature with Rossetti has been passed through the medium of another art before it comes into his poetry; it is a doubly distilled nature. It is nature as we have it in the "Roman de la Rose," or the backgrounds of old Florentine painters: flowery pleasances and orchard closes, gardens with trellises and singing conduits, where ladies are playing at the palm play. In his most popular poem, "The Blessed Damosel"--a theme which he both painted and sang--the feeling is exquisitely and voraciously human. The maiden is "homesick in heaven," and yearns back towards the earth and her lover left behind. Even so, with her symbolic stars and lilies, she is so like the stiff, sweet angels of Fra Angelico or Perugino, that one almost doubts when the poet says "--her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm." The imagery of the poem is right out of the picture world; "The clear ranged, unnumbered heads Bowed with their aureoles." The imaginations are Dantesque: "And the souls, mounting up to God, Went by her like thin flames." "The light thrilled towards her, filled With angels in strong, level flight." Even in "Jenny," one of the few poems of Rossetti that deal with modern life, mediaeval art will creep in. "Fair shines the gilded aureole In which our highest painters place Some living woman's simple face. And the stilled features thus descried, As Jenny's long throat droops aside-- The shadows where the cheeks are thin And pure wide curve from ear to chin-- With Raffael's, Leonardo's hand To show them to men's souls might stand." The type of womanly beauty here described is characteristic; it is the type familiar to all in "Pandora," "Proserpine," "La Ghirlandata," "The Day Dream," "Our Lady of Pity," and the other life-size, half-length figure paintings in oil which were the masterpieces of his maturer style. The languid pose, the tragic eyes with their mystic, brooding intensity in contrast with the full curves of the lips and throat, give that union of sensuousness and spirituality which is a constant trait of Rossetti's poetry. The Pre-Raphaelites were accused of exaggerating the height of their figures. In Burne-Jones, whose figures are eight and a half heads high, the exaggeration is deliberate. In Morris' and Swinburne's early poems all the lines of the female face and figure are long--the hand, the foot, the throat, the "curve from chin to ear," and above all, the hair.[22] The hair in these paintings of Rossetti seems a romantic exaggeration, too; immense, crinkly waves of it spreading off to left and right. William Morris' beautiful wife is said to have been his model in the pieces above named. The first collection of original poems by Rossetti was published in 1870. The manuscripts had been buried with his wife in 1862. When he finally consented to their publication, the coffin had to be exhumed and the manuscripts removed. In 1881 a new edition was issued with changes and additions; and in the same year the volume of "Ballads and Sonnets" was published, including the sonnet sequence of "The House of Life." Of the poems in these two collections which treat directly of Dante the most important is "Dante at Verona," a noble and sustained piece in eighty-five stanzas, slightly pragmatic in manner, in which are enwoven the legendary and historical incidents of Dante's exile related by the early biographers, together with many personal allusions from the "Divine Comedy." But Dante is nowhere very far off either in Rossetti's painting or in his poetry. In particular, the history of Dante's passion for Beatrice, as told in the "Vita Nuova," in which the figure of the girl is gradually transfigured and idealised by death into the type of heavenly love, made an enduring impression upon Rossetti's imagination. Shelley, in his "Epipsychidion," had appealed to this great love story, so characteristic at once of the mediaeval mysticism and of the Platonic spirit of the early Renaissance. But Rossetti was the first to give a thoroughly sympathetic interpretation of it to English readers. It became associated most intimately with his own love and loss. We see it in a picture like "Beata Beatrix," and a poem like "The Portrait," written many years before his wife's death, but subsequently retouched. Who can read the following stanza without thinking of Beatrice and the "Paradiso"? "Even so, where Heaven holds breath and hears The beating heart of Love's own breast,-- Where round the secret of all spheres All angels lay their wings to rest,-- How shall my soul stand rapt and awed, When, by the new birth borne abroad Throughout the music of the suns, It enters in her soul at once And knows the silence there for God!" Rossetti's ballads and ballad-romances, all intensely mediaeval in spirit, fall, as regards their manner, into two very different classes. Pieces like "The Blessed Damozel," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary," and "The Staff and Scrip" (from a story in the "Gesta Romanorum") are art poems, rich, condensed, laden with ornament, pictorial. Every attitude of every figure is a pose; landscapes and interiors are painted with minute Pre-Raphaelite finish. "The Bride's Prelude"--a fragment--opens with the bride's confession to her sister, in the 'tiring-room sumptuous with gold and jewels and brocade, where the air is heavy with musk and myrrh, and sultry with the noon. In the pauses of her tale stray lute notes creep in at the casement, with noises from the tennis court and the splash of a hound swimming in the moat. In "Rose Mary," which employs the superstition in the old lapidaries as to the prophetic powers of the beryl-stone, the colouring and imagery are equally opulent, and, in passages, Oriental. On the other hand, "Stratton Water," "Sister Helen," "The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy" are imitations of popular poetry, done with a simulated roughness and simplicity. The first of these adopts a common ballad motive, a lover's desertion of his sweetheart through the contrivances of his wicked kinsfolk: "And many's the good gift, Lord Sands, You've promised oft to me; But the gift of yours I keep to-day Is the babe in my body." . . . "Look down, look down, my false mother, That bade me not to grieve: You'll look up when our marriage fires Are lit to-morrow eve." "Sister Helen" is a ballad in dialogue with a subtly varying repetend, and introduces the popular belief that a witch could kill a man slowly by melting a wax figure. Twice Rossetti essayed the historical ballad. "The White Ship" tells of the drowning of the son and daughter of Henry I. with their whole ship's company, except one survivor, Berold, the butcher of Rouen, who relates the catastrophe. The subject of "The King's Tragedy" is the murder of James I. by Robert Graeme and his men in the Charterhouse of Perth. The teller of the tale is Catherine Douglas, known in Scottish tradition as Kate Barlass, who had thrust her arm through the staple, in place of a bar, to hold the door against the assassins. A few stanzas of "The Kinges Quair" are fitted into the poem by shortening the lines two syllables each, to accommodate them to the ballad metre. It is generally agreed that this was a mistake, as was also the introduction of the "Beryl Songs" between the narrative parts of "Rose Mary." These ballads of Rossetti compare well with other modern imitations of popular poetry. "Sister Helen," _e.g._, has much greater dramatic force than Tennyson's "Oriana" or "The Sisters." Yet they impress one, upon the whole, as less characteristic than the poet's Italianate pieces; as _tours de force_ carefully pitched in the key of minstrel song, but falsetto in effect. Compared with such things as "Cadyow Castle" or "Jack o' Hazeldean," they are felt to be the work of an art poet, resolute to divest himself of fine language and scrupulously observant of ballad convention in phrase and accent--details of which Scott was often heedless--but devoid of that hearty, natural sympathy with the conditions of life from which popular poetry sprang, and wanting the lyrical pulse that beats in the ballad verse of Scott, Kingsley, and Hogg. In "The King's Tragedy" Rossetti was poaching on Scott's own preserves, the territory of national history and legend. If we can guess how Scott would have handled the same story, we shall have an object lesson in two contrasted kinds of romanticism. Scott could not have bettered the grim ferocity of the murder scene, nor have equalled, perhaps, the tragic shadow of doom which is thrown over Rossetti's poem by the triple warning of the weird woman. But the sense of the historic environment, the sense of the actual in places and persons, would have been stronger in his version. Graeme's retreat would have been the Perthshire Highlands, and not vaguely "the land of the wild Scots." And if scenery had been used, it would not have been such as this--a Pre-Raphaelite background: "That eve was clenched for a boding storm, 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; And where there was a line of the sky, Wild wings loomed dark between." The historical sense was weak in Rossetti. It is not easy to imagine him composing a Waverley novel. The life of the community, as distinct from the life of the individual, had little interest for him. The mellifluous names of his heroines, Aloyse, Rose Mary, Blanchelys, are pure romance. In his intense concentration upon the aesthetic aspects of every subject, Rossetti seemed, to those who came in contact with him, singularly _borné_. He was indifferent to politics, society, speculative thought, and the discoveries of modern science--to contemporary matters in general.[23] It is to this narrow aestheticism that Mr. Courthope refers when, in comparing Coleridge and Keats with Rossetti and Swinburne, he finds in the latter an "extraordinary skill in the imitation of antique forms," but "less liberty of imagination." [24] The contrast is most striking in the case of Coleridge, whose intellectual interests had so wide a range. Rossetti cared only for Coleridge's verse; William Morris spoke with contempt of everything that he had written except two or three of his poems;[25] and Swinburne regretted that he had lost himself in the mazes of theology and philosophy, instead of devoting himself wholly to creative work. Keats, it is true, was exclusively preoccupied with the beautiful; but he was more eclectic than Rossetti--perhaps also than Morris, though hardly than Swinburne. The world of classic fable, the world of outward nature were as dear to his imagination as the country of romance. Rossetti was not university bred, and, as we have seen, forgot his Greek early. Morris, like Swinburne, was an Oxford man; yet we hear him saying that he "loathes all classical art and literature." [26] In "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise" he treats classical and mediaeval subjects impartially, but treats them both alike in mediaeval fashion; as Chaucer does, in "The Knightes Tale." [27] As for Rossetti, he is never classical. He makes Pre-Raphaelite ballads out of the tale of Troy divine and the Rabbinical legends of Adam's first wife, Lilith; ballads with quaint burdens-- "(O Troy's down, Tall Troy's on fire)"; "(Sing Eden Bower! Alas the hour!)" and whose very titles have an Old English familiarity--"Eden Bower," "Troy Town," as who says "London Bridge," "Edinboro' Town," etc. Swinburne has given the _rationale_ of this type of art in his description of a Bacchus and Ariadne by Lippino Lippi ("Old Masters at Florence"), "an older legend translated and transformed into mediaeval shape. More than any others, these painters of the early Florentine school reproduce in their own art the style of thought and work familiar to a student of Chaucer and his fellows or pupils. Nymphs have faded into fairies, and gods subsided into men. A curious realism has grown up out of that very ignorance and perversion which seemed as if it could not but falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance; but far as these may be removed from the true tale and the true city of Troy, they are not phantoms." But of all this group, the one most thoroughly steeped in mediaevalism--to repeat his own description of himself--was William Morris. He was the English equivalent of Gautier's _homme moyen âge_; and it was his endeavour, in letters and art, to pick up and continue the mediaeval tradition, interrupted by four hundred years of modern civilisation. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not attract him; and as for the eighteenth, it simply did not exist for him.[28] The ugliness of modern life, with its factories and railroads, its unpicturesque poverty and selfish commercialism, was hateful to him as it was to Ruskin--his teacher. He loved to imagine the face of England as it was in the time of Chaucer--his master; to "Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston smoke, . . . And dream of London, small and white and clean, The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green." The socialistic Utopia depicted in his "News from Nowhere" (1890) is a regenerated Middle Age, without feudalism, monarchy, and the mediaeval Church, but also without densely populated cities, with handicrafts substituted for manufactures, and with mediaeval architecture, house, decoration, and costume. None of Morris' books deals with modern life, but all of them with an imaginary future or an almost equally imaginary past. This same "News from Nowhere" contains a passage of dialogue in justification of retrospective romance. "'How is it that though we are so interested with our life for the most part, yet when people take to writing poems or painting pictures they seldom deal with our modern life, or if they do, take good care to make their poems or pictures unlike that life? Are we not good enough to paint ourselves?' . . . 'It always was so, and I suppose always will be,' said he, 'however, it may be explained. It is true that in the nineteenth century, when there was so little art and so much talk about it, there was a theory that art and imaginative literature ought to deal with contemporary life; but they never did so; for, if there was any pretence of it, the author always took care . . . to disguise, or exaggerate, or idealise, and in some way or another make it strange; so that, for all the verisimilitude there was, he might just as well have dealt with the times of the Pharaohs.'" [29] The difference between the mediaevalism of Rossetti and of Morris illustrates, in an interesting way, the varied results produced by the operation of similar influences on contrasted temperaments. The comparison which Morris' biographer makes between him and Burne-Jones holds true as between Morris and Rossetti: "They received or re-incarnated the Middle Ages through the eyes and brain, in the one case of a Norman, in the other of a Florentine." Morris was twice a Norman, in his love for the romancers and Gothic builders of northern France; and in his enthusiasm for the Icelandic sagas. His visits to Italy left him cold, and he confessed to a strong preference for the art of the North. "With the later work of Southern Europe I am quite out of sympathy. In spite of its magnificent power and energy, I feel it as an enemy, and this much more in Italy, where there is such a mass of it, than elsewhere. Yes, and even in these magnificent and wonderful towns I long rather for the heap of gray stones with a gray roof that we call a house north-away." Rossetti's Italian subtlety and mysticism are replaced in Morris by an English homeliness--a materialism which is Teutonic and not Latin or Celtic, and one surface indication of which is the scrupulously Saxon vocabulary of his poems and prose romances. "His earliest enthusiasms," said Burne-Jones, "were his latest. The thirteenth century was his ideal period always"--the century which produced the lovely French romances which he translated and the great French cathedrals which he admired above all other architecture on earth. But this admiration was aesthetic rather than religious. The Catholic note, so resonant in Rossetti's poetry, is hardly audible in Morris, at least after his early Oxford days. The influence of Newman still lingered at Oxford in the fifties, though the Tractarian movement had spent its force and a reaction had set in. Morris came up to the university an Anglo-Catholic, and like his fellow-student and life-long friend, Burne-Jones, had been destined to holy orders. We find them both, as undergraduates, eagerly reading the "Acta Sanctorum," the "Tracts for the Times," and Kenelm Digby's "Mores Catholici," and projecting a kind of monastic community, where celibacy should be practised and sacred art cultivated. But later impressions soon crowded out this early religious fervour. Churchly asceticism and the mediaeval "praise of virginity" made no part of Morris' social ideal. The body counted for much with him. In "News from Nowhere," marriage even is so far from being a sacrament, that it is merely a free arrangement terminable at the will of either party. Morris had a passionate love of earth and a regard for the natural instincts. He complains that Swinburne's poetry is "founded on literature, not on nature." His religion is a reversion to the old Teutonic pagan earth-worship, and he had the pagan dread of "quick-coming death." His paradise is an "Earthly Paradise"; it is in search of earthly immortality that his voyagers set sail. "Of heaven or hell," says his prelude, "I have no power to sing"; and the great mediaeval singer of heaven and hell who meant so much to Rossetti, appealed hardly more to Morris than to Walter Scott. Moreover, Morris' work in verse was the precise equivalent of his work as a decorative artist, who cared little for easel pictures, and regarded painting as one method out of many for covering wall spaces or other surfaces.[30] His poetry is mainly narrative, but whether epical or lyrical in form, is always less lyric in essence than Rossetti's. In its objective spirit and even distribution of emphasis, it contrasts with Rossetti's expressional intensity very much as Morris' wall-paper and tapestry designs contrast with paintings like "Beata Beatrix" and "Proserpina." Morris--as an artist--cared more for places and things than for people; and his interest was in the work of art itself, not in the personality of the artist. Quite unlike as was Morris to Scott in temper and mental endowment, his position in the romantic literature of the second half-century answers very closely to Scott's in the first. His work resembled Scott's in volume, and in its easiness for the general reader. For the second time he made the Middle Ages _popular_. There was nothing esoteric in his art, as in Rossetti's. It was English and came home to Englishmen. His poetry, like his decorative work, was meant for the people, and "understanded of the people." Moreover, like Scott, he was an accomplished _raconteur_, and a story well told is always sure of an audience. His first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858), dedicated to Rossetti and inspired by him, had little popular success. But when, like Millais, he abandoned the narrowly Pre-Raphaelite manner and broadened out, in "The Life and Death of Jason" (1867) and "The Earthly Paradise" (1868-70), into a fashion of narrative less caviare to the general, the public response was such as met Millais. Morris' share in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was in the special field of decorative art. His enthusiasm for Gothic architecture had been aroused at Oxford by a reading of Ruskin's chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice." In 1856, acting upon this impulse, he articled himself to the Oxford architect G. E. Street, and began work in his office. He did not persevere in the practice of the profession, and never built a house. But he became and remained a _connoisseur_ of Gothic architecture and an active member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. His numerous visits to Amiens, Chartres, Reims, Soissons, and Rouen were so many pilgrimages to the shrines of mediaeval art. Indeed, he always regarded the various branches of house decoration as contributory to the master art, architecture. A little later, under the dominating and somewhat overbearing persuasions of Rossetti, he tried his hand at painting, but never succeeded well in drawing the human face and figure. The figure designs for his stained glass, tapestries, etc., were usually made by Burne-Jones, Morris furnishing floriated patterns and the like. In 1861 was formed the firm of Morris & Company, which revolutionised English household decoration. Rossetti and Burne-Jones were among the partners in this concern, which undertook to supply the public with high art work in wall painting, paper hangings, embroidery, carpets, tapestries, printed cottons, stamped leather, carved furniture, tiles, metals, jewelry, etc. In particular, Morris revived the mediaeval arts of glass-staining, illumination, or miniature painting, and tapestry-weaving with the high-warp loom. Though he chose to describe himself as a "dreamer of dreams born out of my due time," and "the idle singer of an empty day," he was a tireless practical workman of astonishing cleverness and versatility. He taught himself to dye and weave. When, in the last decade of the century, he set up the famous Kelmscott Press, devoted to artistic printing and book-making, he studied the processes of type-casting and paper manufacture, and actually made a number of sheets of paper with his own hands. It was his favourite idea that the division of labour in modern manufactures had degraded the workman by making him a mere machine; that the divorce between the art of the designer and the art of the handicraftsman was fatal to both. To him the Middle Ages meant, not the ages of faith, or of chivalry, or of bold and free adventure, but of popular art--of "The Lesser Arts"; when every artisan was an artist of the beautiful and took pleasure in the thing which his hand shaped; when not only the cathedral and the castle, but the townsman's dwelling-house and the labourer's cottage was a thing of beauty. He believed that in those times there was, as there should be again, an art by the people and for the people. It was the democratic and not the aristocratic elements of mediaeval life that he praised. "From the first dawn of history till quite modern times, art, which nature meant to solace all, fulfilled its purpose; all men shared in it; that was what made life romantic, as people call it, in those days; that and not robber-barons and inaccessible kings with their hierarchy of serving-nobles and other such rubbish." [31] One more passage will serve to set in sharp contrast the romanticism of Scott and the romanticism of Ruskin and Morris. "With that literature in which romance, that is to say humanity, was re-born, there sprang up also a feeling for the romance of external nature, which is surely strong in us now, joined with a longing to know something real of the lives of those who have gone before us; of these feelings united you will find the broadest expression in the pages of Walter Scott; it is curious, as showing how sometimes one art will lag behind another in a revival, that the man who wrote the exquisite and wholly unfettered naturalism of 'The Heart of Midlothian,' for instance, thought himself continually bound to seem to feel ashamed of, and to excuse himself for, his love of Gothic architecture; he felt that it was romantic, and he knew that it gave him pleasure, but somehow he had not found out that it was art, having been taught in many ways that nothing could be art that was not done by a named man under academical rules." [32] It is worth while to glance at Morris' culture-history and note the organic filaments which connect the later with the earlier romanticism. He had read the Waverley novels as a child, and had even snatched a fearful joy from Clara Reeve's "Old English Baron." [33] He knew his Tennyson before he went up to Oxford, but reserved an unqualified admiration only for such things as "Oriana" and "The Lady of Shalott." He was greatly excited by the woodcut engraving of Dürer's "Knight, Death and the Devil" in an English translation of Fouqué's "Sintram." [34] Rossetti was first made known to him by Ruskin's Edinburgh lectures of 1854 and by the illustration to Allingham's "Maids of Elfin Mere," over which Morris and Burne-Jones "pored continually." Morris devoured greedily all manner of mediaeval chronicles and romances, French and English; but he read little in Elizabethan and later authors. He disliked Milton and Wordsworth, and held Keats to be the foremost of modern English poets. He took no interest in mythology, or Welsh poetry or Celtic literature generally, with the exception of the "Morte Darthur," which, Rossetti assured him, was second only to the Bible. The Border ballads had been his delight since childhood. An edition of these; a selection of English mediaeval lyrics; and a "Morte Darthur," with a hundred illustrations from designs by Burne-Jones, were among the unfulfilled purposes of the Kelmscott Press. Morris' first volume, "The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems," was put forth in 1858 (reprint in 1875); "a book," says Saintsbury, "almost as much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's early work was of the first." [35] "Many of the poems," wrote William Bell Scott, "represent the mediaeval spirit in a new way, not by a sentimental, nineteenth-century-revival mediaevalism, but they give a poetical sense of a barbaric age strongly and sharply real." [36] These last words point at Tennyson. The first four pieces in the volume are on Arthurian subjects, but are wholly different in style and conception even from such poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere." They are more mannerised, more in the spirit of Pre-Raphaelite art, than anything in Morris' later work. If the name-poem is put beside Tennyson's idyl "Guinevere"; or "Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery," beside Tennyson's "Sir Galahad," the difference is striking. In place of the refined ethics and sentiment, and purely modern spiritual ideals which find a somewhat rhetorical expression in Tennyson, Morris endeavours to render the genuine Catholic mediaeval materialistic religious temper as it appears in Malory; where unquestioning belief, devotion, childish superstition, and the fear of hell coexist with fleshly love and hate--a passion of sin and a passion of repentance. Guenevere's "defence" is, at bottom, the same as Phryne's: "See through my long throat how the words go up In ripples to my mouth: how in my hand The shadow lies like wine within a cup Of marvellously colour'd gold." "Dost thou reck That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you And your dear mother?" [37] Morris criticised Tennyson's Galahad, as "rather a mild youth." His own Galahad is not the rapt seer of the vision beatific, but a more flesh-and-blood character, who sometimes has cold fits in which he doubts whether the quest is not a fool's errand; and whether even Sir Palomydes in his unrequited love, and Sir Lancelot in his guilty love, do not take greater comfort than he. Other poems in the book were inspired by Froissart's "Chronicle" or other histories of the English wars in France: "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," "Concerning Geffray Teste Noire," "The Eve of Crecy," etc.[38] Still others, and these not the least fascinating, were things of pure invention, lays of "a country lit with lunar rainbows and ringing with fairy song." [39] These have been thought to owe something to Edgar Poe, but they much more nearly resemble the work of the latest symbolistic schools. When reading such poems as "Rapunzel," "Golden Wings," and "The Tune of Seven Towers," one is frequently reminded of "Serres Chaudes" or "Pelléas et Mélisande"; and is at no loss to understand why Morris excepted Maeterlinck from his general indifference to contemporary writers--Maeterlinck, like himself, a student of Rossetti. There is no other collection of English poems so saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism. The flowers are all orchids, strange in shape, violent in colouring. Rapunzel, _e.g._, is like one of Maeterlinck's spellbound princesses. She stands at the top of her tower, letting down her hair to the ground, and her lover climbs up to her by it as by a golden stair. Here is again the singular Pre-Raphaelite and symbolistic scenery, with its images from art and not from nature. Tall damozels in white and scarlet walk in garths of lily and sunflower, or under apple boughs, and feed the swans in the moat. "Moreover, she held scarlet lilies, such As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light Of the great church walls." [40] "Lord, give Mary a dear kiss, And let gold Michael, who look'd down, When I was there, on Rouen town, From the spire, bring me that kiss On a lily!" [41] The language is as artfully quaint as the imaginations are fantastic: "Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows Not loud, but as a cow begins to low." [42] "Pale in the green sky were the stars, I ween, Because the moon shone like a star she shed When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago, And ruled all things but God." [43] "Quiet groans That swell out the little bones Of my bosom." [44] "I sit on a purple bed, Outside, the wall is red, Thereby the apple hangs, And the wasp, caught by the fangs, Dies in the autumn night. And the bat flits till light, And the love-crazed knight Kisses the long, wet grass." [45] A number of these pieces are dramatic in form, monologues or dialogues, sometimes in the manner of the mediaeval mystery plays.[46] Others are ballads, not of the popular variety, but after Rossetti's fashion, employing burdens, English or French: "Two red roses across the moon"; "Hah! hah! la belle jaune giroflée"; "Ah! qu'elle est belle La Marguerite"; etc. The only poem in the collection which imitates the style of the old minstrel ballad is "Welland Water." The name-poem is in _terza rima_; the longest, "Sir Peter Harpdon's End," in blank verse; "Golden Wings," in the "In Memoriaro" stanza. When Morris again came before the public as a poet, his style had undergone a change akin to that which transformed the Pre-Raphaelite painter into the decorative artist. The skeins of vivid romantic colour had run out into large-pattern tapestries. There was nothing eccentric or knotty about "The Life and Death of Jason" and "The Earthly Paradise." On the contrary, nothing so facile, pellucid, pleasant to read had appeared in modern literature--a poetic lubberland, a "clear, unwrinkled song." The reader was carried along with no effort and little thought on the long swell of the verse, his ear lulled by the musical lapse of the rime, his eye soothed--not excited--by ever-unrolling panoramas of an enchanted country "east of the sun and west of the moon." Morris wrote with incredible ease and rapidity. It was a maxim with him, as with Ruskin, that all good work is done easily and with pleasure to the workman; and certainly that seems true of him which Lowell said of Chaucer--that he never "puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse." Chaucer was his avowed master,[47] and perhaps no English narrative poet has come so near to Chaucer. Like Chaucer, and unlike Scott, he did not invent stories, but told the old stories over again with a new charm. His poetry, as such, is commonly better than Scott's; lacking the fire and nervous energy of Scott in his great passages, but sustained at a higher artistic level. He had the copious vein of the mediaeval chroniclers and romancers, without their tiresome prolixity and with finer resources of invention. He had none of Chaucer's humour, realism, or skill in character sketching. In its final impression his poetry resembles Spenser's more than Chaucer's. Like Spenser's, it grows monotonous--without quite growing languid--from the steady flow of the metre and the exhaustless profusion of the imagery. The reader becomes, somewhat ungratefully, surfeited with beauty, and seeks relief in poetry more passionate or intellectual. Chaucer and, in a degree, Walter Scott, have a way of making old things seem near to us. In Spenser and Morris, though bright and clear in all imagined details, they stand at an infinite remove, in a world apart-- "--a little isle of bliss Midmost the beating of the steely sea" which typifies the weary problems and turmoil of contemporary life. "Jason" was a poem of epic dimensions, on the winning of the Golden Fleece; "The Earthly Paradise," a series of twenty-four narrative poems set in a framework of the poet's own. Certain gentlemen of Norway, in the reign of Edward III. of England, set out--like St. Brandan--on a voyage in search of a land that is free from death. They cross the Western ocean, and after long years of wandering, come, disappointed of their hope, to a city founded centuries since by exiles from ancient Greece. There being hospitably received, hosts and guests interchange tales in every month of the year; a classical story alternating with a mediaeval one, till the double sum of twelve is complete. Among the wanderers are a Breton and a Suabian, so that the mediaeval tales have a wide range. There are Norse stories like "The Lovers of Gudrun"; French Charlemagne romances, like "Ogier the Dane"; and late German legends of the fourteenth century, like "The Hill of Venus," besides miscellaneous travelled fictions of the Middle Age.[48] But the Hellenic legends are reduced to a common term with the romance material, so that the reader is not very sensible of a difference. Many of them are selected for their marvellous character, and abound in dragons, monsters, transformations, and enchantments: "The Golden Apples," "Bellerophon," "Cupid and Psyche," "The Story of Perseus," etc. Even "Jason" is treated as a romance. Of its seventeen books, all but the last are devoted to the exploits and wanderings of the Argonauts. Medea is not the wronged, vengeful queen of the Greek tragic poets, so much as she is the Colchian sorceress who effects her lover's victory and escape. Her romantic, outweighs her dramatic character. Sea voyages, emprizes, and wild adventures, like those of his own wanderers in "The Earthly Paradise," were dearer to Morris' imagination than conflicts of the will; the _vostos_ or home-coming of Ulysses, _e.g._ He preferred the "Odyssey" to the "Iliad," and translated it in 1887 into the thirteen-syllabled line of the "Nibelungenlied." [49] Of the Greek tales in "The Earthly Paradise," "The Love of Alcestis" has, perhaps, the most dramatic quality. Like Chaucer and like Rossetti,[50] Morris mediaevalised classic fable. "Troy," says his biographer, "is to his imagination a town exactly like Bruges or Chartres, spired and gabled, red-roofed, filled (like the city of King Aeetes in 'The Life and Death of Jason') with towers and swinging bells. The Trojan princes go out, like knights in Froissart, to tilt at the barriers." [51] The distinction between classical and romantic treatment is well illustrated by a comparison of Theocritus' idyl "Hylas," with the same episode in "Jason." "Soon was he 'ware of a spring," says the Syracusan poet, "in a hollow land, and the rushes grew thickly round it, and dark swallow-wort, and green maiden-hair, and blooming parsley and deer-grass spreading through the marshy land. In the midst of the water the nymphs were arraying their dances, the sleepless nymphs, dread goddesses of the country people, Eunice, and Malis, and Nycheia, with her April eyes. And now the boy was holding out the wide-mouthed pitcher to the water, intent on dipping it; but the nymphs all clung to his hand, for love of the Argive lad had fluttered the soft hearts of all of them. Then down he sank into the black water." [52] In "Jason," where the episode occupies some two hundred and seventy lines, one of the nymphs meets the boy in the wood, disguised in furs like a northern princess, and lulls him to sleep by the stream side with a Pre-Raphaelite song: "I know a little garden close Set thick with lily and red rose"; the loveliest of all the lyrical passages in Morris' narrative poems except possibly the favourite two-part song in "Ogier the Dane"; "In the white-flower'd hawthorne brake, Love, be merry for my sake: Twine the blossoms in my hair. Kiss me where I am most fair-- Kiss me, love! for who knoweth What thing cometh after death?" This is the strain which recurs in all Morris' poetry with the insistence of a burden, and lends its melancholy to every season of "the rich year slipping by." Three kinds of verse are employed in "The Earthly Paradise": the octosyllabic couplet; the rime royal, which was so much a favourite with Chaucer; and the heroic couplet, handled in the free, "enjambed" fashion of Hunt and Keats. "Love is Enough," in the form of a fifteenth-century morality play, and treating a subject from the "Mabinogion," appeared in 1873, Mackail praises its delicate mechanism in the use of "receding planes of action" (Love is prologue and chorus, and there is a musical accompaniment); but the dramatic form only emphasises the essentially undramatic quality of the author's genius. What is the matter with Morris' poetry? For something is the matter with it. Beauty is there in abundance, a rich profusion of imagery. The narrative moves without a hitch. Passion is not absent, passionate love and regret; but it speaks a sleepy language, and the final impression is dream-like. I believe that the singular lack which one feels in reading these poems comes from Morris' dislike of rhetoric and moralising, the two main nerves of eighteenth-century verse. Left to themselves, these make sad work of poetry; yet poetry includes eloquence, and life includes morality. The poetry of Morris is sensuous, as upon the whole poetry should be; but in his resolute abstention from the generalizing habit of the previous century, the balance is lost between the general and the concrete, which all really great poetry preserves. Byron declaims and Wordsworth moralises, both of them perhaps too much; yet in the end to the advantage of their poetry, which is full of truths, or of thoughts conceived as true, surcharged with emotion and uttered with passionate conviction. One looks in vain in Morris' pages for such things as "There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away"; or "--the good die first, ----And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, Burn to the socket." Such coin of universal currency is rare in Morris, as has once before been said. Not that quotability is an absolute test of poetic value, for then Pope would rank higher than Spenser or Shelley. But its absence in Morris is significant in more than one way. While "The Earthly Paradise" was in course of composition, a new intellectual influence came into Morris' life, the influence of the Icelandic sagas. Much had been done to make Old Norse literature accessible to English readers since the days when Gray put forth his Runic scraps and Percy translated Mallet.[53] Walter Scott, e.g., had given an abstract of the "Eyrbyggja Saga." Amos Cottle had published at Bristol in 1797 a metrical version of the mythological portion of the "Elder Edda" ("Icelandic Poetry, or the Edda of Saemund"), with an introductory verse epistle by Southey. Sir George Dasent's translation of the "Younger Edda" appeared in 1842; Laing's "Heimskringla" in 1844; Dasent's "Burnt Nial" in 1861; his "Gisli the Outlaw," and Head's "Saga of Viga-Glum" in 1866. William and Mary Howitt's "Literature and Romance of Northern Europe" appeared in 1852. Morris had made the acquaintance of Thorpe's "Northern Mythology" (1851) and "Yuletide Stories" (1853) at Oxford; two of the tales in "The Earthly Paradise" were suggested by them: "The Land East of the Sun" and "The Fostering of Aslaug." These, however, he had dealt with independently and in an ultra-romantic spirit. But in 1869 he took up the study of Icelandic under the tuition of Mr. Erick Magnusson; in collaboration with whom he issued a number of translations.[54] "The Lovers of Gudrun" in "The Earthly Paradise" was taken from the "Laxdaela Saga," and is in marked contrast with the other poems in the collection. There is no romantic glamour about it. It is a grim, domestic tragedy, moving among the homeliest surroundings. Save for the lawlessness of a primitive state of society which gave free play to the workings of the passions, the story might have passed in Yorkshire or New England. A book like "Wuthering Heights," or "Pembroke," occasionally exhibits the same obstinate Berserkir rage of the tough old Teutonic stock, operating under modern conditions. For the men and women of the sagas are hard as iron; their pride is ferocious, their courage and sense of duty inflexible, their hatred is as enduring as their love. The memory of a slight or an injury is nursed for a lifetime, and when the hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest human instincts--such as mother love--can avert the blow. Signy in the "Völsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness of the fierce Medea to sacrifice her young brothers to Jason's safety; more terrible by far than the matricide of Orestes. The colossal mythology of the North had impressed Gray's imagination a century before, Carlyle in his "Hero Worship" (1840) had given it the preference over the Greek, as an expression of race character and imagination. In the preface to his translation of the "Völsunga Saga," Morris declared his surprise that no version of the story yet existed in English. He said that it was one of the great stories of the world, and that to all men of Germanic blood it ought to be what the tale of Troy had been to the whole Hellenic race. In 1876 he cast it into a poem, "Sigurd the Volsung," in four books in riming lines of six iambic or anapaestic feet. "The Lovers of Gudrun" drew its material from one of that class of sagas which rest upon historical facts. The family vendetta which it narrates, in the Iceland of the eleventh century, is hardly more fabulous--hardly less realistic--than any modern blood feud in the Tennessee mountains. The passions and dramatic situations are much the same in both. The "Völsunga Saga" belongs not to romantic literature, strictly speaking, but to the old cycle of hero epics, to that earlier Middle Age which preceded Christian chivalry. It is the Scandinavian version of the story of the Niblungs, which Wagner's music-dramas have rendered in another art. But in common with romance, it abounds in superhuman wonders. It is full of Eddaic poetry and mythology. Sigmund and Sinfiotli change themselves into were wolves, like the people in "William of Palermo": Sigurd slays Fafnir, the dragon who guards the hoard, and his brother Regni, the last of the Dwarf-kin; Grimhild bewitches Sigurd with a cup of evil drink; Sigmund draws from the hall pillar the miraculous sword of Odin, and its shards are afterwards smithed by Regni for the killing of the monster. Morris was so powerfully drawn to the Old Norse literature that he made two visits to Iceland, to verify the local references in the sagas and to acquaint himself with the strange Icelandic landscapes whose savage sublimity is reflected in the Icelandic writings. "Sigurd the Volsung" is probably the most important contribution of Norse literature to English poetry; but it met with no such general acceptance as "The Earthly Paradise." The spirit which created the Northern mythology and composed the sagas is not extinct in the English descendants of Frisians and Danes. There is something of it in the minstrel ballads; but it has been so softened by modern life and tempered with foreign culture elements, that these old tales in their aboriginal, barbaric sternness repel. It is hard for any blossom of modern poetry to root itself in the scoriae of Hecla. An indirect result of Morris' Icelandic studies was his translation of Beowulf (1897), not a success; another was the remarkable series of prose poems or romances, which he put forth in the last ten years of his life.[55] There is nothing else quite like these. They are written in a peculiar archaic English which the author shaped for himself out of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century models, like the "Morte Darthur" and the English translation of the "Gesta Roroanorum," but with an anxious preference for the Saxon and Danish elements of the vocabulary. It is a dialect in which a market town is called a "cheaping-stead," a popular assembly a "folk-mote," foresters are "wood-abiders," sailors are "ship-carles," a family is a "kindred," poetry is "song-craft," [56] and any kind of enclosure is a "garth." The prose is frequently interchanged with verse, not by way of lyrical outbursts, but as a variation in the narrative method, after the manner of the Old French _cantefables_, such as "Aucassin et Nicolete"; but more exactly after the manner of the sagas, in which the azoic rock of Eddaic poetry crops out ever and anon under the prose strata. This Saxonism of style is in marked contrast with Scott, who employs without question the highly latinised English which his age had inherited from the last. Nor are Morris' romances historical in the manner of the Waverley novels. The first two of the series, however, are historical in the sense that they endeavour to reproduce in exact detail the picture of an extinct society. Time and place are not precisely indicated, but the scene is somewhere in the old German forest, and the period is early in the Christian era, during the obscure wanderings and settlements of the Gothic tribes. "The House of the Wolfings" concerns the life of such a community, which has made a series of clearings in "Mirkwood" on a stream tributary to the Rhine. The folk of Midmark live very much as Tacitus describes the ancient Germans as living. Each kindred dwells in a great common hall, like the hall of the Niblungs or the Volsungs, or of King Hrothgar in "Beowulf." Their herding and agriculture are described, their implements and costumes, feasts in hall, songs, rites of worship, public meetings, and finally their warfare when they go forth against the invading Romans. In "The Roots of the Mountains" the tribe of the Wolf has been driven into the woods and mountains by the vanguard of the Hunnish migrations. In time they make head against these, drive them back, and retake their fertile valley. In each case there is a love story and, as in Scott, the private fortunes of the hero and heroine are enwoven with the ongoings of public events. But it is the general life of the tribe that is of importance, and there is little individual characterisation. There is a class of thralls in "The House of the Wolfings," but no single member of the class is particularised, like Garth, the thrall of Cedric, in "Ivanhoe." The later numbers of the series have no semblance of actuality. The last of all, indeed, "The Sundering Flood," is a war story which attains an air of geographical precision by means of a map--like the plan of Egdon Heath in "The Return of the Native"--but the region and its inhabitants are alike fabulous. Romances such as "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" and "The Wood beyond the World" (the names are not the least imaginative feature of these curious books) are simply a new kind of fairy tales. Unsubstantial as Duessa or Armida or Circe or Morgan le Fay are the witch-queen of the Wood beyond the World and the sorceress of the enchanted Isle of Increase Unsought. The white Castle of the Quest, with its three champions and their ladies, Aurea, Atra, and Viridis; the yellow dwarfs, the magic boat, the wicked Red Knight, and his den, the Red Hold; the rings and spells and charms and garments of invisibility are like the wilder parts of Malory or the Arabian Nights. Algernon Charles Swinburne was an early adherent of the Pre-Raphaelite school, although such of his work as is specifically Gothic is to be found mainly in the first series of "Poems and Ballads" (1866);[57] a volume which corresponds to Morris' first fruits, "The Defence of Guenevere." If Morris is prevailingly a Goth--a heathen Norseman or Saxon--Swinburne is, upon the whole, a Greek pagan. Rossetti and Morris inherit from Keats, but Swinburne much more from Shelley, whom he resembles in his Hellenic spirit; as well as in his lyric fervour, his shrill radicalism--political and religious--and his unchastened imagination. Probably the cunningest of English metrical artists, his art is more closely affiliated with music than with painting. Not that there is any paucity of imagery in his poetry; the imagery is superabundant, crowded, but it is blurred by an iridescent spray of melodious verbiage. The confusion of mind which his work often produces does not arise from romantic vagueness, from the dreamlike and mysterious impression left by a ballad of Coleridge's or a story of Tieck's, but rather, as in Shelley's case, from the dizzy splendour and excitement of the diction. His verse, like Shelley's, is full of foam and flame, and the result upon the reader is to bewilder and exhaust. He does not describe in pictures, like Rossetti and Morris, but by metaphors, comparisons, and hyperboles. Take the following very typical passage--the portrait of Iseult in "Tristram of Lyonesse" (1882); "The very veil of her bright flesh was made As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun, And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep, Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep, Shone, as the sea's depth swallowing up the sky's, The springs of unimaginable eyes. As the wave's subtler emerald is pierced through With the utmost heaven's inextricable blue, And both are woven and molten in one sleight Of amorous colour and implicated light Under the golden guard and gaze of noon, So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune, Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange With fiery difference and deep interchange Inexplicable of glories multiform; Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold, And now afire with ardour of fine gold. Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate, For love upon them like a shadow sate Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things, A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings That knew not what man's love or life should be, Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied, Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride And unkissed expectation; and the glad Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had Such maiden heat as if a rose's blood Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud." What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all this squandered wealth of words and tropes? Compare the entire poem with one of Tennyson's Arthurian "Idyls," or even with Matthew Arnold's not over-prosperous "Tristram and Iseult," or with any of the stories in "The Earthly Paradise," and it will be seen how far short it falls of being good verse narrative--with its excesses of language and retarded movement. Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have written an epic: "he would have perished from a plethora of thought." It is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the wheels in Swinburne. Too often his tale is "Like a tale of the little meaning, Though the words are strong." But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like Shelley's "Laon and Cythna," but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe and Chapman's "Hero and Leander." If not so conceited as these, it is equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from getting forward. The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical. But two marks of the Pre-Raphaelite--and, indeed, of the romantic manner generally--are obtrusively present in his early work. One of these is the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious, natural outlines of the subject. Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the piece entitled "At Eleusis," "--she lying down, red flowers Made their sharp little shadows on her sides." "Endymion" is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty. It is a sign of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor. It is impossible to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by its theme. Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from "At Eleusis" with the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the "Winter's Tale" and in "Paradise Lost." Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in Swinburne in a morbid eroticism. The first series of "Poems and Ballads" was reprinted in America as "Laus Veneris." The name-poem was a version of the Tannhäuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, and it set the key of the whole volume. It is hardly necessary to say of the singer of the wonderful choruses in "Atalanta" and the equally wonderful hexameters of "Hesperia," that his imagination has turned most persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula. But there are a few noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics. "A Christmas Carol" is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of Rossetti's, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour. The inevitable damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen's hair with golden combs, while she sings a song of God's mother; how she, too, had three women for her bed-chamber-- "The first two were the two Maries, The third was Magdalen," [58] who "was the likest God"; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad style: "If your child be none other man's, But if it be very mine, The bedstead shall be gold two spans, The bedfoot silver fine." "The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough _naïveté_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage directions and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David to hear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulis head, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a bad man--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally carried off by the comic devil: "_S. M._ I rede you in the devil's name, Ye come not here to make men game; By Termagaunt that maketh grame, I shall to-bete thine head. _Hic Diabolus capiat eum_." [59] Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity of the old martyrologies.[60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with "Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a heathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotes Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticed window, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who play upon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does his devotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walled pleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose," "Thick with companies Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes." Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. There were some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, of which several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows," were imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwrought with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "The Bloody Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poems and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two of them Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters and holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his review of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.[61] "The highest form of ballad requires, from a poet," he writes, "at once narrative power, lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency of romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can be no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothing that flags, nothing that overflows." He pronounces "Sister Helen" the greatest ballad in modern English; but he thinks that "Stratton Water," which is less independent in composition, and copies the formal as well as the essential characteristics of popular poetry, is "a study after the old manner too close to be no closer. It is not meant for a perfect and absolute piece of work in the old Border fashion, . . . and yet it is so far a copy that it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther. On this ground Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whose genius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as I did afterwards. In his first book, the ballad of 'Welland River,' the Christmas carol in 'The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,' etc., . . . are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner. Any less absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses some sense of failure by excess or default of resemblance." Swinburne's own ballads are clever and learned experiments, but he does not practise the brevity which he recommends; some of them, such as "The Bloody Son," "The Weary Wedding," and "The Bride's Tragedy," otherwise most impressive, would be more so if they were shorter or less wordy. Though his genius is more lyrical than dramatic, the fascination which the dramatic method has had for him from the first is as evident in his ballads as in his series of verse dramas, which begins with "The Queen Mother," and includes the enormous "Mary Stuart" trilogy. Several of these are mediaeval in subject; the "Rosamond" of his earliest volume--Fair Rosamond of the Woodstock Maze--the other "Rosamund, Queen of the Goths" (1899) in which the period of the action is 573 A.D.; and "Locrine" (1888), the hero of which is that mythic king of Britain whose story had been once before dramatised for the Elizabethan stage; and whose daughter, "Sabrina fair," goddess of the Severn, figures in "Comus." But these are no otherwise romantic than "Chastelard" or "The Queen Mother." The dramatic diction is fashioned after the Elizabethans, of whom Swinburne has been an enthusiastic student and expositor, finding an attraction even in the morbid horrors of Webster, Ford, and Tourneur.[62] Once more the poet touched the Round-Table romances in "The Tale of Balen" (1896), written in the stanza of "The Lady of Shalott," and in a style simpler and more direct than "Tristram of Lyonesse." The story is the same as Tennyson's "Balin and Balan," published with "Tiresias and Other Poems" in 1885, as an introduction to "Merlin and Vivien." Here the advantage is in every point with the younger poet. Tennyson's version is one of the weakest spots in the "Idylls." His hero is a rough Northumberland warrior who looks with admiration upon the courtly graces of Lancelot, and borrows a cognisance from Guinevere to wear upon his shield, in hope that it may help him to keep his temper. But having once more lost control of this, he throws himself upon the ground "Moaning 'My violences, my violences!'"-- a bathetic descent not unexampled elsewhere in Tennyson. This episode of the old "Morte Darthur" has fine tragic possibilities. It is the tale of two brothers who meet in single combat, with visors down, and slay each other unrecognised. It has some resemblance, therefore, to the plan of "Sohrab and Rustum," but it cannot be said that either poet avails himself of the opportunity for a truly dramatic presentation of his theme. Tennyson, as we have seen, aimed to give epic unity to the wandering and repetitious narrative of Malory, by selecting and arranging his material with reference to one leading conception; the effort of the king to establish a higher social state through an order of Christian knighthood, and his failure through the gradual corruption of the Round Table. He subdues the history of Balin to this purpose, just as he does the history of Tristram which he relates incidentally only, and not for its own sake, in "The Last Tournament." Balin's simple faith in the ideal chivalry of Arthur's court is rudely dispelled when he hears from Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of his reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to their lord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in the first adventure that offers. Moreover, in consonance with his main design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather than of epic or drama--whose theatre is the human will. To such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance. There are very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a "darkling manslayer"; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance. All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives at full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the roving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by which he conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method. As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne stands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and anti-romantic. Gérard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault, who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the French literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetière, on the contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be found in the writers of Louis XIV.'s time--that France is instinctively and naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of the modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake. Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugo is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and verse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet." [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and "Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le mont Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very characteristic piece in the same collection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France" (1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which have since grown familiar in the hands of Dobson, Lang, Gosse, and others. In the second series of "Poems and Ballads" (1878) he gave translations of ten of the ballads of that musical old blackguard "Villon, our sad, bad, glad, mad brother's name." [66] The range of Swinburne's intellectual interests has been wider than that of Rossetti and Morris. He is a classical scholar, who writes easily in Latin and Greek. Ancient mythology and modern politics divide his attention with the romantic literatures of many times and countries. Rossetti made but one or two essays in prose criticism, and Morris viewed the reviewer's art with contempt. But Swinburne has contributed freely to critical literature, an advocate of the principles of romantic art in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had been in the first. The manner of his criticism is not at all judicial. His prose is as lyrical as his verse, and his praise and blame both in excess--dithyrambic laudation or affluent billingsgate. In particular, he works the adjective "divine" so hard that it loses meaning. Yet stripped of its excited superlatives, and reduced to the cool temperature of ordinary speech, his critical work is found to be full of insight, and his judgment in matters of poetical technique almost always right. I may close this chapter with a few sentences of his defence of retrospective literature.[67] "It is but waste of breath for the champions of the other party to bid us break the yoke and cast off the bondage of that past, leave the dead to bury their dead, and turn from the dust and rottenness of old-world themes, epic or romantic, classical or feudal, to face the age wherein we live. . . . In vain, for instance, do the first poetess of England and the first poet of America agree to urge upon their fellows or their followers the duty of confronting and expressing the spirit and the secret of their own time, its meaning, and its need. . . . If a poem cast in the mould of classic or feudal times, of Greek drama or mediaeval romance, be lifeless and worthless, it is not because the subject or the form was ancient, but because the poet was inadequate. . . . For neither epic nor romance of chivalrous quest or classic war is obsolete yet, or ever can be; there is nothing in the past extinct . . . [Life] is omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Crusader, to dwell, as she does with equal good will, among modern appliances in London and New York." [1] See vol. i., chaps. iv. and vii., "The Landscape Poets" and "The Gothic Revival." [2] This was the organ of the Pre-Raphaelites, started in 1850. Only four numbers were issued (January, February, March, April), and in the third and fourth the title was changed to _Art and Poetry_. The contents included, among other things, poems by Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. One of the former's twelve contributions was "The Blessed Damozel." The _Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, which ran through the year 1856 and was edited by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, was also a Pre-Raphaelite journal and received many contributions from Rossetti. [3] The foreign strain in the English Pre-Raphaelites and in the painters and poets who descend from them is worth noting. Rossetti was three-fourths Italian. Millais' parents were Channel Islanders--from Jersey--and he had two mother tongues, English and French. Burne-Jones is of Welsh blood, and Alma Tadema of Frisian birth. Among Neo-Pre-Raphaelite poets, the names of Theophile Marzials and Arthur O'Shaughnessy speak for themselves. [4] Let the reader consult the large and rapidly increasing literature on the English Pre-Raphaelites. I do not profess to be a very competent guide here, but I have found the following works all in some degree enlightening. "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," two vols., New York, 1892. "English Contemporary Art." Translated from the French of R. de la Sizeranne, Westminster, 1898. "D. G. Rossetti as Designer and Writer." W. M. Rossetti, London, 1889. "The Rossettis." E. L. Cary, New York, 1900. "Dante Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement." Esther Wood, New York, 1894. "Pre-Raphaelitism." J. Ruskin, New York, 1860. "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Holman Hunt in _Contemporary Review_, vol. xlix. (three articles). "Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti." by Theodore Watts. Of course the standard lives and memoirs by William Rossetti, Hall Caine, William Sharp, and Joseph Knight, as well as Rossetti's "Family Letters," "Letters to William Allingham," etc., afford criticisms of the movement from various points of view. Lists of Rossetti's paintings and drawings are given by several of these authorities, with photographs or engravings of his most famous masterpieces. [5] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting." Delivered at Edinburgh in 1853. Lecture iv., "Pre Raphaelitism." [6] _Cf._ Milton: "Each stair mysteriously was meant" ("P. L."). [7] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a record and a study," London, 1882, pp. 40-41. [8] "Pre-Raphaelitism," p. 23, _note_. [9] "Autobiographical Notes of William Bell Scott," vol. i., p. 281. [10] "English Contemporary Art," p. 58. [11] "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," 1853. [12] See vol. i., p. 44. [13] "The return of this school was to a mediaevalism different from the tentative and scrappy mediaevalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial mediaevalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow and distinctly conventional mediaevalism of Tennyson. . . . Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, these poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature, which they thus revived, a subtle something which differentiates it from--which, to our perhaps blind sight, seems to be wanting in--mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and legend of the Middle Ages lack--to us--life; that they are shadowy, unreal, tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of their followers introduced into their work, they have given the vivification required" (Saintsbury, "Literature of the Nineteenth Century," p. 439). Pre-Raphaelitism "is a direct and legitimate development of the great romantic revival in England. . . . Even Tennyson, much more Scott and Coleridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into the treasures of mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with those of mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. Early French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, the Oxford Movement directed attention to mediaeval architecture, literature, thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has never been the case at all in any other country" ("A Short History of English Literature," by G. Saintsbury, London, 1898, p. 779). [14] "Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," by T. Hall Caine, London, 1883, p. 41. [15] "The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti." Edited by W. M. Rossetti, two vols., London, 1886. [16] "Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A Record and a Study," p. 305. [17] He wrote to Allingham in 1855, apropos of the latter's poem "The Music Master": "I'm not sure that it is not too noble or too resolutely healthy. . . . I must confess to a need in narrative dramatic poetry . . . of something rather 'exciting,' and indeed, I believe, something of the 'romantic' element, to rouse my mind to anything like the moods produced by personal emotion in my own life. That sentence is shockingly ill worded, but Keats' narratives would be of the kind I mean." Theodore Watts ("Encyclopaedia Britannica," article "Rossetti") says that "the purely romantic temper was with Rossetti a more permanent and even a more natural temper than with any other nineteenth-century poet, even including the author of 'Christabel' himself." He thinks that all the French romanticists together do not equal the romantic feeling in a single picture of Rossetti's; and he somewhat capriciously defines the idea at the core of romanticism as that of the evil forces of nature assailing man through his sense of beauty. Analysis run mad! As to Poe, Rossetti certainly preferred him to Wordsworth. Hall Caine testifies that he used to repeat "Ulalume" and "The Raven" from memory; and that the latter suggested his "Blessed Damozel." "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions, and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven" ("Recollections," p. 384). [18] "Recollections," p. 140. [19] Caine's "Recollections," p. 266. [20] Burne-Jones had been attracted by Rossetti's illustration of Allingham's poem, "The Maids of Elfinmere," and had obtained an introduction to him at London in 1856. It was by Rossetti's persuasion that he gave up the church for the career of an artist. Rossetti and Swinburne some years later (1862) became housemates for a time at Chelsea; and Rossetti and Morris for a number of years, off and on, at Kelmscott. [21] Sharp's "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," p. 190. [22] See especially Morris' poem "Rapunzel" in "The Defence of Guenevere." [23] "I can't say," wrote William Morris, "how it was that Rossetti took no interest in politics; but so it was: of course he was quite Italian in his general turn of thought; though I think he took less interest in Italian politics than in English. . . . The truth is, he cared for nothing but individual and personal matters; chiefly of course in relation to art and literature." [24] "The Liberal Movement in English Literature," by W. J. Courthope, London, 1885, p. 230. [25] "Keats was a great poet who sometimes nodded. . . . Coleridge was a muddle-brained metaphysician who, by some strange freak of fortune, turned out a few real poems amongst the dreary flood of inanity which was his wont. . . . I have been through the poems, and find that the only ones which have any interest for me are: (1) 'Ancient Mariner'; (2) 'Christabel'; (3) 'Kubla Khan'; and (4) the poem called 'Love'" (Mackail's "Life of Morris," vol. ii., p. 310). [26] "The Life of William Morris," by W. J. Mackail, London, 1899, vol. ii., p. 171. [27] For the Chaucerian manipulation of classical subjects by Pre-Raphaelite artists see "Edward Burne-Jones," by Malcolm Bell, London, 1899. [28] "The slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century" ("Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 211). "The English language, which under the hands of sycophantic verse-makers had been reduced to a miserable jargon . . . flowed clear, pure, and simple along with the music of Blake and Coleridge. Take those names, the earliest in date among ourselves, as a type of the change that has happened in literature since the time of George II." (_ibid._, p. 82). [29] Page 113. [30] "Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting . . . and he thought that the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused throughout it as equally as possible. Such, too, was his own practice in the cognate art of poetry; and this is one reason why his poetry affords so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation" (Mackail's "Life of William Morris," vol. ii., p. 272). [31] "Hopes and Fears for Art," p. 79. [32] _Ibid._, p. 83. [33] See vol. i., pp. 241-43. [34] _Vide supra_, p. 153. [35] "A Short History of English Literature," p. 783. [36] "Recollections of Rossetti," vol. ii., p. 42. [37] "King Arthur's Tomb." [38] 0ne of these, "The Haystack in the Floods," has a tragic power unexcelled by any later work of Morris. [39] Saintsbury, p. 785. [40] "King Arthur's Tomb." [41] "Rapunzel." [42] "King Arthur's Tomb." [43] _Ibid_. [44] "Rapunzel." [45] "Golden Wings." [46] See "Sir Galahad," "The Chapel in Lyoness," "A Good Knight in Prison." [47] See "Jason," Book xvii., 5-24, and the _Envoi_ to "The Earthly Paradise." [48] Some of Morris' sources were William of Malmesbury, "Mandeville's Travels," the "Gesta Romanorum," and the "Golden Legend." "The Man Born to be King" was derived from "The Tale of King Constans, the Emperor" in a volume of French romances ("Nouvelles françaises en prose du xiii.ième Siècle," Paris, 1856) of which he afterwards (1896) made a prose translation. The collection included also "The friendship of Amis and Amile"; "King Florus and the Fair Jehane"; and "The History of Over Sea"; besides "Aucassin and Nicolete," which Morris left out because it had been already rendered into English by Andrew Lang. [49] His Vergil's "Aeneid," in the old fourteener of Chapman, was published in 1876. [50] _Vide supra_, p. 315. [51] Mackail, i., p. 168. [52] Lang's translation. [53] See vol. i., pp. 190-92. [54] The "Grettis Saga" (1869); the "Völsunga Saga" (1870); "Three Northern Love Stories" (1875). [55] These, in order of publication, were "The House of the Wolfings" (1889); "The Roots of the Mountains" (1890); "The Story of the Glittering Plain" (1891); "The Wood Beyond the World" (1894); "The Well at the World's End" (1896); "The Water of the Wondrous Isles" (1897); and "The Sundering Flood" (1898). [56] Morris became so intolerant of French vocables that he detested and would "fain" have eschewed the very word literature. [57] This collection is made up of Swinburne's earliest work but is antedated in point of publication by "The Queen Mother, and Rosamond" (1861) dedicated to Rossetti; and "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865). "Poems and Ballads" was inscribed to Burne-Jones. [58] "Where the lady Mary is, With her five handmaidens whose names Are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys." --"The Blessed Damozel." [59] _Cf._ Browning's "The Heretic's Tragedy," _supra_, p. 276. [60] This was the subject of Massinger's "Virgin Martyr." [61] "Essays and Studies," pp. 85-88. [62] See "A Study of Ben Jonson"; "John Ford" (in "Essays and Studies"); and the introductions to "Chapman" and "Middleton" in the Mermaid Series. [63] _Vide supra_, pp. 90, 109, 330, and vol. i., pp. 221-22, 301. [64] See especially "A Study of Victor Hugo" (1886); the articles on "L'Homme qui Rit" and "L'Année Terrible" in "Essays and Studies" (1875); and on Hugo's posthumous writings in "Studies in Prose and Poetry" (1886); "To Victor Hugo" in "Poems and Ballads" (first series); _Ibid_. (second series); "Victor Hugo in 1877," _Ibid_. [65] See "Ave atque Vale" and the memorial verses in English, French, and Latin on Gautier's death in "Poems and Ballads" (second series). [66] "A Ballad of François Villon." _Vide supra_, pp. 298-99. [67] "Essays and Studies," pp. 45-49. CHAPTER VIII. Tendencies and Results. It has been mentioned that romanticism was not purely a matter of aesthetics, without relation to the movement of religious and political thought.[1] But it has also been pointed out that, as compared with what happened in Germany, English romanticism was almost entirely a literary or artistic, and hardly at all a practical force, that there was no such _Zusammenhang_ between poetry and life as was asserted by the German romantic school to be one of their leading principles. Walter Scott, _e.g._, liked the Middle Ages because they were picturesque; because their social structure rested on a military basis, permitted great individual freedom of action and even lawlessness, and thus gave chances for bold adventure; and because classes and callings were so sharply differentiated--each with its own characteristic manners, dialect, dress--that the surface of society presented a rich variety of colour, in contrast with the drab uniformity of modern life. Perhaps to Scott the ideal life was that of a feudal baron, dwelling in a Gothic mansion, surrounded by retainers and guests, keeping open house, and going a-hunting; and he tried to realise this ideal--so far as it was possible under modern conditions--at Abbotsford. He respected rank and pedigree, and liked to own land. He was a Tory and, in Presbyterian Scotland, he was an Episcopalian. But his mediaeval enthusiasms were checked by all kinds of good sense. He had no wish to restore mediaeval institutions in practice. In spite of the glamour which he threw over feudal life, he knew very well what that life must have been in reality: its insecurity from violence and oppression, its barbarous discomfort; the life of nobles in unplumbed stone castles; the life of burghers in walled towns, without lighting, drainage, or police; the life of countrymen who took their goods to market over miry roads impassable half the year for any wheeled vehicle. As to the English poets whom we have passed in review, from Coleridge to Swinburne, not one of them joined the Catholic Church; and most of them found romantic literary tastes quite consistent with varying shades of political liberalism and theological heterodoxy. THE ANGLO-CATHOLIC MOVEMENT.--Still even in England, the mediaeval revival in art and letters was not altogether without influence on practice and belief in other spheres of thought. Thus the Oxford Tractarians of 1833 correspond somewhat to the throne-and-altar party in Germany. At Newcastle in 1845, William Bell Scott visited a painted-glass manufactory where he found his friend, Francis Oliphant--afterwards husband of Margaret Oliphant, the novelist--engaged as a designer. He describes Oliphant as no artist by nature, but a man of pietistic feelings who had "thrown himself into the Gothic revival which was, under the Oxford movement, threatening to become a serious antagonist to our present freedom from clerical domination." Scott adds that the master of this glass-making establishment was an uncultivated tradesman, who yet had the business shrewdness to take advantage of "the clerical and architectural proclivities of the day," and had visited and studied the French cathedrals. "These workshops were a surprise to me. Here was the Scotch Presbyterian working-artist, with a short pipe in his mouth, cursing his fate in having to elaborate continual repetitions of saints and virgins--Peter with a key as large as a spade, and a yellow plate behind his head--yet by constant drill in the groove realising the sentiment of Christian art, and at last able to express the abnegation of self, the limitless sadness and even tenderness, in every line of drapery and every twist of the lay figure." Here is one among many testimonies to the influence of the Oxford movement on the fine arts. It would be easy to call witnesses to prove the reverse--the influence of romance upon the Oxford movement. Newman[2] quotes an article contributed by him to the _British Critic_ for April, 1839, in which he had spoken of Tractarianism "as a reaction from the dry and superficial character of the religious teaching and the literature of the last generation, or century. . . . First, I mentioned the literary influence of Walter Scott, who turned men's minds to the direction of the Middle Ages. 'The general need,' I said, 'of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he reacted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles.'" Of Coleridge he spoke, in the same paper, as having laid a philosophical basis for church feelings and opinions, and of Southey and Wordsworth as "two living poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their readers in the same direction." Newman, like Ruskin, was fond of Scott's verse as well as of his prose.[3] Professor Gates has well recognised that element in romantic art which affiliates with Catholic tendencies. "Mediaevalism . . . was a distinctive note of the Romantic spirit, and, certainly, Newman was intensely alive to the beauty and the poetic charm of the life of the Middle Ages. One is sometimes tempted to describe him as a great mediaeval ecclesiastic astray in the nineteenth century and heroically striving to remodel modern life in harmony with his temperamental needs. His imagination was possessed with the romantic vision of the greatness of the Mediaeval Church--of its splendour and pomp and dignity, and of its power over the hearts and lives of its members; and the Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with this romantic ideal. . . . As Scott's imagination was fascinated with the picturesque paraphernalia of feudalism--with its jousts, and courts of love, and its coats of mail and buff-jerkins--so Newman's imagination was captivated by the gorgeous ritual and ceremonial, the art and architecture of mediaeval Christianity. . . . Newman sought to revive in the Church a mediaeval faith in its own divine mission and the intense spiritual consciousness of the Middle Ages; he aimed to restore to religion its mystical character, to exalt the sacramental system as the divinely appointed means for the salvation of souls, and to impose once more on men's imaginations the mighty spell of a hierarchical organisation, the direct representative of God in the world's affairs. . . . Both he and Scott substantially ruined themselves through their mediaevalism. Scott's luckless attempt was to place his private and family life upon a feudal basis and to give it mediaeval colour and beauty; Newman undertook a much nobler and more heroic but more intrinsically hopeless task--that of re-creating the whole English Church in harmony with mediaeval conceptions." [4] All this is most true, and yet it is easy to exaggerate the share which romantic feeling had in the Oxford movement. In his famous apostrophe to Oxford, Matthew Arnold personifies the university as a "queen of romance," an "adorable dreamer whose heart has been so romantic," "spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age," and "ever calling us nearer to . . . beauty." Newman himself was a poet, as well as one of the masters of English prose. The movement left an impress upon general literature in books like Keble's "Christian Year" (1827) and "Lyra Innocentium" (1847); in Newman's two novels, "Callista" and "Loss and Gain" (1848), and his "Verses on Various Occasions" (1867); and even found an echo in popular fiction. Grey in Hughes' "Tom Brown at Oxford" represents the Puseyite set. Miss Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe" and Shorthouse's "John Inglesant" are surcharged with High-Church sentiment. Newman said that Keble made the Church of England poetical. "The author of 'The Christian Year' found the Anglican system all but destitute of this divine element [poetry]; . . . vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; . . . the royal arms for the crucifix; huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in place of the mysterious altar; and long cathedral aisles unused, railed off, like the tombs (as they were) of what had been and was not." [5] Newman praises in "The Christian Year" what he calls its "sacramental system"; and to the unsympathetic reader it seems as though Keble saw all outdoors through a stained-glass window. The movement had its aesthetic side, and coincided with the revival of church Gothic and with the effort to make church music and ritual richer and more impressive. But, upon the whole, it was more intellectual than aesthetic, an affair of doctrine and church polity rather than of ecclesiology; while the later phase of ritualism into which it has tapered down appears to the profane to be largely a matter of upholstery, given over to people who concern themselves with the carving of lecterns and the embroidery of chasubles and altar cloths; with Lent lilies, antiphonal choirs, and what Carlyle calls the "singular old rubrics" of the English Church and the "three surplices at All-Hallowmas." Newman was, above all things, a theologian; a subtle reasoner whose relentless logic led him at last to Rome. "From the age of fifteen," he wrote, "dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion; I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery." Discussions concerning church ceremonies, liturgy, ritual, he put aside with some impatience. His own tastes were simple to asceticism. Mozley says that Newman and Hurrell Froude induced several of the Oriel fellows to discontinue the use of wine in the common room. "When I came up at Easter, 1825, one of the first standing jokes against the college all over the university was the Oriel tea-pot." [6] Dean Church testifies to the plainness of the services at St. Mary's.[7] Aubrey de Vere reports his urging Newman to make an expedition with him among the Wicklow Mountains, and the latter's "answering with a smile that life was full of work more important than the enjoyment of mountains and lakes. . . . The ecclesiastical imagination and the mountain-worshipping imagination are two very different things. Wordsworth's famous 'Tintern Abbey' describes the river Wye, etc. . . . The one thing which it did not see was the great monastic ruin; . . . and now here is this great theologian, who, when within a few miles of Glendalough Lake, will not visit it." [8] There is much gentle satire in "Loss and Gain" at the expense of the Ritualistic set in the university who were attracted principally by the external beauty of the Roman Catholic worship. One of these is Bateman, a solemn bore, who takes great interest in "candlesticks, ciboriums, faldstools, lecterns, ante-pend turns, piscinas, roodlofts, and sedilia": wears a long cassock which shows absurdly under the tails of his coat; and would tolerate no architecture but Gothic in English churches, and no music but the Gregorian. Bateman is having a chapel restored in pure fourteenth-century style and dedicated to the Royal Martyr. He is going to convert the chapel into a chantry, and has bought land about it for a cemetery, which is to be decorated with mediaeval monuments in sculpture and painting copied from the frescoes in the Campo Santo at Pisa, of which he has a portfolio full of drawings. "It will be quite sweet," he says, "to hear the vesper-bell tolling over the sullen moor every evening." Then there is White, a weak young aesthete who shocks the company by declaring: "We have no life or poetry in the Church of England; the Catholic Church alone is beautiful. You would see what I mean if you went into a foreign cathedral, or even into one of the Catholic churches in our large towns. The celebrant, deacon and sub-deacon, acolytes with lights, the incense and the chanting all combine to one end, one act of worship." White is much exercised by the question whether a sacristan should wear the short or the long cotta. But he finally marries and settles down into a fat preferment. Newman's sensitiveness to the beauty of Catholic religion is acute. "Her very being is poetry," he writes. But equally acute is his sense of the danger under which religion lies from the ministration of the arts, lest they cease to be handmaids, and "give the law to Religion." Hence he praises, from an ecclesiastical point of view, the service of the arts in their rudimental state--the rude Gothic sculpture, the simple Gregorian chant.[9] A similar indifference to the merely aesthetic aspects of Catholicism is recorded of many of Newman's associates; of Hurrell Froude, _e.g._, and of Ward. When Pugin came to Oxford in 1840 to superintend some building at Balliol, he saw folio copies of St. Buenaventura and Aquinas' "Summa Theologiae" lying on Ward's table, and exclaimed, "What an extraordinary thing that so glorious a man as Ward should be living in a room without mullions to the windows!" This being reported to Ward, he asked, "What are mullions? I never heard of them." Ward cared nothing about rood-screens and lancet windows; Newman and Faber preferred the Palladian architecture to the Gothic.[10] Pugin, on the other hand, who had been actually converted to the Roman Church through his enthusiasm for pointed architecture; and who, when asked to dinner, stipulated for Gothic puddings, for which he enclosed designs, was greatly distressed at the carelessness about such matters which he found at Oxford. A certain Dr. Cox was going to pray for the conversion of England, in an old French cope. "What is the use," asked Pugin, "of praying for the Church of England in that cope?" [11] Of the three or four hundred Anglican clergymen who went over with Newman in 1845, or some years later with Manning, on the decision in the Gorham controversy, few were influenced in any assignable degree by poetic motives. "As regards my friend's theory about my imaginative sympathies having led me astray," writes Aubrey de Vere, "I may remark that they had been repelled, not attracted, by what I thought an excess of ceremonial in the churches and elsewhere when in Italy. . . . It seemed to me too sensuous." [12] Indeed, at the outset of the movement it was not the mediaeval Church, but the primitive Church, the Church of patristic discipline and doctrine, that appealed to the Tractarians. It was the Anglican Church of the seventeenth century, the Church of Andrewes and Herbert and Ken, to which Keble sought to restore the "beauty of holiness"; and those of the Oxford party who remained within the establishment continued true to this ideal. "The Christian Year" is the genuine descendant of George Herbert's "Temple" (1632). What impressed Newman's imagination in the Roman Catholic Church was not so much the romantic beauty of its rites and observances as its imposing unity and authority. He wanted an authoritative standard in matters of belief, a faith which had been held _semper et ubique et ab omnibus_. The English Church was an Elizabethan compromise. It was Erastian, a creature of the state, threatened by the Reform Bill of 1832, threatened by every liberal wind of opinion. The Thirty-nine Articles meant this to one man and that to another, and there was no court of final appeal to say what they meant. Newman was a convert not of his imagination, but of his longing for consistency and his desire to believe. There is nothing romantic in either temper or style about Newman's poems, all of which are devotional in subject, and one of which--"The Pillar of the Cloud" ("Lead, Kindly Light") (1833)--is a favourite hymn in most Protestant communions. The most ambitious of these is "The Dream of Gerontius," a sort of mystery play which Sir Henry Taylor used to compare with the "Divine Comedy." Indeed, none but Dante has more poignantly expressed the purgatorial passion, the desire for pain, which makes the spirits in the flames of purification unwilling to intermit their torments even for a moment. The "happy, suffering soul" of Gerontius lies before the throne of the Crucified and sings: "Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be, And there in hope the lone night-watches keep Told out for me." [13] Some dozen years before the "Tracts for the Times" began to appear at Oxford, a sporadic case of conversion at the sister university offers a closer analogy with the catholicising process among the German romantics. Kenelm Henry Digby, who took his degree at Trinity College in 1819, and devoted himself to the study of mediaeval antiquities and scholastic philosophy, was actually led into the Catholic fold by his enthusiasm for the chivalry romances, as Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture. His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in 1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus," "Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of the Rhine." Like Fouqué, Digby was inspired by the ideal of knighthood, but he emphasises not so much the gallantry of the knight-errant as his religious character as the champion of Holy Church. The book is, loosely speaking, an English "Genié du Christianisme," less brilliantly rhetorical than Chateaubriand, but more sincerely devout. It is poetic and descriptive rather than polemical, though the author constantly expresses his dislike of modern civilisation, and complains with Burke that this is an age of sophists, calculators, and economists. He quotes profusely from German and French reactionaries, like Busching,[14] Fritz Stolberg, Görres, Friedrich Schlegel, Lamennais, and Joseph de Maistre, and illustrates his topic at every turn from mediaeval chronicles, legendaries, romances, and manuals of chivalry; from the lives of Charlemagne, St. Louis, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Chevalier Bayard, St. Anselm, King Rene, etc., and above all, from the "Morte Darthur." He defends the Crusades, the Templars, and the monastic orders against such historians as Muller, Sismondi, and Hume; is very contemptuous of the Protestant concessions of Bishop Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance";[15] and, in short, fights a brave battle against the artillery of "the moderns" with weapons borrowed from "the armoury of the invincible knights of old." The book is learned, though unsystematic and discursive, but its most interesting feature is its curiously personal note, its pure spirit of honour and Catholic piety. The enthusiasm of the author extends itself from the institutes of chivalry and the Church to the social and political constitution of the Middle Ages. He is anti-democratic as well as anti-Protestant; upholds monarchy, nobility, the interference of the popes in the affairs of kingdoms, and praises the times when the doctrines of legislation and government all over Europe rested on the foundations of the Church. A few paragraphs from "The Broad Stone of Honour" will illustrate the author's entrance into the Church through the door of beauty, and his identification of romantic art with "the art Catholic." "It is much to be lamented," he writes, "that the acquaintance of the English reader with the characters and events of the Middle Ages should, for the most part, be derived from the writings of men who were either infidels, or who wrote on every subject connected with religion, with the feelings and opinions of Scotch Presbyterian preachers of the last century." [16] "A distinguishing characteristic of everything belonging to the early and Middle Ages of Christianity is the picturesque. Those who now struggle to cultivate the fine arts are obliged to have recourse to the despised, and almost forgotten, houses, towns, and dresses of this period. As soon as men renounced the philosophy of the Church, it was inevitable that their taste, that the form of objects under their control, should change with their religion; for architects had no longer to provide for the love of solitude, of meditation between sombre pillars, of modesty in apartments with the lancet-casement. They were not to study duration and solidity in an age when men were taught to regard the present as their only concern. When nothing but exact knowledge was sought, the undefined sombre arches were to be removed to make way for lines which would proclaim their brevity, and for a blaze of light which might correspond with the mind of those who rejected every proposition that led beyond the reach of the senses. . . . So completely is it beyond the skill of the painter or the poet to render bearable the productions of the moderns, . . . and so fast are the poor neglected works of Christian antiquity falling to ruin, that it is hard to conceive how the fine arts can be cultivated after another century has elapsed; for when children are taught in infant schools to love accounts from their cradle, and to study political economy before they have heard of the Red Cross Knight or the Wild Hunter, the manner and taste of such an age will smother the sparks of nature." [17] The Church summoned all natural beauty to the ministry of religion. "Flowers bloomed on the altars; men could behold the blue heaven through those tall, narrow-pointed eastern windows of the Gothic choir as they sat at vespers. . . . The cloud of incense breathed a sweet perfume; the voice of youth was tuned to angelic hymns; and the golden sun of the morning, shining through the coloured pane, cast its purple or its verdant beam on the embroidered vestments and marble pavement." [18] Or read the extended rhapsody which closes the first volume, where, to counteract the attractions of classic lands, the author passes in long review the sites and monuments of romance in England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France. Aubrey de Vere says that nothing had been so "impressive, suggestive, and spiritually helpful" to him as Newman's "Lectures on Anglican Difficulties" (1850), "with the exception of the 'Divina Commedia' and Kenelm Digby's wholly uncontroversial 'Mores Catholici'" (1831-40). THE STUDY OF MEDIAEVAL ART.--The correlation of romantic poetry, Catholic worship, and mediaeval art has been indicated in the chapter upon the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as in the foregoing section of the present chapter. But the three departments have other tangential points which should not pass without some further mention. The revival of Gothic architecture which began with Horace Walpole[19] went on in an unintelligent way through the eighteenth century. One of the queerest monuments of this new taste--a successor on a larger scale to Strawberry Hill--was Fonthill Abbey, near Salisbury, that prodigious folly to which Beckford, the eccentric author of "Vathek," devoted a great share of his almost fabulous wealth. It was begun in 1796, took nearly thirty years in building, employed at one time four hundred and sixty men, and cost over 273,000 pounds. Its most conspicuous feature was an octagonal tower 278 feet high, so ill constructed that it shortly tumbled down into a heap of ruins.[20] The growing taste for mediaeval architecture was powerfully reinforced by the popularity of Walter Scott's writings. But Abbotsford is evidence enough of the superficiality of his own knowledge of the art; and during the first half of the nineteenth century, Gothic design was applied not to churches, but to the more ambitious classes of domestic architecture. The country houses of the nobility and landed gentry were largely built or rebuilt in what was known as the castellated style.[21] Meanwhile a truer understanding of the principles of pointed architecture was being helped by the publication of archaeological works like Britton's "Cathedral Antiquities" (1814-35), Milner's "Treatise on Ecclesiastical Architecture" (1811), and Rickman's "Ancient Examples of Gothic Architecture" (1819). The parts of individual buildings, such as Westminster Abbey and Lincoln Cathedral, were carefully studied and illustrated with plans and sections drawn to scale, and measurement was substituted for guesswork. But the real restorer of ecclesiastical Gothic in England was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an enthusiast, nay, a fanatic, in the cause; whose "Contrasts" (1836) is not only a landmark in the history of the revival of mediaeval art, but a most instructive illustration of the manner in which an aesthetic admiration of the Middle Ages has sometimes involved an acceptance of their religious beliefs and social principles. Three generations of this family are associated with the rise of modern Gothic. The elder Pugin (Augustus Charles) was a French _emigré_ who came to England during the Revolution, and gained much reputation as an architectural draughtsman, publishing, among other things, "Specimens of Gothic Architecture," in 1821. The son of A. W. N. Pugin, Edward Welby (1834-73), also carried on his father's work as a practical architect and a writer. Pugin joined the Roman Catholic Church just about the time when the "Tracts for the Times" began to be issued. His "Contrasts: or a Parallel between the Architecture of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" is fiercely polemical, and displays all the zeal of a fresh convert. In the preface to the second edition he says that "when this work was first brought out [1836], the very name of Christian art was almost unknown"; and he affirms, in a footnote, that in the whole of the national museum, "there is not even one room, one _shelf_, devoted to the exquisite productions of the Middle Ages." The book is a jeremiad over the condition to which the cathedrals and other remains of English ecclesiastical architecture had been reduced by the successive spoliations and mutilations in the times of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Cromwell, and by the "vile" restorations of later days. It maintains the thesis that pointed architecture is not only vastly superior artistically, but that it is the only style appropriate to Christian churches; "in it alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied and its practices illustrated." Pugin denounces alike the Renaissance and the Reformation, "those two monsters, revived Paganism and Protestantism." There is no chance, he thinks, for a successful revival of Gothic except in a return to Catholic faith. "The mechanical part of Gothic architecture is pretty well understood, but it is the principles which influenced ancient compositions, and the soul which appears in all the former works, which is so lamentably deficient. . . . 'Tis they alone that can restore pointed architecture to its former glorious state; without it all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy." He points out the want of sympathy between "these vast edifices" and the Protestant worship, which might as well be carried on in a barn or conventicle or square meeting-house. Hence, the nave has been blocked up with pews, the choir or transept partitioned off to serve as a parish church, roodloft and chancel screen removed, the altar displaced by a table, and the sedilia scattered about in odd corners. The contrast between old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great deal of satirical humour. There is, _e.g._, a Catholic town in 1440, rich with its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, and the spires and towers of St. Marie's Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen's Cross, St. Cuthbert's Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabled houses of the burgesses. Over against it is the picture of the same town in 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, Wesleyan Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hall of Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrial community. Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. Mary Overies, destroyed in 1838. The door stands invitingly open, showing the noble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there over the unobstructed pavement. Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, with a printed notice nailed upon it: "Divine Service on Sundays. Evening lecture." A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in painted deal and plain as a pike-staff. But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the "bastard pagan style" introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion. English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign churches. "I do not think," he concludes, "the architecture of our English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic hierarchy. . . . It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . . Indeed, such is the total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than the actual service of half the chapels in England." In short, Pugin's Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by his professional feelings. His reverence was given to the mediaeval Church, not to her--aesthetically--degenerate daughter; and it extended to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages. "Men must learn," he wrote, "that the period hitherto called dark and ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith." In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin. He did not like St. Peter's at Rome, and said: "If those students who journey to Italy to study art would follow the steps of the great Overbeck,[22] . . . they would indeed derive inestimable benefit. Italian art of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries is the beau ideal of Christian purity, and its imitation cannot be too strongly inculcated; but when it forsook its pure, mystical, and ancient types, to follow those of sensual Paganism, it sunk to a fearful state of degradation." As a practising architect Pugin naturally received and executed many commissions for Catholic churches. But the Catholic Church in England did much less, even in proportion to its resources, than the Anglican establishment towards promoting the Gothic revival. Eastlake says that Pugin's "strength as an artist lay in the design of ornamental detail"; and that he helped importantly in the revival of the mediaeval taste in stained glass, metal work, furniture, carpets, and paper-hangings. Several of his works have to do with various departments of ecclesiology; chancel-screens, roodlofts, church ornaments, symbols and costumes, and the like. But the only one that need here be mentioned is the once very influential "True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture" (1841). This revival of ecclesiastical Gothic fell in with the reform of Anglican ritual, which was one of the features or sequences of the Oxford movement, and the two tendencies afforded each other mutual support. Evidence of a newly awakened interest in mediaeval art is furnished by a number of works of a more systematic character which appeared about the middle of the century, dealing not only with architecture, but with the early schools of sculpture and painting. One of these was "Sketches of the History of Christian Art" (3 vols., 1847) by Alexander William Crawford Lindsay, twenty-fifth Earl of Crawford. In the preface to the reprint of this book in 1885, Lady Crawford speaks of it as a pioneer in an "early time of unawakened interest." Ruskin refers to it repeatedly--always with respect--and acknowledges in "Praeterita" that Lord Lindsay knew a great deal more about Italian art than he himself did. The book reviews in detail the works of Christian builders, sculptors and painters, both in Italy and north of the Alps, from the time of the Roman catacombs and basilicas down to the Renaissance. It gives likewise a history of Christian mythology, iconography and symbolism; all that great body of popular beliefs about angels, devils, saints, martyrs, anchorites, miracles, etc., which Protestant iconoclasm and the pagan spirit of the _cinque-cento_ had long ago swept into the dust-bin as sheer idolatry and superstition. Lord Lindsay's treatment of these matters is reverential, though his own Protestantism is proof against their charm. His tone is moderate; he has no quarrel with the Renaissance, and professes respect for classical art, which seems to him, however, on a lower spiritual plane than the Christian. He remarks that all mediaeval art was religious; the only concession to the secular being found in the illuminations of some of the chivalry romances. Gothic architecture was the expression of Teutonic genius, which is realistic and stands for the reason, while Italian sacred painting was idealistic and stands for the imagination. In the most perfect art, as in the highest type of religion, reason and imagination are in balance. Hence, the influence of Van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer on Italian painters was wholesome; and the Reformation, the work of the reasoning Teutonic mind, is not to be condemned. Reason is to blame only when it goes too far and extinguishes imagination.[23] "The sympathies of the North, or of the Teutonic race, are with Death, as those of the Southern, or classic, are with Life. . . . The exquisitely beautiful allegorical tale of 'Sintram and His Companions' by La Motte Fouqué, was founded on the 'Knight and Death' of Albert Dürer, and I cannot but think that Milton had the 'Melancholy' in his remembrance while writing 'Il Penseroso.'" [24] The author thinks that, whatever may be true of Gothic architecture--an art less national than ecclesiastical--"sculpture and painting, on the one hand, and the spirit of chivalry on the other, have usually flourished in an inverse ratio one to the other, and it is not therefore in England, France, or Spain, but among the free cities of Italy and Germany that we must look for their rise." [25] I give these conclusions--so opposite to those of Catholic mediaevalists like Digby and Pugin--because they illustrate the temper of Lindsay's book. One more quotation I will venture to add for its agreement with Uvedale Price's definition of the picturesque:[26] "The picturesque in art answers to the romantic in poetry; both stand opposed to the classic or formal school--both may be defined as the triumph of nature over art, luxuriating in the decay, not of her elemental and ever-lasting beauty, but of the bonds by which she had been enthralled by man. It is only in ruin that a building of pure architecture, whether Greek or Gothic, becomes picturesque." [27] Lord Lindsay's "Sketches" contained no illustrations. Mrs. Jameson's very popular series on "Sacred and Legendary Art" was profusely embellished with wood-cuts and etchings. The first number of the series, "Legends of the Saints and Martyrs," was begun in 1842, but issued only in 1848. "Legends of the Monastic Orders" followed in 1850; "Legends of the Madonna" in 1852; and the "History of Our Lord" (completed by Lady Eastlake) in 1860. Mrs. Jameson had an imperfect knowledge of technique, and her work was descriptive rather than critical. But it probably did more to enlist the interest of the general reader in Christian art than Lord Lindsay's more learned volumes; or possibly even than the brilliant but puzzling rhetoric of Ruskin. With Pugin's "Contrasts" began the "Battle of the Styles." This was soon decided in Pugin's favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were concerned. Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion. The Cambridge Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, _The Ecclesiologist_, in 1841. But the first national triumph for secular Gothic was won when Barry's design for the new houses of Parliament was selected from among ninety-seven competing plans. The corner-stone was laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on, was furnished by Pugin. It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite painting. The masterly analysis of "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice" (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they saw it. Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on English building. Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance to the architecture of the period. But, in general, working architects were rather contemptuous of Ruskin's fine-spun theories, which they ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism. Ruskin's adhesion to Gothic was without compromise. It was "not only the best, but the _only rational_ architecture." "I plead for the introduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, not merely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as come daily to our hands." [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture is essentially base; the study of classical literature is "pestilent"; and most modern building is the fruit of "the Renaissance poison tree." "If . . . any of my readers should determine . . . to set themselves to the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . . The whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious. Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age." [29] Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine, Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacred painters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino. He thought that whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came from their training in the old religious school, not from the new science of the Renaissance. "Raphael painted best when he knew least." He deplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitter dissensions of the Reformation. But he sorrowfully acknowledged the corruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism. Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively for ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested. On the contrary, he advised its reintroduction, especially in domestic building. "Most readers . . . abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style. . . . The High Church and Romanist parties . . . have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the good architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so--a piece of absurdity. . . . Wherever Christian Church architecture has been good and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal style. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to perfection except when they were used for both." [30] The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child he read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. The freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal," and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott." Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of mediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right," he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are "piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe." If Scott was unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek; and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a reproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence of modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best romances, of 'Ivanhoe,' or 'Marmion,' or 'The Crusaders,' or 'The Lady of the Lake,' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and costume." [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as they below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heart of Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic ideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood in their own strength. . . . The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream." [34] For it cannot be too often repeated that the romance is not in the Middle Ages themselves, but in their strangeness to our imagination. The closer one gets to them, the less romantic they appear. MEDIEVAL SOCIAL IDEALS.--It is obvious how a fondness for the Middle Ages, in a man of Scott's conservative temper, might confirm him in his attachment to high Tory principles and to an aristocratic-feudal ideal of society; or how, in an enthusiastic artist like Pugin, and a gentleman of high-strung chivalric spirit like Sir Kenelm Digby, it might even lead to an adoption of the whole mediaeval religious system. But it is not so easy, at first sight, to understand why the same thing should have conducted Ruskin and William Morris to opinions that were more "advanced" than those of the most advanced Liberal. Orthodox economists looked upon the theories put forward in Ruskin's "Unto this Last" (1860), "Munera Pulveris" (1862-63), and "Fors Clavigera" (1871-84), as the eccentricities of a distinguished art critic, disporting himself in unfamiliar fields of thought. And when in 1883 the poet of "The Earthly Paradise" joined the Democratic Federation, and subsequently the Socialist League, and was arrested and fined one shilling and costs for addressing open-air meetings, obstructing public highways, and striking policemen, amusement was mingled with disapproval. What does this dreamer of dreams and charming decorative artist in a London police court? But Socialism, though appearing on the face of it the most modern of doctrines, is in a sense reactionary, like Catholicism, or knight-errantry, or Gothic architecture. That is, those who protest against the individualism of the existing social order are wont to contrast it unfavourably with the principle of association which is found everywhere in the Middle Ages. No mediaeval man was free or independent; all men were members one of another. The feudal system itself was an elaborate network of interdependent rights and obligations, in which service was given in return for protection. The vassal did homage to his lord--became his _homme_ or man--and his lord was bound to take care of him. In theory, at least, every serf was entitled to a living. In theory, too, the Church embraced all Christendom. None save Jews were outside it or could get outside it, except by excommunication; which was the most terrible of penalties, because it cut a man off from all spiritual human fellowship. The same principle of co-operation prevailed in mediaeval industry and commerce, organised into guilds of craftsmen and trading corporations, which fixed the prices and quality of goods, the number of apprentices allowed, etc. The manufacturer was not a capitalist, but simply a master workman. Government was paternal and interfered continually with the freedom of contract and the rights of the individual. Here was where Carlyle took issue with modern Liberalism, which proclaims that the best government is that which governs least. According to the _laissez-faire_ doctrine, he said, the work of a government is not that of a father, but of an active parish constable. The duty of a government is to govern, but this theory makes it its duty to refrain from governing. Not liberty is good for men, but obedience and stern discipline under wise rulers, heroes, and heaven-sent kings. Carlyle took no romantic view of the Middle Ages. He is rather contemptuous of Scott's mediaeval-picturesque,[35] and his Scotch Calvinism burns fiercely against the would-be restorers of mediaeval religious formularies and the mummeries of "the old Pope of Rome"--a ghastly survival of a dead creed.[36] He said that Newman had the brain of a good-sized rabbit. But in this matter of collectivism versus individualism, Carlyle was with the Middle Ages. "For those were rugged, stalwart ages. . . . Gurth, born thrall of Cedric, it is like, got cuffs as often as pork-parings; but Gurth did belong to Cedric; no human creature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his way into Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire_. . . . That Feudal Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. . . . It was a Land Aristocracy; it managed the Governing of this English People, and had the reaping of the Soil of England in return. . . . Soldiering, Police and Judging, Church-Extension, nay, real Government and Guidance, all this was actually _done_ by the Holders of Land in return for their Land. How much of it is now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens! '_Laissez faire_, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep,' is everywhere the passionate half-wise cry of this time." [37] From 1850 onwards, in which year Ruskin made Carlyle's acquaintance, the former fell under the dominion of these ideas, and began to preach a species of Aristocratic Socialism.[38] He denounced competition and profit-seeking in commerce; the factory system; the capitalistic organisation of industry. His scheme of a regenerated society, however, was by no means so democratic as that imagined by Morris in "News from Nowhere." It was a "new feudalism" with a king at the head of it and a rural nobility of "the great old families," whose relations to their tenantry are not very clearly defined.[39] Ruskin took some steps towards putting into practice his plans for a reorganisation of labour under improved conditions. "Fors Clavigera" consisted of a series of letters to workingmen, inviting them to join him in establishing a fund for rescuing English country life from the tyranny and defilement of machinery. In pursuance of this project, the St. George's Guild was formed, about 1870, Ruskin devoting to it 7,000 pounds of his own money. Trustees were chosen to administer the fund; a building was bought at Walkley, in the suburbs of Sheffield, for use as a museum; and the money subscribed was employed in promoting co-operative experiments in agriculture, manufacturing, and education. In 1848 the widespread misery among the English working class, both agricultural labourers and the operatives in cities, broke out in a startling way in the Chartist movement. Sympathy with some of the aims of this movement found literary expression in Charles Kingsley's novels, "Yeast" and "Alton Locke", in his widely circulated tract, "Cheap Clothes and Nasty"; in his letters in _Politics for the People_ over the signature "Parson Lot"; in some of his ballads like "The Three Fishers"; and in the writings of his friends, F. D. Maurice and Thomas Hughes. But the Christian Socialism of these Broad Churchmen was by no means of the mediaeval type. Kingsley was an exponent of "Muscular Christianity." He hated the asceticism and sacerdotalism of the Oxford set, and challenged the Tractarian movement with all his might.[40] Neither was this Christian Socialism of a radical nature, like Morris'. It limited itself to an endeavour to alleviate distress by an appeal to the good feeling of the upper classes; and by setting on foot trade-unions, co-operative societies, and workingmen's colleges. Kingsley himself, like Ruskin, believed in a landed gentry; and like both Ruskin and Carlyle, he defended Governor Eyre of Jamaica against the attacks of the radical press.[41] Ruskin and Morris travelled to Socialism by the pathway of art. Carlyle had early begun his complaints against the mechanical spirit of the age, and its too great reliance on machinery in all departments of thought and life.[42] But Ruskin made war on machinery for different reasons. As a lover of the beautiful, he hated its ugly processes and products. As a student of art, he mourned over the reduction of the handicraftsman to a slave of the machine. Factories had poisoned the English sky with their smoke, and blackened English soil and polluted English rivers with their refuse. The railroad had spoiled Venice and vulgarised Switzerland. He would like to tear up all the railroads in Wales and most of those in England, and pull down the city of New York. He could not live in America two months--a country without castles. Modern architecture, modern dress, modern manufactures, modern civilisation, were all utterly hideous. Worst of all was the effect on the workman, condemned by competitive commercialism to turn out cheap goods, condemned by division of labour to spend his life in making the eighteenth part of a pin. Work without art, said Ruskin, is brutalising. To take pleasure in his work, said Morris, is the workman's best inducement to labour and his truest reward. In the Middle Ages every artisan was an artist; the art of the Middle Ages was popular art. Now that the designer and the handicraftsman are separate persons, the work of the former is unreal, and of the latter merely mechanical. This point of view is eloquently stated in that chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in "The Stones of Venice," which made so deep an impression on Morris when he was in residence at Oxford.[43] "It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth and against nobility is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill-fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. . . . We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men--divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. . . . And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all, in very deed, for this--that we manufacture everything there except men. . . . And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only . . . by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman." [44] Morris' contributions to the literature of Socialism include, besides his romance, "News from Nowhere," two volumes of verse, "Poems by the Way" (1891)and "The Dream of John Ball"; together with "Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome" (1893), an historical sketch of the subject written in collaboration with Mr. E. Belfort Bax. Mackail also describes a satirical interlude, entitled "The Tables Turned, or Nupkins Awakened," which was acted thrice at Farringden Road in the autumn of 1887--a Socialistic farce in the form of a mediaeval miracle play--a conjunction quite typical of the playwright's political principles and literary preferences. Morris' ideal society, unlike Ruskin's, included no feudal elements; there was no room in it for kings, or nobles, or great cities, or a centralised government. It was primitive Teutonic rather than mediaeval; resembling the communal type described in "The House of the Wolfings." There were to be no more classes--no rich or poor. To ordinary Socialists the reform means a fairer distribution of the joint product of capital and labour; higher wages for the workingman, shorter hours, better food and more of it, better clothes, better houses, more amusements--in short, "beer and skittles" in reasonable amount. The Socialism of Ruskin and Morris was an outcome of their aesthetic feeling. They liked to imagine the work people of the future as an intelligent and artistic body of handicraftsmen, living in pretty Gothic cottages among gardens of their own, scattered all over England in small rural towns or villages, and joyfully engaged in making sound and beautiful objects of use, tools, furniture, woven goods, etc. To the followers of Mr. Hyndman these motives, if not these aims, must have seemed somewhat unpractical. And in reading "Fors Clavigera," one sometimes has a difficulty in understanding just what sort of person Ruskin imagined the British workman to be. THE NEO-ROMANTICISTS.--The literature of each new generation is apt to be partly an imitation of the last, and partly a reaction against it. The impulse first given by Rossetti was communicated, through Morris and Swinburne, to a group of younger poets whom Mr. Stedman distinguishes as "Neo-Romanticists." [45] The most noteworthy among these are probably Arthur O'Shaughnessy,[46] John Payne,[47] and Théophile Marzials;[48] though mention (want of space forbids more) should also be made of George Augustus Simcox, whose "Poems and Romances" (1869) are in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. The work of each of these has pronounced individuality; yet, as a whole, it reminds one continually now of Rossetti, now of Morris, and again of Swinburne; not infrequently, too, of Keats or Leigh Hunt, but never of the older romanticism, never of Scott nor even of Coleridge or Tennyson. The reminder comes sometimes through a turn of phrase or the trick of the verse; but more insistently in the choice of subject and the entire attitude of the poet towards art and life, an attitude that may be vaguely described as "aesthetic." Even more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest representatives is seen to be taking a French direction. They show the influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools of "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion, the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (_serres chaudes_); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the impression of this neo-romantic poetry. Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents. His "Gallery of Pigeons" is inscribed to the modern Provençal poet Aubanel, and introduced by a French sonnet. O'Shaughnessy "was half a Frenchman in his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and the younger school of French poets. O'Shaughnessy and Payne were intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other. In 1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne, and William Bell Scott. O'Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical gift--a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the second series of his "Golden Treasury" (1897), a greater number of selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson: a larger space than he gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively little of O'Shaughnessy's work belongs to the department of mediaeval-romantic. His "Lays of France," five in number, are founded upon the _lais_ of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth century whose little fable, "Du coq et du werpil," Chaucer expanded into his "Nonne Prestes Tale." O'Shaughnessy's versions are not so much paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie's stories merely in outline. The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the narrative frequently suggests "The Earthly Paradise" or "The Story of Rimini." The most remarkable of these pieces is "Chaitivel," in which the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the bridegroom for possession of her soul. The song which the lady sings to the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the cleaving of "soul's love" to "body's love," the tenderness intense that pierces the "wormy circumstance" of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead be dead, which was noted in Keats' "Isabella": "Hath any loved you well, down there, Summer or winter through? Down there, have you found any fair Laid in the grave with you? Is death's long kiss a richer kiss Than mine was wont to be-- Or have you gone to some far bliss And quite forgotten me?" Of similar inspiration, but more pictorially and externally Gothic, are such tales as "The Building of the Dream" and "Sir Floris" in Payne's volume, "The Masque of Shadows." The former of these, introduced by a quotation from Jehan du Mestre, is the history of a certain squire of Poitou, who devotes himself to necromancy and discovers a spell in an old Greek manuscript, whereby, having shod his horse with gold and ridden seven days into the west, he comes to the enchanted land of Dame Venus and dwells with her a season. But the bliss is insupportable by a mortal, and he returns to his home and dies. The poem has analogies with "The Earthly Paradise" and the Tannhäuser legend. The ancient city of Poitou, where the action begins, is elaborately described, with its "lazy grace of old romance"; "Fair was the place and old Beyond the memory of man, with roofs Tall-peak'd and hung with woofs Of dainty stone-work, jewell'd with the grace Of casements, in the face Of the white gables inlaid, in all hues Of lovely reds and blues. At every corner of the winding ways A carven saint did gaze, With mild sweet eyes, upon the quiet town, From niche and shrine of brown; And many an angel, graven for a charm To save the folk from harm Of evil sprites, stood sentinel above High pinnacle and roof." "Sir Floris" is an allegorical romaunt founded on a passage in "Le Violier des Histoires Provenciaux." The dedication, to the author of "Lohengrin," praises Wolfram von Eschenbach, the poet of "Parzival," as "the sweetest of all bards." Sir Floris, obeying a voice heard in sleep, followed a white dove to an enchanted garden, where he slew seven monsters, symbolic of the seven deadly sins; from whose blood sprang up the lily of chastity, the rose of love, the violet of humility, the clematis of content, the marigold of largesse, the mystic marguerite, and the holy vervain "that purgeth earth's desire." Sir Galahad then carries him in a magic boat to the Orient city of Sarras, where the Grail is enshrined and guarded by a company of virgin knights, Percival, Lohengrin, Titurel, and Bors. Sir Floris sees the sacred chalice--a single emerald--lays his nosegay upon the altar, witnesses the mystery of the eucharist, and is kissed upon the mouth by Christ. This poet is fond of introducing old French words "to make his English sweet upon his tongue"; _accueillade_, _valiantise_, _faineant_, _allegresse_, _gentilesse_, _forte et dure_, and occasionally a phrase like _dieu vous doint felicité_. Payne's ballads are less characteristic.[51] Perhaps the most successful of them is "The Rime of Redemption"--in "The Masque of Shadows" volume. Sir Loibich's love has died in her sins, and he sits by the fire in bitter repentance. He hears the voice of her spirit outside in the moonlight, and together they ride through the night on a black steed, first to Fairyland, then to Purgatory, and then to the gate of Heaven. Each of these in turn is offered him, but he rejects them all-- "With thee in hell, I choose to dwell"-- and thereby works her redemption. The wild night ride has an obvious resemblance to "Lenore": "The wind screams past; they ride so fast, Like troops of souls in pain The snowdrifts spin, but none may win To rest upon the twain." Very different from these, and indeed with no pretensions to the formal peculiarities of popular minstrelsy, is O'Shaughnessy's weird ballad "Bisclaveret," [52] suggested by the superstition concerning were-wolves: "The splendid fearful herds that stray By midnight"-- "The multitudinous campaign Of hosts not yet made fast in Hell." _Bisclaveret_ is the Breton word for _loup garou_; and the poem is headed with a caption to this effect from the "Lais" of Marie. The wild, mystical beauty of which the Celtic imagination holds the secret is visible in this lyrist; but it would perhaps be going too far to attribute his interest in the work of Marie de France to a native sympathy with the song spirit of that other great branch of the Celtic race, the ancient Cymry. Payne's volume of sonnets, "Intaglios" (a title perhaps prompted by the chiselled workmanship of Gautier's "Emaux et Camées") bears the clearest marks of Rossetti's influence--or of the influence of Dante through Rossetti. The inscription poem is to Dante, and the series named "Madonna dei Sogni" is particularly full of the imagery and sentiment of the "Purgatorio" and the "Vita Nuova." Several of the sonnets in the collection are written for pictures, like Rossetti's. Two are on Spenserian subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one, "Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's work as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the "Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and the poems of François Villon, all made for the Villon Society. Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all this school; but it is in Théophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive, verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and the decorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_ excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricities of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleached pleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with tall lilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their heads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins-- "I dreamed I was a virginal-- The gilt one of Saint Cecily's." The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles, rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at her broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleeps in the northern tower where "Above all tracery, carven flower, And grim gurgoil is her bower-window"; and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice, "And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight," and higher still, the banderolle flutters "At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak." In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother's chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody: "They chase them each, below, above,-- Half madden'd by their minstrelsy,-- Thro' garths of crimson gladioles; And, shimmering soft like damoisels, The angels swarm in glimmering shoals, And pin them to their aureoles, And mimick back their ritournels." This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known verses in _Punch_: "Glad lady mine, that glitterest In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn; Canst tell me whether is bitterest, The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?" This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours and all the rest of the picturesque furniture grew to be a burden. The artistic movement had invaded dress and upholstery, and Pre-Raphaelitism tapered down into aestheticism, domestic art, and the wearing of sunflowers. Du Maurier became its satirist; Bunthorn and Postlethwaite presented it to the philistine understanding in a grotesque mixture of caricature and quackery. THE REACTION.--Literary epochs overlap at the edges, and contrasting literary modes coexist. There was some romantic poetry written in Pope's time; and in the very heat and fury of romantic predominance, Landor kept a cool chamber apart, where incense was burned to the ancient gods.[53] But it is the master current which gives tinge and direction to lesser confluents; and romanticism may be said to have had everything its own way down to the middle of the century. Then reaction set in and the stream of romantic tendency ceased to spread itself over the whole literary territory, but flowed on in the narrower and deeper channels of Pre-Raphaelitism and its allied movements. This reaction expressed itself in different ways, of which it will be sufficient here to mention three: realistic fiction, classical criticism, and the Queen Anne revival. The leading literary form of the past fifty years has been the novel of real life. The failure of "Les Burgraves" in 1843 not more surely signalised the end of French romanticism, than the appearance of "Vanity Fair" in 1848 announced that in England, too, the reign of romance was over. Classicism had given way before romanticism, and now romanticism in turn was yielding to realism. Realism sets itself against that desire of escape from actual conditions into an ideal world, which is a note of the romantic spirit in general; and consequently it refuses to find the past any more interesting than the present, and has no use for the Middle Ages. The temperature, too, had cooled; not quite down to the Augustan grade, yet to a point considerably below the fever heat registered by the emotional thermometer of the late Georgian era. Byron's contemporaries were shocked by his wickedness and dazzled by his genius. They remonstrated admiringly with him; young ladies wept over his poetry and prayed for the poet's conversion. But young university men of Thackeray's time discovered that Byron was a _poseur_; Thackeray himself describes him as "a big, sulky dandy." "The Sorrows of Werther," which made people cry in the eighteenth century, made Thackeray laugh; and he summed it up in a doggerel ballad: "Charlotte was a married woman And a moral man was Werther, And for nothing in creation Would do anything to hurt her." * * * * * "Charlotte, having seen his body Borne before her on a shutter, Like a well-conducted woman, Went on cutting bread and butter." Mr. Howells in Venice sneers at Byron's theatrical habit of riding horseback on the Lido in "conspicuous solitude," as recorded in "Julian and Maddalo." He notices the local traditions about Byron--a window from which one of his mistresses was said to have thrown herself into the canal, etc.--and confesses that these matters interest him very little. As to the Walter Scott kind of romance, we know what Mr. Howells thinks of it; and have read "Rebecca and Rowena," Thackeray's travesty of "Ivanhoe." Thackeray took no print from the romantic generation; he passed it over, and went back to Addison, Fielding, Goldsmith, Swift. His masters were the English humourists of the eighteenth century. He planned a literary history of that century, a design which was carried out on other lines by his son-in-law, Leslie Stephen. If he wrote historical novels, their period was that of the Georges, and not of Richard the Lion Heart. It will not do, of course, to lay too much stress on Thackeray, whose profession was satire and whose temper purely anti-romantic. But if we turn to the leaders of the modern schools of fiction, we shall find that some of them, like George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, are even more closely realistic than Thackeray--who, says Mr. Howells, is a caricaturist, not a true realist--and of others such as Dickens and Meredith, we shall find that, in whatever way they deviate from realism as strictly understood, it is not in the direction of romance. In Matthew Arnold's critical essays we meet with a restatement of classical principles and an application of them to the literature of the last generation. There was something premature, he thinks, about the burst of creative activity in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Byron was empty of matter, Shelley incoherent, Wordsworth wanting in completeness and variety. He finds much to commend in the influence of a literary tribunal like the French Academy, which embodies that ideal of authority so dear to the classical heart. Such an institution acts as a salutary check on the lawlessness, eccentricity, self-will, and fantasticality which are the besetting intellectual sins of Englishmen. It sets the standard and gives the law. "Work done after men have reached this platform is _classical_; and that is the only work which, in the long run, can stand." For want of some such organ of educated opinion, to take care of the qualities of order, balance, measure, propriety, correctness, English men of genius like Ruskin and Carlyle, in their national impatience of prescription and routine, run on into all manner of violence, freak, and extravagance. Again, in the preface of the 1853 edition of his poems, Arnold asserts the superiority of the Greek theory of poetry to the modern. "They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them the action predominated over the expression of it; with us the expression predominates over the action. . . . We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total impression." "Faust" itself, judged as a whole, is defective. Failing a sure guide, in the confusion of the present times, the wisest course for the young writer is to fix his attention upon the best models. But Shakspere is not so safe a model as the ancients. He has not their purity of method, and his gift of expression sometimes leads him astray. "Mr. Hallam, than whom it is impossible to find a saner and more judicious critic, has had the courage (for at the present day it needs courage) to remark, how extremely and faultily difficult Shakspere's language often is." Half a century earlier it would have needed courage to question Hallam's remark; but the citation shows how thoroughly Coleridge and Hazlitt and Lamb had shifted the centre of orthodoxy in matters of Shaksperian criticism. _Now_ the presumption was against any one who ventured a doubt of Shakspere's impeccability. The romantic victory was complete. "But, I say," pursues the essayist, "that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise . . . what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the ancients." All this has a familiar look to one at all read in eighteenth-century criticism; but in 1853 it sounds very much like heresy. As an instance of the inferiority of romantic to classical method in narrative poetry, Arnold refers to Keats' "Isabella." [54] "This one short poem contains, perhaps, a greater number of happy single expressions which one could quote than all the extant tragedies of Sophocles. But the action, the story? The action in itself is an excellent one; but so feebly is it conceived by the poet, so loosely constructed, that the effect produced by it, in and for itself, is absolutely null. Let the reader, after he has finished the poem of Keats, turn to the same story in the 'Decameron'; he will then feel how pregnant and interesting the same action has become in the hands of a great artist who, above all things, delineates his object; who subordinates expression to that which it is designed to express." A sentence or two from Arnold's essay on Heinrich Heine, and we may leave this part of our subject. "Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school of Germany--Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter. . . . The mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Görres, or Brentano, or Arnim; Heine, the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet; he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, the power of modern ideas." And, finally, the oscillation of the pendulum has brought us back again for a moment to the age of gayety, and to that very Queen Anne spirit against which the serious and sentimental Thomson began the revolt. There is not only at present a renewed appreciation of what was admirable in the verse of Pope and the prose of Swift, but we discover a quaint attractiveness in the artificiality of Augustan manners, dress, and speech. Lace and brocade, powder and patch, Dutch gardens, Reynolds' portraits, Watteau fans, Dresden china, the sedan chair, the spinet, the hoop-skirt, the _talon rouge_--all these have receded so far into the perspective as to acquire picturesqueness. To Scott's generation they seemed eminently modern and prosaic, while buff jerkins and coats of mail were poetically remote. But so the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and the old-fashioned, as distinguished from the antique, begins to have a romanticness of its own. It is now some quarter century since people took to building Queen Anne cottages, and gentlemen at costume parties to treading minuets in small clothes and perukes, with ladies in high-cushioned hair and farthingales. Girl babies in large numbers were baptised Dorothy and Belinda. Book illustrators like Kate Greenaway, Edwin Abbey, and Hugh Thomson carried the mode into art. The date of the Queen Anne revival in literature and the beginnings of the _bric-à-brac_ school of verse are marked with sufficient precision by the publication of Austin Dobson's "Vignettes in Rhyme" (1873), "Proverbs in Porcelain" (1877), and the other delightful volumes of the same kind that have followed. Mr. Dobson has also published, in prose, lives of Steele, Fielding, Hogarth, and Goldsmith; "Eighteenth-Century Vignettes," and the like. But his particular ancestor among the Queen Anne wits was Matthew Prior, of whose metrical tales, epigrams, and _vers de société_ he has made a little book of selections, and whose gallantry, lightness, and tone of persiflage, just dashed with sentiment, he has reproduced with admirable spirit in his own original work. It was upon the question of Pope that romantics and classics first joined issue in the time of Warton, and that the critical battle was fought in the time of Bowles and Byron; the question of his real place in literature, and of his title to the name of poet. Mr. Dobson has a word to say for Pope, and with this our enquiries may fittingly end: "Suppose you say your Worst of POPE, declare His Jewels Paste, his Nature a Parterre, His Art but Artifice--I ask once more Where have you seen such artifice before? Where have you seen a Parterre better grac'd, Or gems that glitter like his Gems of Paste? Where can you show, among your Names of Note, So much to copy and so much to quote? And where, in Fine, in all our English Verse, A Style more trenchant and a Sense more terse?" "So I, that love the old Augustan Days Of formal courtesies and formal Phrase; That like along the finish'd Line to feel The Ruffle's Flutter and the Flash of Steel; That like my Couplet as Compact as Clear; That like my Satire sparkling tho' severe, Unmix'd with Bathos and unmarr'd by trope, I fling my Cap for Polish--and for POPE!" [55] But ground once gained in a literary movement is never wholly lost; and a reversion to an earlier type is never complete. The classicism of Matthew Arnold is not at all the classicism of the eighteenth century; Thackeray's realism is not the realism of Fielding. It is what it is, partly just because Walter Scott had written his Waverley Novels in the mean while. Apart from the works for which it is directly responsible, the romantic movement had enriched the blood of the literature, and its results are seen even in writings hostile to the romantic principles. As to the absolute value of the great romantic output of the nineteenth century, it may be at once acknowledged that, as "human documents," books which reflect contemporary life have a superior importance to the creations of the modern imagination, playing freely over times and places distant, and attractive through their distance; over ancient Greece or the Orient or the Middle Age. But that a very beautiful and quite legitimate product of literary art may spring from this contact of the present with the past, it is hoped that our history may have shown. [1] See vol. i., pp. 31-32. [2] "Apologia pro Vita Sua," p. 139. [3] "It would require the . . . magic pen of Sir Walter to catalogue and to picture . . . that most miserable procession" ("Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century," 1855; chapter, "Christianos ad Leones"). It is curious to compare this tale of the early martyrs, Newman's solitary essay in historical romance, with "Hypatia." It has the intellectual refinement of everything that came from its author's pen; and it has strong passages like the one describing the invasion of the locusts. But, upon the whole, Newman was as inferior to Kingsley as a novelist as he was superior to him in the dialectics of controversy. [4] See the entire section "Selections from Newman," by Lewis G. Gates, New York, 1895. Introduction, pp. xlvi-lix. [5] "Essays Critical and Historical" (1846). [6] "Reminiscences," Thomas Mozley, Boston, 1882. [7] "Life and Letters of Dean Church," London, 1894. [8] "Recollections of Aubrey de Vere," London, 1897. [9] "Idea of a University" (1853). See also in "Parochial and Plain Sermons" the discourse on "The Danger of Accomplishments," and that on "The Gospel Palaces." In the latter he writes, speaking of the cathedrals: "Unhappy they who, while they have eyes to admire, admire them only for their beauty's sake; . . . who regard them as works of art, not fruits of grace." [10] Cardinal Wiseman had a decided preference for Renaissance over Gothic, and the churches built under his authority were mostly in Italian styles. [11] "William George Ward and the Oxford Movement," London, 1889, pp. 153-55. [12] "Recollections," p. 309. [13] Frederick William Faber, one of the Oxford men who went over with Newman in 1845, and became Superior of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, was a religious poet of some distinction. A collection of his hymns was published in 1862. [14] "Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen." [15] See vol. i., pp. 221-26. [16] Vol. i., p. 44 (ed. 1846). [17] _Ibid._, pp. 315-16. [18] _Ibid._, p. 350. [19] See vol. i., chap. vii., "The Gothic Revival." [20] A view of Fonthill Abbey, as it appeared in 1822, is given in Fergusson's "History of Modern Architecture," vol. ii., p. 98 (third ed.). [21] For Scott's influence on Gothic see Eastlake's "Gothic Revival," pp. 112-16. A typical instance of this castellated style in America was the old New York University in Washington Square, built in the thirties. This is the "Chrysalis College" which Theodore Winthrop ridicules in "Cecil Dreeme" for its "mock-Gothic" pepper-box turrets, and "deciduous plaster." Fan traceries in plaster and window traceries in cast iron were abominations of this period. [22] _Vide supra_, p. 153. [23] "A blast from the icy jaws of Reason, the wolf Fenris of the Teutonic mind, swept one and all into the Limbo of oblivion--that sole ante-chamber spared by Protestantism in spoiling Purgatory. Perhaps this was necessary and inevitable. If we would repair the column, we must cut away the ivy that clings around the shaft, the flowers and brushwood that conceal the base; but it does not follow that, when the repairs are completed, we should isolate it in a desert,--that the flowers and brushwood should not be allowed to grow up and caress it as before" (vol. ii., p. 380, second ed.). [24] Vol. ii., p. 364, _note_; and _vide supra_, p. 152. [25] _Ibid._, p. 289. [26] _Vide supra_, p. 34. [27] _Ibid._, p. 286, _note_. [28] "Stones of Venice," vol. ii., p. 295 (American ed. 1860). [29] _Ibid._, vol. iii., p. 213. [30] _Ibid._, vol. ii., pp. 109-14. [31] See the final instalment of "Praeterita" for an extended eulogy of Scott's verse and prose. [32] "I know what white, what purple fritillaries The grassy harvest of the river-fields Above by Ensham, down by Sandford, yields." --Matthew Arnold, "Thyrsis." [33] "Stones of Venice," vol. iii., p. 211. [34] _Ibid._, vol. ii., p. 4. [35] _Vide supra_, p. 35. [36] "I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight. . . . Here is a Supreme Priest who believes God to be--what, in the name of God, _does_ he believe God to be?--and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori, etc." ("Past and Present," Book iii., chap. i.). [37] Ibid., Book iv., chap. i. [38] With Morris, too, when an Oxford undergraduate, "Carlyle's 'Past and Present,'" says his biographer, "stood alongside of 'Modern Painters' as inspired and absolute truth." [39] For a systematic exposition of Ruskin's social and political philosophy, the reader should consult "John Ruskin, Social Reformer," by J. A. Hobson, London, 1898. [40] _Vide supra_, pp. 279, 280. [41] For a number of years, beginning with 1854, Ruskin taught drawing classes in Maurice's Working Man's College. [42] See "Characteristics" and "Signs of the Times." [43] _Vide supra_, p. 321. [44] Vol. ii., chap. vi., section xv., xvi. Morris reprinted the whole chapter on the Kelmscott Press. [45] "Victorian Poets," chap. vii., section vi. [46] "An Epic of Women" (1870); "Lays of France" (1872); "Music and Moonlight" (1874); "Songs of a Worker" (1881). [47] "A Masque of Shadows" (1870): "Intaglios" (1871); "Songs of Life and Death" (1872); "Lautrec" (1878); "New Poems" (1880). [48] "A Gallery of Pigeons" (1873). [49] "Arthur O'Shaughnessy." By Louise Chandler-Moulton, Cambridge and Chicago, 1894. [50] Swinburne, as a living author, is not represented in the "Treasury." O'Shaughnessy's metrical originality is undoubted. But one of his finest lyrics, "The Fountain of Tears," has an echo of Baudelaire's American master, Edgar Poe, as well as of Swinburne; "Very peaceful the place is, and solely For piteous lamenting and sighing, And those who come living or dying Alike from their hopes and their fears: Full of cypress-like shadows the place is, And statues that cover their faces; But out of the gloom springs the holy And beautiful Fountain of Tears." [51] See especially "Sir Erwin's Questing," "The Ballad of May Margaret," "The Westward Sailing," and "The Ballad of the King's Daughter" in "Songs of Life and Death." [52] In "An Epic of Women." [53] "From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, try to alter the bournes of time and space in these respects, and to make out that the classical, whatever the failings on its part, was always in its heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little classical. . . . But such observations are only of use as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification; the great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removed in imagination without loss and confusion" ("A Short History of English Literature," Saintsbury, p. 724). [54] _Vide supra_, pp. 123-25. [55] "A Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope." THE END. BIBLIOGRAPHY. Allingham, William. "Irish Songs and Poems." London and New York, 1893. Arnim, Ludwig Joachim von. Selections in Koch's "Deutsche National Litteratur." Stuttgart, 1891. Vol. cxlvi. Arnim, Ludwig Joachim [and Brentano]. "Des Knaben Wunderhorn." Wiesbaden and Leipzig, 1874-76. 2 vols. Arnold, Matthew. "Essays in Criticism." London, 1895. ---------- "On the Study of Celtic Literature." London, 1893. ---------- Poems. London, 1877. 2 vols. Austin, Sarah. "Fragments from German Prose Writers." London, 1841. Balzac, Honoré de. "Les Contes Drolatiques." Paris, 1855. Baring-Gould, S. 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Abbot, The, 42 Aben-Humeya, 246 Addison, Jos., 95 Adonais, 120 Age of Wordsworth, The, 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 Ahnung und Gegenwart, 147 Alhambra, The, 239 Allemagne, L', 139, 141-45, 192, 208 Allingham, Wm., 258, 300, 304, 324 Alonzo the Brave, 77, 83 Alton Locke, 383 Amadis of Gaul, 236, 241 Amber Witch, The, 42, 280 Ancient Mariner, The, 48, 49, 54, 74-80 Ancient Poetry and Romance of Spain, 248 Ancient Spanish Ballads, 239, 247-49 Anima Poetae, 78 Annales Romantiques, 201 Anthony, 198 Antiquary, The, 31, 33, 178 Appreciations, 42 Ariosto, Lodovico, 91, 104, 107, 109, 122 Arme Heinrich, Der, 297 Arnim, Achim von, 134, 138, 155, 167, 192, 400 Arnold, Matthew, 255, 256, 263, 274-76, 278, 280, 356, 378, 398-400, 402 Arthur's Tomb, 305 Aslauga's Knight, 168 Aspects of Poetry, 18 At Eleusis, 342 Athenaeum, The, 134 Aucassin et Nicolete, 330 Aue, Hartmann von, 297 Aulnoy, Comtesse d', 194 Austin, Sarah, 162, 170 Ave atque Vale, 349 Bagehot, Walter, 39 Balin and Balan, 347, 348 Ballad of a Nun, 263, 264 Ballad of Dead Ladies, 298 Ballad of Judas Iscariot, 263 Ballade à la Lune, 189 Ballads and Sonnets (Rossetti), 310 Ballads of Irish Chivalry, 260 Balzac, Honoré de, 42 Bande Noire, La, 216 Banshee and Other Poems, The, 261 Banville, Théodore F. de, 388 Barante, P. A. P. B., 226 Bards of the Gael and the Gall, 260 Basso, Andrea de, 110 Baudelaire, Chas., 388, 389 Bax, E. B., 386 Beata Beatrix, 291, 303, 310 Beckford, Wm., 367 Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 86, 118, 119, 127, 262, 279, 303, 307 Berlioz, Hector, l80, 181 Bertrand, A., 175, 388 Beyle, Henri. See Stendhal. Biographia Literaria, 48, 55, 63, 88, 89 Bisclaveret, 393 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 269, 270 Blake, Wm., 99 Blessed Damozel, The, 285, 301, 308, 311, 343 Blue Closet, The, 305 Blüthenstaub, 167 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 92, 123, 124 Bowles, W. L., 55-73 Bowring, Sir Jno., 248 Boyd, Henry, 96, 97 Boyesen, H. H., 139, 159, 160, 165 Brandl, Alois, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 Brentano, Clemens, 134, 138, 141, 147, 153, 155, 167, 192, 247, 400 Bridal of Triermain, The, 6, 13, 14 Bride's Prelude, The, 300, 311 Broad Stone of Honour, The, 363-66 Brooke, Stopford A., 261 Brown, F. M., 389 Brownie of Bodsbeck, The, 253 Browning, Elizabeth B., 277, 278 Browning, Robert, 190, 221, 276, 277 Buchanan, Robert, 263 Building of the Dream, The, 390, 391 Bürger, G. A., 83, 133, 144, 159, 192, 297 Burgraves, Les, 226, 299, 396 Burke, Edmund, 145 Burne-Jones, Edward, 285, 304, 305, 309, 318-20, 322, 324, 340 Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 8, 9, 26, 53, 60, 65-73, 81, 84, 99-101, 106, 116-18, 171, 192, 195, 196, 203, 232-34, 246, 333, 396-98 Caine, T. Hall, 279, 296, 301, 302, 308 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 156, 192, 234, 247 Calidore, 129 Callista, 355, 357 Calverley, C. S., 249 Campbell, Thomas, 64-67, 71, 72 Cancionero, The, 246 Carlyle, Thos., 15, 35, 39, 92, 103, 110, 137, 149, 151, 160, 162, 164, 168, 171, 335, 381, 382, 384, 398, 400 Cary, Henry F., 97-99, 102 Castle by the Sea, The 170 Castle of Otranto, The, 4, 10 Cecil Dreeme, 367 Chaitivel, 390 Chartier, Alain, 118 Chasse du Burgrave, La, 189, 277 Chateaubriand, F. A. de, 90, 176, 191, 202-08, 225, 246, 363 Chatterton, Thos., 52, 54, 86, 119, 191, 300 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93, 315-17, 328, 329 Cheap Clothes and Nasty, 383 Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Les, 225 Childe Harold, 70, 73, 91, 99, 233 Childe Roland, 276 Christabel, 14, 27, 49, 53, 54, 75, 80-85, 126, 296 Christian Year, The, 357, 361 Christmas Carol, A, 343 Chronicle of the Cid, 236 Cinq Mars, 191 Civil Wars of Granada, The, 247 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 230, 231 Coleridge, S. T., 9, 12-14, 27, 48-63, 74-89, 97-99, 119, 126, 127, 136-38, 158, l59, 168, 291, 295-97, 314, 355 Collins, J. Churton, 257, 260 Collinson, Jas., 284, 292, 293 Colvin, Sidney, 116, 127 Conde Alarcos, 247 Congal, 260 Conquête d'Angleterre, La, 39, 226 Conservateur Littéraire, Le, 201 Conspiracy of Venice, The, 246 Contes Bizarres, 167 Contes Drolatiques, 42 Contrasts, 368-71, 375 Count Gismond, 276 Courthope, W. J., 314 Cowper, Wm., 57, 58, 68 Croker, T. C., 253, 256, 258 Cromwell, 90, 218, 221 Cross, W. L., 1, 31, 38 Dante, Alighieri, 40, 90-113, 122, 282, 290, 298-301, 310, 311, 362, 393 Dante and his Circle, 299, 303 Dante at Verona, 310 Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Sharp), 291, 292, 306 Dante's Dream, 291 Dark Ladie, The, 49, 86 Dark Rosaleen, 259 Dasent, Sir Geo., 334 Davidson, Jno., 263, 264 Day Dream, The, 265-67 Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil, The, 216 Decameron, The, 123, 124, 393, 400 Defence of Guenevere, The, 275, 296, 309, 321, 324-28 Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 101 Deirdrè, 260 Dejection: an Ode, 60, 86 Delacroix, Eugène, 177, 178 De Quincey, Thos., 38 Development of the English Novel, The, 1, 31, 38 Devéria, Eugène, 178, 195 Dialogue to the Memory of Mr. Alexander Pope, 402 Dies Irae, 5, 153 Digby, Kenelm H., 319, 363-66, 379 Discourse of the Three Unities, 133 Divine Comedy, The, 92-99, 102, 103, 105, 109, 111, 282, 290, 310, 362, 366 Djinns, The, 189 Dobell, Sydney, 262, 263 Dobson, Austin, 401, 402 Don Alvaro, 246 Dondey, Théophile, 185, 190 Don Quixote, 156, 241 Dream of Gerontius, The, 362 Dream of John Ball, The, 386 Dryden, Jno., 117, 124, 125, 269 Ducs de Bourgogne, Les, 226 Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 209 Dürer, Albrecht, 152, 153, 324, 373, 374 Earthly Paradise, The, 237, 238, 315, 321, 328-32, 334, 380, 390, 391 Ecclesiologist, The, 375 Edda, The, 334 Eden Bower, 315 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 146 Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 401 Elfinland Wud, 254, 255 Elves, The, 163 Emerson, R. W., 165, 166, 307 Endymion, 121, 126, 128, 342 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 26, 60, 63, 69, 70, 72 English Contemporary Art, 293 Enid, 270, 272 Epic and Romance, 46, 47 Epic of Women, An, 393 Epipsychidion, 101, 310 Erfindung des Rosenkranzes, Die, 153 Erl King, The, 192 Erskine, Wm., 6, 7, 13 Espronceda, José de, 246 Essay on Epic Poetry (Hayley), 95 Essays and Studies (Swinburne), 349, 351 Essays on German Literature (Boyesen), 139, 159, 160, 165 Essays on the Picturesque (Price), 34 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 85, 107, 120-22, 125-29, 307 Eve of St. John, The, 13, 22, 23 Eve of St. Mark, The, 130, 131 Faber, F. W., 360, 362 Faërie Queene, The, 120, 275 Fairies, The, 258 Fair Inez, 279 Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland, 253, 256, 258 Fairy Thorn, The, 258 Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 32 Fantasio, 226 Faust, 178, 191, 192, 238 Feast of the Poets, The, 108 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 258-60 Fichte, J. G., 137 Fin du Classicisme, La, 175 Ford, R., 246, 248 Forest Lovers, The, 230-32 Fors Clavigera, 380, 383, 387 Fountain of Tears, The, 389 Fouqué, F. de la M., 36, 139, 140, 153, 162, 167-69, 324, 363, 373 Fourteen Sonnets (Bowles), 55, 58-61 Fragments from German Prose Writers, 162 Frere, Jno. H., 248 From Shakspere to Pope, 116 Gallery of Pigeons, The, 388, 394, 395 Gareth and Lynette, 274 Gaspard de la Nuit, 388 Gates, L. E., 129, 355, 356 Gaule Poétique, La, 225 Gautier, Théophile, 167, 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, 195-98, 202, 219, 221-25, 349, 388, 393 Gebir, 235, 237 Génie du Christianisme, Le, 90, 176, 202, 203, 205-08, 363 Gentle Armour, The, 109, 110 Germ, The, 284 German Novelists (Roscoe), 167 German Poets and Poetry (Longfellow), 167 German Romance (Carlyle), 162 Gierusalemme Liberata, 91 Girlhood of Mary Virgin, The, 287, 290, 291 Glenfinlas, 13, 22 Globe, Le, 201, 202 Goblet, The, 164 Goblin Market, The, 82 Godiva, 265 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 5, 92, 133, 178, 191, 192 Golden Legend, The, 297 Golden Treasury, The, 25, 389 Golden Wings, 326-28 Goldsmith, Oliver, 95 Görres, Joseph, 138, 147, 152, 363, 400 Gosse, Edmund, 116 Götz von Berlichingen, 5, 133, 193 Gries, J. D., 156, 247 Grimm, Jakob and Wm., 154, 162, 247, 256 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 270 Hallam, Henry, 103, 399 Han d'Islande, 196, 218 Hardiknute, 3 Harold the Dauntless, 29 Hartleap Well, 19-21, 80 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 245 Hawker, R. S., 262, 263 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 162-64 Hayley, Wm., 95, 96 Haystack in the Floods, The, 326 Heart of Midlothian, The, 31, 33, 379 Heine, Heinrich, 35-38, 139-41, 144, 146-49, 152, 154-59, l6l, 170, 400 Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 164-66 Heir of Redcliffe, The, 357 Helvellyn, 15, l6 Henri III., 209 Heretic's Tragedy, The, 276 Hereward the Wake, 281 Herford, C. H., 12, 24, 34, 87, 88 Hernani, 186, 188, 195-200 Hero Worship, 103, 111, 335 Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 152, 153 Hewlett, Maurice, 230-32 Higginson, T. W., 163 Histoire du Romantisme (Gautier), 176-81, 183-85, 187, 188, 191-93, 195-98, 22l-25 Histoire du Romantisme en France (Toreinx), 202 History of France (Michelet), 226 History of Literature (Schlegel), 157 History of Spanish Literature, A (Kelly), 246, 247 History of Spanish Literature, A (Ticknor), 242, 243, 248 History of the Crusades, 226 History of the Swiss Confederation, 153 Hita, Perez de, 247 Hogg, Jas., 250-55 Holy Cross Day, 277 Homme qui Rit, L', 219, 22l Hood, Thos., 278, 279 House of Life, The, 307, 310 House of the Wolfings, The, 232, 337-39, 387 Howells, W. D., 397, 398 Howitt, Chas. and Mary, 334 Hughes, Arthur, 305-07 Hughes, Thomas., 357, 383 Hugo, François V., 222 Hugo, Victor Marie, 90, 137, 173, 176, 178-82, 188, 189, 194-96, 200, 214-21, 224, 226, 247, 277, 298, 299, 349, 388, 389 Hunt, Jas. Leigh, 49, 105-13, 118, 119, 121-23, 127, 388 Hunt, Wm. H., 283, 284, 288-90, 292, 302, 306, 307 Hurd, Richard, 364 Hutton, R. H., 40 Hylas, 331 Hymns to the Night, 164 Hypatia, 355 Hyperion (Keats), 117, 122 Hyperion (Longfellow), 172 Idylls of the King, 268-75, 303, 347 Illustrations of Tennyson, 257, 260 Il Penseroso, 374 Imitation of Spenser (Keats), 120 Inferno, 96, 99, 103, 191 Intaglios, 393 Irving, Washington, 239 Isabella, 123-25, 307, 390, 400 Ivanhoe, 31, 36, 39, 40, 43, 379, 397 Jameson, Anna, 374, 375 Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 37 Jenny, 309 John Inglesant, 357 Journal des Débats, 201 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, The, 166 Journey into the Blue Distance, 162, 163 Joyce, P. W., 260 Joyce, R. D., 260 Keats (Colvin), 116, 127 Keats, Jno., 53, 54, 82, 85, 86, 107, 113-31, 172, 228, 262, 264, 279, 287, 294, 299, 300, 306, 307, 314, 315, 342, 388, 390, 400 Kebie, Jno., 292, 357, 361 Keith of Ravelston, 262, 263 Kelly, J. F., 246, 247 Ker, W. P., 46, 47 Kilmeny, 252 Kinder und Hausmärchen, 154, 162 King Arthur's Tomb, 327 Kinges Quair, The, 306, 312 Kingsley, Chas., 279-81, 292, 355, 383, 384 King's Tragedy, The, 306, 311-13 Knaben Wunderhorn, Des, 155, 172 Knight, Death, and the Devil, The, 152, 153, 324, 373 Knight's Grave, The, 87 Kronenwächter, Die, 167 Kubia Khan, 87 Lady of Shalott, The, 365, 271, 303, 304, 324 Lady of the Lake, The, 19, 29, 251, 379 Lament for the Decline of Chivalry, 279 Lamia, 117, 129 Landor, W. S., 16, 20, 27, 53, 54, 117, 235, 237, 395 Lang, Andrew, 330 Lara, 233 Laus Veneris, 343, 349 Lay of the Brown Rosary, The, 277, 278 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 3, 5, 11, 25-28, 40, 53, 85, 252 Lays of Ancient Rome, 249 Lays of France, 389, 390 Lays of the Western Gael, 260 Leading Cases done into Equity, 249 Legends of the Cid, 246 Lenore, 83, 133, 144, 192, 297, 392 Leper, The, 349 Lesser, Creuzé de, 225 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 364 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 41 Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 226 Lewis, M. G., 77, 83, 238, 239 Liberal Movement in English Literature, The, 314 Life and Death of Jason, The, 315, 321, 328-33 Life and Letters of Dean Church, The, 358 Life of William Morris, The (Mackail), 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 Light of the World, The, 288-90 Lindsay, A. W. C., 372-74 Lines on a Bust of Dante, 105 Literary Reminiscences (De Quincey), 38 Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, 334 Literature of Europe, The (Hallam), 103 Lockhart, J. G., 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 23, 239, 247, 248 Locrine, 346 Longfellow, H. W., 105, 109, 164, 167, 170, 172, 239, 297 Lord of the Isles, The, 29, 85 Lorenzaccio, 226 Lorenzo and Isabella, 287, 291 Loss and Gain, 357, 359 Love, 86, 127 Love is Enough, 332, 333 Lovers of Gudrun, The, 330, 334-36 Lowell, J. R., 70, 82, 93, 116, 131, 165, 203, 260 Lucinde, 157 Luck of Edenhall, The, 170 Lürlei, Die, 141 Lyra Innocentium, 357 Lyrical Ballads, 18, 48, 74 Mabinogion, The, 270, 332 Macaulay, T. B., 103, 249 Mackail, W. J., 315, 320, 331, 333, 382 McLaughlin, E. T., 43 Madoc, 237 Mador of the Moor, 251 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 326 Maidens of Verdun, The, 216 Maids of Elfin-Mere, The, 258, 304, 324 Maigron, L., 33, 34, 44-46 Mallet, P. H., 107, 229 Malory, Sir Thos., 270, 272, 303, 347, 348 Manfred, 234 Mangan, J. C., 259, 260 Manzoni, Alessandro, 133 Märchen (Tieck), 162 Marie de France, 390, 393 Marienlieder, 148 Marino Faliero, 234 Marion Delorme, 200 Marmion, 6, 15, 23, 29, 40, 90, 379 Martyrs, Les, 225 Marzials, Théophile, 285, 387, 388, 394, 395 Masque of Queen Bersabe, The, 277, 344 Masque of Shadows, The, 390, 392 Meinhold, J. W., 42, 280 Mérimée, Prosper, 30, 33 Michaud, J. F., 226 Michelet, Jules, 226 Middle Ages, The (Hallam), 103 Millais, J. E., 283-85, 287, 288, 290, 291, 307 Milton, Jno., 93, 103, 269, 374 Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern (Motherwell), 253 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 21, 22, 24, 26, 243, 250, 251 Modern Painters, 6, 10, 284, 292, 294 Mores Catholici, 319, 366 Morgante Maggiore, 234 Morris, Wm., 29, 232, 237, 275, 285, 296, 304-06, 309, 314-40, 345, 350, 380, 382, 384-89 Morte Darthur (Malory), 106, 270, 273, 303, 304, 324, 347, 364 Morte d'Arthur (Tennyson), 271, 272 Motherwell, Wm., 250, 253-55 Mozley, T., 358 Müller, Johannes, 153 Munera Pulveris, 380 Muse Française, La, 201 Music Master, The, 258, 300 Musset, Alfred de, 180, 189, 198, 226, 247 Myller, H., 154 Mysteries of Udolpho, 83 Nanteuil, Célestin, 178, 223-25 Nature of Gothic, The, 321, 375, 385, 386 Nerval, Gérard de, 190-92, 196, 197, 225, 349 New Essays toward a Critical Method, 122 Newman, J. H., 292, 319, 354-62, 366, 381 News from Nowhere, 317, 319, 382, 386 Nibelungenlied, The, 154, 155, 297 Nodier, Chas., 194 Northern Antiquities, 107, 229 Northern Mythology. 334 Notre Dame de Paris, 178, 179, 221, 224 Novalis, 134, 137, 148, 152, 164-67, 172, 302, 400 Ode to a Dead Body, 110 Ode to a Grecian Urn, 117 Ode to the West Wind, 102 Odes et Ballades (Hugo), 176, 180, 189, 217 Odes et Poésies Diverses (Hugo), 214 Odyssey, The, 331 Ogier the Dane, 330, 332 Old Celtic Romances, 260 Old Masters at Florence, 316 Old Mortality, 31, 33, 253, 379 Old Woman of Berkeley, The, 238, 239 Oliphant, F., 353 On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, 117, 122 Oriana, 265, 313, 324 Orientales, Les, 189 Orlando Furioso, 90, 91, 109 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 387-90, 393 Ossian, 208, 261 Palgrave, F. T., 25, 389 Palmerin of England, 236, 241 Paradise, 311 Parochial and Plain Sermons, 360 Parsons, T. W., 105 Partenopex of Blois, 90 Past and Present, 381, 382 Pater, Walter, 42, 79 Payne, Jno., 387-93 Perrault, Chas., 194, 265, 349 Percy, Thos., 3, 54, 57, 74, 159, 238, 295 Petrarca, Francesco, 92 Phantasus, 160 Pillar of the Cloud, The, 362 Poe, Edgar A., 162, 163, 300, 301, 389 Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 296, 339, 343, 345, 349, 350 Poems and Romances (Simcox), 388 Poems by the Way, 386 Poets and Poetry of Munster, 259 Politics for the People, 383 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 249 Pope, Alexander, 52-54, 56, 63-73, 115-17, 402 Portrait, The, 311 Praeterita, 372, 378 Preface to Cromwell, 182, 188, 218-20 Pre-Raphaelitism (Ruskin), 293 Price, Sir Uvedale, 34, 374 Primer of French Literature, A, 183, 184 Prince Arthur (Blackmore), 270 Prince des Sots, Le, 225 Princess, The, 267, 268 Prior, Matthew, 401 Prophecy of Dante, The, 100, 101 Proverbs in Porcelain, 401 Psyche, 121 Pugin, A. C., 368 Pugin, A. W. N., 360, 361, 368-72, 375, 379 Pugin, E. W., 368 Purgatorio, 362 Queen Gwynnevar's Round, 262 Queenhoo Hall, 8, 20, 32 Queen Mab, 235 Queen's Wake, The, 252, 253 Quentin Durward, 31, 36 Quest of the Sancgreall, The (Westwood), 276 Quest of the Sangreal, The (Hawker), 262 Quiberon, 216 Racine et Shakspere, 38, 186, 208, 211, 213 Radcliffe, Anne, 41, 42, 82, 193 Rapunzel, 309, 326, 327 Raven, The, 301 Reade, Chas., 230 Rebecca and Rowena, 397 Récits Mérovingiens, 226 Recollections of D. G. Rossetti (Caine), 296, 297, 301, 302, 308 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3, 17, 74, 107, 229, 238, 243, 247 Reminiscences (Mozley), 358 Remorse, 86, 89 Richter, J. P. F., 169 Rime of Redemption, The, 392 Rime of the Duchess May, The, 277, 278 Rivas, Duke de, 246 Robertson, J. M., 122 Rogers, Chas., 96 Roi s'Amuse, Le, 200, 201 Rokeby, 29 Romancero General, The, 243, 247 Roman Historique, Le, 33, 34, 44-46 Romantische Schule, Die (Heine), 36, 139-41 Romaunt of the Page, The, 277 Roots of the Mountains, The, 337, 338 Rosa, Martinez de la, 246 Rosamond, 346, 347 Rosamund, Queen of the Goths, 346 Roscoe, Wm., 65, 66 Rose, W. S., 90 Rose Mary, 263, 311, 312 Rossetti, Christina, 82, 282, 284, 302 Rossetti, D. G., 131, 228, 258, 262, 263, 265, 282-88, 290-92, 295-315, 318-21, 323, 324, 340, 343, 345, 350, 387-89, 393 Rossetti, Gabriele, 282 Rossetti, Maria F., 282 Rossetti, W. M., 282, 284 Runenberg, The, 163 Ruskin, Jno., 6, 10, 284, 286-89, 292-94, 304, 317, 321, 324, 371, 372, 375-80, 382-87, 398 Sacred and Legendary Art, 374, 375 Saint Agnes, 267 Saint Brandan, 263 Saint Dorothy, 344 Saint Patrick's Purgatory, 238 Saintsbury, George, 50, 118, 183, l84, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 Saints' Tragedy, The, 279, 280, 292 Samuel Taylor Coleridge und die Englische Romantik, 50-55, 75, 77, 82, 86 Scherer, Wm., 167, 170 Schiller, J. C. F., 210, 212 Schlegel, A. W., 88, 140, 144, 145, 154, 156-59, 162, 165, 172, 192, 247 Schlegel, F., 99, 134, 135, 137, 148, 151, 157-59, 172, 247, 363 Scott, Sir Walter, 1-47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 71, 75, 77, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 119, 120, 127, 129, 136, 158, 167, 169, 172, 173, 178, 180, 192, 212, 226, 232, 243, 246, 247, 249-53, 256, 267, 295, 313, 320, 321, 323, 329, 352-56, 367, 378, 379, 397, 402 Scott, W. B., 292, 293, 305-07, 353, 389 Selections from Newman, 355, 356 Seward, Anne, 98 Shairp, J. C., 18 Shaker Bridal, The, 164 Shakspere, Wm., 210, 222, 399 Sharp, Wm., 291, 292, 306 Shelley, P. B., 8, 25, 101, 102, 120, 232-35, 299, 310, 340, 398 Short History of English Literature, A, 50, 118, 295, 324, 326, 395, 396 Shorthouse, J. H., 357 Short Studies (Higginson), 163 Sigerson, Jno., 259, 261 Sigismonda and Guiscardo, 124, 125 Sigurd the Volsung, 336 Simcox, G. A., 388 Sintram and his Companions, 153, 162, 168, 324, 373 Sir Floris, 390-92 Sir Galahad (Morris), 306, 325, 328 Sir Galahad (Tennyson), 267, 271, 325 Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinivere, 271, 325 Sir Tristram, 7 Sister Helen, 311, 312, 345 Sisters, The, 265, 313 Sizeranne, R. de la, 293 Sketches of Christian Art, 372-74 Sleep and Poetry, 114-16 Sleeping Beauty, The, 265 Smith, Charlotte, 55 Socialism, 386 Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 18, 19 Song of the Western Men, 262 Sonneur de Saint Paul, Le, 193 Sorrows of Werther, The, 397 Southey, Robert, 50, 51, 55, 71, 235-39, 355 Specimen of an Induction to a Poem, 129 Specimens of German Romance, 167 Specimens of Gothic Architecture, 368 Spenser, Edmund, 3, 4, 93, 107, 120-22, 269, 275, 329 Staël, Mme. de, 134, 139, 141-45, l71, 192, 208 Staff and Scrip, 311 Stedman, E. C., 265, 387 Stendhal, De, 36-38, 186, 187, 201, 208-14 Stephen, Leslie, 10, 38, 80 Sternbald's Wanderungen, 152 Stevenson, R. L., 32 Stokes, Whitley, 259, 261 Stolberg, F. L., Count, 149, 363 Stones of Venice, 321, 375-79, 385, 386 Stories from the Italian Poets, 109-11 Story of Rimini, The, 105-07, 119, 121, 122, 390 Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl, The, 167 Student of Salamanca, The, 246 Studies and Appreciations, 129 Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature, 43 Study of Celtic Literature, On the, 256 Succube, La, 43 Sundering Flood, The, 232, 337, 339 Swinburne, A. C., 275, 276, 296, 304, 309, 314, 315, 319, 339-51, 387-89 Table Talk (Coleridge), 12 Tables Turned, The, 386 Tale of Balen, The, 347, 348 Tale of King Constans, The, 330 Tales of Wonder, 238 Talisman, The, 28, 36, 43 Tannhäuser, 153, 160, 264, 343, 391 Task, The, 58 Tasso, Torquato, 91, 104, 109 Taylor, Edgar, 162 Taylor, Wm., 53, 162, 238 Templars in Cyprus, The, 149 Tennyson, Alfred, 257, 260, 262, 264-75, 295, 303, 324, 325, 347, 348 Thackeray, W. M., 397, 398, 402 Thalaba the Destroyer, 235 Theocritus, 331 Thierry, Augustin, 39, 225, 226 Thomas the Rhymer, 7 Thoreau, H. D., 165 Thorpe, Benjamin, 334 Thousand and One Nights, The, 393 Three Bardic Tales, 259 Three Fishers, The, 383 Thyrsis, 378 Ticknor, Geo., 242, 243, 248 Tieck, Ludwig, 42, 134, 137, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156-65, 172, 245, 400 Tighe, Mary, 121 Tintern Abbey, 358 Todhunter, Jno., 259, 261 Tom Brown at Oxford, 357 Tracts for the Times, 292, 319, 363, 368 Treasury of Irish Poetry, A, 261 Tristram and Iseult (Arnold), 275, 278, 341 Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne), 275, 340 Tristram und Isolde (Wagner), 393 Troy Town, 315 True Principles of Pointed Architecture, The, 372 Tune of Seven Towers, The, 305, 326 Two Foscari, The, 234 Uhland, Ludwig, 140, 154-56, 170, 171 Ulalume, 301 Undine, 168 Unto this Last, 380 Vabre, Jule, 222 Vanity Fair, 396 Vathek, 367 Vere, Aubrey de, 259, 260, 358, 361, 366 Verses on Various Occasions (Newman), 357 Versunkene Glocke, Die, 245 Victorian Poets, 265, 387 Vignettes in Rhyme, 401 Vigny, A. V., Comte de, 188, 191, 210 Villon, François, 298, 299, 350, 393 Vision of Judgment, The, 70 Vita Nuova, La, 101, 299, 302, 310, 393 Volksmärchen (Tieck), 160 Völsunga Saga, The, 334, 335 Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 92, 94, 95 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur (Schlegel), 88, 158, 162, 192 Voss, J.H., 149 Voyage of Maeldune, The, 260 Wackenroder, W. H., 134, 152, 153, 159 Wagner, Richard, 153, 264, 391, 393 Walladmor, 38 Walter Scott et la Princesse de Clèves, 36 Ward, W. G., 360 Warton, Joseph, 61, 63, 64, 71, 73, 157, 158 Warton, Thos., 27, 57, 60, 61, 94, 157, 158 Water Lady, The, 279 Water of the Wondrous Isles, The, 337, 339 Watts, Theodore, 300 Waverley Novels, The, 30-39, 324, 378, 379, 403 Welland River, 328, 345 Welshmen of Tirawley, The, 260 Werner, Zacharias, 148, 149, 212, 302 Westwood, Thos., 276 White Doe of Rylstone, The, 16-18 White Ship, The, 311, 312 William George Ward and the Oxford Movement, 361 Winthrop, Theodore, 367 Wisdom and Languages of India, The, 157 Wissenschaftslehre (Fichte), 137 Witch of Fife, The, 252 Wood beyond the World, The, 337, 339 Woolner, Thos., 284 Wordsworth, Wm., 9, 12, 14-20, 48, 50-55, 71, 77, 80, 89, 119, 300, 333, 355, 358, 398 Yarrow Revisited, 14 Yeast, 383 Yeats, J. B., 261 Yonge, Charlotte M., 357 Yuletide Stories, 334 Zapolya, 89 Zauberring, Der, 168 Zeitung für Einsiedler, 138, 172 Zorrilla, José de, 246 
47675	----	(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.) MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE BY GEORGE BRANDES IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED I THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN MCMVI To the Memory of HANS BRÖCHNER [Illustration: ROUSSEAU] INTRODUCTION It is my intention in the present work to trace the outlines of a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century by means of the study of certain main groups and movements in European literature. The stormy year 1848, a historical turning-point, and hence a break, is the limit to which I purpose following the process of development. The period between the beginning and the middle of the century presents the spectacle of many scattered and apparently disconnected literary efforts and phenomena. But he who carefully observes the main currents of literature perceives that their movements are all conditioned by one great leading movement with its ebb and flow, namely, the gradual fading away and disappearance of the ideas and feelings of the preceding century, and the return of the idea of progress in new, ever higher-mounting waves. The central subject of this work is, then, the reaction in the first decades of the nineteenth century against the literature of the eighteenth, and the vanquishment of that reaction. This historic incident is of European interest, and can only be understood by a comparative study of European literature. Such a study I purpose attempting by simultaneously tracing the course of the most important movements in French, German, and English literature. The comparative view possesses the double advantage of bringing foreign literature so near to us that we can assimilate it, and of removing our own until we are enabled to see it in its true perspective. We neither see what is too near the eye nor what is too far away from it. The scientific view of literature provides us with a telescope of which the one end magnifies and the other diminishes; it must be so focussed as to remedy the illusions of unassisted eyesight. The different nations have hitherto stood so remote from each other, as far as literature is concerned, that they have only to a very limited extent been able to benefit by each other's productions. For an image of the position as it is, or was, we must go back to the old fable of the fox and the stork. Every one knows that the fox, having invited the stork to dinner, arranged all his dainties upon a flat dish from which the stork with his long bill could pick up little or nothing. We also know how the stork revenged himself. He served his delicacies in a tall vase with a long and slender neck, down which it was easy for him to thrust his bill, but which made it impossible for the fox, with his sharp muzzle, to get anything. The various nations have long played fox and stork in this fashion. It has been and is a great literary problem how to place the contents of the stork's larder upon the fox's table, and _vice versâ_. Literary history is, in its profoundest significance, psychology, the study, the history of the soul. A book which belongs to the literature of a nation, be it romance, drama, or historical work, is a gallery of character portraits, a storehouse of feelings and thoughts. The more momentous the feelings, the greater, clearer, and wider the thoughts, the more remarkable and at the same time representative the characters, so much the greater is the historical value of the book, so much the more clearly does it reveal to us what was really happening in men's minds in a given country at a given period. Regarded from the merely æsthetic point of view as a work of art, a book is a self-contained, self-existent whole, without any connection with the surrounding world. But looked at from the historical point of view, a book, even though it may be a perfect, complete work of art, is only a piece cut out of an endlessly continuous web. Æsthetically considered, its idea, the main thought inspiring it, may satisfactorily explain it, without any cognisance taken of its author or its environment as an organism; but historically considered, it implies, as the effect implies the cause, the intellectual idiosyncrasy of its author, which asserts itself in all his productions, which conditions this particular book, and some understanding of which is indispensable to its comprehension. The intellectual idiosyncrasy of the author, again, we cannot comprehend without some acquaintance with the intellects which influenced his development, the spiritual atmosphere which he breathed. The intellectual phenomena which condition, elucidate, and explain each other, fall of themselves into natural groups. What I shall describe is a historical movement partaking of the form and character of a drama. The six different literary groups it is my intention to represent may be looked on as six acts of a great play. In the first group, the French Emigrant Literature inspired by Rousseau, the reaction begins; but here the reactionary are still everywhere mingled with the revolutionary currents. In the second group, the semi-Catholic Romantic school of Germany, the reaction is on the increase; it is more vigorous and holds itself more aloof from the contemporary struggle for progress and liberty. The third group, consisting of such men as Joseph de Maistre, Lamennais in his strictly orthodox period, Lamartine and Victor Hugo when they (after the restoration of the monarchy) were still mainstays of the Legitimist and clerical party, represents the militant, triumphant reaction. Byron and his English contemporaries form the fourth group. It is this one man, Byron, who produces the revulsion in the great drama. The Greek war of liberation breaks out, a revivifying breeze blows over Europe, Byron falls like a hero in the cause of Greece, and his death makes a tremendous impression on all the productive minds of the Continent. Shortly before the Revolution of July a change of front occurs among the great authors of France; they form the French Romantic school, which is our fifth group, a new Liberal movement on the roll of whose adherents we find such names as Lamennais, Hugo, Lamartine, Musset, George Sand, &c. The movement passes from France into Germany, and in that country also Liberal ideas are victorious. The writers forming the sixth and last group which I shall depict, Young Germany, are inspired by the ideas of the Greek war of liberation and the Revolution of July, and, like the French authors, see in Byron's great shade the leader of the Liberal movement. The authors of Young Germany, Heine, Börne, Gutzkow, Ruge, Feuerbach, &c., prepare, together with the contemporary French writers, the great upheaval of 1848. _A household god made of wax, that had been carelessly left standing beside a fire in which precious Campanian vases were bakings began to melt_. _It addressed bitter complaints to the element. "See," it said, "how cruelly you treat me! To these things you give durability, me you destroy_." _But the fire answered: "You have nothing to complain of but your own nature. As for my I am fire, always and everywhere_." _W. HEINSE_. THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE CONTENTS I. CHATEAUBRIAND II. ROUSSEAU III. WERTHER IV. RENÉ V. OBERMANN VI. NODIER VII. CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE" VIII. MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE" IX. EXILE X. "CORINNE" XI. ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES XII. NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE XIII. DE L'ALLEMAGNE XIV. BARANTE XV. CONCLUSION LIST OF PORTRAITS J. J. ROUSSEAU DE SÉNANCOUR CHARLES NODIER BENJAMIN CONSTANT MADAME DE STAËL WINCKELMANN THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE The passage of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was accompanied in France by social and political disturbances of hitherto unknown force and magnitude. The new seed sown by the great ideas and events of the Revolution at first made little or no growth in literature. It was unable to shoot up, for, with but brief interval between, two destroying tyrannies, the dictatorships of the Convention and of the Empire, passed over France, annihilating all personal freedom as they went. The first terrorism cowed, exiled, or guillotined all whose political colouring did not accurately match the then prevailing shade of popular opinion. Aristocracy, royal family, priests and Girondists alike succumbed to it, and men fled to the quiet of Switzerland or the lonely prairies of North America to escape the fate which had destroyed their nearest and threatened themselves. The second terrorism persecuted, imprisoned, shot, or exiled all who would not submit to being silenced (a silence which might only be broken by cheers for the Emperor). Legitimists and Republicans, Constitutionalists and Liberals, philosophers and poets were crushed under the all-levelling roller, unless they preferred, scattered in every direction, to seek a refuge beyond the boundaries of the empire. No easy matter in those days, for the empire followed swiftly upon their heels, rapidly growing, swallowing Germany and Italy in great gulps, until no place seemed secure from its armies, which overtook fugitives even in Moscow. During both these great despotisms it was only far from Paris, in lonely country places where he lived a life of death-like stillness, or beyond the frontier, in Switzerland, Germany, England, or North America, that the French man of letters pursued his calling. Only in such places could the independent intellects of France exist, and it is by independent intellects alone that a literature can be founded or developed. The first French literary group of the present century, then, a group brought together from all points of the compass, is distinguished by its oppositionist tendency. I do not mean that its members are united on certain fundamental principles, for they are often utterly at variance, but they are all united by their hatred of the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic autocracy. Whatever they may originally have been, and whatever they become after the restoration of the monarchy, whether literary reformers, reactionary Legitimists, or members of the Liberal Opposition, they are at the beginning of the century one and all opposed to the prevailing order of things. Another thing they all have in common is their difficult position as heirs of the eighteenth century, whose last bequest to them is that Empire against which they protest. Some of them would fain renounce the inheritance and its liabilities, others are ready to accept it if they can repudiate the liabilities, all feel that the intellectual development of the new century must be based upon other assumptions than that of the old. The folding-doors of the nineteenth century open; they stand gazing in intently; they have a presentiment of what they are to see, and believe they see it, and the new shapes itself for each and is interpreted by each according to his gifts and desires. Thus as a body there is something premonitory, precursory about them: they are the bearers of the spirit of the new age. There was a wider sphere for a literary revival in France than in any other European country, for in France in the eighteenth century literary art had developed into formalism. Social and academic culture had laced it in the iron corset of so-called good taste, into stiff, meagre, regulation proportions. France has long presented the contradiction of being a country with a feverish desire for change in all external arrangements, unable, once it determines to gratify this desire, to keep within the bounds of moderation, and of being at the same time remarkably stable in everything that regards literature--acknowledging authority, maintaining an academy, and placing rule and regularity above everything. Frenchmen had instituted a Republic and overturned Christianity before it occurred to them to dispute the authority of Boileau. Voltaire, who turns tradition upside down and uses tragedy as a weapon against the very powers whose chief support it had been, namely the autocracy and the Church, never ventures to allow his action to last more than twenty-four hours, or to pass in two different places in the same play. He, who has little respect for anything in heaven or earth, respects the uniform caesura of the Alexandrine. It was another people than the French, a people to whom Voltaire had scornfully wished more wit and fewer consonants, who remodelled literature and re-created poetry, while Frenchmen were overturning political systems and customs. The Germans of that day, of whom the French scarcely knew more than that, in humble, patriarchal submission to their petty princes, they drank their beer, smoked their pipes, and ate their _sauer-kraut_ in the corner by the stove, made far greater conquests in the intellectual world than Frenchmen achieved in the geographical. Of all the nations of Europe none save the Germans had had their literary blossoming time in the eighteenth century. It was the second half of that century which witnessed the notable development of poetry between Lessing and Goethe, and the energetic progress of metaphysics between Kant and Schelling. For in Germany nothing had been free save thought. The French literature of the beginning of the century is, naturally, influenced by Germany, the more so as the nations now first begin to enter into unbroken intellectual communion. The great upheavals, the wars of the Republic and the Empire, jostled the peoples of Europe together, and made them acquainted with each other. But the men most profoundly influenced by foreign surroundings were those for whom these great events meant long, in some cases life-long, exile. The influence of the foreign spirit, only fleeting as far as the soldier was concerned, was lasting and momentous in the case of the _émigré_. Exiled Frenchmen were obliged to acquire a more than superficial acquaintance with foreign tongues, if for no other reason, in order to be able to give French lessons in the country of their adoption. It was the intelligent _émigré_ who diffused knowledge of the character and culture of other lands throughout France, and in seeking a general designation for the literary phenomena of this period, it would scarcely be possible to find a better than the one I have adopted: "The Emigrant Literature." The name must not be taken for more than it is--a name--for it would be foolish not to class along with the works of _émigrés_ proper, kindred writings by authors who, though they did not live in Paris, perhaps not even in France, yet were not exiles; and, on the other hand, some of the works written by _émigrés_ are distinctly not products of the renovating and fertilising literary movement, but belong to the anti-liberal literature of the Restoration period. Nevertheless the name may fitly be applied to the first group of French books which ushers in the century. The émigré\ as already remarked, inevitably belongs to the opposition. But the character of his opposition varies, according to whether it is the Reign of Terror or the Empire to which he objects, and from the tyranny of which he has escaped. Frequently he has fled from both, in which case the motive of his opposition is of a compound nature. He possibly sympathised with the Revolution in its early stage as curtailing the power of the monarchy, and his desire may be a moderate republic; in this case he will be inspired by a more passionate ill-will towards the Empire than towards the old Reign of Terror. Whatever the nature of the compound, a double current is discernible in the emigrant literature. Its direct reaction is against certain mental characteristics of the eighteenth century, its dry rationalism, its taboo of emotion and fancy, its misunderstanding of history, its ignoring of legitimate national peculiarities, its colourless view of nature, and its mistaken conception of religions as being conscious frauds. But there is also an unmistakable undercurrent in the direction of the main stream of the eighteenth century; all the authors carry on the great war against petrified tradition, some only in the domain of literature, others in each and every intellectual domain. They are all daring, enterprising natures, and for none of them has the word Liberty lost its electrifying power. Even Chateaubriand, who in politics and religion represents the extreme Right of the group, and who in some of his writings is positively reactionary, takes "_Liberty_ and Honour" as his motto; which explains his finally going over to the Opposition. The double current is everywhere discernible, in Chateaubriand, in Sénancour, in Constant, in Mme. de Staël, in Barante, Nodier, &c., and to this subtle correlation of reaction and progress I shall draw attention from the first. In speaking of the spirit of the eighteenth century it is generally Voltaire's name which rises to our lips. It is he who in most men's minds embodies and represents the whole period; and in as far as the _émigrés_ bring about a revulsion against him, they may certainly be said to represent the reaction against the preceding century. Even those among them who are closely related to him intellectually, compulsorily join in the reaction against him, compelled, that is to say, by the spirit of the age; as, for instance, Constant in his book _On Religion_. But among the writers of the eighteenth century there is one who was Voltaire's rival, who is almost his equal, and whose works, moreover, in a much higher degree than Voltaire's, point to an age far ahead of that in which they were written. This man in many ways inspires the Emigrant Literature, and in as far as it descends from Rousseau, and to a certain extent perpetuates his influence, it may be said to perpetuate the preceding century and the Revolution. It is astonishing to what an extent the great literary movements in all the principal countries of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century were influenced by Rousseau. Among his spiritual progeny in France in the eighteenth century had been men so unlike each other as St. Pierre, Diderot, and Robespierre, and in Germany geniuses and men of talent like Herder, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul. In the rising age he influences, among others, Chateaubriand, Mme. de Staël, and later, George Sand, in France; in Germany, Tieck; and in England, Byron. Voltaire influences minds in general, Rousseau has a special power over productive talents, over authors. These two great men exercised an alternating influence upon posterity well-nigh into our own day, when both have been supplanted by Diderot. At the close of last century, Voltaire yielded his sceptre to Rousseau; fifty years later his name returned to honour in France; and now in some of the most eminent writers of that country--take Ernest Renan as an instance--a twofold intellectual tendency is discernible, something of Rousseau's spirit combined with something of Voltaire's. But it is in the writings of Rousseau alone that the great spiritual streams which flow from other countries into France at the beginning of the nineteenth century have their source, and to Rousseau is it due that the literature produced by Frenchmen living in remote provinces or foreign countries, in spite of its antagonism to the spirit which produced and upheld the imperial despotism, remained in touch with the eighteenth century, and was based upon originally French theories. I CHATEAUBRIAND The year 1800 was the first to produce a book bearing the imprint of the new era, a work small in size, but great in significance and mighty in the impression it made. _Atala_ took the French public by storm in a way which no book had done since the days of _Paul and Virginia_. It was a romance of the plains and mysterious forests of North America, with a strong, strange aroma of the untilled soil from which it sprang; it glowed with rich foreign colouring, and with the fiercer glow of consuming passion. The history of a repressed, and therefore overpowering and fatal love, was depicted upon a background of wild Indian life, the effect of the whole being heightened by a varnish of Roman Catholic piety. This story of the love and death of a Christian Indian girl was so admired that its principal characters were soon to be seen adorning the walls of French inns in the form of coloured prints, while their waxen images were sold on the quays of Paris, as those of Christ and the Virgin usually are in Catholic countries. At one of the suburban theatres the heroine figured in savage attire with cock's feathers in her hair, and a farce was given at the _Théâtre des Variétés_ in which a school girl and boy, who had eloped, talked of nothing but alligators, storks, and virgin forests in the style of _Atala_. A parody published under the title of "_Ah! là! là_!" substituted for the long, gorgeous description of Mississippi scenery an equally lengthy and detailed description of a potato patch--so strange did it seem at that day that an author should devote several pages to the description of natural scenery. But though parodies, jests, and caricatures rained upon the author, he was not to be pitied, such things being symptoms of fame. With one bound he had risen from complete obscurity to the rank of a celebrity. His name was upon all lips, the name of François René de Chateaubriand. The youngest of ten children, he was born of an ancient and noble house in St. Malo, Brittany. His father was a stern, dry, unsociable and silent man, whose one passion was his pride of race; while his mother, a little, plain, restless, discontented woman, was God-fearing to the highest degree, a church-goer and a patroness of priests. The son inherited a mixture of both natures. Sternly brought up in a home where, as he himself expressed it, the father was the terror and the mother the scourge of the household, he was reserved and shy, an obstinate, excitable, melancholy child, early familiar with the unrest of the sea and the music of its storms, never reconciled to the discomfort and coldness of his home. His sister Lucile, the nearest him in age, was his one friend and confidante. Like him, she was of a morbid and passionate temperament, year by year more prone, like Rousseau, to suspect every one of conspiracy against her, and to regard herself as persecuted. In her childhood it was to her brother, in later life to religion, that she turned for protection in these troubles and dangers. At first plain and shy, like her brother, she afterwards became very beautiful; with her pale face and dark hair she was like a lovely angel of death. She passed the greater part of her life in convents; was passionate in her sisterly love, and passionately Catholic; she had considerable poetic talent, and in shyness and romantic excitability she seems to have been the feminine counterpart of her brother. Another sister, Julie, having passed her youth as a gay woman of the world, ended her life in the most saintly self-renunciation. The tendency towards Catholicism seems to have run in the blood of the whole family. The great constraint of young Chateaubriand's upbringing induced in him a wild longing to be free and his own master, while the perpetual surveillance under which he suffered created an overwhelming, misanthropic desire for solitude. When he ran alone down the stairs of the old manor-house, or went out with his gun, he felt all the passions boiling and seething within him in wild ecstasy at being able to dream and long unrestrainedly. Ill at ease in the society of others, he plunged when alone into dreams of happiness and ambition, the dreams of a poet. In this half-sensuous, half-spiritual dreaming and longing, he created the image of a supernaturally charming woman, a youthful queen, bedecked with flowers and jewels, whom he loved and by whom he was beloved in the balmy, moonlit nights of Naples or Sicily. To awake from these dreams and realise the insignificant little Breton that he was, awkward, unknown, poor and possibly without talent, was torture to him. The contrast between what he was and what he longed to be overwhelmed him. He was at first intended for the navy, but his unconquerable aversion to discipline proved an insurmountable obstacle, and his thoughts turned to the Church, from which, however, a conviction of his unfitness for a life of renunciation made him draw back. In the depth of his despondency he attempted to commit suicide. An irrevocable family decision put an end to his vacillation; he was given a commission as sub-lieutenant in the army, and found the life to his liking. As a cadet of a noble family he was presented to Louis XVI., at whose court he witnessed the last glimmer of the old splendour and ceremony of royalty. Two years later the Revolution broke out, and in 1790 rank, titles, and feudal rights were abolished. Chateaubriand gave up his commission, and, as no occupation offered itself under the new order, or disorder, he conceived the fantastic plan of travelling to America to discover the North-West Passage. Without any of the requisite information, without interest or money, he was inevitably soon obliged to abandon this project. But if he did not find the North-West Passage, he did discover a new race, fresh conditions, and new scenery. In his early youth, after reading Rousseau, he had conceived the idea of writing the Epic of Primitive Man, a description of the ways of the savages of whom he knew nothing. Now he was upon their own soil, in their world, and though they were not as untouched by civilisation as he had imagined, it was not difficult to reconstruct their original condition. The first impression he received of them was undeniably a strange one. On the way from Albany to Niagara, when his guide led him for the first time into the virgin forest, he was seized by one of those transports of delight in his independence which he had felt in his early youth when he went hunting in Brittany. He wandered from tree to tree, to right and left, saying to himself: "Here are no roads, no towns, no monarchies, no republics, no men." Imagining himself to be alone in the forest, he suddenly came upon a score of half-naked, painted savages with ravens' feathers in their hair and rings in their noses, who--marvellous to relate!--were dancing quadrilles to the sounds of a violin played by a little powdered and frizzed Frenchman, once kitchen-boy to a French general, now retained as dancing-master by these savages for a consideration of beaver-skins and bear-hams. What a humiliating introduction to primitive life for a pupil of Rousseau! Subsequent impressions were, fortunately, simpler and more beautiful than this. Chateaubriand purchased clothes and weapons from the Indians, and lived their life for some weeks at least. He was presented to the Sachem, or chief, of the Onondagas (as Byron at a later period was presented to Ali Pasha); he rode through the country, coming here and there upon little European houses, with their pianos and mirrors, close to the huts of the Iroquois; he saw the Falls of Niagara; and in two charming Florida girls found the models for his famous characters, Atala and Celuta. It was in America that Chateaubriand planned his two brilliant short tales, _Atala_ and _René_, and also the long, somewhat slovenly work of which they form part, _Les Natchez_, a great romance dealing with the destruction of an Indian tribe in its struggle with the whites. _Atala_ was the first to be completed. After a brief stay in France, where he arrived in January 1792, recalled by the news of the fall of the monarchy and the dangerous position of Louis XVI., he again emigrated, this time to London. He made the first rough drafts of _Atala_ and _René_ sitting under the trees in Kensington Gardens, and when he joined the emigrant army on the Rhine, his knapsack contained more manuscript than linen. _Atala_ was revised during the halts of the army, and repacked in his knapsack when the march was resumed, his comrades teasing him by tearing the protruding leaves. In the action in which he was wounded in the thigh by a splinter of shell, _Atala_ proved the means of saving his life, for two spent bullets glanced off his knapsack. He arrived at Brussels after the destruction of the emigrant army, wounded, emaciated, and ill with fever; his brother, with wife and father-in-law, having meanwhile perished on the scaffold in Paris. His mother and two sisters, of whom Lucile was one, had been imprisoned for a time after his flight. In London, in 1797, he published his _Essai historique sur les Revolutions_, which was written in a comparatively liberal and, as regards religion, a distinctly sceptical spirit. It was the death of his mother, he tells us, which led him back to Christianity, but the reactionary spirit of the times probably contributed quite as much to his change of attitude, and when he returned to France in 1800, after Bonaparte had quelled the Revolution, he carried with him his great work, _Le Génie du Christianisme_, in which _René_ was included, and the publication of which coincided with Bonaparte's restoration of Christian worship in France. The book harmonised too well with the plans of the First Consul not to bring its author into favour with that autocrat; Chateaubriand, however, broke with his government after the judicial murder of the Duc d'Enghien in 1804. These are the principal incidents in the youthful career of the man who became famous in 1800 as the author of _Atala_. His character was even more remarkable than his career. High-spirited, ambitious, vain, and shy, perpetually wavering in his faith in his own powers, he was not only endowed with the self-consciousness of genius, but with an egotism which ignored with absolute indifference all that did not immediately concern himself. He came too late into the world, and was educated under too peculiar circumstances, to have faith in the Revolution or the eighteenth century philosophy which partly inspired it. He came into the world too soon to make acquaintance with the science of the nineteenth century, and through it to win a new faith and a new standpoint. He therefore became a kind of Nihilist in the service of the past, a spirit who, as he repeatedly observes, believed in nothing. He adds, when he remembers to do so, "except religion"; but a man is, according to his nature, either a believer or a sceptic, and the idea that it is possible to be a believer in the matter of religion when one believes in nothing else, is a mere delusion, to which the half-educated are specially liable. Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ are full of the sort of tirade on the vanity of name and fame which we so often meet with in Byron. There is undoubtedly a good deal of affectation in these outbreaks, but they nevertheless betray genuine ennui and persistent melancholy. "Unable to believe in anything except religion, I am distrustful of all else.... The trivial and ridiculous side of things is always the first to show itself to me. In reality neither great geniuses nor great deeds exist for me.... In politics the warmth of my conviction does not outlast my speech or pamphlet.... In the whole history of the world I do not know a fame that could tempt me. If the greatest honour in the world lay at my feet and I had but to stoop and take it up, I would not take the trouble. If I had been my own creator, I should probably have made myself a woman, out of passion for the sex; or if I had chosen to be a man, I would first of all have bestowed beauty upon myself; then, to provide against ennui, my worst enemy, I would have been a great but unknown artist, using my talent for myself alone. If we set aside all humbug and examine into what it is that gives life real worth, we find only two things of value, religion in combination with talent, and love in combination with youth, that is to say the future and the present; all the rest is not worth the trouble of thinking about.... I have no belief in anything except religion. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my staff or sceptre? I should have been equally weary of glory and genius, work and rest, prosperity and adversity. Everything irks me. I drag my weariness painfully after me all day long, and yawn my life away (_et je vais partout bâillant ma vie_)."[1] How much passion had he not wasted upon fantastic imaginings and poetic dreams before he was reduced to this utter boredom! In _Atala_ the passion still wells up like a hot spring, and its spray stings and scalds. The old Indian, Chactas, tells the story of his youth to a young Frenchman to whom Chateaubriand has given his own second name, René. Chactas, taken captive by a hostile tribe, is condemned to death upon the pyre. The daughter of the chief of the tribe takes a fancy to him and approaches the place where he lies bound. He mistakes her for the maiden whose part it is to solace the prisoner in the last hour before the consummation of the death sentence; but her intention is to release, not to console. He conceives a sudden passion for her, and entreats her to fly with him and be his; she refuses, and, delayed by her opposition, he is recaptured. He is already adorned for the pyre, crowned with flowers, his face painted blue and red, and beads attached to his ears, when Atala delivers him for the second time and escapes with him. The greater part of the book describes this flight, Chactas's desire, and the mingling of passion and reserve in Atala which makes her constantly vacillate between resistance and surrender. Her behaviour is explained when she tells Chactas that her mother, who was seduced by a white man, had her baptized and made her swear to remain unwed. In her anguish at the vow and her despair of being able to keep it, she takes poison, and dies in her lover's arms, comforted by the old missionary in whose hut the pair have taken shelter. A full impression of the burning passion and lyrical exaltation of the book can only be gained by reading it, nor can we obtain any idea from descriptions and quotations of the power with which the wonderful scenery is described. It is an easy matter, however, to show how much and how instinctively Chateaubriand relied upon a mingling of the terrible with the erotic to obtain his effects. In the principal love scene we have not only a lavish musical accompaniment of the rattle of snakes, the howling of wolves, the roaring of bears and jaguars, but also a storm which shatters the trees, and impenetrable darkness, torn by flash upon flash of the lightning which finally sets fire to the forest. Round about the lovers the pines are blazing like wedding torches, and Atala is about to yield when a warning flash strikes the ground at her feet. It is after this she takes poison, and the burning passion of her last words to Chactas are in harmony with the conflagration of the forest: "What torture to see thee at my side, far from all mankind, in these profound solitudes, and to feel an invincible barrier between thee and me! To pass my life at thy feet, to wait upon thee as thy slave, to prepare thy repast and thy couch in some forgotten corner of the universe would have been my supreme happiness. This bliss I had actually attained to, but could not enjoy. What plans have I not planned! what dreams have I not dreamed! Sometimes, looking upon thee, I have been tempted to form desires as wild as they were guilty. I have sometimes wished that thou and I were the only living creatures on earth; sometimes, conscious of a divinity which arrested my horrible transports, I have wished that divinity annihilated, that, clasped in thy arms, I might fall from abyss to abyss amid the ruins of God and the world." Remarkable as these outbursts of irresistible passion are, and novel as is the scenery which throws them into relief, we feel that both would have been impossible if Rousseau had never lived, and if his literary work had not been carried on by another and greater intellect of another nationality. [1] _Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe_, vol. i. p. 207-451; vol. ii. p. 129. II ROUSSEAU Rousseau's chief work as an imaginative writer is _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. The novelty of the book lay, in the first instance, in the fact that it gave the death-blow to gallantry, and, consequently, to the theory of the French classical period on the subject of the emotions. This theory was that all noble, fine emotions, and chief among them love, were the products of civilisation. It is obvious enough that a certain degree of civilisation was necessary before such a sentiment as love could arise. Until they wore womanly garb women did not exist, but only females, and until there were women there was no love. From this perfectly correct idea had resulted (in the pre-Rousseau period) the belief that the veiling of passion ennobled it and made it worthy. The more it could be shrouded in circumlocutions, hints, and suggestions, the less coarse it was. The morality and the literature of that period were the products of social culture, a culture confined to the highest circles. We need but read Marivaux's plays to find literary evidence of the extent to which courtly formality and refined sentiment were preferred to nature and passion. Marivaux's lovers are always each other's equals in culture, and, what is of still greater importance, in rank. We never find, as in the dramas of our century, the aristocratic lady who loves a man of lower social station, nor such a character, for instance, as Ruy Blas, the lackey who finds favour in the eyes of a Queen. In Marivaux, if a gentleman is disguised as a lackey, or a young lady as a waiting-maid, they always divine each other immediately in spite of their disguise. Their conversation is an incessant pursuit and flight, advance and retreat; it is full of ambiguities and hints and evasions, masked confessions and suppressed sighs, love-sickness expressed in a becomingly conventional manner. In Rousseau's eyes these mannerisms are as ridiculous as they are artificial. He prefers love, like everything else, in its natural state, and to him love in its natural state is a violent, irresistible passion. In his books we are very far removed from those scenes in Marivaux in which the kneeling lover never forgets to preserve a graceful attitude while pressing the tips of a glove to his lips. For all his chivalry and virtue, St. Preux is an electric battery charged with passion; the first kiss in the Grove of Clarens produces the shock, the conflagration of a thunderbolt; and when Julie, bending towards St. Preux and kissing him, swoons away, it is no coquettish faint of the days of the periwig, but the effect of the overwhelming might of passion upon a young and healthy child of nature. The second novelty in the book is the inequality in station of the hero and heroine. Julie is the daughter of a nobleman, St. Preux is a poor tutor, a plebeian. Here, as in the _Sorrows of Werther_, the passion of love is connected with the equality-loving plebeian's determination to make a name for himself. This is no chance connection, for passion creates equality, whereas love in fashionable society has a tendency to develop into gallantry. A third significant feature in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ is that, just as we have passion in place of gallantry and inequality of station in place of similarity of rank, we have also the moral conviction of the sanctity of marriage in place of that honour grounded on aristocratic pride and self-respect, which stood for virtue in fashionable literature. This word, Virtue, little in vogue until now, became with Rousseau and his school a watchword which was in perfect harmony with their other watchword, Nature; for to Rousseau virtue was a natural condition. Following the example of society, French literature had been making merry at the expense of marriage; Rousseau, therefore, defied the spirit of the times by writing a book in its honour. His heroine returns the passion of her lover, but marries another, to whom she remains faithful. Here, as in _Werther_, the lover proper loses the maiden, who is wedded to a Monsieur Wolmar (the Albert of _Werther_ and the Edward of Kierkegaard's _Diary of a Seducer_), a man as irreproachable as he is uninteresting. The moral conviction which is vindicated and glorified in Rousseau as Virtue, is the same as that which in Chateaubriand, under the influence of the religious reaction, takes the form of a binding religious vow. Note, finally, that the watchword Nature is to be taken in its literal meaning. For the first time, out of England, we have the genuine feeling for nature in fiction, superseding love-making in drawing-rooms and gardens. Under Louis XV. and the Regency, people passed their time (in real life as well as in books) in boudoirs, where light conversation and light morals were in place. The rooms, like the verses of Voltaire's _Poesies Fugitives_, were adorned with endless multitudes of Cupids and Graces. In the gardens goat-footed Pans embraced slender white nymphs by the side of artificial fountains. In their pictures of the _fêtes-champêtres_ of those days, Watteau and the less-gifted Boucher and Lancret have preserved for us these gardens with their shady walks and quiet corners, where courtly gentlemen and gay ladies, clad as Pierrots and Columbines, coquetted and whispered, conscious of being on the right stage for such free and frivolous masquerading. Turn from these to the scenery of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. Rousseau's statue stands at this day on a little island lying in the Lake of Geneva, at its narrow southern extremity. The spot is one of the loveliest in the world. Pass the island and cross another bridge and you see the Rhone rush, impetuous and foaming white, out of the lake. A few steps further and you can see its white stream joined by the grey snow waters of the Arve. The rivers flow side by side, each retaining its colour. Far away between two mighty ridges you discern the white snow-caps of Mont Blanc. Towards evening, as those mountain ridges darken, the snows of Mont Blanc glow like pale roses. It would seem as if Nature had gathered together all her contrasts here. Even in the warmest season as you approach the grey, foaming mountain torrents, the air becomes icy cold. In the course of a short stroll you may feel the heat of summer in some sheltered nook, and a few steps farther on encounter harsh autumn with its cutting winds. One can form no conception of the cool freshness and strength of the air here. Only the sun and the brilliant shimmer of the stars at night recall the south. The latter are not the bright points in a distant sky which they appear to be in the north; they seem to hang loose in the air; and the air itself, as one inhales it, feels like a strong massive substance. Sail up the lake to Vevey. Behind that town the Alpine slopes are clad with the trees and vineyards of southern lands. On the farther side of the lake rise great walls of blue rock, solemn and threatening, and the sun plays in light and shade down the mountain-side. No waters are so blue as those of the Lake of Geneva. As you sail down it on a beautiful summer day, it shines like blue satin shot with gold. It is a fairyland, a dreamland, where mighty mountains cast their blue-black shadows down into the azure waters and a brilliant sun saturates the air with colour. Sail a little farther up the lake to Montreux, where the rock fortress of Chillon, the prison in which mediæval cruelty collected all its instruments of torture, projects into the water. This witness to wild and terrible passions lies in the midst of scenery which may well be called enchanted. The lake is more open here, the view less peculiar, and the climate more southern than at Vevey. One sees sky, Alps, and lake, all melting together in a mysterious blue light. From Montreux walk to Clärens and pause in the chestnut grove which is still called the _Bosquet de Julie_. It is situated on a height from which you look down upon Montreux, lying sheltered and hidden in its bay; look round and you will understand how it was from this spot that the love of nature spread throughout Europe. We are standing in Rousseau's country, upon the scene of his _Nouvelle Héloïse_. This was the scenery which supplanted that of the Regency. It is not difficult to trace the relation between Chateaubriand's first work and Rousseau's famous romance. First and foremost Chateaubriand inherits the love of nature; his strongly coloured pictures of North American scenery have their progenitors in those descriptions of Swiss nature. But there is this difference between Rousseau's and Chateaubriand's landscapes, that the latter's are much more dependent upon the mood of the hero and heroine. If stormy passions rage in their hearts, the storm rages without also; the characters are blent with their natural surroundings, which they permeate with their passions and moods in a manner quite unknown to the literature of the eighteenth century. The hero and heroine themselves, being savages, have even less suspicion of gallantry about them, are far more the children of nature than Rousseau's lovers; and although expressions occur again and again which are absurd coming from the lips of a Red Indian, yet many of the love-speeches have a touch of primitive poetry in them, a genus of literature which was entirely unknown in France in the eighteenth century. Take for an example the warrior's love-song beginning with the words: "I will fly so fast that before the day has touched the mountain tops I shall have come to my white dove among the oaks of the forest. I have bound a necklace of beads about her neck--three red beads to speak of my love, three violet beads to speak of my fear, and three blue beads to speak my hope," &c. The inequality of position between Rousseau's lovers, so typical of that revolutionary time, finds its equivalent in _Atala_ in the difference of religion, a matter which in the new century, with its reaction against Voltaire, acquires new importance. The religious reaction also explains the fact that a Catholic vow to remain unwed plays the same rôle in Chateaubriand's story which the dictate of morality does in Rousseau's. We have, then, progress in colouring, in the development of character, in the comprehension of the spirit and racial peculiarities of an uncivilised people, but we have also a deliberate step backward, in the substitution of Catholic conventual piety, with its unnatural renunciation, for morality. Passion is whetted, so to speak, on the altar of Catholicism, and its unnatural suppression creates that unnatural frenzy which causes Atala, the charming young Indian girl, who has so long held the desire of her heathen lover in check, to die with a wish on her lips for the annihilation of God and the world, if at that price she can be clasped for ever to his heart. III WERTHER _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ appeared in 1761. Thirteen years later, in another country and in very different environments, a youthful genius, who possessed little in common with Rousseau, but who wrote under the influence of his romance and his ideas, published a little book which contained all the merits and none of the defects of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, a book which stirred thousands upon thousands of minds, which awoke lively enthusiasm and a morbid longing for death in a whole generation, which in not a few cases induced hysterical sentimentality, idleness, despair, and suicide, and which was honoured by being proscribed by a fatherly Danish government as "irreligious." This book was _Werther_. St. Preux has changed his costume, has donned the famous Werther garb, the blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and Rousseau's _belle âme_ has passed into German literature as _die schöne Seele_. And what is _Werther_? No definitions can give any real idea of the infinite wealth of an imaginative masterpiece, but we may briefly say that the great importance of this story of ardent, unhappy love, lies in its being so treated that it gives expression not merely to the isolated passion and suffering of a single individual, but to the passions, longings, and sufferings of a whole age. The hero is a young man of the burgher class; he is artistically gifted, and paints for pleasure, but by profession he is Secretary to a Legation. Goethe has involuntarily made this young man see, and feel, and think as he himself did in his youth, has endowed him with all his own rich and brilliant genius. This transforms Werther into a great symbolic figure; he is more than the spirit of the new era, he is its genius. He is almost too rich and great for his destiny. There is, perhaps, actually a certain discrepancy between the first part of the book, in which Werther's mind manifests itself in its energetic, youthful health and strength, and the second part, in which he succumbs to circumstances. In the first half there is in Werther more of Goethe himself, who certainly did not commit suicide; in the second, more of that young Jerusalem whose unhappy death inspired the book. But such as he is, Werther is a type. He is not only the child of nature in his passion, he is nature in one of its highest developments, genius. Losing himself in nature, he feels its whole infinite life within himself, and feels himself "deified" thereby. Turn, for instance, to that wonderful entry in his journal written on August 18, 1771. It is as powerful and full of genius as a _Faust_ monologue. Read that description of how "the inner, glowing, holy life of nature" opens before him, of how he perceives the "unfathomable powers working and creating in the depths of the earth," of how he yearns to "drink the surging joy of life from the foaming cup of infinity, in order that, as far as his narrow limitations permit, he may taste one drop of the bliss of that being which produces everything in and by itself," and you will understand how it is that, when he begins to feel like a prisoner who sees no way of escape, he is seized by a burning, so to speak, pantheistic, desire to fling his human life away, that he may "rend the clouds asunder with the storm-wind and grasp the billows;" you will feel the justification for his dying exclamation: "Nature! thy son, thy friend, thy lover, approaches his end." A soul which demands so much room must inevitably be an offence to society, especially when society is hedged in by as many rules as it was at the close of the most social of all centuries. Werther abhors all rules. At a time when poetry was fettered by them, he reduces all its laws to one: "Know what is good and dare to put it into words." An artist, his views on painting are as heretical as his views on poetry. He meets a young brother artist, fresh from the schools, who deafens him with the doctrines of all the famous theorists, Winckelmann and Sulzer amongst others. This fellow is a perfect terror to him. "Nature alone," he writes, "fashions the great artist. Much may be said in favour of the laws of art, about as much as may be said in praise of the laws of society. The artist who observes them will never produce anything bad or absolutely valueless, just as the man who submits to the control of convention and decorum will never be an unbearable neighbour or a remarkable scoundrel; nevertheless, every rule, say what you will, tends to destroy true feeling for nature and to prevent its sincere expression." Werther's detestation of rules explains his abhorrence for all technical and conventional expressions. He gnashes his teeth with annoyance when the prince, who has no artistic taste, brings out some æsthetic platitude in reply to an eager remark he himself has let fall on the subject of art, and he is enraged by the string of ready-made social judgments which Albert has at his fingers' ends. "Why," he cries, "must you people, when you speak of a thing, immediately say, 'it is stupid' or 'it is clever,' 'it is good' or 'it is bad'? What do you mean? Have you investigated into the inner significance of the action? Have you traced its causes, divined its inevitability? If you had, you would not be so ready to pass judgment!" He revolts against the pedantry of the ambassador who cavils at the style of his secretary's despatches, he wishes misfortune may befall the theological blue-stocking who has cut down the pretty hazels in the rectory garden, and he is unreasonably embittered by the arrogance of antiquated erudition, by all lifeless, solemn ceremonial, and by the claims which those of a certain rank in society make on the submission and obedience of their inferiors. He seeks refuge with children, who "of all things upon earth are nearest to his heart," and with uncultured souls, whose genuine feelings and genuine passions give them a beauty in his eyes which nothing can surpass. Watching the girls fetch water from the well reminds him of patriarchal times, of Rebecca and Eleazer, and when he cooks his own green peas he lives in thought in those Homeric days when Penelope's haughty suitors killed and prepared their own food. Nature enchants and captivates him. If he is not a Christian, if, as he expresses it, he is not one of those who have been given to the Son--something in his heart telling him that the Father has reserved him for Himself--it is because to him that Father is Nature; Nature is his God. Wherever he goes in society he offends against its cold and formal regulations. He is ejected in the most insulting manner from an aristocratic gathering; he, the plebeian, all unwitting of offence, having remained in his chief's drawing-room after the arrival of distinguished guests. Himself ardently, hopelessly in love, he does what he can to save an unfortunate youth whom an unconquerable and not unrequited passion has driven to offer violence and to murder a rival. Werther's petition is not only rejected by the representatives of the law, but he is himself compelled by the law to bear witness against the man he would so willingly shield and save. All this, however, is mere minor detail. The woman he loves, and whom he could so easily have won, had no plighted word stood between them, becomes the wife of another; this is the shock that breaks his heart. This book represents the full heart, right or wrong, in collision with the conventions of everyday life, its craving for infinity, for liberty, which makes life seem a prison and all society's partition walls seem prison walls. "All that society does," says Werther, "is to paint them for each individual with fair perspectives opening to a wide horizon. The walls themselves are never broken down." Hence this dashing of the head against the wall, these long sobs, this deep despair which nothing but a bullet through the heart can still. On the occasion of their meeting, Napoleon reproached Goethe for having mixed up the love-story with the revolt against society; the reproach was unreasonable, for the two are indissolubly connected; it is only together that they express the idea of the book. Unlike _La Nouvelle Héloïse, Werther_ is no glorification of the triumph of virtue and deistic piety over natural instincts and passions; it represents passion running its predestined course. In this tragedy of the human heart, the law-defying being and the lawless passion meet their inevitable doom. The termination to the story, however, was not of Goethe's invention; he made use of a manuscript describing the death of young Jerusalem (_vide_ Kestner's book on Goethe and Lotte). In its last lines he only altered a single word, as being too vulgar. The manuscript runs, "Barbiergesellen trugen ihn"; in the book we read, "Handwerker trugen ihn, kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet." This sentence in its cutting brevity intimates that a life is at an end, that a human being at war with himself and society, mortally wounded in his deepest sympathies, has succumbed. Mechanics bore him to the grave, middle-class society held pharisaically aloof; no priest accompanied him, for he was a suicide, and had defied the laws of religion; but he had loved the people and had associated with the uncultured, so they followed him to the grave. It is well known to what an outburst of sentimental literature this work gave rise; how its passionate emotion turned into heavy sentimentality, as in the case of Clauren, Lafontaine, and Rahbek, the Dane, or was diluted into sickly platonism, as in Ingemann's feeble imitation, _Varners Vandringer_, But _Werther_ was not responsible for all this; absorption in feeling and emotions is only one feature of the book. There wells forth from the very midst of this absorption such a healthy love of nature and of life, such a hearty, revolutionary ire at conventional society, its prejudices, its compulsory regulations, its terror of genius, whose stream might possibly overflow its banks and flood the "tulip beds and kitchen-gardens," that the main impression which the work leaves on our minds is that of the impulse towards originality and poetry which it depicts, arouses, and satisfies. What an advance we have here upon _La Nouvelle Héloïse_! In the first place, there is a far deeper and purer feeling for nature than in Rousseau. The additional fact, that scenery is looked at from a new point of view, is to be ascribed to the influence of a literary event which occurred in 1762, and made a great impression; namely, the publication of Ossian. The Scottish bard so melted even Napoleon's hard heart that he much preferred him to Homer. At this time the authenticity of Ossian had not been called in question; at a later period men turned from these poems with the pique which people who have been raving about the singing of a nightingale would show if they discovered that some rascal hidden among the bushes had been imposing on them. In the hearts of his contemporaries, Macpherson succeeded in supplanting Homer. Among others he influenced Goethe, which accounts for our finding the healthy Homeric view of nature which prevails in the first half of _Werther_, superseded in the second by the Ossianic mist pictures which harmonise with the increasing morbidity, restlessness, and lyrical passion of the tale. Rousseau's chief female figure is drawn with uncertain touch. Like most French heroines, she is wanting in womanly simplicity. In genuineness and sincerity of passion she falls far short of her namesake, the real Héloïse, whose every word comes from the heart. Julie's utterances are cold; she perpetually relapses into lectures on Virtue and the Supreme Being. She makes such observations as the following: "To such a degree are all human affairs naught, that with the exception of the being which exists by itself, there is no beauty except in that which is not." She means in our illusions. Julie dissects feelings, and reasons in high-flown language. In contrast with her how naïve and natural is the vigorous Charlotte! Think of the latter, for instance, in the famous scene where she is cutting bread and butter for her little sisters and brothers. If she offends it is not by declamation, but by a touch of sentimentality, as, for instance, in the scene where her thoughts and Werther's meet, when, looking out into the rain through the wet window-pane, she utters the word: "Klopstock!" From St. Preux to Werther the advance is equally great In the former there was, as his name implies, some reminiscence of the ideal knight. It is Goethe, the poet of the modern era, who finally disposes of this ideal. In his heroes, physical courage, which never fails in its effect on naïve readers, is almost too much ignored. It is so in the case of Wilhelm Meister and Faust. And Werther too is no knight, but a thinking and feeling microcosm. From his limited point in space he embraces the whole of existence, and the trouble in his soul is the trouble which heralds and accompanies the birth of a new era. His most enduring mood is one of limitless longing. He belongs to an age of anticipation and inauguration, not to one of abandonment and despair. We shall see his antithesis in Chateaubriand's René. The main source of Werther's unhappiness is to be found in the disparity between the limitations of society and the infinity of the heart. In early days the heroes of literature were kings and princes; their worldly position harmonised with their spiritual greatness; the contrast between desire and power was unknown. And even after literature had widened its bounds, it still admitted only those whose birth and wealth raised them above the low toils and troubles of life. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe indicates the cause. "O thrice happy," he cries, "are they who are placed by birth on the heights of humanity, and who have never dwelt in, have never even travelled through, the valley of humiliation in which so many an honest soul spends a miserable life. They have scarcely entered existence before they step on board a ship to take the great common journey; they profit by every favourable breath of wind, while the others, left to their own resources, swim painfully after, deriving but small benefit from the favouring breeze, and often sink when their strength is exhausted to a miserable death beneath the waves." Here we have one of the blessings of life, namely, wealth, praised in eloquent terms, and what may be said of wealth, the lowest in order of life's outward advantages, may be said with still more reason of all the other external forms of happiness and power. It is at the change of the century that we first come upon this strange incongruity, a personality who is a sort of god and ruler in the spiritual world, whose capacity of feeling is such that by means of it he draws into his own life the whole life of the universe, the demand of whose heart is a demand for omnipotence (for omnipotence he must have in order to transform the cold, hard world into a world after his own heart), and who, along with all this, is--what? A Secretary of Legation, perhaps, like Werther, with a few hundred thalers a year, a man who is so needy that he is glad when the Hereditary Prince makes him a present of twenty-five ducats, who is confined half the day to his office, who is debarred from all except bourgeois society, and looks for the fulfilment of all his desires of happiness in the possession of a girl who is carried off from under his nose by a commonplace prig. Would he cultivate a talent, there are obstacles in his way; would he gratify a desire, some conventional rule restrains him; in his longing to follow his ardent impulses, to quench his burning spiritual thirst, he passionately stretches out his hands, but society peremptorily says: No. It seemed as if there were a great and terrible discord between the individual and the general condition of things, between heart and reason, between the laws of passion and those of society. The impression that this was so had taken deep hold of that generation. It appeared to them that there was something wrong with the great machinery of existence, and that it would soon collapse. Nor was it long before they heard the crash, before that time came when all barriers were broken down and all forms done away with; when the established order was overthrown and distinctions of class suddenly disappeared; when the air was filled with the smoke of gunpowder and the notes of the "Marseillaise" when the ancient boundaries of kingdoms were changed and re-changed, kings were dethroned and beheaded, and the religion of a thousand years was abolished; when a Corsican lieutenant of artillery proclaimed himself the heir of the Revolution and declared all careers open to the man of talent, the son of a French innkeeper ascended the throne of Naples, and a quondam grenadier grasped the sceptres of Sweden and Norway. It is the longing and the vague unrest of anticipation that distinguish Werther. A revolution lies between him and the next great type, the Frenchman, René. In René the poetry of prophecy is superseded by that of disillusionment. In place of pre-revolutionary discontent we have anti-revolutionary dissatisfaction. All those great changes had been powerless to bring man's actual condition into harmony with the cravings of his spirit. The struggle for the human rights of the individual appeared to have resulted solely in a new tyranny. Once again we meet the young man of the age in literature. How changed he is! The fresh colour has gone from his cheek, the ingenuousness from his mind; his forehead is lined, his life is empty, his hand is clenched. Expelled from a society which he anathematises because he can find no place in it, he roams through a new world, through primeval forests inhabited by savage tribes. A new element, not to be found in Werther, has entered into his soul--the element of melancholy. Werther declares again and again that nothing is so obnoxious to him as ill-humour and despondency; he is unhappy, but never melancholy. René, on the other hand, is lost in an idle grief which he is unable to control. He is heavy-hearted and misanthropical. He is a transition figure, standing midway between Goethe's Werther and Byron's Giaour and Corsair. IV RENÉ Chateaubriand was not, like Goethe, a man of peace. A star of destruction stood above his cradle; he was born in the same year as Napoleon, and the cruel and dark spirit of that age of the sword is apparent in his writings, and imparts to them a peculiar, wild poetry. But, it may be objected, has he really anything at all in common with Goethe and Rousseau? Did he actually learn anything from them? I regard it as certain that not only he but the whole age was moulded by the books we have just criticised. A species of proof can be adduced. When Chateaubriand reproaches Byron for never mentioning his name, for ignoring all that Childe Harold owes to René, he emphasises the fact that it is not so with himself, that he will never deny the influence which Ossian, Werther, and St. Preux have exercised upon his mind. Again, describing Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, he writes: "The library he carried with him contained _Ossian, Werther, La Nouvelle Héloïse_, and the Old Testament; sufficient indication of the chaos reigning in his brain. He mixed realistic thought with romantic feeling, systems with dreams, serious studies with fantasies, and wisdom with madness. It was out of the heterogeneous productions of this century that he fashioned the empire."[1] I give this pronouncement for what it is worth, but so much is clear, that if Rousseau's _Héloïse_, Goethe's _Werther_, and Ossian's poems were so much in the air that they seemed to a contemporary to be important factors in the creation of the empire, they must indubitably have had part and lot in the epoch-making literary works which appeared at the same period. Comparing Chateaubriand's talent with the contemporary genius of Napoleon, it seems to us as if the new century had concentrated all its energy and spirit of enterprise in its great general and conqueror, leaving none to spare for the young contemporaries who did not follow him on his warlike path. The procession of men of action and warriors passes them by and leaves them standing irresolute and dissatisfied. René is supposed to live in the days of Louis XV., but the description given of that period would apply equally well to the time of Chateaubriand's youth. It was, says René, a time when people had relapsed from the reverence for religion and the austere morality which had hitherto prevailed, into a condition of impiety and corruption, when genius had degenerated into mere nimbleness of wit, and the serious and right-minded felt ill at ease and lonely. All this applies very accurately to the close of the eighteenth century as it would be seen by Chateaubriand. In _Atala_ Chactas had told René the story of his life; now René in return relates his past history to Chactas. He describes his childhood in the old manor-house of the remote province, he tells how ill at ease and repressed he felt in the presence of his father, and how he was only happy in the society of his sister Amélie. Brother and sister, both by nature melancholy, and both poetically inclined, are early left orphans and obliged to quit their home. René's great longing is for the peace of the cloister; but he is changeable in his longings; they presently take the form of a desire to travel. This desire he gratifies. He finds food for his melancholy among the ruins of Greece and Rome, and discovers as much forgetfulness of the dead among living peoples as upon the soil of past nations; the workmen whom he questions in the streets of London know nothing of that Charles the Second at the foot of whose statue they stand. What, then, is the value of fame? He travels to Scotland to live in the memory of the heroes of Morven, and finds herds of cattle grazing on the spots where Ossian sang and Fingal conquered. He returns to Italy and studies its monuments of art, but finds that for all his pains he has learned nothing. Past and Present are two incomplete statues; the one has been dug up from the earth in a mutilated condition, the other stands unfinished, and can only be completed by the Future. Nature has as little power as history to soothe his disordered soul. He climbs Mount Etna, and, standing on its summit, sees on one side the sun rise above the horizon, with the whole of Sicily spread out far beneath, surrounded by the great sea, and looking so small that its rivers resemble the lines on a map; on the other side he looks down into the crater of the volcano, with its burning glow and its black smoke. This situation he considers to be exactly typical of his own character and life. "All my life long," he says, "I have had a widespread and yet insignificantly small world before my eyes, and at my side a yawning abyss." So volcanic and pretentious a nature was, naturally, out of place in the land that had given it birth. It is in vain that Chateaubriand attempts to conform in his modes of expression to the standards of that society to which he considers himself, spiritually, infinitely superior; he is invariably treated and spoken of as an _esprit romanesque_ for whom life has no use. Here we come for the first time on the term which in a slightly different form was to become so familiar in France as the denomination of a whole school. There is, undoubtedly, something of the Romanticist before the days of Romanticism in this mysterious suffering, which is so conscious of being interesting. From all these half-forgotten memories of vanished grandeur, all these impressions of the vanity of name and fame, these transports of indignation at the baseness and littleness of mankind, René has distilled an obstinate conviction that there is no such thing as happiness, and a persuasion of the weariness and emptiness of life even while he feels its healthy glow tingling in his veins. His favourite expressions are: "La folie de croire au bonheur; dégoût de la vie; profond sentiment d'ennui," &c. In all this misery, the thought of his sister is his only solace, but on his return to France he notices with surprise and grief that she avoids him; she repeatedly declares that she is unable to meet him, and has apparently forgotten all his love for her. Once only, when she divines that he is contemplating suicide, does she draw near to him again for a moment. He has already added this coldness of his beloved sister to the list of his bitter experiences of the faithlessness of mankind, when news of her intention of entering a convent makes him hasten to her. He arrives just in time to take part in the dreary ceremony, to see Amélie's hair fall under the scissors, and to kneel by her side, while she, as the ceremony prescribes, lies prostrate like a corpse on the marble floor of the church. He hears her murmur a prayer for forgiveness for the "criminal passion she has felt for her brother," and, grasping the reason of his sister's conduct towards him, falls in a swoon. As soon as he recovers consciousness he determines to leave Europe and travel to the New World. The night he quits the French coast a terrible storm rages. "Did Heaven," he asks, "mean to warn me that tempests must always attend my steps?" One thing is certain, that to Chateaubriand René's career was as unimaginable without an accompaniment of thunder and lightning as Atala's love tale had been. We have here an exceptional character encountering an exceptional destiny. And it is from this character that the melancholy and misanthropy of the new literature may be said to emanate. This melancholy and this misanthropy differ from any previously known. Molière's Alceste, for instance, the finest and most profound of his masculine characters, is only misanthropical in so far that he is troubled to the depths of his being by the meanness, the servility, the frivolous or cowardly duplicity which prevail at a corrupt and worldly court; but he is not melancholy, there is nothing morbid in his temperament, he does not bear the mark of Cain upon his brow. The melancholy of the early nineteenth century partakes of the nature of a disease; and it is not a disease which attacks a single individual or a single nation only, it is an epidemic which spreads from people to people, in the manner of those religious manias which so often spread over Europe in the Middle Ages. René's is merely the first and most marked case of the disease in the form in which it attacked the most gifted intellects. René bears that mark of Cain already alluded to, which is, withal, the mark of the ruler. The seal of genius, invisible to himself, has been set on his brow. Behind the mournful self-accusations of which his confession consists, lies the proud feeling of superiority which filled the writer's breast. If we read Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ attentively, we cannot resist the impression that the fiction of Amélie's love for René veils a kind of confession, an admission of the passionate love his sister Lucile cherished for her remarkable brother. How much in the way of confession may not the remainder of the book contain? René's sufferings are the birth-throes of genius in the modern soul. He is the moment in which the chosen spirit, like the Hebrew prophet of old, hears the voice that calls him, and timidly draws back, shrinking despairingly from the task, and saying: "Choose not me, O Lord; choose another, my brother; I am too weak, too slow of speech." René is this first stage, the stage of unrest, of election. The chosen waits to see another follow the call; he looks around but sees none arise, and the voice continues to call. He sees all that he loathes and scorns triumph, and all that worsted for which he would so willingly sacrifice everything if another would but lead the way. With amazement and dread he realises that there is not one who feels as he does; he wanders about seeking a leader and finding none, until at last the certainty is borne in upon him that, as none appears, as he can discover no helper, no guide, it must be because it is he himself who is destined to be the guide and support of weaker souls. At last he follows the call; he sees that the time for dreaming and doubting is past, that the time to act has come. The crisis leaves him, not, like Werther, prepared to commit suicide, but with a firm resolve and a higher opinion of himself. Genius, however, is always a curse as well as a blessing. Even the greatest and most harmoniously constituted natures have, all their lives, been aware of the curse it carries with it. In René, Chateaubriand has shown us the curse alone. His own nature and the position in which he stood to the ideas of his time caused genius, as _he_ knew it, to seem merely a source of lonely suffering, or of wild, egotistical pleasure, marred by the feeling of its emptiness and worthlessness. Chateaubriand, the inaugurator of the religious reaction of the nineteenth century, himself possessed no faith, no enthusiasm, no real devotion to an idea. The ideas of the eighteenth century were beginning to suffer an eclipse, to look like fallacies; the great ideas of the nineteenth had not as yet taken scientific shape, and, placed and constituted as he was, Chateaubriand was incapable of anticipating them. Hence he became the leader of the reaction, the champion of Catholicism and the Bourbons. With the genius's instinctive inclination to seize on the great principle of the new age, but without the genius's infallible prevision of its real nature and faith in its final victory, he took hold of the ideas which a temporary revulsion in men's mood and sympathies had brought to light, and championed them with obstinacy, with magnificent but often hollow eloquence, with great talent but without warmth, without that conviction which permeates the whole individual and makes of him the enthusiastic, indefatigable organ of the idea. Whilst Voltaire, with all his restlessness and all his faults, sustained his life's battle freshly, unweariedly, and invincibly to the last, because he never for a moment wavered in his faith in his ideals, Chateaubriand was consumed by ennui, incredulity, and cynicism. In one direction only, namely as a poet, and more especially a colourist, did he break new ground; and hence it was only his youthful poetical efforts that satisfied and inwardly rewarded him. But of all his creations, René, the picture of the intellectual type to which he himself belonged, was the most successful. A genius of René's type may employ religious phraseology, but he never truly merges himself in a higher being; his melancholy in its inmost essence is only the egoist's unsatisfied craving for enjoyment. As a genius René knows that the Deity is with and within him, and he can scarcely distinguish between himself and the Deity. He feels that his thought and his words are inspired, and where is the boundary between that which is of him and that which is not of him? He demands everything--the homage of the public, the love of women, all the laurels and roses of life--and it never occurs to him that he is in duty bound to make any return. He accepts love without loving again. Is not his a privileged nature? is not he a prophet hastening through life like a fugitive, a fleeting fire which illuminates, consumes, and vanishes? In these traits the author has simply described his own nature. Chateaubriand's _Mémoires_ contain, especially in their silences, sufficient witness to the studied coldness with which he accepted love and admiration. Some of his private letters to which Sainte-Beuve had access show with what icy egotism he at times attempted to enveigle with promises of a consuming passion. Even at the age of sixty-four he wrote to a young lady from whom he was soliciting a rendezvous in Switzerland: "My life is merely an incident; of that incident take the passion, the perturbation and the suffering; I shall give you more of these in one day than others in long years." One looks back and remembers the touching tenderness shown by Voltaire to his Emilie even after he knew that he was being grossly deceived by her, and the so-called Lucifer of the last century seems as innocent as a child in comparison. The picture of René was not finished in the book which bears his name; he plays an important part in _Les Natchez_, a romance written about the same time, but published later. His behaviour in it completes the portrayal of the character. Conforming to Indian custom, he takes to himself a wife, Celuta, who is passionately devoted to him. But it goes without saying that life with her does not heal the wounds of his heart. "René," we read, "had longed for an uninhabited country, a wife, and liberty; he had got what he longed for, but something marred his enjoyment of it. He would have blessed the hand that at one blow freed him from his past suffering and present felicity, if felicity indeed it were. He tried to realise his old dreams. What woman could be more beautiful than Celuta? He carried her into the heart of the forest, and strove to strengthen the impression of his freedom by exchanging one lonely dwelling-place for another, but whether he pressed his young wife to his heart in the depths of the forest or high on the mountaintop, he did not experience the happiness he had hoped for. The vacuum that had formed deep down in his soul could not be filled. A divine judgment had fallen upon René--which is the explanation both of his suffering and his genius. He troubled by his presence; passion emanated from him but could not enter into him; he weighed heavy on the earth over which he impatiently wandered, and which bore him against his will." Such is the author's description of René as the married man. These experiments of the hero with his young bride, these attempts to enhance the attraction of her love by the added zest of peculiar natural surroundings, are extremely characteristic. But it is all in vain! The unnatural passion he had once inspired, and to which the very fact of its being unnatural, and, according to human laws, criminal, communicated a strength and a fire which harmonised with the fiery strength of his own nature, has half infected him, has, in any case, made it impossible for him to love again. In his very remarkable farewell letter to Celuta he says that it is this misfortune which has made him what he is; he has been loved, too deeply loved, and that mysterious passion has sealed the fountains of his being although it has not dried them up. "All love," he says, "became a horror to me. I had the image of a woman before my eyes whom none could approach. Although consumed by passion in my inmost soul, I have been in some inexplicable fashion frozen by the hand of misfortune...." "There are," he continues, "some existences so miserable that they seem an accusation against Providence, and should surely cure any one of the mania for life." Even the innate desire to live, the deeply-rooted natural love of life itself, is scorned by him half affectedly, half weariedly, as a _mama_, and is supplanted by a wild Satanic lust of destruction. "I take it," he continues to Celuta, "that René's heart now lies open before you. Do you see what a strange world it is? Flames issue from it, which lack nourishment, and which could consume creation without being satiated, yea, could even consume thee!" In the next breath he is religious again, humble again, trembling at God's wrath. In the solitude he hears the Almighty cry to him as to Cain: "René! René! what hast thou done with thy sister? The one wrong which he accuses himself of having done to Celuta is, that he has united her destiny with his. The deepest sorrow this connection has caused him lies in the fact that Celuta has made him a father; it is with a species of horror that he sees his life thus extended beyond its limits. He bids Celuta burn his papers, burn the hut built by him in which they have lived, and return home to her brother. He wishes to leave no traces of his existence upon earth. It is evident that he would fain also require her, after the manner of Indian widows, to lay herself upon his funeral pile; for the same species of jealousy inspires him which prompted many a mediæval knight to kill his favourite horse. This last letter to his wife ends with the following characteristic farewell:-- "If I die, Celuta, you may after my death unite yourself with a more tranquil soul than mine. But do not believe that you can accept with impunity the caresses of another man, or that weaker embraces can efface those of René from your soul. I have pressed you to my heart in the midst of the desert and in the hurricane; the day when I bore you across the stream, it was in my mind to plunge my dagger into your heart in order to secure that heart's happiness, and to punish myself for having given you this happiness. It is thou, O supreme Being, the source of love and happiness, it is thou alone who hast made me what I am, and only thou canst understand me! Oh, why did I not fling myself into the foaming waters of the torrent! I should then have returned to the bosom of nature with all my energies unimpaired. "Yes, Celuta, if you lose me you will remain a widow. Who else could surround you with the flame which radiates from me even when I do not love? The lonely spots to which I imparted the warmth of love, would seem icy cold to you by the side of another mate. What would you seek in the shades of the forest? For you there is no rapture, no intoxication, no delirium left. I robbed you of all this in giving you it all, or rather in giving nothing, for an incurable wound burned in my inmost soul.... I am weary of life, a weariness which has always consumed me. I am left untouched by all that interests other men. If I had been a shepherd or a king, what should I have done with my shepherd's crook or my crown? Glory and genius, work and leisure, prosperity and adversity, would weary me alike. I have found society and nature irksome in Europe as in America. I take no pleasure in my virtue, and should feel no remorse were I a criminal. I would that I had never been born, or that I were eternally forgotten."[2] Thus powerfully was the dissonance first sounded which was afterwards repeated with so many variations by the authors of the "Satanic" school. Not satisfied with depicting, with a sure hand and in the grand style, a self-idolatry bordering upon insanity, Chateaubriand throws it into relief on the dark background of a sister's guilty passion. So impelled is he to make René irresistibly seductive, that he does not rest until he has inspired his own sister with an unnatural love for him. This criminal attachment between brother and sister was a subject which occupied men's minds considerably at that time. Not many years previously, Goethe, in his _Wilhelm Meister_, had made Mignon the fruit of a sinister union between brother and sister; and both Shelley and Byron treated the same subject in Rosalind and _Helen, The Revolt of Islam, Cain_, and _Manfred_. It was a favourite theory with the young revolutionary school that the horror of incest between brother and sister was merely based upon prejudice. But René's melancholy is too innate and profound to be caused by Amélie's unhappy passion alone. The reader feels all the time that this passion only provides an occasion for the outburst of the melancholy. René's despondency, his egotism, his outward coldness and suppressed inward fire, are to be found independently of this external cause in many of the gifted authors of that period, and in a number of their best-known characters--Tieck's _William Lovell_, Frederick Schlegel's _Julius_, Byron's _Corsair_, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_, and Lermontov's _Hero of our Own Time_. They constitute the European hall-mark with which the heroes of literature are stamped in the early years of the nineteenth century. But what marks _René_ as being more especially a product of the nascent reaction is the aim of the story--an aim which it has in common with only one of the above-mentioned works, Kierkegaard's _Johannes Forföreren_. Forming part of a greater whole which has a distinctly moral and religious tendency, it professes to be written for the express purpose of warning against the mental condition it portrays, of showing the glory and the indispensability of Christianity as a refuge for the disordered soul, and more particularly of proving by means of Amélie's example that the re-establishment of convents is imperative, because salvation from certain errors is only to be found in the cloister. The pious intention of the book and its very profane matter conflict in a manner which is not particularly edifying. But this too is a typical trait of the reaction; we find it again, for instance, in the first parts of Kierkegaard's _Enten-Eller_ and _Stadier_. The prevailing tone is a wild longing of genius for enjoyment, which satisfies itself by mingling the idea of death and destruction, a sort of Satanic frenzy, with what would otherwise be mild and natural feelings of enjoyment and happiness. It avails little that this work, like _Atala_, has an avowedly Catholic, even clerical, tendency; its undercurrent is anything but Christian, is not even religious. But this undercurrent, however impure and diluted it may be in the individual writer, springs from a spiritual condition which is the result of the great revolution in men's minds. All the spiritual maladies which make their appearance at this time may be regarded as products of two great events--the emancipation of the individual, and the emancipation of thought. The individual has been emancipated. No longer satisfied with the place assigned to him, no longer content to follow the plough across his father's field, the young man released from serfdom, freed from villenage, for the first time sees the whole world lie open before him. Everything seems to have become suddenly possible; the word impossible has lost its meaning now that the drumstick in the soldier's hand may, by a series of rapid changes, turn into a marshal's baton or even a sceptre. The powers of the individual, however, have not kept pace with his possibilities; of the hundred thousand to whom the road is suddenly thrown open, only one can reach the desired goal, and who is to assure the individual that he is that one? Inordinate desire is necessarily accompanied by inordinate melancholy. Nor is it every one, without exception, that can take part in the great wild race. Those who for some reason or other feel themselves bound up with the old order of things, and the finer, less thick-skinned natures, the men who are rather dreamers than workers, find that they are excluded; they stand aside or emigrate, they are thrown back upon themselves, and their self-communings increase their self-centredness and thereby augment their capacity for suffering. It is the most highly developed organisms which suffer most. Add to this, that the collapse of the old order releases the individual from a wholesome pressure which has kept him within certain social bounds and prevented his thinking himself of too much importance. Now self-idolatry is possible, wherever the power of self-restraint is not as strong as the control formerly exercised by society. And at the same time that everything has become possible, it seems as if everything had become permissible. All the power which the individual had given up, had voluntarily transferred to his God or his king, he now reclaims. Just as he no longer raises his hat to the gilded chariot for whose gilding he himself has paid, so he no longer bows to any prohibition whose human origin he can plainly discern. To all such he has an answer ready, an answer which is a question, a terrible question, one that is the beginning of all human knowledge and all human freedom, the question "Why?" It is plain that even these aberrations of fancy upon which we have just dwelt, these excursions into the domain of unnatural passions and unnatural crimes, are only a symptom; they are one of the mistakes made in the great, momentous struggle of the individual to assert himself. Thought has been emancipated. The individual, released from tutelage, no longer feels himself part of a whole; he feels himself to be a little world which reflects, on a diminished scale, the whole of the great world. So many individuals, so many mirrors, in each of which the universe is reflected. But though thought has gradually acquired courage to understand, not fragmentarily, but in this universally comprehensive manner, its capacity has not grown along with its courage; humanity stumbles on in the dark as before. To the old questions, Why is man born? Why does he live? To what end does it all lead? the answer, as far as it can be made out, seems unsatisfying, discouraging, a pessimistic answer. In times gone by men had been born into a distinct, unquestioned creed, which provided them with answers believed to have been supernaturally communicated, full of comfort and promise. In the eighteenth century, this creed having been abandoned, they were born into an almost equally dogmatic, at any rate equally inspiring, belief in the saving power of civilisation and enlightenment; they lived on the promises of the happiness and harmony which should spread over the earth when the doctrines of their philosophers were universally accepted. In the beginning of the nineteenth century this ground of confidence also was undermined. History seemed to teach that this path also led nowhere, and the confusion in men's minds was like the confusion of an army which receives contradictory orders in the midst of a battle. The standpoint even of those who try to turn thought back into the old religious grooves is not the standpoint of the old religion, for they themselves were but a few years ago either Voltaireans or adherents of Rousseau's deism; their new piety has been painfully reasoned out and struggled for. This explains the cribbed, constrained character of the intellectual movement among the writers who usher in the new century. In a very striking image Alfred de Musset has expressed the impression they produce. "Eternity," he says, "is like an eyrie from which the centuries fly forth like young eaglets to skim through the universe each in his turn. Now it is our century which has come to the edge of the nest. It stands there glaring, but its wings have been clipped, and it awaits its death gazing into the infinite space out into which it is incapable of flying." [1] Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, ii. 190; iii. 78. [2] Les Natchez. Chateaubriand, _Oeuvres complètes_, vol. v. pp. 353-463. In his _Mémoires_ the author has, in expressing his own sentiments, unconsciously repeated one of these sentences. It has already been quoted. V OBERMANN A striking contrast to René, egotistical and imperious as he is despite his weariness of life, is presented by the next remarkable variant of the type of the age. _Obermann_, a work produced in the same year as René, was also written in exile. Its author, Étienne Pierre de Sénancour, was born in Paris in 1770, but emigrated in the early days of the Revolution to Switzerland, where a long illness and various other circumstances compelled him to remain. In his quality of émigré he was banished from France, and could only now and again venture secretly over its frontiers to visit his mother. Under the Consulate he returned to Paris without permission, and for the first three years lived the life of an absolute hermit in order not to attract the attention of the authorities. He afterwards gained a scanty livelihood by writing for Liberal newspapers and editing historical handbooks. His was a lonely, quiet life--the life of a deeply-feeling stoic. Sénancour's first work, the title of which, _Meditations on the Original Nature of Man_, proclaims the pupil of Rousseau, appeared in 1799. His psychological romance, _Obermann_, was published early in 1804. This book created no particular stir on its first appearance, but at a later period it passed through many editions; successive generations perused its pages, and in France it was long classed with _Werther_ and _Ossian_. It was studied by Nodier and Ballanche, and was Sainte-Beuve's favourite work, he and George Sand doing much to bring it into public notice. _Obermann_ in France, like _Werther_ in Germany, has been in the hands of many a suicide; it was constantly read by Victor Hugo's unhappy friend, Rabbe, known to the public through Hugo's life and poems, and a certain clique of young men, Bastide, Sautelet (who committed suicide), Ampère, Stapfer, made a regular cult of the book. As René is the elect, Obermann is the passed by. Some of the ruling spirits of the century recognised themselves in René, Obermann was understood and appreciated by highly-gifted, deeply-agitated spirits of the finest temper. The book begins as follows: "In these letters are to be found the utterances of a spirit that feels, not of a spirit that acts." Here we have the kernel of the matter. Why does he not act? Because he is unhappy. Why is he unhappy? Because he is too sensitive, too impressionable. He is all heart, and the heart does not work. It was the age of rule, discipline, military despotism, the age in which mathematics was the most esteemed of all the sciences, and energy, accompanied by a capacity for unqualified submission, the most esteemed of all the virtues. By no single fibre of his being does Obermann belong to this period; he abhors both discipline and mathematics as heartily as could any future Romanticist. He despises the Philistines who take the same walk every day, turning daily at the same place. He does not wish to know beforehand how his feelings will be affected. "Let the mind," he says, "strive to give a certain symmetry to its productions; the heart does not work, and can only produce when we exempt it from the labour of fashioning." We feel that this unreasonable principle is applied in his letters, which form a heavy, diffuse, serious, badly written book; they produce the effect of improvisations, to which the author, regarding them as the children of his heart, has not chosen or else not been able to impart an attractive form. It is true that nuggets of gold are hidden in the ponderous ore, but they must be laboriously sought for; a man with real literary talent would have gilded the whole mass with them. [Illustration: DE SÉNANCOUR] The hero of the book is one of those unhappy souls who seem created for the shady side of life and never succeed in getting out into its sunshine. There is, as Hamlet says, along with many excellent qualities some "one defect" in their nature which prevents the harmonious interplay of its parts. In the delicately balanced works of a watch some little spring, some little wheel breaks, and the whole mechanism comes to a standstill. Obermann has no settled occupation, no sphere of activity, no profession; it is only in the last pages of the book that he makes up his mind that he will be an author; the reader feels no assurance, however, that success awaits him upon this path. The author who has been successful with ever so small a work sees, on looking back, what an almost incredible variety of circumstances have favoured him, what an extraordinary number of obstacles, great and small, have had to be overcome; he remembers how carefully he had to watch his time, how eagerly to seize the opportune moment, how often he was on the point of giving it all up, how many paroxysms of despair he lived through, all to attain this paltry end. The most insignificant book which is born alive speaks of ten thousand triumphs. And what a combination of favourable circumstances is demanded to prevent its dying immediately after birth! As many as in the case of a living organism. The book must find some unoccupied space into which it fits, the interest awakened by it must not be interfered with by other, stronger, interests, or the talent displayed in it outshone by greater talent. It must not recall any previous work, must not even accidentally resemble anything else, and yet must, in one way or other, be associated with something already familiar, must follow a path already struck out. It is of special importance that it should appear at the right moment. There are works which are not actually weak, but which appear so in the light of some contemporaneous event or in comparison with some contemporaneous production; they are made to seem old-fashioned, poor, pale, as it were. It is probable that Obermann, as an author, will belong to the same class of writers as his creator, Sénancour, namely those who believe that there is something of a magical nature in the secret of success. His letters provide us with full particulars of his spiritual life and history. The latter is epitomised in the following words: "Oh! how great one is, so long as one is inexperienced! how rich and productive one would be if only the cold looks of one's neighbours and the chill blast of injustice did not shrivel up one's heart! I needed happiness; I was created to suffer. Who does not know those dark days towards the coming of winter, when even the morning brings dense mists and the only light is in some burning bars of colour in the clouded sky? Think of those veils of mist, that wan light, those hurricane gusts whistling among bending, trembling trees, that steady howl, interrupted by terrific shrieks; such was the morning of my life. At midday the colder, steadier storms; towards evening gathering darkness; and man's day is at an end." To so morose a temperament a regularly ordered life is insupportable. The most difficult, distressing moment in a young man's life, that in which he must choose a profession, is one which Obermann cannot face. For to choose a calling means to exchange complete liberty and the full privileges of humanity for confinement resembling that of the beast in its stall. It is to their freedom from the stamp of any calling that women owe part of their beauty and of the poetry of their sex. The stamp of a calling is a restraint, a limitation, a ridiculous thing. How then could a man with a nature like Obermann's possibly choose a profession? At once too intense and too weak for real life, he hates nothing more than dependence! The whole constitution of society is repellent to him: "Thus much is certain; I will not drag myself up step by step, take a place in society, be compelled to show respect to superiors in return for the privilege of despising inferiors. Nothing is so imbecile as these degrees of contempt reaching down through society from the prince, who claims to be inferior to God alone, to the poorest rag-picker who must be servile to the woman from whom he hires a straw mattress for the night." He will not purchase the right to command at the price of obedience. To him a clock represents the quintessence of torture. To bind himself to tear his mood into fragments when the clock strikes, as the labourer, the man of business, and the official must, is to him to deprive himself of the one good thing which life with all its tribulations offers, namely, independence. He is a stranger among his fellow-men; they do not feel as he feels, he does not believe what they believe. They appear to him so tainted with superstition, prejudices, hypocrisy, and social untruthfulness, that he shrinks from contact with them. At the close of the eighteenth century France was not orthodox, but it had not emancipated itself from the belief in God and in a future existence. Obermann does not share these beliefs; his is an essentially modern spirit; his philosophy is the scientific philosophy of the nineteenth century; he is a warm, convinced humanitarian, and has as little belief in a happier existence after death as in a personal God. The question of religion is discussed from various points of view in his letters. We already find the indignant refutation of the theory that atheism is the result of wickedness. They who believe in the Bible, says Obermann, maintain that it is only men's evil passions which prevent them from being Christians; the atheist might with equal justice assert that only the bad man is a Christian, since it is only the Christian who requires the help of phantasms to restrain him from stealing, lying, and murdering, and who endorses the theory that it would not be worth while leading an upright life if there were no hell. He attempts to explain the psychical origin of the belief in the immortality of the individual. The majority of human beings, restless and unhappy, live in hope that next hour, that to-morrow, and, finally, that in a life to come, they may attain the happiness they desire. To the argument that this belief is, at any rate, a consolation, he replies, that its being a consolation to the unhappy, is but one reason the more for doubting its truth. Men so readily credit what they wish to believe. Suppose one of the old sophists to have succeeded in making a pupil believe that by following certain directions for ten days he would be assured of invulnerability, eternal youth, &c.--the belief would doubtless be very agreeable to the pupil in question, but none the better founded for that. When asked what becomes of motion, mind, and soul, which are incorruptible, Obermann replies: "When the fire on your hearth goes out, its light, its warmth, its force forsake it, and it passes into another world, where it will be eternally rewarded if it has warmed your feet and eternally punished if it has burned your slippers." He also attacks the theory, as often urged in our own as in those days, that those who do not believe in the dogmas of religion should hold their peace and not deprive others of the mainstay of their lives. He argues warmly, passionately, asserting that the cultivated classes and the town populations no longer believe in dogma (we must remember that he is writing of 1801-2), and as regards the lower classes, putting the matter thus: Even if we take for granted that it is both impossible and inadvisable to cure the masses of their delusions, does this justify deceit, does this make it a crime to speak the truth, or an evil that truth should be told? As a matter of fact, however, the masses now universally display a desire to learn the truth; it is clear that faith is everywhere undermined; and our first endeavour ought to be to prove clearly to all and sundry that the obligation to do right is quite independent of the belief in a future life. Obermann, then, maintains that the laws of morality are natural, not supernatural, and are consequently unaffected by the collapse of belief. He repeatedly emphasises the disastrous practical results of silence in matters of religion; it is the system of silence which makes it possible for the education of woman to be still carried on upon the old lines, keeping her, as a rule, in a state of ignorance that makes her the enemy of progress, and too often delivers her, body and soul, into the power of her father confessor. A comparison between love as a happiness-producing power and love in the rôle it plays in marriage, leads him on to express some very strong opinions regarding the then prevailing ideas on the relations between the sexes, and the principles according to which a woman's conduct is judged in civilised society. On these points Obermann is quite modern--he here follows the line of thought indicated by the preceding century; but in all that regards the emotions he is less modern, although he heralds something new, something that is on the way, namely Romanticism. He reflects much on the subject of the romantic; a portion of his book bears the significant title, "De l'expression romantique et du Ranz des Vaches." He defines the idea much as contemporary German writers do, although he does not systematise to the same extent. He declares the romantic conception of things to be the only one that harmonises with profound, true feeling: In all wild countries like Switzerland nature is full of romance, but romance vanishes when the hand of man is discernible everywhere; romantic effects resemble isolated words of man's original speech, which is not remembered by all, &c., &c.; nature is more romantic in her sounds than in her sights; the ear is more romantically impressionable than the eye; the voice of the woman we love affects us more romantically than her features, the Alpine horn expresses the romance of the Alps more forcibly than any painting; for we admire what we see, but we feel what we hear. It is interesting to note how Obermann unconsciously takes up the tone of the German Romanticists whom he has never read. They also exalt music as the art of arts. Sénancour declares elsewhere that he cares almost more for the songs whose words he does not understand than for those of which he can follow the words as well as the melody. He remarks this _à propos_ of the German songs he hears in Switzerland, naïvely adding: "Besides, there is something more romantic about the German accent." It is remarkable that we should find already suggested in Sénancour even that conception of language as simply musical sound which was subsequently characteristic of the German Romantic School. But his senses are too highly developed for him to rest content with music as the best means of intercourse between man and nature. In two separate passages in his book he declares that a succession of different fragrances contains as rich a melody as any succession of tones, and can, like music, call up pictures of far-away places and things.[1] Among the late French Romanticists we do not find such another highly developed, ultra-refined sense of smell until we come to Baudelaire. But whereas in Baudelaire it is a symptom of over-developed sensuousness, in Sénancour it is only an indication of the purely romantic cult of the Ego; it is one element in an emotional revel, for Sénancour believes that by means of the sense of smell as well as by means of the sense of hearing he can distinguish the hidden harmonies of existence. It also implies a shrinking from reality, with the corresponding intensified self-centredness; for it is only a volatilised essence of things that one inhales through the medium of perfumes and tones. In his repugnance for realities, no solitude is too complete for Obermann. He lives alone, avoiding both cities and villages. There is in him the strangest mixture of love for mankind in general and complete indifference in all the relations of real life. So sensitive is he, that he is afflicted by scruples about his addiction to the mild dissipation of tea-drinking (tea being very characteristically his favourite beverage). He finds that it distracts his melancholy (le thé est d'un grand secours pour s'ennuyer d'une manière calme), but he despises all external excitement and stimulant. He is aware that he is far from being French in this respect, for, he aptly remarks, if Frenchmen inhabited Naples, they would build a ball-room in the crater of Vesuvius. He does not truly live except when he is entirely alone, in mist-veiled forests which recall the inevitable Ossian, or at night by the silent shores of a Swiss lake. Like his contemporary Novalis, he feels that darkness, by veiling visible nature, forces man's Ego back into itself. Speaking of a night he passed alone with nature, he says: "In that one night I experienced all that mortal heart can know of unutterable longing, unutterable woe. In it I consumed ten years of my life." And he attains to an even more profound self-consciousness by day, in the snow-fields of the Alps, where all surrounding life is not only veiled, as by night, but is frozen and apparently at a standstill. He is most himself when he climbs from the Swiss valley in which he lives up to the desolate wilds of the highest mountains. With an indescribable, almost boyish gladness, he watches the form of his guide disappearing in the distance; revelling in loneliness, he becomes oblivious of time and humanity. Note him in these surroundings: "The day was hot, the horizon misty, and the valleys full of vapour. The lower atmosphere was lighted up by bright reflections from the glaciers, but absolute purity seemed the essential quality of the air I breathed. At this height no exhalation from the lower regions, no earthly light, troubled the dark, infinite depths of the sky. It had no longer the pale, clear, soft blue colour of the vault we look up to from the plains; no, the ether permitted the sight to lose itself in boundless infinity, and, heedless of the glare of sun and glacier, to seek other worlds and other suns as it does by night. Imperceptibly, the vapours of the glaciers rose and formed clouds under my feet. My eyes were no longer wearied by the sparkle of the snow, and the heavens grew darker and deeper still. The snowy dome of Mont Blanc lifted its immovable mass above the moving grey sea of piled-up mist which the wind raised into enormous billows. A black speck showed far down in their abysses; swiftly rising, it advanced directly towards me. It was a great Alpine eagle; its wings were wet and its eyes were fierce; it was seeking prey. But at the sight of a human being it uttered a sinister cry, precipitated itself into the mist and disappeared. This cry was echoed twenty times, but the echoes were dry sounds, without resonance, like so many isolated cries in the universal silence. Then all sank back into absolute stillness, as though sound itself had ceased to exist, as though the reverberating property of bodies had been universally suspended. Silence is unknown in the noisy valleys, it is only on these cold heights that this immobility reigns, this perpetual solemnity which no tongue can express, no imagination conjure up. Were it not for the memories he brings from the plains, man would believe up here that, leaving himself out of the question, movement did not exist; the motion of the stars would be inexplicable to him, even the mists seem to remain the same despite their changes. He knows that the moments follow each other, but he does not feel it. Everything seems to be eternally petrified. I could wish I had preserved a more exact remembrance of my sensations in those silent regions. In the midst of everyday life the imagination is hardly capable of recalling a sequence of ideas which present surroundings seem to contradict and thrust aside. But in such moments of energy one is not in a condition to think of the future or of other men and take notes for it and them, or to dwell upon the fame to be acquired by one's thoughts, or even to take thought of the common good. One is more natural; one is not bent on making use of the present moment, one does not control one's ideas, nor require one's mind to examine into things, discover hidden secrets, or find something to say which has never been said before. Thought is no longer active and regulated, but passive and free. One dreams, one abandons one's self, one is profound without _esprit_, great without enthusiasm, energetic without will." We can see him, this pupil of Jean Jacques, who has energy without will (exactly Obermann's case), sitting solitary amidst Jean Jacques's scenery. _René_ had widened the range of literary landscape. Instead of the Swiss lake and the woods and groves with which we began in _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, _René_ and _Atala_ gave us the great primeval forest, the gigantic Mississippi and its tributaries, and all the glowing, dazzling colour and fragrant, intoxicating luxuriance of tropical nature. This was a fitting natural background for a figure like René's. The exiled Chateaubriand had wandered through such scenery, and it had left its imprint on him. Obermann is in his proper place in the desert silence and dumbness of the mountains. It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some day cast it from him? He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says, "look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result." His determination to live, not to lay violent hands upon himself, is not engendered by humility but by a spirit of haughty defiance. "It may be," he says, "that man is created only to perish. If so, let us perish resisting, and if annihilation is our portion, let us at least do nothing to justify our fate." But it is long before Obermann attains to this calm. Many and impassioned are his arguments in justification of suicide; and this is not surprising, for the suicide-epidemic in literature is one of those symptoms of the emancipation of the individual to which I have already referred. It is one form, the most radical and definite, of the individual's rejection of and release from the whole social order into which he was born. And what respect for human life were men likely to have in the days when Napoleon yearly made a blood-offering of many thousands to his ambition? "I hear every one declare," says Obermann, "that it is a crime to put an end to one's life, but the same sophists who forbid me death, expose me to it, send me to it. It is honourable to give up life when we cling to it, it is right to kill a man who desires to live, but that same death which it is an obligation to seek when dreaded, it is criminal to seek when desired! Under a thousand pretexts, now sophistical, now ridiculous, you play with my existence, and I alone have no rights over myself! When I love life, I am to despise it; when I am happy, you send me to die; and when I wish to die, you forbid me, and burden me with a life that I loathe." "If I ought not to take my life, neither ought I to expose myself to probable death. All your heroes are simply criminals. The command you give them does not justify them. You have no right to send them to death if they had no right to give their consent to your order. If I have no right of decision in the matter of my own death, who has given this right to society? Have I given what I did not possess? What insane social principle is this you have invented, which declares that I have made over to society, for the purpose of my own oppression, a right I did not possess to escape from oppression." Once, many years ago, in an essay on the tragedy of fate, I put similar words into the mouth of a suicide: "He who groans under the burden of existence may reasonably turn and accuse destiny, saying, 'Why was I born? Why are we not consulted? If I had been asked and had known what it was to live, I would never have consented.' We are like men who have been pressed as sailors and forced on board a ship: such sailors do not consider themselves obliged to stay on the ship if they see an opportunity of deserting. If it is argued that, having enjoyed the good of life I am bound to accept the evil, I reply: 'The good of life, the happiness of childhood, for example, which I enjoyed and my acceptance of which you say implied my consent to live, I accepted in absolute ignorance of the fact that it was earnest-money, therefore I am not bound by such earnest-money. I will not violate the ship's discipline, will not murder my comrades or anything of that sort; I will only take the one thing I have a right to, my liberty; for I never bound myself to remain.'" This is obviously not the place to discourse at length on the permissibility of suicide. I leave that task to the moralists, only remarking that, although I do not believe anything reasonable can be urged against its permissibility except our obligations to our fellow-men, I consider these obligations in numberless cases an entirely sufficient and conclusive argument. At present I am only depicting from a purely historical point of view an actual psychical condition which is one of the phenomena of the literature under consideration. For _Werther_ and _Obermann_ are not the only books of this period in which suicide is represented or discussed. Atala kills herself. René is only prevented from doing so by his sister Amélie, and at one time, with a contempt of life almost as great as Schopenhauer's, he sneers at the love of life as a "mania." Their attitude towards suicide, then, forms a point of resemblance between two such different writers as Chateaubriand and Sénancour, and stamps their work with the impress of the period. The author of _Obermann_ made his hero in his own image, which perhaps explains why he makes him finally resolve to be an author. "What chance have I of success?" says Obermann. "If to say something true and to endeavour to say it convincingly be not enough, it is certain that I shall not succeed. Take the first place, ye who desire the fame of the moment, the admiration of society, ye who are rich in ideas which last a day, in books which serve a party, in effective tricks and mannerisms! Take the first place, seducers and seduced; it is nothing to me; ye will soon be forgotten, so it is well that ye should have your day. For my own part, I do not consider it necessary to be appreciated in one's lifetime, unless one is condemned to the misfortune of having to live by one's pen." In these words Sénancour expressed his own literary faith and predicted his own destiny. His own generation overlooked him; he was not appreciated while he lived, although he was in the unhappy position of possessing no source of income but his pen. But in the days of the Romantic School he attained renown; the Romantic critics bound his simple field flowers into garlands along with the passion-flowers and roses of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. And he deserved the fame he attained. For he is one of the most remarkable authors of the Emigrant Literature-a worshipper of Nature, as becomes a pupil of Rousseau, melancholy, as befits a genuine admirer of Ossian, weary of life, as befits a contemporary of Chateaubriand. He is thoroughly modern in his theories on religion, morality, education, and the position of women in society; he is the regular German Romanticist in his sentimentality, his indolence, and his dread of contact with reality, as if it were something that would burn him; and he is the French Romanticist in his mixture of liberal-mindedness with excessive scrupulosity and of enthusiasm with refined sensuousness, a combination which reappears in French literature twenty years later in Sainte-Beuve's _Joseph Delorme_. Everything stamps him as a herald or forerunner of the long train of greater intellects who at this moment begin their progress through the century; his weak voice announces them and he prepares their way. [1] Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90. VI NODIER Simultaneously with _Obermann_ there appeared in the French book market a little romance which was a product of intellectual tendencies akin to those of Sénancour. Though its author too is a forerunner of greater men than himself, his remarkable and versatile talent, his sense of the fantastic (exceptionally strong for a French author), and his courage in striking out new paths, make of him not a mere precursor but a pioneeer. This writer was Charles Nodier, and the name of his book, _Le Peintre de Saltzbourg_. Charles Nodier, who belongs only by virtue of a couple of early works to the period with which we are dealing, and who, except for these, must be classed as a French Romanticist prior to the existence of the French Romantic School, was born at Besançon in 1780. His father was a magistrate, a gifted and honourable man, severe in his public capacity and amiable in his home; he was a declared adherent of the eighteenth-century philosophy, and educated his son according to the principles laid down in Rousseau's _Émile_. Charles early showed an astonishing aptitude for learning, and much talent in various directions. At seventeen years of age he was so capable a philologist as to have compiled a dictionary of French onomatopoeic words, a work which the Minister of Education considered worthy of a place in the school libraries. By the time he was eighteen he was so accomplished a naturalist that he brought out a work on the antennae of insects and their organs of hearing. His first romance was given to the press about the same time. [Illustration: NODIER] Nodier's was a stirring childhood and early youth. At the age of thirteen he had some experience of the horrors of the Reign of Terror, for his father was head of the revolutionary tribunal at Besançon. In 1793 the warmhearted and determined little boy saved a woman's life. A lady of the town was accused of sending money to an émigré relation in the Royalist army of the Rhine. The charge was proved beyond a doubt, and the provisions of the law in such a case being unmistakable, the lady's fate was apparently sealed. A mutual friend of his family and the lady told the whole story to young Nodier, who first vainly attempted to move his father by entreaties, and then declared that he would kill himself if the death sentence were passed. He was so much in earnest, and seemed so resolved to carry out his threat, that at the last moment the father, in dread of losing his son, did violence to his Roman virtue, and acquitted the offender. In the same year, Besançon not offering sufficient educational advantages, young Nodier was sent to Strasburg. It so happened that he was boarded there in the house of the notorious Eulogius Schneider, the cruel governor of Alsace, who shortly afterwards perished on the scaffold in Paris. The scenes he saw in Strasburg were well adapted to quicken the imagination of a future writer of romance. As a youth in Paris he was a witness of the frivolity and pleasure-seeking that prevailed under the Directory, and after his return to Besançon in 1799 he interested himself in the cause of the state prisoners and suspected persons in that town. This led to his being denounced as dangerous to society; one night his door was broken open and his papers were examined, but nothing more incriminating was found than his works on the antennae of insects and the roots of words. The excitement of the situation satisfied his romantic love of adventure; it pleased him to be at war with the authorities, to run risks, to know he was spied upon, &c. He had no political convictions then or later, but he was an enthusiast in the cause of liberty, and always belonged to the Opposition, whatever the Government of the moment might be; he was religious under the Republic, a freethinker under the Empire, &c., &c. The despotism of the First Consul so exasperated him that at the age of twenty he wrote an ode against him entitled _La Napoléone_. Arrests were made right and left in the hope of finding the author, and when at last the printer was imprisoned, Nodier gave himself up. After several months' imprisonment in Paris he was sent back to his native town, where he was placed under the surveillance of the police. This was the beginning of a long series of persecutions and annoyances on the part of the Government, which, although certainly exaggerated by the young poet's lively and always active imagination, must have been anything but pleasant to him. He went from one hiding-place to another in the Jura Mountains, living and writing in unfrequented spots, and never staying long enough in any one place to complete the work begun there. Thus, in addition to all the impressions of the period already received, he had experience, at a very early age, of the emotions of the exile and the mood of the _émigré_. It is these moods and emotions which form the background of his first literary attempt. _Le Peintre de Saltzbourg_ was written during his incessant changes of abode among the Jura Mountains. _Le Peintre de Saltzbourg, journal des émotions d'un coeur souffrant, suivi des Méditations du Cloître_, is the title of the first edition, published in Paris, 1803. The _Méditations du Cloître_, a sort of appendix to this edition of the romance, possesses a certain interest as the expression of one of the ideas prevailing among the young generation. It is written with the same intention as _René_, being, namely, a plea for the restoration of monasteries. It is a monologue, spoken by a being peculiarly unhappy in his own estimation, who bewails the absence of any monastery wherein to take refuge, and naïvely seeks to prove his vocation for the life of a Trappist by a perfect torrent of complaint. "I, who am still so young and yet so unhappy, who have too early gauged life and society, and am completely estranged from the fellow-men who have wounded my heart, I, bereft of every hope which has hitherto deluded me, have sought a haven in my misery and found none." Hereon follows a long panegyric on monks and nuns, those "angels of peace, who did nought but pray, console the wretched, educate the young, tend the sick, help the needy, follow the condemned to the scaffold, and bind up the wounds of heroes." How explain the fact that these devout men and women have brought down on themselves a fury of persecution unequalled in the annals of fanaticism? How can the legislators of the eighteenth century have had so little knowledge of the human heart as not to understand, not to divine the existence of those needs, to supply which religion founded monasteries? "To the present generation political circumstances have given the education that fell to the lot of Achilles. We have been fed on the blood and the marrow of lions; and now that a government which leaves nothing to chance and which determines the future has set limits to the dangerous development of the powers of youth, saying to them: 'Thus far and no farther!'--do they understand now what melancholy occurrences result from so much suppressed passion and unemployed strength, how many temptations to crime exist in a passionate, melancholy, world-weary heart? With bitterness, with horror, I set it down: Werther's pistol and the executioner's axe have already made a clearing amongst us. The present generation rises up and demands the cloisters of old." Assuredly a humble and sentimental desire for a generation nourished on the marrow of lions! But we discern defiance behind the meekness, and the demand is not to be taken literally. It is impatient despondency grasping at random at any means of alleviating its woe. In a preface which Nodier added to his book in 1840, he speaks of the circumstances which produced it. Under the Directory, he says, emotionalism was very much out of fashion; the language of reverie and passion, to which thirty years before Rousseau had lent a passing vogue, was considered ridiculous at the close of the century. But it was quite otherwise in Germany, "that wonderful Germany, the final refuge of poetry in Europe, the cradle of the society of the future (if a society can still come into being in Europe). And we were beginning to feel the influence of Germany.... We read _Werther, Goetz von Berlichingen_, and _Die Räuber_." The hero of Nodier's book is fashioned after the pattern of Werther; he is twenty years of age, a painter, a poet, and, above all, a German. But he is a weak imitation, decidedly inferior to the original. Charles (Nodier's own name) is an exile, banished from Bavaria for political offences. For two years he has roamed through Europe, a restless fugitive, for two years has lived Nodier's own life. One feeling alone has sustained him, his love for a young girl who bears the poetical name of Eulalia. He returns to Bavaria, and learns--hear it, ye heavens!--that Eulalia is faithless! Eulalia is wedded to another! The betrayed lover cannot resist his desire to haunt the place of her abode. One day they meet, and--O Destiny!--Eulalia tells him that, never hearing from him, and being told he was dead, she had sorrowfully, and solely out of obedience to her mother, at last consented to marry a young Herr Spronck, whose fancied resemblance to Charles touched her, and who is, it appears, the noblest of men. On this follow lamentations and descriptions of feeling of the Werther type, but all in a much more dejected key. Charles abandons himself to melancholy retrospect. Here it was that he saw her for the first time; there that he had the first dark forebodings of the future; in this other place, in his ecstasy at beholding her, he forgot his paper, his pencils, and his "Ossian"; yonder, where the trees are now hewn down, he had determined to bury his dear Werther; now it is his own grave that he would fain dig. Werther has been Charles's friend, the friend on whom he has obviously formed himself. On one occasion only is Charles more energetic and manly than Werther, namely in his outburst of indignation at the obstacles which interpose themselves between him and his beloved. "Why did I not take her in my arms, seize her like a prey, carry her far from the abodes of man, and proclaim her my wife in the sight of heaven! Oh, if even this desire be a crime, why is it so intimately entwined with every fibre of my being that I cannot renounce it and live? A crime, did I say I In uncivilised times, in the days of ignorance and of slavery, some one or other of the barbarous horde took it into his head to write down his personal prejudices and say: 'There are laws for you!' How easily deluded men are! What a contemptible comedy to see so many generations ruled by the prejudices and whims of a dead past!" Immediately upon this follows, quaintly enough, a long, solemn panegyric on Klopstock's _Messiah_, obviously inspired by other, but very dissimilar, reminiscences of Werther. "O divine Klopstock!" cries Charles, "how magnificently you present the assembled miracles of poetry to our eyes, whether you introduce us into the presence-chamber of the Most High, where the first-born among the angels hymn the mysteries of heaven, or show us the cherubims in holy adoration covering their faces with their golden wings!" The transition from revolutionary sentiments to pious ecstasy is somewhat abrupt, but the mixture of revolutionary with romantic tendencies which would seem extraordinary in any other age, does not surprise in the Emigrant Literature. It is to be found in all its authors. We have it in Chateaubriand as Satanic Catholicism; in Sénancour as sentimental and romantic atheism; here it is revolt against social laws in combination with enthusiasm for the _Messiah_--different developments of the same phenomenon. It presently appears that Eulalia's husband is no happier than her unfortunate lover. He has been deprived by death of the love of his youth and cannot forget his bereavement even by the side of Eulalia. He observes the attachment existing between his wife and Charles, and, not wishing to stand in their way, takes poison and dies, after begging them to forgive the suffering he has involuntarily caused them "by his hapless existence." It would be impossible to imagine a more considerate husband. The lovers, however, are not a whit less noble. Eulalia especially is too high-minded to profit by so melancholy a death. She retires to a convent, and Charles drowns himself in the Danube. Two suicides and a retreat to a nunnery was the regulation ending in those days. To us, nowadays, this romance is a very insignificant intellectual production, but a very interesting piece of historical evidence. Its author soon passed into another phase of development. We shall find Nodier again upon a higher plane of the evolution of French literature; no one changed form more frequently than he--and the butterfly is more beautiful than the grub. VII CONSTANT: "ON RELIGION"--"ADOLPHE" The literary critic passing from one variety to another of the type of a certain period in a manner resembles the scientist tracking some structure through its metamorphoses in the different zoological species. The next variant of our main type who seems to me worthy of study, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, the hero of the only romance written by that famous political author. Adolphe is less brilliant than René, less melancholy than Obermann, but he is a representative of the same restless and unsatisfied generation. He too is related to Werther, but, like René, he is the child of the age of disillusionment. It was not until after the fall of the Empire that the book appeared, but it was written, or at any rate projected, in the first years of the century. Like those other books which on their emotional side are in touch with Rousseau, and which perpetuate his tradition, it conflicted sharply with the prevailing sentiments of the day. In Paris figures and the sword held sway, in literature the classic ode and science were in vogue, whereas in Constant's book emotions and psychical analysis predominated. Benjamin Constant de Rebecque was born at Lausanne in 1767, of Protestant parents. His mother died in childbirth; his father, a cold-hearted, worldly-wise man, was much such another as the father in _Adolphe_. Constant was an exceptionally gifted being. If, in reading _Adolphe_, we find it a little difficult to understand the extraordinary fascination exercised by the hero, the explanation is, that, having employed so many reminiscences of his own life in the making of the book, Constant seems to have shrunk from dwelling too strongly on his hero's attractive qualities. Adolphe is so distinctly Constant himself, that we can only, so to speak, understand how the type originated, by studying the author's youth. Constant was refined and charming, early addicted to a sort of sportive self-mockery, excitably impressionable, and, curiously enough, at the same time slightly blasé. To a craving for strong emotions was added a gift of putting himself entirely outside his own emotions. Even as a youth he was able to halve himself, to double himself, and to mock at himself. He could say: "I am as amused by the embarrassments in which I find myself as though they were another's," and his favourite expressions when angry were such as this: "I storm, I am beside myself with fury, and yet at the bottom of it all I am indifferent." No pains were spared to give this brilliant, intellectual youth an education suited to his gifts. He was first sent to the University of Edinburgh, where he formed friendships with several distinguished young Englishmen and Scotchmen, almost all of whom were destined to become famous. From Edinburgh he went to the small, peaceful University of Erlangen, where the foundation was laid of his acquaintance with German literature and German affairs in general. Here, as in Edinburgh, he displayed more interest in the politics of the old Greek republics than in their poetry. We gain the most trustworthy information on the subject of Constant's youthful character and development from his letters to Mme. de Charrière, a gifted, free-thinking Swiss authoress, Dutch by birth but completely Gallicised, who was over forty years of age when Constant, then in his twentieth year, first made her acquaintance. It was in this lady's house, sitting beside her while she wrote, that, at the age of nineteen, he began the great book on religion at which he was to work almost all his life, making perpetual alterations as his views changed and took more definite form. He finished it thirty years later, in the hours which he could spare from the Chamber and the Paris gambling-tables. But it was begun at Mme. de Charrière's; and there was a curious significance in the fact that the first instalment was written on the backs of a pack of playing cards, each card, as it was filled, being handed to his mentor. Constant expresses himself with absolute frankness in his letters to this faithful and devoted friend; from them we learn how he felt and thought as a youth. The feelings and thoughts are those of the eighteenth century, minus its enthusiasm for certain ideas, and plus a good deal of doubt. He writes:-- [Illustration: BENJAMIN CONSTANT] "I feel the emptiness of everything more than ever; it is all promise and no fulfilment. I feel how superior our powers are to our circumstances, and how wretched this incongruity must inevitably make us. I wonder if God, who created us and our environment, did not die before He finished His work, if the world is not an _opus posthumum_? He had the grandest and most beautiful intentions, and all the means for carrying them out. He had begun to use these means, the scaffolding for the building was erected, but in the midst of His work He died. Everything is constructed with an aim which has ceased to exist; we, in particular, feel ourselves destined for something of which we can form no conception. We are like clocks without dials or hands, whose wheels, which are not without understanding, revolve until they are worn out, without knowing why, but saying, 'I revolve, therefore I have an aim.'--Farewell, you dear, clever wheel, who have the misfortune to be so superior to the clock-work of which you are a part and which you disturb! Without too much self-praise I may say that I am in the same predicament." In another place he writes: "Oh, how generous, how magnanimous are our princes! They have again issued a pardon from which none are excluded save those who have rebelled against them. It reminds me of a psalm in praise of the exploits of the Hebrew God. He has slain this one and that, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has drowned Pharaoh and all his hosts, for His mercy endureth for ever; He has smitten the first-born of Egypt with death, for His mercy endureth for ever, &c. &c." "You do not appear to be democratic. Like you, I believe fraud and frenzy to be at the bottom of the Revolutionist's heart. But I prefer the fraud and frenzy which pulls down prisons, abolishes titles and such like imbecilities, and places all religious day-dreams upon the same footing, to the fraud and madness which would maintain and consecrate that monstrosity produced by grafting the barbaric stupidity of the Hebrew upon the barbaric ignorance of the Vandal." "The more one thinks it over, the less is one able to imagine any possible good reason for the existence of this foolish thing we call the world. I understand neither the intention, nor the master-builder, nor the artist, nor the figures in this _Laterna Magica_ of which I have the honour to form a part. Shall I understand any better when I have disappeared from the small, dark globe on which it amuses I know not what unseen power to have me dance, whether I will or no? I cannot say. But I fear the secret will prove, like that of the Freemasons, to be a thing of no value except in the estimation of the uninitiated." Having read these extracts, it does not surprise us to know that the book _On Religion_, planned at the close of the century to effect the same object from a Protestant standpoint that Chateaubriand aimed at from a Catholic, namely, the revival of the religious spirit in France, had originally a very different character from that which it finally acquired. If the first part were published as it was originally written, entirely in the eighteenth-century manner, it would indicate in its author exactly the stage of mental development indicated in Chateaubriand by his book on the Revolutions. In the form in which it has taken its place in French literature the work is remarkable for its calm, passionless style, its unprejudiced views, and an erudition not common at that period. Its weaknesses are its total lack of warmth and the general indecision of its principles. The main idea is as follows: All the earlier conceptions of the nature of religion have been imperfect. One school of writers, who regard religion as inaccessible by the path of reason, and who believe it to have been imparted to man once for all by divine revelation, seek to restore it to its original form. Another school, rightly appalled by the evils resulting from intolerance and fanaticism, have rejected religion as a delusion, and have sought to base an ethical system upon a purely earthly foundation. A third have believed themselves able to steer a middle course; they accept something which they call natural religion, or the religion of reason, and which consists only of the purest dogmas and the simplest fundamental principles. But the adherents of this school, like those of the first two, believe that mankind can attain to absolute truth--that truth, therefore, is one and unchangeable; they stigmatise all who believe less than themselves as ungodly, and all who believe more as priest-ridden and superstitious. In opposition to all these three schools, Constant regards religion as progressive; he starts from the premise that the religious feeling is a fundamental element of the human soul, that it is only the forms it assumes which differ, and that these are capable of ever-increasing perfection. He has obviously read Lessing's _Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts_; but he is more in sympathy with his own contemporaries, Kreuzer and Görres, than with Lessing. He either does not understand or does not appreciate the latter's delicate and yet profound irony; he is captivated by the Romantic-Protestant revival ideas, and assimilates as much of them as a French Liberal politician and converted Voltairean can. He strongly objects to the spirit of intolerance and persecution which makes itself felt so strongly in Lamennais' book on "Indifference in Matters of Religion" unlike Chateaubriand and De Maistre, he objects to the temporal power of the Papacy, or to any other combination of spiritual and temporal power; but he imagines that in his _sentiment religieux_ he has discovered a kind of spiritual primary element, incapable of further resolution, an element which is unalterable and universal, i.e. diffused over the whole earth and unaffected by time; and upon this theory, which is incompatible with the data of psychology, he bases his whole conservative system. As far as possible he evades troublesome questions: he refuses, for example, to decide whether mankind came into being in a savage or in a paradisaically perfect condition; and he expressly states that he begins with a delineation of the lowest fetish worship only for the sake of order, that he by no means denies that this pitiable stage may have been the result of a fall, this hypothesis, indeed, seeming to him a very probable one.--Few books have more rapidly grown old-fashioned than this of Constant's, which is now merely of historical interest as typical of the half-heartedness and indecision of the period in which it was written. In the early years of the French Revolution, Constant was appointed gentleman-in-waiting to the Duchess of Brunswick. In this position he heard the Revolution spoken of with that mixture of fear and abhorrence of which we have an example in the dialogue of Goethe's play, _Der Bürgergeneral_; but he had no difficulty in forming an independent and unprejudiced estimate of the significance of the great movement. In Brunswick, as elsewhere, much of his time seems to have been spent in amours, one following on the other in rapid succession. He himself jestingly assumed _Sola inconstantia constans_ as his motto. He married, solely out of ennui, it would appear, divorced his wife after the honeymoon, and presently fell in love with a lady who was at the time sueing for a divorce from her husband. For this lady's sake he returned at a later period to Brunswick. Her maiden name was Charlotte von Hardenberg, and many years afterwards she became his second wife. In the letters of this Brunswick period to Mme. de Charrière, Constant appears as aimless and bored as he is sagacious and witty. He makes merry over his stupid, little-minded associates, and for a time even over his feeling for the lady of his heart, until it suddenly occurs to him that jesting on this latter subject is scarcely seemly, and he decides to forego it. So far there was neither a centre nor an object in his life. Towards the close of 1774, however, a decisive change took place. He met Mme. de Staël, and it became apparent that neither of these two minds could produce the best of which it was capable without the assistance of the other. Constant was then twenty-seven years of age, Mme. de Staël twenty-eight. He had just arrived in Paris, the city to which his ambition had long attracted him, but which he now saw for the first time. He was introduced into the best society, frequented the houses of Mme. Tallien, Mme. Beauharnais, and Mme. de Staël, and made an impression both by his personal beauty and his intellectual gifts. With his fresh complexion and fair hair he resembled a young Northerner, but in mind he was the acute Frenchman, and in culture the cosmopolitan. He made an impression on the most gifted Frenchwoman of the day that was never effaced, even when the circumstances of life estranged and separated them, and it was soon no secret that Mme. de Staël's admiration had become passionate love. She imparted to the rising states man her faith in political liberty, her enthusiasm for the rights of the individual, and for a government which should assure them; and her fiery ardour inspired him with her spirit of enterprise and with her confidence in the power of words and of deeds to influence, to re-mould life in spite of destiny. In return for this, her relation to him seems, by setting her at variance with society, to have supplied her with the greater part of the passions, emotions, and rebellious thoughts which form the kernel of her imaginative writings. At Mme. de Staël's house Constant met a whole host of foreign diplomatists, disaffected journalists, and plotting women, who for the moment influenced him against the Convention. He soon, however, arrived at convictions of his own, refuted his first newspaper articles, and, more radical than his friend, joined the "Patriot" party in opposing the so-called Moderates, in whom he perceived no moderation. The year 1795 he spent, on the invitation of Mme. de Staël, at her country-house of Coppet, in Switzerland; the following year she was separated from her husband. When, as First Consul, in 1799, Napoleon gave France a constitution, in which autocracy was veiled by a slight pretence of freedom, he nominated-Constant, formerly his ardent admirer, a member of the Tribunate. In this capacity Constant, supported by some few sympathisers, carried on an honourable struggle against the Napoleonic absolutism, a struggle which attracted the attention of all Europe, and highly exasperated the First Consul. In 1802 the latter made the famous remark about the five or six metaphysicians among the Tribunes who deserved to be drowned, and not long after, these five or six, namely Constant and his friends, were expelled by the votes of a servile majority. Mme. de Staël and her father, the famous Necker, showing themselves actively antagonistic to Napoleon's autocratic policy, were both banished from France. Constant, who followed Mme. de Staël to Coppet, was forbidden to return. In May 1802, Mme. de Staël became a widow. In 1803-4 she and Constant travelled together in Germany. She, loving him devotedly, evidently seems to have expected that he would marry her; but it is plain that he did not reciprocate her feeling; it was only out of weakness and compassion that he concealed from her his constant correspondence with Charlotte von Hardenberg. Having probably invented some pretext for leaving her, he went to Weimar alone. There, in 1804, he translated Schiller's _Wallenstein_ into French. It was not Constant but A. W. Schlegel who accompanied Mme. de Staël to Italy in 1805 (as tutor to her children), on the journey immortalised in _Corinne_. Constant was privately married to his Charlotte in the summer of 1808, and so little was Madame de Staël resigned to his defection, that terrible scenes occurred when she unexpectedly met the newly married pair in the neighbourhood of Geneva. Charlotte, driven to despair by her rival's furious jealousy, made an unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide. So great was Madame de Staël's influence over Constant, that she actually persuaded him to leave his wife and return for a time with her to Coppet. For some years after this episode Benjamin Constant lived in quiet retirement at Göttingen, occupied with collecting material for his work on the origin and development of religion. The defeat of Napoleon in 1813 brought him and his friend Madame de Staël once more into the political arena. Her influence at the courts of Russia, Germany, and Sweden gave him a voice in the proceedings against the defeated autocrat. He went to Paris in Bernadotte's train, and, although he was in favour of the restoration of the monarchy, he strove ardently to save all that could be saved of constitutional liberty. He published masterly pamphlets on the liberty of the press, on ministerial responsibility, &c. It is well known that immediately after this, his blind infatuation for Mme. Récamier caused him to take such violent action against Napoleon on the latter's return from Elba, that there seems something traitorous in his acceptance of a post in the Council of State during the Hundred Days, and his collaboration in the Emperor's attempt to give France a species of constitution. We must not judge Constant as a politician by this unfortunate episode. Under the Bourbons, and even during the first years of the reign of Louis Philippe, he was the determined and eloquent leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though never remarkable for purity of character, he had noble impulses. When in 1830 he received a letter from one of his friends in Paris saying, "A terrible game is being played here; our heads are in danger; come and add yours!" he did not hesitate for a moment, but came and undauntedly sided with the revolutionists. A few months later, however, although he was at the time leader of the Opposition, he accepted 100,000 francs from Louis Philippe for the purpose of paying his gambling debts. Constant was an accomplished dialectician. No truth, he was accustomed to observe, is complete unless it includes its antithesis. He succeeded in completing many truths. The imprint set upon him by the period in which his youth had fallen was never effaced. The doubleness which in the other notable men of the same generation is only a secondary quality, is in Constant's character the essential, distinguishing, and, at the same time, disturbing trait. _Adolphe_, the chief work of this man's youth, deserves some study. In it we find the following utterance: "What surprises me is, not that humanity should feel the need of a religion, but that it should in any age fancy itself strong enough, and sufficiently secure from disaster, to venture to reject anyone religion. It seems to me as if in its weakness it should rather be prone to invoke the aid of them all. Is there, in the dense darkness which surrounds us, any ray of light that we can afford to reject? Does there float on the whirling torrent which carries us along with it any branch to which we dare refuse to cling?" We feel that the author is more certain of the existence of the whirling torrent than of the branch. His manner of recommending religion reveals his own lack of it, and a profound depth of melancholy. The explanation is simple. There was a reaction against Voltaire in the air at that time, a reaction practically inaugurated by Rousseau--the rebound of repressed, unconsulted, ignored feeling. A half-unconscious effort was going on in men's minds to restore the balance between the demands and the possibilities of the human soul which had been disturbed during the autocratic reign of critical intellect; and this half-conscious tendency was plainly perceptible even in men whose natures were really akin to Voltaire's, and who, had they been born thirty years earlier, would have been his eager sympathisers and fellow-workers. Voltaire had not only criticised, he had been forced by the evils of the times and by his unruly wit into an attitude of aggression. With all available weapons, even poisoned ones, he had attacked those purely external, palpable forms of authority, which in his time stood in the way of honourable human conditions, nay, made them impossible. Now all these powers had fallen, and the times once more craved authority. There are inner, spiritual authorities. The Right, the Good, the True are such. But the enthusiastic attempts to introduce and establish a free form of government which should realise these ideals without the invocation of any authority unexplainable by reason, had resulted in the savage excesses of lawlessness. What wonder, then, that not only many ordinary individuals began to grope after planks from the wreck of the once powerful political and religious systems, but that also a majority of the most highly gifted came forward as the champions of some authority, either temporal or spiritual, which they supported for the sake of the principle, but with no real belief or confidence in it. They had no real confidence, for the simple reason that for them, as genuine and intelligent sons of the young nineteenth century, it was impossible to believe in the strength of a stem which their fathers had sawn through. Chateaubriand's faith in legitimacy was as faint-hearted as Constant's in religion in general. Men were uneasy in their minds. The old house was burned down. The new was not even begun. And, instead of boldly beginning to erect a new building, events led them to seek refuge among the ruins of the old, the half-burned materials of which they built up as best they could. During this performance they were perpetually tempted to try experiments not planned from the first. After some vain attempts to give solidity to the building by the addition of new material, they would in despair give a kick at the shaky, newly built walls, which brought them down again. No group of writers whose aim was to preserve society ever brought such passionate accusations against it as the authors of the Emigrant Literature. It is one of these accusations of society which forms the basis of Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_. Adolphe is a love story which, in its presentment of the relations of the individual to society, takes a quite different point of view from _Werther_. In _Werther_ outward, and, by reason of these, also inward, obstacles prevent the union of a couple obviously made for each other. In _Adolphe_ outward, and because of them, also inward, reasons part two beings who are united. _Werther_ represents the power of society, and of once-accepted social responsibilities, to hinder a love match. _Adolphe_ describes the power of society and of public opinion to absolve from accepted personal responsibilities and to sever a long-united pair. The books, taken together, form a double picture of the pope-like power of society to bind and loose. But whereas _Werther_ depicts the feelings of the pre-revolutionary, enthusiastic, energetic generation to which its author belonged, the feelings described in _Adolphe_ are those of the first French generation of the new century. Unlike former love stories, _Adolphe_ does not delineate love only in its first awakening in the dawn of delusive hopes, but follows it through its whole existence, depicts its growth, its strength, its decay, its death, and even pursues it to the other side of the grave and shows the feelings into which it is transformed. Hence _Adolphe_, even more than _René_, is the story of the individual's rude awakening from delusion, the representation of the anguish of disappointment. It is the flower of life which is here stripped of its petals one by one and carefully dissected. In this point, too, the book is a great contrast to _Werther, Werther_ is naïve in comparison. It is the same flower, the perfume of which is a deadly poison to Werther, that is calmly dissected by Adolphe. The change is expressed in the very costume; the blue coat and yellow waistcoat have made way for our dull, funereal black. But the flame which is extinguished in the man's breast now burns in the woman's. _Adolphe_ is woman's _Werther_. The passion and melancholy of the new age have advanced another step; they have spread to the other sex. In _Werther_ it was the man who loved, suffered, stormed, and despaired; in comparison with him the woman was sound, strong, and unharmed--perhaps a trifle cold and insignificant. But now it is her turn, now it is she who loves and despairs. In _Werther_ it was the woman who submitted to the laws of society, in _Adolphe_ it is the man who does so. The selfsame war waged by Werther in the name of his love is now waged by Eléonore, and with equally tragic result. It is scarcely an exaggeration to call this romance the prototype of a whole new species of fiction, namely that which occupies itself with psychical analysis. It is its treatment of love that is new. Far behind us now lies the time when Amor was represented as the charming child we all know from Thorwaldsen's bas-reliefs. To Voltaire Amor was the god of pleasure. "Les ris, les jeux et les plaisirs" were his attendants. To Rousseau he is the god of passion. With Goethe he has ceased to be a beneficent spirit; we understand when we read Goethe what Schopenhauer meant when he wrote that Amor pursues his way, indifferent to the misery of the individual. In Faust, the first poem of the new era, he is transformed from a roguish boy into a criminal. Faust seduces Gretchen and deserts her; Gretchen's love-story means the death of her mother, her brother, her infant, and herself. She, the innocent, loving girl, kills her mother with the sleeping-draught she administers in order that Faust may visit her by night; Faust and Mephistopheles together slay the brother who attempts to avenge his sister's disgrace; from fear of shame Gretchen kills her new-born child, for which she is thrown into prison and finally executed. Goethe's passion for truth impelled him to paint a very different picture of Amor from that which represents him as the rose-crowned boy. And in Goethe it is not only in its consequences but in its very nature that love is fraught with fate. In _Elective Affinities_ he has made a study of the mysterious and irresistible attraction and repulsion by which the mutual relations of souls are determined, as if they were chemical substances. The book is a kind of study of passion from the point of view of natural philosophy; Goethe shows us its rise, its magic power as a mysterious natural force, its foundation in the unfathomed depths of our soul. An attempt had thus been made to explain the attraction to which we give the name of love by instituting a parallel between it and the attraction with which we are familiar in inanimate nature. But there was yet another step to be taken, namely, to dissociate love from everything with which it had hitherto been connected, and analyse it. This task fell to the lot of the unsettled, unsatisfied generation to which Constant belongs. However much men had differed in their conception of love, its causes and its consequences, they had all agreed in accepting the emotion itself as something understood, something simple. They now for the first time began to treat it as something composite, and to attempt to resolve it into its elements. In _Adolphe_, and the fiction which follows in its steps, an accurate calculation is made of how many parts, how many grains, of friendship, how many of devotion, of vanity, ambition, admiration, respect, sensual attraction, hope, imagination, disappointment, hatred, weariness, enthusiasm, calculation, &c. on the part of each, go to make up the compound which the two concerned call their love. With all this analysis the emotion lost its supernatural character, and the worship of it ceased. Instead of its poetry, its psychology was offered to the reader. What happened resembled that which happens when we look at a star through a telescope; its bright rays disappear, only the astronomical body remains: before, in the bright full moon we saw only a clear, shining disc with an unchanging face; now, we distinguish a multitude of mountains and valleys. From the moment when men began to desire really to understand, they necessarily fixed their attention less upon that first awakening of the emotion, which poets had sung and celebrated from time immemorial, than upon its later development, its duration and its cessation. In those tragedies which are to be found in the literature of all races, which are, as it were, their hymns to love, the death of the lovers follows close upon the blossoming time of their love. Romeo sees Juliet; they adore one another; after a few days and nights passed in the seventh heaven, both lie dead. The question of constancy does not occur. Our Danish love-tragedy, _Axel and Valborg_, seems, indeed, to deal with nothing but constancy; the whole plot turns on the prolonged engagement of the lovers, a characteristically national pivot--but _in Axel and Valborg_ constancy is glorified as a virtue, not explained as a product, for the play is a lyrical tragedy, not a psychological analysis. It is the question of the conditions of constancy which is treated of in _Adolphe_--under what conditions is passion lasting or otherwise? And it is the answer to this question which is really an impeachment of society. For it is maintained that while society, in this case represented by public opinion, upholds those unions which are of its own institution, it at the same time basely strives to destroy all possibilities of faithfulness in any union it has not sanctioned, even if that union be to the full as honourable, to the full as unselfish, as any of those which it fences round and supports. Constant prefers his accusation in a story which could hardly be less pretentious. It contains but two characters, no scenery, and there is not a single fortuitous incident in the whole course of its action. Everything occurs according to the natural laws indicated by the relations of the couple to each other and to society in general. The reader follows this history of two souls to its close much as a student of chemistry watches the fermentation of two substances in an inexplosible phial and observes the results. Who, then, are these two characters? In the first place, who is _he_? He is a very young man, who (like the author) has been given an appointment at one of the little German courts, after completing his studies at a small German university. He has been tolerably dissipated, but has also gone through a course of serious and laborious study. His relations with his father, an outwardly cold, ironical man, who represents the culture of the eighteenth century, have increased the hero's youthful taste for powerful, passionate emotions, and his leaning to the unusual, the extravagant. His father's severe discipline has inspired him with an impatient longing for freedom from the bonds which gall him, and a strong disinclination to let himself be trammelled by new ones. At this stage of his development he comes to a court where monotony and formality reign. To him, who from his earliest youth has felt an unconquerable aversion to dogmatism and formalism, it is positive suffering to be obliged to listen to his companions' eternal platitudes. "The self-satisfied chatter of mediocrity about absolutely unquestionable and unshakable religious, moral, or social principles, all considered of equal importance, drove me to contradict, not so much because I was of a different opinion as because I had no patience with such clumsy, stolid certainty. I was involuntarily on the alert against all these general maxims which are considered universally applicable, without restriction or modification. The blockheads knead their morality into such an indivisible mass that it cannot possibly permeate their actions and be applicable in individual cases." He revenges himself for the boredom which his associates inflict on him by jesting at them and their ideals, and soon acquires a character for ill-natured frivolity. He does not himself approve of his own contradictory, mocking spirit. "But," he says, "I may urge in self-defence that it takes time to accustom one's self to such beings, to that which selfishness, affectation, vanity, and cowardice have made of them. The astonishment a man in his early youth feels at such an artificial, arbitrarily regulated state of society witnesses rather to the naturalness of his character than to depraved tendencies. Besides, this society has nothing to fear from such as us; it weighs us down, its foolish influence is so strong that it quickly moulds us to the general pattern. Then we only wonder that we were ever astonished. We become accustomed to the new life as men become accustomed to the air in a room full of people, where at first they feel as if they could not breathe." These skirmishes with his narrow surroundings were not sufficient to satisfy the gifted young man; his discontent is perpetually with him, he drags it about as a man drags a weight attached to his leg. Like René and Obermann, he belongs to a generation of sons to whom their fathers did not appear to have left anything to do worth doing. The future has no interest for him, for he has anticipated it in imagination, and the past has made him old, for he has lived in thought through many a century. He has desired much, but willed nothing, and the more lacking in will he feels himself, the vainer does he become; for vanity is the invariable stop-gap with which those in whom will or ability is defective, attempt to fill the lacunae in their will or ability. He wishes to love and to be loved, looking on love in the light of a tonic for his self-esteem. He expects to attain to a stronger persuasion of his own worth, to be raised in his own and other people's eyes, by some great triumph and scandal. The happiness that love is to bring to him is the happiness of feeling for once that his will is strong, because he is able to bend another's to it. He is not by nature more faithless than other men. It is in him to love more tenderly, to act more unselfishly than many do, but for him to love faithfully many circumstances would need to be altered. He is still so young that there is more of curiosity and of the spirit of adventure in his feeling for a woman than of real love; and even if he loved deeply, he is too weak, too little of the man, to be able to love on in spite of society's disapproval of his passion; above all, in spite of his unlikeness to his father, he is too much his son to be able, without despising or deceiving himself, to stake his whole existence on one card. He differs from and yet resembles his father, just as the beginning of the nineteenth century differed from and yet resembled the eighteenth. And who is _she_? She is carefully described by the author as being such that Adolphe's love for her, however strong, is certain sooner or later to be affected by social considerations. In the first place, Adolphe is not the only man she has loved, and the verdict of society has been passed upon her before they meet; she is not his equal in its eyes, although she is so by birth. In the second place, she is considerably older than he; and in the third, hers is a passionate, power-loving nature, which could only be fused with his if social conditions favoured the process, and which must make both unhappy if they harden him against her. When Adolphe makes her acquaintance, Eléonore is no young, inexperienced girl, who learns for the first time what love is; she is a woman, whose new emotions stand out upon a background of sad, harrowing experience. The mark which this experience has set upon her is the first noticeable trait in her personality. Eléonore has relinquished her right to all the privileges and pleasures of a safe-guarded, peaceful life. Although of good family and born to wealth, she has left home and family to follow the man she loves, as his mistress. She has chosen between the world and him, and has ennobled her action by entirely, unconditionally sacrificing herself for his sake. She has done him the greatest services, has saved his fortune, and been as faithful as any wife could be, endeavouring by this absolute fidelity to solace the pride wounded by the reprobation and scorn of the world. Strength of will is the second noticeable feature of the character. When the first doubt of her friend's constancy assails her, the whole edifice that she has raised crumbles to pieces. Does he love her, or does he only treat her as a man of honour must? is he faithful, or is he only too proud and too well-bred to show himself ungrateful and indifferent? With tears she puts the question to herself, with anguish answers it. It is at this moment that she meets Adolphe. He is drawn to her with a desire in which his whole thirst for life and all that life contains is concentrated, drawn as to one in whom he mysteriously feels treasures of passion, tenderness, enthusiasm, intellect, and experience to be accumulated, buried, as it were. And his longing and her regret, his vanity and her despair, his youth and her disappointment take hold of each other like two wheels in the works of a watch. It is easy to foresee with what a fiery flame this passion will blaze at first, to foretell what a full and mighty chord, what a joyful paean will resound, as though both had won complete and lasting victory and salvation. There is a new and strange mixture in her feeling--an enthusiasm which is almost fanatical, because it must be equal to the task of stifling his constantly recurring jealousy of the past; a faith which is almost convulsive, because it is not based upon sound, natural confidence, but upon a determination to believe in spite of everything, even in spite of having already been deceived; and a fidelity which suffers tortures from being constantly called upon to demonstrate its existence, because it is the offspring of faithlessness towards the past. This redoublement of passion constitutes the third marked feature in Eléonore's character. "One regarded her," says Adolphe, "with the same interest and admiration with which one gazes on a magnificent thunderstorm." It is in reality an entirely new female type which is here presented to us, a type which many years later Balzac appropriates, styles "la femme de trente ans," and varies with such genius that he may be said to be its second creator, and which George Sand too developed and embellished in a whole series of her novels. Under the treatment of these two authors this type proved to be a whole, hitherto unknown, world, in which every feeling, passion, and thought was infinitely stronger than in the world of the girlish heart. In time the type passed from the novel into the drama, and long usurped the French stage. In it the early literature of the century found its queen, as in René it found its king.[1] The strong, Promethean generation to which Goethe belonged had produced its type in Faust, the fully developed man, with the powerful, cultivated intellect, who, having studied in all the schools and toiled through all the sciences, becomes conscious in his manhood's prime of a void in his heart, a thirst for youth, freshness, and simplicity. Casting himself into the whirl of life, he falls in love with a child. It is her simplicity and innocence that win and intoxicate him, and arouse the desire of possession. The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought, though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome--in a word, mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony. It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution of July, and George Sand had to pave the way--Saint Simon with his doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who ventured to oppose Napoleon himself--Mme. de Staël. This new type forms a strong contrast to those female characters of Goethe's in which German poetry attained its highest level, and in which the characteristically Teutonic spiritual quality is expressed more perfectly than it ever had been before. Although Gretchen and Clärchen are the antitheses of each other, the one being mild and submissive, the other fiery and daring, both are children, both are absorbed by a single feeling, both have perfectly simple, single-minded natures, Both love for the first and only time. Both give themselves to the man they love without thought of marriage, with entire trust, without any resistance, without even the wish to resist; the one from deep womanly devotion, the other from lofty womanly enthusiasm. They do not understand that they are doing wrong, they do not think at all. Their whole being, their will, their thoughts pass out of their own possession, they themselves do not know how. Their hearts are soft as wax to receive an impression, but once received it is ineffaceable, it is as though it were stamped in gold. Their innocence, purity, and integrity are beyond compare. They are faithful by instinct, and do not dream of the possibility of being anything else. They possess no morality, but all the virtues; for human beings are moral consciously, but good by nature. They do not consider themselves the equals of their lovers, but look up to them, as if the old legend had been realised and the sons of God had come down to the daughters of men. Gretchen is amazed and overpowered by Faust's knowledge, Clärchen kneels like a child before Egmont when he appears in his full splendour. They lose themselves, they, as it were, disappear in their lovers. What we have here is not two equals, who take each other's hands, and plight their faith to each other, but a bewildered, admiring child clinging to a man. He is her life, while she is but an episode in his. At a glance he grasps and comprehends her whole nature; she is incapable of grasping his from any point, incapable of penetrating and judging. She can see neither his limits nor his faults. Whichever way she turns, she sees him as something gigantic, looming on every side. Hence there is in this love no criticism, no emancipation of the spirit, no employment of the understanding. He is the great, the glorious one--like Faust, who can talk of everything and has an answer for all questions, or like Egmont, whose name as a hero and a saviour is upon every tongue and who is known to the whole city. The reason why this love brings with it no spiritual emancipation is that the young girl has no spirit, in the sense of intellect; she is pure soul. When she performs actions which would seem to require a certain amount of will or firm determination, when Clärchen, for example, astonished and indignant that the citizens of Brussels are indifferent and cowardly enough to allow their hero to be carried off to prison and probable death, makes a public appearance in the market-place, and vainly attempts to rouse their dull souls with fiery words, the motive of the action is to be found in the young girl's naïve belief that her lover's life must be of as great importance to others as it is to her; as she sees nothing in the world but him, she cannot imagine how others can think of anything else. These young girls are genuine daughters of the great family to which Ophelia and Desdemona belong. A sharp contrast confronts us in the new type of Frenchwoman; instead of sweetness, clinging affection, naturalness, we have passion, will, energy, and conscious intelligence. For it was in the most remarkable and intellectual woman of the day, a woman who had given up country, peace, and prosperity, rather than submit to the petty tyranny with which Napoleon's despotism pursued the unsubmissive, that Constant found the new type. The appearance of woman in literature as conscious intelligence is a first step towards her appearance as genius. We already see Mme. de Staël's turban appearing on the horizon. The woman who shares man's passions and struggles will soon share his genius and his renown. Yet a little while and the struggle ends in victory, the same woman who succumbs under the name of Eléonore is crowned at the Capitol as Corinne. It only now remains to direct attention to the accurate psychological observation in _Adolphe_, and to show the results arrived at. The hero starts, as we have seen, with the idea that the conquest of Eléonore is a task worthy of him; he imagines that he will be able coldly to study her character, and calmly to lay his plan of campaign; but, his susceptibility being quite as great as his egoism, he soon succumbs to a fascination which completely overmasters him, and which so increases his natural timidity that he cannot summon up courage to make the declaration which he had promised his vanity to arrive at very speedily. He writes, but Eléonore will have nothing to say to him, and avoids him. Her resistance and coldness produce in him a submission and devotion which soon become a species of worship. Never before has Eléonore been thus loved, for however much true devotion her protector has shown her, there has always been a touch of condescension in it. He could have made a more honourable alliance; he has never said so, but what is unsaid may quite well make itself felt. It is this reverence of Adolphe for her which wins Eléonore. She gives herself to him, and he is almost dazed with rapture and happiness. What first jars upon him is her not being able (when the Count has gone from home for a day or two) to let him out of her sight even for a few hours. She detains him when he attempts to leave her; when he goes, she asks when he will return. Pleased and flattered at first by this boundless devotion, he soon finds that his time is so absorbed by her that he has not an hour at his own disposal. He is compelled to refuse all invitations and break off with all his acquaintances. This is no great loss to him, but he would prefer being able to come and go as he pleases to being obliged to put in an appearance at the stroke of the clock. She who had been his aim and object in life is now a tie upon him. Where are ye now, O touching romances, in which the lover never had anything to do but to love, in which he rose up early to love, loved all day, and for love passed sleepless nights! It is a wonderfully naturalistic touch in _Adolphe_ that the lover feels his loss of time to be indeed a loss. It avails not that he asserts his right to dispose of his time as he will, for the thought of the grief she endures when he fails to appear, prevents his making any satisfactory use of the time gained, especially as he is also tormented by a feeling of shame that another human being should have such an ascendency over him. Then when he returns to her, annoyed with himself for having come back much sooner than was prudent for the sake of her reputation or his own work, he finds her miserable because he has stayed away so long. For two hours he has been suffering from the knowledge that she is longing, and now he must suffer two more before he can pacify her. In spite of all this he feels happy; he tells himself that it is sweet to be thus loved; nevertheless, he is unconsciously consoling himself with the thought that the peculiarities of their position must, sooner or later, put an end to the situation. The Count returns, and Adolphe first suffers from being compelled to deceive him, and then endures the torture of seeing Eléonore sacrifice everything for his own sake, give up at one and the same time her home and her fortune. It is a double grief, partly selfish, for he mourns over the inevitable restriction of his own liberty by the sacrifice she is so happy in making for him, and partly compassionate, for he knows with what hyena-like fury society will tear her reputation to pieces. All she has won by years of irreproachable behaviour she loses in one day. Her pride suffers agonies, and his devotion becomes a duty. From henceforth each has a secret suffering which is not confided to the other. Adolphe's character begins to deteriorate. He fights a duel with a man who has spoken slightingly of Eléonore, but himself unintentionally injures her reputation by the incessant mockery of women and the men who live in subjection to them in which he indulges as a kind of relief from the feeling of his own dependence; men put their own interpretation on his jests and jeers. He who cannot resist a tear, makes a point of speaking of women with callous contempt. Many have suffered the misery of loving without return; Adolphe's torment consists in being loved after he has ceased to love. Eléonore sees through his efforts to appear overjoyed when they meet, and one of those terrible scenes ensues with which Mme. de Staël had made Constant familiar; the exasperation of her passionate nature resembles hatred. An attempt is made by Adolphe's relations, who disapprove of his wasting his youth on such a connection, to get rid of Eléonore. Adolphe's chivalrous feeling impels him to run away with her, and for a time their tender feeling towards each other resembles love. Eléonore makes fresh sacrifices which it galls Adolphe to accept. At one time she suffers as much from not being loved as he from not loving; at another she so intoxicates herself with her own passion that she sees it double and believes that it is returned. Both live in the memory of their former happiness, which is vivid enough to make parting seem painful, even impossible, but not strong enough to impart any happiness to their daily life. The tender but faint protestations of love made now and again by Adolphe to Eléonore resemble the weak, colourless leaves put forth from the branches of some uprooted tree. He fails to make the being happy who is the cause of so much unhappiness to himself. Every time she feels that she has won new rights, he feels that he is bound by new fetters. Her passionateness makes their daily life one incessant storm. In a biography of Constant we find the following significant sentence: "This year Constant was happy; Mme. de Staël was in Russia." Eléonore inherits her father's fortune and is no longer dependent upon Adolphe's protection. The world now suspects him of deriving pecuniary advantage from the friendship; he is blamed for injuring her reputation by being always in her company, and it is of course impossible for him to explain that it is she who will not live without him. His life is slipping away between his fingers; he is fulfilling none of the promises of his youth; for, as he is not allowed to forget, there is an insurmountable barrier between him and any possible future, and that barrier is Eléonore. He determines to break off with her, but this very determination makes his position more hopeless, for the moment he resolves upon the death sentence (which he is too weak not to postpone) all bitterness leaves him, and he feels such tender compassion for her that she misunderstands and believes that all is well. She makes a final violent effort to win him by rousing his jealousy; but nothing now has any effect; on all sides the rupture is represented to him as the most natural thing in the world, as a duty to his father, to his own future, even to the unhappy being to whom he is chained, and whom he is tormenting. She receives a letter which throws light on his intentions, and soon after is attacked by a fatal fever and dies, proclaiming her devotion to her lover with her last breath. The moment Adolphe is free he realises that freedom is now useless to him; he no longer knows what to do with it, and longs for the old fetters. Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe, then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good." [1] The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:-- "Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has suppressed the girl of sixteen. "'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I! I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.' "In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance, this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our famous writers of fiction." The intelligent, refined Madame Émile de Girardin defended Balzac, answering very justly: "Is it Balzac's fault that thirty is now the age of love? Balzac is obliged to paint passion where he finds it, and nowadays it is not to be found in the heart of sixteen." VIII MADAME DE STAËL: "DELPHINE" In one of his letters Byron writes of _Adolphe_: "The book contains some melancholy truths, though I believe that it is too triste a work ever to have been popular. The first time I ever read it was at the desire of Mme. de Staël." Mme. de Staël herself says somewhere: "I do not believe all men resemble Adolphe, but only vain men." Simple as the observation is, we feel that it is written by a woman in self-defence; for _Adolphe_ had struck home to Necker's daughter personally, had bared her deepest heart wound. Anne Marie Germaine Necker was born in Paris in 1766. Her father, the great Genevese financier, became First Minister of France shortly before the outbreak of the Revolution, and his name was at that time the watchword of liberal France. Her mother was a highly gifted woman, but stiff, reserved, and the slave of duty; she believed that education did everything, nature little, and she laid pedantic stress upon trifles, being of opinion that nothing is trifling from the moral point of view. To this lady Rousseau's educational theories were naturally highly antipathetic, and the consequence was that Rousseau, with his belief in nature and in innate virtues, became her daughter's ideal. This daughter, a frank, lively child, developed into a bright, intelligent brunette, whose dark eyes sparkled with wit and beamed with kind-heartedness. While Mme. Necker chiefly appreciated common sense and the habit of self-examination, the daughter, who suffered from the strict control under which she was kept, and whose great gifts roused her mother's jealousy, grew to love all the qualities and virtues which spring without cultivation from Nature's own health and wealth. In her father's house she was from childhood brought into contact with the most famous men of the day, who were amused and attracted by her quick repartee and surprising originality. The lively, marvellously intelligent child was her father's pride, and she returned his affection with a boundless love and admiration which lasted all her life and can be traced in most of her writings. At fifteen years of age she began to write essays, novels, and tragedies. One of her tragedies, entitled _Montmorency_, marks the time when she began to feel attracted by the young Vicomte Mathieu de Montmorency, who had distinguished himself in the American War of Independence. Her parents being opposed to her marriage with a Catholic, she was obliged to refuse his hand, but to the end of their lives they remained faithful friends. Yielding to her mother's wishes, Germaine Necker married in 1786 the Swedish Ambassador in Paris, Baron Erik Magnus Staël Holstein, a favourite of Gustavus the Third. In order to assist him to this wealthy and influential connection, Gustavus confirmed the Baron in his post of ambassador in Paris for a certain number of years. The bridegroom, who was double the age of his bride, promised her parents that he would never take her to Sweden against her will. He seems to have been the ordinary northern nobleman of the period, very simple, polished in manner, but only half educated, a spendthrift and a gambler. It was said of him that he would never have found out how to boil a potato, much less have invented gunpowder. Curiously enough, he sympathised with the Revolution. Mme. de Staël's first book, _Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, was published immediately before the Revolution. It is a panegyric and a defence. At the close of the third letter she seeks to interweave Rousseau's fame with that of her father, who, at the time she wrote, had just been called to the head of affairs; at the end of the fourth she hails the assembling of the States-General with youthful enthusiasm, and expresses the hope that the great French nation will attain by the path of enlightenment, reason, and peace, to the possession of those blessings which other peoples had gained by the shedding of streams of blood. She calls upon the nation to make it a matter of honour not to go beyond the point which all are united in regarding as their aim, and she closes with an apostrophe to Rousseau, in which she laments that he did not live long enough to see the approaching awe-inspiring spectacle, nor to encourage that patriot, Necker, who merited a judge, admirer, and fellow-citizen such as he. [Illustration: MADAME DE STAËL] The Revolution broke out, and would not be stayed in its career at what was the limit of her hopes and wishes, i.e. the acquisition of a constitution after the English pattern. Necker was soon compelled to flee, but his daughter remained in Paris, and, protected by her husband's position, rescued many an innocent victim of the Reign of Terror. With the assistance of the courageous German, Justus Erich Bollmann, she saved the life of the man who was her lover at that time, Narbonne, the former Minister of War. Bollmann got him safely to London in 1792.[1] She had even laid a plan for the flight of the royal family. The hatred of the revolutionary leaders was roused by her behaviour; and it was with difficulty she escaped the mob's thirst for revenge. She fled to Coppet, accompanied by her friend Montmorency, who, as an aristocrat, was also in danger, and who disguised himself as her lackey. Afterwards she went to England, where she published a pamphlet in defence of Marie Antoinette, whom she did not know personally, but by whose fate she had been deeply affected. This pamphlet was soon followed by another, also called forth by current events, entitled _De l'Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur des Individus et des Nations_, a piece of declamatory writing, in which the authoress exhibits no knowledge of life except when she treats of love, and no political acumen except when she is writing of the Revolution. There is a hollow, insincere ring in what she says on the subject of ambition. Though not formally banished by the Directory, Mme. de Staël was placed under the surveillance of the police, and would have been arrested if she had entered France without permission. As soon, however, as Sweden had acknowledged the French Republic, she returned to Paris and busied herself actively with politics. Her aim was a Parliamentary constitution and peace with Europe. It was through her influence that Talleyrand was made Foreign Minister. Her house was a great political rendezvous, more especially of the Moderates, and it was not long before Benjamin Constant played the leading part among the politicians who assembled there, as well as occupied the first place in the good graces of the mistress of the house. When Bonaparte came to Paris as a conqueror towards the end of 1797, after the campaign in Italy, he made an extraordinary impression upon Madame de Staël. She sought every opportunity of approaching him, felt herself alike attracted and overpowered by him. Whenever she tried to interest him, it seemed as if she were struck dumb, she, the incessant talker. The feeling of his unapproachableness tortured her. There is no doubt that for a short time she nourished the hope of becoming the friend of this Caesar, and it was a grievous disappointment to have to relinquish the idea. From the moment she did so, she joined the ranks of his political adversaries, continuing, however, for a time to display a sort of coquetry as far as he was personally concerned. Not till she was definitely repulsed, did her feeling change to pure hatred. In the book which she published in the intermediate stage, we have satirical allusions to Bonaparte's government along with flattering allusions to himself personally. In conversation she openly and constantly expressed her desire that he (and consequently the army of her country under his command) might suffer defeat, in order that a stop might be put to his tyranny. It was in the year 1800 that she published her first large book, _De la Littérature, considérée dans ses Rapports avec les Institutions Sociales_, a work which, from its general purport, must be classified as belonging to that great body of writings in which, ever since the days of the Renaissance, the relative merits of ancient and modern literature have been discussed. Chateaubriand dealt with the same problem very soon afterwards in his _Génie du Christianisme_. Mme. de Staël and he both declare themselves in favour of the modern literatures, but upon different grounds. He bases their superiority upon the fact that they deal with Christian themes, of which the ancient authors had no knowledge; Mme. de Staël bases it upon progressing civilisation. She believes in the capacity of humanity to improve, and in the gradual perfecting of social institutions, and on this belief grounds her assurance that literature will contain a steadily increasing treasure of experience and insight. At this stage of her development there is no question of any profound and systematic literary psychology; she calmly, for instance, excludes imagination from the list of faculties which are capable of development--why?--because in spite of all her enthusiasm for Ossian, she cannot deny that Homer's is the fuller, richer, poetry. The merit of her book, however, does not depend upon what it proves, but upon what it proclaims and urges, namely the necessity for a new literature, new science, and a new religion. She draws attention to the literatures of England and Germany, to the Icelandic sagas, and the old Scandinavian epics; but Ossian is to her the great type of all that is splendid in the poetry of the North. She loves his seriousness and melancholy, for, she says, "melancholy poetry is the poetry which accords best with philosophy."[2] Writing of the Germans, she remarks: "The most important book the Germans possess, and the only one that can compare with the masterpieces of other languages, is _Werther_. Because it calls itself a novel, many do not realise that it is a truly great work.... The author of _Werther_ has been reproached for making his hero suffer from other sorrows besides those of love, for allowing him to be made so unhappy by a humiliation, and so resentful by the social inequalities which were the cause of the humiliation; but to my mind the author shows his genius in this quite as much as in anything else in the book." The fundamental idea of her book is, that free social conditions must inevitably lead to a new development of literature, that it would be absurd if a society which had won political liberty for itself were to own only a literature shackled by rules. "Oh, if we could but find," she cries with youthful ardour, "a system of philosophy, an enthusiasm for all that is good, a strong and righteous code of laws, which should be to us what the Christian religion has been to the past!" Jealous of her growing fame, and on the alert as the champion of religion, Chateaubriand reviewed her book. Other critics had twitted her with her enthusiasm for everything melancholy, and had inquired what she thought of the Greeks, who were certainly not melancholy. Chateaubriand seized the opportunity to strike a blow on behalf of revealed religion. "Mme. de Staël," he says, "attributes that to philosophy which I attribute to religion "; and addressing her, he continues: "Your talent is but half developed; it is smothered by philosophy. You seem to be unhappy, and how, indeed, should philosophy heal the sorrow of your soul? Is it possible to fertilise one desert by means of another desert?" He exhausts himself in mere phrases. It was about this time that antagonism to Bonaparte, who was soon to banish her again, this time for ten years, became the ruling idea in Mme. de Staël's life. After the Italian campaign she had seen in him the champion of freedom, had written him enthusiastic letters, and had prevailed upon him to erase her father's name from the list of exiles. But in the First Consul she saw only "a Robespierre on horseback," and Bonaparte complained with reason that she inflamed men's minds against him. Her former enthusiasm had turned into passionate hatred. From her salon she carried on a regular war against him. She and Constant were unwearied in their satire of his associates, his person, his behaviour. She scoffed at his little body and big head, at his arrogance and his awkwardness. He was the _bourgeois gentilhomme_ on the throne, annoyed by the wit of cultivated women, incapable of expressing himself coherently, eloquent only when abusive. His genius was mere charlatanism. He was not even a great general, for at Marengo he had lost his head, and might have lost the battle if Desaix had not come to his aid. There was something essentially vulgar about the man, which even his tremendous power of imagination could not always conceal. She entered into all sorts of intrigues with the generals who were opposed to Bonaparte, either from principle, like Moreau, or from pure envy, like Bernadotte. So far did she carry her hatred, that she was beside herself with rage when she heard of the humiliation of England by the Peace of Amiens, and kept away from Paris at the time of the festivities held in honour of this peace. The foreign diplomatists in Paris, to use Madame de Staël's own words, "spent their lives with her." She conversed every day with numbers of influential people, conversation being her greatest pleasure; and Bonaparte is reported to have said that every one thought less of him after having talked with her. He sent to inquire what it was she really wanted, and if she would be satisfied if he paid her the two millions which Necker had given in trust to the Treasury, and which were being wrongfully kept back; she only answered that it was not a question of what she wanted, but of what she thought. From the day when Benjamin Constant first raised his voice in the Tribunate against one of Bonaparte's proposals, her house in Paris was deserted, and all her invitations were declined; and immediately after the publication of her father's book, _Les dernières Vues de Politique et de Finances_, she was banished from Paris by express command of the First Consul. No heavier blow could have fallen upon Mme. de Staël. She herself likened the sentence to one of death; for to her, who only really lived when she was in the capital, and who could so ill dispense with friends, intellectual intercourse, and a certain participation in the great events of the day, it was misery to be thus torn from home and country. "Every step the post-horses took caused me suffering, and when the postillions inquired if they had not done well, I could not refrain from bursting into tears at the thought of the sorry service they had rendered me."[3] She was accompanied by Benjamin Constant; but when she heard of her husband's illness she went to him, and nursed him till he died. In the following year, 1803, she published Delphine, a tale written in five parts and in the form of letters, after the pattern of _La Nouvelle Héloïse_. It is easy to trace the personal impressions and reminiscences which form the groundwork of this novel. The story is the story of a woman's dutiful renunciation of a happy marriage, and for this the authoress's own refusal of Montmorency supplied a background of fact. But the real theme of the book is the loving woman's conflict with society, and the cruel, cold destruction by society of the happiness of the individual. Looking at it in this light, we feel that it was the fresh impressions of her later years, her relations with her husband and Benjamin Constant, that gave the book its tone. Her reputation had been injured by her separation from her husband, her relations with Constant were no secret, and he was undoubtedly the father of her daughter Albertine, born in 1797, the future Duchesse de Broglie. When Mme. de Staël wrote _Delphine_ it had never occurred to her to doubt that Constant would legitimise this daughter by a speedy marriage; but, in spite of the great allowance always made by public opinion for people of wealth and position, and her consequent comparative independence of action, she bitterly felt both the covert persecution of slander and the deliberate attempts at defamation made by the pharisaical. The spiritless, resigned motto of _Delphine_: "A man should be able to defy public opinion, a woman to submit to it," almost betrays its authoress, Madame de Staël's mother. The actual story harmonises with the motto, but the spirit of the book and the very fact of its publication contradict it. For the book is a justification of divorce, and it appeared in the same year that Napoleon concluded the Concordat with the Pope; it attacked indissoluble wedlock and the religious sacrament of marriage, at the very moment when the marriage laws were being made more stringent, and a portion of its old power was being restored to the Church. The book answers to its motto in so far that it teaches, through the fate of its heroine, that if a woman, even after a generous and prolonged sacrifice of her own well-being, transgress the rules of society, though it may be only to prevent the ruin of her lover, she is lost. It contradicts its motto in so far that the crying injustice of such a fate speaks more powerfully than any declamation, of the imperfection of the social organism and of the preposterousness of that power to coerce and make unhappy, which man's short-sightedness and pusillanimity have entrusted to the antiquated institutions under the pressure of which Delphine is crushed. She is depicted from the very first as a superior being, pure, benevolent, spirited, elevated by the very fact of her purity above the pharisaical morality of society. Her character is nowhere more charmingly suggested than in the scene where an unfortunate and maligned woman enters the salon of the Tuileries, and the other ladies immediately rise from their seats and move away, leaving a great open space round the poor, marked creature; upon which Delphine walks across the room and seats herself by her at whom all the other women have vied in casting the first stone. By a series of astoundingly base devices and intrigues, one of the principal characters of the book, a female Talleyrand, succeeds in separating Delphine from her lover, and uniting him to her antipodes, the cold, orthodoxly pious Mathilde, who privately accepts from the deserted Delphine the enormous dowry without which the marriage cannot be arranged. By the time all the various deceptions are detected, the totally unsuitable, unnatural pair, Mathilde and Léonce, are united. Other equally odious marriages and equally unhappy love affairs are grouped round this central couple, in order that the main idea of the book may be made sufficiently clear. Henri de Lebensei, who is an embellished edition of Constant, cannot be united to the woman he loves until she has obtained a divorce from her husband, with whom she cannot live, she declares, without destroying all that is good and noble in her nature. M. de Serbeliane stands in the same hopeless position to Thérèse d'Ervins as Delphine does to Mathilde's husband. Delphine is represented as of so pure and self-sacrificing a nature that she not only peremptorily rejects the idea of a union with Léonce, which would necessarily destroy his wife's happiness, but will not permit him to dwell upon the thought. She calms him; she points him to a profounder morality and religion than that in which he, as a child of the eighteenth century, has been brought up: "Léonce, I did not expect to find such an indifference to religious ideas in you. I take it upon me to reproach you for it. Your morality is only based upon honour; you would have been much happier if you had given your homage to those simple and true principles which teach us to submit our actions to the dictates of our conscience, and free us from all other yokes. You know that my education, far from enslaving my mind, has made it if anything too independent. It is possible that superstition is as yet more suitable for a woman than freedom of thought; weak and wavering beings that we are, we need support on every side, and love is a kind of credulity which is perhaps apt to ally itself with all the other kinds of credulity and superstition. But the noble guardian of my youth esteemed my character sufficiently to wish to develop my reason, and never did he require of me to accept any opinion without examining into it. I can therefore speak to you of the religion I love, as I can speak on any other subject which my heart and mind have freely tested, and you cannot attribute what I say to you to inculcated habit or the unweighed impressions of childhood.... Do not, Léonce, refuse the comfort which is offered to us by natural religion." We distinguish an echo of Rousseau, and the influence of the reaction against Voltaire, in this sermon which Necker's daughter places in the mouth of her second self. The plot develops; soon it becomes impossible any longer to maintain the unnatural union, to endure the unnatural misery. Henri de Lebensei writes the letter advising a divorce, which brought ill-fortune to the book, and which fell like a firebrand into the clerical camp. He writes to Délphine: "The man you love is worthy of you, madame, but neither his nor your feeling is of any avail to alter the situation in which an unhappy destiny has placed you. One thing alone can restore your reputation and procure your happiness. Collect all your strength to hear me. Léonce is not irrevocably bound to Mathilde; he can still become your husband; in a month from now divorce will be legalised by the Legislative Assembly." We must remember that the book appeared just at the time of the reinstitution of Catholic marriage in France. Here are more extracts from his letter: "You, who reprobate divorce, believe your view to be the more moral. If it were so, it ought to be the view taken by all sincere thinkers; for the first aim of thinking man is to determine his duties to their full extent. But let us go into the matter together; let us inquire whether the principles which induce me to approve of divorce do not harmonise with the nature of man and with the beneficent intentions which we ought to attribute to the Divinity. The indissolubility of unhappy marriages makes life one long succession of hopeless miseries. Some men say, indeed, that it is only necessary to repress youthful inclinations, but they forget that the repressed inclinations of youth become the lasting griefs of age. I do not deny all the disadvantages connected with divorce, or rather, the imperfections of human nature which make divorce necessary; but in a civilised society which urges nothing against marriages of convenience, or against marriages at an age when it is impossible to foretell the future, a society whose law can neither punish the parents who misuse their authority, nor the husband or wife who behaves badly--in such a society the law which prohibits divorce is only harsh towards the victims whose fetters it takes upon itself to rivet more firmly, without in the least affecting the circumstances which make these fetters easy or terrible to bear. It seems to say: 'I cannot ensure your happiness, but I can at least vouch for the continuance of your unhappiness'." In such involved and eloquent periods is couched what has been called Mme. de Staël's attack upon marriage. In reality it is, as we see, only an attack upon the binding, oppressing power with which society (itself first moulded into shape by the Church in the days when the Church was the only spiritual power) has invested the first attachment of youth--in Catholic countries by legislation, in Protestant by means of public opinion, which metes out as stern justice as any marriage laws. Her argument is based on the assumption that marriage can only be considered that which it is maintained to be, namely an ideally moral relation, when the two beings, who at a given moment of their lives promise to live together and be faithful to one another for the rest of their days, really know and love one another, and she points out how exceedingly difficult it is for any human being thoroughly to know himself and another human being. If marriage requires this mutual knowledge as its foundation, then a union in which it is lacking is not marriage. What kind of life can be based upon a sudden fancy, or upon a lie, or upon a Yes wrung from a woman by fear? In every case in which marriage does not rest upon a better foundation, its sanctity is imaginary, is derived from a confusion of the real relation with the ideal. Delphine does not allow herself to be persuaded. Faithful to the motto of the book, that a woman must bow to public opinion, she even determines to place another obstacle between herself and Léonce. By the time his wife dies, Delphine has taken the veil. Once more, though in another form, we have strong opposition to a vow generally regarded as sacred. Again it is Henri who is spokesman, but this time he appeals to Léonce: "Are you able to listen to bold, salutary advice, the following of which would save you from an abyss of misery? Are you capable of taking a step which would offend what you have been accustomed all your life to defer to, public opinion and established custom, but which would be consonant with morality, reason, and humanity? I was born a Protestant, and have, I grant, not been brought up in awe of those insane and barbarous institutions of society which demand of so many innocent beings the sacrifice of all natural inclinations; but ought you to have less confidence in my judgment because it is uninfluenced by prejudice? A proud and high-minded man should only obey the dictates of universal morality. Of what signification are those duties which are merely the outcome of accidental circumstances, and depend upon the caprices of law or the will of a priest? duties that subject a man's conscience to the judgment of other men, of men, too, who have long bent their necks under the yoke of the prejudices and self-interest of their order? The laws of France will release Delphine from the vows unhappy circumstances have forced from her. Come and live with her upon our native soil! What is it that keeps you apart? A vow she has made to God? Believe me, the Supreme Being knows our nature too well ever to accept irrevocable vows from us. Possibly something in your heart rebels against profiting by laws which are the outcome of a Revolution to which you are antagonistic? My friend, this Revolution, which has unfortunately been soiled by so many violent deeds, will be extolled by posterity because of the freedom it has bestowed upon France. If it is followed only by fresh forms of slavery, this period of slavery will be the most ignominious period in the history of the world; but if freedom is its result, then happiness, honour, virtue, all that is noble in humanity, is so inseparably bound up with freedom, that centuries to come will be lenient in their judgment of the events which prepared the way for the age of freedom." Besides attacking to this extent certain definite social institutions, the book makes protest throughout against the great mass of received opinions, the prejudices with which most men are clad as it were in a coat of triple mail, the beliefs which must not even be approached, because the very ground around them is holy within a circumference of so and so many square miles. It cannot be too plainly asserted that, in this particular, _Delphine_ is a more vigorous, remarkable work than most of the other productions of the Emigrant Literature. For a nation has a literature in order that its horizon may be widened and its theories of life confronted with life. In his early youth society offers the individual an extraordinary, patched-together suit of prejudices which it expects him to wear. "Am I really obliged," asks the man, "to wear this tattered cloak? Can I not dispense with these old rags? Is it absolutely necessary for me either to blacken my face or hide it under this sheep's mask? Am I compelled to swear that Polichinelle has no hump, to believe that Pierrot is an eminently honourable, and Harlequin a particularly serious man? May I not look up into any of their faces, or write on any hand, 'I know you, fair mask!'? Is there no help?" There is no help, unless you are prepared to be beaten by Polichinelle, kicked by Pierrot, and whacked by Harlequin. But literature is, or should be, the territory where officialism ceases, established customs are disregarded, masks are torn off, and that terrible thing, the truth, is told. _Delphine_ met with much disapprobation. The most famous critic of the day wrote: "One cannot conceive more dangerous and immoral doctrines than those which are disseminated by this book. The authoress would seem to have forgotten the ideas with which she, as Necker's daughter, was brought up. Regardless of the Protestant faith of her family, she expresses her contempt for revealed religion; and in this pernicious book, which, it must be confessed, is written with no small ability, she presents us with a long vindication of divorce. Delphine speaks of love like a Bacchante, of God like a Quakeress, of death like a grenadier, and of morality like a sophist." High-sounding words these, but just the high-sounding words which the future must always listen to from the toothless past, whose heavy artillery is charged to the muzzle with the wet powder of orthodox belief and the paper balls of narrow-mindedness. Whereas Mme. de Staël's contemporaries lavishly praised the style of the book and the literary ability of its authoress, in order to be the better able to reprobate her views of life and her aims, the modern critic has little to say for the loose and diffuse style which the novel has in common with almost all others written in the form of letters; but, as regards the ideas of the book, they hold good to-day; they have actually not yet penetrated into all the countries of Europe, although the present century has striven to realise them ever more and more fully. The breach between society and the individual depicted in _Delphine_ is entirely in the spirit of the Emigrant Literature. The same bold revolt followed by the same despair in view of the uselessness of the struggle, is to be found throughout the whole group of writings. In the present case the revolt is a spirited, desperate attempt to hold fast one of the gains of the Revolution at the moment when it is being wrested away by the reaction. The despair is due to the sorrowful feeling that no remonstrance will avail, that the retrograde movement must run its course, must exceed all reasonable limits, before a better condition of things can be looked for. Was a woman's novel likely to prevail against an autocrat's compact with a Pope! The "war with society" which she depicts is less a conflict with the state or the law than with the jumble of conventions and beliefs, old and new, artificial and natural, reasonable and unreasonable, hurtful and beneficial, which, fused together into a cohesive and apparently homogeneous mass, constitute the stuff whereof public opinion is made. Just as the so-called sound common sense, which is always ready to set itself in opposition to any new philosophy, is at any given time to a great extent simply the congealed remains of a philosophy of earlier date, so the rules of society and the verdicts pronounced by society in accordance with these rules, verdicts always unfavourable in the case of new ideas, are to a great extent founded upon ideas which in their day had a hard struggle to assert themselves in face of the opposition of the then prevailing public opinion. That which was once an original, living idea, stiffens in time into the corpse of an idea. Social laws are universal laws, the same for all, and, like everything that is universal, they in numberless cases victimise. No matter how singular the individual may be, he is treated like every one else. The genius is in much the position of the clever head-boy in a stupid class; he has to listen to the same old lessons over and over again because of the dunces who have not learned them and yet must learn them. The verdict of society is an irresponsible verdict; while the judgments of the individual, as such, must always to a certain extent be a natural product, those of society are in most cases a manufactured article, provided wholesale by those whose business it is to concoct public opinion; and no responsibility is felt by the individual in giving his adherence to them. The natural course would be for the individual to form his own views and principles, make his own rules of conduct, and, according to his powers, search for the truth with his own brains; but instead of this, in modern society the individual finds a ready-made religion, a different one in each country, the religion of his parents, with which he is inoculated long before he is capable of religious thought or feeling. The result is that his religion-producing powers are nipped in the bud, or if they are not, then woe be to him! His essays are a gauntlet flung in the face of society. And in the same way all originality of moral feeling is, in the majority of men, crushed or checked by the ready-made moral code of society and ready-made public opinion. The verdicts of society, which are the outcome of all the pious and moral doctrines accepted by it on trust, are necessarily untrustworthy, often extremely narrow-minded, not infrequently cruel. It was Mme. de Staël's lot to be brought face to face with more prejudices than the generality of authors are. She was a Protestant in a Catholic country, and in sympathy with Catholics although brought up in a Protestant family. In France she was the daughter of a Swiss citizen, and in Switzerland she felt herself a Parisian. As a woman of intellect and strong passions, she was predestined to collision with public opinion, as the authoress, the woman of genius, to war, offensive and defensive, with a social order which relegates woman to the sphere of private life. But that she saw through the prejudices by which she was surrounded, more clearly than did any other contemporary writer, was principally due to the fact that, as a political refugee, she was obliged to travel in one foreign country after another; this gave her ever-active, inquiring mind the opportunity of comparing the spirit and the ideals of one people with those of another. [1] Friedrich Kapp: "Justus Erich Bollmann." [2] _De la Littérature_, p. 257. Paris, 1820. [3] _Dix Années d'Exil_, 1820, p. 84. IX EXILE When the edict banishing Mme. de Staël from Paris was made known to her, she inquired through Joseph Bonaparte, who was among the number of her friends, whether she would be permitted to travel in Germany or would be brought back from there. After some delay a passport was sent her, and she set out for Weimar. There she made the acquaintance of the ducal family, had long conversations with Schiller on the reciprocal relations of French and German literature, and pestered Goethe with questions upon every subject in heaven and earth. The eager discussion of problematical questions was, he says, her special passion. But what surprised both Goethe and the other German celebrities most was, that she not only wished to make their acquaintance, but to influence affairs generally; she always talked as if the moment for action had come, and they must all be up and doing. She went on from Weimar to Berlin, made acquaintance with Prince Louis Ferdinand, was taken up by the Fichte, Jacobi, and Henriette Herz circles, and carried off A. W. Schlegel as tutor to her children. The following year she travelled in Italy, studied its ancient monuments, its art, the southern manners and customs of its people, and absorbed impressions of Italian nature at every pore. Then she returned to Coppet and wrote _Corinne, ou l'Italie_. Her longing for France, however, gave her no peace. She had been forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, but she took up her abode just outside that limit, first at Auxerre, then at Rouen. (The prefect of this latter town was suspended for having shown her some courteous attention.) She eventually received permission to superintend the publishing of _Corinne_ from a country house only twelve leagues from Paris. But the book was barely published before a new edict banished her from France altogether. _Corinne_ was a grand success, and Napoleon could not endure any success in which he had no share. Mme. de Staël returned to Coppet, and, like the Emperor, continued to extend her realm. It grew as her emotional nature expanded, her intellectual grasp widened, and the number of her friendships increased. She held a regular court at Coppet. Remarkable men from all parts of Europe gathered round her there. In her house were to be met statesmen like Constant--whom in her infatuation she calls the cleverest man in the world--historians like Sismondi, poets like Zacharias Werner and Oehlenschläger, German princes, Polish princes and princesses, the flower of the aristocracy of birth and of intellect. Since her visit to Germany she had steadily continued to study the German language and literature, but she found that it would be necessary for her to make another sojourn in that country if she desired to present to her countrymen a complete picture of the new world which had revealed itself to her. She had been in North Germany, now she spent a year in Vienna, and upon her return to Switzerland set to work upon her great three-volume book, _De l'Allemagne_. It was completed in 1810. The next thing was to get it published in Paris. A law had been passed which forbade the publication of any book until it had been approved of by the Censors; on this followed another regulation, specially aimed at Mme. de Staël, which gave the Chief of the Police authority to suppress a book if he saw fit, even though it had been published with the approval of the Censors. This was a law which did away with all law. Having again received permission to take up her abode at a distance of forty leagues from Paris to superintend the publication of her book, Mme. de Staël went to Blois, lived first at the château of Chaumont-sur-Loire, then at Fossé, and afterwards at the country-houses of friends in the neighbourhood; she fluttered round her beloved Paris at the required distance, as a moth flutters round a candle. Once she even ventured into the capital. Meanwhile the Censors examined her book, corrected, deleted, and gave the mangled remains their _imprimatur_. Ten thousand copies were printed. But on the day on which they were to be issued, the Chief of the Police sent his gendarmes into the publisher's shop, after placing a sentinel at every exit, and, by order of the Government, performed the heroic feat of hacking the ten thousand copies to pieces. The mass was kneaded into a dough, and the publisher received twenty louis d'or in compensation. Mme. de Staël was at the same time ordered to deliver up her manuscript (representing the labours and hopes of six years) and to leave France in the course of twenty-four hours. In the letter which she received from the Chief of the Police on this occasion occur the following sentences: "You are not to seek the reason of the command I have communicated to you in your omission of all reference to the Emperor in your last work; that would be a mistake; no place could be found for him in it that would be worthy of him: your banishment is the natural consequence of the course you have persistently pursued for some years past. It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you; as for us, we are, fortunately, not yet reduced to seeking models amongst the people you so much admire. Your last work is not French." That was what doomed her--it was _not French_. And to think that it was the epoch-making book, _De l'Allemagne_, epoch-making in French literature, because, not accidentally but on principle, it broke with all antiquated literary traditions and indicated new sources of life--to think that it was this book which the spiritual policeman of the nation presumed to condemn as _not French_! And the cruelly ironical attempt to assume a tone of gallantry! "It appears to me that the air of this country does not suit you "--therefore be kind enough to betake yourself elsewhere! We seem to hear the intoxicated vanity of France itself speak: "Because you have ventured to love liberty even now, when the rest of us are happy under tyranny; because, whilst we have been sunning ourselves in the beams of Napoleon's glory, you have dared to depict in Corinne the sovereign independence of genius, and, yourself banished from Paris, have crowned your ideal at the Capitol; because, at the moment when the eagles of France are shining resplendent with the glory of a thousand victories, and foreign nations have become our lieges, you, a weak woman, have had the audacity to represent to us our sources of spiritual life as almost dried up, and to point us to the despised Germany as a land whose poetry far outshines our own, to hated England, perfidious Albion, as a country whose love of liberty is more persistent and genuine than ours, and to dying Italy, the subjugated province of France, as a country whose simple manners and customs and vast superiority in art are worthy of imitation--because of all these things, you shall be stigmatised as unpatriotic, the cockade of your country shall be torn from your brow, your books shall be destroyed, even your manuscripts shall be torn into fragments, and you yourself, with a couple of spies at your heels, shall be chased like a wild animal across the frontier of France before twenty-four hours have passed." The Prefect of the department was sent to demand the manuscript of the book; Mme. de Staël succeeded in saving it by giving him a rough copy. But anxiety about her book was for the moment the least of her anxieties. She had hoped to cross to England, but, expressly to prevent this, the Chief of the Police had added a postscript to his letter, forbidding her to embark at any northern port. She was half inclined to sail in a French ship bound for America, on the chance of the ship being captured by the English, but abandoned this plan as too adventurous. Despondent and sorrowful, she retired once more to Coppet. Here fresh persecutions of every description awaited her. The Prefect of Geneva, on the strength of the first order he received, gave her two sons to understand that they also were forbidden ever to return to France, and this merely because they had made a fruitless attempt to obtain an audience of Napoleon on behalf of their mother. A few days later Mme. de Staël received a letter from the Prefect, in which he, in the name of the Chief of the Police, demanded the proof-sheets of her book on Germany. It had been ascertained by means of spies that the proofs must be in existence, and the French Government had no intention of resting contented with half measures, with the destruction of the printed book; the work was to be completely annihilated, any future edition of it made impossible. The authoress replied that the proofs had already been sent abroad, but that she would willingly promise never again to print any of her works on the Continent of Europe. "There was no great merit in such a promise," she remarks in her _Dix Années d'Exil_, "for of course no Continental government would have sanctioned the publication of a book which had been interdicted by Napoleon." Not long after this, the Prefect of Geneva, Barante, the father of the historian, was banished for having shown too great leniency towards Mme. de Staël. Her son falling ill, Mme. de Staël accompanied him by the advice of the doctors to the baths of Aix in Savoy, some twenty leagues from Coppet. Scarcely had she arrived there when she received, by special messenger, an intimation from the Prefect of the Department of Mont Blanc that she was not only forbidden to leave Switzerland on any pretext whatever, but even to travel in Switzerland itself; two leagues from Coppet was indicated as the distance beyond which she might not go. Not satisfied with transforming her sojourn upon her own estate into an imprisonment, the Government took care that she should suffer not only from the loss of freedom, but from that special curse of prison life, solitude--doubly painful to one of her peculiarly social disposition. Schlegel, who had lived in her house as tutor to her children for eight years, was ordered to leave, on the foolish pretext that he influenced her against France. To the inquiry how he did this, the answer was returned, that in the comparison which he, as literary critic, had instituted between Racine's Phèdre and the Phædra of Euripides, he had pronounced himself in favour of the latter. Montmorency was exiled for having spent a few days at Coppet, and Mme. Récamier, whom Mme. de Staël had not time to warn of the punishment attending even a brief visit, was forbidden to return to France, because on her way through Switzerland she had gone to cheer her old friend with a little conversation. Even a man of seventy-eight, St.-Priest, an old ministerial colleague of her father's, was exiled for having paid a polite call at Coppet. The isolation which is the lot of those who set themselves in opposition to despotic power was not new to her. For long no man of rank or fame, no politician who wished to stand well with the Government, had dared to visit her at Coppet. They were all prevented by business or illness. "Ah!" she said once, "how weary I am of all this cowardice which calls itself consumption!" But now, to the pain of seeing herself abandoned by so many former friends was added that of seeing her real friends punished with exile for the slightest expression of good-will towards her. She complained that she spread misfortune round her like an infectious disease. It stood in her power even now, after years of exile, persecution, and practical imprisonment, to obtain liberty, and permission once more to write and publish; it was privately intimated to her that a slight change of opinion or attitude would procure her the right to return to France; but she would not purchase liberty at this price. And when it was said to her later in more definite terms: "Speak or write one little word about the King of Rome, and all the capitals of Europe will be open to you;" all she replied was: "I wish him a good nurse." Isolated and closely confined, she came to the decision to make a determined attempt to escape from Coppet. It was her desire to go to America, but that was impossible without a passport, and how was she to procure one? She feared, besides, that she might be arrested on her way to the port she must sail from, on the pretext that she intended to go to England, which was forbidden her under penalty of imprisonment. And she was well aware that when the first scandal had blown over, there would be nothing to prevent the Government quietly leaving her in prison; she would soon be completely forgotten. She contemplated the possibility of reaching Sweden by way of Russia, the whole of North Germany being under the control of the French. She believed she could manage to escape through the Tyrol without being delivered up by Austria, but a passport to Russia must be procured from St. Petersburg, and she feared that if she wrote for this from Coppet, she might be denounced to the French Ambassador; she must get to Vienna first and write from there. For six months she pored over the map of Europe, studying it to find a way of escape as eagerly as Napoleon studied it to find the paths by which he was to proceed on his conquest of the world. When, after a month's delay, a last petition for a passport to America was refused (although Mme. de Staël had pledged herself, if it were granted, to publish nothing there), the weak, brave woman determined upon a decisive attempt to escape. One day in 1812, she and her daughter drove away from Coppet, with their fans in their hands, and not a single box or package in the carriage. They arrived safely at Vienna, and wrote to St. Petersburg for Russian passports. But the Austrian Government was so anxious to avoid complications with France that Mme. de Staël was detained upon the frontier of Galicia, and was followed by spies through the whole of Austrian Poland. When she stopped on her journey to spend a single day at Prince Lubomirski's, the Prince was obliged to give an Austrian detective a seat at his table, and it was only by threats that Mme. de Staël's son prevented the man taking up his position at night in her bedroom. Not till she had passed the Russian frontier did she breathe freely again. But the feeling of freedom did not last long, for she had barely reached Moscow before rumours that the French army was approaching the city compelled her to take flight again, and it was not until she reached St. Petersburg that she could consider herself in safety. The year before her flight from Coppet, Mme. de Staël, then forty-five years of age, had been privately married to a young French officer of twenty-three, Albert de Rocca, who had been severely wounded, and had come to Switzerland a complete invalid, exhausted by loss of blood. The sympathy which Mme. de Staël showed him roused a passionate devotion in the young soldier, and this led to a secret union. Rocca joined Mme. de Staël upon the Russian frontier. Her intention was to travel to Constantinople and Greece, in search of the correct local colouring for a poem she was planning on Richard Coeur de Lion. Reading Byron seems to have inspired her with the idea of this poem, which was, she said, to be a _Lara_, though not a reflection of Byron's. The fear, however, that the fatigues of the journey might be too great for her young daughter and De Rocca, decided her to go to Stockholm instead. There she renewed her friendship with Bernadotte and met her old friend, Schlegel, whom Bernadotte had made a Swedish noble and his own private secretary. Through Schlegel, Bernadotte also made the acquaintance of Constant, whom he created a Knight of the Northern Star, and whom he vainly attempted to persuade into concurrence in his ambitious designs on the French throne. As far as Bernadotte's character was concerned, Mme. de Staël was less keen-sighted than Constant; she always speaks of him with warmth; their common hatred of Napoleon was, doubtless, a bond of union. In her case it became a dumb hatred from the moment that the allied armies marched against France. She laments the necessity of wishing Napoleon success, but she can no longer separate his interests from those of France. Possessed of more strength of character than Constant, she rejected the overtures made to her by Napoleon during the Hundred Days. She survived his final downfall, and saw with sorrow the return of the Bourbons, more virulent enemies of freedom than the autocrat they displaced. She foregathered once more with Constant in Paris in 1816; and in the following year she died. This brief summary of the life of a remarkable woman and of the life-conflict of her maturer years, is a sufficient groundwork for the elaboration of a complete picture of her character as a woman and a writer. Innate warmth of heart and intelligence were her original gifts; her warm-heartedness developed into broad-minded philanthropy, and her intelligence into a power of receptivity and reproduction which was akin to genius. She possessed in a marked degree several of the characteristics of the eighteenth century--sociability, for instance, and love of conversation accompanied by remarkable conversational powers. Whereas George Sand, the great authoress of the nineteenth century, was reserved and silent in company, and only revealed her inner self when she wrote, Mme. de Staël was a lively improvisatrice. She possessed the gift of electrifying; her words shed a stream of light upon the subject of which she spoke. All who knew her personally said that her books were as nothing in comparison with her conversation. One of her critics ends a review thus: "When one listens to her, it is impossible not to agree with her; if she had said all this instead of writing it, I should not have been able to criticise;" and a great lady said jestingly: "If I were Queen I should command Mme. de Staël to talk to me constantly." The countless sayings which have been preserved give us, in spite of the chilling influence of print, some idea of the sparkle and originality of her conversation. One day when she was discoursing on the unnaturalness of parents arranging marriages instead of doing the only right thing, allowing the young girl to choose for herself, she cried laughingly: "I shall _compel_ my daughter to marry for love." One of Napoleon's friends having informed her that the Emperor would pay her the two millions her father had entrusted to the Bank of France if he were certain of her attachment, she replied: "I knew that a certificate of birth would be required before I could obtain my money, but I did not expect to be asked for a declaration of love." But behind the ready wit and the facility of expression which are the qualities developed by a social age, lay much of the fervour and the soul which the nineteenth century has not failed to appreciate. The much admired châtelaine of Coppet, the fêted, fascinating leader of society, was a genuine, natural woman. The want of sympathy between her and her mother had, as already noted, early strengthened her tendency to believe in and love human nature. The idea of duty as conflicting with nature rather than guiding it was repulsive to her. In her work _De l'Influence des Passions_, she considers the passions in their relation, not to the idea of duty, but to the idea of happiness, investigating into the proportionate infringement of each upon our happiness. In Corinne she says: "Nothing is easier than to make a grand pretence of morality while condemning all that is noble and great. The idea of duty ... can be turned into a weapon of offence, which the mediocre, perfectly satisfied with their mediocrity and narrow-mindedness, employ to impose silence upon the gifted, and to rid themselves of enthusiasm, of genius, in short, of all their enemies." The temperamental foundation upon which Mme. de Staël built was genuinely feminine. The final ideal of this undeniably ambitious woman was a purely personal, purely idyllic one--happiness in love. It is upon this that her two great novels, _Delphine_ and _Corinne_, turn; the improbability of finding it in marriage as ordained by society, and the impossibility of finding it outside marriage, are her fundamental ideas; and the perpetual conflict between domestic happiness and noble ambitions or free love, is merely the expression of her constant complaint, that neither genius nor passion is compatible with that domestic happiness which is her heart's eternal desire. In her books the woman only seeks the path of fame when she has been disappointed in all her dearest hopes. To Mme. de Staël the heart is everything; even fame was to her only a means of conquering hearts. Corinne says: "When I sought glory, I always had the hope that it would make people love me," and Mme. de Staël herself exclaims: "Do not let us give our unjust enemies and our ungrateful friends the triumph of crushing, of suppressing our powers. It is they who force those who would so willingly have been content with feeling, to seek fame." It is this warm-heartedness, one might almost say motherliness, which, in her case, gives the melancholy of the age a peculiar imprint. Hers is not only that universal human melancholy that arises from the certainty with which two human beings who love one another can say: "The day is coming when I shall lay you in the grave, or you me." Still less is it the egotistical despondency to be found in so many of the male writers of the day. It is a depression connected with the struggle for ideal equality and liberty of those revolutionary times, it is the sadness of the enthusiastic reformer. From her youth she had been such an enthusiast on the subject of equality that even in the matter of ability she regarded all men as essentially equal, assuming only the most trifling difference between the genius and the ordinary man. From the time she sat upon her father's knee she had cherished the strongest faith in the power of liberty to make men happy and to call forth all that is good in them, and her faith did not waver even on the September day when she was compelled to flee from that Reign of Terror which was the result of an experiment in equality, or when, under the Consulate, she was banished by the dictatorship into which liberty had resolved itself. But it is small wonder that a veil woven of sadness and despondency early dimmed the brightness of her spirit. At the close of a letter to Talleyrand, whom in the days of her power she had saved from banishment, but who was not sufficiently grateful to attempt to make her any return, she writes: "Farewell! Are you happy? with so superior an intellect do you not penetrate to what is at the core of everything--unhappiness?" And in _Corinne_ the heroine repeats what Mme. de Staël herself often said: "Of all the capacities with which nature endowed me, the capacity of suffering is the only one I have developed to its full extent." Healthy-minded as she was, she came in time to take a brighter view of life. A relative who knew her well writes: "Possibly there was a time when life, death, melancholy, and passionate self-sacrifice played too great a part in her conversation; but when these words spread like a contagion throughout her whole circle, and actually began to be heard amongst the servants, she took a deadly loathing to them."[1] She succeeded in advancing beyond the intellectual stage at which so many of her French contemporaries stopped short. It is, indeed, one of the most noticeable things about her, this development of her critical faculty in the spirit and direction of the nineteenth century. Originally she was a true Parisian, with no real appreciation of the beauties of nature. When, after her first flight from Paris, she saw the Lake of Geneva for the first time, she exclaimed in her home-sickness: "How much more beautiful were the gutters of the Rue du Bac!" Not many years later she described the scenery of Italy, in _Corinne_, in truly glowing language. In her earlier years she was in love with, infatuated with, Paris, which to her represented civilisation, yet it was she who first taught the Frenchman to appreciate the characteristic and the good qualities of the other European nations. For she possessed the true critical gift, that is, she had the power of steadily enlarging her mind, increasing her receptivity, and destroying her prejudices in the bud, thereby holding herself in constant preparedness to understand. It is to this we must ascribe her marvellous power of attraction; and this explains how, banished and disgraced as she was, she enjoyed the power and influence of a queen at Coppet. Although our countryman Oehlenschläger does not seem to have had any clear appreciation of the real greatness of the woman whose guest he was, he gives a very charming description of Mme. de Staël and his visit to her in 1808. "How intellectual, witty, and amiable Mme. de Staël was," he says, "the whole world knows. I have never met a woman possessed of so much genius; but, probably on that very account, there was something masculine about her. She was square built, with marked features. Pretty she was not, but there was something most attractive in her bright brown eyes, and she possessed in a very high degree the womanly gift of winning, subtly ruling, and bringing together men of the most different characters. That in matters of the heart she was the true woman, she has shown us in _Delphine_ and _Corinne_. Rousseau himself has not depicted love with more fire. Wherever she appeared she collected round her all the men of intellect, drawing them away even from young and beautiful women. When one remembers that in addition to all this she was very rich and very hospitable, giving magnificent entertainments every day, one does not marvel that, like some queen or fairy, she drew men to her enchanted castle. One is almost tempted to believe that it was to indicate this dominion of hers that she always had a little leafy branch by her at meals, which she took in her hand and played with. The servants had to lay one beside her plate every day, for it was as necessary to her as knife, fork, and spoon." Men made their way to Coppet, as some fifty years earlier they had made their way to the adjacent Ferney, where Voltaire, also an exile dwelling as close to the frontiers of France as possible, gathered the picked men of Europe round him in the last years of his life. One is irresistibly tempted to compare the influence which emanated from the aged man at Ferney with that exercised by the owner of Coppet. The years spent at Ferney are in every respect the most glorious period of Voltaire's life. It was from there that he, as the champion of justice and toleration, compassed achievements which no one could have believed to be within the power of a private individual whose only weapon was his pen. Three years of his life at Ferney were devoted to litigation on behalf of Jean Calas. Calas was a merchant of Toulouse, aged sixty-eight, a Protestant. His youngest son had become converted to Catholicism, and was completely estranged from his family. The eldest son, a wild, dissipated young man, committed suicide. The Catholic clergy immediately spread a rumour among the people that the father had strangled his son out of hatred for the Romish faith, which the latter, it was said, had intended to embrace on the following day. The whole family was imprisoned. The suicide's corpse lay in state, and performed one miracle after another. The bi-centenary of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in Toulouse occurred at the time of the trial, and in their fanatical excitement, thirteen judges, despite all proofs of his innocence, and without a shadow of evidence of his guilt, condemned Calas to be broken on the wheel. The sentence was carried out, the old man protesting his innocence to the last. His children, under the pretext of a reprieve, were shut up in a monastery and forced to adopt the Catholic faith. Then Voltaire at Ferney wrote his celebrated treatise on tolerance, and moved heaven and earth to get the case tried over again. He appealed to the public opinion of the whole of Europe. He compelled the Council of State in Paris to demand the minutes of the trial from the Parliament of Toulouse. They were refused; there were delays of every kind; but in the end, after three years of unwearied fighting, Voltaire gained his point. The Toulouse sentence was pronounced unjust, the dead man's honour was cleared, and an indemnification was paid to his family. All who desire to be just to Voltaire ought to remember that it is during this period that the phrase, _Écrasez l'infâme_, perpetually recurs in his letters. It was at Ferney that Voltaire gave shelter to the Sirven family. The father was a Calvinist, but one of his daughters had been forced into a convent. Upon her becoming insane, she was released, whereupon she drowned herself in a well not far from her father's house. The father, mother, and sister are accused of murdering the nun, are tried, and all condemned to death. The unhappy family, knowing of no sanctuary in the whole of Europe except Voltaire's house, escape to Ferney, the mother dying of grief upon the way. Voltaire, the banished man, by his eloquence and his ardour compels the French courts to try this case also again, and the family is acquitted. Three years later Étalonde found refuge at Ferney. Two young men, De la Barre and Étalonde, were accused in 1765 of having passed a church procession without taking off their hats, which was a true accusation, and of having thrown a crucifix into the water, which was a false one. They were both examined under torture, and afterwards De la Barre was broken on the wheel. He went bravely to his death, his only words being: "I could not have believed that they would kill a young man for such a trifle." Étalonde, who was condemned to lose his right hand and have his tongue cut out, escaped to Ferney, and no one dared to lay hands on him in Voltaire's house. Yet another human life did Voltaire succeed in saving while he lived at Ferney. A young married couple named Montbailli were condemned to death on a false accusation of murder. The man was first broken on the wheel and then burned, but the burning of the woman was deferred because she was pregnant. Voltaire hears of the case, sees through the infamous charge with his lightning glance, appeals to the French ministry, proves that an innocent man has been put to death, and saves the woman from the stake. Besides protecting the life of the accused, he defended the honour of the dead. One of the last pieces of news that he received on his own deathbed was, that his appeal against the unjust sentence which had cost General Lally his life had been successful, that the sentence was reversed, the dead man acquitted. During these years Voltaire also found time to transform Ferney from a poor village into a prosperous town, to labour zealously for the abolition of serfdom in France, and to write a number of his most important books, in all of which his one aim was to undermine the dogmas of Christianity, which appeared to him to be at the root of the power of the priesthood and all the evils resulting therefrom. Nor did he neglect the claims of polite society; he built a private theatre, and engaged the best actors to play in it; and he was visited at Ferney by the most gifted and able men of the day. The renown of Coppet cannot be compared with that of Ferney, but none the less it is a fair renown. From this place of banishment also, emanated the ardent desire for justice, the love of freedom and the love of truth. Somewhat later in the nineteenth century each of the three principal countries of Europe sent its greatest author into exile; England sent Byron; Germany, Heinrich Heine; and France, Victor Hugo; and not one of these men lost any of his literary influence from the fact of his exile. But with the beginning of the century the time had gone by when men of letters were a great power. Even a genius of Voltaire's calibre would hardly have exercised the powerful, tangible influence in this century which he did in his own. And Mme. de Staël was far from being Voltaire's equal in genius. Moreover, her task was of an entirely different nature. The outward power of the Church was temporarily broken, and in any case her mind was far too religious ever to have permitted her following in Voltaire's steps. The political despotism was so pronounced, that merely to omit the French Emperor's name from a work on Germany was regarded as a political demonstration and punished accordingly. But there was a task left undone by the Revolution with all its great outward reforms, a task the doing of which could not be forbidden by Imperial edict, and that was, the undermining of the mountain of religious, moral, social, national, and artistic prejudices which weighed upon Europe with an even heavier pressure than did the dominion of Napoleon, and which indeed had alone made that dominion possible. Voltaire himself had been entangled in many of these prejudices, especially the artistic and national. From Coppet, Mme. de Staël waged war upon them all. And none the less she, like Voltaire, found time to fulfil all social duties; she too had her own theatre, and she both wrote plays for it, and acted in them. The châtelaine of Coppet was as untrammelled intellectually and as noble in her aims as was the philosopher of Ferney; she was less fortunate and less powerful, but on account of her sex and her sufferings she is even more interesting. Voltaire succeeded in doing much for others. Mme. de Staël barely succeeded in defending herself. [1] Mme. Necker de Saussure: _Notice sur le Caractère et les Écrits de Mme. de Staël_, p. 358. X "CORINNE" In her book, _Essai sur les Fictions_, Mme. de Staël makes the first attempt to define her literary ideal. Her motto is: Avoid legend and symbol, avoid the fantastic and the supernatural; it is nature, it is reality, that must reign in poetry. She does not as yet seem to have apprehended the fundamental difference between poetry as psychical delineation, and poetry as the free play of the imagination, the difference which later became so clear to her that we may call the apprehension of it one of her most important deserts as an authoress; for it was by means of this clear apprehension that she assisted her countrymen to an understanding of the relative position of their national poetic art. The French are, namely, accustomed to regard knowledge of human nature founded upon observation as the substance, the essence of poetry--such knowledge as is displayed in Molière's _Tartuffe_ and _Misanthrope_. And just as Frenchmen as a rule seek the essence of poetry in observation, Germans seek it in intensity of feeling, and Englishmen in an exuberance of imagination which refuses to be restricted by rules, and leaps at a bound from the horrible to the ideal, and from the serious to the comic, not limiting itself to the natural, but also not employing the supernatural otherwise than as a profound symbol. The poetry which radiates from the Italian soil and the Italian people is something different again from all these. In Corinne, the improvisatrice, Mme. de Staël seeks to personify poetical poetry as opposed to psychological poetry, i.e. poetry as understood by Ariosto, as opposed to the poetry of Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe. In spite of her intention, however, she unconsciously makes Corinne half northern. No one who has not laboured painfully to attain to a real, thorough understanding of the point of view of an entirely foreign race can know how difficult it is to shake off one's innate national prejudices. To do so it is necessary to breathe the same air, to live for some time in the same natural environments, as the foreign race. But for the foreign travel made obligatory by her banishment, Mme. de Staël could not have expanded her power of apprehension as she did. In all modesty I lay claim to be able to speak on this matter from experience. It was during lonely walks in the neighbourhood of Sorrento that I first succeeded in seeing Shakespeare at such a distance that I could get a full view of him and really understand him and, consequently, his antithesis. I remember one day in particular which was in this respect to me very momentous.--I had been spending three days in Pompeii. Of all its temples, that of Isis had interested me most. Here, thought I, stood that goddess whose head (now in the National Museum) has open lips and a hole in the back of the neck. I went down to the underground passage behind the altar, from which the priests, by means of a neatly adjusted reed, enabled the goddess to deliver oracles. The reflection involuntarily occurred to me that, in spite of the craft of the priests and the credulity of the people, it must have been extremely difficult to produce any effect of mystery in this climate. The temple is a pretty little house standing in the bright sunshine; there is no abyss, no darkness, no horror; even at night its outlines must have stood clearly defined in the moonlight or the starlight. The landscape, in combination with the sober sense of the Roman people, prevented any development of mysticism or romance. I went on to Sorrento. The road, hewn in the mountain side, follows the sea, now projecting into it, now receding from it; where it recedes one looks down upon a great ravine, filled with olive trees. The aspect of the country is at once grand and smiling, wild and peaceful. The bare rocks lose their austerity, illuminated by such a brilliant sun, and in every ravine lie white cottages, or villas, or whole villages, framed in the shining green foliage of the orange trees or the soft velvety grey of the olives. Upon the other side the white towns lie strewn, as if scattered by a sugar-sifter, on the wooded sides of the mountains, right up to the topmost ridge. The sea was indigo blue, in some places steel blue, the sky without a cloud; and in the distance lay the enchantingly beautiful rocky island of Capri. Nowhere else is to be found such a glorious harmony of line and colour. Elsewhere, even in the most beautiful spots, there is always something to take exception to--the lines of Vesuvius, for example, melt almost too softly into the air. But Capri! The contours of its jagged rocks are like rhythmic music. What balance in all its lines! How grand and yet how delicate, how bold and yet how charming it all is! This is Greek beauty--nothing gigantic, nothing that appeals to the vulgar, but absolute harmony within clearly defined bounds. From Capri one sees the islands of the sirens, past which Ulysses sailed. Homer's Ithaca was like this, only perhaps less beautiful; for Greek-peopled Southern Italy is the only living evidence of what the climate of Greece was in ancient days; the land of Greece itself is now but the corpse of what it was. It began to grow dark; Venus shone brilliantly, and the great flanks and clefts of the mountains gradually assumed the fantastic appearances which darkness imparts. But the general impression was not what a Northerner calls romantic. The sea still glimmered through the delicate foliage of the olives, its deep blue broken by branch and leaf. Then it was I realised that there is a world, the world of which the Bay of Naples is an image, of which Shakespeare knew nothing; because it is great without being terrible, and enchanting without the aid of romantic mists and fairy glamour. I now for the first time rightly understood such painters as Claude Lorraine and Nicholas Poussin; I comprehended that their classic art is the expression of classic nature; and by force of contrast I understood better than ever before such a work as Rembrandt's etching of "The Three Trees"--which stand like sentient beings, like types of northern humanity, on the swampy field in the pouring rain. I understood how natural it is that a land such as this should not have produced a Shakespeare, or needed a Shakespeare, because here Nature has taken upon herself the task which falls to the lot of the poet in the North. Poetry of the profound, psychological species is, like artificial heat, a necessity of life where nature is ungentle. Here in the South, from the days of Homer to the days of Ariosto, poetry has been able to rest content with mirroring, clearly and simply, the clearness and simplicity of nature. It has not sought to probe the depths of the human heart, has not plunged into caverns and abysses in search of the precious stones which Aladdin sought, which Shakespeare found, but which the sun-god here scatters in lavish profusion over the surface of the earth. _Corinne, ou l'Italie_ is Mme. de Staël's best tale. In Italy, that natural paradise, her eyes were opened to the charms of nature. She no longer preferred the gutters of Paris to the Lake of Nemi. And it was in this country, where a square yard of such a place, for instance, as the Forum, has a grander history than the whole Russian empire, that her modern, rebellious, melancholy soul opened to the influence of history, the influence of antiquity with its simple, austere calm. In Italy too, in Rome, that house of call for all Europe, the characteristics and limitations of the different nations were first clearly revealed to her. Through her, her own countrymen for the first time became conscious of their peculiarities and limitations. In her book, England, France, and Italy meet, and are understood, not by each other, but by the authoress and her heroine, who is half English and half Italian. Corinne is, in the world of fiction, like a prophecy of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning was to be in the world of reality. One thinks of Corinne when one reads that Italian inscription upon a house in Florence: "Here lived Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poems are a golden thread binding Italy to England." The plot of _Corinne_ is as follows: A young Englishman, Oswald, Lord Nelvil, who has lost the father he loved above everything on earth, and whose grief is the more poignant because he reproaches himself for having embittered the last years of that father's life, attempts to distract his thoughts by travel in Italy. He arrives in Rome just as the poetess, Corinne, is borne in triumph to the Capitol, and, although public appearances and public triumphs do not harmonise with his ideal of womanhood, he is quickly attracted by, and soon passionately in love with, Corinne, who is as frank and natural as she is intellectual. But though intercourse with her reveals all her beautiful and rare qualities to him, he never loses the fear that she is not a suitable wife for a highly born Englishman. She is not the weak, timid woman, absorbed in her duties and her feelings, whom he would choose for his wife in England, where the domestic virtues are a woman's glory and happiness. He entertains morbid scruples as to whether his dead father would have desired such a daughter-in-law as Corinne, a question which, as time goes on, he plainly perceives must be answered in the negative. Corinne, whose love is far deeper and fuller than his, is alarmed by his vacillation, and, fearing that he may suddenly leave Italy, endeavours to keep him there by rousing his interest in the history and antiquities of the country, its art, its poetry, and its music. Oswald is especially perturbed by the mystery attaching to Corinne's life; her real name and her parentage are unknown; she speaks many languages; she has no relatives; he fears something discreditable in the circumstances which have thrust her out into the world alone. As a matter of fact, Corinne is the daughter of an Englishman and a Roman lady. After her father's second marriage she had been brought up by her stepmother, in a little narrow-minded English country town. Tortured by the petty restrictions which were designed to crush her spirit, she had left England after her father's death, and had since lived an independent, but absolutely blameless life as a poetess. She is aware that her family and Oswald's are acquainted, that his father had chosen her for his daughter-in-law, and that a match is now projected between Oswald and her younger sister, Lucile. This not remarkably probable complication provides a pretext for description of Italy. Whenever Oswald entreats Corinne to tell him her past history, she endeavours to postpone the moment of explanation; and she can find no better means of diverting his thoughts than constituting herself his cicerone, showing him ruins, galleries, and churches, and finally carrying him off on a tour through the most famous parts of Italy. Like a second Scheherazade, she strives to prolong her life and ward off the threatening danger by daily showing him new splendours, in comparison with which those of the _Thousand and One Nights_ pale; and these splendours she provides with an accompaniment of subtle, profound comment. In this manner the description of Rome, the delineation of Neapolitan scenery, and that of the tragic beauty of Venice, present themselves naturally, one after the other. It is in Rome that Corinne's great passion comes into being; so Rome provides the scenery for the first act of this love story; its solemn grandeur and wide horizon harmonise with these profound emotions and serious thoughts. In Naples her love rises to its highest lyrical expression; here the volcano and the smiling splendour of the bay are her background, and music upon the sea accompanies her passionately sorrowful improvisation on the subject of woman's love and woman's destiny. In Venice, where one is so perpetually forced to reflect on the decay and annihilation of beauty, Oswald leaves Corinne for ever. The news that his regiment is ordered to India recalls him to England. He considers himself betrothed to Corinne, and hastens to find her stepmother and secure the restoration of the fugitive to her family rights. But at Lady Edgermond's he meets Corinne's half-sister, Lucile, and her modest, womanly loveliness by slow degrees obliterates the impression made by the elder sister, whose brilliant gifts do not seem so alluring from a distance, and whose independent, bold appearance in the full sunshine of public life does not augur well for wedded happiness in a country where the subdued light of home (with which Lucile's subdued character is in admirable keeping) is the only one in which a woman can show herself with advantage. Marriage with Corinne would be a challenge to society; and he feels that it would, consequently, be a slight to his father's memory. Marriage with Lucile, on the other hand, would be unanimously approved of by society. In Corinne, he would wed the foreign, the far off, that which would be irreconcilable in the long run with the spirit of his country; in Lucile, he would wed as it were England itself. Corinne, who in agonising anxiety has followed him to England, learns his state of mind, and sends him back his ring. Oswald believes that she has ceased to love him, and marries Lucile. He learns of the wrong he has done her, and the story ends tragically with his remorse, and Corinne's death. We have little difficulty in determining which of the events and circumstances of the book had their counterparts in real life. Oswald's melancholy brooding over the memory of his father, reminds us that the authoress at the time she wrote was mourning Necker's death. Another trait in Oswald borrowed from her own character, is his very feminine fear of taking a step to which the sole objection offered by his conscience is, that it would scarcely have won his dead father's approbation. Possibly, too, his grief that the last years of his father's life had been troubled by his conduct, had a point of correspondence in the authoress's own history. In all else, Oswald's personality is obviously a free rendering of that of Benjamin Constant. Many small details betray that Mme. de Staël clearly had Constant in her mind. Oswald comes from Edinburgh, where Constant spent part of his youth; and it is stated that he is exactly eighteen months younger than Corinne (Mme. de Staël was born on the 22nd of April, 1766, and Constant on the 25th of October, 1767); but far weightier evidence is to be found in the whole cast of the character, in the blending of chivalrous courage, displayed towards the outer world, with unchivalrous cowardice, displayed towards the loving and long-loved woman whom he abandons in order to escape from her superiority. But remark that Mme. de Staël has created a typical Englishman out of these and many added elements. In Corinne the authoress has depicted for us her own ideal. She has borrowed the chief characteristics of her heroine from her own individuality. Corinne is not, like Delphine, the woman who is confined to the sphere of private life; she is the woman who has overstepped the allotted limits, the poetess whose name is upon all lips. The authoress has given her her own exterior, only idealised, her own eyes, even her own picturesque dress, with the Indian shawl wound about her head. She has endowed her with her own clear, active intellect; but it is with Corinne, as with herself--the moment passion grips her with its eagle's talon, her intellect avails her nothing, she becomes its defenceless prey. Like Mme. de Staël, Corinne is an exile, with all the thoughts and sorrows of the exile. For in Italy she is severed from the land of her birth, in England banished from the home of her heart and its sunshine. Hence when Corinne sings of Dante, she dwells sorrowfully on his banishment, and declares her belief that his real hell must have been exile. Hence, too, when giving Oswald an account of her life, she says that for a being full of life and feeling, exile is a punishment worse than death; for residence in one's native country implies a thousand joys which one first realises when bereft of them. She speaks of all the manifold interests which one has in common with one's fellow-countrymen, that are incomprehensible to a foreigner, and of that necessity for constant explanation which takes the place of rapid, easy communication, in which half a word does duty for a long exposition. Corinne, too, like her creator, hopes that her growing fame will bring about her recall to her native land, and reinstatement in her rights. Finally, Mme. de Staël has endowed Corinne with her own culture. It is expressly stated that it was her knowledge of the literatures and understanding of the characters of foreign nations that gave Corinne so high a place in the literary ranks of her own country; her charm as a poet lay in her combination of the southern gift of colour with the northern gift of observation. Employing all these borrowed characteristics, and inventing many others, the authoress has, it is to be observed, succeeded in producing a distinctly Italian type of female character. Mme. de Staël's literary activity divides itself, as it were, into two activities--a masculine and a feminine, the expression of thoughts and the dwelling upon emotions. We can trace this duality in _Corinne_. The book has, unquestionably, more merit as an effort of the intellect than as a work of creative imagination. A peculiar fervour and a certain tenderness in the treatment of the emotions betray that the author is a woman. Psychology is still in such a backward condition that as yet only the merest attempt has been made to define the characteristic qualities of woman's mind, of woman's soul, as distinguished from man's; when the day comes for making the attempt in good earnest, Mme. de Staël's works will be one of the most valuable sources of enlightenment. The woman's hand is, perhaps, most perceptible in the delineation of the hero. The authoress supplies us with the reasons for each of his distinguishing qualities. His sense of honour is explained by his distinguished birth, his melancholy by his English "spleen" and by his unhappy relations with the father whom he worshipped, as Mme. de Staël worshipped hers, and by whose memory he allowed himself to be influenced in a manner which reminds us of the way in which Sören Kierkegaard was influenced by the memory of his father. Only one thing does the writer leave unexplained in a person whose moral courage is so extremely slight, and that is the recklessness with which he risks his life. Female novelists almost invariably equip their heroes with a courage which has no particular connection with their character, while at the same time, in modern society, it is generally women who prevent men from doing deeds of daring, and who also as a rule admire and pay hysterical homage to essentially cowardly public characters--the priests who carefully protect their own lives in epidemics, the warriors who attack the enemy upon paper. The explanation would seem to be that masculine courage is a quality which, regarded as the highest attribute of man, becomes to woman a sort of ideal, but an ideal which she does not understand, which she does not recognise in real life, and which perhaps for this very reason she chooses to portray--and portrays badly. These remarks apply more particularly to Oswald's heroic behaviour on the occasion of the fire at Ancona, where he saves the entire town under the most terrible circumstances. He alone, with his English followers, makes an attempt to extinguish the conflagration, an attempt which is crowned with success. He rescues the Jews, who are shut up in the Ghetto, where the people in their religious frenzy have left them to be burned as a propitiatory offering. He ventures into the burning asylum, into the room in which the most dangerous lunatics are confined; these maniacs he controls and rescues from the flames by which they are already surrounded; he loosens their chains, and will not leave one recalcitrant behind. The whole scene is excellently described, but, as already said, the psychology is weak. Mme. de Staël makes full amends for this, however, in her description of the impression made by these deeds upon Corinne's womanly heart. Oswald, by leaving the town at once, manages to escape from all expressions of gratitude; but on the return journey they come to Ancona again, he is recognised, and Corinne is awakened in the morning by shouts of: "Long live Lord Nelvil! long live our benefactor!" She goes out on the piazza, is recognised as the poetess whose name is famous all over Italy, and is received with acclamation. The crowd beseech her to be their spokeswoman, and interpret their gratitude to Oswald. When he in his turn appears on the piazza, he is amazed to see that the crowd is led by Corinne. "She thanked Lord Nelvil in the name of the people, and did it with such grace and nobility that all the inhabitants of Ancona were enraptured." And, adds the authoress with feminine subtlety, she said we in speaking for them. "You have saved us." "_We_ owe you our lives." This _we_ makes the more impression because of the authoress, earlier in the book, having dwelt upon the moment when Corinne and Oswald first used the word we, in arranging a walk in Rome, feeling all the happiness of the timid declaration of love therein implied. Now Corinne dissolves that _we_, that she may range herself on the side of those who owe him everything. And the story goes on to tell that when she approached to offer Lord Nelvil in the name of the people the wreath of oak and laurel leaves which they had woven for him, she was overcome by an indescribable emotion, and felt almost afraid as she drew near him. At the moment of her offering the wreath, the whole populace, in Italy so susceptible and so ready to worship, fell on their knees, and Corinne involuntarily followed their example. It is in the delineation of feminine emotions that Mme. de Staël excels, the emotions of a gifted woman who pays dearly for her gifts. Domestic happiness and feminine purity are what touch Corinne most deeply. She, the Sibyl, is moved when she reads the inscription on a Roman woman's sarcophagus: "No stain has soiled my life from wedding festival to funeral pyre. I have lived chastely between the two torches." But wedded happiness was not to be hers. It was not for Corinne as it was not for Mignon, the two children of longing who, the one in French, the other in German literature, as it were personify enthusiasm for Italy. Corinne herself says that only through suffering can our poor human nature attain to an understanding of the infinite; and she is as if created to suffer. But before she perishes as the last victim in the ancient arena, she is adorned for the sacrifice and led in triumphal procession. When we first meet her, on her progress to the Capitol, she is simply but picturesquely clad, with antique cameos in her hair, and a fine red shawl wound turbanwise about her head, as in Gérard's well-known portrait of Mme. de Staël. The costume suits Corinne: she is the child of the land of colour, and she has not lost her love of colour; even in stiff conventional England she has retained her fresh natural tastes, her joy in what Gautier has called the trinity of beautiful things--gold, purple, and marble. Like all the other great types of the period, she must be seen in the surroundings with which she harmonises, among which she is at home, as René is in the primeval forest, Obermann upon the heights of the Alps, and Saint-Preux by the Lake of Geneva. Her appearance has been preserved to posterity in the painting which engravings have made so familiar: Corinne improvising at Cape Miseno. Her volcanic, glowing nature is at home in this volcanic, glowing region. The Bay of Naples appears to be a great sunken crater, surrounded by fair towns and forest-clad mountains. Encircling a sea which is even bluer than the sky, it resembles an emerald goblet filled with foaming wine, its rims and its sides adorned with vine leaves and tendrils. Near land the sea is a deep azure blue; farther out it is, as Homer said, wine-coloured; and above it shines a sky which is not, as is generally believed, bluer than ours, but really paler, only that its blue is underlaid by a white fire, which glows with a shimmer that is both blue and white. It was in this region that the ancients imagined hell to lie; the descent to it being through the cave of the Lake of Avernus. They called it hell, this paradise. Its volcanic origin and surroundings made them feel as if Tartarus were not far off. Volcanic formations everywhere! One great mountain has a side which looks as if it had been cut with a knife; half of that mountain fell in an earthquake. Cape Miseno, the farthest-out point of land on one side of the bay, with the little rocky island of Nisida in front of it, and Procida and Ischia behind it, did not always consist, as now, of two separate heights--long ago there was only one. The two craters of Vesuvius were formed by the eruption which overwhelmed Pompeii. Fertility and fire everywhere! A few steps from where the sulphureous fumes of Solfatara force their way up into the air through the crumbling lava, lie fields, some one mass of bright-red poppies, others full of great blue flowers, of powerfully scented downy mints and other herbs growing waist-high in such thronging profusion, such fruitfulness and luxuriance, that one feels as if all this billowing fulness would shoot up again in a single night, were it all cut down. And then the overpowering perfume! a spicy fragrance unknown in the north, a stupendous symphony of the scents of millions of different plants! It is towards evening that Corinne and her friends find their way out to Cape Miseno. From there one looks back upon the great town, and one hears a dull sound, which is like the beat of its heart. After sunset lights become visible everywhere; they are lying even in the ruts of the roads; across the path and away up the mountain sides bright flames leap and flit through the air; those which fly highest resemble moving stars. These flames, which move with long leaps and are extinguished for a moment after each leap, are the fire-flies of the South. The myriads of lights flashing through the darkness transport one in thought to fairyland. Right opposite, looking from Cape Miseno, the fiery lava glows with a ruddy glare as it streams down the side of Vesuvius. It is here that they bring Corinne her lyre, and that she sings of the glories of the scenery, and of the many memories of this land--of Cumæ, where the Sibyl dwelt; of Gaeta, close to the spot where the tyrant's dagger was plunged into Cicero's heart; of Capri and Baiæ, where men recall the deeds of darkness of Tiberius and Nero; of Nisida, where Brutus and Portia bade each other a last farewell; of Sorrento, where Tasso, just escaped from a mad-house, a miserable, hunted creature, ragged and unshaven, knocked at the door of the sister, who first did not recognise him, and then could not speak for tears. It is here that she ends her song with an elegy on all the suffering of this earthly life and all its happiness. Listen to the inspired words uttered by Corinne in these surroundings, where beauty is based upon ruin, where happiness reveals itself as a flitting, quickly extinguished flame, and where fertility is perpetually endangered by a volcano. She says: "Jesus permitted a frail and perhaps repentant woman to anoint His feet with the most precious ointment; He rebuked those who counselled her to keep it for a more useful purpose. 'Let her alone,' He said; 'Me ye have not always with you.' Alas! all that is good and great is with us upon this earth only for a short time. Old age, infirmities, and death soon dry up the dewdrop which falls from heaven and rests upon the flower. Let us then blend everything together--love, religion, genius, sunshine and perfumes, music and poetry; the only true atheism is coldness, selfishness, and baseness. It is said: 'Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.' And what is it, O God, to be gathered together in Thy name, if it be not to enjoy the wondrous gifts of Thy-fair nature, to render homage to Thee for them, to thank Thee for life, and to thank Thee most of all when another heart also created by Thee fully and entirely responds to our own!" Thus she speaks under the influence of her dual inspiration, in her life's meridian, when she is attempting to interweave the happiness of genius with the happiness of love, as the myrtle and the laurel were interwoven in the wreath with which she was crowned at the Capitol. It may not be; they untwist, they recoil from each other; and Corinne, the inspired Sibyl, becomes one of the many crushed, despairing spirits through whom the genius of the century utters its protest against that society which, like these apparently safe towns, is undermined by volcanic flames, flames which are never at rest, but find vent in one outburst after another, throughout the whole of the restless and unhappy nineteenth century. XI ATTACK UPON NATIONAL AND PROTESTANT PREJUDICES One might call _Corinne_ a work on national prejudices. Oswald represents all those of England; his travelling companion, Count d'Erfeuil, all those of France; and it is against the prejudices of these two nations, at that time the most powerful and the most self-reliant in Europe, that the heroine does battle with her whole soul. It is no coldblooded, impersonal warfare, for Corinne's future depends upon whether she can succeed in freeing Oswald from his national prejudices to such an extent as to enable him to be happy with a woman like herself, whose life conflicts at every turn with the English conception of what is becoming in woman. But while she is attempting to widen Oswald's view of life and to impart pliancy to his rigid mind, which always starts back again into its accustomed grooves, she is at the same time carrying on the education of the reader. Mme. de Staël continues in the domain of the emotions the task with which we have seen her occupied in the domain of thought. She sketches the first outlines of _national_ psychology, shows how there is a colouring of nationality even in men's most private, personal feelings. Her countrymen were then, much in the manner of the Germans of to-day, attempting to blot out the national colours of neighbouring countries in the complacent persuasion that they themselves had a monopoly of civilisation. Her inmost desire is to show them that their conception of life is but one among many conceptions that are equally justifiable, some of them possibly more justifiable. When we remember how powerful is the prejudice which, in every country without exception, makes it a crime for the individual to deny that his nation is in possession of all the virtues which it ascribes to itself, and which so many a sanctimonious Jack-in-the-box finds it to his advantage to assure it daily that it possesses, we shall understand what courage Mme. de Staël displayed in attacking French national vanity at such a period. There is one great idea that is more fatal than any other to the coercive power wielded by the established beliefs and customs of any given society. It has nothing to do with the logic of the matter. One would imagine that logic, let loose among the whole stock of prejudices ruling in any given country at any given time, would work the same havoc as a bull in a china-shop; but such is not the case; pure logic does not affect the majority of mankind at all I No! if you would really awaken and astound the generality of men, you must succeed in making it plain to them that what they consider absolute is only relative--that is to say, must show them that the standards which they believe to be universally recognised, are only accepted as standards by so and so many similarly constituted minds; whereas other nations and other races have an entirely different conception of the befitting and the beautiful. In this manner the general public of a country learn for the first time that the art and poetry which they despise are regarded by whole races as the highest, while their own, which to them seem the finest in the world, are held in slight esteem by other nations; learn, moreover, that it is vain to take refuge in the thought that all other nations are mistaken in their judgment, seeing that each one of these other nations believes that all the rest are mistaken. If I were asked to define in one word the service rendered by Mme. de Staël to French society, to its culture and literature, and through these to Europe in general, I should express myself thus: By means of her writings, more particularly her great works on Italy and Germany, she enabled the French, English, and German peoples to take a _comparative_ view of their own social and literary ideas and theories. Count d'Erfeuil, in _Corinne_, is a cleverly drawn type of French superficiality and vanity in combination with some of the most charming and characteristic of French virtues. One does not really appreciate the character until one has repeatedly reflected on the amount of courage that was required to introduce into a circle of foreigners, as the sole, and properly accredited, representative of France, such an extremely narrow-minded personage as D'Erfeuil. He is a young French _émigré_, who has fought with singular gallantry in the war, has submitted to the confiscation of his large estates not merely with serenity, but with cheerfulness, and has with great self-sacrifice tended and supported the old uncle who brought him up, who like himself is an _émigré_ and who without him would be absolutely helpless--in short, there is a foundation of chivalry and unselfishness in his character. When one talks to him, however, one feels it impossible to believe that he is a man of much and sad experience, for he positively seems to have forgotten all that has happened to him. He talks of the loss of his fortune with admirable frivolity, and with equal, if less admirable, frivolity on all other subjects. Oswald meets him in Germany, where he is nearly bored to death; he has lived there for several years, but it has never occurred to him to learn a word of the language. He intends to go to Italy, but anticipates no pleasure from travelling in that country; he is certain that any French provincial town has more agreeable society and a better theatre than Rome. "Do you not mean to learn Italian?" asks Oswald. "No," he replies; "that is not part of my plan of study;" and he looks as serious when giving this answer as if something very important had led him to the determination. In Italy he does not vouchsafe the landscape so much as a glance. His conversation turns neither on outward objects nor on feelings; it hovers between reflection and observation as between two poles, neither of which it touches; its topics are always society topics; it is garnished with puns and anecdotes, is chiefly about his numberless acquaintances, is indeed in its essence nothing but society gossip. Oswald is astonished by this strange mixture of courage and superficiality. D'Erfeuil's contempt for danger and misfortune would have seemed admirable to him if it had cost more effort, and heroic if it had not been the outcome of the very qualities which render him incapable of deep feeling. As it is, he finds it tiresome. When D'Erfeuil for the first time sees St. Peter's in the distance, he likens it to the dome of the Invalides in Paris--a comparison more patriotic than apt; when he sees Corinne at the Capitol he feels a desire to make her acquaintance, but no reverence for her. He is not surprised that her heart has remained untouched in a country where he finds no good qualities in the men, but he cannot help flattering himself with the hope that she will be unable to resist the charms of a well-bred young Frenchman. When she speaks to others in his presence in Italian or English (languages he does not understand), he says to her: "Speak French. You know the language and are worthy to speak it." When he sees that Corinne loves Oswald he does not take it amiss, though his vanity is wounded; but he thinks her passion foolish, because of the improbability of its bringing her happiness. At the same time he most strongly advises Oswald not to enter into a life-long union with an unpresentable woman like Corinne. With all his daring, he bows to the supreme authority of established custom. "If you will be foolish," he says to Oswald, "at least do nothing irreparable;" reckoning among irreparable follies marriage with Corinne. His ideas on literary, correspond to his ideas on social subjects. In Corinne's house the conversation frequently turns upon Italian and English poetry. D'Erfeuil, starting from the premise that French poetry from the time of Louis XV. onwards forms the unquestioned standard, is naturally very severe in his judgment of all foreign productions. To him the Germans are barbarians, the Italians are corrupters of style, and "the taste and elegance of French style" are law-giving in literature. "Our stage literature," he remarks, "is admittedly the finest in Europe, and I do not think that it occurs even to the English themselves to compare Shakespeare with our dramatists." In a company of Italians he shrewdly enough, if without much delicacy, defines Italian drama as consisting of ballets, silly tragedies, and wearisome harlequinades; to him the Greek drama is coarse, Shakespeare formless. "Our drama," he says, "is a model of refinement and beauty of form. To introduce foreign ideas among us would be to plunge us into barbarism." D'Erfeuil considers the antiquities of Rome altogether overrated. He is not going to fatigue himself, he says, by toiling through all these old ruins. He makes his way northwards, but is as bored by Alpine scenery as he was by Rome. In the end he goes to England, where he assists Corinne in her misfortunes; his deeds have ever been nobler than his words. He cannot, however, when he sees how miserable her love for Oswald has made her, deny his vanity the satisfaction of ringing the changes upon "I told you so;" and he considers it a duty to himself not to let the opportunity slip of offering himself as Oswald's successor. For all this, it is true and unselfish devotion that he displays, and Corinne is distressed by her inability to be more truly grateful to him; but he is so careless and scatterbrained that she is constantly tempted to forget his generous deeds just as he himself forgets them. "It is very charming, no doubt," observes the authoress, "to set little value on one's own good deeds, but it may be that the indifference with which some men regard their own noble actions has its origin in their superficiality." Without regard for anything but what she considers the truth, she thus derives some of the most conspicuous virtues of her countrymen from weaknesses in their character. By means of this typical character of D'Erfeuil, Mme. de Staël shows how in France all good feelings are held in check by one vice, that fear of society which has its origin in vanity. It seems to her as if all feeling, the whole of life, indeed, were ruled by _esprit_, by the desire to appear to advantage, and by a fear which may be expressed in the words, "What will people say?" An author who writes not long after Mme. de Staël, the acute and original Henri Beyle, is of the same opinion. His name for Frenchmen is _les vainvifs_ and he asserts that all their actions are dictated by the consideration, _Qu'en dira-t-on_? the fear, that is to say, of the unbecoming or ridiculous. The French were then, what the Danes are still, very proud of their keen sense of the comical; it was this which led them to describe themselves modestly as the wittiest nation in the world. Corinne maintains that this sense of the ridiculous, with the corresponding fear of being ridiculous, destroys all originality in manners, in dress, and in speech, prevents all free play of imagination, and stifles natural expression of feeling. She maintains that feeling, that every kind of intellectuality, is obliged to take the form of wit instead of the form of poetry, in a country where the fear of becoming the victim of wit or mockery makes each man try to be the first to seize those weapons. "Are we," she asks D'Erfeuil, "only to live for what society may say of us? Is what others think and feel always to be our guiding star? If this be so, if we are intended to imitate each other for ever and ever, why has each one of us been given a soul? Providence might have spared itself this unnecessary outlay." The national prejudices of France are typified in D'Erfeuil; in Oswald we have a personification of all the prejudices which have been part of England's strength and England's weakness throughout the centuries. Powerful nations are always unjust, and their injustice both adds to their power and limits it. It was upon this injustice that Mme. de Staël considered it her mission to throw a very strong light. The story of the book turns upon the attempt of a woman to regain, by means of a man's love, that place in English society which she has forfeited by too great independence, by entering the arena of public life; consequently what the authoress chiefly dwells upon in her delineation of English character is the narrowness of the English conception of ideal womanhood. From this conception, with which he has been brought up, Oswald makes sincere but fruitless efforts to free himself. When, in Italy, he sees Corinne admired and loved for her great gifts, without a thought being given to her sex or her enigmatical past, he is greatly perplexed. There is something repulsive to him in a woman's leading this public life. He is accustomed to look upon woman as a sort of higher domestic animal, and for long cannot reconcile himself to the idea of society forgiving her the crime of having talent. He feels himself as it were humiliated and exasperated by the thought; he regards it as impossible that a woman with such a well-developed, independent mind should be capable of binding herself faithfully to one man and living contentedly for him alone. And though, in spite of everything, Corinne loves him, loves him with a passion beside which all that he has seen or heard of pales, and which is so unselfish that it leads her to risk her reputation for his sake without demanding anything whatever in return, he forgets her, her great gifts, her nobility of mind and soul, the moment he stands once again upon English soil, inhales English mists and prejudices, and meets a fresh young girl of sixteen, the very perfection of a wife after the English recipe, reserved, ignorant, innocent, silent, a fair-haired, blue-eyed incarnation of domestic duty. The authoress tracks the prejudice which explains Oswald's conduct to its source, which she finds to be the English conception of home. Oswald's principal difficulty in coming to a decision about Corinne is expressed in the words: "Of what use would all that be at home?" "And home is everything to us--to the women, at least," remarks an Englishman to Oswald; and the authoress herself remarks elsewhere: "Though it is possible for an Englishman to find pleasure for a time in foreign ways and customs, his heart invariably returns to the impressions of his childhood. If you ask the Englishman you meet on board ship in foreign climes whither he is bound, he answers, if he is upon the return journey: '_Home_.'"[1] It is to this English love of home that she attributes both the superstition that the independent intellectual development of woman is absolutely incompatible with the domestic virtues, and the English idolatry of these virtues. And, strange as it may seem to us to see the Italian woman, nowadays so indifferent to everything intellectual, set up as a model of independence, there is no doubt that Mme. de Staël is right. The ideal of well-being conveyed by the word home, is a genuine Northern, Teutonic conception, originally so foreign to the Latin races that the English word _home_ has passed into the Latin languages, because these possess no equivalent. To this conception of home corresponds the word "cosiness" (untranslatable into any Latin language), which was created to express the pleasure of being able to sit warm and comfortable within four walls. We have not far to seek for the origin of this ideal. The inhabitant of Northern Europe, living in a raw climate, amidst cold, harsh natural surroundings, finds the same pleasure in the thought of sitting by a warm hearth whilst snow and rain beat impotently on the window pane, which a Neapolitan feels in the thought of sleeping under the warm, glorious, starry sky, or passing the cool night in dance, play, and song, in the open air. But to each of these different ideals of well-being and happiness corresponds a different conception of virtues and duties, which the nation that possesses or enforces them regards as the universal conception. It considers itself the first among nations because it exacts the fulfilment of these particular duties and possesses these particular virtues (which is not surprising, seeing that both are naturally entailed by the national character), and it moreover censures all the nations whose conceptions differ from its own. Speaking of England, Oswald asks Corinne: "How could you leave the home of chastity and morality and make fallen Italy the country of your adoption?" "In this country," Corinne replies, "we are modest; neither proud of ourselves like the English, nor pleased with ourselves like the French." It gratifies her to put both the Puritanic arrogance of the Northerner and the vain Frenchman's fear of ridicule to shame, by comparing them with the frank naturalness which the people of Italy even in their humiliation have preserved. She describes, delicately and truthfully, the touching naïveté with which the latter display their emotions. There is no stiff reserve, as in England, no coquetry, as in France; here the woman simply desires to please the man she loves, and cares not who knows it. One of Corinne's friends, returning to Rome after an absence of some duration, calls upon a distinguished lady. He is informed by the servant that "the Princess does not receive to-day; she is out of spirits, she is _innamorata_." Corinne tells how indulgently a woman is judged in Italy, and how frankly she owns her feelings. A poor girl dictates a love-letter to a writer in the open streets, and the man writes it with the utmost seriousness, never omitting to add all the polite forms which it is his business to know; hence some poor soldier or labourer receives a letter in which many tender assurances occupy the space between "Most honoured contemporary!" and "Yours with reverential respect." _Corinne_ is perfectly correct. I have myself seen such letters. And, on the other hand, it seems as if learning had not been at all unusual among the Italian women of those days. A Frenchman in _Corinne_ who calls a learned woman a pedant, receives the reply: "What harm is there in a woman's knowing Greek?" Neither does Corinne fail to perceive that the official recognition and support of duty and morality in the North is accompanied by the greatest brutality in all cases in which the laws of society have once been transgressed. She shows how the Englishman respects no promise or relation which has not been legally registered, and how in strict England the sanctity of marriage and an irreproachable home life exist side by side with the most shameless and bestial prostitution, just as the personal devil exists side by side with the personal God. She remarks, with womanly circumspection and modesty, but yet quite plainly: "In England it is the domestic virtues which constitute woman's glory and happiness; but, granted that there are countries in which love is to be met with outside the bonds of holy matrimony, then undoubtedly among all these countries Italy is the one in which most regard is shown to woman's happiness. The men of that country have a code of morality for the regulation of those relations which are without the pale of morality--a tribunal of the heart." It is the same tribunal as that of the mediæval Courts of Love. Byron is greatly impressed when he comes to Italy and finds this complete moral code, exactly the opposite of the English. Mme. de Staël as usual tries to explain the milder morality by the milder climatic conditions; she says: "The aberrations of the heart inspire a more indulgent compassion here than in any other country. Jesus said of the Magdalen: 'Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much.' Those words were spoken under a sky as beautiful as ours. The same sky invokes for us the same Divine mercy." Corinne, who is herself a Catholic, teaches the Scottish Protestant who loves her, to understand Italian Catholicism. "In this country, Catholicism, having had no other religion to combat, has become milder and more indulgent than it is anywhere else; in England, on the other hand, Protestantism, in order to annihilate Catholicism, has been obliged to arm itself with the utmost severity of principle and morality. Our religion, like the religion of the ancients, inspires the artist and the poet; is a part, so to speak, of all the pleasures of our life; while yours, which has had to adapt itself to a country where reason plays a much more important part than imagination, has received an imprint of moral severity which it will always retain. Ours speaks in the name of love, yours in the name of duty. Although our dogmas are absolute, our principles are liberal, and our orthodox despotism adapts itself to the circumstances of life, while your religious heresy insists upon obedience to its laws without making any allowance for exceptional cases." She shows how, in consequence of this, there is always a certain dread of genius, of intellectual superiority, in Protestant countries. "It is a mistaken fear," she says; "for it is very moral, this superiority of mind and soul. He who understands everything becomes very compassionate, and he who feels deeply becomes good." "Why are great powers a misfortune? Why have they prevented my being loved? Will he find in another woman more mind, more soul, more tenderness than in me? No, he will find less; but he will be content, because he will feel himself more in harmony with society. What fictitious pleasures, what fictitious sorrows are those we owe to society! Under the sun and the starry heavens all that human beings need is to love and to feel worthy of each other; but society! society! how hard it makes the heart, how frivolous the mind! how it leads us to live only for what others will say of us! If human beings could but meet freed from that influence which all collectively exercise upon each, how pure the air that would penetrate into the soul! how many new ideas, how many genuine emotions would refresh it!"--"Receive my last salutation, O land of my birth!" cries Corinne in her swan song in praise of Rome--and one feels the bitterness of the exile and the thrust at Napoleon in the words that follow: "You have not grudged me fame, O liberal-minded people that do not banish women from your temples, that do not sacrifice immortal talent to passing jealousies! You welcome genius wherever you recognise it; for you know that it is a victor without victims, a conqueror that does not plunder, but takes from eternity wherewith to enrich time." This sketch of the contrast between the emotional life of Catholicism and that of Protestantism prepares for a digression on the contrast between their respective views of art. On this latter point the book makes a decided attack on Protestant arrogance and want of all understanding of art, as exhibited by Oswald, who represents the narrowest English ideas. In the midst of this plastic and musical people, who are so good-natured, so childlike, so careless of their dignity, and, according to English ideas, so immoral, Oswald, who is accustomed to regard it as the aim and end of existence to live up to certain insular conceptions of duty and dignity, feels himself very ill at ease. Devoid of all artistic feeling, he judges art now by a literary, now by a moral, now by a religious standard; his prejudices are constantly offended; he understands nothing. He notices some reliefs on the doors of St. Peter's, and great is his amazement to find that they represent scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Leda with the swan, and the like! What is this but pure paganism! Corinne takes him to the Colosseum, and (in this resembling his contemporary Oehlenschläger) his one thought is that he is standing in a gigantic place of execution, his one feeling, moral indignation at the crimes here perpetrated against the early Christians. He enters the Sistine Chapel and, ignorant of the history of art, is greatly outraged that Michael Angelo has ventured to portray God the Father in ordinary human form, as though he were a Jupiter or a Zeus. He is equally scandalised on finding in Michael Angelo's prophets and sibyls none of that humble Christian spirit which he had looked for in a Christian chapel. All this the authoress has drawn from life. Italy presupposes in her visitors a certain amount of artistic, or æsthetic, taste. There are three ways of looking at everything--the practical, the theoretical, and the æsthetic. The forest is seen from the practical point of view by the man who inquires if it conduces to the healthiness of the district, or the owner who calculates its value as firewood; from the theoretical, by the botanist who makes a scientific study of its plant life; from the æsthetic or artistic, by the man who has no thought but for its appearance, its effect as part of the landscape. It is this last, the artistic, æsthetic view, that Oswald is unable to take. He has no eyes; his reasoning power and his morality have deprived his senses of their freshness. Therefore he cannot lose sight of the substance in the form, therefore the Colosseum awakens in him only the remembrance of all the blood so wickedly spilled there. In Corinne's vindication of the æsthetic view we feel the influence of Germany, more particularly of A. W. Schlegel, the first exponent of the awakening romantic spirit in that country. For, however differently Romanticism may develop in different countries, one thing which it invariably maintains is, that the beautiful is its own aim and end, or Selbstzweck, as it was called in Germany; an idea borrowed from Kant's _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_; the vindication of beauty as the standard and true aim of art. In France this theory was expressed by the formula _l'art pour l'art_, and it makes its appearance for the first time in Denmark in certain of Oehlenschläger's poems. But it is not only the art, but the people and the life of Italy, that must be seen with the artist's eye to be understood and appreciated. Nothing is more common than to meet in Italy, Englishmen, Germans or Frenchmen, who, seeing everything from their national point of view, have nothing but blame for everything. In the eyes of the Germans the women lack that timid modesty, that maidenliness, which is their ideal; Englishmen are shocked by the want of cleanliness and order; Frenchmen are dissatisfied with the social intercourse, the absence of conversational ability, and express contempt for the Italian prose style. Corinne points out that the beauty of Italian women is not of a moral, but of a plastic and picturesque kind; that to appreciate it we must have an eye susceptible to colour and form, not dulled by too much poring over printed books. She contrasts Italian improvisation with French conversation, and finds it equally admirable. A sensible people like the English cultivate and appreciate practical business qualities; an emotional people like the Germans cultivate and love music; a witty people like the French cultivate conversation--that is to say, the best in them is brought out in intercourse, in converse with others; an imaginative people like the Italians improvise--that is to say, rise naturally from their ordinary feelings into poetry. Corinne says: "I feel myself a poet whenever my spirit is exalted; when I am conscious of more than usual scorn for selfishness and meanness, and when I feel that a beautiful action would be easy to me--then it is that my verses are best. I am a poet when I admire, when I scorn, when I hate, not from personal motives, but on behalf of the whole of humanity." And she does not rest content with defending the light nightingale-song which was what the Italians at that time understood by lyrical poetry; she also accounts for the exaggerated importance attached to style and rhetorical pomp in Italian prose. She explains it partly by the love of the South for form, partly by the fact that men lived under an ecclesiastical despotism which forbade the serious treatment of any theme; they knew that it was not possible for them to influence the course of events by their books, and so they wrote to show their skill in writing, to excite admiration by the elegance of their composition--and the means became the end. Another of the things which had shocked Oswald was Michael Angelo's representation of the Divinity and the prophets in the Sistine Chapel. In the mighty human form of Jehovah he does not recognise that invisible, spiritual divinity into which the passionate national God of the old Hebrews has been transformed by the Protestantism of the North; and where among all these proud forms with which Michael Angelo has covered the ceiling in his Promethean desire to create human beings, where among those defiant, enthusiastic, despairing, struggling figures, is to be found the humility, the meekness he expected to see? Corinne reads her countrymen a lesson, a lesson needed in other countries at this day, and especially in one like ours, where so much unintelligent talk is to be heard on the subject of Christian art and Christian æsthetics. The passionately violent attack made by Sören Kierkegaard towards the end of his life upon so-called Christian art does not surprise us, coming as it did from a man destitute of all artistic culture. He first invests the painters of the Renaissance with his Protestant, nay, his personal, conception of religion, and is then shocked because, with this conception in the background of their consciousness, they could paint as they did. Oswald behaves in much the same way. He does not realise that the painters of the Renaissance stood in a different relation to their subjects from the painters of our day; that whereas the artists of to-day seek to gain a real understanding of their subject, and study it either from the antiquarian, the ethnological, or the psychological point of view, the artist of the Renaissance took his subject as he found it, and made of it what he fancied--that is to say, what harmonised with his character. Herein is to be found the explanation of what surprises and shocks the North--ener in the old masters. For, just as a small selection of themes taken from the Iliad and the Odyssey provided the whole of Greek art--sculpture, painting, and drama--with its subjects (it is always the same story, of Paris and Helen, of Atreus and Thyestes, or of Iphigenia and Orestes), so a score of themes from the Old and New Testament (the Fall, Lot and his Daughters, the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Passion) keep brush and chisel at work in Italy for three centuries. It is such subjects alone which artists are commissioned to paint, and for long it is only for the purpose of painting such subjects that study from the nude is permitted. Men's minds develop, the subjects remain the same. The pious, naïve faith of old days is superseded by the enthusiastic humanism and reviving paganism of the Renaissance; but it is still Madonnas and Magdalens that are painted, with this difference, that the stiff Queen of Heaven of Byzantine art is transformed into an idealised peasant girl of Albano, and the woefully emaciated and remorseful sinner of Andrea del Verocchio into the voluptuous Magdalen of Correggio; the apostles and martyrs too are still depicted, but the stoned and crucified saints of olden times, painted for the purpose of exciting compassion and devotional feeling, are transformed into the St. Sebastians of Titian and Guido Reni, the beautiful young page glowing with health and beauty, the dazzling white of whose flesh is thrown into relief by one or two drops of blood which drip from an arrow-head inserted becomingly between the ribs. Oswald is taught by Corinne to admire the liberal spirit of Italian Catholicism, which in the days of the Renaissance permitted each artist to develop his talent or genius with perfect independence, even when he only made his Christian or Jewish subject a pretext for the representation of his own personal ideal of man or woman. This brings us to another of Oswald's stumbling-blocks, namely, that blending of the Christian and the pagan which so offended him in the reliefs by Antonio Filarete on the doors of St. Peter's. The same thing is to be observed everywhere; everywhere the pagan material has been preserved and employed. The old basilicas and churches are built with the pillars of antique temples. A simple cross superficially christianises the obelisks, the Colosseum, and the interior of the Pantheon. The statues of Menander and Posidippos were prayed to as saints all through the Middle Ages. Corinne shows Oswald that it is to this often childish, but always unprejudiced position towards the pagan and the human, that Catholicism owes the artistic glory with which it will always shine in history, a glory which will never be dimmed by the artistic performances of Protestantism. Protestantism tears down from above its altars the beautiful Albano peasant women with smiling babes at their breasts, tinder the pretext that they are Madonnas, whitewashes all the glowing pictures, and glories in bare walls. The Italy of the Renaissance divested Christianity of its spirit of self-renunciation, of its Jewish-Asiatic character, and transformed it into a mythology, fragrant of incense, wreathed with flowers. Italian Catholicism allied itself with the civic spirit in the cities, and with all the fine arts when art was born again. Thus its interests were quite as often promoted from patriotic as from religious motives. It was in Tuscany that the Renaissance began. There humanity was born again after its fall, its renegation of Nature. There the first Italian republics were founded. There men once more willed; houses congregated and formed small, proud, indomitably liberal states, each a town with its surrounding district. Towers and spires rose into the air, erect and proud as the bearing of a free man; fortified palaces were begun, churches were completed; but the church was far more a state treasure-house, a witness to wealth, perseverance, and artistic taste, a valuable item in the rivalry between state and state, between Siena and Florence, than a dwelling-place of "Our Most Blessed Lady." Much more was done in honour of Siena than in honour of God. A Tuscan church, such as that of Orvieto, with its mosaics inlaid in gold, or that of Siena, with its façade of sculptured marble resembling the lace robe of some youthful beauty, is to us much more of a jewel-casket than a church. Or think of the Church of St. Mark in Venice. The first time one sees it, one feels momentarily surprised by its oriental façade, its bright cupolas, its peculiar arches resting on pile upon pile of short, clustered pillars of red and green marble. After casting a glance from the piazza at the mosaics of the outside walls, rich colours on a golden ground, one enters, and one's first thought is: Why, this is all gold, golden vaulting, golden walls! The minute gilt tesseræ composing the mosaic background of all the pictures form one great plane of gold. A sunbeam falling upon it produces sparkling flecks upon the darker ground, and the whole church seems aflame. The floor, undulating with age, is composed of a mosaic of red, green, white, and black marble. The pillars, which are of reddish marble, have capitals of gilded bronze. The small arched windows are of white, not stained glass; coloured windows would be unsuitable with all this magnificence; they are for less gorgeous churches. The pillars are alternated with enormous square columns of greenish marble, at least six yards in diameter, which support gilded half-arches; each cupola rests upon four such half-arches. The smaller pillars which support altars, &c., are, some of green and red speckled marble, some of transparent alabaster. All the lower-lying marble, that, for instance, of the seats and benches running along the sides of the church and surrounding the columns, is of a bright red colour. The whole church, as seems only natural in a town whose school of painting so entirely subordinated form to colour, impresses by its picturesqueness, not by its architectural grandeur. With its gilded ornaments, its inlaid stalls, its lovely bronzes, its golden statues, candelabra, and capitals, San Marco lies there like some luxurious Byzantine beauty, heavily laden with gold and pearls and sparkling diamonds, the richest brocade covering her oriental couch. Such a church as this was undoubtedly originally an expression of religious enthusiasm, but in the palmy days of the Renaissance, as the building became ever more and more richly ornamented, religious feeling was entirely supplanted by love of art. Very significant of this is the one inscription in the church, which is to be found above the principal entrance: "_Ubi diligenter inspexeris artemque ac laborem Francisci et Valerii Zucati Venetorum fratrum agnoveris tum tandem judicato_." (When you have diligently studied and considered all the art and all the labour which we two Venetian brothers, Francesco and Valerio Zucati, have expended here, then judge us.) A caution by the artists against hasty criticism. The brothers Zucati were the masters in their art who in the sixteenth century executed most of the mosaics in the church, entirely, or principally, after designs by Titian. Such an inscription, which, instead of being an invitation to worship, a greeting to the faithful, a benediction, or a text of Scripture, is an appeal to the beholder to examine carefully and seriously the artistic work executed in the service of religion, would be an impossibility in or on a Protestant church. When the Catholic faith disappears, as it is doing to-day in Italy, from the Catholic Church, when Inquisition and fanaticism become a legend, when the ugly animal in the snail-shell dies, the beautifully whorled shell will still remain. There will still remain the magnificent churches, statues, and paintings; there will still remain Michael Angelo's Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Sistine Madonna, St. Peter's at Rome, the cathedrals of Milan, Siena, and Pisa. Protestantism has shown itself incapable of producing any great religious architecture; and, though iconoclasm has long been a thing of the past, Rembrandt remains the one great master in whose pictures it has shown capacity to give artistic expression to its religious sentiments. It has been necessary to dwell a little upon the fact that Corinne, the art-loving poetess, always takes the part of Catholicism against Protestant Oswald, because here again the influence upon Mme. de Staël of her intercourse with Germans may be clearly traced. Here again we feel, and this time more forcibly, the approach of Romanticism, with its loathing of Protestantism, as unimaginative, uncultured, dry, and cold, and its steadily increasing affection for Catholicism, a faith whose æsthetic proclivities, and close and warm relations with imagination and art, gave it an unexpected new lease of life and power in the beginning of the nineteenth century, after the prosaic reasonableness of the "enlightenment" period. We have here a most distinct attack upon the France of the eighteenth century, which, with Voltaire at its head, had persecuted and scorned Catholicism, and which, without any love for Protestant dogma, had yet expressed a distinct preference for Protestantism, with its independence of Papal authority, its married clergy, and its hatred of the real or pretended renunciations of conventual life. [1] Corinne. 1807. I. 291; II. 21. XII NEW CONCEPTION OF THE ANTIQUE There is another part of this book on Italy where the influence of Germany makes itself profoundly felt, and where we are also sensible of the transition from the creative mood which produced _Corinne_ to that which produced the book on Germany. I refer to Corinne's conception of the antique and of the position in which modern art stands towards it. Reflections on this subject naturally suggested themselves when she was acting as Oswald's guide in Rome. For Rome is the one place in the world where history is, as it were, visible. There successive ages have deposited their records in distinct layers. One sometimes comes upon a single building (one of the houses in the vicinity of the Temple of Vesta for example) in which the foundation belongs to one period of history, and each of the three superimposed stories to another--ancient Rome, imperial Rome, the Renaissance, and our own day. It is to the most ancient period that Corinne first introduces her friend. It must be confessed that while she looks at the ruins, he looks at her. But the significance of this part of the book lies in the fact that it introduces a new view of the antique into French literature. Of the two great classic peoples, it was really only the Romans that were understood in France. Some Roman blood flows in Frenchmen's veins. A true Roman spirit breathes in Corneille's tragedies. It was, thus, not surprising that the great Revolution revived Roman customs, names, and costumes. Charlotte Corday, of the race of the great Corneille, is penetrated by the Roman spirit. Madame Roland moulded her mind by the study of Tacitus; and David, the painter of the Revolution, reproduced ancient Rome in his art--Brutus and Manlius are his heroes. But the Greeks had never been rightly understood. The French, indeed, still flattered themselves that their classical literature continued the tradition of Greek literature, and actually surpassed it; but since Lessing had written his _Hamburgische Dramaturgie_ it had been no secret to the rest of Europe that Racine's Greeks were neither more nor less than so many Frenchmen; it had been discovered that Agamemnon's immortal family consisted of disguised marquises and marchionesses. It was of no avail that the costume had been altered in the Théâtre Français, that since Talma's day its Greeks had appeared in classic draperies instead of with perukes, powder, and small-swords; from the moment that the critical spirit awoke in Germany, the French conception of the antique became the jest of Europe. It is Mme. de Staël who has the honour of being the first to introduce her fellow-countrymen, in her book on Germany, to the bold scoffer, Lessing, who had dared to make the arch-mocker himself, his own teacher and master, Voltaire, the butt of his wit, in this case sharpened by a personal grudge. She paves the way for doing so in _Corinne_, by making her heroine's conversation with Oswald a _résumé_ of all the results produced in the mind of Germany by the new study of the antique, and by the doctrines propounded in _Laokoon_ on the subject of the relation between poetry and sculpture. [Illustration: WINCKELMANN] In Germany too, a thoroughly French conception of Hellenism had prevailed, the conception apparent in Wieland's clever, frivolous romances, _Agathon_ and _Aristippos_, and in his poems, _Endymion, Musarion, &c_., which are severely handled by Mme. de Staël in her book on Germany. But a new era had dawned. A poor German school-master, Winckelmann, inspired by genuine, pure enthusiasm, succeeded, after encountering innumerable difficulties, in making his way to Rome to study the antique. Against his convictions, and in spite of the opposition of his friends, he adopted the Catholic religion to facilitate his stay there. He eventually fell a victim to his love of art, for he was foully murdered by a scoundrel who wished to obtain possession of his collection of valuable coins and precious stones. It was this Winckelmann who, in a long series of writings, beginning with the appeal to the German nobility and ending with the great history of art, opened the eyes of his fellow-countrymen to the harmony of Greek art. His whole work as an author is one great hymn to the re-discovered, the recovered antique. All who are acquainted with his writings are aware that the Apollo Belvedere, the Venus of Medici, and the Laocoon group represented to him the supreme glory of Greek art; nor could it be otherwise, seeing that no work of art of the great style had as yet been discovered. The Teutonic neo-Hellenic development took place prior to the discovery of the Venus of Milo. Even Thorwaldsen was an old man when he first saw this statue. But in spite of this one great deficiency and of his many historical inaccuracies, it was from Winckelmann that the mighty influence went forth which inspired Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. Lessing's work is a continuation of Winckelmann's. Endowed with an unrivalled critical faculty, he sketched the first plan of a science of art and poetry with Winckelmann's theory of art as a foundation. All who are familiar with Goethe's life know how great an influence these twin spirits, Winckelmann and Lessing, had upon his artistic development. The new, grand, genial conception of the antique finds its first expression in Goethe's sparkling little masterpiece, _Götter, Helden und Wieland_. I give a few specimen speeches. Wieland's ghost stands, nightcap on head, and is being utterly crushed in an argument with Admetus and Alcestis when Hercules appears. H. Where is Wieland? A. There he stands. H. That he? He is small enough, certainly. Just what I had pictured him to myself. Are you the man that is always prating about Hercules? W. (_shrinking away_). I have nothing to do with you, Colossus I H. Eh! What? Don't go away. W. I imagined Hercules to be a fine man of middle height. H. Of middle height! I? W. If you are Hercules, it was not you I meant. H. That is my name and I am proud of it. I know very well that when a blockhead cannot find a suitable bear or griffin or boar to hold his scutcheon, he takes a Hercules. It is plain that my godhead has never revealed itself to you in a vision. W. I confess this is the first vision of the kind that I have ever had. H. Then take thought, and ask pardon of the gods for your notes to Homer, who makes us too tall for you. W. In truth you are enormous; I never imagined anything like it. H. Is it my fault, man, that you have such a narrow-chested imagination? What sort of a Hercules is the one you are for ever prating about, and what is it he fights for? For virtue? What's the motto again? Have you ever seen virtue, Wieland? I have been a good deal about in the world too, and I never yet met such a thing. W. What! You do not know that virtue for which my Hercules does everything, ventures all? H. Virtue! I heard the word for the first time down here from a couple of silly fellows who couldn't tell me what they meant by it. W. No more could I. But don't let us waste words upon that I wish you had read my poems; if you had, you would see that at bottom I don't care so very much about virtue myself--it is an ambiguous sort of thing. H. It is a monstrosity, like every other phantasy which cannot exist in the world as we know it. Your virtue reminds me of a centaur. So long as it prances about in your imagination, how splendid it is, how strong! and when the sculptor represents it for you, what a superhuman form! But anatomise it, and you find four lungs, two hearts, and two stomachs. It dies at the moment of birth like any other monstrosity, or, to be more correct, it never existed anywhere but in your brain.[1] W. But virtue must be something, must be somewhere. By the eternal beard of my father, who doubted it? Meseems it dwelt with us, in demigods and heroes. Do you suppose we lived like brute beasts? We had splendid fellows among us. W. What do you call splendid fellows? H. Those who share what they have with others. And the richest was the best If he had more muscular strength than he needed, he gave another man a good thrashing; and of course no good man and true will have anything to do with a weaker man than himself, only with his equals, or his superiors. If he had a superfluity of sap and vigour, he provided the women with as many children as they might wish for--I myself begot fifty men-children in a single night. And if Heaven had given him goods and gold enough for a thousand, he opened his doors and bade a thousand welcome to enjoy it with him. W. Most of this would be considered vice in our day. H. Vice? that is another of your fine words I The very reason why everything is so poor and small with you is, that you represent virtue and vice as two extremes between which you oscillate, instead of thinking the middle course the ordained and best, as do your peasants and your men-servants and maid-servants. W. Let me tell you that in my century you would be stoned for such opinions. See how they have denounced me for my little attack on virtue and religion. H. And what had you to do attacking them? I have fought with horses, cannibals, and dragons, to the best of my ability, but never with clouds, what shape soever it pleased them to take. A sensible man leaves it to the winds that have blown them together to sweep them away again. W. You are a monster, a blasphemer. H. And you can't understand. Your Hercules stands like a beardless simpleton, hesitating between virtue and vice. If the two jades had met _me_ on the way--see! one under this arm, one under that, off I'd have gone with them both. Here we have Goethe's early and vigorous new conception of the antique contrasted with Wieland's Frenchified one; and we have at the same time the poetical confession of faith of the man whom his contemporaries called the Great Pagan. This is the philosophy of Spinoza in the form of a daring jest. But Goethe did not retain this bold, naturalistic view of the antique. When his youthful ardour had exhausted itself in _Werther_, in _Götz_, and in his enthusiastic treatise on Gothic architecture, he abruptly turned his back upon the Gothic and upon enthusiasm; and when he returns to the Greeks, it is their serenity and their lucidity, their simple harmonies and their sound common sense which captivate him. All that was passionate, full of colour, and realistic, he put aside and ignored; what was popular, burlesque, sensational, he only admitted in his allegorical farces, such as _Die klassische Walpurgisnacht_ in Faust; and for what was wildly bacchantic or darkly mystical his eyes were closed. With an increasing aversion for Christianity, which finds its chief expression in the Venetian Epigrams, was associated such a repugnance for the Gothic and all Christian art, that when he was at Assisi, a place so rich in famous Christian mementoes, Goethe did not even visit the beautiful Church of St. Francis, but devoted his attention exclusively to the insignificant ruins of the Temple of Minerva. It was in this frame of mind that he wrote his Iphigenia, a work which may be looked upon as typical of the whole Germanic-Gothic renaissance of the antique, and which played an important part in the formation of the art theories of the nineteenth century. It was regarded by German æstheticism under the leadership of Hegel, and by French æstheticism under the leadership of Taine, as a species of model work of art. Hegel considered that only the _Antigone_ of Sophocles was worthy to be compared with it. The spirit by which it is inspired is the same spirit which inspired all Schiller's neo-Hellenic poems, _Die Götter Griechenlands, Die Künstler, Die Ideale, Das Ideal und das Leben_. Men were actually inclined at that time to accept, as representative of the life of the Greeks, Schiller's description of the life of the gods: "Ewig klar und spiegelrein und eben Fliesst das zephyrleichte Leben Im Olymp den Seligen dahin." It is this entirely one-sided conception of the antique which is gradually evolved from that expressed in _Götter, Helden und Wieland_, and which finally leads Goethe to write Homeric poems like _Achilleïs_. Thorvaldsen's position to the antique is influenced by the same ideas and presents a succession of almost parallel movements. In some of his earliest bas-reliefs--Achilles and Briseïs, for example--we observe that greater daring in the rendering of the antique with which Goethe started; but all his later representations of Greek subjects have been inspired by the ideal of peaceful, subdued harmony which superseded the vigorous tendency. This new, Germanic-Gothic conception of Hellas is that with which all my (Danish) readers have been brought up, which they have imbibed from conversation, from newspapers, from German and Danish poetry, and from the Thorvaldsen sculptures. It is the conception which with us is not only regarded as the Danish and German, but as the only, the absolutely correct one. The view which I venture to express here for the first time is, that the Greece of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Thorvaldsen is _almost_ as un-Greek as that of Racine and that of Barthélemy in _Le Jeune Anacharse_. Racine's style has too strong a flavour of the drawing-room and the court to be Greek; Goethe's and Thorvaldsen's (framed on Winckelmann's theories) is, in spite of the surpassing genius of these two great men, too chastened, too limpid, and too cold to be Greek. I believe that the time will come when Goethe's Iphigenia will not be considered appreciably more Greek than Racine's, when it will be discovered that the German Iphigenia's dignified morality is as German as the French Iphigenia's graceful refinement is French. The only question that remains is, whether one is more Greek when one is German or when one is French. I am perfectly aware that I am dashing my head against a wall of Germanic-Gothic prejudice when I declare myself on the side of the French. I am not ignorant of the firmly-rooted conviction that of the two European streams of culture one is Latin, Spanish, French, the other Greek, German, Northern. I know of the plausible arguments, that German poetry with Goethe at its head has an antique bias, and is more or less Hellenic; that Germany has produced Winckelmann, the re-discoverer of the antique, and the philologists who have interpreted Greece to us; while France has only produced Racine, who turned the Greek demigods and heroes into French courtiers, and Voltaire, who considered Aristophanes a charlatan. And yet, when in comparing the two Iphigenias I asked myself the question: Which of the two, the Frenchman's or the German's, more resembles the Greek? the answer I gave myself was--The Frenchman's. The spirit of the French people resembles the Greek spirit in its absolute freedom from awkwardness, its love of lightness, elegance, form and colour, passion and dramatic life. No reasonable person would dream of ranking the French with the Greeks. The distance between them is so great as to be practically immeasurable. Still one must maintain their right to the place of honour against those who assert that the Germans stand nearer to the Greeks. The Germans who more immediately influenced Mme. de Staël, the leaders of the Romantic School, cherished a firm conviction of the vanity of literary and artistic attempts to reproduce the antique. A. W. Schlegel perpetuated Lessing's antagonism to the so-called classical poetry of France, exalting at its expense the poetry of the Troubadours, which did not depend for support on Greek or Latin literature; and he was very much colder in his criticism of Goethe's neo-Hellenic poems than of those which dealt with more home-like and more varied themes. To such influence is to be ascribed Corinne's dictum (i. 321) that, since we cannot make our own either the religious feelings of the Greeks and Romans or their intellectual tendencies, it is impossible for us to produce anything in their spirit, to invent, so to speak, anything in their domain. We do not need the footnote referring to an essay by Fr. Schlegel to tell us whose suggestion the authoress has here followed. And we almost feel as if we were reading the work of one of the Romantic critics when, in _De l'Allemagne_, we come upon the following development of the same thought: "Even if the artists of our day were restricted to the simplicity of the ancients, it would be impossible for us to attain to the original vigour which distinguishes them, and we should lose that intensity and complexity of emotion which is only found with us. Simplicity in art is apt with us moderns to become coldness and unreality, whereas with the ancients it was full of life."[2] I believe that this utterance hits the mark. And just as the German reproduction of the antique is German, so the Danish renaissance of the antique is Danish and not Greek; that is to say, it is too Danish to be properly Greek, and too Greek to be genuinely Danish and really modern. One is never more conscious of this than when one sees a work of Thorvaldsen's side by side with an antique bas-relief; when, for instance, one compares the Christiansborg medallions with the metopes of the Parthenon, or, as in the Naples Museum, sees a bas-relief of the most vigorous Greek period beside Thorvaldsen's most beautiful bas-relief, his "Night." Thorvaldsen's "Night" is only the stillness of night, the night in which men sleep. Night, as a Greek would conceive of it, the night in which men love, in which they murder, the night which hides under its mantle voluptuousness and crime, it certainly is not. It is a mild summer night in the country. And it is this idyllic spirit and sweet serenity which is the specially Danish characteristic of this production of the Northern renaissance of the antique. The peculiar rustic beauty of the charming figure is as essentially Danish as the severe grandeur and nobility of Goethe's Iphigenia are German. Like Goethe's, Thorvaldsen's revival of the antique is the expression of a reaction against the French-Italian rococo style, which, in spite of its justifiableness, was not a successful reaction. For, even where the rococo style is most ridiculous, there is always this to be said for it, that it has the strongest objection to repeat the old, to do over again what has already been done, and that, though its attempts frequently result in ugliness and distortion, they nevertheless evince a passionate, personal endeavour to find something new, something that shall be its own. Hence Bernini, in spite of his sins against truth and beauty, is really great in his best works, such as his St. Theresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, and his St. Benedict at Subiaco--so great that we understand the enthusiasm he aroused, and feel that he far excels many modern sculptors, who never produce anything distorted, but also never produce anything original. By his abrupt return to the antique, Thorvaldsen as it were ignored the whole development of art since the days of the Greeks. It would be impossible to divine from his work that such a sculptor as Michael Angelo had ever lived. He was drawn to the antique by precisely the same qualities which attracted Goethe--its serenity and quiet grandeur. It is possible to share Mme. de Staël's and the Romanticists' view that the neo-Hellenic style in modern art (that offspring of a disinclination to be one's self, i.e. modern, and an attempt to be the impossible, i.e. antique) is in itself an abortion--exactly as the Romanticists' own medieval hieratic style was one--and at the same time, without any self-contradiction, warmly to admire Goethe's _Iphigenia_ and Thorvaldsen's finest works. This is, indeed, only what the German Romanticists and Mme. de Staël herself did. But Mme. de Staël has failed to observe, that in every case in which a work that is the result of the study of the antique is a work of real, lasting importance, it is so because the artist's or poet's national character and personal peculiarities show distinctly through the more refined, but less robust, classicism which is the result of his endeavour. The attacks made in _Corinne_ and _De l'Allemagne_ upon spurious classicism were an expression, in the first instance, of the reaction against the eighteenth century; but, so far as France was concerned, they applied also to an earlier period, were attacks upon the great names of the seventeenth century, of the classic period of Louis XIV., which A. W. Schlegel, following in Lessing's steps, had so severely criticised. Here, where Mme. de Staël was running the risk of wounding French national pride, she shows all possible circumspection, only repeats the remarks of others, and qualifies where she can. She justly maintains, however, that the spirit of this criticism is not un-French, since it is the same as that which inspires Rousseau's Letter on French Music, the same accusation of having supplanted natural expression of the emotions by a certain pompous affectation. When the Germans of those days desired to give a tangible example of the French conception of the antique, they pointed to the portraits of Louis XIV., in which he is represented now as Jupiter, now as Hercules, naked or with a lion's hide thrown over his shoulders, but never without his great wig. But when Madame de Staël, following their example, praises German Hellenism at the expense of French, she scarcely does her countrymen justice. The art of David had already proved that Frenchmen were capable of discarding the periwig without foreign suggestion. Besides, she over-estimates German neo-Hellenism. There is no doubt that the Germans, whose literature is so critical, whose modern poetry is actually an offspring of criticism and æstheticism, have understood the Greeks far better than the French have done, and that this understanding has been of value in their imitation of them. But one never resembles an original nature less than when one imitates it. The Germans favour restriction and moderation in all practical matters, but are opposed to the restriction of either thought or imagination. Therefore they triumph where plastic form vanishes--in metaphysics, in lyrical poetry, and in music; but therefore also there are conjectures in their science, their art is formless, colour is their weak point in painting, and the drama in poetry. In other words, they lack exactly that plastic talent which the Greeks possessed in the highest degree. If France is far from being a Greece in art, Germany is still farther. Of all the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, the Germans have only succeeded in acclimatising one--Pallas Athene, and in Germany she wears spectacles. Mme. de Staël might have observed to Schlegel that an Athene with spectacles is not much more beautiful than a Jupiter with a wig. [1] It cannot be denied that this scientific, anti-mythological simile does not come well from Hercules. But the rest atones for it. [2] Madame de Staël: _Oeuvres complètes_, x. 273. XIII DE L'ALLEMAGNE The strongly opposed and long suppressed book on Germany is the most mature production of Mme. de Staël's culture and intellect. It is the first of her longer works in which she so entirely loses herself in her subject as to have apparently forgotten her own personality. In it she gives up describing herself, and only appears to the extent that she gives an account of her travels in Germany and reproduces her conversations with the most remarkable men of that country. In place of self-defence and self-exaltation, she offers her countrymen a comprehensive view of a whole new world. The last information Frenchmen had received regarding the intellectual life of Germany was, that there was a king in Berlin who dined every day in the company of French savants and poets, who sent, his indifferent French verse to be corrected by Voltaire, and who refused to acknowledge the existence of a German literature. And now, not so many years later, they learned that this same country, which their conquering armies were in the act of treading under foot, had, in the course of a single generation, produced, as if by magic, a great and instructive literature, which some had the audacity to rank with the French, if not above it. The book gave a complete, comprehensive picture of this foreign intellectual life and literary production. It began with a description of the appearance of the country and its towns; it noted the contrasts between the character of Northern and of Southern Germany, between the tone and morals of Berlin and of Vienna; it gave information on the subject of German university education, and of the new life which Pestalozzi had imparted to the training of children. From this it passed on to a general survey of contemporary German poetry, made doubly intelligible by many translations of poems and fragments of drama; and the authoress did not even flinch from putting the climax to her work by giving a sketch of the evolution of German philosophy from Kant to Schelling. The impressions of German naïveté, good-nature, and straightforwardness which prevailed in France until 1870 were due to Mme. de Staël's book. She made the acquaintance of the people who had caused Europe to resound with the clash of their arms throughout the Thirty Years' War and during the reign of Frederick the Great, at the moment of its deepest political and military degradation, and this led her to conclude that the national character was peaceful and idyllic. It seemed to her that the warmth of the stoves and the fumes of ale and tobacco gave the atmosphere in which this people moved a peculiar, heavy, dull quality; and it was her opinion that their strength lay exclusively in their earnest morality and their intellectual independence. She never wearies of praising the integrity and truthfulness of the German men, and only very occasionally does she hint at a pretty general lack of refinement and tact. We feel that their conversation often wearied her, but for this she blames the social customs and the language. It is impossible, she says, to express one's self neatly in a language in which one's meaning as a rule only becomes intelligible at the end of the sentence, in which, consequently, the interruptions which give life to a conversation are almost impossible, it being also impossible always to reserve the pith of the sentence for the end. It is natural, she thinks, that a foreigner should sometimes be bored by the conversation in a society where the listeners are so unexacting and so patient; where no one consequently has that dread of boring which prevents circumlocution and repetitions. Even the custom of perpetually repeating insignificant and lengthy titles necessarily makes conversation formal and cumbersome. The German women she describes with warm sympathy, but not without a touch of sarcasm, as follows:-- "They have an attraction peculiarly their own, touching voices, fair hair, dazzling complexions; they are modest, but less timid than Englishwomen; one can see that they less frequently meet men who are their superiors. They seek to please by their sensibility, to interest by their imagination, and are familiar with the language of poetry and of the fine arts. They play the coquette with their enthusiasms as Frenchwomen do with their _esprit_ and merry wit. The perfect loyalty distinctive of the German character makes love less dangerous to women's happiness, and possibly they approach the feeling with more confidence because it has been invested for them with romantic colours, and because slights and infidelity are less to be dreaded here than elsewhere. Love is a religion in Germany, but a poetic religion, which only too readily permits all that the heart can find excuse for. "One may fairly laugh at the ridiculous airs of some German women, who are so habitually enthusiastic that enthusiasm has with them become mere affectation, their mawkish utterances effacing any piquancy or originality of character they may possess. They are not frankly straightforward like Frenchwomen, which by no means implies that they are false; but they are not capable of seeing and judging things as they really are; actual events pass like a phantasmagoria before their eyes. Even when, as occasionally happens, they are frivolous, they still preserve a touch of that sentimentality which in their country is held in high esteem. A German lady said to me one day with a melancholy expression: 'I do not know how it is, but the absent pass out of my soul.' A Frenchwoman would have expressed the idea more gaily, but the meaning would have been the same. "Their careful education and their natural purity of soul render the dominion they exercise gentle and abiding. But that intellectual agility which animates conversation and sets ideas in motion is rare among German women." Mme. de Staël was necessarily much impressed by the intellectual life of Germany. In her own country everything had stiffened into rule and custom. There, a decrepit poetry and philosophy were at the point of death; here, everything was in a state of fermentation, full of new movement, life, and hope. The first difference between the French and the German spirit which struck her was their different attitude to society. In France the dominion exercised by society was absolute; the French people were by nature so social that every individual at all times felt bound to act, to think, to write like every one else. The Revolution of 1789 was spread from district to district merely by sending couriers with the intelligence that the nearest town or village had taken up arms. In Germany, on the contrary, there was no society; there existed no universally accepted rules of conduct, no desire to resemble every one else, no tyrannical laws of language or poetry. Each author wrote as he pleased, for his own satisfaction, paying little heed to that reading world around which all the thoughts of the French writer revolved. In Germany the author created his public, whereas in France the public, the fashion of the moment, moulded the author. In Germany it was possible for the thought of the individual to exercise that power over men's minds which in France is exercised exclusively by public opinion. At the time when the French philosopher was a society man, whose great aim was to present his ideas in clear and attractive language, a German thinker, living isolated from the culture of his time at far-away Königsberg, revolutionised contemporary thought by a couple of thick volumes written in a language saturated with the most difficult technical terms. A woman who had suffered all her life from the oppression of a narrow-minded social spirit could not but feel enthusiasm for such conditions as these. The next great contrast with French intellectual life that struck Mme. de Staël was the prevailing idealism of German literature. The philosophy which had reigned in France during the last half of the eighteenth century was one which derived all human ideas and thoughts from the impressions of the senses, which, consequently, asserted the human mind to be dependent upon and conditioned by its material surroundings. It was certainly not in Mme. de Staël's power to estimate the nature and the bearing of this philosophy, but, like a genuine child of the new century, she loathed it. She judged it like a woman, with her heart rather than her head, and ascribed to it all the materialism she objected to in French morals, and all the servile submission to authority she objected to in French men. Taking Condillac's sensationalism in combination with the utilitarianism of Helvetius, she pronounced the opinion that no doctrine was more adapted to paralyse the soul in its ardent, upward endeavour than this, which derived all good from properly understood self-interest. With genuine delight she saw the opposite doctrine universally accepted in Germany. The ethics of Kant and Fichte and the poetry of Schiller proclaimed exactly that sovereignty of the spirit in which she had believed all her life. These great thinkers demonstrated, that inspired poet in each of his poems proved, the spirit's independence of the world of matter, its power to rise above it, to rule it, to remould it. They expressed the most cherished convictions of her heart; and it was in her enthusiasm for these doctrines, for German high-mindedness and loftiness of aspiration, that she set to work to write her book _De l'Allemagne_ (as Tacitus in his day had written _De Germania_), for the purpose of placing before her fellow-countrymen a great example of moral purity and intellectual vigour. Mme. de Staël had always looked upon enthusiasm as a saving power. She had said in _Corinne_ that she only recognised two really distinct classes of men--those who are capable of enthusiasm and those who despise enthusiasts. It seemed to her that in the Germany of that day she had found the native land of enthusiasm, the country in which it was a religion, where it was more highly honoured than anywhere else on earth. Hence it is that she ends her book with a dissertation on enthusiasm. But this belief in enthusiasm, in the power of imagination and the purely spiritual faculties, led her to many rash and narrow conclusions. In her delight in the philosophic idealism of Germany, she treats experimental natural science with the most naïve superiority--is of opinion that it leads to nothing but a mechanical accumulation of facts. Naturphilosophie, on the other hand, which has made the discovery that the human mind can derive all knowledge from itself by the conclusions of reason--which, in other words, regards all things as formed after the pattern of the human mind--seems to her the wisdom of Solomon. "It is a beautiful conception," she says, "that which finds a resemblance between the laws of the human mind and the laws of nature, and which looks upon the material world as an image of the spiritual." In her pleasure in the beauty of this idea she fails to perceive how untruthful it is, to foresee how barren of all result it is soon to prove. She extols Franz Baader and Steffens at the expense of the great English scientists, and, following the example of her Romantic friends, has a good word to say for clairvoyance and astrology--for every phenomenon, in short, which seems to prove the prevailing power of the spirit. Many years before this a French pamphlet written against Mme. de Staël had been entitled _L'Antiromantique_. Her Romantic tendency had in the interval become more and more marked. Spiritualism, as such, seemed to her the good, the beautiful, the true, both in art and in philosophy. This explains both her over-indulgence towards the abortions of the Romantic school, especially the dramas of her friend Zacharias Werner, and her misunderstanding of Goethe, whose greatness rather alarms than delights her, and whom she now excuses, now quotes with the remark that she cannot defend the spirit of his works. She prefaces her prose translation of _Die Braut von Corinth_ with the words: "I can certainly neither defend the aim of the poem nor the poem itself, but it seems to me that no one can fail to be impressed by its fantastic power;" and she concludes her otherwise excellent criticism of the first part of Faust with these words: "This drama of 'Faust' is certainly not a model work. Whether we look upon it as the outcome of a poetic frenzy or of the life-weariness of the worshipper of reason, _our hope is that such productions will not repeat themselves_;" adding only by way of compensation a remark on Goethe's genius and the wealth of thought displayed in the work. Thus irresistibly was even such a mind as hers affected by the spirit of the day in her native country, with its tendency to religious reaction. In the intellectual life of Germany she had perception and sympathy for Romanticism alone; German pantheism she neither sympathised with nor understood; it alarmed her; the daring spirit which had sounded so many abysses, recoiled tremblingly from the verge of this one. And yet here lay the key to the whole new intellectual development in Germany. Behind Lessing's brilliant attack upon ecclesiastical dogma there had lain, unperceived by his contemporaries, the philosophy of Spinoza. Immediately after the great critic's death the literary world received a double surprise. The controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi elicited the appalling fact that Lessing had lived and died a Spinozist, and also showed that even Jacobi himself was of the opinion that all philosophy logically carried out must inevitably lead to Spinozism and pantheism. He endeavoured to extricate himself from the difficulty by pointing out that there is another way of arriving at knowledge of the truth than by conclusive argument, namely, the way of direct intuitive perception. But from this time onwards pantheism was in the air, and from the moment that Goethe, enraptured by his first reading of Spinoza, declares himself a Spinozist (a faith from which he never wavered to the end of his long life), it reigns in German literature; and this spirit of the new age, with its rich dower of poetry and philosophic thought, weds that antique beauty which has been brought to life again; as Faust, in the most famous poetical work of the period, weds Helen of Troy, who symbolises ancient Greece. The great pagan renaissance which had been inaugurated in Italy by such men as Leonardo and Giordano Bruno, and in England by such men as Shakespeare and Bacon, now finds its way to Germany, and the new intellectual tendency is strengthened by the enthusiasm for pagan-Greek antiquity awakened by Winckelmann and Lessing. Schiller writes _Die Götter Griechenlands_, Goethe, _Die Diana der Epheser_ and _Die Braut von Corinth_. After the glory of Greece had departed, a mariner, voyaging along her coast by night, heard from the woods the cry: "Great Pan is dead!" But Pan was not dead; he had only fallen asleep. He awoke again in Italy at the time of the Renaissance; he was acknowledged and worshipped as a living god in the Germany of Schelling, Goethe, and Hegel. The new German spirit was even more pantheistic than the antique spirit. When the ancient Greek stood by some beautiful waterfall, like that of Tibur near Rome, he endowed what he saw with personality. His eye traced the contours of beautiful naked women, the nymphs of the place, in the falling waters of the cascade; the wreathing spray was their waving hair; he heard their merry splashing and laughter in the rush of the stream and the dashing of the foam against the rocks. In other words, impersonal nature became personal to the antique mind. The poet of old did not understand nature; his own personality stood in the way; he saw it reflected everywhere, saw _persons_ wherever he looked. Precisely the opposite is the case with a great modern poet like Goethe or Tieck, whose whole emotional life is pantheistic. He, as it were, strips himself of his personality in order to understand nature. When he in his turn stands by the waterfall, he bursts the narrow bonds of _self_. He feels himself glide and fall and spin round with the whirling waters. His whole being streams out of the narrow confines of the Ego and flows away with the stream he is gazing on. His elastic consciousness widens, he absorbs unconscious nature into his being; he forgets himself in what he sees, as those who listen to a symphony are lost in what they hear. It is the same with everything. As his being flows with the waves, so it flies and moans with the winds, sails with the moon through the heavens, feels itself one with the formless universal life. This was the pantheism which Goethe indicated in the biting epigram:-- "Was soll mir euer Hohn Ueber das All und Eine? Der Professor ist eine Person, Gott ist keine." This was the pantheism to which he gave expression in _Faust_, and which lies so deeply rooted in the German nature that even the Romantic school, with its antagonism to the revival of the antique and its secret leaning to Catholicism, is as pantheistic as Hölderlin and Goethe. The worship of the universe is the unchecked undercurrent which forces its way through all the embankments and between all the stones with which an attempt is made to stay it. Mme. de Staël did not perceive this. Her German acquaintances drew her with them into the movement that was going on upon the surface, and she saw and felt nothing else. This surface movement was the Romantic reaction. The violent attempt to be that which was really unnatural in the modern German, namely antique and classical, produced a violent counter-movement. Goethe's and Schiller's ever more determined and strict adherence to the antique ideal in art led them at last, in their attachment to severity and regularity of style, to take a step in the direction of that school against which they had been the first to rebel, namely French classical tragedy. Goethe translated Voltaire's _Mahomet_, and Schiller, Racine's _Phèdre_; and thus, through the action of these two greatest of German poets, the French and the German conception of the classical entered into league with one another. But this alliance, as was inevitable, gave the signal for revolt. The antique was so severe; men longed for colour and variety. It was so plastic; they longed for something fervent and musical. The antique was so Greek, so cold, so foreign; who had the patience to read Goethe's _Achilleïs_, or Schiller's _Die Braut von Messina_, with its solemn antique chorus? Had they not a past of their own? They longed for something national, something German. The antique was so aristocratic; enthusiasm for the classical had actually led to the revival of the old court poetry of the period of Louis XIV. But surely art should be for all classes, should unite high and low? Men wanted something simple, something popular. These classical efforts were, in the last place, so very dull. Lessing's genial rational religion had, under the treatment of Nicolai the bookseller, turned into the same sort of insipid rationalism which was in favour in Denmark at the close of the century. Goethe's pantheism could not warm the hearts of the masses. Schiller's _Die Sendung Moses_ could not but be an offence to every believer. And after all, the word "poetic" did not necessarily mean "dull." Men wanted to be roused, to be intoxicated, to be inspired; they wanted once again to believe like children, to feel the enthusiasm of the knight, the rapture of the monk, the frenzy of the poet, to dream melodious dreams, to bathe in moonlight and hold mystic communion with the spirits of the Milky Way; they wanted to hear the grass grow and to understand what the birds sang, to penetrate into the depths of the moonlit night, and into the loneliness of the forest. It was something simple that was wanted. Weary of ancient culture, men took refuge in the strange, rich, long-neglected world of the Middle Ages. A thirst for the fantastic and marvellous took possession of their souls, and fairy-tale and myth became the fashion. All the old, popular fairy-tales and legends were collected, and were re-written and imitated, often as excellently as by Tieck in his Fair Eckbert and Story of the Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence, but also often with a childish magnification of the poetical value of superstitions which in reality possess only scientific value as distorted remains of ancient myths. Novalis, in a spirited poem, prophesied that the time would come when man would no longer look to science to solve the riddles of life, but would find the explanation of all in fairy tale and poetry; and when that time came, when the mystic word was spoken, all perversity and foolishness and wrong would vanish. All foolishness and wrong, all that the French Revolution in its foolhardiness had sought to put an end to by wild destruction and bloody wars, was to vanish as in a dream or a fairy-tale, at the sound of a spoken word, when men had become children again! They were to be regenerated by turning from ideas that were redolent of powder and blood to ideas redolent of the nursery. It was something popular that was wanted. The seed was sown of the same popular movement which was started in Denmark by Grundtvig, after he, like so many others, had been powerfully impressed by the youthful ardour with which the doctrines of the new Romantic School were proclaimed by Steffens and received by the rising generation, in those days when there was still youth in Denmark. Men rightly regretted the great gulf which had been fixed between the educated and the uneducated by the extremely rapid advance of the vanguard and the exclusion of the poorer classes from culture, and rightly appealed to the man of science and the artist to clothe their thoughts and feelings in the simplest and most easily comprehensible form. But the movement went astray, by making the insane attempt to recall the advanced guard for the sake of the laggards; they would hardly have minded sabring the foremost for the sake of keeping the army together. With the renunciation of the mainspring of action--belief in progress--the fatalistic tragedy, with its follies and superstitions, came into vogue. In Werner's tragedy, _The Twenty-Fourth of February_, whatever happens on that particular day reminds the heroine of a terrible crime and curse. This is carried so far that when a hen is killed that day, she cries: "It seemed to scream a curse at me; it reminded me of my father with the death-rattle in his throat." Yet this play is praised by that usually discerning critic, the authoress of _De l'Allemagne_! The affectedly childlike tone of the satirical dramas gave them the character of puppet plays; naïveté became more and more the fashion; in their terror of the salons of the eighteenth century men took refuge in the nursery. The leaders of the school were Protestants by birth, but their bias towards the pious simplicity of the Middle Ages of necessity brought about a movement in the direction of Catholicism. In that essay on the difference between neo-classical and popular art by which Mme. de Staël showed herself influenced both in _Corinne_ and _De l'Allemagne_, Friedrich Schlegel, after demonstrating that it is impossible for genius to preserve its freshness, its impetuosity, when it chooses subjects the treatment of which demands erudition and exercise of the memory, observes: "It is not so with the subjects which belong to our own religion. From them artists receive inspiration; they feel what they paint; they paint what they have seen; life itself is their model when they represent life. But when they attempt to return to the antique, they must seek what they are to reproduce, not in the life they see around them, but in books and pictures." The false implication lies in the words "our own religion." Which was "our own religion"? Protestantism had developed into an idealistic philosophy that had long made common cause with the Revolution. In the year 1795, two young men, whose names were to attain world-wide celebrity, had gone out to a lonely field and, in their naïve enthusiasm for the Revolution, planted a Tree of Liberty. These two were Schelling and Hegel. There was, then, a return to Catholicism. But the spirit of Italian Catholicism was still too classic, too antique. A huge, light church like St. Peter's at Rome was not sufficiently mysterious; it was, as Lamartine observed, fitted, when all dogmatic religion should have disappeared from Europe, to become the temple of humanity. In Italy it was with the pre-Raphaelite painters alone that the Romanticists felt themselves akin; in Spain they found a kindred spirit in Calderon, whose mysticism they soon set high above their earlier favourite, Shakespeare's, realism and liberal-mindedness. Even Heiberg ranks Calderon above Shakespeare. There is a regular cult of the Gothic in art. Men turn with renewed admiration to the great monuments of their native land, to that style begotten of the deep feeling and the superstitious terrors of northern barbarians--Frenchmen, however. Albert Dürer, genuinely German, popular, simple-minded, but above all (with his stags bearing crosses between their antlers, and all the rest of his symbolical fancies) mystic, was canonised by the German Romanticists; even with us, Oehlenschläger and his sister persisted in seeing more in Dürer than other people could see. The infection was so universal that even the poet of the Gulnares, Alis, and Gulhyndis imagined himself a devotee of mysticism. Men's hearts were certainly not agitated by the religious agonies and hopes of the old pious times; but the strangeness of the Gothic style, and the extravagance which betrays itself in its artistic symbolism, harmonised with the unnaturalness and restlessness of their morbid modern imaginations. It may be related, as not without significance, that when Oehlenschläger first came into the presence of the leaders of the Romantic School, in whom he had naïvely expected to find a set of eager, emaciated ascetics, he was somewhat taken aback by the sight of Friedrich Schlegel's "satirical fat face shining cheerfully at him." It was, however, in the course of the ardent struggle against the neo-classical tendency that Friedrich Schlegel rendered his one true, and also really great, service to science: he introduced the study of Sanscrit, and thereby opened up to Europeans an entirely new intellectual domain. He laid the foundation, first of one new linguistic science, the Indo-Oriental, which henceforth developed alongside of the Greco-Roman, and then of a second, namely, comparative philology. For the moment it was Hindu indolence, the contemplative life, the plant life, that was the ideal. It is this ideal which is extolled in Schlegel's _Lucinde_ and which somewhat later is appropriated by the French Romanticists, re-appearing with variations in Théophile Gautier's _Fortunio_. We trace it in Oehlenschläger's inspired idler, Aladdin, and it is the ideal always present to the mind of the æsthete in _Enten-Eller_, who, like Kierkegaard himself, was brought up on the German Romanticists. Note his words: "I divide my time thus: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. When I sleep I never dream, for to sleep is the highest achievement of genius." Goethe, as an old man, sought refuge in the East from the turmoil of the day, and wrote his _West-östlicher Divan_. The Romanticists did but follow in his track. Presently, however, their doctrines were placed on a philosophical basis by Schelling, who had been alarmed and converted by the religious and political aberrations of the French. As Goethe had sought refuge in far-off Asia, Schelling sought refuge from discordant surroundings in the far-off past, and discovered there the sources of life and truth. In contradiction to the belief of the "enlightenment" period that humanity had laboriously raised itself from barbarism to culture, from instinct to reason, he maintained that it had fallen--fallen, that is to say, from a higher state in which its education had been superintended by higher beings, spiritual powers. There was a fall; and in the degenerate times following upon that fall, there appeared but few of those teachers, those higher beings, prophets, geniuses of the Schelling type, who strove to lead men back to the old, perfect life. We of to-day know that science has justified the pre-Revolutionists and proved Schelling wrong; we, who live in the age of Charles Darwin, no longer accept the possibility of an original state of perfection and a fall. There is no doubt that the teaching of Darwin means the downfall of orthodox ethics, exactly as the teaching of Copernicus meant the downfall of orthodox dogma. The system of Copernicus deprived the heaven of the Church of its "local habitation"; the Darwinian system will despoil the Church of its Paradisaic Eden. But in those days this was not recognised, and Schelling directed men back to that primeval world whose myths of gods and demigods were to him historical facts; he ended by extolling mythology as the greatest of all works of art, one which was capable of infinite interpretation; and infinite in this context means arbitrary. We have here the germ of Grundtvig's myth-interpretation--with its unscientific and untrustworthy presentment of Scandinavian mythology. But the loss of all interest in the life of the day is still more markedly shown in Schelling's absorption in nature. As the mystics held that it was the working of the imagination of God which created the world, so Schelling held that it was the corresponding power in man which alone gave ideal reality to the productions of his intellect. It is, then, this essentially artistic force, the so-called "intellectual intuition" (which may be defined as the entire imagination working according to the laws of reason), of which Schelling, clearly influenced by the æsthetic criticism of the day, maintains that it alone opens the door to philosophy, to the perception of the identity of thought and reality. Nay, this "intellectual intuition" was not only the means, it was the end. This confusing of the tool with the work marks the beginning of a general, complete confusion in Romantic poetry and philosophy. Philosophy begins to encroach on the domain of art; instead of research we have fancy and conjecture; poetry and the fine arts, on the other hand, invade the domain of philosophy and religion; poems become rhymed discussions and their heroes booted and spurred ideas; works of art seek vainly to disguise their lack of corporeal form by a cloak of Catholic piety and love. Men imagined that the new Naturphilosophie was to make all experimental study of nature superfluous henceforth and for ever; but we, who have seen the absolute impotence of the _Naturphilosophie_, and who live in an age in which experimental science has changed the aspect of the earth and enriched human life by unparalleled discoveries and inventions--we know that in this case also reactionary endeavours led to defeat, and that life itself undertook the refutation of the fallacy. The interest of the above doctrine to us Danes lies especially in its energetic vindication of the divine imagination as the source of creation, and of the human imagination as the source of all artistic production; for here we have the idea that gave birth to Aladdin, and feel the heart-beat which in 1803 drove the blood straight to that extremity of the great Germanic-Gothic body which is known by the name of Copenhagen. It is easy to understand how inevitable it was that these new theories should make a strong impression on Oehlenschläger. The Romanticists exalted imagination above everything in the world--it was the peculiarly divine gift. Whom could this impress more than the man through whom inventive power had in Danish literature supplanted the clever manipulation of language which had distinguished Baggesen and the eighteenth century? The Romanticists looked upon the world of myth as the highest, as the real world; there he was, with a whole new mythology, the Scandinavian, ready to his hand, waiting to be used. Fr. Schlegel and Novalis had cried in chorus: "We must find a mythology which can be to us what the mythology of the Greeks and Romans was to them!" But they sought in vain, or found only the old Catholic legends. Oehlenschläger alone had no need to seek; "the orange fell into his turban." The Romanticists believed in a greater past from which the race had fallen; and he dwelt among a people whose past far outshone its present, a people that desired to forget the darkness of to-day and to see itself glorified in the glorification of the dreams of its childhood and the achievements of its youth. Thus it was that it only needed a word from Steffens to break (to the surprise of Steffens and every one else) the spell by which his tongue was tied. It was one of the unmistakable deserts of the Romantic School that it endeavoured to widen the narrow circle of subjects provided by classical literature, and to teach men to appreciate what was admirable and characteristic in modern foreign nations as well as in their own country. This made the school a patriotic school, and patriotic in every country. It is to be observed that there already existed in Germany that inclination to make excursions into foreign regions which characterised French Romanticism in the days of Victor Hugo. We notice it first in Herder, with his admirable appreciation of the characteristically national intellectual productions of different countries. Then came A. W. Schlegel, with his criticism and translations. Schlegels famous lectures on dramatic literature, published just before the entry of the Powers into Paris, expound the Greek, English, and Spanish drama sympathetically, but contain the most violent, bitter attacks upon French taste and the French drama. Not content with attacking the tragedians, he treats even Molière with foolish contempt. It is instructive to compare this book with Mme. de Staël's _De l'Allemagne_. Schlegel's misunderstanding and dislike of France are as great as Mme. de Staël's understanding and appreciation of Germany. He makes amends by expounding both Shakespeare and his own discovery, Calderon, with profound and subtle sympathy. His criticism of these two poets has, however, along with one great merit, one great defect. The merit is, that every characteristic, however small, has justice done to it. Schlegel's own masterly translations of many of Shakespeare's and some of Calderon's plays show what progress has been made in the comprehension of foreign poetry since Schiller, in his translation of _Macbeth_, cut up the play to suit the classical fancies of the day, and in so doing cut away all its boldness and realism. The defect, which is the defect of the whole school (and in Denmark does not pass away with the school, but is to be observed in the following period too), lies in the conception of poetry, which, marked by German one-sidedness, is so sweepingly transcendental that it quite shuts out the historical interpretation. One model, unquestioned, absolute, follows the other. The French had found their models in the Greeks and Aristotle; now it is, say, Shakespeare who is alone absolutely worthy of imitation in poetry, Mozart (as Kierkegaard maintains in _Enten-Eller_) who is the perfect model in music. The sober, trustworthy, historical view of the matter, which recognises no perfect models, is entirely disregarded. The great work is the model for a whole new style, is in itself a code of laws. To our Heiberg, for instance, _St. Hansaften-Spil_ is "the perfect realisation of the drama proper in lyrical form." Instead of studying poetry in connection with history, with the whole of life, men evolve systems in which schools of poetry and poetic works grow out of each other like branches on a tree. They believe, for instance, that English tragedy is descended in a direct line from Greek tragedy, not perceiving that the tragedy of one nation is not the offspring of that of other nations, but the production of the environment, the civilisation, the intellectual life in the midst of which it comes into being. But, in the meantime, barriers were broken down, the world lay open to the poet's gaze, and he was free to choose his subject wherever his fancy led him. We have in our own literature a spirited confession of this new faith in Oehlenschläger's beautiful poem, _Digterens Hjem_ (_The Home of the Poet_)-- "Det strækker sig fra Spitzbergs hvide Klipper, For Syndflods ældste Lig en heilig Grav, Til hvor den sidste Tange slipper I Söndrepolens öde Hav."[1] This was the emancipating watchword sounded by the Romantic critic. The brief résumé here given of the aims of the school which was flourishing in Germany at the time _De l'Allemagne_ was written, has already indicated to the reader the points upon which Mme. de Staël was in sympathy with this school, and how far it may be said to have influenced the direction of her later literary career. The strenuous opposition of the Romanticists to the philosophy of the eighteenth century had her full sympathy; Schelling himself had called his whole system a reaction against the enlightening, clarifying processes of the age of reason. Their profound respect for poetic inspiration and their broad-mindedness harmonised with her own tendencies and prejudices. The Romantic doctrine of the all-importance of imagination won her approbation, but the Romanticists' conception of the nature of imagination was incomprehensible to her. They started from the hypothesis that at the foundation of everything lay a perpetually producing imagination, a species of juggling imagination, which with divine irony perpetually destroyed its own creations as the sea engulfs its own billows; and they held that the poet, that creator on a small scale, should take up the same ironical position towards the creatures of his imagining, towards his whole work, and deliberately destroy the illusion of it. Mme. de Staël had too practical a mind to be able to accept this far-fetched theory, on the subject of which she had many hot arguments with her Romantic friends. But on another very important point she was in harmony with them: Like all the authors involved in the first reaction against the eighteenth century, she became as time went on more and more positively religious. The philosophical ideas of the revolutionary times were gradually effaced in her mind, and their place was supplied by ever more serious attempts to imbue herself with the new pious ideas of the day. She, who in her youth had eagerly controverted Chateaubriand's theory of the superiority of Christian subjects in art, now becomes a convert to his æsthetic views. She accepts unreservedly the Romanticist doctrine that modern poetry and art must build upon Christianity, as the antique had built upon the Greco-Roman mythology; and, living, listening, talking herself into ever greater certainty that the eighteenth century was completely astray, and constantly meeting men who have returned to the pious belief of the past, she finally herself comes to believe that idealism in philosophy, which to her, as a woman, is the good principle, and inspiration in poetry, which to her, as an authoress, is the saving, emancipating principle, must necessarily restore its authority to revealed religion, seeing that sensationalism, the principles of which in both philosophy and art are antipathetic to her, has opposed religion as an enemy. Thus it is that in her book on Germany she actually comes to range herself on the side of that passionate, prejudiced, and often painfully narrow reaction against the eighteenth-century spirit of intellectual liberty, which had broken out on the other side of the Rhine, and was to reach its climax in France itself. [1] It stretches from the white cliffs of Spitzbergen, the grave of that which walked the earth before the flood, to where the last sea-wrack vanishes in the dreary waters round the Southern Pole. XIV BARANTE Mme. de Staël's book on Germany was a glance into the future, a glimpse of what was going on beyond the frontiers of France; it was in many ways a prophecy of the nature of the literature of the nineteenth century. But the group of writers to which she belonged would have left its task unfulfilled, if it had not supplemented its prognostications by a backward glance over the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. This retrospect was supplied by Barante (1809) in his remarkable book, _Tableau de la Littérature Française au Dix-huitième Siècle_. Prosper de Barante, born in 1782 of an old and distinguished bureaucrat family of Auvergne, is the one member of our group who cannot be described as an _émigré_; for he took office under the Empire as Prefect in La Vendée. His book, however, partakes of the general character of the Emigrant Literature; nor is this surprising, for he lived far from Paris, was on intimate terms with the exiles, especially with Mme. de Staël, and in disfavour with the Government on account of his frequent visits to Coppet. He also shared Mme. de Staël's partiality for foreign, more particularly German, literature, which was another offence in the days of the Empire. He translated all Schiller's plays. After the restoration of the monarchy, he acquired political influence as a member of the moderate Liberal party. The work on France in the eighteenth century with which, at the age of twenty-seven, Barante made his début in literature, reveals a maturity and moderation surprising in so young an author, but which may be explained, partly by a certain lack of warmth in his nature, partly by his official position. In all the books which we have just glanced at, there lay an implicit judgment of the eighteenth century; in this we have the first connected survey and estimate of it. The survey is a brief but excellent one; the general conception of the period is philosophically based; the presentment is clear and passionless; but the estimate is very faulty, on every side conditioned and hampered by those limits beyond which the authors of the Emigrant Literature were incapable of seeing. This settlement with the past century, in which the new generation renounces all connection with the old, is not a final settlement, and is far from being as unprejudiced as it is passionless. Barante has the honest desire to judge impartially, and emphasises the fact that he is the better qualified to do so since he does not belong to the generation which took immediate part in the Revolution as destroyers or defenders of the old social order; but his intellect is not as unbiassed as his will; his whole development is, though he does not know it, conditioned by the reaction against that century the character of which he, as observer and thinker, undertakes to explain. Barante's standpoint is a suggestive, and was in those days an uncommon one. He hears it constantly asserted that the authors of the eighteenth century were responsible for the revolution which at the close of that century shook France to its very foundations, and this assertion he considers a baseless one. It contains an injustice to those authors, from the fact that it attributes too much significance to them. If the building had not been ready to fall, that literary puff of wind would not have sufficed to blow it over. Contemporaneously with Nodier and Mme. de Staël, he formulates and interprets the proposition: Literature is the expression of the state of society, not its cause. In his opinion, the Seven Years' War had a great deal more to do with the weakening of authority in France than had the Encyclopedia, and the profanity which prevailed at the court of old Louis XIV., at the time when he was cruelly persecuting both the Protestants and the Jansenists, did more to undermine reverence for religion than the attacks and jeers of the philosophers. He is very far from ascribing any particular merit to the literature of the preceding century, but he regards it as merely "a symptom of the general disease." With historical penetration he searches for the omens of the collapse of monarchy, and finds them much further back, in the results of the conflict between Mazarin and the Fronde. Held down by the iron hand of Richelieu, princes, nobles, and officials, all the great in turn, had made a bid for popular support, and by so doing had lost in dignity and consideration. The power of royalty alone remained totally unaffected. The waves of opposition rolled to the steps of the throne, but stopped there; during the first half of Louis XIV.'s reign the throne stood in more solitary elevation than ever over the general level. Richelieu's work was accomplished; every power in the land, except that of the throne, was destroyed. If this one remaining authority were undermined, then all the powers of society would stand bereft of the veneration which had constituted their strength; and this was very sufficiently done during Louis XIV.'s miserable old age, the insolent rule of the Regency, and the wanton, foolish rule of Louis XV. The philosophy of the eighteenth century, then, according to Barante, was not the conscious work of any individual or individuals, but represented the general bent of the mind of the people; it was written, so to speak, at their dictation. This did not add to its value; to his thinking, all that this philosophy accomplished was to overturn an immoral and inequitable government in an immoral and inequitable manner. But what thus happened, happened of necessity. The soul of Barante's book is the firmest faith in historical laws. "The human mind," he says, "seems as irrevocably appointed to run a prescribed course as are the stars." He knows that there is at all times a necessary connection between literature and the condition of society; but whereas this connection is at times indistinct, requiring penetration to detect it, and careful demonstration to prove it plainly, in the period under consideration it seems to him so plain that no nice observation is required to discover it. The first reason for this he finds in the relation of the writers to their readers. In earlier times the number of the former had been very small; thinly scattered over the whole of Europe, they had written in a dead language. In those days there was no social life, and conversation had not become a power. Authors did not write for society but for each other, and society in return looked upon them as uninteresting pedants. In time culture and enlightenment spread among the higher classes, and writers entered into relation with them; they wrote for princes and courtiers, for the little class which did not need to work. In the days of Louis XIV. authors tried to please this class, and were flattered by its approbation. But by degrees civilisation spread until a real reading public came into existence, a public which made the author independent of the great. Frederick the Second of Prussia, who, to shed lustre upon his reign, called Voltaire to his court, did not treat him with the condescension shown by Louis XIV. to Molière, but seemed to place him by his side as an equal. The greatest political and the greatest intellectual powers of the age stood for a moment upon an equal footing, without any one discerning that the time was approaching when these two powers were to declare war upon each other. And in the last half of the century there was unintermitted reciprocity between men of letters and society in general. In the olden times a philosopher had been a severe, systematic thinker, who, careless of approbation, developed a connected system. The word had changed its meaning now; the philosopher was no longer a solitary thinker, but a man of the world, who conversed more than he wrote or taught, who invariably sought to please society and win its approbation, and who did this by making himself its organ. Barante sees an evidence of the powerful influence exercised by the spirit of the times upon individual writers in the circumstance that authors, such, for instance, as the Abbé de Mably, who had the strongest antipathy to the philosophers of the fashionable school, nevertheless resembled the very men they opposed, and arrived at the same results by different means. And he finds in the unpatriotic classical education of the upper classes the explanation of the fact that the public forestalled the men of letters in neglecting and slighting their own historical traditions and national memories for the sake of laboriously appropriated exotic ideals. At school the child learned to spell the names of Epaminondas and Leonidas long before he heard of Bayard or Du Guesclin; he was encouraged to take a deep interest in the Trojan wars, but no one dreamt of interesting him in the Crusades. Roman law, the principles of which are the outcome of autocratic rule, had gradually superseded those Germanic laws, which were the outcome of the life of a free people. What wonder then, that when authors turned to antiquity for their subject-matter, and grew enthusiastic on the subject of Greece and Rome, they found a ready audience in French society! What wonder that in literature also, national tradition was slighted and broken! Having thus in advance laid the blame on society of all the mistakes made by literature in the eighteenth century (and its achievements appear to him to be one and all mistakes), Barante has provided himself with the basis for a calm appraisement of the individual eminent writers. In his appreciations we have the views scattered throughout the Emigrant Literature concentrated and, as it were, brought to a focus. Voltaire, whose reputation had, since his death, been made the subject of as much hot dispute as the body of Patroclus, he criticises coldly, but without animosity. He admires his natural gifts, the easily stirred, impetuous feeling that produced his pathos, the irresistible fascination of his eloquence and his wit, and the charm that lies in his genial facility in shaping and expressing thoughts. But he sees the use Voltaire made of his talents, sees how he allowed himself to be led by the opinions of the time, by the desire to succeed, to please. He laments the tendency to shameless, irreverent mockery, which characterised Voltaire even as an old man. And this is all. For what was just, for what was great in Voltaire's life-warfare he has no eyes, no word. He professes to criticise Voltaire impartially, and yet he, as it were, juggles away the indignation that was in his soul, that which was the very breath of life in him; he calls the persecutions of Voltaire stupid, but never once wicked; he excuses, not the blots on Voltaire's greatness, but, as it were, the greatness itself--and it is evident that he really desires to be impartial, since he excuses. Of all the great authors of the past century, Montesquieu is the only one for whom Barante expresses any really warm admiration. This is natural enough, for in him he recognised some of his own qualities. Montesquieu was not the ordinary author who could let his pen run away with him; he was, like Barante himself, an official, a high official, a famous lawyer, who was obliged to consider the dignity of his position and the effect of his example. "President Montesquieu," says Barante, "was not in that position of independence which men of letters prize so highly, and which is possibly injurious both to their talents and their characters." One is sensible of the cautious attempt at selfvindication made in this ingenious paradox by the imperial official who was at enmity with the Emperor. But whatever the cause, Barante made no mistake in rating Montesquieu very highly. Other authors of his period had more genius, but Montesquieu's accurate knowledge of practical life, of administration and government, gave him an insight which the others lacked, and a moderation on which high value was set at the beginning of this century. In Montesquieu Barante approves of things which he censures bitterly in others. He invites the reader to compare Montesquieu's work, _De l'Esprit des Lois_, with an older work by Domat on the same subject, in order to see the progress in philosophy made by Montesquieu, who, treating religion with all due reverence, nevertheless regards it as a subordinate matter.[1] Diderot is the author against whom Barante is most biassed; in judging him he shows himself extremely narrow-minded; he allows Diderot's precipitancy and violence to blind him to his genius. A genius whose recklessness ever and again reminds one of the recklessness of an elemental force, was as little comprehensible to Barante as to the rest of the alarmed, disillusioned generation to which he belongs. Diderot was better calculated to please the Germans, who were unprejudiced in intellectual matters, than his own over-sensitive countrymen of this period. Goethe himself translated _Le Neveu de Rameau_, and Hegel treated of it exhaustively in his _Phänomenologie des Geistes_. But Barante, passionately condemning Diderot's incessant and unbridled attacks upon religion, sums him up in these words: "His inner man was ardent and disorderly, his mind was a fire without fuel, and the talent of which he showed _some gleams_ was never put to any systematic use." It was but natural that the eighteenth-century writer who had the profoundest understanding of nature, should be held in lowest esteem by the young idealists. Rousseau, the last of the writers of the eighteenth century cited before the bar of the nineteenth, had characteristics which necessarily appealed to Barante. He was the only sentimentalist among these writers, and the new century had begun sentimentally. He was the most solitary of them, and the new century appreciated the isolated personality. He stood quite apart from the philosophers and Encyclopedists; his character had been formed by a strange and unhappy life; he was uninfluenced by society or public opinion. Without family, friends, position, or country, he had wandered about the world, and, on his first appearance as an author, he had condemned society instead of flattering it; instead of giving in to public opinion, he tried to alter it; his attempt was successful, and where others pleased, he roused enthusiasm. All this was certain to appeal to Barante. But one has only to compare Barante's pronouncement on Rousseau with that published twenty years earlier by his friend Mme. de Staël, to see what progress the reaction against the spirit of the previous century has made. That he dwells at length on the impurity of Rousseau's life and the bad points in his character is in itself quite justifiable, and in this matter his criticism only presents the natural contrast to Mme. de Staël's warm apologetics. His severe judgment of Rousseau's political doctrines is the result of more critical, mature reflection than Mme. de Staël's woman-like attempt to vindicate them up to a certain point. But in his appreciation of Rousseau's attempts at religious reform, he is far from reaching her level. His principal objection to the famous Confession of Faith, to the so-called natural religion, is that it is a religion without public worship. "Nor can we wonder at this," he says, "for to a morality without deeds, like Rousseau's, a religion without worship is the inevitable corollary." His bias towards inference-drawing in favour of the existing, actually led this free-thinking critic to defend the traditional usages of the Church against Rousseau. At the bottom of all this narrow-mindedness and injustice of Barante's, lay what lay at the root of much that was false and perverted in other Liberal writers during the two following decades, namely, that spiritualistic philosophy which was now making its way into France, and which, after encountering much resistance, became dominant; nay, was actually, under Cousin and his school, elevated to the rank of State philosophy. Had this philosophy been content to develop its principles and ideas as clearly and convincingly as possible, it would have been a philosophy like any other, would have roused opposition, but never enmity and detestation. But its champions, from the very beginning, and in almost every country into which it found its way, displayed unscientific and ill-omened tendencies. They were less anxious to prove their theories than to vindicate the moral and religious tendency of these theories. They were far less bent upon refuting their opponents than upon denying them feeling for what is noble, high enthusiasms, sense of duty, and ardour. Mme. de Staël's dread of sensationalism was not a dread of the philosophy in itself, but of its consequences. The noble-hearted woman, who, with all her love of truth, was never anything but a dilettante in philosophy, was possessed by a naïve fear that sensationalistic psychology would lead men to submit unresistingly to the tyranny of Napoleon; so, out of love for liberty, she took up arms against it. Barante, as a man, has not her excuse. To him also, however, Descartes and Leibnitz are not only great thinkers, but represent the principle of good in metaphysics; as if there were any place for moral principles in metaphysics. "Possibly," he observes, "they at times lost themselves in misty regions, but at least they pursued an upward direction; their teaching harmonises with the thoughts which move us when we reflect profoundly on ourselves; and this path necessarily led to the noblest of sciences, to religion and morality." He goes on to describe how men grew weary of following them, and turned to follow in the path of Locke and Hume, whose doctrine he describes, not as a contradictory though equally justifiable one-sidedness, but as a degradation of human nature, a prostitution of science. He thinks it natural that Spinoza (whom he couples with Hobbes) should be opposed not only with reasons, but "with indignation."[2] He confronts the empiricists with Kant's famous doctrine that the pure notions of the understanding have their sources in the nature of the soul, and that an innate fundamental conception of religion is to be found at all times and in all races. Always and everywhere, he says, there is to be found the belief in a life after death, reverence for the dead, burial of the dead in the certainty that life has not ended for them, and, finally, the belief that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. These are to him, much as they were to Benjamin Constant, the spiritual elements which constitute the firm foundation of religion. He does not realise that they may be resolved into still simpler elements, which are to be found unconnected with religious feeling. For he does not investigate freely, independently, but esteems it an honour to succeed to what he calls "le glorieux héritage de la haute philosophie." In a precisely similar manner he inveighs against attempts to place morality upon an empirical basis. "Instead," he says, "of starting from the feeling of justice and sympathy which dwells in the hearts of all men, people have tried to base morality upon the instinct of self-preservation and utility." He clearly has no comprehension whatever of the profound philosophic instinct which has led the thinkers of the opposite school to resolve the idea of justice into its first elements, and show how it originates and takes shape. He merely writes bombastically and indignantly of the impossibility of arriving by such processes at revealed religion, "the divine proofs of which unbelief had rejected."[3] The same man who praises Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_, and approves of that author's qualification of religion as a secondary matter, is, with the half-heartedness of the period, horrified by the attempt of the empirical philosophers to discover the elements which go to the construction of the idea of justice. Hence it is that we find in Barante the beginnings of that foolish play upon the double meaning of the word sensualism, which was to be throughout the century a weapon in the hands of hypocrisy and baseness--the word being used at one time as the appellation of the particular philosophy sometimes known by that name, at another as the equivalent for sensuality, or yet again for the doctrine that sensual pleasures are the aim of life. Barante, like Cousin, defends the superficial and unscientific spiritualism which flourished in France in the first decades of this century as a philosophy which encouraged virtue and morality. Mme. de Staël wrote a notice of Barante's book for one of the newspapers of the day, the _Mercure de France_. The censor forbade it to be printed at the time, but it was published later, without alterations. It is only three pages long, but a critic needs no further evidence to convince him of the genius of the writer. She begins with some warm words of admiration for the maturity and rare moderation of the young author, only regretting that he does not more frequently abandon himself to his impressions, and reminding him that restraint does not always imply strength. Then, as if in a flash, she perceives beneath the incidental and personal merits and defects of the book the intellectual character of the new century. The consideration of this work seems to have suddenly and forcibly revealed to her to what an extent she herself, with her cheerful, reformatory energy, was a product of the preceding century with its firm faith in progress. Barante's book is to her an intimation that the period of transition is at an end; she is amazed by the despondent resignation to circumstances, the fatalism, the reverence for the accomplished fact, which meet her in its pages. She divines that this despondent resignation to the pressure of circumstance will be one of the features of the new period; she has the presentiment that its philosophy will to a great extent consist of demonstrations that the real is the rational; and she seems, with the far-sightedness of genius, to discern how ambiguous that word "the real" will prove to be, and how much irreflective acquiescence in the existing the maxim will entail. She closes her review with these words of prophetic wisdom:-- "The eighteenth century proclaimed principles in a too unconditional manner; possibly the nineteenth century will explain facts in a spirit of too great resignation to them. The eighteenth believed in the nature of things, the nineteenth will only believe in the force of circumstances. The eighteenth desired to control the future, the nineteenth confines itself to the attempt to understand mankind. The author of this book is perhaps the first who is very distinctly tinged with the colour of the new century." The style and the matter of this utterance are equally striking. Of all the notable men with whom Mme. de Staël was acquainted, not one had so distinctly separated himself from the preceding century as this youngest among them, Barante. The others, one after the other, had left the sinking ship of the eighteenth century, and gone on board the ship of the nineteenth, loading it by degrees with all the goods and seed-corn that it was to carry; but it still lay side by side with the wreck, made fast to it. It was Barante who cut the cables and sent the vessel out into the wide ocean. [1] Alors on pourra distinguer, comment la religion, respectée par Montesquieu, était pourtant jugée par lui, tandis que Domat l'avait seulement adorée, et en avait fait tout découler au lieu de la considérer comme accessoire. [2] On arriva bientôt à tout nier; déjà l'incrédulité avait rejeté les preuves divines de la révélation et avait abjuré les devoirs et les souvenirs chrétiens. [3] _De la Litt. Française_, p. 213. XV CONCLUSION The literary group the formation and development of which we have been following, produces the impression of an interwoven whole. Multitudes of threads that cross and recross each other stretch from the one work to the other; this exposition has only made the connection clear; it has not taken separate entities and arbitrarily woven them together. It is to be noted that this collection of writings, this set of writers, form a group, not a school. A group is the result of the natural, unintentional connection between minds and works which have a common tendency; a school is the result of the conscious fellowship of authors who have submitted themselves to the guidance of some more or less distinctly formulated conviction. The Emigrant Literature, although French, develops beyond the frontiers of France. In order to understand it, we must keep before our minds that short and violently agitated period in which the old order was abolished, the principle of legitimacy was discarded, the ruling classes were humiliated and ruined, and positive religion was set aside by men who had freed themselves from its yoke rather by the help of a pugnacious philosophy than by scientific culture--men whose ruthless and not always honourable mode of warfare had irritated all those who were more or less dimly sensible of injustice in the charges directed against the old order of things, and whose intellectual, moral, and emotional cravings found no satisfaction in the new. The more unreal and impracticable the ideas of the rights and the progress of humanity proved themselves to be, the more certain did it become that an intellectual rebound must be at hand. It came; the reaction began. I have shown how at first it was only a partial reaction, how the ideas of the Revolution were invariably blended with the ideas which inspire the revulsion against Voltaire; we have seen that the intellectual point of departure of all its leaders lay in the eighteenth century, and that they were all liable to be affected by reminiscences, and subject to relapse. They all proceed, so to speak, from Rousseau. Their first step is simply to take his weapons and direct them against his antagonist Voltaire. Only the youngest of them, Barante, can with truth deny kinship with Rousseau. These men are followed by a second set of authors whose aim is the preservation of society. They also are for the most part émigrés, and they advocate unconditional reaction. Their writings, along with single works of authors like Chateaubriand, who are progressive in art but reactionary in their attitude towards Church and State, and certain youthful reactionary works of future Liberal and even Radical writers like Lamartine and Hugo, form a group characterised by unconditional adherence to the old--the ruling idea in them being the principle of authority. Amongst the leading men of this set are Joseph de Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais. But under the title "Emigrant Literature," I have gathered together and drawn attention to the more healthy literary productions, in which the reaction has not as yet become subjection to authority, but is the natural and justifiable defence of feeling, soul, passion, and poetry, against frigid intellectuality, exact calculation, and a literature stifled by rules and dead traditions, like that which continued to prolong its feeble and bloodless existence in France under the Empire. The following group, more closely united in its submission to one dominant principle, has necessarily a clearer, sharper outline; but the one at present in question has more life, more feeling, more restless power. We see the writers and writings of the Emigrant Literature as it were in a tremulous light. It is in the dawn of the new century that they stand, these men; the first beams of the morning sun of the nineteenth century fall upon them, and slowly disperse the veil of Ossianic mist and Wertherian melancholy which envelops them. One feels that a night of terror and bloodshed lies behind them; their faces are pale and serious. But their grief is poetical, their melancholy awakes sympathy, and one is conscious of fermenting forces in the passionate outbursts which betray their mortification at being obliged, instead of continuing the work of the day before, to regard the foundation laid that day with suspicion, and to gather together laboriously the fragments left by the havoc of the night. The Emigrant Literature is a profoundly agitated literature. Chateaubriand leads the way with the stormy passion and the powerful, brilliant landscape-painting of his novels. In them everything glows and flames with Catholic ecstasy and Satanic passion; but in the midst of the flames stands, like a figure hewn in stone, the modern personality, the egoistic, solitary genius, René. Sénancour produces a work in which, in a peculiarly soulful manner, modern liberal thought is fused with Romantic yearnings, Teutonic sentimentality and idealism with Latin refined sensuousness, the rebellious inclination to sift every question to the bottom with the despondency that dreams of suicide. Nodier mingles his voice in the chorus. Subtle, versatile, fantastic, possessed by the spirit of opposition, he attacks Napoleon and the existing state of society, and panegyrises Klopstock and conventual life. Naive as a child and learned as an old man, he seeks martyrdom for the pleasure of being persecuted and for the sake of being able to pursue his studies in solitude. Constantly progressing, he makes belief in progress the subject of incessant satire. Constant makes his appearance as a politician, and also as a dilettante in fiction who puts masters to shame. His mind sways like a pendulum between the ideas of two periods. By nature he is the child of the eighteenth century, but his culture and his aims are those of the period of the syntheses and the constitutions. In his one imaginative work he presents his contemporaries with a model of psychological character-drawing, and directs their attention to all the good feelings and energies that are sacrificed to the laws of modern society. But it is in Mme. de Staël that the Emigrant Literature first becomes conscious of its aims and its best tendencies. It is this woman whose figure dominates the group. In her writings there is collected the best of that which is valid in the productions of the exiles. The tendency to return to the past, and the tendency to press onwards to the future, which produce discordancy in the actions and writings of the other members of the group, in her case combine to produce an endeavour which is neither reactionary nor revolutionary, but reformatory. Like the others, she draws her first inspiration from Rousseau, like the others, she deplores the excesses of the Revolution, but better than any of the others, she loves personal and political freedom. She wages war with absolutism in the State and hypocrisy in society, with national arrogance and religious prejudice. She teaches her countrymen to appreciate the characteristics and literature of the neighbouring nations; she breaks down with her own hand the wall of self-sufficiency with which victorious France had surrounded itself. Barante, with his perspective view of eighteenth-century France, only continues and completes her work. Naturally connected with the Emigrant Literature is that German Romanticism by which Mme. de Staël was influenced in the last period of her activity, and the influence of which is also to be traced in Barante. The whole group of books to which I have given the common name Emigrant Literature may be described as a species of Romanticism anticipating more especially the great Romantic School of France. But it is also in touch with the German spirit and its Romanticism, often from unconscious sympathy, at times directly influenced by it. Hence it is that in her book on Germany Mme. de Staël calls Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and Chateaubriand unconscious Germans, and hence it is that we find the men and women of the Emigrant Literature every now and again showing a tendency to Romanticism, or interesting themselves in the word and the idea. But they not only herald the great authors who are to succeed them; they are in a very remarkable manner their prototypes. As a Romantic colourist Chateaubriand anticipates Victor Hugo, in his melancholy ennui he anticipates Byron. Long before the days of the Romantic School, Sénancour touches the chords which are afterwards sounded by Sainte-Beuve. Nodier, with his philological and archaeological erudition, his pure, austere prose, his fantastic and unpleasant themes, is the precursor of Mérimée. Long before the time of the great French novelists, Constant gives us Balzac's heroines; as a politician, although liberal and anti-clerical, he has some points of resemblance with an emphatically Romantic politician, the German, Gentz. Barante, with his spiritualistic and yet fatalistic literary philosophy, prepares the way for the criticism and æstheticism which were to be enthroned in high places in the days of Victor Cousin. Mme. de Staël seems to announce the greatest authoress of the century, a woman who possessed less elevation of mind than herself, but more genius and fecundity, the poetess and philosopher, George Sand. The literary history of a whole continent during half a century obviously does not begin at any one single point. The point of departure chosen by the historian may always be described as arbitrary and fortuitous; he must trust to his instinct and critical faculty, or he will never make a beginning at all. To me the Emigrant Literature seemed the natural starting-point indicated by history itself. Looked at from one point of view, this group prepares the way for the later religious and political reaction in French literature; looked at from another, it prepares the way for the Romantic School in France. It is the best of introductions to the study and understanding of the Romantic School in Germany; it has even points of contact with such remote phenomena as Byron and Balzac. In a word, the Emigrant Literature constitutes the prologue to the great literary drama of the century. MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE By GEORGE BRANDES In Six Vols, illustrated I. THE EMIGRANT LITERATURE. II. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN GERMANY. III. THE REACTION IN FRANCE. IV. NATURALISM IN ENGLAND. V. THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL IN FRANCE. VI. YOUNG GERMANY. 
48042	----	(http://freeliterature.org) (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.) MAIN CURRENTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE BY GEORG BRANDES IN SIX VOLUMES ILLUSTRATED VI YOUNG GERMANY LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1905 [Illustration: GOETHE] CONTENTS I. THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND II. PHILOSOPHY AND REACTION III. SPIRIT OF THE OPPOSITION IV. INFLUENCE OF THE REVOLUTION OF JULY. V. INFLUENCE OF BYRON VI. VALUE OF THE NEW LITERATURE VII. BÖRNE VIII. BÖRNE IX. BÖRNE X. BÖRNE XI. HEINE XII. HEINE XIII. HEINE XIV. HEINE XV. HEINE AND GOETHE XVI. HEINE XVII. HEINE XVIII. LITERATURE AND PARTY XIX. IMMERMANN XX. HEGELIANISM XXI. YOUNG GERMANY AND MENZEL XXII. GUTZKOW, LAUBE, MUNDT XXIII. RAHEL, BETTINA, CHARLOTTE STIEGLITZ XXIV. FREDERICK WILLIAM IV. OF PRUSSIA XXV. THE NEUTRAL LITERATURE XXVI. POLITICAL POETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION XXVII. REVOLUTIONARY POETRY XXVIII. REVOLUTIONARY POETRY XXIX. THE REVOLUTION XXX. CONCLUSION LIST OF PORTRAITS GOETHE CHAMISSO BÖRNE HEINE IMMERMANN HEGEL GUTZKOW "_Si l'artiste ne se précipite pas dans son oeuvre, comme Curtius dans le gouffre, comme le soldat dans la redoute, sans réfléchir; et si, dans ce cratère, il ne travaille pas comme le mineur enfoui sous un éboulement; s'il contemple les difficultés au lieu de les vaincre une à une, l'oeuvre reste inachevée, elle périt au fond de l'atelier, ou la production devient impossible, et l'artiste assiste au suicide de son talent"_--BALZAC. YOUNG GERMANY I THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND From the days of the Holy Alliance onward, the spirit of systematic reaction brooded over the German countries--a reaction which dated from the Congress of Vienna, and had its centre in Austria. Its most typical representative, Metternich, a pupil of Talleyrand, a less adroit but far more mischievous man than his master, hoped to extend it to the whole of Europe. Everything that had been shaken, loosened, or overturned by the Revolution or by Napoleon was to be repaired and re-established. In the struggle with the great enemy they had been obliged at last to resort to every possible method, had been forced to appeal to the people instead of simply commanding, to appeal to their sentiment in place of their allegiance, and even to promise a thing as contrary to all cabinet policy, as youthfully revolutionary, as "the regeneration of Germany." There had been, it is true, a very noticeable difference between the Austrian and the Prussian watchwords. "Justice and Order," "Order and Peace," were the cues of the Austrian proclamations; those of the Prussian were "The Nation," "Freedom and Honour," "Germany." Still both of the great German States had made more concessions to the spirit of the times than at all suited the ideas of their leading statesmen. And no sooner was the enemy driven off, the heir of the Revolution crippled, and "the war of freedom" ended, than it became their object to put an end to the freedom as they had put an end to the war. The generation that had grown up during the war with France had expected to see a united Germany arise as the result of victory. As far back as 1812, Stein had sketched a plan for the reunion of the scattered parts of the former German Empire, and Arndt and Görres had given expression to the same idea. But the Peace of Paris, in 1814, decreed: "The German States shall be independent, and united by a federative league;" and herewith all hopes of unification were dashed to the ground. Almost a generation passed before the people were again animated by the thought. In place of the unified State arose the German Confederacy, _der deutsche Bund_, or, as Jahn called it, _Bunt_, a many-coloured harlequin's garb for the nation; and the disappointment was a bitter one. The dream of freedom shared the fate of the dream of unification. To animate their peoples in the struggle with Napoleon, several of the princes had promised them constitutional government. Of the larger States, only Bavaria, Baden, and Würtemberg, the former members of the Napoleonic Rhenish Confederacy, kept these promises. Bavaria and Baden received constitutions in 1818; Würtemberg, where for once the king was more liberally minded than the estates, in 1819; and in little Saxe-Weimar, Karl August, the pioneer of political freedom in Germany, had given his people a free constitution and inaugurated a Parliamentary idyll as far back as 1816. All this, however, was of small significance in view of the fact that Austria, after, as well as before, the Peace, represented the reactionary principle, and that Prussia, with a population more inclined than any of the others to political activity, adhered unhesitatingly to the Metternichian principles. Yet the Prussian people not only desired a constitution, but possessed a right to it. They had it in black and white. In an edict of 1810, the Chancellor, Prince Hardenberg, the restorer of the power of Prussia, had held out the prospect of representative government. During the war with Napoleon the promise had been repeated, and finally, in an ordinance of the 22nd of May 1815, a formal promise had been made to the people, a clear intimation of the king's intention to appoint without delay a committee whose task it should be to prepare the draft of a constitution. But as the Metternichian principles gained ground, the realisation of this plan was postponed. When Görres ventured to present to Hardenberg an address from the Rhine provinces, in which the King of Prussia was reminded of his promise, the only answer he received was, that the king who had given the promise had also, in his wisdom, reserved the right to judge of the proper time for its fulfilment. On several later occasions the king declared himself to be bound by his promise, but at the same time always insisted that the question of time must be left to his fatherly care to decide. And meanwhile full twenty-five years passed--the rest of the king's life.[1] The object of the Powers was to eradicate every trace of the Napoleonic administration. In Hanover, for example, the _Code Napoléon_, with its public, verbal judicial proceedings, was abolished, and the old inquisitional system of the sixteenth century, with its secret modes of procedure, was re-established. The peasants, who had been liberated by the French, had to return to serfdom and villeinage. The principle of equality before the law was set at naught, the aristocracy re-acquiring the political and social privileges which they had possessed in the eighteenth century. And just as the first germs of a freer political life were ready to sprout in South Germany, an event occurred which gave the signal for much stronger, much hastier reaction, one symptom of which was the employment of the most violent measures in the repression of unimportant and innocent expressions of popular feeling. This event was the assassination of Kotzebue, or, to be more correct, the enthusiasm for the assassin which his deed awakened throughout Germany, then suffering from oppression and espionage. The strong national feeling and the enthusiasm for freedom which had asserted themselves during the conflict with France, had in the years following on that conflict given birth to two movements among the youth of Germany, to which the attention of the Governments were now directed--the gymnastic and the student movement (Turnwesen and Burschenschaftswesen). Jahn, the populariser of gymnastics, who succeeded Fichte in the favour of the youth of Germany, opened the first school of gymnastics in Berlin. He had belonged to Lützow's free-lance Jaegercorps, was a German of Germans and a hater of the French, and went about with his long, unkempt grey hair hanging over his shoulders, bare-necked, his broad shirt-collar thrown wide open, and a thick, knotted stick in his hand. In the course of the holiday excursions which he made with his pupils, whenever they came upon a French sign-board or met a fashionably-dressed man, they would draw up round the object of their detestation, bawling: "Oh! Oh!" On these excursions the strictest temperance in food and drink was observed; they lived chiefly on bread and water, and bivouacked at night under the open sky. From round the fire rose the strains of the worthy Massmann's beautiful _Turnerwanderlied:_ "Stubenwacht, Ofenpacht, Hat die Herzen weich gemacht, Wanderfahrt, Turnerart Macht sie frank und hart."[2] This Massmann, who, besides being one of the leaders of the gymnastic movement, was one of the founders of the students' unions (Burschenschaften), is the same who figures so frequently as scapegoat in Heine's poems and prefaces.[3] Jahn soon became the object of the most ardent admiration, not only on the part of immature youth, but of men of note and of public bodies. Poets inscribed their verses to him; a philologist like Thiersch dedicated his _Pindar_ to him, and compared German to Greek gymnastics; two universities invested him with an honorary degree. He himself was a most loyal subject, but it was the fashion among his long-haired, bare-necked gymnasts with the unbleached linen jackets to jeer at the army, especially at the dandy officers of the guard. They raved, too, against abstract enemies; among their rules was one for the assassination of the enemy of the good cause; they were to aim with a dagger at his eyes, and, when the victim covered his face, to strike at his heart. This movement emanated from Berlin, the student movement from Thuringia. The latter began as a sort of semi-national, semi-Christian enthusiasm, and aimed among other things at the reform of the low standard of manners and morals among the students. Originating in one of the small States of Germany, it took for its programme that famous song of Arndt's which declares the whole of Germany to be the German's fatherland. Amongst the Jena professors a certain Fries had most influence among the students, the same Fries who, in the preface to Hegel's _Philosophy of Right_, is loaded with invective as being the representative of shallowness. He was a violent Liberal, who had said that Hegel's new theories did not grow in the gardens of science, but in the hotbeds of servility; and under his fostering care the endeavour after unity and abstract liberty spread amongst the youth of the universities. The banner of the Burschen was black, red, and gold, said to have been suggested by the colours of the uniform of Lützow's Corps, black, with red facings and gold buttons. The Reformation commemoration-festival in 1817 first drew general attention to the gymnastic and student societies (Turner and Burschen). It had suggested the idea of a meeting at the Wartburg of delegates from all the German student unions. In a pamphlet published on the occasion of the festival by Karl Sand, he names as the three enemies of German nationalism from time immemorial, Roman imperialism, monasticism, and militarism. On the 18th of October, five hundred students, headed by several professors, marched up from Eisenach to the Wartburg, where they dined in the Knights' Hall, placed at their disposal by the liberal Karl August. After the repast the gymnasts gave a display of their agility for the benefit of the astonished natives. In the evening great bonfires were lighted, and then Jahn proposed that, following the example of Luther, who had burned the Papal Bull, they should burn what the enemies of the good cause had written. Massmann feelingly expressed his approval of the proposal, and bundles of old printed paper were produced, on which were inscribed the titles of the detested books written by the enemies of the gymnasts. There were three by the notorious Schmalz, the first Rector of the University of Berlin, the Police Statute Book of the equally notorious Prussian Minister of Justice, Herr von Kamptz, the _Code Napoléon_, Kotzebue's _Deutsche Geschichte_, Haller's _Restauration_, &c, &c. The last things thrown into the flames were a Uhlan's corset, a queue, and a corporal's baton.[4] When Fries in high-flown language bade the students farewell, he particularly impressed on them that they had been in the country of German liberty, liberty of action and of thought: "Here there is no standing army," &c.; an expression rendered more absurd by the fact that the army of Weimar consisted of a number of worthy artisans, who at times, in consideration of a small payment, appeared as hussars, with high riding-boots and spurs, but without horses. In Hegel's preface to the _Philosophy of Right_ he remarks, _à propos_ of this speech, that Fries was not ashamed, on the occasion of a notorious public demonstration, to say of the constitution of the State that it was from below, from the people, that life would come, if true public spirit prevailed; that only by the sacred chain of friendship could a community, a society, be inviolably united. Hegel calls this the very hall-mark of shallowness, this melting down of the elaborate architecture of a rationally designed state into "a broth of feeling, friendship, and enthusiasm." Massmann published an account of the festival, in which he described how night still brooded over Germany, but proclaimed that the blood-red dawn was about to break. Metternich succeeded in persuading both Prince Hardenberg and the Emperor Alexander to bring pressure to bear on Karl August in the matter of this festival, and ever afterwards Karl August's nickname at the court of Vienna was "der Altbursche." Amongst the books burnt in effigy at the Wartburg were some of Kotzebue's. Kotzebue was publishing at this time in Weimar his _Litterarisches Wochenblatt_, a journal which flattered Russia and made merry over the youth of Germany. Little as Goethe generally sympathised with youth, he rejoiced with them, for once, at the insult offered to his old enemy.[5] As Councillor of the Russian Legation, Kotzebue from time to time sent communications to St. Petersburg, and was consequently supposed to be a Russian spy. It is probable that his communications were no more than harmless reports on literary matters, but, be this as it may, in the eyes of the students, he was Beelzebub--Beltze- or Kotze-bue. At the University of Giessen at this time, under the leadership of three brothers Follen, fanatical Republicans, a species of Radicalism had developed, which gloated over the idea of the assassination of tyrants and their instruments. In the students' songs such expressions occurred as: "Freiheitsmesser gezückt!--Hurrah! den Dolch durch die Kehle gedrückt." (Draw freedom's knife from its sheath!--Hurrah! Thrust the poniard into the throat.) Karl Follen, the leading spirit, had completely under his influence that young, narrow-minded mystic, Karl Sand, who had the image of Jesus constantly before his eyes, and who, on the 23rd of March 1819, drove his poniard into old Kotzebue's neck. On a strip of paper which he left lying beside the corpse, was, amongst other writing, this line by Follen: "You, too, may be a Christ." It was perfectly clear that this murder, committed in a moment of religious exaltation, could not be laid to the charge of the Liberal youth of Germany; nevertheless, and more especially as Sand became a species of saint in the popular estimation, Metternich and Gentz, the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and the Czar, who was irritated by this expression of Russophobia, took united action, and the Resolutions of Karlsbad were passed--provisional, exceptional legislation for the universities, the "demagogues," and the press. Thus a censorship of the German press came into existence, answering to that prevailing in Russia now. Gentz was not mistaken when he called this the greatest retrograde movement that had taken place for thirty years. Under the pretext of combating a great revolutionary party, which they knew did not exist, the Governments began a war of persecution against what was then called Liberalism. Even the professor of theology at the University of Berlin, De Wette, was dismissed, because he had written a private letter of condolence to Sand's mother, which was seized and opened by the police. The reaction went the length of attacking the men who represented the German national feeling which had arisen during the war. Jahn was arrested, first confined in a fortress, and then sent to live in a small town under police supervision. Arndt was entangled, as a "demagogue," in a criminal case, and lost his appointment. Görres, who was dismissed, escaped over the frontier. In Prussia the censorship was not only exercised in the case of books and newspapers printed in the country, but extended to foreign printed matter. All German newspapers published in England, France, or Holland were forbidden. The whole stocks of some publishers, Brockhaus, for example, were subjected to a special censorship, on account of one or two pamphlets published by them. At all the universities trusted agents of the Government were appointed to watch over the disposition of the students and the lectures of the professors. All gymnastic and student societies were put down. The so-called old German dress, and the black, red, and gold colours were forbidden. The police especially distinguished themselves in the carrying out of these last prohibitions; they hunted coats, caps, tassels, ribbons, and pipe-bowls, and any man caught wearing a straw hat, a red waistcoat, and a black coat was imprisoned on a charge, of high treason. Some Marburg students in the Twenties had ordered foils from a manufactory in Solingen, and it was reported that the usual trade-mark, "Prince," was wanting on these particular foils. The government of Hesse-Cassel instituted an inquiry for the purpose of discovering if the omission had been ordered by the students. To the great annoyance of the police, no cause for accusation was found. "I am sorry for your statesmen," said the French Minister, Comte de Serre, to the famous Niebuhr about this time; "they are making war on students." A specially keen look-out was kept for prohibited combinations among students. When Arnold Ruge was imprisoned, Herr von Kamptz set the whole police on the chase after a walking-stick belonging to him, on which the names of some Jena students were carved, the _corpus delicti_ being finally confiscated in Stralsund. Ruge was tortured by long pauses between his examinations, having to spend the intervals in a cell where life was rendered unendurable by vermin. Fritz Reuter had to expiate the crime of having "worn the German colours in broad daylight" by imprisonment, first in a miserable hole in Berlin, and after having been condemned for high treason, in dirty fortress cells. A youthful political offender in Bavaria was sentenced to fortress-imprisonment for treason on an indictment of which one of the gravest clauses was that something resembling a German prince's robe had been found in his room. Chiefly at the instigation of Austria, thousands of young Prussians were either imprisoned or driven into exile. In short, the Liberal middle-class youth of the Germany of those days was as unprotected by the law and as much persecuted as are, in our days, the Socialistic youth of the fourth estate of the same country, or the Liberal youth of Russia. Political and religious reaction went, as usual, hand in hand. In the year 1821, the Prussian Government concluded a concordat with the Pope, which gave the Roman Catholic Church an influence in Prussia such as would have been unimaginable under Frederick the Great. In the following year a new liturgy, more nearly resembling the Roman, was introduced into the Protestant Church. And it is exceedingly significant that the word Protestantism now fell into disrepute. By a Ministerial decree of the year 1821, the terms Protestant and Protestantism were forbidden in Prussia; the censors received orders not to pass these words, but to substitute the word Evangelical. The sadness that takes possession of all progressively inclined minds during long and apparently hopeless periods of reaction now weighed upon the spiritual _élite_ of Germany. But the great majority fell a quick prey to carelessness and political indifference. With the reaction, at first forced on them from without, they soon familiarised themselves. Many began to be of opinion that a representative constitution, such as had been promised to Prussia, was a thing of no value. Others felt it deeply that Prussia, which had made such sacrifices in the war with Napoleon, had not succeeded in obtaining a constitution, while the South German States, which had to the last made common cause with the enemy, had long enjoyed popular government and the privilege of Parliamentary debate; but they concealed their shame under a mask of contempt for these skirmishers, a contempt that had a strong family resemblance to envy and anger. It was malevolently pointed out that the Bundestag, in which Austria and Prussia predominated, took good care that the trees of the South German Parliamentary system were well pruned down. The various Governments had, moreover, succeeded in bringing such opposition as arose in the South German States into disrepute. Ministers often succeeded in preventing an election that was objectionable to them; they also won over opponents by direct bribery or fear of dismissal; and they had always the final resource, to which they frequently resorted, of completely disregarding the oppositionist resolutions of the Chambers. As the power was in the hands of the Governments, it lay in the nature of things that the proceedings of the Parliaments, up to 1830, were of no serious interest. The German press had never occupied a high position. All discussion of State matters being now prohibited, it had to confine itself, as regarded politics, to the simple chronicling of facts, and to fill its columns with court news, accounts of storms and floods, the birth of marvellous monsters in the animal, and the appearance of new stars in the theatrical, world. The cultivated classes sought a kind of compensation for their exclusion from politics in a frantically exaggerated interest in the theatre. Never had the adoration of a prima donna or a ballet-dancer been carried to such an extreme. In the Berlin of the Twenties every other interest was swallowed up in the question of the superiority of German or Italian music. People thought of nothing but the rivalry between Spontini and Weber. When Börne came to Berlin in 1828, the public mind was so engrossed with the famous singer, Henriette Sontag, that no one remembered anything about Börne, except that he had written an article on her. In his _Letters from Paris_ (in "Härings-Salat") he gives a witty and yet veracious account of how he was met and saluted everywhere with the cry: "This is the man who wrote about Sontag!" Even in 1832, everything--the agitation in France, the Polish defeat, sympathy with the exiled Poles--everything was forgotten in the enthusiasm for the feet of the great _danseuse_ Taglioni, which were then setting out on their triumphal progress through Europe. The chief representative of the reactionary spirit in Prussia, the Hofmarschall and future diplomatist, General Theodor Heinrich von Rochow, writes in May 1832 to von Nagler, the Postmaster-General: "She is to dance, consequently there is great rejoicing, and occupation in abundance.... Taglioni's mimetic grace has dispelled the threatening signs of the times."[6] The word occupation here is significant. The performance did not merely please, it occupied.[7] As regards literature, the generation of that day luxuriated in an idolisation of the octogenarian Goethe, which accepted everything that the aged master wrote or said as wisdom, and beauty, and inspired poetry. All his life long he had had to struggle against hatred and misunderstanding; now the reverence for him verged on the ridiculous; in Berlin it verged on idiocy.[8] In Zelter's _Letters to Goethe_ he writes, on the subject of the latter's _Elpenor_: "Posterity will not believe that the sun of our days beheld the forthcoming of such a work."[9] All those who had obstructed Goethe's path so long as his name still belonged to combatant literature, became his votaries from the moment that that name conveyed undisputed authority, and could be employed as a sort of Conservative and national emblem. Otherwise literature languished. The day of romantic poetical fancy was at an end--Raupach and Müllner ruled the stage, Clauren fiction. Light literature sank deeper and deeper into the slough of vulgarity and pruriency. [1] Biedermann: _Dreissig Jahre deutscher Geschichte_. Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i. and ii. [2] Soul and body lose their strength Covering idle by the stove Free beneath the open sky Must the hardy gymnast rove. [3] _Wintermährchen_, Kap. xi.; _Lobgesänge auf König Ludwig_; preface to _Romancero_. [4] Treitschke: _Deutsche Geschichte,_ ii. 383-443. [5] Epigram: "Du hast es lang genug getrieben, Niederträchtig vom Hohen geschrieben. Dass du dein eignes Volk gescholten, Die Jugend hat es dir vergolten." Thou hast long enough had thy way, long enough reviled what is great; youth now requites thee for the insults offered to thine own nation. [6] "Sie wird tanzen und somit ist grosse Freude und Beschäftigung vollauf ... die Mimik der Grazien der Taglioni haben die drohenden Zeichen der Zeit verdrängt." [7] "Preussen und Frankreich zur Zeit der Julirevolution. Vertraute Briefe des Generals von Rochow, herausgegeben von E. Kelchner und K. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy." [8] A certain Geheimrath Schulz, of the Berlin "Wednesday Society," addressed the following birthday poem to Goethe: "Ich wollt, ich war ein Fisch--so wohlig und frisch--und ganz ohne Gräten--So war ich für Goethen--gebraten am Tisch--ein köstlicher Fisch" _Translation:_ I would I were a fish--lively and fresh--and without any bones--Then I should be for Goethe--fried for his table--a delicious fish. [9] Die Nachwelt wird es nicht glauben, dass die Sonne unsrer Tage ein solches Werk hervorgehen sah. II PHILOSOPHY AND REACTION German philosophy, all the branches of which shot out vigorously after the flood of Romanticism had fertilised the ground with its deposit, at the same time changed colour. Through the unpropitiousness of circumstances, it became farther removed from reality than heretofore, though more closely bound up with existing conditions. Hegel is the great example. In March 1819, Karl Sand murdered Kotzebue; on the 22nd of October of the preceding year, Hegel entered on his professorial duties at the University of Berlin. From the programme which he gave his audience in his opening address, it could be clearly deduced that Hegel's philosophy and the Prussian State in its existing form were closely connected; for the said philosophy was based on the omnipotence of the Idea, the State on the power of intelligence and culture. Of the fact that Prussia, allowing herself to be led by Austria, was at this very time proving false to her character and traditions by entering on a policy of spiritual and political reaction, no account was taken. Yet the Resolutions of Carlsbad were already drafted, and it was Prussia that took the initiative in issuing all the petty tyrannical regulations which soon placed the whole of Germany under police surveillance. But the sentimental politics of the students were as obnoxious to Hegel as sentimental philosophy; the Wartburg rendezvous was to him a piece of romantic foolery, and Sand's poniard-thrust an abomination. In the preface to the _Philosophy of Right_, the first and most important work he produced in Berlin, he not only condescended to defend the persecution of the demagogues, but demeaned himself by playing police agent, and denouncing his former colleague, Fries, to the Governments: "It is to be hoped that neither office nor title will serve as a talisman for principles destructive both of morality and public order." From this time onward Hegel became the philosophic dictator of Germany. He ruled from Berlin over the whole domain of German thought. Yet in this same philosophy, even in a work with such a pronounced Conservative tendency as the _Philosophy of Right_ there existed a portentous ambiguity. As early as in the above-mentioned notorious preface we find the proposition which was to become the classic motto of the age, which was first appropriated eagerly by the Conservatism of the Restoration period, and then used as a battering-ram by Hegel's younger disciples. It is in larger print than the rest, in two lines: "What is rational is real, What is real is rational." What does this mean? Hegel goes on to explain that when reflection, feeling, or whatever other form the subjective consciousness may assume, regards the present as vanity, it is itself false, finds itself in emptiness. But, on the other hand, the doctrine that the idea is a mere idea or figment, philosophy meets with the assertion that nothing is real except the idea. What is all-important is to recognise that which is eternal in the present, temporal, transient; in other words, in this case, not to construct a state, but to understand the state as it exists. Hegel's biographer, Haym, rightly says that not even the doctrine of divine right is so dangerous as this, which declares everything existing to be sacred. But, on the other hand, it may with equal right be maintained that not even the destructive ardour of the youthful revolutionaries went so far as this doctrine, which grants reality only to what is rational, and to all else nothing but a mock reality, which can and should be defied, disregarded, overturned, exploded. Hence Robert Prutz could say of this same proposition that by it all doubt was removed, the old God of darkness hurled into the abyss, and a new, eternally reigning Zeus, the idea that comprehends itself, man as a thinking being, raised to the throne.[1] The interpretations of Hegel's philosophy that soon appeared were many and widely different, but the kinship between his doctrines and Goethe's poetry was felt by all the initiated. Hegel became the strongest ally of the little circle of Goethe votaries in Berlin, and the two men, known as the absolute poet and the absolute philosopher, were the objects of a common veneration. The orthodox Hegelian even saw a significant coincidence in the circumstance that Hegel was born on the 27th of August and Goethe on the 28th. In the Twenties, the faithful gathered round the festive board on the evening of the 27th of August, drank the toast of the master in the kingdom of thought, and called to mind the saying in the preface to the _Philosophy of Right_ about the owl of Minerva, which begins its flight only when the shades of night are gathering. "But as soon as the midnight hour had struck, an orator rose to proclaim the glad tidings that Apollo, the God of day and of song, was now in his sun-chariot, ushering in the 28th, the glorious day."[2] The patriotism which in 1813 had driven the enemy out of the country, contained two radically different elements, a historical, retrospective tendency, which soon developed into Romanticism, and a liberal-minded, progressive tendency, which developed into the new Liberalism. When the reaction came, it sought support in many of the theories of Romanticism, and finally took the whole movement into its pay. Men like Görres, Friedrich Schlegel, and others, passed from the camp of Romanticism into that of reaction. The freedom-loving group had, of course, during the wars with Napoleon, shared the Romanticists' hatred of France. But when their sympathies came to take the shape of wishes and demands (for liberty of the press, constitutional government, the franchise, &c), the hatred of France inevitably evaporated. And the stronger the reaction became, the more keenly were all eyes turned to that neighbouring country which possessed Parliamentary government. The heroes of French Liberalism were soon men of great consequence in the estimation of the German Liberals; indeed at a distance they seemed of more consequence than they did at home. In Germany, after the victory over Napoleon, as after the great defeat, quietness was the first duty of the citizen.[3] All was obedience and silence. And the result was what it usually is when a highly gifted but unenergetic people are incapable of throwing off a yoke; its pressure generated self-contempt, and the self-contempt a kind of desperate wit, of chronic "gallows-humour"; the better sort developed a real passion for solacing themselves with derision of their own impotence. The observation of existing conditions gave constantly recurring occasion for irony directed against themselves--against visionary Romanticism, the spirit of patience and submission in the domain of politics, orthodoxy and pietism in the domain of religion. Caricature-like developments of political life, religion, and poetry incited to sarcasm, that sometimes ruthlessly wounded patriotic feeling, sometimes assumed a frivolous tone which, taken in connection with the French leanings of Liberalism, was, or inevitably seemed to be, more French than German. [1] Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_, p. 365; R. Prutz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der Gegenwart,_ p. 259. [2] Treitschke: _Deutsche Geschichte_, iii. 686. [3] "_Die erste Bürgerpflicht ist Ruhe,_" These words occur in an official notice posted in the streets of Berlin after the defeat of Jena. [Illustration: CHAMISSO] III SPIRIT OF THE OPPOSITION The most notable of the freedom-loving poets and prose authors of the period are embodiments of some of the shades of opinion which have been alluded to. Adalbert von Chamisso, who, by virtue of his famous prose tale, _Peter Schlemihl_, and certain of his qualities, belongs to the German Romantic School, while in other respects he approaches more nearly to the French ideal of thought and writing, is, in some of his most characteristic poems, and even in his epigrams, a mouthpiece of the grief of the better sort over the steadily growing political and social reaction. As early as 1822, in his poem, _Die goldene Zeit_ ("The Golden Age"), he ridicules an age in which that man is a Jacobin who has openly expressed his belief that 2 and 2 make 4; in the _Nachtwächterlied_ ("Watchman's Song") he scoffs at the power of the Jesuits; in _Joshua_ and _Das Dampfross_ ("The Steam Horse"), at those who have robbed time of its secret, and learned how to force it backwards day by day; in _Das Gebet der Wittwe_ ("The Widow's Prayer") he gives a darkly pessimistic picture of the heartless rule of the powers that be, with its complete indifference to the fate of the common people; finally he sums up his view of the times in this bitterly humorous quatrain, which greets us sadly in the form of a four-part catch: KANON. "Das ist die Noth der schweren Zeit! Das ist die schwere Zeit der Noth! Das ist die schwere Noth der Zeit! Das ist die Zeit der schweren Noth!"[1] Count August von Platen-Hallermünde, whose youthful efforts were Romantic, both in their choice of subject and in their imitation of the forms of the Spanish drama, afterwards waged systematic war with Romanticism. Its latest developments in Germany he holds up to ridicule, without possessing enough of critical tact to discriminate between the authors who did and those who did not belong to the Romanticist group. He quits the literary drama to cultivate the political lyric muse, as he gradually arrives at the conviction that the pitiable condition of public affairs is also at the bottom of the German people's lack of appreciation of power and style and form in poetry. He finds life in Germany impossible to endure, and seeks, under the sunny skies of Sicily, amidst its reminiscences of antiquity, to forget the heavy atmosphere and the political abuses of his Northern home. But he cannot completely distract his thoughts from the ignominy there. He writes his Berlin national song, which begins with the chorus: "Diesen Kuss den Moscoviten, Deren Nasen sind so schmuck; Rom mit seinen Jesuiten Nehme diesen Händedruck!"[2] We find also the following bitter outburst of national self-contempt, written in wrath over the maltreatment of his poems by the censor: "Doch gieb, o Dichter, dich zufrieden, Es büsst die Welt nur wenig ein; Du weisst es längst, man kann hienieden Nichts Schlechtres als ein Deutscher sein."[3] Romantically as Platen's adversary, Heinrich Heine, starts, the modern spirit soon makes itself perceptible in his prose. Even before he touches on the subject of politics proper, he amuses himself, in his _Reisebilder_, by making taunting allusions to German conditions and to the way in which German stolidity accommodates itself to them. And the love of liberty, abstract, political liberty, was all along the true passion of Ludwig Börne, who long appeared to occupy himself with purely æsthetic matters, being known for whole decades only as a dramatic critic and writer of short stories. That these authors found readers and admirers bears witness to the fact that the thinking part of the German people at the end of the Twenties was laying aside its faith in authority in the domain of politics as well as in general intellectual matters. At this time the persecution of the students' unions (Burschenschaften) was being carried on with the utmost ardour. They were broken up everywhere. But they formed again at once, and in one German State, Bavaria, after the accession of King Ludwig, they were actually sanctioned by the police. The divisions that occurred among them show the directions of the various currents of public opinion at that time. In Erlangen, after 1827, there were three unions, at feud with each other--Teutonia, Arminia, and Germania. Teutonia was the organ of pure Romanticism, of religious mysticism, and declared that politics in no way concerned it. Arminia's principles were strict morality and the pursuit of science; it aimed at the reformation of the conditions of public life, and also at the unity and liberty of Germany. Germania answered to the Radical tendencies of the day. It dropped the older _Tugendbund's_ requirement of strict morality, emancipated itself from the rule of authority, including authority in the matter of religion, and declared the belief that its aim--which in the case of this union also was the unity and liberty of Germany--could only be attained by revolution. Though it was essentially a political organisation, it would be ridiculous to call it an important and dangerous one. These three main movements were soon represented at all the German universities, and significantly enough, it was, as a rule, the one represented by Germania, which had the greatest influence. [1] This is the need of these hard times! These are the hard times of need! This is the hard need of these times! These are the times of hard need! [2] This kiss is for the Moscovites, with their handsome noses; this hand-clasp for Rome with her Jesuits. [3] Console thyself, O poet! 'tis but little the world loses; thou hast long known that on this earth a man can be nothing worse than a German. IV INFLUENCE OF THE REVOLUTION OF JULY In 1830, while things were in this state of stagnation, oppression, and ferment, the news of the Paris Revolution of July arrived, and acted upon public feeling in Germany like an electric shock. All eyes were turned towards Paris, and among thinking people real enthusiasm was felt. The effect was perhaps most plainly observable among the quite young men. Two months before the Revolution, Karl Gutzkow, then nineteen, had, as he himself has told us, no understanding whatever of European politics. He neither knew who Polignac was, nor what it meant to violate _la Charte_ (the French constitution). He only knew that in spite of all the persecution of the German student unions (Burschenschaften), they were still alive, and that the object to be attained was the unification of Germany. If he thought at all of upheavals which might hasten the march of events, he looked for them rather from the direction of Erlangen or Jena than from Paris; at the utmost he conceived it possible that a troop of returning Philhellenes landing armed at Stralsund, might take forcible possession of the town and call the Pomeranian militia (Landwehr) to arms, and that the peasants, driven to it perhaps by famine, might join in the revolt. At this time the French author, Saint-Marc Girardin, had come to Berlin to study the German language, the Prussian school system, and also the University theology as represented by Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Pietism emanating from Halle. As a contributor to the _Journal des Débats_, he received his newspaper regularly from Paris, and with the eager interest of the aspirant to office, followed the progress of the Opposition in France. Gutzkow gave him a German lesson daily; they read one of Kotzebue's comedies, which the Frenchman preferred as practice to Goethe or Schiller, but they invariably drifted into political discussions. Gutzkow made no attempt to conceal from Saint-Marc Girardin the slight general significance he attached to the French constitutional struggle, openly ascribing a greater influence on the course of history to the student union in Jena than to the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Girardin smilingly gave a polite answer. From time to time these conversations were interrupted by Eduard Gans, the famous Prussian professor, Hegel's most renowned disciple in the faculty of law, Varnhagen's and Heine's friend, who in fluent French joined in the political argument, and made a great impression on Girardin by his woolly black hair and his whiskers. Gutzkow, who had heard the fashionably dressed, subtle and sarcastic professor ridicule the student movement from his professorial chair, and laughingly confess that he too once on a day, on the banks of the Saale, had deliberated upon the best means of helping Germany to an imperial crown, entreated the French politician not to believe that the youth of Germany thought with Gans. "I am quite aware of it," answered Girardin, "you intend to liberate the world with Sanscrit." On the 3rd of August 1830, the king's birthday was celebrated with song and speech in the great hall of the Berlin University. The students stood crowded together in front of the barrier behind which sat professors, officials, and officers of high rank. The famous philologist Boekh was the orator, and from the gallery above his head songs were sung by the University choir, under the leadership of Music-Director Zelter, Goethe's correspondent. The Rector of the University, Professor Schmalz, with queue and sword, went from chair to chair, exchanging a few words with the most honoured guests. But Gans, excited and impatient, passed round letters from Friedrich von Raumer, who had just come from Paris. The Crown Prince, afterwards Frederick William IV., sat and smiled; but all knew that a few days ago in France a king had been dethroned. It was as if the thunder of the barricade cannonade were booming through the festive hall. Boekh's speech on the subject of the fine arts did not succeed in arousing attention, and when Hegel read from the chair the names of the prizewinners of the year, no one except the medallists listened. Gutzkow did hear with one ear that he had taken the prize in the faculty of philosophy, but with the other he heard of a people that had deposed a king, of cannonades, of thousands fallen in the fight. He was oblivious to the congratulations offered him; he did not even open the case which contained the gold medal with the king's portrait; he had forgotten the hope of a professorship which he had connected with the thought of winning this medal; he stood dazed, thinking of Saint-Marc Girardin and his prophecies, and of what he himself had prophesied of the German Burschenschaft. Then he rushed off to a confectioner's shop in Unter den Linden, and for the first time in his life read a newspaper with avidity. He could hardly await the publication of the official gazette that evening; not because he was impatient to see his name in the list of medallists; all he wished was to know the state of matters in Paris, whether or not the barricades were still standing, whether France was to come forth from Lafayette's hands a republic or a monarchy. "Science lay behind me," he writes, "history before me."[1] And Gutzkow is a type of the youngest generation of the Germany of that day--the young men of twenty. Almost simultaneously with Karl Gutzkow's political awakening, there occurred a memorable misunderstanding in the study of the octogenarian Goethe. A visitor, greeted by the old man with exclamations of joy over the great event in Paris, at first believed that he meant the Days of July, and only gradually came to understand that he was talking of the decision of the scientific dispute between Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire in favour of the latter. This famous misunderstanding has long enough been regarded as only a symptom of Goethe's limitation in matters political; it is but fair to point out that the anecdote is also an indication of the old sage's justifiable indifference to over-estimated political events. The scientific dispute was, by reason of the idea involved, and its transforming effect on the spiritual map of the world, a weightier matter than the French Revolution of July. Does not Saint-Hilaire's theory of the unity of "plan" herald _The Origin of Species!_ But the picture of the overwhelming effect of the French political catastrophe on the youngest generation stands out all the sharper against the background of Goethe's impassibility.[2] The impression made on eminent individuals belonging neither to the youngest nor the oldest generation was very deep. The most intellectual and open-minded woman of the day, the most distinguished of Goethe's female admirers, Rahel, who by this time was sixty, was in entire sympathy with the Revolution. To her, as a woman, the social side was of more interest than the political. Saint-Simonism takes strong hold upon her; her marvellously youthful mind perceives its possibilities, and in the events of July she sees the beginning of the triumph of its social theories. To the reviving, inspiriting impression of the Revolution of July was now added another, which gave a sharp edge to the passionate political feeling of the younger generation--the impression, to wit, made by the outbreak of the Polish revolt. It is most plainly observable in the case of Platen, who in wild excitement addresses a poetical adjuration to the Crown Prince of Prussia (said to be the most favourably disposed) to take the part of unhappy Poland, and also writes the _Polenlieder_, the only poems of his that rise to the height of passion, proud songs of liberty, full of outspoken scorn of the autocrat who was worshipped at the German courts as an almighty being, and of those who allowed themselves to be bribed and bought with his roubles. On Ludwig Börne's mind the news of the Revolution of July acted with the effect of a flash of lightning. In the summer of 1830 he was at the watering-place of Soden, near Frankfort-on-Main, recovering from a long bout of rheumatic fever and repeated attacks of hemorrhage. His _Journal_ shows that his political hopes were almost extinguished, his desires stifled. A soul like his, whose aspiration after liberty was a passion, whose hunger and thirst after righteousness consumed his vital force, was unable permanently to bear the heavy weight of political reaction. He was now forty-four, and since the time of the War of Liberation, that is to say as youth and grown man, had had experience of nothing but the triumphs of baseness and its persecution of all rectitude, all freedom of opinion. He had never been able to lift his eyes from the sheet of paper he was writing on, without seeing pallid fear of every great passion, of ideals, of youth itself, enthroned in high places, side by side with the animal instinct of self-preservation and animal self-indulgence--the Metternich and Gentz principle. He had given up none of the convictions of his youth and manhood, but the world to him was draped in mourning weeds. He had the feeling in Germany of sitting at the bottom of the sea, a diving-bell providing him with just enough air to keep him from suffocation. In Paris he had breathed fresh air. There the light of the sun, human voices, the sounds of life had enraptured him. Now, down among the fishes, he shivered with cold. He suffered the most terrible ennui. The stillness made him ill; the narrowness of everything galled him to the quick. He describes himself as one of those natures which cannot in the long run endure the "solo music" of existence. "Symphonies of Beethoven or thunder-storms" were a necessity to him. He was one of the people who feel themselves out of place in a box at the theatre, who sit from choice in the pit, in the middle of the crowd. It seemed to him as if in Germany the bullion of life were minted underground, in the silence of midnight, like counterfeiters' coin. Those who worked did not enjoy, and those who enjoyed, who in the light of day set the money in circulation that had been coined in fear and trembling in the darkness, did not work. In France a man of health and spirit lived a life like that of a king's messenger, who is sent with despatches to foreign towns, never twice to the same place, and who on his long journeys sees and enjoys life in its most different developments; in Germany he lived like a postilion, who is always taking the same short journey back and forwards between two post-houses, receiving a miserable tip from fortune for his trouble. The postilion was perfectly able to take the journey in his sleep; he knew every stone on his ten miles of road; and this in Germany was called thoroughness; but Börne, sitting in the little hotel in Soden, watching the geese fighting in the yard, and studying the jealousy of the turkey-cocks and the coquetry of the turkey-hens, was not grateful for the opportunity of remarkable thoroughness afforded him.[3] When the news reached him that Polignac's ministry had issued the famous ordinances, had violated the constitution, he cried, anticipating all the consequences of this step: "And God said, let there be light!" The news of the Revolution of July followed. Every day he awaited the hour of the arrival of the newspaper with impatience; he walked out the country road, on the lookout for the mail; if it delayed too long, he went all the way to Höchst, where the papers came from. Soon he felt unable to remain in Soden. He returned to Frankfort, and astonished, electrified his environment by his fire. The silent, invalid-looking Börne was unrecognisable; a miracle seemed to have happened; he was young and strong again. All his old dreams seemed to have become realities, and everything in him that he had been forcibly keeping down sprang up again like a spring when pressure is removed. Frankfort did not long satisfy him; presently we hear of him in Paris. On the 7th of September he writes from Strasburg: "The first French cockade I saw was on the hat of a peasant who passed me in Kehl coming from Strasburg. It seemed to me like a little rainbow after the flood of our time, a sign of peace from a reconciled God. But when the bright tri-coloured flag greeted my eyes--oh! words cannot express my emotion. My heart beat so violently that I was on the point of fainting.... The flag was on the middle of the bridge, its staff rooted in French ground, but part of the bunting waving in German air. Ask the first Secretary of Legation you meet if this is not a breach of international law. It was only the red stripe of the flag that fluttered over our native soil. And this is the one colour of French liberty that will be ours. Red, blood, blood--and alas! not blood shed on the battlefield." Börne is here only the mouthpiece of a feeling which had taken possession of most of the many in Germany who were susceptible of enthusiasm. The heroism shown by the French students, polytechnicians, and working men during _les trois jours glorieux_ was admired as much as in France itself, and doubly admired as the proof of an energy which the German people appeared to have lost. There was a universal inclination to drift into exaggerated contempt of their own want of political aptitude and insight, their own want of ability to act at the decisive moment. Thus powerfully did events act upon characters like Börne, and upon the enthusiasts who were to be found in greatest numbers in the scholarly class. Let us complete the picture by observing their effect on the men of the reaction. Gentz, who had at first exulted over Charles X.'s energy, grew anxious as the _coup d'état_ approached. "I look upon the ordinance against newspapers and books," he writes, "as a tremendous venture, of the success of which I am as yet by no means assured.... Such weapons ought to be played with only by people who are sure of their strength and of the means at their disposal. To venture into such regions means ruin for men like Polignac and Peyronnet."[4] As soon, however, as the first alarm had subsided, he and his spiritual kindred set to work to take advantage of every mistake made by the Liberals. Wisely turned to account, the after-effects of the Revolution of July in Germany, by the occasion they gave for ruthless repression and persecution, censorship, and imprisonment, might lame the German Liberal movement for many a day; might (as Metternich said a few years later of the Hambach Festival) make the anniversary of the Revolution a day of rejoicing for the good instead of for the bad. And only a year later, Gentz, who at times had seen the future in a very dark light, was able to write: "Away with all gloomy forebodings now! We are not to die, Europe is not to die, and what we love is not to die. I am proud of never having despaired."[5] Metternich had enough literary taste to admire Börne, and Gentz was a fanatical Heine enthusiast. Before the Revolution of July it was still possible to look upon Heine as essentially the poet of unhappy love and the poetical humorist, with a touch of blasphemy and frivolity. In the summer of 1830 Heinrich Heine was at Heligoland, dreaming on the shore, gazing out to sea, listening to the plash of the waves. He had given up all hope of better times. He occupied himself with reading the few books he had taken with him--Homer, the Bible, the history of the Lombards, and some old volumes on witches and witchcraft. He could hardly himself believe that he had quite lately been the editor of the _Politische Annalen_ in Munich. Two days after the Revolution of July had taken place, but before the news of it had reached Heligoland, he wrote, in one of his letters from that island, that he had now determined to let politics and philosophy alone, and to devote himself entirely to the observation of nature and to art; that all this torture and trouble was to no purpose; that however great sacrifices he might make in the general cause, they would be of little or no avail; the world, doubtless, did not stand still, but it moved in a circle, with no result whatever; when he was young and inexperienced, he had believed that even if the individual perished in the war of human liberation, the great cause would be victorious in the end; now he recognised the fact that humanity, like the ocean, moved according to fixed laws of ebb and flow. Even if these expressions have been strung together at a later period, even if the letters are not genuine, but a fragment of memoir inserted later, for the sake of contrast, in the book on Börne[6], they will undoubtedly give us a correct picture of Heine's mental attitude at that time. On the 6th of August he writes: "I was sitting reading Paul Warnefried's _History of the Lombards,_ when the thick packet of newspapers, with the warm, glowing-hot news, arrived from the mainland. Each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed paper, and together they kindled my soul into a wild glow. I felt as if I could set the whole ocean, to the very North Pole, on fire, with the red heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that glowed within me." It was all like a dream to him; the name Lafayette especially was like the echo of one of the stories of his earliest childhood; he could hardly believe that the man who had ridden in front of the grandfathers of the present generation in the American War of Independence was once more on horseback, the hero of the nation. He felt as if he must go to Paris and see it for himself. He writes with a passionate fervour, which he soon feels obliged to temper with a touch of self-contempt: "Lafayette, the tri-colour flag, the Marseillaise.... It intoxicates me. Bold, ardent hopes spring up, like trees with golden fruit and with branches that shoot up wildly, till their leaves touch the clouds.... My longing for rest is gone. I know once more what I desire, what I ought to, what I must, do.... I am the son of the Revolution, and again I take into my hand the charmed weapons, over which my mother spoke the magic spell.... Flowers, flowers! that I may crown my head for the death struggle. And the lyre, too; give me the lyre! that I may sing a song of battle.... Words like flaming stars, that shoot down from the sky, set palaces on fire, and illuminate huts.... Words like burnished javelins, that whirr up into the seventh heaven and transfix the pious hypocrites who have insinuated themselves into the holy of holies.... I am all gladness and song, all sword and flame, and quite possibly mad." Among other things, he tells how the fisherman who some days later rowed him out to the sandbank from which they bathed, told him the news smilingly, with the words: "The poor people have won the victory." Heine expresses his astonishment at the correct instinct of the common man. And yet the exact opposite was the real state of matters; it was the rich people who in the end were and remained the victors. But an utterance such as the last quoted suffices to show the light in which German authors regarded the Revolution of July. It inspired in them the same religious emotion with which forty years previously the leading spirits of the Germany of that day had regarded the great Revolution. It was not to them the result of the strength of the Liberal bourgeoisie, and of their ability to persuade the lower classes to work and shed their blood for them; it was the general signal for the political, economical, and religious emancipation of humanity. It was the great deed that with one blow freed all nations from the yoke, all minds from oppression. In 1847 one of the foremost of the Radical writers of the Forties, Robert Prutz (at the time of the Revolution only fourteen), gave an excellent reproduction of the impression it created. "For fifteen years," he says, "it had seemed as if the eternal generative power of the world's history were paralysed. For fifteen years they had been building and cementing, holding congresses, forming alliances, spreading the net of police supervision over the whole of Europe, forging fetters, peopling prisons, erecting gallows--and three days had sufficed to overturn one throne, and make all the others tremble. It was not true then, after all, what the sovereigns had boasted, what the court romanticists had said and sung."[7] The millennial reign of the Holy Alliance had lasted fifteen years. It seemed as if a new spring must be at hand in the political and intellectual life of the German people. [1] Karl Gutzkow: _Das Kastanienwäldchen in Berlin. --Rückblicke auf mein Leben_, p. 7. [2] _Cf_. Emil Kuh: _Biographie Fr. Hebbels_, i. 437. [3] _Aus meinem Tagebuch_. Soden, May 22, 1830. [4] "Die Ordonnanz gegen die Zeitungen und Bücher betrachte ich als ein kolossales Wagstück, dessen Ausführbarkeit mir noch nicht recht einleuchtet.... Mit solchen Waffen darf man nur spielen, wenn man seiner Kraft und seiner Mittel gewiss ist. Leute wie Polignac und Peyronnet, wenn sie sich in diese Regionen versteigen, gehen zu Grunde." [5] "Nun fort mit allen schwarzen Gedanken! Wir sterben nicht, Europa stirbt nicht, was wir liebe stirbt nicht. Wie viel bilde ich mir darauf ein, nie verzweifelt zu haben." [6] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke_, XII. 80. [7] R. Prutz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der Gegenwart_, 270, 271. V THE INFLUENCE OF BYRON The classical literature of Germany in the end of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century was in subject or form imitative of the antique; the Romantic literature which followed swore allegiance to the Middle Ages; both stood aloof from surrounding actualities, from the Now, from existing political or social conditions; neither directly aimed at producing any change in these. The ideal floated in the deep blue ether of Greece or in the Catholic sky of the Middle Ages. Now it was resolutely dragged down to earth. The modern ideal, an ideal which contains no mythic element, manifested itself to the dreamers and the workers. And with a haste, a violence, that too often made prose journalistic, poetry only lyric or quite fragmentary, the opposition poets and prose writers set to work to draw all modern life into the sphere of literature. From the fact of this inclusion, this appropriation, taking place when things were on a war footing, wit and satire became more prominent powers than they had ever been before in Germany; and the mood and inspiration of the "Sturm und Drang" period seemed to have revived, so far as aggressive defiance of the established was concerned. It was a strong craving for liberty that first induced Heine and Börne to strike out a new path in German literature, and afterwards inspired the writers who followed them, and were known by the vague name of "Young Germany." But there was one great man who, foreigner though he was, influenced German intellectual life by his personality, writings, and actions more than any of the famous men of the past. This was Lord Byron. It was long before men's eyes in Germany were opened to his artistic weaknesses and deficiencies. Gutzkow alone, about the year 1835, begins to criticise him discerningly. But the Byron whom Goethe had admired and shown favour to (though principally because of that in him which the old master attributed to his own influence), Byron, with his contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath the "wars of liberty" against Napoleon, with his championship of the oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen, his passionate love of liberty in every domain, transfigured by his death as a liberator, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry. Wilhelm Müller, the poet of the _Griechenlieder_, sings of him with fervent enthusiasm: "Siebenunddreissig Trauerschüsse? Und wen haben sie gemeint? Sind es siebenunddreissig Siege, die er abgekämpft dem Feind? Sind es siebenunddreissig Wunden, die der Held trägt auf der Brust? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Siebenunddreissig Jahre sind es, welche Hellas heut beweint! Sind' die Jahre, die du lebtest? Nein um diese wein ich nicht: Ewig leben diese Jahre in des Ruhmes Sonnenlicht, Auf des Liedes Adlerschwingen, die mit nimmer müdem Schlag Durch die Bahn der Zeiten rauschen, rauschend grosse Seelen wach. Nein, ich wein um andre Jahre, Jahre die du nicht gelebt, Um die Jahre, die für Hellas du zu leben hast gestrebt: Solche Jahre, Monde, Tage kündet mir des Donners Hall, Welche Lieder, welche Kämpfe, welche Wunden, welchen Fall! Einen Fall im Siegestaumel auf den Mauern von Byzanz, Eine Krone dir zu Füssen, auf dem Haupt der Freiheit Kranz!"[1] Byron's pride and his contempt for political slavery meet us again in Platen; his aristocratic tone, his antipathy to prejudice, his taste for travel, his love of animals and of nature, his charm and his irony, live again in Prince Pückler. How enormously he influenced the formation of Heine's poetical ideal needs no insisting on, so forcibly does it strike every one who is familiar with the development of the modern literature of Europe. But it is both remarkable and instructive to observe the light in which he was looked upon by Börne, the first pioneer of the new German literary movement, a fundamentally different character from the English poet. One would naturally imagine that the vain, frivolous sides of Byron's personality would repel him, as these same qualities did in the case of Heine. Far from it. Note the expressions he employs in writing about him (_Briefe aus Paris_, No. 44) after reading Moore's _Life of Byron_. He calls the book wine that sends a glow of warmth through the poor German wayfarer, shivering on his journey through life. He feels almost ill with envy of such a life: "Like a comet that submits to no rules and regulations of the star community, Byron wandered through the world, wild and free; came without welcome, departed without farewell, preferring solitude to the thraldom of friendship. His feet never touched the dry earth; through storm and shipwreck he steered undauntedly onwards, and the first harbour he came to was the grave. Oh, how he was tossed about! But what islands of bliss did he not discover!... His was the kingly nature ... he is king who lives as he lists. When I hear people say that Byron only lived for thirty-seven years, I laugh; he lived for a thousand. And when they pity him because he was so melancholy! Is not God melancholy? Melancholy is God's gladness. Is it possible to be glad when one loves? Byron hated men because he loved mankind, hated life because he loved eternity. I would give all the joys of my life for a year of Byron's sorrows." We observe not only that Börne takes everything about Byron seriously, but that he is quite unconscious of the same self-indulgent temperament in Byron which repelled him so strongly in Goethe. And it is still more surprising that Börne should consider his own nature to be akin to Byron's. He writes:-- "Perhaps you ask me in surprise how such a beggarly fellow as I come to compare myself with Byron; in which case I must tell you something that you do not know. When Byron's genius on his journey through the firmament first came to this earth, he stayed for a night with me. But the lodging was not to his mind; he left again at once, and took up his quarters at the Hotel Byron. I sorrowed over this for many a year, grieved over my insignificance, my failure. But that is past now; I have forgotten it, and live contented in my poverty. My misfortune is that I was born in the middle class, for which I am not suited." Words such as these bear striking witness to the magic power which the shade of Byron still exercised over the minds of the leaders of literature. [1] What mean these thirty-seven minute-guns? Do they tell of thirty-seven victories? of thirty-seven wounds on the hero's breast?... They are thirty-seven years, that Greece is mourning to-day. Are they the years of thy life? Nay, over these we do not mourn; these live for ever in the sunlight of fame, borne upon the eagle wings of song, whose tireless beat resounds down the ages, awakening great souls. 'Tis other years I weep, the years thou wouldst have lived for Greece. 'Tis of these years and months and days that the volley's thunder speaks to me. What songs, what struggles, what wounds, what a fall! A fall in the intoxicating moment of victory, on the walls of Byzantium, a crown at thy feet, on thy brow the wreath of liberty! VI VALUE OF THE NEW LITERATURE It was under the conditions and influences just described that the German opposition literature of 1820 to 1848 came into being. In surveying such a large group of intellectual productions, we naturally look upon them in the first instance as being, taken generally, a series of documents which inform us how the people of that country and that time thought and felt, what were the developments of their civilisation, what their hopes, their wishes, their philanthropy, their devotion to liberty, their sense of right, their ideal of good government, and, finally, what their taste was--that is to say, in what manner an author required to write who wished to be read and to awaken real interest. Our historical curiosity on these points being satisfied, there next involuntarily arises the question of the actual value of the literature. In the case of philosophical writings this question turns mainly upon the measure of new truth they contain; or if, as is too often necessary, we are obliged to regard them chiefly in the light of productions of the imagination, it turns upon the scope and suggestiveness of their hypotheses. In the case of poetry and fiction, and also to a certain extent in the case of the allied historical and descriptive writings, the question of their value is the same as the question of their beauty; for by beauty we mean artistic worth. It is a well-known fact that out of a very large number of authors only one or two continue to be read after the lapse of a few generations; out of an enormous number of works there is only one here and there that people continue to make their own. Of the writers of the period under consideration, very few are known and read to-day out of Germany; in Germany of course a considerably greater number; still, comparatively few of the productions of that day are in the hands of the general reading public. The first rough criticism is thus the work of time; after the lapse of so many years, such and such an author does not sell, whilst another is perpetually coming out in new editions. But it is no absolute proof of the worth of a writer that he long continues to have a wide circle of readers. It does not prove that his place is among the best, only that he is among the most approachable, the most entertaining. A high degree of culture, or of refinement of mind, may stand in the way of a wide circulation, though they ensure lasting fame. At the present day, out of Germany, only two of the philosophical writers of that day, Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, are still read, the former little, the latter much; but it was at a later period that Schopenhauer began to influence men's minds, and both these thinkers are read less for the sake of their matter than for their original, daring style. Of the poets, only Heine is much and steadily read out of Germany. In Germany he is looked on and judged as the stinging-nettle in the garden of literature; he stings the historians' fingers and they curse him. In histories of literature and magazine articles his prose is described as old-fashioned and his poetry as artificial; yet his works, now that the copyright has expired, are republished in innumerable editions. Both in and out of Germany he is as much sung as read. His poems have given occasion to more than 3000 musical compositions. In 1887 the solo-songs alone (leaving out of account the duets, quartettes and choruses) numbered 2,500. Hueffer has counted one hundred and sixty settings of "Du bist wie eine Blume," eighty-three each of "Ich hab' im Traum geweinet" and "Leise zieht durch mein Gemuth," seventy-six of "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam," and thirty-seven of "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten." Amongst these compositions are many of the most beautiful songs of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Robert Franz, and Rubinstein--very few of which the poet himself can have heard. Of all the German lyric poets Heine is the one whose songs have been most frequently set to music. After him, with his 3000 compositions, comes Goethe, with about 1700; the others follow far behind. Out of Germany Heine's fame not merely lives unassailed, but is steadily growing and spreading. In France he occupies men's minds as if he were a contemporary. He is the only foreign poet whom Frenchmen regard as one of their own, one of their greatest. No other foreign author is so frequently mentioned in the French literature of our own day, and none is named with greater admiration, not even Shelley or Poe. Edmond de Goncourt makes use of the strong expression, that all modern French writers when compared with Heine remind him of commercial travellers; and Théophile Gautier said that the Philistines sought to drag the stones to build a pyramid above Heine's grave. A question that is constantly cropping up in one civilised society or another is: What works should be included in a library of the hundred best books? The answers of course vary very much. But in all Romanic and Slavonic countries, Heine's name is sure to be one of the first on the lists. On English lists there are usually ninety English books and ten foreign, but Heine's name is certain to be among the ten. The belief that it is possible to find a hundred books which would be the best reading for every one, a belief which has its origin in the Protestant notion of there being one such great book, is of course childish, and the question interesting only in so far as it shows what an entirely impersonal ideal of culture exists in the mind both of the questioner and of those who naïvely set themselves to answer his question. It is instructive, however, _à propos_ of Heine, to notice the results in certain specific cases. No small astonishment was expressed in Germany a few years ago, when a great number of English lists were published, and Heine was found in them all--a distinction shown to no other German author, for there were lists which contained no book by Goethe. This universal fame is not, however, founded on Heine's merits alone, but also on the fact that much of his writing demands only the very slightest amount of culture for its comprehension, and of refinement of mind for its enjoyment; the latter quality being indeed rather a hindrance to the enjoyment of some of it. Still its main foundation is the fact that, after all, his talent was, in its way, the most eminent of that period. If, then, the value of a literary work of art is evidenced by its power of resistance to time, and its attraction for foreign readers, and yet these qualities form no proper criterion of its value, how are we to gauge it? By the originality and vigour of the spiritual life and of the emotion of which the work is an expression, together with its power of impressing these characteristics on the reader. All art is the expression of some emotion, and has for its object the production of emotions. The deeper a signet gem is cut, the sharper, the clearer are the outlines in wax. The deeper the impression in the soul of the artist, the clearer, the more forcible is its artistic expression. The emotions of the artist differ from those of other men only in this, that they leave in his memory that species of impression, which, when he reproduces it, infects listener or reader. The questions to which any work provides us with answers are such as the following: How far-sighted was the author? How deeply did he penetrate into the life of his time? How characteristically did he feel joy, or grief, or sadness, or love, or enthusiasm, or cynicism? We say: So great was the horror, or disgust, inspired in him by stupidity or wickedness; so sharply or wittily did he revenge himself and us on contemptible stupidity or worthlessness. From the best we receive an impression of high-mindedness or greatness, of love of truth or love of beauty; in the case of inferior men we suffer from deficiency in understanding, in depth of feeling, in sense of beauty, or in strength of character. Now the literary group under consideration includes no creative minds of the highest, and only one of very high rank, namely Heine. It bequeathed to posterity little that was tangibly great. It denied, it emancipated, it cleared up, it let in fresh air. It is strong through its doubt, its hatred of thraldom, its individualism. In Germany, especially in North Germany, it has never stood so low in general estimation as at the present day. Those writers who, about the year 1830, made war upon all the forms of tyranny which weighed upon the German-speaking peoples, have in our days been overtaken by an unpopularity which shows no signs of decrease. The explanation is simple. The younger generation of the Germany of to-day, which has the unification of the Empire behind it--that unification which to the men of 1830 was a fantastic hope--and which has seen Germany put forth its united strength in prompt, universally successful action, that generation takes little interest in the old dreamy speculations as to how the unification was to be brought about, and is bored by these old writers' everlasting ridicule of German sleepiness and inactivity, German pedantry and theorising, now that results have shown how practical and how resolute the flouted Germany could be when an opportunity was offered her. More especially since the Franco-German war, the writers who half a century ago were always praising France at the expense of Germany, or maintaining that liberty would bring to Germany those blessings which actually came to her through Bismarck, have been placed under a sort of ban. They are looked on as bad patriots and foolish prophets. Only a small minority are able to perceive how powerfully that very indignation, that scorn for the contemptible existing conditions, helped to bring on the change and improvement that followed. And still fewer in number are those who read in the literature of the Thirties and Forties a living reproach for betrayed or forgotten ideals, and who, as they turn over the leaves of these old books, ask themselves sadly what, in the new order of things, has become of the best that these men fought for. VII BÖRNE Of the authors who in those days stood in the foremost rank, Ludwig Börne is now almost the most neglected. The subjects on which he wrote are obsolete, and none but those interested in the personality of the writer read his short prose pieces in the form of newspaper articles or letters, for the sake of the style, or of the spirit in which the subject is treated. It was in the later years of his life that Börne first really made a name for himself by his _Letters from Paris_; and the abstract hatred of princes and the republican faith which find expression in these letters are entirely out of place in the young Empire of to-day. No personality could be more utterly out of keeping with the new order of things. Where the idea of the State is by slow degrees becoming all-powerful: where, from above, despotically socialistic, it seeks to restrict initiative, transforms as many citizens as possible into paid officials, and gives the paid official precedence of the simple citizen, and from below, revolutionarily socialistic, strives with all its might to restrict individual freedom of action: there markedly self-reliant characters inevitably disappear, and the rugged, independent individuality seems something illegal, something which no one can accept as a model of culture. Börne's was just such an angular individuality and perfectly independent character. [Illustration: LUDWIG BÖRNE] In the German middle-class of to-day, speaking generally, the only task that seems worthy of a man is to build up, to forward, to strengthen or remould the already acquired. The iconoclastic tendency of Börne's mind at once alarms. The fire which warmed his age and generation is to the new generation that of a Don Quixote who charges with his lance at fortress and castle walls. And yet Börne, too, had a hand in the production of the iron architecture of the new Iron Age of Germany. His fire melted the ore out of which the new pillars of society have been cast. Perhaps nothing has injured Börne more in the estimation of the present generation than his violently prejudiced denunciation of Goethe. Goethe, as productive and intelligent spirit, is so great, and his temperament and personality are so unique, that in our own day a man's judgment of him gives a valuable clue to that man's mind and character. And although in those days there were quite a number of writers, not only belonging to the clerical party, but also among the opposition, who detested Goethe, there can be no doubt that Börne gave clear proof of narrow-mindedness by the manner in which he wrote of the venerable old man in Weimar, by the nature of his protests against the general belief in Goethe's greatness as a man and as a poet. But in order to understand how it came about and what it signified that a revolutionary political moralist like Börne entertained a feeling of positive hatred and of lasting and lively resentment towards the greatest genius in all German literature, it is necessary that we should understand how, from his very birth, Börne's fate placed him in a position of antagonism to the great man whom he was driven to judge by an alien and therefore a false standard. Goethe and Börne were natives of the same town, born, one thirty-seven years after the other, in Frankfort-on-Main. Frankfort was an old imperial fortified city, with gates and towers which indicated the boundaries of the town in earlier days, and an outer circle of gates, towers, walls, bridges, ramparts and moats round the new town. It was a fortified place enclosing smaller fortifications in the shape of monastic buildings and castle-like mansions. There was something unalterable about the town, which was surrounded by a sort of halo of ancient, venerable independence. It was a patrician republic, in which a stranger was practically without the pale of the law. Woe to him if he engaged in a law-suit with a Frankfort citizen in a Frankfort court of justice, though it might be clear as noon-day that he was in the right! The ruling families formed an exclusive coterie, and their social intercourse was marked by much old-fashioned ceremony. No one dreamed of the possibility of tampering with any of the old political or social institutions of the city. The authorities had no spirit of enterprise, the inhabitants no feeling that change of any kind was possible. Such a thing as political cohesion with the rest of Germany was unthought of. In the Germany of that day each town, and in the town each quarter, was a little world by itself. Goethe was a young patrician. His father was an Imperial Councillor (_kaiserlicher Rath_). As soon as the young man had acquired a thorough knowledge and understanding of his native town, it must have seemed to him that fate could not possibly have any other lot in store for him but that of a prosperous Frankfort citizen. For the town enthralled him; its best families took possession of the handsome, gifted youth, their women made much of him, their tradition bound him. There was nothing to attract him to the larger towns, Vienna or Berlin, which were then practically as far from Frankfort as Rome and St. Petersburg are in our days. Fate appeared to have destined him to become in due time a lawyer, paterfamilias, public official, house-owner, and literary notability in his native town.[1] Goethe's actual evasion of this fate was, as every one knows, mainly due to the fact which calls down Börne's wrath upon him, that he became the retainer of a prince, that the Duke of Weimar gave him an important appointment at his little court. Börne, too, was born in Frankfort-on-Main, but in the Jews' quarter. In his day it was a misfortune to be born a Jew in Germany; for there, as elsewhere, the Jews had none of the rights of citizens. But it was a special misfortune to be born a Jew in Frankfort-on-Main. In other large towns, the position which Jews by this time took in society to a certain extent counterbalanced their political disqualifications. Both in Vienna and Berlin many Jewish houses were frequented as centres of liberal-minded culture and brilliant wit. Jewesses of genius like Rahel, charming Jewesses like Henriette Herz, Baroness Grotthuis, Baroness Arnstein, the Prince of Reuss's consort, and many others, were soon to become leaders of society in the capitals of Prussia and Austria. But in Frankfort, in every walk of life, the barrier between the religions was an impassable one. All Jews were compelled to live in the narrow, mean, over-populated Judengasse, which was their only place of abode for 334 years, from 1462 onwards. The contrast we read of in novels between the outward meanness and inward splendour of the Ghettos did not exist here; the interiors of the houses corresponded to their exteriors; in the small, dark rooms no display of splendour or of taste was possible. A few years ago we had the best of all opportunities of judging of the kind of life the inhabitants of the Judengasse must have lived. One side of the street was pulled down, and a single stunted row of deformed, hunchbacked, cramped, startled-looking houses, in which great gaps had already been made by the axe of the leveller, was exposed to the full light of day, from which their little blinking bull's-eye windows gave them the appearance of shrinking. As soon as it began to grow dark, all the inhabitants of the Ghetto were locked in. When they walked through the streets or round the ramparts in the day-time, they dared not set foot on the pavement or foot-paths, but had to keep to the middle of the road. They were obliged to take off their hats and make a low bow to every passer-by who called: "Mach mores, Jud'!" In order to prevent their too rapid increase, only fourteen couples were permitted to marry each year. Although even at that time a large proportion of the Frankfort Jews, with Rothschild at their head, were wealthy, a strong society barrier existed between the religions. They were even separated in the Masonic Lodges, which are consecrated to "brotherly love" and the worship of "the highest Being." It is clear that such a condition of things must have had a strong influence on a receptive young mind. On the 6th of May 1786, in house No. 118 of that Judengasse which has now disappeared, there was born to the "Jew merchant Jakob Baruch" a third son, the same who in 1818, shortly before his baptism, exchanged the name Juda Low Baruch, given him at his birth, for that of Ludwig Börne. The family stood in very high estimation. Börne's grandfather was a rich and remarkably benevolent man. He built and fitted up a synagogue for the community at his own expense. He was the business agent at Neckarsulm of the Teutonic Order, and was thence transferred, on account of his ability and honesty, to Mergentheim, the headquarters of the Order, where he took up his residence. An Electorship becoming vacant, he did such good service, in the course of the election, to the House of Hapsburg, that Maria Theresa with her own hand signed a document promising all sorts of privileges to him and his descendants if they should at any time take up their abode in Austria. This man's son, Jakob Baruch, inherited, it seems, his father's ability and sagacity without his orthodox religious faith. He was a clever man of business, with considerable diplomatic talent, much esteemed at courts and by high officials for his knowledge of human nature, his clearsightedness and coolness; a cold, prudent man, to whom life had taught the lesson that the best thing those in his position could do was to live quietly and thus avoid exciting hatred. He held enlightened opinions on religious subjects, and the wearisome Jewish ceremonial, which, chiefly for his father's sake, he felt obliged to observe with all his household, was a burden to him personally. It was not till late in life that he tried to emancipate himself. Being a rich man's son, he had received a fair education; it is said that he was at the same school in Bonn as Prince Metternich; but his cautiousness led him to give strict orders to his own son's one tutor to confine himself to the old Jewish course of instruction--the Bible, the prayer-book, and the Talmud. The boy was quiet and shy. As he was the one of her children his mother cared least for, and was constantly in disgrace with the tyrannical old servant, his home-life was one of severe discipline, his father too, no doubt with the manifestation of independence in thought or action. One result of this was, that when he first came into contact with the outer world, his emotions blunted, his intellect doubly keen, he looked at everything from the purely intellectual point of view. A thing was stupid or not stupid, and that was all.[2] The religious observances of his home and of the synagogue aroused in the boy a feeling of aversion as dead ritual; the religious instruction he received at home made as little impression on him as his attendance at the synagogue. Certain prayers, as, for instance, the prayer for the reinstitution of sacrificial worship, displeased him, in spite of his boyish orthodoxy. To the horror of those about him, he said: "That is a stupid prayer." His learning was mere committing to memory, his teacher not believing himself what he taught; and it was all quickly forgotten. As a grown man, he did not know a single word of Hebrew, had no understanding whatever of Jewish customs, and no affection even for the Old Testament, of which Heine was such an enthusiastic admirer. The man who himself reminds us of an Old Testament prophet, has not one allusion to the prophets in all his writings. From time to time, indeed, with complete indifference, and merely as a well-known illustration, he refers to some Bible narratives; but as Steinthal acutely observes, he quotes even such a passage as Samuel's republican warning against the establishment of a kingdom, which one would expect to excite his every sympathy, as if he were quoting one of Æsop's fables.[3] Schiller's essay, _The Mission of Moses_, was the first hint of a rational conception of religion that reached the boy. It made a deep impression on him, and shook his faith. Naïvely simple as the essay is, with its implicit trust in the historic accuracy of the Bible narrative, it yet inevitably produced a revolution in the mind of the youthful reader, who now for the first time saw the most important events in the life of his people and of their lawgiver divested of every miraculous element, Providence itself being superseded by "destiny." Various anecdotes exist, illustrating the awakening of the spirit of criticism in the boy, and the play of the different forces which formed his character. One day, when it was raining heavily and the road was inch-deep in mud, he was walking with his tutor outside the gates of the town. "Let us walk on the footpath," said Börne. "Do you not know," answered the teacher, "that we are forbidden to do that?" The boy's reply, "no one sees us," gave the tutor an opportunity for a moral exhortation, with remarks on the sacredness of law. "That is a stupid law," said Börne. The tutor was careful to avoid occasions of exciting bitterness in the child. But there were so many. No Jew was allowed to be present at any open-air public amusements, not even at a balloon ascent. On all festive occasions, as, for instance, when the town was decorated for the reception of royal guests, the Jews were shut up in the Judengasse; on the day of the coronation of Leopold II. some of their leading men ventured out, but were at once arrested and taken to the guard-house. They were prohibited from entering most of the hotels, and from setting foot in any public grounds or open spaces. The general rule was: Where there is green grass, no Jew must be seen. On Sundays the gates of the Judengasse were locked at four o'clock in the afternoon, and the sentry allowed no one to pass out except persons taking letters to the post-house or going for medicine to the apothecary's. Little Börne used to say: "I only don't go out because the sentry is stronger than I am." Yet when the boy, who early showed signs of a distinctly benevolent disposition, was accosted one day by two beggars, the one a Jew, the other a Christian, it was to the latter he gave all the money he had in his pocket. "Why do you not give the preference to one of your own people?" asked the tutor. "Because it is written in the Proverbs of Solomon that we are to heap coals of fire on our enemies' heads." The conscientious tutor would not hear of this reason: "it was based on the false assumption that the Christians are the enemies of the Jews." It is easy to understand that such impressions, received in childhood, must have caused Börne's ancestry to weigh more upon his mind than it would have done under normal conditions. And even if he could have forgotten it, the frequent humiliations experienced in his youth, and in later years the perpetual allusions to his nationality made both by his opponents and his champions, would have constantly reminded him of it. With reference to these perpetual allusions he writes in _Briefe aus Paris_ (Feb. 7, 1832): "It is like a miracle! The thing is always happening, and yet is always new to me. One set of people reproach me with being a Jew; another set forgive me for it; a third go the length of praising me for it; but they one and all think of it. It is as if they had been conjured into this magic Jewish circle; none of them can get clear of it. And I know quite well what is the evil spell. These poor Germans! They live in the basement, weighed down by seven stories of higher ranks, and it eases their perturbed minds to talk of human beings who live even lower down than they do, right down in the cellar. The fact that they are not Jews consoles them for not even being court-councillors (_Hofräthe_)." It cannot, however, be asserted that Börne was peculiarly sensitive on the subject of his Jewish extraction. He often declaimed with the greatest indignation against the oppression of the unfortunate inhabitants of the Ghettos, but he could not do what many expected of him, could not advocate the emancipation of the Jews with greater warmth than other kindred causes. A pursuit of liberty with only that end in view he looked upon as one-sided and egoistic. Moreover, the Jews inspired him with a feeling of dissatisfaction, of aversion, originating in the antipathy which Frankfort commerce, consisting chiefly in banking business, early awoke in the born poet and idealist. It horrified him to hear a Frankfort merchant speak with the same enthusiasm and ardour of Rothschild or the Austrian loan, with which "a lover of art would speak of a Raphael." In 1822 he wrote: "My aversion from traders and Jews, as such, has reached a climax, now that I have got away from Frankfort, and see what it really means to enjoy life." Börne was by no means incapable of appreciating great commercial undertakings from the æsthetic as well as the practical point of view. Not many years later, the exchange and the harbour of Hamburg excite his lively admiration. But the Frankfort merchants, Rothschild among them, appeared to him, with their speculations in government stock, to be connected with what he abhorred above everything--the dismembered state of Germany and the Metternichian principles. His writings abound in thrusts at "the ennobled German Jews, who are on terms of the most familiar intimacy with all the ministers and royal mistresses," and in consequence look with complete indifference on the Poles' struggle for liberty. Rothschild especially is to him the symbol of evil: "The government could not be more despicable if Rothschild the Jew were king, and had formed a ministry of bill-brokers.... Rothschild will stand till the last day of kings. What a day of reckoning! what a crash!" In his bitter hatred of him he goes so far as to call it a disgrace to the Jewish nation when Rothschild is sentenced in Paris to two days' imprisonment for declining, in spite of repeated warnings, to have his cabriolet numbered. Börne had, of course, no personal enmity to the man, but he detests him as "the great broker of all those State loans which give monarchs the power to defy liberty." Being firmly persuaded, after the Revolution of July, that another great revolution was close at hand, he mistakenly considers it stupid of the Jews to curry favour with those in power throughout Europe. But he is right when he calls them "stupider than cattle" for imagining that in the event of a threatening revolution they will be protected by the governments. With sound political judgment he perceives, what events in Russia have confirmed, that it is exactly at such a time that those in power will deliver them up to the tender mercies of popular hatred in order to escape themselves.[4] The fact of Börne's being born without the pale of Christian society did not produce in him any excessive sympathy with his co-religionists; but the severe discipline of his joyless childhood, the coldness of his parents, the aversion aroused in him by the cupidity, cowardly caution, and other vices generated by oppression which he observed in those around him, all contributed to forge a spirit that could never be bent, softened, or broken--a character on whose adamantine firmness neither flattery nor threats made the smallest impression. The severity of this character of ermine-white purity, a severity born of the burning love of justice, at times clad itself in the garment of humorous irony, at times in that of scathing ire. As a writer Börne was for Germany much what Paul Louis Courier was for France, that is to say, a political tribune, as satirical and as liberty-loving as the Frenchman, less clear-sighted in matters of the day, but with more feeling, more imagination, an all-round richer nature.[5] For in Börne's case firmness of character did not preclude gentleness of disposition. The weak, always rather sickly boy, who grew up in a sunless street, shut off from fresh air and from nature, was tender-hearted. The germ of tenderness in his nature was perhaps first developed by reading that German author who exercised most influence on the formation of his opinions and his style--Jean Paul. It is from Jean Paul, his best comforter in the dark days of his youth, that Börne, the author, is directly descended. To him Jean Paul was the poet of those who are born in obscurity. He loved him as the spokesman of those who suffer wrong. He saw in him a priest of justice, an apostle of mercy. His famous commemorative oration gives us some idea of his youthful enthusiasm, and at the same time shows what it was in Jean Paul's style that he endeavoured to make his own. Real emotion makes itself felt through the artificial antitheses in such a passage as this:-- "We will sorrow for him whom we have lost, and for those who have not lost him. For he did not live for all. But the time is coming when he will be born for all, and then all will mourn for him. He stands with a patient smile at the gates of the twentieth century, waiting till his lagging people overtake him. Then he will lead the tired and the famishing into his city of love." And there is clever character-drawing in such lines as the following:-- "In countries the towns only are counted; in towns, only the towers, the temples, and the palaces; in houses, their masters; in nations, parties; and in parties, their leaders.... By narrow, overgrown paths Jean Paul sought out the neglected village. In the nation he counted the human beings, in towns the house-roofs, and under every roof each heart." It was possibly Jean Paul's political attitude which first brought Börne under his spell. Jean Paul early took his place in German literature as the inheritor of Herder's cosmopolitan sentiments and doctrines. Herder had persistently exalted love of humanity, at the expense of patriotism and national antipathy. Jean Paul continued to proclaim the common brotherhood of man. All his writings were, moreover, pervaded by a general spirit of political liberalism, resembling that formulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had electrified him; and he treats of sovereigns, courts, and the great world generally, in a tone of sustained irony. At times he regards as close at hand a coming golden age, in which it will no longer be possible for nations, but only for individuals, to sin, and from which the spectre of war shall have disappeared; at other times he relegates it to a very far off future; but the rapidity of what was and is called _historic progress_ induced both him and his disciple to imagine that universal brotherhood was not very distant. It was, however, not only his grand conception of the future that made Jean Paul so attractive to Börne, but also the idyllic and satiric qualities of his talent. Börne adopted some of his comical names of places (_Kuhschnappel Flachsenfingen_), and as a young man imitated his humorous style. Many of the short tales and sketches contributed to periodical literature--the comic _Esskünstler am Hoteltisch, Allerhochstdieselben, Hof- und Commerzienräthe, Die Thurn und Taxissche Post_ (the postal system of the day), &c. &c.--are in Jean Paul's manner, though Börne keeps closer to reality both in his facts and his local colouring than Jean Paul does. Börne attacks State, Church, executive, manners, and customs in Jean Pauls farcical fashion; but he has not his predecessor's stores of observation to fall back on, and does not approach him in variety of knowledge. By way of compensation, his style is in many ways superior to Jean Paul's. Börne, who was not gifted with any profound artistic feeling, or delicate appreciation of style, admired the inartistic in Jean Paul as being unartificial. He did not feel that the profusion of imagery was collected from here, there, and everywhere, and was seldom the natural outgrowth of the subject it adorned. That Oriental wealth of simile, that flowery luxuriance of language, pleased his taste as being poetical; and the want of harmony in the periods, the heavy ballast of the innumerable parenthetic clauses, were to his ear only evidences of the naturalness of the style. To him, too, Goethe's plastic art was only coldness, while the impersonal style of Goethe's old age was a horror. When he read Jean Paul's works, the living, restless ego in them came forth to meet his own warm-hearted, passionate ego. He unconsciously remoulded Jean Paul's style on the lines of his own individuality, that individuality which discloses itself in his earliest letters, and whose distinguishing traits were modified or developed, but never altered. There were no wildernesses, no primeval forests in his mind, as there were in Jean Paul's. He did not think of ten things at a time, all inextricably entwined. No; in his case both fancy and reasoning-power were clear, and concise in expression. His acquaintance with Johannes von Müller's works early produced a propensity for pithy, Tacitus-like brevity. From the first there was a half French, half Jewish tendency to antitheses and contrast in his style. He loved symmetry of thought and symmetry of language; his spiritual _tempo_ was quick; as a writer he was short-winded. Hence short, sharp, strong sentences following each other at a gallop; no rounded periods. Metaphors abound; yet they are not so numerous as to jostle each other out of place, and all are apt and suggestive; he did not ransack note-books for them, like Jean Paul; they presented themselves in modest abundance. He employed similes freely; but in his clear-headed fashion he arranged them almost algebraically in his sentences, so that they produce the effect rather of equations than of scattered flowers. By degrees his decidedly marked individuality took shape in a decidedly individual humorous style. Jean Paul's humour spreads itself throughout lengthy and discursive investigations, narratives, romances; not so Börne's. He was never able to produce a political, poetical, critical, or historical work of any length; he could not write books, only pages. His was an essentially journalistic talent.[6] And this determines the character of his humour. Playful humour was his, but also that sarcastic wit which stings like a lash, and yet thrills and touches by an indirect appeal to the feelings; his that bitterness of complaint and accusation which assumes the conciliatory form of an attempt to comfort; and that melancholy, which with a smile and a whimsical conceit rises above time and place. But something similar to this might be said of other great humorists. What distinguishes Börne (from Sterne, Jean Paul, and others) is, in the first place, the strength, the violence of the reaction produced in him by all the occurrences of the day which came within the bounds of his horizon. A comparatively trifling incident in real, and especially in public, life is sufficient to set all the chords of his being in vibration. The second peculiarity is that all occurrences directly act upon one and the same point in his spiritual life, that passion for liberty which was born of the keenest sense of justice. One of his critics, Steinthal, explains in a masterly manner the connection between this fact and the fact of his inability to produce a great work. He never thought systematically, never combined with each other all the many things that one after the other occupied and affected his mind, but looked on each separately in its relation to the centre point of his being.[7] His humour brought the miserable reality into juxtaposition with the ideal demand of his intellect; but he gave no picture of the different elements of reality, he merely focussed them. Given such a state of matters, it is easy to understand how inevitable it was, not only that Börne should place Schiller high above Goethe, but also that he should consider Jean Paul to be greatly Schiller's superior. And it is highly characteristic that what he objects to in Schiller is not his purely poetical shortcomings, but his want of moral idealism. We are accustomed to think of Schiller as unassailable on this point, but to Börne's ruthless severity of moral requirement he is not so. Börne's pronouncement on the character of Wilhelm Tell is especially enlightening. To him Tell is nothing but a Philistine-- a good citizen, father, and husband, but a man the essence of whose character is submissiveness. He did not appear at the Rüth, that meeting-place of the elect, to take the oath; he had not the courage to be a conspirator. His words: "Der Starke ist am mächtigsten _allein_"-- (The strong man is strongest alone) are to Börne the philosophy of weakness; a man who has only the strength necessary to get the better of himself, is strongest alone, but he that has strength to spare after gaining the mastery over himself, will rule others also. The critic reviews Tell's actions one by one. Tell does not uncover to the hat on the pole, but his is not the noble defiance of the lover of liberty; it is only Philistine pride, a mixture of a sense of honour with fear; he passes the pole with his eyes cast down, that he may be able to say he has not seen it. And when Gessler calls him to account, he is humble--so humble that we are ashamed of him; he says the omission was accidental, and shall not occur again. The famous apple incident arouses no admiration in Börne. A father may dare everything for his child's life, but he has no right to hazard that life. Why did Tell not shoot the tyrant at once instead of beseeching like a woman with his reiterated "Lieber Herr! lieber Herr!"? He deserved to have his ears boxed. And when the governor, in the storm on the lake, trusted himself to him, as enemy trusts enemy, was it not treachery and a knavish trick on Tell's part to leap on shore, push the boat out into the lake and leave him to the mercy of the storm? Börne finds strong cause of offence in the speech: "Ich aber sprach: Ja, Herr mit Gottes Hilfe Getrau ich mir's, und helf uns wohl hindannen. So ward ich meiner Bande los und stand Am Steuerruder und _fuhr redlich hin._"[8] "How," exclaims the critic, "are we to explain such Jesuitry in the simple-minded man? It is inconceivable to me, too, that any one can consider Tell's next action moral, much less beautiful--he lies in safe ambush, and kills his enemy, who has no idea that he is in danger." No one can be surprised that a man in whose spiritual organism the sense of justice was so sharply, so intensely developed that it almost took the place of the æsthetic sense, should be wanting in the organ of appreciation for Goethe, whose craving for justice was undoubtedly less developed. In 1802, after one or two years' residence with a professor at Giessen, young Börne was sent to Berlin, his father being obliged to give in to his desire to study, although on account of his religion this could only lead to his becoming a doctor, a profession for which as yet he showed no turn whatever. He boarded in the house of the famous physician and Kantian, Marcus Herz, whose public lectures on philosophy had drawn such crowded and influential audiences, that the appointment of Professor of Philosophy was conferred on him before any University of Berlin existed. Herz was an eminent physician, a clear thinker, and a good orator; a friend of Lessing, whose poetry he valued as highly as his critical writings. Hence the mysticism of the Romantic school, more especially Hardenberg's, was to him both meaningless and obnoxious. As he died in 1803, his influence on young Börne's development was inconsiderable. All the more powerful was the impression made on the youth by Herz's famous wife, Henriette, _née_ Lemos. She was seventeen years younger than her husband, to whom she was betrothed, without her consent being asked, at the age of twelve. Remarkably beautiful, mistress of many languages, admired by numbers of the most eminent scientific men and authors of the day, she made her house one of the most frequented, most talked of, most looked up to in Berlin. She was thirty-eight, Börne sixteen, but this naturally did not prevent the young man from at once falling violently, though hopelessly, in love with the most beautiful, most distinguished woman it had been his lot to meet. The charming Henriette presented in outward appearance, as well as in character, a marked contrast to her little, clever, ugly husband; she was a faultless beauty, tall and stately as Queen Louise, with the small head we see on Greek statues. She went by the name of the Tragic Muse or the Beautiful Circassian. She was worshipped by Wilhelm von Humboldt, by Mirabeau, by Schleiermacher, and after her husband's death she was surrounded by a bevy of men of position, who all wooed the fair widow in vain. She refused all offers, in spite of her poverty rejected even the hand of the richest noblemen in Germany, and took the place of governess to the future Empress of Russia. She was as severely virtuous as she was intoxicatingly beautiful. She was on terms of intimacy with more than one man, but always within the strict bounds of friendship. In her circle a line was drawn between the admissible coquetry which aims at enthralling the whole man, and the inadmissible, which only aims at enthralling his senses. She herself belonged to the dangerous class of virtuous flirts. Of a passionless temperament and much addicted to sentimental moralising, she founded in her younger days a "Tugendbund" (league of virtue), in which Wilhelm von Humboldt played the principal part, and of which old and young, known and unknown men, were members. They called each other Thou, wrote long letters to each other in foreign languages or in Greek or Hebrew characters, exchanged rings or silhouettes, aimed at each other's "moral development," desired "to attain happiness by self-devotion" (unencumbered by duties, for self-devotion knows no duties), and ignored the rules and regulations of conventional propriety--but in all chastity and honour. Rahel laughed at them, and would have nothing to do with the league. The letters the members of the league exchanged bear a strong resemblance to those which passed a little later in Denmark between Kamma Rahbek and Molbech. They were absorbed in their own feelings, but in constant self-examination, thereby naturally depriving their feelings of all freshness. Friends of different sexes explained to each other in interminable letters, with written tears, how they mutually supplemented and developed one another. They tore themselves up into lint, and contemplated themselves in this unravelled condition; they did not collect themselves for each other's benefit, but spun themselves out. They put their inner man under pressure till the result was a liquid--tears, heart's blood, or such like--and this they poured into the bosom of a like-minded friend, without themselves becoming in any way more remarkable or original under this treatment. The beautiful and noble Henriette Herz herself was less an original personality than what the Germans call an "Anempfinderin." From the remarkable men with whom she came in contact, she seldom assimilated more than what she picked up from a surface knowledge of their ways and doings. What brought her particularly into notice was the tender friendship existing between her and Schleiermacher. It was much talked about in Berlin, but with no insinuation of evil. The contrast was too striking between the "Tragic Muse" and little Schleiermacher, whose distinguished head was set upon a fragile, slightly deformed body. People smiled good-naturedly when they saw the little pastor coming out of Henriettas house in the evening with a lantern fastened to the button of his coat, or when they met him in the daytime hanging on the arm of his majestic Melpomene. A caricature appeared, in which she was represented carrying him--the jewel, as he was called--in her hand, like a parasol.[9] Even if young Börne had been the fresh, red-cheeked youth he was not, he would hardly have made much impression on his proud, spoiled foster-mother. At first she did not even understand what was the matter with the young man, whose passion--described in his own memoranda was a real school-boy worship, of the kind produced at his age by half-conscious instinct and exaggerated ideas of the perfection of woman. One or two attempts which he made, through the medium of the servant, to procure arsenic from an apothecary's, opened Henriette Herz's eyes to the position, and she did her best, by an admixture of kindness with strictness, to bring him to reason.[10] That she was not quite insensible to his adoration, or quite innocent of a certain amount of coquetry, which masqueraded in this case as motherliness, is shown by the following little incident. Börne had taken her to be between twenty-eight and thirty, but at the dinner-table, on the 3rd of December 1802, she told him that she was thirty-four. In the evening she added two to this figure, but she never acknowledged more than the thirty-six, and on the 5th of March 1803, Börne still supposes this to be her age. So the charming "Frau Mutter," as she allowed him to call her, made herself two years younger than she was. Naturally he continued to love, to admire, to despair, to suffer the pangs of hell because of her indifference, and to feel the bliss of heaven when she smiled at him or said a friendly word; also to be so suspicious, bitter, unreasonable, and capricious that at last it became necessary to send him away. He went to Halle to continue his studies there. As he was leaving he handed her the diary of his emotions--she had, it seems, advised him to pour forth his sorrows on paper--and a number of passionate letters addressed to herself. He continued to write to her from Halle with unchangeable devotion and passionate longing, but in absence he soon so far recovers himself as no longer to be entirely absorbed in the sifting of his own feelings; we presently have calm and entertaining criticism of his surroundings, and a certain dignified self-esteem, combined with self-criticism. In these letters we already notice the characteristic combination of enthusiasm for ideas, indignant denunciation of slavishness, and sharp satire. They give us an understanding of Börne's real nature--a temperament to which licentiousness presents as little temptation as does drink, a soul that suffers under weakness of body, suffers from the inward conflict that ensues where there is courage without power, love that meets no return, undefined longing to do great deeds without any definite aim. Here and there we come upon a threat of what, when once his powers are matured, awaits the Philistine crowd that now smile at him--upon a wrathful presentiment of future humiliations, and fiery projects of revenge on those who, as he already knows, will shamelessly revile him because of his birth, and torture him by calling his reserve cowardice.[11] It is plain that one result of young Börne's stay in Berlin has been the maturing of his emotional life, and also that his intellectual powers have been stimulated by his being brought into contact, in Marcus and Henriette Herz's house, with the most eminent men of the day. Börne was studying at Halle when the battle of Jena was fought. Shortly afterwards that university was suppressed by Napoleon, and he went to pursue his studies at Heidelberg, full of patriotic rancour against the French, to which he gave vent in a pamphlet which the censor refused to pass. Whilst one result of Napoleon's triumphal progress was the expulsion of the students from Halle, another was a complete revolution in the political conditions of Börne's native town. In 1806 Dalberg, as "Prince-Primas" of the newly formed Rhenish Confederation, took possession of Frankfort-on-Main. One of his first acts was to improve the position of the Jews, and in 1810 Napoleon issued an ordinance removing all burdens resting upon them and upon serfs. In 1811 the Jewish community in Frankfort received the full rights of citizens, in consideration of a sum of 440,000 guldens, which was paid up by the following year. The first result of all this, as far as Börne was concerned, was that he gave up the study of medicine, which he had taken to unwillingly, and only because he was debarred from every other, and entered on that of political economy and jurisprudence, as opening the way to a government appointment. In 1818 he took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. His father, who had been extremely dissatisfied with his want of application as a student, and with being constantly called on to pay small debts, and who was now no less dissatisfied with him for throwing up the study of medicine, insisted that he should begin to support himself, and procured for him a small post in the Frankfort police establishment, an appointment which contrasts comically with the position which he afterwards took as an author. He was appointed "Aktuarius," sat in the old, dark Römer building, examined passports and journeymen's certificates, entered minutes, and on state occasions, dressed in uniform and wearing a sword, represented local authority. But he had also by this time made his _début_ as a writer. He contributed to a Frankfort daily paper articles crammed with primeval German rhetoric, defying the mighty Corsican with a patriotic enthusiasm which he at times allows to run away with common sense. They are appeals to the youth of Germany, and passionate expressions of blind, loyal faith in the rulers of Germany.[12] He is absolutely hopeful of the result of "the war of liberation." He had no foreboding that he himself would be one of the first victims of victory. Hardly had the Emperors of Russia and Austria and the King of Prussia entered Frankfort, when the seven years' rule of Prince Dalberg came to an end. The Grand Duchy of Frankfort was blotted from the list of States, and the old constitution came into force again. The citizenship which the Jews had acquired at such a high price was simply taken from them again, of course without the return of the money. "It was," writes Karl Gutzkow, "as if the couriers who rushed back and forwards between Vienna, where the Peace Congress was sitting, and the other German towns where reactionary congresses were being held, tore furrows in the blood-manured soil of Germany, in which the ruling powers dared to sow the seed of the old prejudices and privileges." The fall of the French power deprived Börne of his appointment, and his brothers in misfortune of their rights as men; he was impersonal enough in his way of looking at things to consider the foreign rule a disgrace from first to last. It is not surprising that Goethe's indifference to this, as to other results of the great reaction, strengthened Börne's hatred for a personality that appeared great upon no side accessible to him. In his notice of Bettina's book, _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ ("Goethe's Correspondence with a Child")--perhaps the most misleading criticism he ever wrote--Börne says: "What made Goethe, that greatest of poets, the smallest of men? What entwined hops and parsley in his wreath of laurel? What set a night-cap on his lofty brow? What made him a slave of circumstances, a cowardly Philistine, a mere provincial? He was a Protestant, and his family belonged to the ruling class in Frankfort, from among whom its senators were chosen. At the age of sixty, at the zenith of his fame, with the incense-clouds under his feet separating and sheltering him from the base passions of the valley-dweller, it angered him to hear that the Frankfort Jews demanded the rights of citizens, and he foamed with rage at the 'humanitarian twaddlers' who championed their cause." It was his relations with the great ones of the earth that Börne could least of all forgive Goethe. He overlooked the fact that the generation that lay between him and Goethe meant a complete change in the position of the author towards men of rank and the public generally. In Germany in the eighteenth century authors did not live on their works, but on their dedications. Poets were obliged to seek the favour of a high-born patron, to educate young noblemen, or accompany young princes on their educational tours. Wieland accepted money in return for his dedications; Schiller gladly accepted the assistance which the Duke of Augustenburg procured for him from Denmark. In the end of the eighteenth century, kings, princes, and the aristocracy generally, took a true and keen interest in philosophy and poetry, in all the new truth and beauty; they sought the acquaintance of authors, and associated with them as with their equals. With the French Revolution these admirable relations came to an end, but Goethe's position dated from before the Revolution. Börne blinded himself with gazing at disconnected expressions of Goethe's veneration for rank. Somewhere or other he copies this passage from Goethe's diary: "I afterwards had the unexpected happiness of being permitted to pay my homage to their Imperial Highnesses the Grand Duke Nicholas and his consort, in my own house and garden. The Grand Duchess graciously allowed me to write some lines of poetry in her elegantly splendid album." Börne adds: "This he wrote in his seventy-first year. What youthful power!" The older Börne grew, and the more he developed, by his own conscious volition, into a simple incarnation of political conviction, into a being of whose feelings, talents, and wit political conviction had taken possession, to whom it had become a religion, with all the outward expressions of religion, faith, worship, fanaticism--the more unworthy and contemptible did Goethe's rôle of spectator of the political struggles of the day appear to him. Elsewhere he writes: "I have finished Goethe's journal. No drier or more lifeless soul exists in the wide world, and nothing can be more comical than the simplicity with which he lays bare his own callousness.... And these are the consuls chosen by the German people--Goethe, who, more timid than a mouse, burrows in the ground, and gladly dispenses with light, air, liberty, everything, so long as he is left in peace in his hole gnawing at his stolen bacon; and Schiller, more noble, but equally faint-hearted, who seeks refuge from tyranny above the clouds, where he vainly cries to the gods for aid, and, dazzled by the sun, loses sight of the earth, and forgets the human beings whom he intended to help. And meanwhile the unhappy country, without leaders, without guardians, without advisers, without protectors, falls a prey to its kings, and the nation becomes a byeword among nations." From the summer of 1818 onwards, Börne, who till then had only published an occasional pamphlet, appears as an independent journalist, publisher of the _Die Wage_ ("The Balance"), most of the articles in which he wrote himself. He was the first German journalist in the grand style, and first to make the periodical press of Germany a power. The possessors of the now rare numbers of that old epoch-making magazine "of politics, science, and art," look on them as treasures. Its success is to be ascribed to its publisher and chief contributor's lively style and apt wit. It treated of politics, literature, and the drama, and had on its staff men like Görres (before his conversion) and Willemer, Goethe's rationalistic, liberal-minded friend ("Suleika's" husband); but whatever the subject under treatment might be, it took a political colouring from the manner in which it was approached. For three months of the four years during which Börne continued to publish _Die Wage_, he was also editor of the daily newspaper, _Zeitung der freien Stadt Frankfurt_, a position he had to give up because of the constant annoyance to which he was subjected by the censorship. He afterwards edited another daily paper, _Die Zeitschwingen_; but this was suppressed, and its editor sentenced to a short imprisonment. Börne now paid his first visit to Paris, whence he for a time wrote letters for Cotta's various periodical publications; but by 1822 he was again in Germany, where a long and dangerous illness soon swallowed up all his savings, and compelled him to apply to his father for assistance. His father was exceedingly dissatisfied with him. All his other children did him credit, he said; but this son, now unable to support himself, had had a most expensive education, and what was there to show for it? He could do nothing but write articles with a tendency highly disapproved of by his (the father's) patron, Prince Metternich, in Vienna. What was the good of making enemies for himself? of attacking the great? Was it becoming in his position of life? What position, indeed, did he suppose himself to occupy, seeing he allowed himself such liberty of speech? By this time he might have been a doctor in good practice, or a barrister, and counsel for Rothschild; instead of which he elected to be a hack writer for periodicals, spending the trifle he got for his articles on travelling, and closing every avenue to success by his impious attacks on those in authority. And Börne's father had sufficient political sagacity to be aware that it was quite unnecessary for his son to be either a doctor or an advocate in order to find lucrative employment. He knew very well where Herr von Gentz's and Herr Friedrich von Schlegel's bank-drafts came from. And besides, had not his son Maria Theresa's promise to fall back on?[13] From the very commencement of Börne's career as a journalist, his talent had attracted the attention of the great reactionaries. On the 18th of May 1819, Rahel writes that Gentz has recommended _Die Wage_ to her, as containing the cleverest, wittiest writing of the day, the best of its kind since Lessing's time. Börne's father was perfectly aware that Herr von Gentz praised his son's style, and Prince Metternich his grasp of politics.[14] So he privately set to work to secure an advantageous sphere of operation for him on the sunny side of society. Before young Börne was told anything about it, Metternich had eagerly come forward with the most liberal proposals: The young man was to live in Vienna with the title, position, and emoluments of an Imperial Councillor (kaiserlicher Rath), and with no claim made on him for any service in return. Everything he chose to write was to be entirely exempt from censorship; he should be his own censor. And if, in the course of a few months, he should elect to give up his appointment, he was to be free to do so. In such a position he would have the very best opportunity of working for the cause of progress and humanity. His father wrote: "Dear Louis! I beg of you to read this letter as carefully as I have read it. Believe me, the independence you prize so highly is an uncertain possession; will you, can you retain it? Why should not you, too, at last think of making a settled position for yourself?... On what is your present bliss founded? Surely not on the 500 francs (Cotta's monthly payment)? Make up your mind, for the sake of your future, to take a journey to Vienna at my expense; I beseech of you not to throw away this chance of success...." Börne refused everything point blank, refused to hold any communication with those in power.[15] Goethe might allow himself to be appointed Privy Councillor at a court, but he, Börne, would not. And yet the temptation must have been greater in the case of the born plebeian, who had had to take off his hat at the bidding of every passer-by, than it was in the case of the great patrician. In reading the hard, contemptuous, and unjust words which Börne wrote of Goethe, we must not forget that behind these words there was a man who would not do what Goethe did. Börne was devoid of artistic sense in the strict acceptation of the term. He frankly confessed the fact himself, and, moreover, betrays it in his intolerance of those to whom it is a matter of indifference what the artist represents, but all-important how he represents it. Artists and connoisseurs of this type are utterly repugnant to him. It disgusts him that any man can prefer a painting of still life to a painting of a Madonna. His natural bias towards the lofty, the sublime, the divine, leads him to demand these qualities in art, and to declare frankly that all works of art in which these qualities are wanting, are to him simply daubs or monstrosities.[16] We cannot agree with Steinthal when he says that Börne was at home in every domain of culture, every sphere of artistic production; for that very branch of art to which the name art is more specially applied, was a sealed book to him. This naturally did not prevent his writing much that is sensible and instructive about works of art; but what he wrote is not art criticism. Börne has been often and much praised for his energetic condemnation of the German fatalistic tragedies (_Schicksalstragödien_) which began in his day to take possession of the stage and to confuse men's minds. But it is to be observed that it is not as æsthetically reprehensible that he objects to them; he looks at the matter from the moral or religious point of view. The belief that a certain date, say the 24th of February, is peculiarly fraught with fate for any family, is stupid and futile. It has no connection whatever either with the belief of the ancients in an inevitable, pre-ordained fate, or with the Christian belief in an omniscient Providence, or with the modern determinist theory of cause and effect, which has undermined the earlier belief in so-called freewill. But to Börne the belief in question is an unreasonable one only because it is a confusion of two theological systems. His chain of reasoning is this: death is either a loving father, who takes his child home, in which case fate is not tragic, or a Kronos, who devours his own children, in which case it is unchristian.[17] As if that were any objection! It might still be extremely poetical. Börne is so clever and clear-headed that his opinion as to the worth or worthlessness of the many dramas it falls to his lot to criticise is almost always correct. He thoroughly enters into the spirit of Oehlenschläger's _Correggio_, and is full of indulgence for the weaknesses of the play, but quite oblivious to its scenic effect. He shows thorough appreciation of dramatists like Kleist and Immermann and young Grillparzer. But when he begins to give his reasons for blame or praise, the inartistic temperament invariably betrays itself, and he frequently displays all the many prejudices of the idealist. He is undoubtedly justified in his unfavourable opinion of Inland's _Die Spieler_ ("The Gamblers"), for instance. But the justification he offers is most peculiar: "What has gambling to do on the stage?" he cries; "one might as well dramatise consumption in all its different stages." There is only this difference, one would imagine, that consumption is a physical ailment, gambling a vice. His position is one that is characteristic of idealism, namely, that there is no need to go to the theatre to see what we can see at home. He gives as examples poverty, debt, a faithful wife's patient endurance of hardships; and instead of remarking on the dull, inartistic spirit in which such things are represented, he exclaims: "Are these such rare sights that we should pay money to see them? On the stage, humanity ought to be raised a step above its common level." And he goes on to explain that it was for this reason the Greek and Roman tragedians had recourse to mythic fable, and to maintain that the modern dramatist ought to represent the real characters of ancient days; or, if nothing will serve him but to grapple with the present, that he must only venture to reproduce its passions. We perceive that Börne is possessed by the naïve belief that the "classic" characters of olden times stood on a higher level than the human beings of to-day; and that he does not understand how every-day reality, properly treated, can be refined into art. A still stronger proof than these academic utterances of Börne's inability to appreciate simple, primitive poetry, is his indifference to the Old Testament. In a letter to Henriette Herz, written in his nineteenth year, we come upon a passage of absolutely alarming sterility, dry and senile as a joke on the Pentateuch by Voltaire-- and this after Goethe: "It has always appeared to me as if it had been the intention of the old Jews, from Abraham down to Solomon the Wise, to parody the history of the world. Read Joshua or the Book of Kings, and you will at once be struck by their resemblance to Blumau."[18] A comparison between these venerable compilations of memorable legends and historical events and a clumsy German parody of Virgil's _Æneid_ could only be instituted by a critic who, devoid of all appreciation of antique literary form, set himself to find in every work some modern sentimental, religious, or political moral. It is quite of a piece with this that Börne should end by blindly admiring the vague, half Biblical, half modern unctuous pathos of Lamennais' _Paroles d'un Croyant._ [1] Hermann Grimm: _Goethe_. [2] Gutzkow: _Börne's Leben_.--M. Holzmann: _Ludwig Börne. Sein Leben und Wirken_. [3] Steinthal: _Ludwig Börne. Illustrirte deutsche Monatshefte_, Juni 1881. [4] L. Börne: _Gesammelte Schriften_. Reclam. Leipzig, III. 112, 129, 167, 173, 209, 244, 259, 313. [5] See _Main Currents_, iii. chap. xiii. [6] "Was jeder Morgen brachte, was jeder Tag beschien, was jede Nacht bedeckte, dieses zu besprechen hatte ich Lust und Muth." What each morning brought, each day's sun shone on, each night covered--that was what I had the desire and the courage to discuss. [7] "Im Centrum seines Geistes trafen unzählige Strahlen zusammen, nur dass dieselben durch keine Peripherie verbunden waren." Countless rays were focussed in the central point of his mind, but no periphery united these rays. [8] So I said: Yes, my Lord, with God's help I can do it, can bring us all safe to land. Then I was unloosed, and took the helm and _steered honourably onward_. [9] Karl Hillebrand: "La société de Berlin," in _Revue des Deux Mondes_. [10] Fürst: _Henriette Herz_, p. 185. [11] _Briefe des jungen Börne an Henriette Herz_, 164, 167. "O, wenn ich dies bedenke, wie ein Sturm braust es in meinem Innersten, es möchte die Seele aus ihrem Wohnhaus stürzen, und sich den Leib eines Löwen suchen, dass sie den Frechen begegnen könnte mit Klauen und Gebiss." _Translation:_Oh, when I think of this, a storm rages within me; the soul struggles to burst from its lodging, that it may find for itself the body of a lion, and rush upon the shameless ones with claws and teeth. [12] "Aber lasst uns nicht, männernde Jünglinge, unsere Kraft vergeuden, sondern die Lust in keuscher Ehe umarmen, damit sie fruchtbar und unsterblich werde ... Es ziemt uns nicht, uns keck in den Rath der Fürsten einzudringen; sie sind besser als wir." _Translation:_ But let us not squander our strength, O youths who are becoming men; let us embrace joy in chaste wedlock, that she may become fruitful and immortal.... It becomes us not audaciously to thrust ourselves into the counsels of princes; they are better than we. [13] Karl Gutzkow: Birne's Leben, Ges. Werke, xii. 328, 329. [14] Metternich was even acquainted with the later, quite revolutionary letters from Paris. On the 26th of January 1834, Princess Melanie Metternich writes in her diary: "I spent the early hours of the evening with Clemens, to whom I read Börne's _Letters from Paris_. They are of course as malicious as possible, but the style, with its dæmonic extravagance, is remarkably clever." (Metternich's _Posthumous Papers_, v. 545, quoted by Holzmann.) [15] He writes to his father: "Gentz, too, was doubtless a Liberal to begin with, but he could give securities for a sincere conversion which I cannot give. He had been sold to England for many years before he took service with Austria. He is sensual, extravagant, the most dissolute man in the country." [16] "A frog, a cucumber, a leg of mutton, a Wilhelm Meister, a Christ--it is all the same to them; they actually forgive a Madonna her holiness, if she is well painted. So am not I, and never was. In nature I have always sought God, God only, and in art the divine; and where I did not find God, I saw nothing but miserable botch-work. History, men, and books I have judged in like manner--unfortunately!" [17] "I have never been able to understand their conception of fate, their confusion of the antique with the Romantic idea, their Christian paganism. Death is either a loving father, who comes to fetch his child home from the school of life, in which case fate is not tragic; or he is the cannibal Kronos, who swallows his own children, in which case it is unchristian. Your fate is a hermaphrodite, unable either to beget or to bring forth." [18] _Briefe des jungen Börne,_ p. 143. VIII BÖRNE But for this lack of poetic-artistic understanding, it would be difficult to explain how Börne came to take the share he did in the reaction against Goethe which was set on foot by some of the leading men of the day. For, though he had a quite individual, spontaneous animosity to Goethe, Börne was certainly not the originator of the reaction, which was in full swing before he took any part in it. About the time when the Pietists were gloating over Pastor Pustkuchen's parody of the _Wanderjahre_, with its attack on the impiety of Goethe, the pagan, progressive, youthful politicians were beginning to approve of investigations into Goethe's political convictions, which measured them by the very latest standard and made him out to be an "aristocrat," with no feeling for the people, and in reality with no genius. The first writer of any note who perseveringly and fanatically devoted himself to the systematic disparagement of Goethe was Wolfgang Menzel (born in 1798), a man who before the age of thirty had made his name famous and feared by the help of a certain coarse literary ability, tremendous self-assurance, and the severity of his creed as a Liberal, Nationalist, and moralist. Like Börne, he was originally a disciple of Jean Paul. But his _Streckverse_ (1823), which were much admired in their day, and which are unmistakable imitations of that master, carry Jean Paul's peculiar kind of humour to the verge of caricature. Things that have no natural connection whatever with each other are forced into juxtaposition to produce an aphorism, in much the same manner as totally unconnected ideas are coupled together in a pun. He writes: "All Saints' Day comes before All Souls'; the prophets reach heaven before the people." "The religion of antiquity was the crystal-matrix of many resplendent gods; the Christian religion is the mother-of-pearl that encloses one god only, but one beyond all price." "This mortal life is a bastinado." "Every church bell is a diving-bell, beneath which the pearl of religion is found."[1] In his periodical, _Deutsche Litteratur_, he began, in 1819, an attack upon Goethe, which he carried on with insane conceit and immovable faith in the justice of his cause. He first tried to undermine the admiration of the reading world for Goethe's originality, examined his works with the aim of discovering imitations or plagiarisms, and demonstrated the existence of foreign influence everywhere throughout them. In his first connected work on the history of literature, _Die deutsche Litteratur_, which was published in 1828, in two parts, he calmly accuses Goethe of having flattered all the prejudices and vanities of his time. He declares him to be possessed of nothing more than great descriptive ability, great "talent," which is a thing unattended by inward conviction, "a hetaira, who is at every one's beck and call." Goethe has always, he declares, swum with the stream, and on its surface, like a cork; he has ministered to every weakness and folly that happened to be in fashion; under the fair mask of his works a refinement of sensuality lies concealed; these works are the blossom of that materialism which prevails in the modern world. Goethe has no genius, but a very high degree of "the talent for making his readers his accomplices," &c, &c.[2] Heine, who was uncritical enough in his review of the book to praise both it and its author--praise which he was soon to regret--would have nothing to say to Menzel's doctrine that Goethe's gift was not genius, only talent. He expresses the opinion that this doctrine will be accepted by few, "and even these few will confess that Goethe at times had the talent to be a genius."[3] Menzel continued the cannonade in his numerous contributions to periodicals, and in a new, very much enlarged, edition of his work on German literature. He convicts Goethe of three distinct kinds of personal vanity and six kinds of voluptuousness ("dreierlei Eitelkeiten und sechserlei Wollüsteleien"). He analyses his works, great and small, one by one, measures them by his own patriotic standard, and declares them to be despicable. _Clavigo_ he condemns, because Goethe makes Clavigo desert Marie. That he afterwards makes him die by the hand of her brother goes for nothing, in fact is only an additional cause of offence to Menzel, who knows that in real life Clavigo lived on happily, which make his death on the stage a mere _coup de théâtre._[4] To find sufficient immorality in the play, the critic must, we observe, take advantage of his knowledge of circumstances that do not concern it. _Tasso_ is to him Goethe's _Höflingsbekenntniss_ ("Confessions of a Courtier"), in which he betrays the vanity of the _parvenu_, to whom the high rank of a woman is an irresistible attraction.[5] The reader will have no difficulty in imagining for himself all the moral reflections for which Menzel finds occasion in _Die Mitschuldigen_, in _Die Geschwister_, where "voluptuousness casts sidelong glances at the pretty sister," in _Stella_, where it craves the excitement of bigamy ("nach dem Reiz der Bigamie gelüstet") and in the _Mann von fünfzig Jahren_, which is the special object of his indignation. Even _Wilhelm Meister_ is to Menzel only an expression of the shamefully light esteem in which Goethe held true virtue, and the strong attraction which the outward conditions of rank possessed for him.[6] _Die Wahlverwandschaften_ he regards as the type of "the novel of adultery," which takes for its theme the desire of voluptuousness after untried sensations ("die Wollüstelei, die das Fremde begehrt"). _Die Braut von Korinth_ is simply the expression of the voluptuousness whose desire is set on corpses, "die sogar noch in den Schauern des Grabes, in der Buhlerei mit schönen Gespenstern einen _haut goût_ des Genusses findet"--(which even amidst the horrors of the grave finds a _haut goût_ of sensual enjoyment in intercourse with beautiful spectres). Where it is impossible to bring an accusation of immorality, Menzel returns to his accusation of want of originality. It is not only its glorification of middle-class Philistinism that stamps _Hermann und Dorothea_ as an inferior work, but also the direct imitation of Voss's _Luise_. According to Menzel, Goethe showed real originality only in _Faust_ and _Wilhelm Meister_, because in these two works he copied himself. In his youth he borrowed from Moliere and Beaumarchais, from Shakespeare and Lessing, and his later iambic tragedies are "the fruits of his rivalry with Schiller." Added to all this, he was, God knows, no patriot. Let us compare Börne's attacks on Goethe with Menzel's, and we shall find, in spite of similar extravagance of expression, this great difference, that Börne does not attempt to judge, still less to condemn Goethe's great works, nor does he condescend to accusations of sexual immorality; he invariably confines himself to attacking Goethe in his political relations. Saint-René Taillandier correctly observes that Börne gave expression to everything that was rankling in his heart when he took as motto for his review of Bettina's _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ ("Goethe's Correspondence with a Child"), these words from _Prometheus_: "Ich dich ehren? Wofür? Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert Je des Beladenen? Hast du die Thränen gestillet Je des Geängsteten?"[7] Though he could only appreciate those of Goethe's works in which the fire of youth was perceptible, his attacks are not based on contempt for the other works, but on the fact that Goethe, so highly favoured in the matter of ability and of social position, never thought of devoting that ability, that position, to the improvement of the existing conditions of life in Germany. It is easy to cull foolish passages conceived in Menzel's strain from Börne's works. In his Journal of 1830, for instance, he writes of Goethe's luck in having succeeded in imitating with his talent the handwriting of genius for sixty years without being detected; and in another place he calls Goethe the rhyming, Hegel the rhymeless, thrall.[8] But to understand these wild and regrettable outbursts, we must make ourselves acquainted with Börne's bill of accusation against both Goethe and Schiller. He started from the premise (in all probability quite a false one) that Goethe, by making timely and energetic protest, could have prevented the Resolutions of Karlsbad, could have secured the liberty of the press and the other spiritual rights of which the reaction had deprived the German nation. In any case, whatever the results might have been, he was firmly convinced that it was Goethe's duty to have protested. Instead of this, what happens? "Geheimrath von Goethe, the Karlsbad poet," as Börne, knowing that he goes there every year to drink the waters, satirically nicknames him, subscribes himself _servant_ among other servants of his Prince ("wir sämmtlichen Diener"); confesses in his _Tag- und Jahres-Hefte_ that he wrote his stupid little play _Der Bürgergeneral_ (the whole plot of which hinges on the stealing of a pail of milk from the peasant Martin), with the intention of ridiculing the French Revolution; also confesses that, far from taking Fichte's part when that philosopher was accused of teaching atheism in the University of Jena, he was much annoyed at the vexation caused to the court by the outside interference which Fichte's utterances provoked.[9] Another cause of offence was the way in which, when Oken's _Isis_ was published, Goethe bewailed the peaceful times brought to an end by the establishment of the liberty of the press in Weimar, "the further consequences of which every right-thinking man with any knowledge of the world foresees with alarm and regret."[10] And the same feeling of disappointment and mortification was aroused in Börne when he read that Schiller, whom he highly esteemed, had at the very crisis of the French Revolution declared in his announcement of the new periodical _Die Horen_, that from this publication everything in the nature of criticism of the government, of religion, or of the political questions of the day, would be expressly and strictly excluded.[11] We must bear all this in mind when we read Börne's flaming denunciations--ablaze with a passion for liberty that forgets to be just--of Schiller and of Goethe, his lament that in their correspondence these two greatest minds of Germany show themselves so small that nothing at all would be better ("so Nichts sind--nein weniger als Nichts, so wenig"), and that they actually are what he, the confirmed democrat, considers the worst thing possible, a pair of confirmed aristocrats. He sees in Schiller a worse aristocrat than Goethe, for Goethe's partiality is merely for the upper classes of society, whereas Schiller will associate with none but the _élite_ of humanity. It is Börne's belief that Goethe might have been the Hercules who should cleanse the Augean stables of his country; but he rather elected to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides, and to keep them for himself.[12] He compares him in his own mind with the great productive spirits of other countries; with Dante, who championed the cause of justice; with Alfieri, who preached liberty; with Montesquieu, who wrote the _Lettres Persanes_; with Voltaire, who dared everything and gave up all his other occupations to assist a persecuted man, or to vindicate the memory of one who had been unjustly condemned to death; with the republican Milton; with Byron, whose life was one struggle against tyranny, intelligent or unintelligent--and he summons him before the judgment seat of posterity. "That terrible, incorruptible judge will say to Goethe: A mighty mind was given to thee, didst thou ever employ it to oppose baseness? Heaven gave thee a tongue of fire, didst thou ever champion justice? Thou hadst a good sword, but it was drawn to defend thyself alone."[13] We cannot deny that Börne has pointed to real flaws in Goethe's greatness, and to real limitations in his nature, even though we know that some of his qualities were bought at the price of these defects, and that a certain limitation was inevitable if the many-sidedness of his genius was not to be its bane. It was not for him to do what Börne required of him. Still we must understand the proportion of justice there is in Börne's attacks, to be able to forgive him this violent and foolish expression of resentment against Goethe during those years when the hopes of the Liberals in the results of the Revolution of July were receiving their double death-blow, from the subjection of the French Government to the power of the great financiers, and from the suppression of the Polish revolt. He is now more bitter and violent than ever. He calls Goethe a prodigious _obstructive_ power, compares him to a cataract on the eye of Germany, and expresses the opinion that not until the old man of Weimar dies will German liberty be born. (Nov. 20, 1830.)[14] It was on the 1st of October 1831, after whole days spent in despair over events which conveyed the impression, specially painful to this obstinately hopeful man, that France was lost and the reaction victorious, that his anger reached boiling-point. He took up Goethe's _Tag- und Jahres-hefte_, and was horrified by its author's "apathy." Goethe tells how, when he was with the army in Silesia in 1790, he wrote one or two epigrams, and how later, at the royal headquarters in Breslau, he lived the life of a hermit, completely engrossed in the study of comparative anatomy. He adds that what originally led to his taking up this study was his finding a half-cloven sheep's skull one evening in Venice on the sand-hills of the Lido. "What!" writes Börne, "Goethe, a highly gifted man, a poet, in the best years of his manhood ... to be in the council of war, in the camp of the Titans, on the very spot where, forty years before, the audacious yet sublime war of kings against their peoples began, and to find no inspiration in these surroundings, to be moved to neither love nor hatred, neither prayer nor curse, to nothing but a few epigrams, which he himself does not consider worth offering the reader. And with the finest of regiments, the handsomest of officers passing in review before him, he finds nothing better to turn his attention to than comparative anatomy! And walking by the sea-shore in Venice--Venice, that _Arabian Night_ in stone and mortar, where everything is melody and colour, both nature and art, man and state, past and present, liberty and despotism; where even tyranny and murder merely clank like the chains in some gruesome ballad (the Bridge of Sighs and the Council of Ten are scenes from Tartarus)--Venice, towards which I turn my longing eyes, but cannot turn my steps, because the Austrian police lies in wait like a serpent at the city gates and repels with the terror of its poisonous gaze--there, after sunset, when the red glow of evening was spread over sea and land, and the waves of crimson light broke upon the man of stone, and imparted their colour to his eternal greyness; when, perhaps, the spirit of Werther came upon him, and he felt that he still had a heart, that there were human beings around him and a God above him; and the beat of his heart, the apparition of his dead youth terrified him, and he felt the hair standing up on his head--he behaved as usual, escaped from his terrors, avoided all disagreeable reflection, by creeping into a cloven sheep's skull and hiding there till night and coldness once more descended upon his heart! And I am to honour that man! to love that man! I would sooner throw myself in the dust at the feet of Vitzli-Putzli, sooner lick the spittle of the Dalai Lama!" Certainly Börne ought to have honoured this man, and for the very reason for which he despises him. For perhaps at no time was he more clearly worthy of all honour. Börne, by his own showing, would, like the ordinary tourist in Venice, have spent himself in vague moonlight and sunset romancings on the subject of the Bridge of Sighs, the terrors of tyranny, the blessings of liberty, and all the melody and colour--Goethe gazed at his sheep's skull. What was there remarkable about it? It was split; and with his naked eye, that seeing eye which pierced into the deepest recesses of nature, into the innermost workshop of life, whence issue all its various forms, Goethe _saw_ the great truth, which he had already suspected, that all the bones of the skull were in reality metamorphosed vertebræ, thus making a discovery in the science of osteology that was closely connected with one he had already given to the world in his work on the _Metamorphosis of Plants_, and founding philosophic anatomy, as he had already founded philosophic botany. Börne did not perceive that this man, whose life-work is one of the foundation-stones in the edifice of the modern world, in this particular instance, with his intuition of the unity underlying all variety of form, in his divine simplicity, resembles one of the fathers of ancient science, a Thales or a Heraclitus. Börne's attacks on Goethe do not come under the same category as Menzel's. They are never malicious, much less base. Though they certainly now and again hit some vulnerable spot in the great man, they throw more light on Börne's own nature than they do on Goethe's; and, even where they most clearly show the limitation of his intelligence, they witness to the purity of his character. They have been powerless to affect men's admiration for Goethe's genius. It would be as foolish to judge Goethe by the false political standard set up by Börne in 1830 as to judge Börne himself by the false German standard of 1870, which those do, who say of him, what he said of Goethe, that he was no true patriot. It was natural, nay inevitable, that Börne should undervalue Goethe. It is possible to understand his want of understanding without sharing his dislike. And it is possible to do full justice to the rush of his pathos, to the elasticity and keen sparkle of his wit, without forgetting, as our eyes light on the seething, flashing cascades of his prose, that there is a deep, calm, wide ocean, called Goethe. [1] "Allerheiligen geht vor Allerseelen, die Propheten haben den Himmel eher als das Volk.--Die Religion des Alterthums war die Cristalmutter vieler glänzenden Götter, die christliche ist die Perlemutter eines einzigen aber unschätzbaren Gottes.--Das Erdenleben ist eine Bastonade.--Jede Kirchenglocke ist eine Taucherglocke, unter welcher man die Perle der Religion findet." [2] Menzel: _Die deutsche Litteratur_, ii. pp. 205-222. [3] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke._ xiii. 265. [4] "Der Dichter ... fühlt zwar, dass das Schicksal in's Mittel treten müsse, und lässt den Verräther durch eine rächende Bruderhand fallen; wie vielmehr muss uns dieser Theaterstreich indigniren, wenn wir wissen, dass der berühmte Liebhaber in der Wirklichkeit fortgelebt, um das Unglück zu beschreiben, welches er angerichtet." The poet ... it is true, feels that destiny ought to intervene, and therefore the betrayer falls by the brother's avenging hand; but this _coup de théâtre_ only arouses more indignation in us, who know that in real life the famous lover lived on happily, to describe the misfortunes of which he had been the author. [5] "Die Eitelkeit des Emporkömmlings, die in den Frauen zugleich das Vornehme, das Königliche, begehrt." _Translation_: The vanity of the _parvenu_, who is not attracted simply by women, but also by their position, their royal birth. [6] "Geadelt zu werden, im Reichthum zugleich den _haut goût_ de Vornehmigkeit in behaglicher Sicherkeit zu geniessen, war ihm für dieses Leben das Höchste." [7] _I_ honour thee? Wherefore? Hast thou ever lightened the burden of the heavy laden? ever stayed the tears of the distressed? [8] "Welch ein beispielloses Glück musste sich zu dem seltenen Talent dieses Mannes gesellen, dass er sechzig Jahre lang die Handschrift des Genies nachahmen konnte und unentdeckt geblieben!... Goethe ist der gereimte Knecht, wie Hegel der ungereimte." [9] "Fichtes Äusserungen über Gott und göttliche Dinge, über die man freilich besser ein tiefes Stillschweigen beobachtet." _Translation:_ Fichte's utterances on the subject of God and things divine, on which it is undoubtedly better to preserve unbroken silence. [10] L. Börne: _Gesamm. Schriften_, iii. 216, 217, 222. [11] "Vorzüglich aber und unbedingt wird sich die Zeitschrift Alles verbieten, was sich auf Staatsreligion und politische Verfassung bezieht." [12] Börne: iii. 536, 572. [13] Ibid. 573. [14] "Dieser Mann eines Jahrhunderts, hat eine ungeheure, _hindernde_ Kraft! er ist ein grauer Staar im deutschen Auge.... Seit ich fühle, habe ich Goethe gehasst; seit ich denke, weiss ich warum. (20 November 1830.) Es ist mir als würde mit Goethe die alte deutsche Zeit begraben; ich meine an dem Tage müsse die Freiheit geboren werden." This man of a century possesses a prodigious _obstructive_ power! he is a cataract on the eye of Germany.... Ever since I could feel, I have hated Goethe; ever since I could think, I have known why. (20 November 1830.) I feel as if the old German era will be buried with Goethe, as if liberty must be born on that day. IX BÖRNE It is in the first volumes of the _Letters from Paris_ that Börne reaches his high-water mark as an author. He was not capable of writing books, not even of writing essays and dissertations; for his explosions of emotion or thought there was no form so suitable as that of a letter. And these are real letters, not newspaper-articles, nor even newspaper correspondence, but letters written to a friend, without thought of publication until that friend took the initiative, and asked Börne's permission to make an experimental selection of passages which might be of interest to the general public. The friend in question was Frau Jeannette Wohl, a lady who plays an important part in Börne's life, though perhaps not so important a part as he plays in hers. For upwards of twenty years, from 1816, when he made her acquaintance, till his death in 1837, he gave her his entire confidence, and rarely took any step without consulting her; and to her, during the same period, his career as an author, his health, his circumstances generally, were of more importance than all else. When they saw each other for the first time, he was thirty and she thirty-three. She had been married to a rich man, with whom she had lived unhappily. After nursing him through a long illness, she got a divorce from him, refusing to accept any share of his fortune or to retain his name. When Börne and she lived in the same town, he read aloud to her everything that he wrote; when they were separated, she would at one time urge him to work, eager that he should win fame and independence; at another, fearing that he was too diligent, and that his health, at all times precarious, might suffer, she would beg him not to be too conscientious in the fulfilment of his engagements to the publishers, but to allow himself sufficient leisure and recreation. Jealous of his honour, she underwent long periods of anxiety and irritation when it seemed to her that he was neglecting his duty to the public. Börne had taken payment in advance from the subscribers to _Die Wage_ for the second volume of that periodical, and then, after bringing out only five numbers, made a lengthy pause, partly because he was tired of the work, and partly because, being in pecuniary difficulties, he was anxious to find more remunerative employment. Her letters, which he always looked for with almost feverish eagerness, at this time keep _Die Wage_ before his eyes by every device which the ingenuity and perseverance of an anxious woman can suggest. She entreats and threatens, she scolds and teases, she sends him four long pages with nothing upon them except _Die Wage, Die Wage._ But she is often quite as anxious to distract and amuse him, to prevent him from over-exerting himself and to keep up his spirits. When he is taken seriously ill at a distance from her, she grieves that she is not able to look after him, has once actually made up her mind to hazard her reputation by going to him; she knows very well that if she does, people will no longer believe that what unites them is only friendship. It was in reality a feeling midway between friendship and love, for which no name exists. After Jeannette's death there was found among her papers an ordinary _Gesindebüchlein der freien Stadt Frankfurt_,[1] on the cover of which Börne had written his name, with the usual particulars. On its first page stands: Took service With whom? For how In what Left service long capacity? when? 15. Jan. 1818 Frau Wohl. For ever. As friend. On the day of his death. There could be no more laconic expression of a voluntary lifelong devotion. And the last words were literally fulfilled, for it was on Jeannette's face that the dying man's last look rested, and to her that he spoke his last words: "You have given me much happiness." Jeannette Wohl's portrait, which Börne declared to be a good one, shows us a woman with a longish face, regular, pleasing features, a high forehead, an expressive, beautifully formed mouth, and bright, kindly eyes; the firm chin indicates energy. Her voice is said to have been remarkably sweet. Hers was not a particularly original, and still less was it a productive mind; she was one of those women who can merge their own individuality in that of the man to whom they are devoted. To Börne, the author, her natural feminine capacity for inspiring a man with confidence in himself was invaluable; she was as much offended by any disparaging remark he made on the subject of his own ability or deserts, as if it had been made by another. She was comfort and consolation to him in human form. In her he had a being on whom he could place absolute reliance, to whom he could confide everything without the slightest fear of ever being misunderstood, far less betrayed, and to whom he could address all his literary efforts. She was to him an epitome of the ideal public for whom he wrote. In one of his confidential letters he writes that his feeling for Jeannette is described in the following passage from _La Nouvelle Heloïse_: "C'est cette union touchante d'une sensibilité si vive et d'une inaltérable douceur; c'est cette pitié si tendre à tous les maux d'autrui; c'est cet esprit juste et ce goût exquis qui tirent leur pureté de celle de l'âme; ce sont, en un mot, les charmes des sentiments, bien plus que ceux de la personne, que j'adore en vous." And we learn, from a letter of Jeannette's written in 1833, after this friendship had lasted seventeen years, that the attraction he exercised was at least equal to that which he experienced. She describes as a sort of _idée fixe_, or chronic ailment, the excitement that takes possession of her about the time when the mail may be expected. The day she writes, she had been obliged to give up her usual occupations and lie on the sofa, and when at last the letter arrives, she weeps for joy. She looks after his money matters, calculates the payments due to him, draws his police pension for him; at one time, when he has a great longing to travel in Italy, but cannot do it for want of means, she takes a lottery ticket, in the hope of winning the necessary sum, and when she is disappointed in this, wishes to sell her piano, but finds she cannot raise the required amount in this way either.[2] And all this without the incentive of love, in the narrower sense of the word. Her friends believed her to be capable of doing even more for him. At the time that it first occurred to her that Börne ought to publish his letters to her, she expressed to a cousin the naïve doubt if it were possible to publish letters before the death of the person to whom they were addressed, to which the cousin replied that she had not the least doubt that Jeannette was quite ready to let herself be buried if it would do any good to Dr. Börne. They often travelled together, and sometimes, it would seem, lived together; but the nature of their relation to each other never altered. It is probable that at one time, in the first stage of their friendship, Börne tried to persuade Jeannette to marry him, but her fear lest the relation existing between them might lose its charm by being turned into an ordinary, everyday marriage, a fear which Börne himself afterwards shared, proved an insurmountable obstacle. Considering that they were both free to dispose of themselves as they would, it seems hardly possible that their relation could have remained what it was for all these years without the existence of some slight, it might be almost unconscious, physical antipathy on her side, or on both sides. An outward hindrance to their union undoubtedly existed in the difference of their creeds. Börne belonged to the Christian, Jeannette to the Jewish confession; her orthodox mother was strongly opposed to her becoming a Christian, and in those days great difficulties were placed in the way of mixed marriages. But this was not the main difficulty. Jeannette herself writes that to marry Börne would require "more courage and more self-confidence" than she possesses. And in this instance we see the man whom we knew in his youth as the passionate lover, and who all his life long suffered from a jealous disposition, quickly rise to the height of pure devotion; he constantly urges Jeannette, for her own sake, to marry a man worthy of her, and make a happy home. In 1821, in answer to the words just quoted, Börne writes: "I swear to you by Almighty God that, ardent and often expressed as my desire to make you mine may have been, it has always been more of your happiness than of my own that I have thought. My love for you makes me happy; what more could marriage give me, since it could not increase that love? Though I did not confess it to you, I always dreaded that marriage might drag down our beautiful friendship to the level of everyday, sordid reality. But I thought, what I still think, that _you_ would gain something by it, and this would indirectly have increased my happiness. So there is nothing to prevent you from marrying another man; you and I should lose nothing by that." Strange to say, the truth of this last, audacious assertion was put to the proof. At a somewhat advanced age, Jeannette actually fell in love with and married a man much younger than herself. It was their mutual admiration for Börne that brought the couple together, and in Jeannette's answer to the letter in which Straus asks her to marry him there is a long reference to Börne, so enlightening in its simple eloquence that it cannot be dispensed with in this estimate of his character as a man and as an author. She writes: "The Doctor has no one in the world but me; I am to him friend, sister, all that these words convey of kindliness, friendliness, sympathy. Can you grudge this to him, to whom life has given nothing else, and who has reconciled himself to his fate ... is even contented with it.... Ican think of no other possibility than that the Doctor should be free to come to us when, where, and for as long as he chooses; for altogether, if he wishes. I can't say _you_, my heart is too full; canst _thou_ think anything else possible? If so, then all is different from what I thought. I!--we!--dream of deserting a man like the Doctor--why, he would be a ruined, a lost man! I would rather give up everything, rather die, than have that upon my conscience; I could not do it, even if I would.... I am trembling all over, and as pale as death from writing even these few words on the subject. For nothing agitates me so deeply as the very thought of such treason, of such infidelity to such fidelity. As long as I live, till I draw my last breath, I shall feel for Börne the love of a daughter for her father, of a sister for her brother, of a friend for a friend. If you do not understand, cannot grasp the situation, do not know me well enough--then all is over, all is night. I can write no more. But no more is necessary. I am thankful this is over."[3] Events proved that Straus thoroughly entered into Jeannette's feelings, indeed shared them. He, too, became a faithful friend to Börne. For five months in the summer of 1833 Börne lived with them in Switzerland. They then removed, for his sake, to Paris; where they all lived together from the end of 1833 till his death, spending the summers at Auteuil. The one person who permitted himself to make disparaging comment on this arrangement was Heine, in that unfortunate passage in his book, _Ludwig Börne_, which led to the duel in which he was wounded by Straus. Heine afterwards, of his own free will, expunged the passage. But in anger and grief at the harm done to his reputation by this work on Börne, he was heard to call Jeannette the baleful woman who, on his triumphal progress as Germany's chosen poet, crossed his path, prophesying evil, and caused him to start back and drop his laurel wreath in the dirt.[4] It is certain that Jeannette never forgave Heine his unpardonable molestation; yet no one could have been less of a Megæra. What Börne once wrote to her, joking, as he often did, on the subject of her faulty orthography, was almost true, namely, that in the letter he had received that day there were more faults than she had herself, for there was one. In her opinions we can follow the different steps of Börne's political development. After the Revolution of July she, too, is a radical democrat. In the expressive words of her biographer, Schnapper-Arndt: "She most frequently thinks with Börne, at times in opposition to him, never without him. But she does seem to be perfectly independent in her passionate sympathy with the revolt of the Polish nation, a feeling so strong that it leads her to heap reproaches on Börne for being capable at such a moment of writing about the Italian opera in Paris. The Polish scythemen, the liberty of Poland--nothing else is worthy to be mentioned along with this. It seems to her that every one must help; she gives her own most cherished possessions to the cause; and nothing can exceed her shame when Germany shows itself indifferent to it, nothing her joy when she can send Börne proofs of the fact that a storm of sympathy and enthusiasm is sweeping over the country." [1] The "service book" which German employés are required to keep. [2] On this occasion Börne writes: "Love has affected the reason of many a human being, but I never heard of human kindness doing so. No one was capable of this but you.... It is well that you have never found the man of your heart--you cannot even stand wine mixed with water." [3] All this information on the subject of Jeannette is to be found in Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt's article: _Jeannette Straus-Wohl und ihre Beziehungen zu Börne. Westermanns Monatshefte_, April 1887. [4] (Alfred Meissner: _Erinnerungen_, p. 79, &c. X BÖRNE The progress of the insurrection in Poland, which lasted from the winter of 1830 till the summer of 1831, was followed with lively sympathy by almost all the nations of Europe. All knew that the struggle in Poland was deciding whether absolutism or national liberty was to prevail in the Europe of the future. The movements of the combatants were eagerly noted; every victory of the Poles was hailed with popular rejoicing, every defeat was heard of with sorrow. Towards the close of the struggle, when it became evident that the Poles, unaided, could not triumph, numerous appeals were addressed by German subjects to their respective governments, urging them to assist Poland. The Germans then possessed the quality, which Bismarck afterwards laid to their charge as a fault--a fault of which he has cured them--of being almost more interested in the welfare of other nations than in their own, to the extent even of desiring that welfare when it could only be purchased by some surrender of power on the part of Germany. When all was over with the Poles, the Germans tried to give proof of their sympathy by showing as much hospitality as possible to the Polish refugees on their wanderings through Central Europe to France. They everywhere met with a warm reception; a committee was appointed in almost every German town to collect money for them and help them on their journey. Jeannette Wohl's letters to Börne at this time contain many significant details. She tells that a number of Polish officers who came by water from Hanau to Frankfort-on-Main were escorted all the way by enthusiasts, that bands played and salutes were fired as they entered the town, and that, they were carried shoulder high through the crowd. When bands of Poles march through the town, all heads are uncovered as they pass. The town defrays their expenses at the hotels. A wounded Polish officer, who dies at one of the hotels, is followed to his grave by thousands, including the city militia. A goldsmith sets a splinter of iron taken from the wound of another Polish officer in the shape of a little sword, and presents it to him. With the fall of Poland the bulwark which protected Germany from the influence of the Russian autocracy was broken down. The defeat of the Poles was a defeat for the champions of liberty in every country. The shock was a violent one. A man who lived at Bremerhafen at the time when the infernal machine devised by the wholesale murderer, Thomas, exploded, tells how, immediately after he had heard the report of the fearful explosion, a torn, bleeding hand flew in at his open window and fell upon the desk at which he sat writing. Something of the same kind happened to German authors' when Warsaw capitulated. Shattered Poland's dissevered hand fell without warning upon their desks. Heine writes in 1831, in his introduction to Kahldorf's book on the aristocracy: "I feel while I am writing as if the blood shed at Warsaw were gushing from my paper, and as if the Berlin officers' and diplomatists' shouts of joy were ringing in my ears." The three Powers that had divided Poland determined to take immediate advantage of the victory to overpower dismayed European Liberalism, and this in four countries at the same time--in Germany, where the Bundestag was to inaugurate, and Prussia and Austria to carry out, a still more energetic reaction; in Italy, which was once more to be occupied by Austria; in Portugal, where Don Miguel was to be supported against his brother; and in the Netherlands, where the King of Holland was to be assisted in his struggle with rebellious Belgium. Immediately after the suppression of the Polish revolt, a note was addressed by the Cabinet of St. Petersburg to the German governments, in which Russia advised them to keep the revolutionary tendencies in their respective countries in check, and offered them her assistance in doing so. The censorship at once became more severe, and many Liberal newspapers and periodicals were suppressed. The Chambers of the South German States protested, and the utterances of the Liberal press, in spite of all warnings and threats, became more violent and reckless from day to day. The general belief had hitherto been that it was the desire of the sovereigns to meet the wishes of their people, but that they were held back by their advisers. Now this belief fell to the ground. The conviction became general that the unification of all the German countries in one constitutional, strongly democratic State was at hand. Politically short-sighted, and imbued with all manner of optimistic ideas, the general public were unable to believe that such a movement as that originated by the Revolution of July could exhaust itself without any political result. The champions of Liberalism had preached "progress" as a religion, and people had arrived at the belief that progress must inevitably be victorious, and that each attempt at reaction would actually work for good in the end. Such was the state of public opinion at the time of the publication of the first volume of Börne's _Letters from Paris_, which gained him great popularity. They were promptly suppressed. (November 1831.) This suppression, and the abuse heaped on the author by his opponents, added to the sensation which the bold language of the book had created. In these letters, Börne's style is only occasionally humorous, whereas in his earlier writings it invariably was so. We seldom find the quiet, resigned sort of humour distinguishing, for instance, his characteristic description of his capture by night and his imprisonment in Frankfort in 1820: "I was refused a boot-jack _Stiefelknecht_ = boot servant or slave), that the distressing symbol of servitude might not be always before my eyes. I was only allowed to use knife and fork in the presence of a warder, in case I should injure myself. Paper, pen, and ink were granted me only after repeated entreaties, and paper in restricted quantity; they were afraid my health might suffer from my sitting still too much. Every evening a warder came with a lantern to examine the stove and see that it did not smoke, as smoke might be injurious to my fine eyes; he also examined the grating in front of the window, to make sure that thieves could not break in, &c, &c." It is only at the commencement of his stay in Paris, while he is kept in a state of constant elation by the supposed attainment of great political results, that he still jests lightly and freely (as, for example, on the subject of the many Princes Henry of Reuss, Greiz, and Schleiz, who are now being punished by the revolution in Gera for all the agony the committing to memory of their respective numbers cost him at school); the jesting tone soon vanishes from his letters, and the striking, convincing similes are all that remains of his old style. His chief feeling, when he thinks of his Fatherland, is shame. In the Days of July, Englishmen and Dutchmen, Spaniards and Italians, Poles and Greeks, helped to fight for the liberty of France, which means the liberty of all nations; but no Germans were there. With its administration of justice, its censorship, and its guilds, Germany will soon be the antiquarian museum of Europe. But more obnoxious to him than anything else is the German spirit of loyalty and humility. The Spaniards, the Italians, the Russians, and all the others are slaves; the people that speak the German tongue are lackeys. Slavery only makes men unhappy, it does not degrade them; servitude degrades. (January 25th 1831.) At an international dinner in Paris, when speeches were being made by Liberals of every nationality, shame for his country prevented him from getting up to speak on its behalf. He thought: These Poles, these Spaniards, who have spoken, represent their country. "But what do I represent? what achievements do I recall? I stand alone, I am a lackey, wearing, like all other Germans, the livery of Count Münch-Bellinghausen." (14th December 1831.) Closely connected with this feeling of shame is an irritability, an inclination to be indignant with every one and everything, which gives a certain impression of weakness, of failing health. Everything, great and small, is "infuriating--from the long-suffering of the nations and their slowness to rise in revolt, to a rude letter from Spontini to the Berlin orchestra; from the proposal to grant Louis Philippe a liberal civil-list, to the deficiencies of an encyclopædia.[1] As time goes on he actually seeks out provocations. We come upon such expressions as: "I am cheerful, for I have been angry;" or "You cannot give me greater pleasure than by reporting cases of German stupidity to me." But in the years immediately following the Revolution of July, shame and anger are drowned in a storm-tossed sea of hope. Börne feels as absolutely certain of the speedy approach of a universal conflagration, followed by the victory of liberty, as the first Christians felt of the immediate end of the world, followed by the day of judgment, with its decree of salvation for the elect, and damnation for the hard of heart. He is in a state of excitement which makes it impossible for him to be the chronicle-writer of his time; he feels that it is his mission to be its prophet, in twelve long volumes, if need be.[2] Alas, it is only the pessimistic prophets who, sooner or later, always prove to be right. And Börne was an optimistic prophet, an enthusiast, naïvely and incorrigibly given to believing in what he wished. Events in France have inspired him with the belief that the death-knell of the reaction has sounded. He seriously reproaches himself for being ashamed to kiss such and such a Frenchman's hand, "the hand which has burst our fetters, and given to us serfs the accolade of knighthood." (17th September 1830.) He knows that the end is at hand. On the occasion of Charles X.'s laying some foundation-stone, Börne remarks that it is high time for kings to stop making themselves ridiculous by laying the foundation-stones of buildings. It would be more suitable for them now to nail the last tile on the roofs. For the time is at hand when the royal cooks will ask each other: "For whom shall we be preparing dinner to-morrow?" (19th September 1830.) A month after this, being asked what he thinks likely to happen, he expresses his firm conviction that the following spring will see the whole of Europe in conflagration. He pities the diplomatists, positively feels sympathy for them. When the Polish insurrection breaks out, he does not believe, taking the great strength of the Russians into consideration, that it will be as easy for the Poles as for the Belgians to attain their object, but is sure that they will succeed in the end. And like a refrain recurs the assertion that, one after another, all the countries of Europe will emancipate themselves, Germany alone remaining in its miserable condition. And yet at times he foresees the salvation of Germany. When the cholera is raging in Moscow, he understands its signification, sees the finger of God in it: "This is once more the naked hand of God. The Powers are prevented from gathering together great armies, and if, in spite of everything, they persist in doing so ... I have a presentiment--no, it is more than that, I _know_ that the cholera will do what as yet nothing else has had the power to do, it will rouse the most procrastinating and timid nation on the face of the earth to show courage." (3rd November 1830.) His confidence in the ultimate success of the Poles increased, supporting itself on the theory that those always win who have no choice but victory or death. At the close of the year 1830 he is certain that the ruling sovereigns are doomed; his "modest" New Year's wish for his friend and himself is, that 1831 maybe a better year for them than it will be for emperors and kings. He will have to say to his servant: "If an emperor comes, keep your eye upon him, and don't leave him alone in my room." And he ends by assuring him that in 1831 a dozen of eggs will be of more value than a dozen princes. (26th December 1830.) On the 8th of January 1831, he maintains that if only the Poles can avoid a pitched battle, the Russians, "powerful as they are, are lost." And he still takes it for granted that the French will take up arms in defence of Poland: France would be insane (_ganz von Sinnen_) if she did not take advantage of this unique opportunity to weaken the power of Russia. On the 11th of February he is perfectly positive that there will be war. He himself has never doubted it for a single day, and many who would not believe it before, have come round to his opinion. Outbursts of rejoicing are frequent. The Poles have once more received help from above; there is "tolerably certain" news of rebellion having broken out in several Russian provinces. On the 6th of March, when things are looking extremely bad for Poland, he has another false piece of news to rejoice over. A Parisian commercial house has received intelligence that the Russian forces have been scattered, and also that the Lithuanians are in revolt behind them, "which will decide matters." He is jubilant. From this time onwards, tyrants will be threatened with the Poles, as naughty children are threatened with the chimney-sweep. Nicholas boasted that he would roll the Poles together like a ball of yarn; the ball has turned into a bomb, which has blown him to pieces! Börne actually has visions of Paris illuminated on the occasion. On the 18th of March, when it is no longer possible to believe in the truth of the favourable news, he is already mounted on a new chimera. All is well; for in France itself a great change is impending: "Matters here are in such a position, that I daily, nay hourly, expect a revolution. Things cannot continue as they are for four weeks longer...." It is undoubtedly a strong proof of Börne's honesty that he allowed Jeannette to publish his letters as they came from his pen, unedited, without any suppression or modification of prophetic passages to which facts speedily gave the lie. But their perusal does not increase our faith in him as a politician. The contradiction between what is prophesied and what happens is at times so marked as to be comical. On the 25th of December he is in despair because of Lafayette's indecision: Lafayette is omnipotent, can bring about whatever he pleases, has only to threaten to give up the command of the National Guard to reduce the king, the ministers, and the Chambers to immediate submission. Next day, the 26th of December, he announces shortly that Lafayette has been deposed from his command, without so much as a dog barking. Strange, says the reader to himself, that such an eager politician should never have felt it a necessity to study the science of politics, in order to be able to form his conclusions with some understanding of the subject--that he should have been perfectly satisfied to produce ephemeral journalistic effusions, of value to-day, to-morrow cast into the oven. What constantly misleads Börne is that optimism of his, which has been already alluded to, an optimism at once naïve and fanatical, which perpetually discovers reasons why the evil that happens is at the same time the best thing that could happen. In March 1831, he trembles for the Poles, and declares that he is prepared for the worst. "But," he continues, "such a victory would be more disastrous for the Russians than all their defeats. The arrogant Nicholas would become presumptuous, and believe that he could dispose of France as easily as of Poland." What a ground of comfort! Börne goes on hoping for a revolution in Paris which shall shake all thrones. But it does not come. He presently discovers that this quietness of France is more dangerous for the crowned heads than anything else could be. On the 30th of November 1831, he writes: "For forty years France has been the crater of Europe. When that crater ceases to shoot forth flames, no throne in Europe will be safe for one night.... Nothing could have been so disastrous for the monarchs as the fall of Warsaw. They have ruined a miracle, and therefore now believe themselves capable of working miracles." In other words: A revolution in Paris is good, no revolution is still better. The victory of Poland would have been the ruin of the monarchs; the fall of Poland is more fatal for them still. At the bottom of all this is Börne's very remarkable, implicit faith in God, which is but rarely disturbed by the doubts of his ever active brain. The formula to which he almost always has recourse when he needs comfort is, that he trusts in God. Nicholas advances against the Poles with an overwhelming force; Börne "trusts in God." It is, as a matter of fact, only the Polish nobility who have risen in revolt, but Börne "trusts in the wisdom of God and the stupidity of his so-called representatives." He himself is, he declares, wiser than all the rest in France, as he was wiser than the rest in Germany; why? Because he "believes in God and nature," while the others believe in men and politics. Yet at times his faith wavers. We saw how at first he rejoiced over the cholera, saw the finger of God in it, felt that it would drive even the Germans to revolution. Only two months later (19th January 1831) he describes its actual effect, the manner in which it is paralysing the nations and aiding in the demolition of such liberty as still exists. At first he wrote: "What nothing else has been able to do, the cholera will do;" now it is the exact opposite: "What no Emperor of Russia, no devil could prevent, the cholera prevents." And he who saw in that plague "God's naked hand," now exclaims: "And the priests would have us believe that this is a judgment of God!" Nine months later (25th November) he gets out of the difficulty with a witty, thoughtless joke: "It is not often that God sends a heavenly commission of justice down to earth to investigate into the stewardship of his representatives, and so far, when such a thing has happened, it has not improved matters. The heavenly emissaries are out of their element on earth; they make mistakes, they even allow themselves to be bribed. We saw this lately, in the case of the Asiatic cholera, which punished the oppressed in place of the oppressors. God only helps those who help themselves."[3] Once only, when the fall of Poland is evidently at hand (5th March 1831), we feel that Börne's faith in his system is seriously shaken. When the Russians are getting the upper hand, he, as usual, makes free use of his favourite words--God, the devil, &c. He comes to the conclusion that "not even the wisdom of God, nothing but the stupidity of the devil can save Poland now." And then he interrupts himself with a question: "But is there a God at all? My heart does not doubt it yet, but one's brain feels bewildered enough at times. And even if he does exist, of what use is an eternal God to mortal man? Were he mortal like us ... he would take account of time and life, would not delay justice so long, would not wait to pay to future generations that which was their forefathers' due. Liberty can and will triumph, sooner or later; but why not now? It may triumph the very day after the fall of Poland; and that would be enough to break one's heart.... Can there be a God? Is this justice? We loathe cannibals, stupid savages, who only eat the flesh of their enemies. But we are reconciled to a far worse cannibalism--to the torturing, slaughtering, hewing asunder of the present, body and soul, with its joys and its happiness, its wishes and its hopes, to satisfy the appetite of the future."[4] A few days later, however, he returns to his accustomed faith in God and to that optimism over which no disappointments can prevail. Here and there in these letters we come upon sheer political twaddle, such as the fantasies on the consequences of the revolt in Hanover, and here and there on proofs of a positively foolish credulity, as, for example, when Börne allows himself to be persuaded that it is Metternich who has instigated the disturbances in South Germany in order that he may take possession of Bavaria while the troops are occupied; and again, that it is Louis Philippe's secret intention to reinstate the dynasty of Charles X. on the throne.[5] But frequently too we come upon utterances that show real political sagacity, a natural capacity for grasping a situation, and an unusual gift of prevision. On the 9th of November 1830, only four months after the Revolution, Börne already perceives that all that has happened amounts to no more than this, that the industrial magnates, those who understand nothing but "fear and money," have come into power. And he is quite certain that, since this Revolution has not attained its object, those in power refusing to see anything in it but a change of dynasty, a new revolution is unavoidable, "and may be expected without fail." A week later, with correct appreciation of the facts, and logical deduction, he explains how events will follow on one another: As these merchants and manufacturers, who for fifteen years have been declaiming against aristocracy, have hardly got into power before they endeavour to form a new aristocracy, of monied men, of adventurers, not based like the old on a principle, but upon privileges conferred by the possession of property; the French people, with their passion for equality, will, the next time they make a revolution, attack that which is now the foundation of privilege, namely, property; and this process will be accompanied by such horrors as no previous revolution has witnessed. Börne, we observe, has a prevision of socialism as a power; he prophesies the Commune. A year later (1st December 1831) he feels so certain how things will go that he writes: "I so plainly foresee the great war between the poor and the rich that I feel as if we were in the middle of it now;" and at this period, in spite of his strong moral bias, he has come to the conclusion that the first thing to be aimed at is the support of right by might. If this is not practicable, then all that can be done is to touch men's hearts, to gain them for the good cause by working upon their feelings, and to pursue tyranny with ridicule, hate, and contempt. It is of no use whatever to be simply honest, to have the right on one's side. No; "their honesty is their bane. They imagine that the main thing is to be, and to prove that they are, right. They talk of liberty as a barrister would talk of some piece of property. As if it were reasons that were wanted here!" (1st February 1831.) The man who shows himself to us in these letters, is, after all, a political enthusiast, a lover of liberty, rather than a statesman. He not only loves the common people but, like Rousseau, he has a true admiration for those who have not been "spoiled" by wealth or education; and this admiration goes hand in hand with a steadily increasing hatred of all the legitimate sovereigns and princes of Europe, which, when Börne casts all moderation from him along with his illusions, turns into veritable nihilism. "To think that ten yards of hempen cord would suffice to give the world peace, happiness, and quiet."[6] The peoples--the sovereigns,--the peoples--the sovereigns; it was between these poles that the pendulum of Börne's political thought incessantly swung; they were the poles of the political thought of the time. And it was natural enough that he should stop short at this antithesis, because he was essentially a democrat, such a confirmed democrat that, as he himself plainly tells us, he took no interest whatever in the study of the individual human being. It was as much of a nuisance to him to have to inquire into the peculiarities distinguishing one human being from another, as it was to have to decipher extremely minute handwriting. He preferred to occupy himself with humanity in the mass and with books. (3rd November 1830.) It is no wonder that we miss in him the delicate psychological insight which we look for in a great writer. To compensate for this deficiency we have the sympathy with whole nations, with whole classes, with a wide circle of readers, which enables an author to electrify a public, and ensures popularity during his lifetime even to a peculiarly audacious writer occupying a peculiarly precarious position. Not that Börne is unjust or prejudiced in his judgment of individuals. On the contrary, he shows the calm benevolence of superior intelligence; though he also undoubtedly at times evinces a real middle-class antipathy to what is over-aristocratic, and corresponding indulgence towards what is commonplace. When De Musset appears, he is at once struck by a kinship with Heine which surprises him in a Frenchman. He promptly recognises, even over-estimates Berlioz's genius, and every one knows how neglected and misunderstood Berlioz was. Prince Pückler he criticises appreciatively, without any warmth, but with a proper discernment of his merits; only he cannot understand how it was possible for any one to believe that Pückler's bright, but essentially unpoetical letters, could have been written by Heine. As regards Heine himself, it is for long only his worship of Napoleon that is distinctly antipathetic to Börne, who appreciates, nay admires him in every other respect. There is something suggestive in Börne's sincere admiration for Paul de Kock, in the warm appreciation with which he mentions him, and the zest with which he perseveringly reads eight volumes of his novels on end. It is their naïve and faithful representation of the life of the Parisian _petit bourgeois_ that seems to Börne so admirable. He goes the length, though half in jest, of praising De Kock's philosophy of life, and on this hardly suitable occasion mounts his old hobby, and writes: "Though he does not, like Goethe in _Wilhelm Meister_, serve up didactic letters with truffles, he gives us good strong philosophy dressed in bourgeois fashion." (3rd March 1831.) Paul de Kock exalted at the expense of Goethe! This sort of criticism says little for Börne's æsthetic sense. Of his political sagacity convincing proof is given by his pronouncements on Talleyrand. In 1830 he at once feels quite confident that Talleyrand will serve France well in London, and does not allow his confidence to be shaken by the Parisians' hatred of that diplomatist. He sees the absurdity of the loud complaint of the Liberal newspapers that Talleyrand, as one of the framers of the Peace of Vienna, is certain to support the Holy Alliance. He comprehends that neither the Holy Alliance nor anything else is holy to Talleyrand. And long afterwards he again refers to the unreasonableness of the accusation brought against that sagacious diplomatist of having served and betrayed every government in turn, acutely remarking that he did not betray governments, he only deserted them, and that not until they were dead. What Börne reads in Talleyrand's hard face is necessity, cast as it were in bronze. But the chief cause of the leniency of Börne's judgments is to be sought, not in his intellect, but in his heart, in the tenderness of his nature, in the strong bias towards kindly interpretation, which is not contradicted by his many violent, inconsiderate utterances; for these themselves, closely examined, prove to be but expressions of his love to his kind. He was a loving-hearted man, and in so far a Christian by nature, by instinct. This is the explanation of his conversion to Christianity. The reproach of hypocrisy in his case is a foolish one; his conception of Christianity may not have been profound, but he acted from honest, independent conviction. He became a Christian because he was a democrat and a humanitarian. To him Christianity was not simply a continuation and supplement of Judaism, it was rather the religion of humanity, and more especially "the religion of all poor devils." Every man who loved his kind was in Börne's eyes a Christian. Christianity was moreover to him the religion of liberty, especially in its Catholic form; for it was as Catholicism that it had destroyed the world-empire of the Romans. In the ardent love of liberty of these Poles with whom he has so much sympathy, he sees a proof of the liberalising power of Catholicism.[7] Börne does not personally believe in the dogmas of Christianity, or consider that faith is its essence; yet any attack on these dogmas is most repugnant to him. He sneers at Saint-Simonism because of its antagonism to the Christian religion, and he considers Strauss's _Life of Jesus_ to be not only a useless, but a mischievous book. All this makes it easy to understand how it was possible for him, in the last years of his life, to be completely carried away by a democratic Catholic like Lamennais, whose _Paroles d'un Croyant_, an attempt to blend Liberalism with religion, he translated and overrated. Religious Radicalism, as here expressed, was the magic formula to which the free and the locked-up powers of his own soul responded. In the course of the first volumes of the _Letters from Paris_, Börne, following the general trend of Oppositionist feeling in Germany, progressed from enthusiasm for constitutionalism to hope of revolution. In April 1832, not six months after their publication, one of the leaders of the Opposition, Dr Siebenpfeiffer, issued a general invitation to all the different German nationalities to attend a great national festival, to be held at the castle of Hambach, near Neustadt on the Haardt, on the 27th of May, the anniversary of the concession of the Bavarian constitution. It was to be a festival of brotherhood for all whose desire and aim was the regeneration of Germany. This festival, however, seemed so suspicious to the government of Rhenish Bavaria, that it was forbidden; strangers were prohibited from visiting Neustadt or its environs from the 26th to the 28th of May, and any assemblage of more than five persons in the streets or other public places was forbidden. These prohibitions excited such general discontent that the authorities were obliged to withdraw them. People streamed to the festival from every point of the compass. Almost every German country sent representatives--the majority, of course, being inhabitants of the Palatinate itself. Even Frenchmen were there in large numbers, and Poles naturally were not lacking. The assembly numbered about thirty thousand in all. Börne, who came from Paris, was the most fêted guest. His journey to Neustadt was a sort of triumphal procession. He was cheered everywhere. Torchlight processions and serenades were the order of the day. He writes from Freiburg; "You have no idea what an impression my _Letters from Paris_ have made in Germany. I never expected anything like it myself. Meyer, Wurm, and others had given out, had printed, that I could never again show myself in Germany, because I should be turned out of all respectable society. Nice prophets they are! I have done nothing but receive homage ever since I arrived. My room is never empty. I often have not chairs enough for my visitors. At the Hambach festival all present desired to make my acquaintance. It was so fatiguing that it has made me ill. When I made my appearance on the street in Neustadt, shouts were heard from the restaurants and from the passing carriages of: 'Hurrah for Börne! hurrah for the author of the _Letters from Paris!'_ The Heidelberg students serenaded me. All the patriots, Wirth and the rest, declared that the credit of the patriotic movement in Germany was due to me; I was first; the others all came after. Many, moved to tears, arid unable to speak for emotion, embraced me warmly. It has been the same thing here in Freiburg. The students came to my house in the evening, serenaded me, and shouted: 'Hurrah for the champion of German liberty!'... What will my critics say to this, those critics who called me a bad patriot? Public opinion does not allow itself to be misled." Absurdly enough, with all this enthusiasm, his watch was stolen at the Hambach festival. On the morning of the 27th of May, the enormous procession made its way from Neustadt to the ruins of the castle of Hambach. Every one wore black, red, and gold colours, and black, red, and gold flags were carried in front of the procession, the ranks of which were swelled by a great number of women, wearing black, red, and gold belts. Siebenpfeiffer and the Bavarian Liberal journalist, Wirth, were the principal speakers. They proclaimed the sovereignty of the people to be the foundation on which every state must rest, and declared that Germany would ere long be a republic. All the speeches made were violent, and all described the degradation of Germany as the work of her sovereigns, in combination with the aristocrats. Wirth proposed the toast (for which he had afterwards to do penance by a long imprisonment) of "The united free states of Germany," and "federated republican Europe," and shouted as he waved the sword of honour that had been presented to him: "Accursed, three times accursed be the rulers of Germany!" These words were re-echoed by part of the assembly; there were shouts of: "Down with kings and princes! To arms! To arms!" The participators in the Hambach festival had, however, no immediate, practical aim in view. Supposing the moment to have been favourable--a tolerably doubtful supposition--they allowed it to pass without taking advantage of it. Heine writes humorously and bitterly: "I dare hardly tell the story, it seems so incredible, yet I have it from a reliable source, from a man who is an honest and truthful republican, and was himself a member of the committee at Hambach which deliberated on the impending revolution. This man told me in confidence that, when it came to the question of competence, to a dispute as to whether the patriots then assembled at Hambach were really competent to begin a revolution in the name of the whole of Germany, those who advised immediate action were outvoted, and the conclusion arrived at was that they were incompetent." Heine calls this the best story he has ever heard, good enough to make him forget all the troubles of this vale of tears, and even to cheer him after death in the dusky tedium of the realm of shades. Then he speaks words of comfort to kings and princes, tells them how it is quite unnecessary that they should imprison any more worthy citizens; they may sleep in peace; they are in no danger; the German revolution is still far off; the question of competence is not yet decided.[8] For many years after he made Heine's literary and personal acquaintance, Börne's feeling towards that author was a friendly one; he spoke of him with affection, gave him his full due as a poet, and more especially appreciated him as a great power in the service of universal emancipation. But their natures were too unlike to permit of his judgment being quite unprejudiced. From 1831 onwards we come upon spiteful references to Heine in the Letters. Although Börne was devoid of petty vanity, the frequent comparisons made between Heine and himself rankled in his mind, especially as, in the matter of ability and gifts, they were often to his disadvantage. And Heine's _Französische Zustände_ ("The Situation in France") offended and wounded him; its perusal roused in him a feeling of ill-humour to which he gave vent (in the last volume of the _Letters from Paris_) in cutting satire, which struck Heine as it were from above, and, in the eyes of many readers, stamped him with the brand of political untrustworthiness. It was in reality the deep-seated antagonism between the natures of the two fellow-combatants that found vent on this occasion. Börne did not understand the real nature of the difference between himself and Heine. To him it seemed to be the difference between manly earnestness and boyish frivolity, or, taken in its highest aspect, between devotion to truth and devotion to form, to art. With accurate perception he detected and exposed some of the small puerilities and snobberies of which Heine, when dazzled by the tinsel of life, could at a time be guilty, and also some of his unjust mockeries of ideal endeavour clothed in clumsy or naïvely popular form. Börne detested the Rothschilds, by whom Heine was impressed and fascinated. Börne, who felt out of his element in drawing-rooms, was quite at home among democratic artisans, and in gatherings of German emigrants, no matter how wild the schemes they planned, or how unpractical the undertakings for which they collected money; Heine, on the contrary, was annoyed by the constant solicitations to support this or that democratic undertaking, was quite unsuited to be a member of the democratic fraternity, preferred, in spite of his revolutionary leanings, to keep himself to himself, and had no intention whatever of being on terms of hail fellow well met with any chance band of emigrant fellow-countrymen. In a letter dated the 25th of February 1833, Börne jeers at Heine for various things, amongst others for writing of the inhuman policy pursued by Austria for the last three hundred years as "sublime perseverance"; for calling King Louis of Bavaria, whom he afterwards so unmercifully satirised, "one of the noblest and most intellectual monarchs that ever sat upon a throne"; and for declaring it to be "courageous and admirable" of the Messrs. Rothschild to remain in Paris during the cholera, while he, at the same time, casts ridicule on the unpaid exertions of the German patriots. On these points, and others, Börne is right, but nevertheless he shows no delicate discernment or profound comprehension of Heine's real character. In the case of Heine, as in the case of Goethe, he stood face to face with a genius he was unable to judge impartially, though he by no means wronged his restless contemporary to the same extent or in the same manner as he did his great predecessor. [1] Stock expressions: "O, es ist zum Rasendwerden! (it is maddening!) O, ich habe eine Wuth! (I am in a transport of rage!)." On the subject of the encyclopædia: "Eine starke halbe Stunde musste ich das Schreiben unterbrechen, und meine Wuth war grenzenlos." (I had to stop writing for a good half hour, and was infuriated beyond all bounds.) [2] "Was, wo, worauf, womit soll ich schreiben? Der Boden zittert, es zittert der Tisch, das Pult, Hand und Herz zittern, und die Geschichte, vom Sturme bewegt, zittert selbst.... Prophet wollte ich sein zwölf Bände durch."--What, where, upon what, with what am I to write? The ground, the table, the desk, hand and heart tremble, shaken by the hurricane, history itself trembles.... A prophet I would be, throughout twelve volumes. [3] _Börne_, iii. 75, 86, 172; 43, 99, 267. [4] _Börne_, iii. 159, 160. [5] _Börne_, 98, 39, 270. [6] "Und mit Zehn Ellen Hanf wäre der Welt Friede, Glück, und Ruhe zu geben." [7] "Das einzige Volk im Norden, das seit dreihundert Jahren nie aufgehört sich für die Freiheit zu erheben, ist das polnische, und es blieb katholisch." The one nation of the North that for three hundred years has not ceased to make a stand for liberty, is Poland, and Poland remained Catholic. [8] Heine: _Sämmtliche Werke_, xii. 153. XI HEINE For Heinrich Heine also, as already observed, the present moment in the development of the new German Empire is an unfavourable one. He is reproached with so much, that it is difficult to summarise. First there is his infatuation for France, and his supposed or real frivolity; then his un-German extraction and wit, his sentimentality, his foppery, his wantonness; and lastly, the defiant manner in which he parades his irreligion. New Germany is indifferent in religious matters, but tacitly so, and in the matter of morals it is thoroughly disciplined. In the Germany of to-day the highest virtues, truthfulness, independence, high spirit, and sensitiveness, are of much less account than dutifulness, correctness, social discipline, military smartness--_Schneidigkeit_, as it is called. In Heine's time the opposite was the case. No value was put on discipline. Piety counted for more than religion, humanity for more than patriotism. The best men of those days did not regard patriotism as an unqualified virtue; nor did they consider that justice ceased to be a virtue when shown to another nation. To an abstract Radical bent of mind there was added in Heine's case the hatred of Prussia, whose future he did not foresee, whose strength he did not realize--that strength of which Carlyle gives us the best idea in his delineation of the father of Frederick the Great, a strength which lay in the ability, by means of sober severity, to conquer chaos, crush all foolish opposition, and rule. Heine's was no undefined dislike, it was the Rhinelander's mortal enmity to Prussia. Read his lines to the Prussian eagle: "Du hässlicher Vogel! wirst du einst, Mir in die Hände fallen, So rupfe ich dir die Federn aus Und haue dir ab die Krallen. Du sollst mir dann in luft'ger Höh' Auf einer Stange sitzen Und ich rufe zum lustigen Schiessen herbei Die _rheinischen_ Bogenschützen."[1] At the Congress of Vienna, after repeatedly refusing, Prussia at last consented to take over the Rhine Provinces. Instead of the rounding off of her frontier in the east for which she had hoped, she thus acquired territory at a distance, and came to rule over a race of Germans totally unlike the Old-Prussians. This Rhine Province was the region where, in days gone by, the line of separation between Kelts and Germans lay. Most of it had been included in the Roman military province. At a later period the land came under priestly rule, which accounts for the fact that it was in no way influenced in the eighteenth century by the spirit of Frederick the Great. Old, decaying clericalism came here into direct contact with the French Revolution, and the propagators of the revolutionary ideas were joyfully welcomed. The Old-Prussian's feeling towards the Rhinelanders was the distrust of antipathy, a feeling the Rhinelanders returned with interest. At the Rhine the Prussians were, and continued to be strangers, unwelcome strangers. When he spoke of a son serving in the army, the Rhinelander said: "He is with the Prussians." The government official transferred from Berlin to Cologne or Düsseldorf put on airs, and disparaged everything, and the Rhinelander long regarded a transfer to one of the old Prussian provinces as a sort of exile to Siberia. Complaints were heard everywhere of Prussia's inability to gain the affections of the peoples she had conquered.[2] [Illustration: HEINRICH HEINE] Heinrich Heine was born near the close of the century at Düsseldorf, then capital of the duchy of Jülich-Cleve-Berg. For six years the town was garrisoned by French revolutionary troops. They took their departure in 1801, and Max Joseph of Pfalz-Zweibrücken became Grand Duke; but in 1806 he was made King of Bavaria, and Joachim Murat was installed as Grand Duke in his stead. Only two years later Murat had to make way for the eldest son of the King of Holland, or, in reality, as the boy was not of age, for Napoleon, as his guardian. The country was now governed exactly according to the French pattern; serfdom, feudal law, and statute-labour were abolished, and complete religious liberty was proclaimed. This last innovation led to Napoleon's being revered by the Jewish population of the Rhine Provinces as their saviour from the oppression of a thousand years. There can be no doubt that the contact with the audacious, victorious Frenchmen of that day powerfully influenced Heine's mental development. His respect for traditional authority was early undermined. His natural wit was developed in the direction of what the French call _esprit_. The germs of his enthusiastic admiration for Napoleon were generated. That enthusiasm seems to us to-day to be an isolated phenomenon in the German literature of the century; in reality it was very far from being so. Let us go back to Wieland, and we shall find that he held Napoleon in the same high estimation, even before such an opinion had been justified by the events of history. In 1798 he declares that France stands in need of a dictator, and that no one is fit for the post except General Bonaparte, then in Egypt. In 1800 he prophesies that Bonaparte will and must make himself king, and defends him against the attacks of the English newspapers. Napoleon, having been told of these prophecies, had a lengthy interview with Wieland at Erfurt in 1808. None of the great Germans at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century knew what national enmity meant. It was without a spark of any such feeling that Goethe, in the capacity of spectator, made the campaign of 1793 in France. Schiller valued his certificate of French citizenship, and believed that it might come to be of use to his children. Knebel, Goethe's friend, wished that he dared sing Napoleon's victories. Goethe himself looked on with complacency while Napoleon shattered the kingdom of Frederick the Great into fragments; it is evident that he must have regarded that kingdom of Prussia as a passing phenomenon in the history of Germany. He had witnessed Napoleon's rise and victorious career, and had seen him suppress that anarchy which was so hateful to himself, the aristocrat and evolutionist. At last he made his personal acquaintance, saw him surrounded by his marshals, in an atmosphere of brightness, amiability, geniality, general irresistibility. The personal impression made upon him by Napoleon was such as to increase his previous admiration for him. Hence it was that even after the Russian campaign, even during the rehabilitation of Germany, Goethe continued to say: "It is all of no use; the man is too strong for them." It was not till all was over that he made a sort of compulsory amends by writing a play for the fête on the occasion of the peace. Goethe's valuation of Napoleon has been the subject of much discussion; less well known is the impression which the great Frenchman made on Hegel, who, as Heine's teacher and chosen philosopher, influenced him quite as much as Goethe. Hegel was born a subject of the small, despotically-ruled State of Würtemberg. He longed for a fatherland, but had never known what it was to have one, and in the beginning of the century he was so embittered by the situation in Germany, and roused to such anger and scorn by the political stupidity of his countrymen, that he, like Goethe, welcomed Napoleon with the unqualified enthusiasm of a cosmopolitan. He had spent his youth dreaming of a possible reconciliation of the real with the ideal, but had never come into contact with a real living power until Napoleon crossed his path and aroused his enthusiasm. It was said of Goethe that he took advantage of the distraction caused by the roar of the cannon at Jena to marry Christiane Vulpius without rousing remark; of Hegel it was said that he finished his work _Die Phænomenologie des Geistes_ ("Philosophy of Mind") in Jena itself, while the battle was raging. It is a fact that it was exactly at this time that he despatched the last pages of the work to his publisher; and there is a very striking contrast between his calm indifference to the ruin of Prussia and his keen anxiety lest any of the precious packets of manuscript should be lost in transit at that unsettled time. A letter to his publisher, which accompanied one of the packets, bears the date of the battle. In the work, to which the finishing touches were put under such circumstances, Hegel expounded his theory of the development of the human mind with a curious mixture of historical and psychological argument. He maintained that humanity had now reached its goal, that such individual mortals as had attained to the highest degree of understanding, now possessed the insight of gods, that their lives, lives of far-reaching influence, were now simply the harmonious unfolding of an existence such as the Greeks imagined that of their gods to be, absolutely contented, absolutely reconciled. While Hegel was writing his concluding words, which are to the effect that history is but a play of the spirit that is conscious of itself as spirit, Napoleon drew rein at the gates of Jena. And Hegel saw him, and seeing him, rejoiced. "I have seen the emperor, that soul of the world," he writes from Jena. "It truly gives one a strange feeling to see one such single individual who, concentrated on a single point, sitting on his horse here in Jena, influences and rules the world. As far as the Prussians are concerned, nothing better could have been prognosticated--but only such a man could have made such way between Thursday and Monday; it is impossible to refuse him admiration." And it is not only the emperor Hegel admires, but the whole French people. Three months later he writes that in the history of the day he sees convincing proof that culture overcomes barbarism, that intellect overcomes unintellectuality. And he even adds: "I have long wished the French army success, now all do so; nor can it fail to be successful, considering the enormous difference between its leaders and soldiers and those of the enemy."[3] If Heine had ever imagined that his enthusiasm for Napoleon required any apology, he might have found one in the fact that he was but following in the footsteps of the man whom he invariably spoke of with reverence as "the great Hegel, the greatest philosopher Germany has produced since Leibnitz," the man of whom he makes the very questionable assertion that he quite unquestionably "towers high above Kant," and whom he criticises with such lenient and gentle disparagement as the following utterance conveys: "Hegel allowed himself to be crowned in Berlin, and alas, to be anointed too." Not only Heine's great models and teachers, but contemporaries like Varnhagen von Ense, who had actually shed his blood in the war against Napoleon, shared his enthusiasm, and were equally free from patriotic enmity to France. Of the Dane Baggesen, who, half German by nature, was fain to be more German than the Germans, Varnhagen writes: "His hatred of Napoleon and the French is peculiarly offensive; it is an aversion which amounts to loathing, and yet it is groundless, for all that is good in us Germans, all that we are proudest of in ourselves, he holds in horror and would fain suppress with the help of Kant, Jacobi, Voss, and Klopstock." Kant is evidently included in this list on account of the very un-German "categorical imperative," the others on account of the extreme narrowness of their patriotism. The cult of Napoleon is thus, we see, to be traced in the words and works of the men who had the greatest influence on Heine's development and on that of young Germany in general. It inspired Heine's muse several years before it became epidemic in France, and Heine rises to an equal height of enthusiasm with Beyle and Hugo. It is not too much to say that the poetic expression of this enthusiasm in his youthful poem _The Two Grenadiers_ (which he probably wrote at the age of eighteen, though he himself claims to have written it at sixteen) surpasses anything of the same nature that exists in French. Not even Béranger's _Souvenirs du Peuple_ is so simply grand, although it, better than any other poem, has given tangible and touching expression to the French popular Napoleonic legend. In Heine's _Grenadiers_ the rhythm of each line answers exactly to its mood and matter--the mournful iambics: _Der Andre sprach: das Lied ist aus_; the fiery anapæsts: _Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab_. The grenadier's impossible request to his comrade to carry his corpse to France passes almost unnoticed. The wildness of the principal strophe: _Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind_, the grenadier's protest against the supposition that he is tied by the wife and child he has left at home, contrasts forcibly with the sentimentality of the Romantic style. It is only ostensibly that this poem glorifies fidelity to Napoleon personally; what it really glorifies is loving fidelity to the great leader, unbounded enthusiasm for the great personality. The gift of describing by means of introducing characters into lyric poetry was common to both Béranger and Heine. But Béranger was a song-writer, Heine a genius. _The Two Grenadiers_ begins, as Heine almost always begins, quietly, smoothly. Nothing could be more unlike this than Victor Hugo's lyric attack: _Lui! toujours lui!_ Heine does not produce his effect by direct representation, but by delineation of the less important, of the small things in which the great are reflected, and which provide a standard to gauge them by; then at last, following on and issuing from the simple dialogue, comes the burst of visionary enthusiasm. That the object of this worship was hardly worthy of it, does not make the feeling itself less admirable. It is a feeling of exactly the same kind that Heine describes in the _Reisebilder_, when he tells how, as a child, he saw Napoleon riding through the ducal garden in Düsseldorf. The chapter begins: "But what were my feelings when I saw himself, saw him with my own highly-favoured eyes, himself, Hosannah! the Emperor!" Note the _Hosannah!_ In the moment of ecstasy, the recollections of childhood bring the Old Testament cry of salutation and rejoicing to his lips. And what did the child think on the occasion? He remembered that it was forbidden, under a penalty of five thalers, to ride through the avenue. And, lo and behold! there was the emperor, with all his officers, riding straight through--the shuddering trees bent forward as he passed.... As a political poet, Heine is considered to be revolutionary, and so he was. But his political animosity is exclusively aroused by medieval conditions, medieval beliefs. He is anti-clerical in good earnest, but not democratic in good earnest. His longest political poem, _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_, ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), gives abundant evidence of this. It rises to real passion only where the poet's invisible companion, the lictor with the terrible axe, breaks up the skeletons of the Three Kings in the Cathedral of Cologne, "the miserable skeletons of superstition." But it is in this great poem, Heine's most important work, that we have the clearest expression of the political feelings and principles which animated him, the element, new to German poetry, of warlike challenge and hand-to-hand struggle. Nothing of the kind is to be found in Goethe. In the end, indeed, Goethe was persuaded of "the absolute pitiableness of the time," but he feared that the overthrow of existing authorities would only make things worse. Not even in Schiller can we find any direct reference to the politics of the day. His political feeling finds a vent in dramas whose theme is liberty. But in Heine, from 1830 onwards, we have always this direct expression of the faith that was in him. His soul was in politics. And in politics he was honest, even in cases where his honesty was misunderstood. Turn to that passage in the _Reisebilder_ which is most frequently cited as an expression of his boastfulness and affectation, the passage following on the description of his visit to the battlefield of Marengo: "'This will be a fine day,' called my travelling companion.--Yes, it will be a fine day, silently echoed my heart, uplifted in prayer, trembling with sadness and joyfulness. Yes, it will be a fine day, and the sun of liberty will gladden the earth. A new generation will spring up and flourish, begotten in free embrace, not in a prison bed, under the control of clerical warders; and this free birth will generate free thoughts and feelings, of which we born serfs have not even a presentiment ..." then at the end these words: "I know not if I deserve that a laurel wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it; has always been to me but a divine plaything, or a weapon consecrated to divine purposes.... But lay on my coffin a _sword_, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity." This political warfare of Heine's is spoken of with the utmost contempt by German historians of literature, historians proper, and literary critics; not only by Menzel, but by such men as Goedeke, Treitschke, Grisebach (Heine's imitator and denouncer), and Hehn, whose perception in other cases is so remarkably acute. Even Scherer is cold and depreciatory. When the Italian poet Carducci some years ago celebrated Heine in an ode as a hero in the struggle of liberty, even Karl Hillebrand, the best literary critic in Germany, who had at one time been Heine's secretary, and had always spoken of him with reverence and admiration, made a sort of protest, declaring that Heine himself had never taken the thing so seriously. This disfavour and distrust is not surprising. The frivolity in Heine's character led in his youth to repellent political vacillation. In 1827, in the hope of being appointed to a professorship at Munich, he was ready to disown his previous principles to please King Louis, but gained nothing by it. He offered at the same time to defend the wretched Duke of Brunswick, the diamond-Duke, in return for a Brunswick order; but in this case also he was disappointed. It was not till 1830 that he began to show political strength of character. We must also remember that in Heine's writings there is an absence of all "pathetic gesture." He was too proud to employ it. Germans cannot understand this. But grievous wrong is done him. The pathos was in his soul. His whole soul is in the little poem _Enfant Perdu_, with which one of the divisions of _Romancero_ concludes, and which he wrote when he was no longer young. He really was what he here calls himself, an advanced and forgotten outpost, left to be shot down. And when, in his posthumous prose hymn, he cries: "I am the sword, I am flame," it is but the truth. The light of his flame, the sparks of his sword-blows, still shine bright. Many still warm themselves at his fire. As already mentioned, Börne, in his _Letters from Paris_, calls Heine an inconsistent, vacillating, characterless politician. He does not so much reproach him with overrating himself personally as with overrating the influence of the individual human being. For it is Börne's opinion that the individual is no longer of much importance. Even a Voltaire or a Rousseau would not be a powerful influence nowadays. Individuals are now merely the heralds of the people. This Heine forgets. Then, in his desire to please the democrats, he declares that the Jesuitic-aristocratic party in Germany malign him because he makes a bold stand against absolutism; but almost at the same time, in order to curry favour with the aristocrats, says that he has made a stand against Jacobinism, and that he is, and always will be, a good monarchist. Börne does not always understand a joke. Heine gives a droll account of a Paris millinery establishment which he frequented the summer before he writes, where he, as a royalist, was one against sixteen, the eight young shop-girls and their eight lovers being all violently aggressive republicans. Elsewhere he writes: "God knows I am no Republican. I know that when the Republicans are victorious, they will cut off my head ... a piece of foolishness for which I am quite ready to forgive them." Börne adds: "Not I. A lunatic asylum would be the proper place for Republicans that were such fools as to suppose that it was necessary to get rid of Heine in order to attain their aims." In spite of their jesting tone, there is something in these and similar utterances of Heine's which puzzles the reader. Intermittent outbursts of violent Radicalism, everywhere an undertone of the most pronounced revolutionary feeling--and these constantly recurring assurances that he is not a Jacobin, not even a Republican. An explanation is required, an explanation which no one has yet offered. For to say that Heine was characterless, characterless to such a degree, that in the most serious matters, and with the eyes of two great nations upon him, he perpetually contradicted himself, is no explanation at all. The vagueness, the contradiction must lie in his principles. Remember his faithful, boundless devotion to Napoleon, which once more and for the last time finds expression in the _Winter's Tale_, in the dirge of the dead emperor, brought in his coffin from St. Helena to Paris: "Die elysäischen Felder entlang, Durch des Triumphes Bogen, Wohl durch den Nebel, wohl über den Schnee Kam langsam der Zug gezogen...."[4] And then think of the scene (from the _Reisebilder_) on the battlefield of Marengo. The Russian asks Heine: "Are you a good Russian?" And Heine answers: "Yes, I am a good Russian." For, he goes on to explain, the incessant change of war-cries and of representatives in the great struggle has now led to this--that the most enthusiastic friends of the Revolution look for the salvation of the world from the domination of Russia, look upon the Emperor Nicholas as the standard-bearer of liberty in Europe. The Russian government is permeated with Liberal ideas, its absolutism is simply a dictatorship, which gives it the power to put these ideas into practice, &c, &c. The mistake is colossal in its simplicity. But for our present purpose this is of no consequence. What interests us is the fact that Russian absolutism, thus understood by Heine, received from him the same measure of approval and sympathy as he had formerly bestowed on the rule of Napoleon. Give this due consideration. Heine, the most advanced representative of Radicalism among the poets of his time, declares the Emperor Nicholas, the most tyrannical autocrat of his time, to be the standard-bearer of liberty! Can this be the same man who took a childish pleasure in invariably associating in his mind the thought of royal or imperial rank with the thought of the guillotine? Remember his words to Barbarossa: "Du wirst hier an ein Brett geschnallt--das senkt sich, &c, &c." (They fasten you to a plank--it is lowered, &c), and the concluding apostrophe to the venerable old emperor: "Die Republikaner lachen uns aus--sehn sie an unserer Spitze--so ein Gespenst mit Scepter und Krön." (The Republicans will laugh us to scorn, if they see us led by an old spectre like you, with sceptre and crown). We see that he sets some value on the opinion of the Republicans, sees things to a certain extent from their standpoint. Or again, think of that extraordinarily witty poem "1649-1793-?" which first treats of the short and sharp justice meted out to kings in the English and French Revolutions, and then prophesies the impending German revolution, but declares that: "Der Deutsche wird die Majestät Behandeln stets mit Pietät. In einer sechsspännigen Hofkarosse, Schwarz panaschirt und beflort die Rosse-- Hoch auf dem Bock mit der Trauerpeitsche Der weinende Kutscher--so wird der deutsche Monarch einst nach dem Richtplatz kutschirt, Und unterthänigst guillotinirt."[5] If this is not simply playing with words and with feelings, there must be an explanation of it, a key to it which Heine himself did not possess. For that there is self-contradiction in such words is undeniable. The explanation is that Heine was at one and the same time a passionate lover of liberty and an out-and-out aristocrat. He had the freedom-loving nature's thirst for liberty, pined and languished for it, and loved it with his whole soul; but he had also the great nature's admiration for human greatness, and the refined nature's nervous horror of the rule of mediocrity. In other words, there was not a drop of conservative blood in Heinrich Heine's heart. His blood was revolutionary. But neither was there a drop of democratic blood in his heart. His blood was aristocratic, his desire was to see genius acknowledged as leader and ruler. When, in his historical retrospects or previsions, he sees a worthless king or emperor guillotined, he applauds. But he would give to Cæsar that which is Cæsar's. _Apodote ta Kaisaros Kaisari_ is the saying of Jesus which is most deeply engraved on his mind. He does not dread a condition of liberty, to which any liberty we have yet known on earth is child's play; but he does not believe that liberty would result from the realisation of the Philistine ideals of the average mind. All mediocrity, Liberal and Republican mediocrity included, he abhors, as inimical to great individuality, to great liberty. Hence his distrust of the North American Republic, his want of enthusiasm for its liberty: "Manchmal kommt mir in den Sinn Nach Amerika zu segeln, Nach dem grossen Freiheitsstall, Der bewohnt von Gleichheitsflegeln...."[6] If Heine adores the _Marseillaise_, it is because the _Marseillaise_ is to him the symbol of the great revolt. If he worships Napoleon, it is because Napoleon is the over-thrower of kings and of the old order of the world; and if, in Napoleon's case, he overlooks all that is inimical to liberty, it is because Napoleon is in his eyes the representative of the people, free from any suspicion of democratic mediocrity. It is only at a rare time, when he is despondent, when he is not himself, but is making use of a borrowed formula, that Heine commits himself to the foolish, plebeian assertion that the power of the great personality is a thing of the past--a theory which is in reality nothing but the classic expression of middle-class envy. In his heart of hearts Heine is so convinced of the contrary that he can go to the mad extreme of imagining Nicholas, the obdurate representative of the principle of coercion, to be the chief champion of liberty in Europe. But Nicholas was at least a personality, a power. And Heine was genius enough to feel that in the last instance personalities and powers are the only things that count. Numbers do not, neither do monarchs, not even in quantities. Hence Heine's standing joke on the subject of the three dozen German monarchs. What Heine dreaded was perhaps in the first place a life without beauty. Fourier's Phalanstery, the great home of labour, where everything, down to the beer, is equally distributed, where there is no room for any superfluity, not even for the superfluity which is known by the name of art, seemed to him to be inevitable in the future, but did not satisfy him. But still more repugnant to him was a life without all greatness, with equality in mediocrity as its religion, and hatred to genius, to inquiring minds, to those who openly discard Nazarene asceticism, as its only real morality. And equally repugnant to him was society as he knew it, dominated by an unintellectual clergy and an unrefined aristocracy, and society as he foresaw it, composed of emancipated slave souls, who had only exchanged the servility which was their instinct for free indulgence in the envy which lay at the root of all their morality. He certainly took part with those who rose in revolution against Louis XVI., that worthy locksmith who became a king. But he as certainly took part with Cæsar against Brutus, that dunce of a usurer, who could do nothing but stick a knife into a great man. Heine imagined himself to be a monarchist; he called himself so from sincere conviction, because he was a Cæsarian, and had not the word to express it. He imagined himself to be a democrat, and called himself so; because he was born a plebeian, hated all unjust privileges of birth, and felt himself in eternal opposition to the squirearchy and the clergy. But in his inmost soul he was consistent. The apparent contradiction in his political sympathies and tendencies arose from the fact that he loved greatness and beauty as truly as he loved liberty, and that he was not prepared to sacrifice the highest development of humanity on the altar of unreal equality and real mediocrity. [1] If I ever get hold of thee, thou ugly bird, I will pluck out thy feathers and cut off thy claws, perch thee high in air on a pole, and call the archers of the Rhineland to the merry shooting-match. [2] K. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: _Preussen und Frankreich zur Zeit der Julirevolution_, p. 25, &c. [3] Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_. [5] The German will ever treat royalty with respect. 'Tis in a carriage of state, drawn by six horses with sable plumes and trappings--on the box a weeping coachman with crape-bound whip--that the German monarch will be driven to the place of execution, and there most submissively guillotined. [6] At times the fancy takes me to set sail for America, that great liberty-stable, where the equality-bumpkins congregate.... XII HEINE It seems most probable that Heinrich Heine was born on the 13th of December 1797. His father, Samson Heine of Hanover, as a young man took part in a campaign in Flanders and Brabant, in the capacity of quartermaster (with the rank of an officer) to the Duke of Cumberland, but after his marriage with Peira (Betty) von Geldern, settled down as a merchant in Düsseldorf. He was a handsome, placid, grave man, without much ability, even as a merchant. He had no taste for art or poetry, but he had a childish love of a fine uniform, and aristocratic tastes for gambling, actresses, dogs, and horses. He is said to have taken twelve horses with him when he removed to Düsseldorf. The poet's mother was a woman of keen intelligence and deep feeling, and was very musical. She had received a good education, spoke French and English as fluently as German, was a disciple of Rousseau, whose _Émile_ she had studied, and an admirer of Goethe. She early rebelled against prejudice and conventionality, and differed from her husband, who reverenced Napoleon, in being an ardent patriot. Education was her hobby, and she taught her children with great care and patience. Both parents were free-thinkers in the matter of religion--the father indifferent, the mother a deist; but they brought up their children in the observance of the old Jewish ritual. After a short time at a Jewish school for young children, where, it may be, the foundation was laid for that knowledge of the Bible which is so conspicuous in his writings, Heinrich was placed in an educational establishment carried on in an old Franciscan monastery by French ecclesiastics, principally Jesuits, who were at the same time educated men of the world. He had had a happy childhood in his home, and at school, too, he found friends and protectors, who took his part when his religion or his mocking tongue threatened to get him into trouble. The earliest noticeable peculiarity in the future poet was a nervousness, which steadily grew upon him, and which showed itself in the disagreeable and even painful effect produced in him by any kind of noise. Piano-playing and loud talk, at times even his sister's sweet, melodious voice, affected him as screaming affects ordinary nerves. And his sense of smell was as acute as his hearing. From a child he, like Goethe, loathed tobacco smoke. He had no taste for music, and never learned to dance. At fifteen he began to write good verse. The Rhineland, with its joyousness, but also with its superstition, tradition, and legend; the Catholic worship of these parts, with its medieval buildings and ceremonies and pilgrimages, over which the Romantic poetry of the day cast a transfiguring halo; the impressions produced by Jewish descent, by the poetry of the Bible, and by the craving for liberty, and the self-contempt engendered in the Jews by oppression; the enthusiasm for the French and for Napoleon, and afterwards, following quickly upon this, the patriotic awakening of Germany, which led all the pupils in the highest class of the school, Heine among them, to attempt (most of them in vain) to enlist as volunteers in the War of Liberation--all these outward conditions and psychological experiences formed and set their imprint on the boy's mind. The great humorists, such as Cervantes and Swift, were his chosen reading; _Don Quixote_ and _Gulliver's Travels_ his favourite books. In his sixteenth year he had a first romantic attachment to a girl of his own age, Josepha by name, the daughter of an executioner, who lived with her aunt, the widow of another executioner, a woman avoided and feared by all. Heine has told us that the young girl was strangely pale, that her movements were rhythmic and dignified, that she had finely cut features, large, dark eyes, and blood-red hair. She knew and taught him many ballads, was, he himself tells us, the first to awaken his taste for popular poetry, and altogether, what with her radiant beauty and the atmosphere of weirdness and horror that surrounded her, exercised no small influence on the budding poet. In Heine's first poems we observe a tendency towards thoughts of death and the grave, which seems to have been one result of the tender attachment of the two children. In No. 6 of the _Dream Pictures_, the eternal damnation which is the price that must be paid for the possession of the beautiful woman who appears in the dream, seems to symbolise the dishonour which clung to the executioner's whole race, and acted like a curse on all who dared to connect themselves with it. After 1816, Josepha's image is supplanted in Heine's soul by that of another young girl. His parents, on whom the brilliant career of the Rothschilds had made a great impression, destined their Harry (as he was originally called) to be a merchant. They sent him first to a commercial school in Düsseldorf, then for a few months to a banker in Frankfort, and finally placed him in an office in Hamburg, where his uncle, the well-known Salomon Heine, had risen to be a great man in the commercial world. In 1818, with the help of this rich uncle, on whom he remained practically dependent for the rest of his life, Heine began business for himself, as a commission agent for English drapery goods. Few were surprised when, in the following spring, the firm of "Harry Heine & Co." stopped payment. But in his uncle's house Heine had found not only the crusty benefactor who, generous to his nephew as he was, never understood him and was always irritated by him, but also, in that benefactor's third daughter Amalie, the woman who was to be the fate of his youth, and whom he has extolled and execrated under various names--Maria, Zuleima, in correspondence Molly. He is never tired of celebrating her charms; she shines in beauty resplendent as that of the goddess who emerged from the sea foam; her eyes, lips, and cheeks are those of the Madonna in the Cathedral of Cologne; her eyes are violets, her hands lilies, &c, &c. But it does not appear that she ever loved him. He hoped in time to win her affections, and it is possible that he may now and again have received tokens of her favour; from his poems we are led to understand that her marriage to a landed proprietor from Königsberg, in the year 1821, stunned him at the time, and was afterwards regarded by him as unpardonable treachery. Heine had shown how little fitted he was for the career of a merchant, and had moreover acquired a thorough distaste for it; fresh help from his uncle now enabled him to prepare himself for one of the learned professions. In 1819, soon after the Jewish Reform secession, he left Hamburg, and travelled by Düsseldorf to Bonn, there to study law and work for the degree which his uncle required that he should take. The University of Bonn, which was closed for several years during the French rule, had lately been reopened, and had a staff of excellent professors. But it was just at this time that, in consequence of the Resolutions of Karlsbad, the prosecution of the students' unions (Burschenschaften) and of all national movements among the students began; and almost immediately after his arrival at the university, Heine, having taken part in a fête on the anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, was summoned before a magistrate and involved in a petty and futile political law-suit, which could not fail to arouse in him a keen personal detestation of the new reaction. The certificate he received at the matriculation examination in 1819 was to the effect that he knew no Greek, had only a slight and unpractical knowledge of Latin, and was not qualified to enter for examination in mathematics at all; but that he was "not entirely wanting in knowledge of history" and that "his German work, though strange in style, showed praiseworthy effort." The young student, in the velvet coat and frilled shirt, with lace falling over his white, beautifully shaped hands, aimed at careless elegance in dress and deportment. He was of middle height; his light-brown hair, which he wore rather long, framed a beardless, regular-featured face. The nose was almost Grecian, the eyes were blue, the mouth was large and expressive, and the lips were often parted in that cold, scornful smile so frequently referred to in his poems. He attended lectures on the history of the German language, on the _Germania_ of Tacitus, on the _Niebelungenlied,_ and other historical and literary subjects; dividing his time between these and the law course, lectures on Roman law, German law, &c. A professor who had an undoubted influence upon the young poet was A. W. Schlegel, the leader of the Romantic school. To him Heine showed his verses. _Almansor_ was written about this time. Towards the end of 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen, with the good intention of applying himself diligently to the study of law at the university there. But, as he tells us very plainly in the _Harzreise_, the place was distasteful to him, and in the course of a few months, moreover, on account of some trifling quarrel with another student, he was rusticated. This led to his going to Berlin in 1821. There, in Varnhagen's house, the intellectual centre of the day, where Rahel gathered around her the aristocracy of culture, talent, and birth, he soon made acquaintance with the élite of the best society of the capital. At night, in Lutter and Wegener's restaurant in the Behrenstrasse (still in existence), he met the leading lights and genial Bohemians of the day, among them men like E. T. W. Hoffmann and Grabbe. And here, after several fruitless attempts, he succeeded in finding a publisher, who was willing to take the risk of bringing out his first collection of poems and to give him forty copies of the book by way of payment. It appeared in December, 1821, made his name known, almost famous, and at once called forth both imitations and parodies. At the university Heine attended the lectures of the first scholars of the day--Hegel, to whom he was ardently devoted; Bopp, the great authority on Sanscrit; Wolf, the classical philologist; and Eduard Gans, the great lawyer. He entered with youthful zeal into the schemes of a circle of men whose object it was to bring about a reform of Judaism, and who were attempting to initiate the Jews into the ideas of European culture. With an equal amount of youthful bitterness, he attacked in _Almansor_, in foreign garb, the renegade Jews who deserted the common cause; and also, though indirectly, Christianity, which he regarded as a hostile power. _Almansor_ was published, along with Heine's other youthful work, _William Ratcliff_, in 1823; it was acted, but had no success, because of the race hatred felt for its author.[1] The life Heine led in Berlin was not compatible with any proper progress in his studies. It was but a continuation of the dissipated life to which he had accustomed himself in Hamburg. In 1823 he determined to turn over a new leaf, and consequently left Berlin, went first to his parents at Lüneburg, thence to Hamburg, and from Hamburg returned to Göttingen, where in 1825 he took his degree of Doctor of Law. Immediately after this he was baptized. He did not change his religion from conviction of the truth of Christianity; on the contrary, his antipathy to it was strong, and he was thoroughly ashamed of the step which he took simply with the aim of extricating himself from the humiliating and galling position of dependence on his uncle; income, office, or profession being attainable on no other condition. His frame of mind at this time is depicted in that overrated fragment, _Der Rabbi von Bacharach_, which, in spite of some spirited and artistic passages, really proves that Heine was incapable of writing a historical novel. At the end of this work, the author, in the disguise of a fictitious character, confesses the shame he felt at going over to a religion which to him was the enemy's camp. In the correspondence between Varnhagen and Rahel, we find occasional allusions to Heine, which give us a good idea of him as he was in those days. Curiously enough, the first time Varnhagen mentions "our little Heine," he quotes an exhortation of Rahel's to the young man, which is very remarkable, because it shows with what acute perception she had at once discovered the very author with whom he had, indeed, something in common, but whom it would have been fatal to him, both personally and in a literary sense, to resemble. The exhortation is: "You must not become a Brentano. I cannot stand that!" At another time she writes jestingly: "Heine must and shall be real, even if he has to be thrashed into it. 'Be real, O man!'" And Varnhagen, too, understood him well. How acute is the following remark in a letter to Rahel, written six years later: "And now, in addition to all the other wise and clever people who entertain you, you have Heine with you, the original, the far-travelled, the fresh Heine! Fresh in this case does not necessarily mean fresh from the sea; for salt herring, too, and that because they _are_ salted, may be called fresh." The same idea recurs in an observation he makes on Heine at the age of thirty: "I hope you will see him often, and that he will try to benefit by his intercourse with you. He requires to be preserved in a good spiritual atmosphere, for there is something about him that spoils easily."[2] Rahel and Varnhagen were the first to proclaim Heine's talent. The earliest laudatory notice of his poems was written by his fashionable diplomatic patron. Yet it is plain that they detected and deplored the weaknesses in his character, which might become dangerous, even fatal, to his great poetic gifts. [1] G. Karpeles: _Biographie Heinrich Heine's_, 1885. [2] _Briefwechsel zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel_, vi. 48, 56, 316, 344. Other interesting utterances of Rand's on the subject of Heine are as follows: "I hardly see Heine; he is entirely taken up with himself, says he must work hard, is almost surprised that such a real thing as his father's death, his mother's grief, should affect him.... He looks healthier, hardly complains now at all; but slight grimaces that used to be only occasional with him, have grown to be habitual, and are not becoming; for instance a twitching of the mouth in speaking, which I used to think rather fascinating, though it was no good sign." "I was intending to write about Heine. The conclusion I have come to is, that his talent is very great, but that unless it matures, it will lose all substance, will degenerate into hollow mannerism." Varnhagen answers: "The one hope for Heine is that he should gain the foothold of truth; once firmly established on that, he may let his talent sally forth to seek prey and disport itself where it will" (vi. 347, 356, 365). XIII HEINE The most popular of Heine's books in our day, that with which his name is most inseparably connected, the _Buch der Lieder_ of 1827, consists of groups of poems belonging to different years and periods. The first group, _Junge Leiden_ (1817-1821), is, as such, the weakest. It is divided into four parts: Dream Pictures, Songs, Romances, Sonnets. The subjects treated are: early recollections of Düsseldorf and of a happy childhood there, his love to his mother, Napoleon worship, much Catholic Rhineland romance, churchyard dances of death with rattle of bones, and all sorts of visions. We have the jesting tone--jocose complaints of the embarrassments resulting from the all too speedy disappearance of the ducats; and the bitter tone, produced by the poet's resentment of the humiliations to which he, as an unsuccessful and defaulting young merchant, was subjected by the wealthy citizens of Hamburg. We have outbursts of affection for college friends, and of admiration for A. W. Schlegel, a man as distinguished in the literary world as at the university; and also patriotic outbursts in the "Burschen" style, which Heine quickly tired of. We have passionate expression of the self-consciousness of genius, and we have love-griefs and plaints of various sorts--first love's aspirations (blended in E. T. W. Hoffmann's manner with churchyard horrors), and then exceedingly sentimental laments over unreturned love, and outbursts of wild, despairing accusation of the false one, who has given him his deathblow, and who drinks his blood and eats his heart at her wedding feast. In one single poem, _Die Fensterschau_, the mood suddenly changes into a sort of coarse jollity. Of these youthful poems, which for the most part are old-fashioned in form, the best are the famous epigrammatic quatrain beginning: "Anfangs wollt' ich fast verzagen" (I at first was near despairing), the earliest example of the condensation of Heine's style; a few of the sonnets, which are much more passionate than the great majority of German sonnets; and lastly, among the romances, _Belsazer_, probably inspired by Byron's _Hebrew Melodies_, and the inimitable ballad of the _Two Grenadiers_, already referred to. The second group, which owes its odd title, _Lyric Intermezzo_, to the fact that it first appeared as a lyric interlude between the two bad tragedies, _Almansor_ and _Ratcliff_, published in 1823, treats of the same subjects as the first, but in more uncommon forms and with freer artistic manipulation. Two critics, Ernst Elster and Wilhelm Bölsche (the former in the introduction to his edition of the original text of the _Buch der Lieder_, the latter in an independent work on Heine), have pointed out with much critical acumen that in this division we seldom have a direct expression of the poet's love troubles, but rather a sort of extract of them, which he gives us from memory. His imagination runs riot among the old sufferings, now and again actually playing with them; hence we have an occasional unlucky expression; the reader at times doubts the reality of the feeling, and becomes suspicious of the constant assurances of a killing grief, in despite of which life goes on and art is not neglected. But it was only natural that Heine should fall back upon this one passion, even though it had received no new nourishment in the interval. He had felt none since which could compare with it in strength or in influence upon his inner life. It was, and it remained, the most important incident in his life. It seems as if any happiness it brought him had been most transient; hence the first time he sang of his love he dwelt exclusively on its woes, on the absence of all return, on his forsakenness, on the treachery and cold cruelty of the beloved. Now that he was so far disenthralled, he related the whole real or imaginary history of the passion, from the day when it first awoke to life to the hour when he was as dead for her; and imparted greater piquancy and fulness to its life story by giving each of its separate moments some background drawn from nature in one or other of her many moods. In the _Dream Pictures_ night reigned supreme. Now we have the budding of the leaf, the singing of the birds, and the starlight of May. That the love supposed to be at first felt by the beloved one for the poet is only a fiction, and does not really agree with the facts of the case, Heine involuntarily discloses when he paints tender scenes between them. For in these the lover never feels himself to be the possessor; even when he holds the object of his desire in his arms his only feeling is longing: "Lehn deine Wang' an meine Wang', Dann fliessen die Thränen zusammen! Und an mein Herz drück fest dein Herz, Dann schlagen zusammen die Flammen! Und wenn in die grosse Flamme fliesst Der Strom von unseren Thränen, Und wenn dich mein Arm gewaltig umschliesst-- _Sterb' ich vor Liebessehnen._"[1] [1] Thy cheek incline, dear love to mine, Then our tears in one stream will meet, love! Let thy heart be pressed till on mine it rest, Then the flames together will beat, love! And when the stream of our tears shall light On that flame so fiercely burning, And within my arms I clasp thee tight-- I shall die with love's wild yearning. (Translated by SIR THEODORE MARTIN.) This favoured lover, who, when the flames meet, dies of longing, betrays himself to be in reality a thoroughly unsatisfied lover. Hence the best of the purely erotic poems are those which express love's longing and those which depict its sad decay. Conspicuous amongst the poems of tender longing is the charming Oriental song, _Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, Herzliebchen, trag' ich dich fort_, which fascinates by its exotic Indian landscape and by its delicate fervency of feeling. Heine longed for India as Goethe longed for Italy; his spiritual home was on the banks of the Ganges, as Goethe's was on the banks of the Tiber. It is probable that Bopp's lectures first turned his thoughts in the direction of that Oriental dream-land; but in picturing it he employs the purely imaginative, Romantic style, which he inherited, remodelled for himself, and used in painting the far-off and alluring. How simply beautiful is such a verse as: "Dort wollen wir niedersinken Unter dem Palmenbaum, Und Lieb' und Ruhe trinken Und träumen seligen Traum."[2] [2] We'll lie there, in slumber sinking, 'Neath the palm tree by the stream, Raptures and rest deep drinking, Dreaming the happiest dream. (C. G. LELAND.) But a verse like: "Dort liegt ein rothblühender Garten Im stillen Mondenschein, Die Lotosblumen erwarten Ihr trautes Schwesterlein."[3] [3] There a red-blooming garden is lying In the moonlight silent and clear; The lotus flowers are sighing For their sister so gentle and dear. (E. A. BOWRING.) beautiful as it is, caressing as it sounds, has something of the unnaturalness which often strikes the reader in Heine's painting of nature. The colouring is vivid, but not real; local colours obtrude themselves to the detriment of the general tone. "Rothblühender," (red-blooming) is hardly the word that it would naturally occur to one to use in describing a garden seen by moonlight. In the lines: "Gegenüber am Fenster sassen _Rosengesichter_ dämmernd und _mond_beglänzt." (At the opposite window glimmered rose-faces, bright in the moonlight glow), from the later poem _Abenddämmerung_ ("Twilight"), we have the same sort of effect, produced at the same expense of naturalness. The declaration that the lotus flowers are expecting their dear sister sounds like an old-fashioned compliment in the midst of this gorgeous Ganges imagery. We have much the same expression in the stanza: "Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen Und schau'n mitleidig mich an: Sei unsrer Schwester nicht böse, Du trauriger, blasser Mann!"[4] [4] The flowers are whispering and talking; With pity my features they scan: O, pray do not chide our sister, Thou sorrowful, pale-faced man! (C. G. LELAND.) This is a madrigal style which Heine leaves behind in his later work. Another of the verses in this wonderfully emotional song of the Ganges has characteristics which point to Heine's derivation from the Romantic school, with its arbitrary interpretation of nature:-- "Die Veilchen kichern und kosen Und schau'n nach den Sternen empor."[5] [5] The violets titter, caressing, Peeping up as the planets appear. (C. G. LELAND.) It is quite audacious enough to represent violets as caressing each other; we are reminded of Hans Andersen's enchanted gardens; to make them titter is certainly too much of a good thing. Émile Zola affects this same style in his description of the Paradou garden. The next song, which is conceived in the same spirit, the song of the lotus flower that fears the splendour of the sun, is a charming poem, despite its flower-innocence, marvellously, meltingly sensuous. Sensual-spiritual desire is here intensified till it reaches the verge of hysteria; for the poet, not content with making the lotus flower blossom and glow and shine and exhale fragrance and tremble, when her lover, the moon, awakes her with his rays, actually makes her weep.[6] [6] _Cf_ W. Kirchbach: _Heine's Dichterwerkstatt_, in _Magazin für die Litteratur_, Jahrgang 57, Nr. 18, 19, 20. Next in real feeling to the poems of desire come those that express the relinquishment, the cessation of the passion. The finest example is poem No. 59 in the _Intermezzo_, which in its first verse describes the falling of a star, the star of love, from heaven; in its second, the falling of the apple-blossoms from the tree; in its third, the sinking of a swan to its watery grave; then sums all up in the concluding verse: "Es ist so still und dunkel! Verweht ist Blatt und Blüth', Der Stern ist knisternd zerstoben, Verklungen das Schwanenlied."[7] [7] The silence and the night fall, The blossoms all have fled, In sparks the star has vanished, The swan and his song are dead. (H. F.) It is very characteristic of Heine that, as the poem stands, it does not produce the impression that he has really witnessed any one of the three natural scenes depicted; they are simply symbols, arbitrarily selected and combined. Amongst this passionate verse he has interspersed poems of a totally different description, treating of far more trivial amours. Some of the most exceptionable of these he did not include in the _Buch der Lieder_, not even, for example, the very harmless:-- "Du sollst mich liebend umschliessen, Geliebtes, schönes Weib! Umschling mich mit Armen und Füssen Und mit dem geschmeidigen Leib!"[8] [8] Come, twine in wild rapture round me, Fair woman, beloved and warm, Till thy feet and hands have bound me, And I'm wreathed with thy supple form! (LELAND.) But we have, among others, _Die Welt ist dumm, die Welt ist blind_ ("The world is stupid, the world is blind"), with its description of burning kisses. There are also other epigrammatic verses of a serious, passionate character, such as the well-known _Ich hab' dich geliebet und liebe dich noch_ ("I have loved thee long, and I love thee now"); and, finally, in the very famous _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen, die hat einen Andern erwählt_ ("A young man loves a maiden, who another to him prefers"), with intentional triviality of diction, and with an impersonality which is unusual with him, Heine generalises the human fate which has made of him an erotic poet. To the collection of poems which form the second part of the _Lyric Intermezzo_, the title _Heimkehr_ ("The Home-Coming") is given. They were written in 1823-1824 in Hamburg and Cuxhaven, and the "home-coming" is the poet's return to Hamburg, the scene of his love romance, where the sight of all the familiar surroundings causes his heart's wounds to bleed afresh. With this main theme is associated another, new in German poetry--the sea, which Heine now saw for the first time. Mingled with the lamentations over his lost love, which the sight of the environments of the old tragedy calls forth, are records of new impressions. There is first a wild outbreak of the old passion; he broods once more over all its agonies; he is miserable in the streets, where he feels as if the houses were falling on him, and still more miserable in the rooms where she plighted her faith to him. What is new in these songs of unhappy love is the hatred, always alike passionate and wild, that flames up over the grave of buried happiness. But on his travels the poet has met the family of his beloved, and her younger sister resembles her, especially when she laughs; she has the same eyes, the eyes that have made him so unhappy. In a letter dated August 23rd, 1823, he tells his best friend that "a new folly has been engrafted on the old." Ernst Elster's careful study of letters and poems has enabled him to show that about this time Heine's first and very unfortunate passionate attachment to Amalie Heine was superseded by a passion for Therese Heine, who was her sister's junior by eight years. Eveline and Ottilie are the poetic names bestowed on Therese. The new passion was a violent one, but in all probability met with as little return as the first. Hence the well-known lines: "Wer zum ersten Male liebt, Sei's auch glücklos, ist ein Gott; Aber wer zum zweiten Male Glücklos liebt, der ist ein Narr. Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe Wieder ohne Gegenliebe; Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen, Und ich lache mit--und sterbe."[9] [9] He who for the first time loves, Though unloved, is still a god; But the man who loves a second And in vain, must be a fool. Such a fool am I, now loving Once again, without return; Sun and moon and stars are smiling, And I smile with them--and perish. (LELAND.) In the year 1828 Therese Heine was engaged and married to a Dr. Adolf Halle. Among Heine's posthumous poems are bitterly satirical verses on the bridegroom and the wedding. He had the unchivalrous poet's habit of revenging himself by satire when he met with a rebuff. But the poems in _Heimkehr_ which refer to Therese are not inspired with the bitterness and hatred which Heine frequently displays in writing of her elder sister. He praises Therese's beauty, her lovely eyes, her purity; she is like a flower; he prays to her as others pray to Paul and Peter and the Madonna; and he struggles against his feelings, dreads this new passion. Both pride and shyness forbid him to declare it; it would be better for her if she did not love him; at times he has himself tried to prevent the awakening of love in her soul; but, having been only too successful in the attempt, the desire for her love once more asserts itself. He is too proud to speak of his passion and of his suffering, mockery and jests are on his lips, while inwardly he is bleeding to death; but she does not understand him, does not see that his heart is trembling, is breaking. Hence these lines: "O, dieser Mund ist viel zu stolz Und kann nur küssen und scherzen; Er spräche vielleicht ein höhnisches Wort, Während ich sterbe vor Schmerzen."[10] [10] Alas, this mouth is far too proud, 'Twas made but for kissing and sighing; Perchance it may speak a scornful word, While I with sorrow am dying. (BOWRING.) But this time the threat of dying is not intended to be taken literally. For in another poem we find the sincere assurance:-- "Glaub' nicht, dass ich mich erschiesse, Wie schlimm auch die Sachen steh'n! Das Alles, meine Süsse, Ist mir schon einmal gescheh'n."[11] [11] Fear not that I shall languish, Or shoot myself: oh, no! I've gone through all this anguish Already, long ago. (LELAND.) Undoubtedly, however, he felt deeply and suffered greatly this time also. Strange as it sounds, cousin-love, which is, as a rule, merely the initiation into the life of passion, its first preliminary stage,[12] (Note 20) was the only serious, and not perfectly transient passion known to young Heine. And no feeling experienced later, in his mature manhood, approached in intensity to this youthful twin-passion for two sisters, the second of whom reminded him of the first. [12] Aux prés de l'enfance on cueille Les petites amourettes Qu'on jette au vent feuille à feuille, Ainsi que des pâquerettes; On cueille dans ces prairies Les voisines, les cousines, Les amourettes fleuries Et qui n'ont pas de racines. (RICHEPIN.) Among the emotional poems which refer to this episode in his psychic history, Heine introduced (exactly as he did in the _Intermezzo_) verses relating to less serious love affairs, to college adventures, and even to quite low, venal, erotic pleasures. He omitted from the _Buch der Lieder_ some of the most objectionable of these, which originally formed part of the _Heimkehr_, amongst others the amusing, though impudent: "Blamier mich nicht, mein schönes Kind, Und grüss mich nicht unter den Linden; Wenn wir nachher zu Hause sind, Wird sich schon Alles finden."[13] [13] Don't compromise me, my pretty one, Don't bow to me in "Rotten Row"; At home together afterwards I'll make up for it, that you know. --and even such a merry wanton rhyme as:-- "Himmlisch war's, wenn ich bezwang Meine sündige Begier; Aber wenn's mir nicht gelang, Hatt' ich doch ein gross Plaisir."[14] [14] 'Twas heavenly joy to overcome Each sinful wish and thought; But when I couldn't, truth to tell, That, too, much pleasure brought. What we are most struck by in the poems of this division is the author's double gift of song and painting. Along with the capacity for producing those outbursts of mixed passion, which sound like the unaffected heart-cry of modern humanity, he here reveals a special talent for painting, for producing figures by means of light and shade and colour, without outline. There is the scene in the lonely parsonage, with the disunited, despairing family (_Der bleiche, herbstliche Halbmond_). The son is determined to be a highway robber, the daughter has made up her mind to sell herself to the Count. With all its vividness, however, this scene is not one of the best. There is too much old-fashioned Romanticism in the idea of the dead father in his black robes standing outside, knocking at the window. The next poem, _Das ist ein schlechtes Wetter_, is a most masterly production. We see the little old woman hobbling across the street with her lantern late on the dark and stormy evening, to make purchases for her tall, beautiful daughter, who is lying in the arm-chair at home, blinking sleepily at the light, her golden locks falling over her sweet face--it is like an old Dutch painting. Still finer is the group of eight poems which was the result of his stay at Cuxhaven. _Wir sassen am Fischerhause_ is a little marvel of artistic ability--that talk with the girls, sitting outside the fisherman's hut, in which far-off India and Ultima Thule are described in a few words: "By the Ganges all is brightness and fragrance, giant trees blossom, and beautiful, tranquil men and women kneel to the lotus flowers. In Lapland the people are dirty and small; their heads are flat and their mouths are wide; they cower round the fire, roast fish, and screech and scream." Then there are merry poems, treating of light characters like the girl whom he searches for through the whole town and finds in a fashionable hotel, and the girl in whose heart the blue hussars are quartered. And lastly, there are single epigrammatic verses, which every one now knows by heart, but which, at the time they appeared, gave great offence and made enemies for their author. Especially noteworthy is the famous: "Selten habt ihr mich verstanden, Selten auch verstand ich euch, Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden, So verstanden wir uns gleich."[15] [15] Little by thee comprehended, Little knew I thee, good brother; When we in the mud descended Soon we understood each other. (LELAND.) It is incomprehensible that this verse should ever have been regarded as a confession of unclean instincts. It only applies to those who find their way straight to any exceptionable or indecent passage in a book, as the sow finds her way to the mire, and stops there. That it never occurred to Heine that he was making any admission of having desired to appeal to his reader's sensual instincts or cynic tendencies is best proved by the poem which immediately follows on the lines in question, the one beginning: "Doch die Kastraten klagten, Als ich meine Stimm' erhob; Sie klagten und sie sagten: Ich sänge viel zu grob."[16] [16] How the eunuchs were complaining At the roughness of my song! Complaining and explaining That my voice was much too strong. (LELAND.) He could not have declared more unmistakably that, where he is straightforward, plain-spoken, or cynical, it is only the result of his modern tendency to realistic truthfulness, of his antipathy to romantic embellishment, and of his instinctive inclination to face the bitter truth of life. And there is quite as little justification for the general complaint of what Julian Schmidt has called the low-mindedness of Heine's sudden leaps from the sublime to the sordid. We have a typical instance of these sudden changes of style and mood in the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace"), one of the group of North Sea poems, in which Heine, during a calm at sea, beholds the giant form of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, striding over sea and land. He is clothed in white; his head touches the clouds; the heart in his breast is the sun, the red, flaming sun, and this sun-heart sheds its illuminating, warming rays over land and sea. Then there is a sudden revulsion of mood. Heine calls to mind a miserable, canting fellow in Berlin, weak in mind and body, strong in faith--what would not _he_ give to be able to hit upon such pious imagery, by means of which he might ingratiate himself with those in power and perhaps attain to the position of court-councillor in the pious town on the Spree--what dreams he would have of a hundred thalers rise in salary! Heine most undoubtedly spoiled the effect of his beautiful vision. He broke up his poem, shattered its melody with grotesque discords; but yet it is easy to understand that in the case of a poet with his experience of modern life, the second vision was a perfectly natural sequel to the first; and in any case it is unjustifiable to speak of this connection of ideas, this "idea-leap," as a symptom of low-mindedness. In this connection Wilhelm Bölsche makes the true and pertinent observation that no one has accused Goethe of low-mindedness because he allows the gibes of Mephistopheles to follow directly upon Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen (_Heinrich Heine_, p. 106). And yet the only difference is that in _Faust_ the pathos and the ribaldry are put into the mouths of two people, whereas in the lyric poem the poet makes himself directly responsible for both. Almost at the end of this collection (_Heimkehr_), we come upon a couple of poems which are distinguished by depth of feeling and perfection of form. The particular arrangement of their rhymes would distinguish them from the majority of the small poems, if nothing else did, as it is one we seldom meet with in Heine. The first, _Dämmernd liegt der Sommerabend_ ("Summer eve with day is striving"), which describes the beautiful elf-maiden bathing in the river by moonlight, has the diaphanous haze of a Corot landscape. The rhythmic treatment of the second gives it a unique place in the collection. It is the pathetic, fantastic: "Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, Das Leben ist der schwüle Tag. Es dunkelt schon, mich schläfert, Der Tag hat mich müd gemacht. Über mein Bett erhebt sich ein Baum, Drin singt die junge Nachtigall; Sie singt von lauter Liebe, Ich hör' es sogar im Traum."[17] [17] Death is a cool and pleasant night, Life is a sultry day. 'Tis growing dark-I'm weary, For day has tired me with his light. Over my bed a fair tree gleams, And in it sits a nightingale: She sings of naught save love, I hear it even in dreams. (LELAND.) The next division of the _Buch der Lieder, Aus der Harzreise_ (1824), contains the delightful mountain-rhymes conceived in the course of a walking tour which Heine took by way of refreshment after his law studies in Göttingen. Here we have charming pictures of mountain scenery and peasant life, and a tone of witty, bold self-laudation, kept up with irresistible audacity. The beautiful and witty poem about the knight of the Holy Spirit was doubtless suggested by the catechising scene in _Faust_, but has an originality of its own which has made it popular all the world over. The _Buch der Lieder_ closes with the North Sea poems (_Die Nordsee_, 1825-1826), inspired by two visits to Norderney, and written in forcible, irregular rhythm. In them we observe first and foremost a particular understanding of nature which is a new gain for German poetry. As far as nature was concerned, Goethe seemed to have exhausted everything. His love for every living thing, his feeling of kinship with animals and plants, his persuasion that the human being is one with all other beings, his intuition of the unity that underlies perpetual change of form--this gift of resolving all nature into feeling was his earliest characteristic. It was soon superseded, or rather supplemented, by his capacity for observing and reproducing natural scenes without any ascription of his own feelings to them. He studies nature, becomes an observer and investigator, and finally, thanks to the steadily increasing profundity of his observation, in combination with his genial intuition, an epoch-making discoverer in two great domains of natural science. We see him pass through all the phases of a great mind in its relation to nature--the emotional, the religious-pantheistic, the poetic-scientific--and see him in the end lay such exclusive stress upon material impressions that he thrusts all that is psychical from him as merely disturbing. His views become more and more positive and realistic. In his essay on granite he writes: "I do not fear the reproach of its being a spirit of contradiction that has led me from the observation and delineation of the human heart, that youngest, most multiform, most mobile, most changeable part of creation, that which it is easiest to unsettle and to shake, to the observation of nature's oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable son"[18] --namely, granite. [18] Goethe: _Werke_, xxxiii. 164. In what domain was it still possible for a German poet to display fresh, original understanding of nature? From the human heart to granite Goethe had embraced them all. There was one left. Goethe had never sung the sea. He saw it for the first time when he was nearly forty, in Venice, from the Lido. "I heard a loud noise," he writes; "it was the sea, and I soon saw it, rolling high waves up the beach, as it drew back. It was midday and ebb-tide. At last, then, I have seen the sea also with my own eyes." A little further on we come upon the short sentence: "Yes, the sea is a wonderful sight." In the Fifth Act of the Second Part of _Faust_, where the sea and navigation are touched on, it is less the sea itself that is in question than the rescuing of land from it and the making of canals. This was all that Goethe had written about the sea. In Heine's North Sea poems we hear, for the first time in German poetry, the roar of the ocean, with all its freshness and in all its might. Here for the first time we have shells in the sand beneath our feet, and sea-gulls in the air above us. The sea is painted in storm and calm, from the shore and from the ship, by day and by night, with the peace that at times lies over it, and with the madness of the hurricane; we have the sweet day-dreams to which it gives rise, and also the sea-sickness; there arise from its depths and there hover over its expanse a whole company of mythic figures, old and new, old that have been metamorphosed into new, a world of gods and goddesses, Tritons and Oceanides, at times pathetic, more frequently burlesque. And yet there is comparatively little description; it is the poet's own memories, griefs, and hopes that fill these poems. And it is his intense longing to be able to breathe freely that breaks forth in the famous cry with which the ten thousand Greeks, after their long and terrible march, hailed the element that spoke to them of home: "Thalatta! Thalatta!--I salute thee, O eternal sea!" Amongst these poems are some of Heine's most beautiful and unforgettable. First there is the humorously frivolous idyll _Die Nacht am Strande_ ("Night by the Seashore"); the poet's visit to the pretty fisherman's daughter, with the masterly description of her appearance, as she sits bending over the fire: "Dass die flackernd rothen Lichter Zauberlieblich wiederstrahlen Auf das glühende Antlitz, Auf die zarte, weisse Schulter, Die rührend hervorlauscht Aus dem groben, grauen Hemde, Und auf die kleine, sorgsame Hand, Die das Unterröckchen fester bindet Um die feine Hüfte."[19] [19] Till the flashing, ruddy flame-rays Shine again in magic lustre On her glowing countenance, On the soft and snow-white shoulder Which so touchingly peers out From its coarse grey linen covering, And on the busy little hand Which is fastening the garment That conceals her slender limbs. (Adapted from LELAND.) Then we come on a poem which is unique in its lyric vigour, _Erklärung_ ("Declaration"), to that Agnes whose name the poet would fain write on the dark vault of heaven with the highest fir of Norway, dipped in the crater of Etna. And there is also the little, reflective poem _Fragen_ ("Questions"), admirable in its pregnant brevity, which gives us an idea of the mood in which Heine conceived the foolhardy idea of writing a "Faust," after Goethe, a plan which he actually did not hesitate to mention to Goethe himself, when he visited him in Weimar. In some of these North Sea poems, and that even when he is belittling and sneering at himself, there is a repellent tone of self-satisfaction. Amongst those which are quite free from it, must be mentioned that masterly piece of pure humour, _Im Hafen_ ("In Harbour"), the immortal fantasy of the Town Cellar of Bremen, in which Heine, whose sobriety was almost equivalent to total abstinence, gives us a most irresistible picture of a clever man's merry carouse. XIV HEINE It is impossible for a northerner of mature years and fairly sound artistic training to study Heinrich Heine's poems without feeling his taste offended by figures and expressions which in Heine's case early became lifeless mannerisms. The Romance nations do not feel this. One actually hears competent critics of Romance nationality compare Heine's lyrics with Goethe's, and give the preference to Heine's as more plastic and more spiritual. To Romance readers Goethe is, as a rule, wanting in transparency; the French say of Heine: _On y voit mieux_. They do not feel that in Goethe's case words always represent things; whereas in Heine's case, expressions are often set pieces, which are inserted to produce a certain poetical effect, but which have no vision, no actuality behind them. Few poets have made such abuse of lily-hands, rose-cheeks, and violet-eyes, these monstrous colour-blotches, in describing female beauty, or of the various attributes of spring--flowers that exhale fragrance, nightingales that sing both day and night--in proclaiming the praises of the lovely month of May. The nightingale in particular becomes under his treatment a purely heraldic bird in the coat-of-arms of love. In Goethe's case all the words are images, and this is the reason why he requires to employ so little imagery. In Heine's the words are constantly allegories, devoid of perspicuity and of that inward connection which is the logic of poetry. Take as an instance: "Aus meinen Thränen spriessen--vie' blühende Blumen hervor,"[1] where by flowers poems are meant; or: "Sprüh'n einmal vert dächt'ge Funken--aus den Rosen, sorge nie--diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen--und sie nimmt's für Poesie,"[2] where we are presented with a skein of images more entangled than those of the notorious old Scandinavian transcriptions of the decadent period in Skaldic poetry--sparks struck out of roses; sparks, which the everyday world will not accept as fire; rose sparks, which are called poetry! [1] Up from my tears are growing Fair flowers in many vales. (LELAND) [2] If suspicious sparks should issue From the roses--fearless be! This dull world in flames believes not, But believes them poetry. (BOWRING) What one objects to most in these poems with their allegorical rhetoric is the combination of sentimentality and materialism. Sighs and tears are talked of as if sighs were very loud breaths and tears very tangible substances. We have, for instance: "Und meine Seufzer werden--ein Nachtigallenchor" (And from my sighs go flying, A choir of nightingales), still further materialised by the addition of: "Und vor deinem Fenster soll singen--das Lied der Nachtigall" (And the nightingales at thy window, Shall sing all the summer hours). A still more striking instance is to be found in the typical poem of the lonely tear:-- "Was will die einsame Thräne? Sie trübt mir ja den Blick, Sie blieb aus alten Zeiten In meinem Auge zurück."[3] [3] What means this lonely tear-drop Which dims mine eye to-day? It is the last now left me Where once so many lay. We are initiated into this particular tear's family history and present lonely situation; it had many bright sisters, who now are no more, so that it is left solitary in its eyecorner. It is addressed much as one would address any good old comrade, told to go its way, now that all the others have gone:-- "Du alte, einsame Thräne, Zerfliesse jetzunder auch!"[4] [4] Thou tear-drop old and lonely, Do thou, too, pass away! The sentimentality is so crude that no parody could be more comic than this mournful apostrophe, which the arch-scoffer wrote in all good faith. Every defect in the artist as a man, comes out in his art. It is always a want of simplicity, of genuine feeling, that produces the sentimental or ostentatious or clap-trap expression. Heine's shortcomings in this way are strongly felt when we compare certain outbursts of his with Goethe's expression of similar feelings. Take, for example, the poem in which Heine describes himself as the ill-fated Atlas; condemned to bear the whole world of suffering: "Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt, Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz! Und jetzo bist du elend."[5] [5] Proud heart, 'twas thine own choice, Thou chosest to be happy, infinitely happy, Or infinitely miserable, proud heart! And now thou art miserable. These are lines one does not forget. But the exclamation of the first line, which expresses a perilous extreme of self-reliance, becomes self-complacency when Heine's stanza is placed alongside of Goethe's simple and grand "Alles geben die Götter, die Unendlichen, Ihren Lieblingen ganz: Alle Freuden, die unendlichen, Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, Ganz."[6] [6] What the eternal Gods, give to their favourites, they give without alloy-infinite joy, infinite sorrow--without alloy. It would be most unreasonable to blame Heine because he employs other and more violent methods than Goethe does--to say, for instance, of a poem like _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen_ ("A young man loves a maiden"), that Goethe would have shrunk from the grotesqueness of the bitter, desperate ending: "Und wem sie just passieret, Dem bricht das Herz entzwei" (And he to whom it happens, It breaks his heart in two). It would have been abhorrent to him for much the same reason that it would have been abhorrent to an old Greek. What is simply new, simply _modern_ in the feeling, is justifiable. Even the grotesqueness is in this case artistically led up to. But at times the grotesque grimace is all that is left of the modern element. Take that famous poem: _Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig_ ("My heart, my heart is heavy"). It contains an admirable description of a wide landscape, viewed from the height of the old bastion. We see the blue town moat, with a boy fishing from a boat, and away on the other side of the moat, small and clear, we see summer-houses and gardens, men and oxen, meadows and woods, girls bleaching clothes, a turning mill-wheel sending out diamond dust, and at the foot of the old grey tower a sentry-box, with the sentry walking up and down, his gun flashing in the sunlight. H. C. Andersen, writing of this poem, remarks, "And the end is so _affecting_: 'Ich wollt', er schösse mich todt'" (I wish he would shoot me dead). Affecting? No. Startling; for nothing has prepared us for it. The ejaculation is possibly not entirely insincere; but it is so nervous that it is practically meaningless; it is in so far untruthful, that these big words only express a momentary mood, not a serious, determined desire. Goethe has expressed, if not longing for death, at least reconciliation to the idea of death, in the famous, immortal lines: "Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh. In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch. Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch."[7] [7] O'er all the hill tops Is quiet now, In all the tree tops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest. (LONGFELLOW) It is unnecessary to direct attention to the contrast between the two poet-natures which is revealed by a comparison of this melody in words with Heine's discord; but note, from the purely artistic point of view, how marvellously in keeping all the different parts of the little poem are. It is one breath from the first word to the last: The calm of evening over the forest and in the human soul, the cessation of all desire, the resolution of all discords, the heart, great and tender, feeling itself one with all nature. Alongside of this perfection, the defects of Heine's lyric effect-style, in its occasional inartistic application, show up only too glaringly. It is akin, in its weaknesses, to the allegorising, fantastic style of the German Romanticists, from whom Heine, the poet, is lineally descended. And yet he is as far from being a genuine Romanticist as he is from being what some consider him, a genuine modern realist. He calls his _Atta Troll_ the last free forest ditty of Romance. Others have, in unfriendly criticism, called his poetry the decomposition process of Romance. "I wrote _Atta Troll_" he says, "for my own amusement, in the whimsical dream-style that prevailed in that Romantic school in which I passed the pleasantest years of my youth, and ended up by thrashing the schoolmaster." But in this case the Romanticism is really only the rich, glittering garment, in which the modern spirit masques, and which it finally throws off. None of the elements of Romance are wanting--animals talk, bears exchange ideas, we listen to a pug-dog's confidences, and we are conducted into a legendary region, the valley of Roncesvalles. Not even the blue flower is wanting: "Ronceval, du edles Thal, Wenn ich deinen Namen höre, Bebt und duftet mir im Herzen Die verscholl'ne blaue Blume."[8] [8] Ronceval, thou noble valley! Whensoe 'er I hear thy name, That blue flower so long departed O'er my spirit sheds its fragrance. (BOWRING) The dream-world reveals itself to us; great spirit eyes look into ours. The poet, with his guide, goes hunting in the Pyrenees. This guide has an old mother, who is reputed to be a witch. We are introduced into the witch's hovel, with the stuffed birds, the ghost-like vultures, and at night bears and ghosts perform a burlesque and weird dance. The spirit as well as the style of this poem is Romantic to a certain point; there are declamations against the clumsy, didactic poetry of the day, against utilitarianism as applied to poetry, and there is literary satire (of Freiligrath, Karl Mayer, Gustav Pfizer) in the style favoured by the Romanticists. And yet there is sedulous realism in the representation of localities and circumstances. Strictly speaking, the poem is simply an account of a stay which Heine and a young French lady friend make at Cauterets in the Pyrenees, where they see a bear dance in the market-place. The bear escapes from his master, takes flight to the mountains, where he is hunted down, shot, and flayed by Laskaro, the guide. The poet's Juliette gets the skin to lay on the floor by her bed; and Heine gives us the superfluous information that many a night he himself has stood bare-footed on this same skin. So the tale is realistic enough. The details of the journey too are faithfully reproduced. We get the impression that Heine's description of the little mountain town up to which he clambered, and where the children danced in a circle to the accompaniment of their own singing, exactly corresponds with what he saw and heard. Even the refrain of the song: _Girofflino, Girofflette_, is doubtless the real one. Nevertheless the finest, most powerful parts of this poem are not in the least realistic. They are visions. And the finest vision is that in which by night from the window of the cottage the poet watches the whole Wild Hunt tear three times round the horizon. He never did finer figure-painting than the passage in which we follow the shining figures across the darkness of the night sky--Diana, the fairy Abunde, and the beautiful Herodias, in wild wantonness playing at ball with the Baptist's bloody head. A parallel may be drawn between Heine's art and that of Rembrandt. There is nothing academic about either of them; both bear the distinct stamp of modernity. But when we call Heine a great realistic poet, we make an assertion of the same qualified truth as when we call Rembrandt the great colourist. Rembrandt cannot be said to be one of the greatest colour-realists, for the reason that several painters surpass him in the power of reproducing local colour and its exact value, and of showing the actual form and colour of an object seen in half darkness. It is not colour, but light, that is the main thing with Rembrandt.[9] To him light is life; the battle of life is the battle of light, and the tragedy of life is the tragedy of light, struggling and dying in damp and darkness. To indicate in what his real greatness as a painter lies, he ought rather to be called a luminist (an expression of Fromentin's) than a colourist, if by luminist we understand an artist whose specialty is the apprehension and treatment of light. He sometimes sacrifices drawing, even painting, in his eagerness to produce some effect of light. Think, for example, of the badly painted corpse in the _Lesson in Anatomy_. But it is exactly what makes him less successful than the realists in tasks requiring absolute truthfulness--the painting of hands, the exact reproduction of stuffs--that makes him so great when he causes light to express what it alone indicates to him, the inner life, the world of waking visions. [9] _Cf_. Fromentin: _Les maîtres d'autrefois_. Something similar to this is the case with Heine. How few real figures this great poet has bequeathed to us! Those who would measure his deserts by what he has done in this way find themselves obliged to fall back upon that crude, grotesque sketch of an old Jew servant, Hyacinth, as his best character. No, if Heine is to be judged by his pictures of real life, many an inferior poet surpasses him. But think of his visions, of the world of waking dreams in his poems and in his prose! As a rule he starts closer to earth than other poets, but presently, above the darkness of earth a gleaming vision appears--and disappears. This is felt even in such small poems as the one already referred to as containing the talk in the fisherman's cottage about the Ganges and Lapland. Think too of the way in which Heine calls up the image of Napoleon before his readers. In the _Two Grenadiers_ it has the effect of a vision. The words, "Dann reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab" ('Tis my Emperor riding, right over my grave), are like a revelation in the darkness of night, illuminated by the glitter of swords. In the equally admirable description in the _Reisebilder_, the vision is conjured up in the form of a recollection of childhood. Or remember how Heine brings the image of Jesus before us. In the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace") he sees him, robed in glittering white, striding over the waves. In _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_ ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), he paints a grey, winter morning on the Paderborn heath; when the mist rises, he sees by the side of the road, in the dawning light, a wooden crucifix with the image of the great enthusiast, who desired to save mankind, and now hangs there "as a warning to others." "Sie haben dir übel mitgespielt, Die Herren vom hohen Rathe."[10] [10] A sorry trick they played thee indeed, The lords of the council stately. (BOWRING) The heart-felt sadness, the bitter humour, that find expression in familiar, disparaging comment, heighten the impression of human grandeur, of solemn horror, much as this same impression is intensified when Hamlet, hearing his father's ghost under ground, calls: "Well said, old mole! Canst work i' the earth so fast?" In the flash of Heine's wit the reader sees Jesus, not now as the Prince of Peace, but as the man who scourged the desecrators of the Temple and sent fire upon earth. _The Winter 's Tale_ is, taken as a whole, a characteristic example of Heine's artistic procedure. All the twenty-seven divisions of the long poem are constructed on the same plan. They begin close to earth, materially, with reminiscences of travel, vulgar realistic impressions; then the writer, without warning, by unnoticeable transitions, rises to the height of passion, to powerful pathos, wild contempt, glowing admiration, destructive or constructive enthusiasm, divine madness that, as it were, rolls thunderbolt on thunderbolt; and then all sinks back once more into the grey dulness of everyday events and situations. Heine arrives at Cologne, sups on an omelet and ham, drinks a bottle of Rhenish wine, and then saunters out into the streets. He calls the town's past days to mind: here the priests had free play, here men and books were burned at the stake; here stupidity and malice wantoned like dogs on the open street. Suddenly in the moonlight the Cathedral, the great spiritual Bastille, appears to his sight and arouses his wrath. As he saunters along, he catches sight of a figure behind him which it seems to him he ought to know. And now we glide into a perfectly new world, the world of vision. The figure follows him as if it were his shadow, stopping when he stops. He has often noticed it beside him before, when he sat late at night at his desk. Under its cloak it holds, and always has held, something that glitters strangely and that resembles an axe, an executioner's axe. This figure is the poet's lictor, who follows his master, instead of preceding him as the Roman lictor did. In the succeeding divisions Barbarossa reveals himself in the same visionary style, coming and going twice. Heine is an epoch-maker, not only in German lyric poetry, but in poetry in general. He introduced a new style, the combination of sentiment and humour in lyric poetry, and a new idea, the introduction of prose into poetry, either by way of foil or by way of parody. His position as epoch-maker is due to his historic position, to his having lived at the period when Romantic perversion of reality was giving way to pessimistic realism; this explains the fusion of the two elements which we find in his writings. Hence, too, it comes that the most characteristic domain in the province of his art is the domain of chiaroscuro, a chiaroscuro akin to Rembrandt's. To make the central objects stand out from the shadow or half-darkness in which they are concealed; to make light, natural light, produce a ghostly, supernatural effect by conjuring it forth from a sea of dark shadow-waves, bringing it flickering or flaring out of half-darkness; to make darkness penetrable, half-darkness transparent--this is Rembrandt's art. Heine's, which is closely related, consists in gradually, imperceptibly, conjuring forth out of the world of reality, and back into it again, a perfectly modern, fantastic dreamworld. At times the vision is in a full blaze of light, and the reality hidden in black darkness; but presently the vision fades, and the reality gradually emerges into the light. XV HEINE AND GOETHE It has already been mentioned that Heine, when a student in Bonn, conceived an enthusiastic admiration for the founder of the Romantic school. A. W. Schlegel's personality was as attractive to him as his teaching. In Schlegel, Heine admired the man who had guided German poetry from artificiality to truth. He was dazzled, too, by the fashionable professor's aristocratic bearing, his knowledge of the world, his acquaintance with the good society and famous people of the day. He was also touched by the kindly interest which Schlegel showed in himself and his first literary efforts. It was to Schlegel that he was indebted for his early initiation into the secrets of metrical art, and for something more valuable still, confidence in his own powers and his future. In Heine's first prose article, that on Romanticism, written in 1820, he expresses his gratitude and makes his Romantic confession of faith in the same breath. He protests against the idea of Romanticism being "a mixture of Spanish enamel, Scotch mists, and Italian jingle"; no, Romantic poetry ought not to be obscure and vague; its images may be as plastic in contour as those of classic poetry. "Hence it is," he writes, "that our two greatest Romanticists, Goethe and A. W. Schlegel, are at the same time our greatest plastic artists." And he names Goethe's _Faust_ and Schlegel's _Rome_ in the same breath, as models of plastic outline, concluding pathetically: "O, that those who love to call themselves Schlegelians would lay this to heart!" This passage should be noted by those whose only knowledge of Heine's connection with Schlegel is derived from the low attack on the latter's private life in _Die Romantische Schule_. It was to A. W. Schlegel, moreover, that Heine addressed his three first sonnets. In the earliest he thanks him for his personal kindness, and declares his own great indebtedness to him; in the second he extols him for the service which he has rendered to German poetry by banishing that caricature in hoop and patches which in his day figured as the Muse; in the third he praises him for his introduction of English, Spanish, early German, Italian, and Indian poetry into modern German literature. The tone is enthusiastic: "Der schlimmste Wurm: des Zweifels Dolchgedanken, Das schlimmste Gift: an eigner Kraft verzagen, Das wollt' mir fast des Lebens Mark zernagen; Ich war ein Reis, dem seine Stützen sanken. Da mochtest du das arme Reis beklagen, An deinem güt'gen Wort lässt du es ranken, Und dir, mein hoher Meister, soll ich's danken, Wird einst das schwache Reislein Blüthen tragen," &c.[1] [1] The most dangerous worm--doubt, with its dagger tooth; the most deadly poison--distrust of one's own powers, were eating away my life; I was a sapling bereft of its supports. Thou hadst pity on the poor sapling, thou gavest it the support of encouraging word; if ever the weak sapling blossoms, thine, great master, be the praise. It is under this first Romantic influence that Heine writes his earliest, purely Romantic poems in archaistic style, verses like: "Die du bist so schön und rein, Wunnevolles Magedein, Deinem Dienste ganz allein Möcht' ich wohl mein Leben weihn. Deine süssen Aeugelein Glänzen mild wie Mondenschein, Helle Rosenlichter streun Deine rothen Wängelein." This reminds us forcibly of Tieck's earliest verses, those introduced into his tales. In the one little poem from which these stanzas are taken, we come upon Wunne, Magedein, Aeugelein, Wängelein, Mündchen, weiland, a whole string of diminutives and archaisms. Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at the early age of thirty-one--Wilhelm Müller, the author of the _Müllerlieder_, particularly well known from Schubert's musical setting, and of the _Griechenlieder_, which were equally admired in their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, _Deutsche Liebe_, the story of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life. On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song, and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses; "but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are those of conventional society." It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses alongside of Müller's. Müller writes: "Wir sassen so traulich beisammen Im kühlen Erlendach, Wir schauten so traulich zusammen Hinab in den rieselnden Bach." And Heine: "Wir sassen am Fischerhause Und schauten nach der See, Die Abendnebel kamen Und stiegen in die Höh'." How closely this last stanza resembles such a stanza of Müller's as: "Die Abendnebel sinken Hernieder kalt und schwer, Und Todesengel schweben In ihren Dampf umher."[2] [2] Wilhelm Müller: _Gedichte_, i. p. 26; "Thränenregen," p. 194; "Dasselbe noch einmal." These are the introductory lines of a long, beautiful poem called _Hirtenbiwouak in der römischen Campagna_, the most important part of which is the shepherd's song of longing for his sweetheart. How much Heine must have learned from such a verse as that which describes the young girl: "Darunter sitzt ein Mädchen, Die Spindel in der Hand, Und spinnt und sinnt und schauet Herab in's eb'ne Land." We do not find Wilhelm Müller marring the impression of his idyll by any sudden revulsion of mood; there is nothing of the devil in him; the gentle andante is maintained to the end of the piece. But it is not in this that the principal difference between his style and Heine's lies; for Heine at times retains his tranquil mood throughout a whole poem. The essential difference is the extraordinary condensation of Heine's style, as compared with Müller's. He gives in one verse, at most two, what the other requires ten to express. The novelty in his lyric style is its unparalleled condensation. The poems are all epitomes. They present us with a spiced, fragrant essence of passion, experience, bitterness, mockery, wit, emotion, and fancy; an essence of poetry and prose in combination. Psychologists talk of a condensation of thought;[3] in comparison with the pupil's thought, the master's is condensed. In the history of all mechanism, increasing condensation is to be observed. Once there were only church clocks; now people carry clocks in their pockets. That is to say, the mechanism which once required for its wheels and springs the space provided by a church clock, now finds room enough in a watch. In like manner, many an old tragedy does not contain more thoughts or more feeling than a Heine poem of two or three verses. [3] Lazarus: _Das Leben der Seele_, 2nd edition, p. 229. Heine's short stanza has, then, two advantages over Wilhelm Müllers--more passion, and much greater condensation of style. In his favourite short iambic metre, Heine is influenced by Wilhelm Müller, in his trochees he resembles another Romantic, far more Romantic poet, Clemens Brentano. In Heine's _Romancero_ there are some curious correspondences with Brentano's _Romanzen vom Rosenkranze_ ("Romances of the Rosary"). These latter were written before _Romancero_, but as they were not published till 1853, Heine cannot possibly have been influenced by them. In the second of the _Rosary Romances_ we read of the hero, Cosmo, that: "Aus dem Wasserspiegel mahnt Ihn des Alters ernste Bote: Du wirst bald die Schuld bezahlen, Spricht des Hauptes Silberlocke."[4] [4] The solemn messengers of age, the white locks of the man who gazes at him from the water-mirror, cry: Soon thou must pay thy debt. In Heine's posthumous poem _Bimini_, one of the divisions begins: "Einsam auf dem Strand von Cuba, Vor dem stillen Wasserspiegel, Steht ein Mensch und er betrachtet In der Flut sein Konterfei. Eben nicht mit sonderlichem Wohlgefallen scheint der Greis In dem Wasser zu betrachten Sein bekümmert Spiegelbildniss."[5] [5] On the shore of Cuba's island Stands an old man solitary, Gazing at his own reflection In the tranquil water-mirror. Not with any special pleasure Does the sad and aged man See beneath him in the water His own image, sorrowful. Metre, situation, idea are identical in the two passages. There is also a certain resemblance between the tale of a mystery-book in the Ninth Romance of the Rosary and the story of the beautiful casket in Heine's poem of _Jehuda ben Halevy_.[6] Only that Brentano's story of the passing of the mystery-book from hand to hand, through many ages, merely opens up to us a Romantic wonder-world, whereas Heine's tale of the wanderings of the casket is at the same time a jest at the vicissitudes of life: the pearls first belong to Smerdis, who gives them to Atossa, then to the great Alexander, who gives them to Thais, then in course of time to Cleopatra, to a Moorish sultan, to the regalia of Castille, and to the Baroness Solomon Rothschild, in a compliment to whom the life-history of the casket terminates. [6] _Cf_. Eduard Grisebach; _Die deutsche Litteratur_, p. 254, &c.; where, however, a definite influence is insisted on, regardless of Heine's priority. It is quite certain that Heine is indebted to Clemens Brentano for the subject of what in Germany is the best known and most sung of all his songs, the song of _Lorelei_, "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten." As far back as 1802 Brentano had published, in his _Godwi,_ a ballad entitled "Lorelei." It is not the story of a siren, but of a young girl of Bacharach on the Rhine, who was so beautiful that all men fell in love with her. She was accused of witchcraft. But the bishop, who ought to have condemned her to be burned, fell in love with her himself. She desires to die, for the one man she loves will have nothing to say to her and has gone away; so, on her way to the convent to which the bishop is sending her, she climbs a high cliff, Lurelei (Ley means slate-rock), and in despairing longing for her beloved, throws herself into the Rhine. This ballad suggested to a writer called Nikolaus Vogt the fabrication of a Rhine legend, which he published in 1811, passing it off as an old one. In it Lorelei, on her way to the convent, sees the man of her heart sail past her on the Rhine, and throws herself from the cliff in grief at having failed to win him. Three of her adorers follow her to a watery grave. Hence a rock in that neighbourhood is known by the name of the Dreiritterstein (Rock of the Three Knights). The last incident was perhaps suggested by the ending of Brentano's poem: "Wer hat dies' Lied gesungen? Ein Schiffer auf dem Rhein. Und immer hat geklungen Vom hohen Felsenstein: Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Als wären es unser Drei."[7] [7] Who was it sang this song? A boatman on the Rhine. And still we heard the cry, from the high cliff overhead: "Lore Lay! Lore Lay! Lore Lay!" Me-seemed that we were three. From this fabricated legend a certain Count Loeben, in 1821, took the theme for a poem, _Lorelei_,[8] in which the young girl who drowns herself is transformed into a mermaid, whose singing lures into the depths those who are sailing past: "Da wo der Mondschein blitzet Um's hohe Felsgestein, Das Zauberfräulein sitzet Und schauet auf den Rhein. Es schauet herüber, hinüber, Es schauet hinab, hinauf, Die Schifflein ziehen vorüber, Lieb' Knabe, sieh nicht auf! Sie singt dir hold am Ohre, Sie blickt dich thöricht an, Sie ist die schöne Lore, Sie hat dir's angethan," &c.[9] [8] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 2nd edition, i. 696. [9] Where the moonlight glitters on the lofty cliff, there the magic-maiden sits, and gazes on the Rhine. She looks across the stream, looks up the stream and down; softly the boats glide past-look not on her, O youth! She sings so sweetly in your ear, she looks at you bewitchingly; she is the lovely Lore, and in her spells you're caught. Now take Heine's world-famed poem, first a students' song, then a popular song, melting and thrilling with the tender harmony of melody and words. The direct imitation is unmistakable. The theme is the same, the metre is the same, even some of the rhymes are the same: "blitzet--sitzet;" instead of "an--gethan, Kahn--gethan." But what a difference! Feeling has been added. First the personal starting-point, the inexplicable melancholy of the narrator and his inability to banish the old legend from his thoughts, then the instantaneous, clear, definite picture of the landscape: "Die Luft ist kühl, und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein, Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abendsonnenschein. Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar, Ihr gold'nes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar."[10] [10] The cool air darkens, and listen, How softly flows the Rhine! The mountain peaks still glisten Where the evening sunbeams shine. The fairest maid sits dreaming In radiant beauty there. Her gold and her jewels are gleaming, She combeth her golden hair. (E. LAZARUS.) And something more has been added--that element of dæmonic passion which the earlier manipulators of the theme were unable to communicate to it. Heine here represents an elemental luring power, akin to that delineated with simpler means and more powerful effect by Goethe in _Der Fischer_. But Goethe, in conformity with his nature, describes a tranquil, enchanting ensnarement; Heine, in conformity with his, an instantaneous, irresistible, maddening bewitchment. A still more profound insight into Heine's art, in the making, and into the manner in which his fancy deals with a theme, is perhaps to be gained by observing how he makes use of a subject which offers itself to him in prose. In Henri Beyle's book, _De l'amour_, he evidently found the three following anecdotes, translated from the Arabic. 1. Sahid ben Agba one day asked an Arab: "Of what tribe art thou?" "Of that tribe," answered the Arabian, "in which men die when they love." "Then thou art of the tribe of Asra?" "Yea, verily, by the Lord of Kaaba!" "Whence comes it that ye love thus?" "Our women are beautiful, and our young men chaste." 2. A man once asked Arua ben Hezam of the tribe of Asra: "Is it true that ye love with a tenderness surpassing that of all other men?" "It is true," answered Arua. "Thirty young men of my tribe have I seen carried off by death, whose only sickness was that of love." 3. An Arab of the tribe Beni-Fazarat said one day to an Arab of the tribe Beni-Asra: "Ye think that to die of love is a sweet and noble death; whereas it is nought but weakness and foolishness." "Thou would'st not speak so," answered the other, "had'st thou seen the great dark, long-lashed eyes of our veiled women, seen their teeth gleam between their brown lips when they smile." Here we have the origin of Heine's famous _Der Asra_: "Täglich ging die wunderschöne." He first paints the place for us--the garden with the fountain whose white waters flash; then he shows us the slave, standing there every day when the sultan's daughter comes to walk, paler every day; then he tells how the princess one evening closely questions the slave: "I would know thy name, thy race, thy family...": "Und der Sklave sprach: 'ich heisse Mohamet, ich bin aus Yemen Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.'"[11] [11] Spake the youthful slave, "My name is Mahomet, I come from Yemen; And by birth I am an Asra, One who dieth when he loves." (E. LAZARUS.) Heine, as we see, has disdained all explanations. We enjoy the marvellous conciseness of these monumental words, this power as it were of hewing out the speech in stone. But what, on closer investigation, is the spiritual substance of the poem? Not much more than a laconic combination of the words love and death. It is the same combination that is to be found in all Heine's youthful poems, in the shape of love and suffering, love and poison, love and suicide--in Alfred de Musset, too, there is the same stereotyped coupling of _l'amour_ and _la mort_. Here, as in general with Heine, the expression is epigrammatic, therefore quite simple. We have now sufficient material before us to give us a certain insight into the formation of Heine's poetic style. It will be interesting to study it finished and fully developed. We may start from the last-mentioned poem with its epigrammatic point. It is characteristic of Heine that neither here nor elsewhere does he deeply concern himself with the true inwardness of a feeling; he only, as a rule, points and sharpens the expression of it. This is the case even with the feeling of love, which he has treated more frequently than any other. And it is characteristic of his want of the power to put himself in another's place, that it has only been possible for him to give expression to masculine love; he has never put a passionate utterance of feeling into the mouth of a woman. Nothing would have been more impossible for Heine than to write such a poem as Goethe's famous: "Freudvoll und leidvoll, Gedankenvoll sein, Langen und bangen In schwebender Pein, Himmelhoch jauchzend, Zum Tode betrübt, Glücklich allein Ist die Seele die liebt."[12] [12] Gladness And sadness And pensiveness blending; Yearning And burning In torment ne'er ending; Sad unto death, Proudly soaring above, Happy alone Is the soul that doth love. (BOWRING) For this is the living delineation of a woman's heart, this is the very inner life of love, its pulsation, its oscillation between bliss and woe. The epigrammatic quality of Heine's style alone would make such an unfolding of the emotional life impossible. And there is the same concentration when he narrates an event. It is a condensation without parallel in poetry; he produces his effect by making the briefest possible statement or suggestion. As an example of this take the lines: "Es war ein alter König, Sein Herz war schwer, sein Haupt war grau; Der arme, alte König Er nahm eine junge Frau. Es war ein schöner Page, Blond war sein Haupt, leicht war sein Sinn, Er trug die seid'ne Schleppe Der jungen Königin."[13] [13] There was an aged monarch, His heart was sad, his head was grey; This foolish, fond old monarch A young wife took one day. There was a handsome page, too, Fair was his hair and light his mien; The silken train he carried Of the beautiful young queen. Observe the telling effect of the inversion: "Blond war sein Haupt;" it is as if the verse began to rejoice and dance. Then comes the end: "Kennst du das alte Liedchen? Es klingt so süss, es klingt so trüb; Sie mussten beide sterben, Sie hatten sich viel zu lieb."[14] [14] Dost know the ancient ballad? It sounds so sweet, it sounds so sad: Both of them had to perish Too much love to each other they had. This is admirable. But we are not told the story; we only suspect it as we suspect the story of the slave and the sultan's daughter. And here again love is coupled with death. A certain emptiness in Heine's conception of love strikes us here again. This love has no real substance, no spiritual significance. It was not till shortly before he lay down upon his death-bed that Heine began to describe a love that has real inward substance. The love of the _Buch der Lieder_ is for the most part wrath excited by coldness or faithlessness, an unfruitful thing, that awakens no sympathy. The later of the love-poems are frequently sensual or frivolous, and the more exaggerated the expression, the less are we affected by the value of the feeling: "Mein Herz ist wie die Sonne, So flammend anzuseh'n. Und in ein Meer von Liebe Versinkt es gross und schön."[15] 15: My heart is like the sun, dear, Yon kindled flame above; And sinks in large-orbed beauty Within a sea of love. (E. LAZARUS.) There is too much self-observation and too much boastfulness in this youthful rodomontade. And it is the same with: "Ich hab' dich geliebet und liebe dich noch, Und fiele die Welt zusammen, Aus ihren Trummern stiegen doch Hervor meiner Liebe Flammen."[16] 16: I have loved thee long, and I love thee now, And, though the world should perish, O'er its dying embers still would glow The flames of the love I cherish. (LELAND) Admitting that this is probably so expressed for the sake of artistic effect, we must also admit that the style is a good, perfectly modern style. We can see it all with the mind's eye. The heart sinks like the sun into a sea. From the ruins of the world rise the flames of love. And still more powerful and much more picturesque is the scene in which the name of Agnes is written on the vault of heaven. What is wanting is substance in the feeling. Think, for the sake of comparison, of those profoundly human lines of Goethe's: "Kanntest jeden Zug in meinem Wesen, Spähtest, wo die reinste Nerve klingt, Konntest mich mit einem Blicke lesen, Den so schwer ein sterblich Aug' durchdringt."[17] [17] Thou knewest every impulse of my nature, thine eye detected where the nerve thrilled keenest, thou couldst read me at a glance, me, so impenetrable to mortal eye. --or of the following, which complete the impression: "Tropftest Mässigung dem heissen Blute, Richtetest den wilden, wirren Lauf, Und in deinen Engelsarmen ruhte Die zerstörte Brust sich wieder auf."[18] [18] The hot blood by thee was tempered, the wild, aimless course by thee directed; and in thine angel arms the torn breast found rest and healing. This is the expression of the healthiest, fullest, mutual sympathy, of love's gratitude, of perfect understanding. For such feeling Heine did not find expression until, with the shadow of death upon him, he loved _la Mouche_, the guardian angel of his death-bed. Until then it is never the healthy, tranquillising, happy element in love that he concerns himself with. It is in another domain that he is master. The modern poet, he reproduces passionate desire with a Correggio-like blending of colours and tones that is more effective than Goethe's antique limpidity. With Goethe desire is Greek or Italian. Think, for instance, of the poem of the orange: "Ich trete zu dem Baume Und sage: Pomeranze! Du reife Pomeranze; Du süsse Pomeranze! Ich schüttle, fühl', ich schüttle, O fall in meinen Schoos!"[19] [19] I take my stand beneath the tree, And cry: O orange! O orange ripe! O orange sweet! Feel, feel how I shake thy tree! O fall into my lap Then compare the feeling, the glow, the fragrance, the exuberance of such a poem of desire as Heine's wonderful: _Die Lotosblume ängstigt sich vor der Sonne Pracht_ ("The lotus-flower is fearful of the sun's resplendent beam"). It is very characteristic of the two poets that (as has already been noted), whenever the representation of love-longing glides into a delineation of foreign lands, Goethe prefers to paint Italy, Heine Hindostan. In Mignon's song of longing, without a superlative or a diminutive, with a power like that of a God, Goethe summons before our eyes the picture of the classic land where the citrons bloom. There is a power in it all, a force in each distinguishing trait, that Heine does not attain to. But compare this with the bewitching sweetness of Heine's _Auf Flügeln des Gesanges_ ("Oh, I would bear thee, my love, my bride, afar on the wings of song"), the dreamy longing, the charm and the mystery of the perspective that opens out to us: "Es hüpfen herbei und lauschen Die frommen, klugen Gazelln, Und in der Ferne rauschen Des heiligen Stromes Welln."[20] [20] Gazelles come bounding from the brake, And pause, and look shyly round; And the waves of the sacred river make A far-off slumb'rous sound. (Sir THEODORE MARTIN) This is an immortal stanza. Goethe, even when he gives the reins to longing, is always, like his own goldsmith of Ephesus, the great, wise heathen, who makes images of the gods; in Heine's visionary brain there was that particle of divine frenzy without which it had been impossible for the Düsseldorf merchant's son to understand and reproduce the fatalistic, self-effacing dreaminess of ancient India. Heine's peculiarities of style stand out even more sharply against the background of Goethe's, when we compare the way in which the two give expression to what is not exactly desire, but the pure longing of love. Think of the following lines, which Goethe puts into Mignon's mouth: "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide, Allein und abgetrennt von aller Freude, Seh' ich an's Firmament nach jener Seite. Ach, der mich liebt und kennt, ist in der Weite.-- Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide."[21] 21: My grief no mortals know, except the yearning! Alone, a prey to woe, all pleasure spurning, Up towards the sky I throw a gaze discerning. He who my love doth know seems ne'er returning; With strange and fiery glow _my heart is burning_[*] My grief no mortals know, except the yearning. (BOWRING) [*]In the original, _my bowels are burning_. This is the master in the fulness of his power. Much art has been expended in the representation of the wearing monotony of longing--the five doubly rhyming lines, the languishing metre--interrupted by the audacious, realistic expression: "Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide." Now compare with this, one of Heine's most perfect expressions of pure love-longing, and we shall see what the plastic fancy and the perfected laconicism of style which we traced in course of development have succeeded in producing for time and eternity: "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Höh'. Ihn schläfert: mit weisser Decke Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee. Er träumt von einer Palme, Die fern im Morgenland Einsam und schweigend trauert Auf brennender Felsenwand."[22] [22] A pine-tree stands alone on A bare bleak northern height; The ice and snow they swathe it As it sleeps there, all in white. 'Tis dreaming of a palm-tree, In a far-off Eastern land, That mourns, alone and silent, On a ledge of burning sand. (Sir THEODORE MARTIN.) This is hardly rhymed. The only real rhyme is the very commonplace _Land_ and _Wand_. The pine dreams in the snow, the palm grieves dumbly in the burning heat--that is all. It is not seen, it is fancied or invented, hence it cannot be painted (though I did once see a painting of it in a German exhibition, an idiotically absurd, double picture); but it is, nevertheless, an unforgettable, an immortal poem. And the reason is that the symbol is so marvellously effective in its simplicity--these two clear outlines instinct with feeling, which express the impossibility of overcoming the obstacle which prevents the union of two who really belong to each other. If Goethe's strength lies in the expression of healthy feelings, comparatively simple and uncomplicated, Heine's lies in the expression of complex modern feeling, of feelings whose unsound state is the result of painful experiences. Goethe could never have written the following lines, with their jarring contrasts and enigmatical meaning: "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh' So schwindet all mein Leid und Weh: . . . . . . . . . . . Doch wenn du sprichst: ich liebe dich! So muss ich weinen bitterlich."[23] [23] Whene'er I look into thine eyes, Then every fear that haunts me flies: . . . . . . . . . . . But when thou sayest: "I love thee;" Then must I weep, and bitterly. (Sir THEODORE MARTIN) Why must he weep? I have heard the naïve answer: Because she is lying. Alas! it is not such a simple matter as that. He has heard these words from other lips, lips which have now ceased to utter words of love; he knows how long such a passion as a rule lasts, and the sound of her voice startles him out of his forgetfulness--he doubts the durability of her feeling or the durability of his own. It is very interesting to note the way in which Heine had wrestled with these words. Originally the last line was: "Dann wein' ich still und bitterlich." Then the word "bitterlich" was altered to "freudiglich," which changed the original tenor of the poem, and finally the line received its present form.[24] [24] H. Hüffer: _Aus dem Leben Heinrich Heines,_ p. 153. Heine was not happy enough and not great enough to attain to reconciliation with existence. It was not possible, apart from all else, that the man who was so long an exile, so long sick to death, should look upon life with the same eyes as the man who was thoroughly sound and healthy, in affluent circumstances, honoured by the great majority, the friend of his sovereign. Hence the expressions of revolt, of bitterness, and of cynicism so frequently to be found in Heine are exceedingly rare in Goethe. Goethe, as a rule, puts them into the mouth of his Mephistopheles. Heine, who was destitute of the dramatic faculty, is himself responsible for every outburst, because he always speaks in his own name. Goethe's bitterest utterances, moreover, are not contained in his works. It is only in the Paralipomena to _Faust_, for instance, that we find this passage: "Nach kurzem Lärm legt Fama sich zur Ruh, Vergessen wird der Held so wie der Lotterbube, Der grösste König schliesst die Augen zu, Und jeder Hund bepisst gleich seine Grube."[25] [25] Fame's short-liv'd turmoil o'er, she sleeps, Hero and waif, oblivion's their doom; The greatest king, life o'er, his eyes doth close, And straightway every dog defiles his tomb. Heine dwells upon the ideas which Goethe only calls up to banish again. Goethe, too, can be blasphemous. He wrote that poem which is so frequently quoted, so seldom understood: _Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass_ ("He that with tears did never eat his bread"). It is a bitter, passionate appeal against the ordering of the world. But its bitterness is a bitterness that is choked with tears, not the wild and desperate bitterness of Heine's splendid _Fragen_ ("Questions") or the poem _Lass die heiligen Parabeln_ ("Holy parable discarding"), in which occur the lines: "Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend, Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte, Während glücklich als ein Sieger Trabt auf hohem Ross der Schlechte? Also fragen wir beständig, Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler, Aber ist das eine Antwort?"[26] [26] Wherefore bends the Just One, bleeding 'Neath the cross's weight laborious, While upon his steed the Wicked Rides all-proudly and victorious? Thus are we for ever asking, Till at length our mouths securely With a clod of earth are fastened-- That is not an answer, surely? (BOWRING) The expression is here, as usual with Heine, on a lower plane, more terrestrial, more boldly outspoken, yet by no means unworthy of the subject. Outbursts of satiety and weariness of life are not infrequent with him. We do not need to search long among his poems to find expressions of the mood of having done for good and all with principle, with endeavour. Nothing of this kind is to be found in Goethe. His _Vanitas vanitatum_, the song _Ich hab' meine Sache auf Nichts gestellt_ ("My trust in nothing now is placed") has, very significantly, become a convivial drinking song. In other words, there is no real, bitter earnest about Goethe's desperation; therefore it soon changes into jovial recklessness. Goethe has not Heine's overpowering feeling of the misery of life, and in so far he is really less Christian. If it is instructive to compare the two poets' lyric expression of fatalistic indifference, it is equally so to compare their expression of the feeling of aspiration, of manly resolve. In this case we may take the song _Feiger Gedanken_ ("Cowardly Thoughts") from _Claudine von Villa Bella_, as characteristic of Goethe; it might serve as a motto for his conduct throughout life. One can hardly imagine a more vigorous expression of manly determination than that of the lines: "Allen Gewalten zum Trutz sich erhalten," &c. (A bold front shown, to powers of earth and heaven). Compare with this Heine's poem, _An die Jungen_ ("To the Young"). The impetuous rush of the rhythm and the picturesque quadruple rhyme would alone suffice to make this a splendid, fascinating composition. The first verse, with its allusion to the golden apples which Hippomenes dropped in front of Atalanta, is a whole poem in itself: "Lass dich nicht kirren, lass dich nicht wirren Durch goldne Aepfel in deinem Lauf. Die Schwerter klirren, die Pfeile schwirren, Doch halten sie nicht den Helden auf."[27] [27] Heed not the confusion, resist the illusion Of golden apples that lie in thy way! The swords are clashing, the arrows are flashing, But they cannot long the hero delay. (BOWRING.) From the picture and example of the hero, who will not be stopped in his career, we pass to that of Alexander. What is wanted is determination and boldness: "Ein kühnes Beginnen ist halbes Gewinnen, Ein Alexander erbeutet die Welt, Kein langes Besinnen! Die Königinnen Erwarten schon kniend den Sieger im Zelt. Wir wagen und werben! besteigen als Erben Des alten Darius' Bett und Thron. O süsses Verderben! o blühender Sterben! Berauschter Triumphtod zu Babylon!"[28] 28: A daring beginning is half way to winning, An Alexander once conquered the earth! Restrain each soft feeling! the queens are all kneeling In the tent, to reward thy victorious worth. Surmounting each burden, we win as our guerdon The bed of Darius of old, and his crown; O deadly seduction! O blissful destruction! To die drunk with triumph in Babylon town. (BOWRING.) Upon victory follows the homage of the queens, then sweet perdition, seductive ruin, death in the intoxication of triumph--what Sardanapalian sentiment in this appeal to youth, this exhortation to relentless determination! The fight here is for honour, and for women as the spoil of battle, not that struggle for the combatant's own individual freedom, of which Goethe writes so simply: "Nimmer sich beugen, Kräftig sich zeigen, Rufet die Arme Der Götter herbei."[29] 29: Nevermore yield thee! Show life has steeled thee! Thus call the arms of The Gods to thine aid. Goethe's feeling is purer and fuller, the music of his language is simpler; with Heine the melody is, as it were, gorgeously orchestrated. In Goethe's case there is nothing for the eye, not a single picture. It is characteristic that his idea is the grander, Heine's the more modern, more complex, just as Heine's metrical expression is more sensuously insinuating, produced by an art which devotes more attention to detail. Now take a picturesque, descriptive subject--the Three Kings of the East, as they are called to mind at the Feast of the Epiphany. It is treated in a broad, lively, popular, genuinely naïve manner in Goethe's _Epiphanias:_ "Die heil'gen drei König' mit ihrem Stern" (The Three Kings of the East with their Star). The three kings, the white, the brown, and the black, are described as they appeared when they went about, dressed up, from house to house in the country; and the poem ends: "Die heil'gen drei König' sind wohlgesinnt, Sie suchen die Mutter und das Kind, Der Joseph fromm sitzt auch dabei, Der Ochs und Esel liegen auf Streu."[30] [30] The Three Kings of the East with reverence lowly Seek out the babe and mother holy, Good Joseph's there too, and close by The ox and ass on the litter lie. Heine does not view the legend in a more religious light than Goethe, but he settles his features into a more serious expression, speaks more concisely, draws with a sharper outline, obtains a totally different effect. Goethe rouses and cheers his readers by his broad and merry artlessness; Heine's words bore their way into men's minds and leave their sting there. He seems to aim at producing the same effect as that of an old Florentine painting: "Die heil'gen drei König' aus Morgenland, Sie frugen in jedem Städtchen: Wo geht der Weg nach Bethlehem, Ihr lieben Buben und Mädchen? Die Jungen und Alten, sie wussten es nicht, Die Könige zogen weiter, Sie folgten einem goldenen Stern, Der leuchtete lieblich und heiter. Der Stern blieb steh'n über Josephs Haus, Da sind sie hineingegangen, Das Oechslein brüllte, das Kindlein schrie, Die heil'gen drei Könige sangen."[31] [31] The three holy kings from the Eastern land Inquired in every city: Where is the road to Bethlehem, Ye boys and maidens pretty? The young and the old, they could not tell, The kings went onward discreetly; They followed the track of a golden star, That sparkled brightly and sweetly. The star stood still over Joseph's house And they entered the dwelling lowly, The oxen bellowed, the infant cried, While sang the three kings holy. (BOWRING.) There is a certain amount of waggery in this. What a concert! But also, what painting! The fewest words possible--not a stroke, not a touch too much, and the most telling, prompt effect. Let us now, in conclusion, think of one of those abstract figures which occur in all lyric poetry--more or less carefully wrought-out personifications of an idea such as peace, happiness, unhappiness--and in this domain also compare Heine with Goethe. Here again it will be observed that Goethe has the fuller note, Heine the firmer outline. Goethe wrote these lines to peace: "Der du von dem Himmel bist, Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest, Den, der doppelt elend ist, Doppelt mit Erquickung füllest, Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde! Was soll all der Schmerz, die Lust? Süsser Friede! Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!"[32] 32: Child of heaven, that soothing calm On every pain and sorrow pourest, And a doubly healing balm Find'st for him whose need is sorest, Oh, I am of life aweary! What availeth its unrest-- Pain that findeth no release, Joy that at the best is dreary? Gentle peace, Come, oh come unto my breast! (Sir THEODORE MARTIN.) There is no picture here, no real personification. There is a crescendo movement through the first six lines, which culminates in the outburst: "Süsser Friede!"--though we could not feel quite certain that this outburst was coming. Now take Heine's personifications of fortune and misfortune, as contained in the following verses: "Das Glück ist eine leichte Dirne Und weilt nicht gern am selben Ort, Sie streicht das Haar dir von der Stirne Und küsst dich rasch und flattert fort. Frau Unglück hat im Gegentheile Dich liebefest an's Herz gedrückt, Sie sagt, sie habe keine Eile, Setzt sich zu dir an's Bett und strickt."[33] [33] Oh, Joy, she is a lichtsome hizzy, She winna bide wi' ye ava'; She strokes your broo an' maks ye dizzy Wi' ae fond kiss, then flits awa'. Dame Sorrow is a canty kimmer, A fond embrace ye'll hae frae her; She vows she's naewise thrang, the limmer, Knits by your bed an' winna stir. (W. A.) Seldom have two ideas been transformed into two living forms with so few strokes; and there is nothing much finer in all modern myth-creation than the last two lines, between which are to be read the record of profound and terrible experience. Heine, as we have seen, makes his earliest appearance in the Romantic school, and learns his trade from A. W. Schlegel, who imparts to him his own correct taste. In the earliest period of his development he is addicted to Romantic ghost stories and Romantic archaisms. Then, in the matter of metre, he begins to study and imitate Wilhelm Müller; in his most famous poem he borrows from Clemens Brentano. He soon forms his own style, the distinguishing feature of which is extreme condensation of thought, feeling, and imagery. Heine makes everything present and living, introduces even into tranquil themes a nervous, at times dæmonic, passion, not infrequently exaggerates until he becomes grotesque, occasionally exchanges the light of day for the glaring brightness of electric light--a kind of un-naturalness which is nevertheless to be found in nature. His most effective poetic quality is pregnant brevity. By reason of the blend of wit and imagination in his nature, he is inclined to produce his effects by contrasts, to seek for striking disharmonies and incongruities; he has a special fancy for the effect produced by letting a commonplace, vulgar reality imperceptibly make way for a poetic vision, or allowing such a vision to fade and evaporate and give place to all too familiar reality. His style is essentially modern--everything graphic, everything perspicuous. What is it that constitutes a great writer? The possession of the power to call forth mental visions or moods, visions by means of moods or moods by means of visions. It was especially the latter faculty that Heine cultivated in himself; he never fails in the matter of clear outline and picturesque effect. At his zenith he can no longer be compared with his teachers and contemporaries. To gauge the power and versatility of his style it was necessary to compare it with the greatest style of the age--with Goethe's. In the process he often, as we have seen, comes far short, but it not so very seldom happens that he establishes his right to almost equal admiration. It is, however, enough for him that it is possible, and now and again necessary, to compare him with Goethe. A style is the expression of a personality and a weapon in the warfare of literature. Goethe's style, with all its greatness, is not sufficiently complex to grapple with modern ideas. But Heine's, that weapon which in its best days was as finely tempered as those old Spanish blades which could be bent like osiers, but which no armour could snap, was better suited than any other to cope with modern life in its hardness and ugliness, its charm, its restlessness, and its wealth of glaring contrasts. It also possessed in the highest degree the power of working upon the nerves of modern readers, who have more inclination for spiced dishes and heating beverages than for plain food and pure wine. XVI HEINE There can be little doubt that nothing has been more injurious to Heine's general reputation than his indiscreet loquacity on sexual subjects. Whole groups of his poems are in ill repute on this account; those, for instance, which compose the collection _Verschiedene_ (Various), most of which have been unjustly condemned, although there are certainly some which are anything but sublime in their theme or refined in their treatment of it. In _Der Gott und die Bajadere_ ("The God and the Bayadere") Goethe had shown how even a very equivocal subject can be ennobled by sublimity of style. And even when, as in the Venetian epigrams, he treats of Bayaderes who are certainly not purified by love, and dwells upon the poet's relations with them, the antique metre in itself produces the effect of distance, and we are not offended by any objectionable word. These few epigrams, too, lie almost buried in the mass of Goethe's writings. Moreover, in reading them, we feel that he is the man whom nature created in order that she might learn from him what she is like in her entirety. With Heine, communicativeness on the subject of his relations with the other sex occupies too important a place, and is not always in good taste. It gains him ten readers for one whom it alienates, but it sometimes happens that the one thus lost was worth more than the ten gained. And yet this frankness is, in a manner, his strength. It need not have been so personal, but it is quite indispensable in one who desires to compass not only the tragic, but also the comic hemisphere. And in this quality, and in his many shameless personal attacks, he resembles the greatest comic poet of all times. Towards the end of his _Winter's Tale_, immediately after the wanton passage in which he smells out the future of Germany by putting his head down the opening of Charlemagne's night-throne, he declares that the noblest of the Graces have tuned the strings of his lyre, and that this lyre is the same which was sounded in days gone by, by his father, "the late Aristophanes, the favourite of the Muses," He adds that in his last chapter he has attempted to imitate _The Birds_, "the best of father's dramas." He thus, we observe, prided himself on artistic descent from the greatest comic poet of ancient Greece. For a moment we are taken aback. Other German poets, such as Platen and Prutz, have imitated the form of the Aristophanic comedy, its trimeters, choruses, parabases, the whole of that irregular and yet regular form of art built up by the Greek comic school; but Heine never even made an attempt to master this poetical form, or any other. It is characteristic of him that, persevering and conscientious as he was in ensuring the telling precision of the single metrical or prose expression (I never saw a manuscript with so many corrections as that of his _Atta Troll_, in the Royal Library of Berlin), it was impossible for him to submit to the artistic restriction of any of the great poetic forms. It tallies with this, that in his longer works the plan of the whole is quite vague, but every single line has been gone through again and again. There is probably no exaggeration in saying that he never, in his capacity as an artist, set himself a task and carried it out. Once only he attempted to write a long, connected prose work, a romance or novel. Whether, as some maintain, the greater part of the manuscript was destroyed by a fire, or whether, as I for one believe, the work was never completed, the fact remains that all we have of it is a fragment. And even this fragment, _Der Rabbi von Bacharach,_ is, when carefully examined, nothing but a very much antedated transcription of Heine's own private experiences. Nor did he ever attempt a severely connected metrical composition. His only long poems, _Atta Troll_ and _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_ ("Germany, a Winter's Tale"), are irregular, whimsical fantasies, soap-bubbles rocked upon cobweb tissue of the brain, only connected by a uniformity of tone and design. The idea of translating or adapting Aristophanes would never have occurred to Heine. He was not like Goethe, who, in spite of his enormous original productivity, condescended to translate and adapt for his countrymen (Diderot, Benvenuto Cellini, Voltaire). When Goethe made acquaintance with Aristophanes, he was enchanted with him, and it is Goethe, not Heine, who undertakes to transplant _The Birds_ on to German soil; but it is characteristic that in his hands the play undergoes a metamorphosis, is transformed from a political into a literary satire. In Goethe's play the two discontented politicians have become literary adventurers; in the owl (as proved by a letter from Jacobi to Heine) he satirises Klopstock, in the parrot, young Cramer. It was in the epilogue to this adaptation that Goethe bestowed on Aristophanes the immortal appellation, "der ungezogene Liebling der Grazien" (the froward favourite of the Graces), which suits Heine so well. Heine was too lazy ever to have studied, translated, adapted, or imitated an ancient classic poet, but, supposing him to have done so, he would never, like Goethe or Platen, have made pure literary comedies of the Aristophanic plays; it was the grand political satire that attracted him. It is probable that Heine is the wittiest man that ever lived, or at least the wittiest man of modern times. Voltaire is, undoubtedly, looked upon as a sort of personification of wit; but his wit is sensible and dry, not poetic and imaginative like Heine's. Platen, the proud and stiff, acted unwisely when he wrote the work in which he satirises Heine, _Der romantische Oedipus_, in the outward form and style of the Aristophanic comedy, for he had nothing in common with Aristophanes but fine versification and coarse language. Heine, on the contrary, had all the chief qualities of Aristophanes combined--wit, wanton wildness, imagination, lyric sweetness, shamelessness, and grace. Without grace and wit, shamelessness is undoubtedly a base and repellent quality. But in this combination with noble qualities it is uncommon. The Aristophanic poet must not, cannot have the pride which shrinks from amusing the coarse minded, who only understand a man when they meet him in the mire. He dares not shrink from debasing himself to a certain point, in order to gain a wider field of vantage. It is useless for an author to attempt, as Platen did, to impress his readers before all else with the idea of his high-mindedness, and to inspire them with respect for his person; it is useless for him to proclaim that he intends "to crush his antagonists with genuine wit." It is not possible to appear at one and the same time in the character of a refined gentleman and an Aristophanic poet. A man is a failure in the latter rôle if he sets more value on the esteem of others than on the triumph of art. The compensation in the case of the true Aristophanic poet is, that his poetry has a compass unattainable by the dignified poets (a Schiller or a Hugo); it reflects the whole of human life, from its highest functions to its lowest. Though there are so few formal points of contact between Heine's lyric-satiric poems and the great fantastic comedies of Aristophanes, it is nevertheless probable that since the days of ancient Greece there has been no wit so nearly akin to the wit of Aristophanes as Heinrich Heine's. This assertion is not based upon any misconception of the extraordinary dissimilarity in the character of their life-work. The Aristophanic comedy with its grand and exact technical structure is the expression of the artistic culture of a whole nation, a monument that commemorates the religious festivals of which it was the outcome. Aristophanes built upon a foundation laid, a substructure prepared, by a whole line of distinguished predecessors, whose style was similar, whose talent was akin to his, and to whose labours he succeeded, in much the same manner as Shakespeare did to the work of his predecessors; hence the Aristophanic comedy as a form of art is to a much greater extent a collective production than Heine's stanza is. Quite apart from our knowledge of the fact that Eupolis and Kratinos accused Aristophanes of making inadmissible use of the ideas of his predecessors, we can see for ourselves, from one of his own comedies, _The Knights_, that plays with titles like the Birds, the Wasps, the Frogs had already been produced by the comic poet Magnes; the chorus disguised as reptiles, insects, birds, was thus not a thing invented by Aristophanes, it was an inheritance. It is only because we are not acquainted with the Greek poet's predecessors that his life's work appears to us to be a purely individual production, the type of grand fantastic comedy, in comparison with whose exuberance of life almost all modern comedy seems spiritless and weak. His world is the topsy-turvy world. When, in the _Peace_, Trygaios saddles a stinking carrion-beetle and on it, as his Pegasus, mounts through the clouds to the dwellings of the Gods, or when he drags Peace up by a fathom-long rope from the deep well into which she has been thrown by War, these proceedings are represented as if there were nothing in the least unusual or impossible about them; no explanation is offered; and we are compelled to believe in them. When, in _The Birds_, we hear two silly fellows, who are posing as philosophers, disclose their crazy plans for building a city in the clouds, it all sounds very mad, and when we see the Birds receive these men with reverence, we do not conceive any higher opinion of their intelligence, we are only struck by the comicality of the birds being so stupid as to put their trust in them. But when we hear that the city is actually built, that fortune has attended the enterprise and that it has been crowned with success, we feel that the world set before us here is not our own everyday world, but one with whose laws things are compatible which are contrary to the laws of ours. This new world is purely fantastic, in so far as it is antagonistic to the laws of probability and of nature. It is a world in which madness triumphs, and the poet pretends that this is as it should be. Not till the spectator begins to wonder _where_ this topsy-turvy world can be, _where_ such things happen, _where_ political effrontery on such a gigantic scale, far from being confounded and put to shame, wins confidence and is rewarded--not till then is he led back to reality, to the recognition in this world of his own world, his own home, Athens. Three of the Aristophanic comedies in our possession, _The Birds, The Frogs_, and _Peace_, do not pass, or pass only in part, on earth; they are meteoric or underground dramas. And it is in these only that Gods are represented, and then merely that they may be rated, ridiculed, or beaten. In the world of reality they do not reveal themselves; for it is only in the world of fancy that they are believed in. Heine, the modern poet, dares not ask his readers to follow him into the same sort of supernatural world; and yet he cannot dispense with the supernatural; hence that constantly recurring use and abuse of dreams, for which hardly any parallel is to be found among other modern poets. Within the frame-work, as it were, of the dream, he dares to be extraordinary, to be Aristophanic. As has been already remarked, he resembles Aristophanes in the depth of his shamelessness and in the height of his lyric flight. Allusions to difficulties of digestion and the like, play a less important part in Heine's writings than in those of Aristophanes, who, however, we must remember, himself declared that he despised this kind of comicality. According to him its only recommendation was that it provoked the laughter of the least cultured part of the public. But such things are frequently referred to by Heine too, at times in the plainest of terms (notably in his attack on Platen), and with him, almost as often as with Aristophanes, we have to be on our guard against certain noisome insects. Heine of course cannot allow himself the same freedom of speech in sexual matters as the old Greek did, but to make up for this, he never hesitates to make an allusion that will atone for any want of outspokenness. And now and then there is almost no circumlocution; what as a general rule is indicated by a smile or a grimace is shouted to all and sundry with a loud guffaw, as, for instance, at the conclusion of _Deutschland_, and in such poems as _Der Ungläubige_ ("The Unbeliever"). And yet again, as with Aristophanes, so with Heine; from this constant insistence upon that in man which reminds us of his dwelling-place during the earliest stages of his development, he rises to the purest, most delicate lyric utterance. He, who so thoroughly comprehends the material origin of all living things, in one of his poems derives them all from the song of the nightingale: "Im Anfang war die Nachtigall Und sang ihr Lied: Zükükt! Zukükt!"[1] [1] In the beginning was the nightingale, Who sang her song: Zükükt! Zükükt! (CARY) We cannot but be reminded of the beautiful lines in _The Birds_: "Gentlest and dearest, thou dost sing Consorting still with mine thy lay, Lov'd partner of my wild-wood way, Thou'rt come, thou'rt come; all hail! all hail! I see thee now, sweet nightingale." (CARY) Heine, like Aristophanes, makes merry at the expense of the Gods. His satire is naturally more cautious than the old Greek's; the modern world does not stand jesting on this subject as well as the ancient world did. In the works of Heine, who wrote under the censorship of the police and of modern society, we have no counterpart to the scene in _The Frogs_, where Dionysus, the god of comedy, who has shown himself both boastful and cowardly, gets one thrashing after another, and at last appeals to his own priest, who occupied a place of honour among the spectators, to help him in his extremity. And yet there is not very much, from playful banter to broad jocularity and the most biting sarcasm, that Heine does not allow himself. Hyacinth's valuation of the various religions (in the _Reisebilder_) is well known. He will have nothing to say to Catholicism, which, with its pealing of bells, its incense fumes, and its "Melancholik," is no religion for a citizen of Hamburg; he tests Protestantism by buying lottery tickets with the numbers which he finds on the hymn-board in a Lutheran church; and he disposes of Judaism in the well-known words: "It is not a religion at all, but a misfortune." In the amusing and audacious verses entitled _Disputation_, a rabbi and a Capucin monk defend their respective dogmas; each, in offensive terms, boasts of the happiness conferred by his doctrine; the royal bride who is to decide the dispute declares herself incapable of doing so, as the only thing she has noted is that they both stink. In a passage in his book on Börne, Heine's mockery of religion becomes almost dramatic. He tells how, when he was living on the island of Heligoland, he was often drawn into arguments with a Prussian Councillor of Justice on the subject of the Trinity. During one of these discussions, the thinness of the flooring permitted them to hear distinctly what was being said in the room below, where a phlegmatic Dutchman was instructing their hostess how to distinguish between cod, haberdine, and stock-fish--which are in reality one and the same fish, but with three names, denoting three different degrees of saltness. As far as earthly potentates are concerned, Heine's comic assaults are not less audacious, not less fantastic than those of Aristophanes. Aristophanes showed courage in his attacks on Kleon and Theramenes; he occasionally chanced to defend the good cause; but as a rule it was the bad cause he upheld, for he made himself the spokesman of an indefensible conservatism, and of unjust personal animosities. Heine was less frequently unjust or mean, and he was never conservative. But he recalls Aristophanes to us by his aristocratic propensities, by the grim character of his personal attacks (those on Meyerbeer, for instance), and also by the form of these attacks, for example the amusing way in which he turns to account well-known, pathetic passages from other poets. He made witty attacks on Frederick William IV., in _Deutschland_, where Hammonia warns Heine himself against "the king of Thule," and in the poem _Der neue Alexander_; and he wrote a whole series of satirical poems on King Ludwig of Bavaria and his doings. This latter king, whom Heine in past days had extolled, was flattered as a Mæcenas by a whole band of contemporary artists and poets. In the _Lobgesänge auf König Lüdewig_, Heine falls foul of all his weaknesses, his gallery of beauty in the Munich palace, his bad verses, his annoyance when several of the famous men of science and artists whom he patronised allowed themselves to be persuaded to leave Bavaria and settle in Prussia. On the subject of the gallery of beauty we have: "Er liebt die Kunst, und die schönsten Frau'n, Die lässt er porträtiren, Er geht in diesem gemalten Serail Als Kunst-Eunuch spazieren."[2] [2] In love with art, he collects fair dames In counterfeit presentment, And in this painted harem finds, Art-eunuch-like, contentment. When writing of the migration to Prussia of the various men of note, Heine seizes the opportunity to give a side-hit at his old scape-goat, Massmann: "Der Schelling und der Cornelius, Sie mögen von dannen wandern. Dem einen erlosch im Kopf die Vernunft, Die Phantasie dem Andern. Doch dass man aus meiner Krone stahl Die beste Perle, dass man Mir meinen Turnkunstmeister geraubt, Das Menschenjuwel, den Massmann, Das hat mich gebeugt, das hat mich geknickt, Das hat mir die Seele zerschmettert, Mir fehlt jetzt der Mann, der in seiner Kunst Den höchsten Pfahl erklettert...."[3] [3] That Schelling should go, and Cornelius too, Without a tear I can see-- The one has lost his reasoning power, The other all his fancy. But to steal from my crown its brightest gem, Its pearl of price, was cruel; My master-gymnast they've filched away, Massmann, mankind's chief jewel. This crime has bent and broken me, 'Tis soul-destroying, cynical-- I have lost the man who had clambered up To his art's supremest pinnacle. Of King Ludwig's essays in poetry he writes: "Herr Ludwig ist ein grosser Poet, Und singt er, so stürzt Apollo Vor ihm auf die Knie und bittet und fleht: Halt ein! ich werde sonst toll, o!"[4] [4] King Ludwig is a poet great; When he sings, the mighty Apollo Falls on his knees and begs and prays: O stop! or my death will follow! Still wittier is the parody of King Ludwig's poetical style, in the inscription above the resting-place of Atta Troll in the Bavarian _Walhalla_: "Atta Troll, Tendenzbär, sittlich-- Religiös; als Gatte brünstig; Durch Verfuhrtsein von dem Zeitgeist Waldursprünglich Sansculotte; Sehr schlecht tanzend, doch Gesinnung Tragend in der zott'gen Hochbrust Manchmal auch gestunken habend; Kein Talent, doch ein Charakter!"[5] [5] Atta Troll, a bear of impulse; Devotee; a loving husband; Full of sans-culottic notions, Thanks to the prevailing fashion. Wretched dancer; strong opinions Bearing in his shaggy bosom; Often stinking very badly; Talentless, a character! (BOWRING) The harshness and the strained participial construction both remind us of the style of the royal effusions which any visitor to Munich may study for himself below the frescoes on the walls of the arcades. This is merely personal satire of crowned heads; but Heine's satire, like that of Aristophanes, is frequently directed against existing political, social, and literary conditions, and it is then that he is obliged to call the dream to his aid. With its help he descends into the depth of the earth, or mounts to a fantastic world above the clouds. This, as already mentioned, happens more especially in _Deutschland_. Observe with what care and skill Heine prepares for the fantastic description of Barbarossa's subterranean dwelling-place in the Kyffhäuser. First he introduces the refrain of an old legendary ballad: "Sonne, du klagende Flamme!" (Sun, thou accusing flame!) with a sketch of the legend which tells how the sun acted as the accuser of the murderer of a young maiden; then he describes the good old nurse who sang this ballad and told many an entrancing tale--the tale of the princess disguised as a goose-herd, the tale of the emperor who lived deep down in the earth below the mountain; this second he relates at length--and presently all else is forgotten; we see Barbarossa with his mail-clad followers, we hear him call them to horse, to arms, to battle, to avenge the wrong which the murderers have done to the golden-haired Germania. Then we return to the mood of the nursery ballad, and to its refrain: "Sonne! du klagende Flamme!" now chanted with enthusiasm and rejoicing. There is an Aristophanic _verve_ in this poetic description of the old arsenal, the empty suits of armour, the faded flags, the sleeping soldiers, and then the sudden revulsion, the appeal to awakening power, the supplication that the Middle Ages may return again, as being infinitely preferable to the sanctimonious Prussia of the day, with her mixture of Gothic folly and modern falsehood. The two following cantos, which contain a further description of the interior of the mountain, and conversations with Barbarossa, take the form of an account of a dream which the poet had while travelling at night in the stage-coach. The anti-Prussian rhapsody in the inn at Minden is prepared for in the same manner. Heine wants to summon forth the Prussian eagle, and to pluck him and shoot him. If Aristophanes had had the same designs, he would have introduced the eagle without more ado. Heine goes to work in his roundabout way. In the act of falling asleep he dreams that the red bed-curtain tassel above his head turns into an eagle with feathers and claws, which threatens to tear the liver out of his breast, and which he taunts with bitter hatred. In a few single instances Heine's artistic procedure is bolder, more like that of the great Greek. One of these is the splendid harangue to the wolves at night in the Teutoburgerwald. At midnight the traveller hears them howling round his carriage, which has lost a wheel. He comes out and makes a speech to the savage brutes: "Mitwölfe, ich bin glücklich, heut' In eurer Mitte zu weilen, Wo so viel' edle Gemüther mir Mit Liebe entgegen heulen."[6] [6] Brother wolves! it gives me great pleasure to-day To tarry awhile midst your growling, Where so many noble spirits have met, Around me lovingly howling. (BOWRING) And the speech is a humorous imitation of those which great men are in the habit of making on such occasions: This is an hour which to him will be ever memorable. They lie who say that he has joined the dogs; the idea of becoming court-councillor to the lambs has never even occurred to him. From time to time he has dressed himself in a sheepskin, but only for the sake of the warmth; he is and always will be a wolf. In the scene between the poet and the strapping woman with the mural crown who represents Hamburg, we have, as Heine himself informs us, a direct imitation of the wedding of Peithetaerus and Basileia in _The Birds_. It is wanton and boyishly frolicsome; its licentiousness is really more offensive than that of similar passages in Aristophanes, who never appears in his own plays except in defence of himself as a poet. Heine does not go the same length as Aristophanes, but he is more personal. In _Atta Troll_ the parallel between the two poets is still more obvious. Here Heine's imagination has freer play, because the hero is not a man, but a bear. There is fine fancy in the passage where the bear, after his flight, is described dancing for his cubs in the moonlight. There is inimitable humour in his declamation against the rights of man, and in his boast of the more ancient rights of bears, which recalls the charming parabasis in _The Birds_, in which it is established that the bird world is the oldest: Everything proceeds from the original egg, the egg of Night, Love first of all, and the birds are children of Love. Atta Troll's pride in the animal world is most amusing, especially so because Heine manages to insinuate into the bear's utterances sarcastic hits at persons whom he himself wishes to depreciate--Freiligrath, for instance, whose popular but foolish poem, _Löwenritt_, and infelicitous _Mohrenkönig_ had roused his mirthful derision: "Giebt es nicht gelehrte Hunde? Und auch Pferde, welche rechnen? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Schreiben Esel nicht Kritiken? Spielen Affen nicht Komödie? . . . . . . . . . . . . . Singen nicht die Nachtigallen? Ist der Freiligrath kein Dichter? Wer besäng' den Löwen besser? Als sein Landsmann, das Kamel?"[7] 7: Are there not such things as learned Dogs, and horses too, who reckon? . . . . . . . . Write not asses criticisms? Are not apes all good comedians? . . . . . . . . Are not nightingales good singers? And is Freiligrath no poet? Who can sing of lions better Than their countryman, the camel?[*] (BOWRING) [*]In German slang "camel" is equivalent to "blockhead." A good deal of what the bear says, sounds like satire on foolish communistic democracy. He holds forth volubly against property--bears are born without pockets, but men have pockets and stuff them; and discourses eagerly on equality: "Strenge Gleichheit! Jeder Esel Sei befugt zum höchsten Staatsamt, Und der Löwe soll dagegen Mit dem Sack zur Mühle traben."[8] [8] Strict equality! Each donkey Be entitled to high office; On the other hand, the lion Carry to the mill the sack. (BOWRING) But on the whole it is harmless, stingless satire, fantastical banter alike of the clerical party and communists, misanthropes and revolutionists, cosmopolitans and patriots--for the bear speaks like them all in turn. A very wonderful passage is Atta Troll's sermon against atheism and its development from his deism, the passage beginning: "Hüte dich vor Menschendenkart, Sie verdirbt dir Leib und Seele; Unter allen Menschen giebt es Keinen ordentlichen Menschen."[9] [9] Guard against man's ways of thinking, They destroy both soul and body; 'Mongst all men there's no such thing as Any good and decent man. (BOWRING) There is a gay profundity in the warning against Feuerbach and Bauer, and there is wit, as brilliant as Voltaire's, but richer, and warmer, in the description of the creative deity: "Droben in dem Sternenzelte, Auf dem gold'nen Herrscherstuhle, Weltregierend, majestätisch, Sitzt ein kolossaler Eisbär" &c.[10] [10] In yon starry bright pavilion, On the golden seat of power, World-directing and majestic, Sits a mighty polar-bear. (BOWRING) What humour there is in the description of the bear-saints who dance before his throne! The bear gives us something of the phraseology of all the different parties in turn, but it is the bigoted Teuton that he chiefly favours; it is he who is most severely satirised. The sleek bear-damsels remind us of a German pastor's daughters; the youngest cub turns somersaults exactly like Massmann, and is, like him, the product of home education, has never been able to learn Greek or Latin, or any language but his mother-tongue. By strange, fantastic detours Heine invariably brings his reader back to the realities of his native land. Aristophanic, in this respect, is the passage in which, when it rains, the cry is heard: "Six-and-thirty kings for an umbrella!" and again, when shelter is reached: "Six-and-thirty kings for a warm dressing-gown!" And absolutely Aristophanic is the suppressed passage, in which the bird Hut-Hut tells how Solomon and Balkis ask each other riddles in the realm of shades, riddles like: "Wer ist wohl der grösste Lump Unter allen deutschen Lumpen; Die in allen sechs und dreissig Deutschen Bundesstaaten leben?"[11] [11] Who, think you, is the paltriest wight Amongst the crowd of worthless fellows In all the different States of Germany, Which are in number six-and-thirty? Balkis, to whom the question is put, sends secret messengers to make inquiry in every country and state in Germany, but each time she informs Solomon of the discovery of a specially contemptible wretch, he answers: "Kind! es giebt noch einen grösser'n! (Child! there is a worse one still!) And it is explained to us as a peculiarity of Germany, that as often as we imagine we have discovered her most despicable character, one still more despicable makes his appearance. There is no progress so certain as the progress in general contemptibility. It was only yesterday that X. appeared to be the sorriest knave, to-day he is not to be named in comparison with N. N. Heine must have felt that he had plentiful stores of invention to draw upon, else he would hardly, in his final revision of the poem, have rejected this means of satirising his opponents, one by one, in the most amusing manner. In purely literary satire, too, Heine's methods have a distinct resemblance to those of Aristophanes. An example of this is the hit in _Atta Troll_ at the Swabian school of poets--the cat in the witch's cottage, which is a bewitched Swabian poet, who will turn into a man again when a pure maiden can read Gustav Pfizer's poems on New Year's eve without falling asleep. Another example is the satire in the same poem on the following rather ridiculous lines of Freiligrath's _Der Mohrenfürst_ (The Moorish Prince) with their far-fetched simile: "Aus dem schimmernd weissen Zelte hervor Tritt der schlachtgerüstete fürstliche Mohr; So tritt aus schimmernder Wolken Thor Der Mond, der verfinsterte, dunkle, hervor."[12] [12] From the glistening white tent the royal Moor issues forth, armed for the fray; even as the moon, gloomy and dark, issues from the glistening gate-way of the clouds. It is a poem about a negro king, who is taken prisoner, brought to Europe, and made to play the drum outside a circus; while doing so he thinks of his former greatness, and beats his drum to pieces. The idea of the black man at the opening of the tent resembling the moon appearing through the clouds is undoubtedly comical. In _Atta Troll_ the red tongue hangs out of the bear's black jaws as the moon shows herself through white clouds. And towards the end of the poem Heine tells us how, in the Jardin des Plantes, he makes acquaintance with a negro caretaker, who confides to him that he is Freiligrath's negro king, that he has married a white Alsatian cook, whose feet remind him of the feet of the elephants in his native land, and whose French sounds to him like the negro tongue. She feeds him so well that he has developed a little round black stomach, which shows itself through the opening of his shirt like a black moon, appearing from behind white clouds. And there is something especially Aristophanic in the recklessly brutal satire upon Platen in the second part of the _Reisebilder_. Certain amusing artifices in their literary warfare are common to the Greek and the German comic poet. In _The Frogs_, in the contest between Æschylus and Euripides (a poet whom Aristophanes hates), Æschylus tacks a refrain, equivalent to "spoiled his verse," to everything that Euripides recites. In the _Reisebilder_ Heine revenges himself by making Hyacinth alternately tack the words _von vorn_ (from the front) and _von hinten_ (from behind) to the end of Platen's lines, thereby maliciously perverting their meaning. The Aristophanic comedy resembles the majestic frescoes that cover the interior of some great dome; to compare Heine's comic writings with those of Aristophanes, is to compare pictures carefully painted on the easel with such frescoes. In the Greek comedies there is the light and space of the Sistine Chapel; in them, as in the frescoes of Michael Angelo, everything is large, sweeping, strong; the creation of a mind that sets recognised rules at defiance by the vehemence of its lyric emotion, the audacity of its fore-shortening, and the force of its allegory. Only that Michael Angelo's world is solemnly, wildly tragic, whereas the world of Aristophanes is dithyrambic, a world of caricatures set in a framework of Greek social conditions. Compared with Aristophanes, Heine is a private, stay-at-home citizen. Aristophanes holds forth to an audience of thousands in the broad daylight of the theatre; Heine communes with his public sitting alone in his room. But the scenes that depict themselves simply on the retina of his eye, are aglow with more ardent, passionate life than those which Aristophanes embodied on the stage. And his aims are not the purely local aims of the Greek poet. When he is at his best, he appeals to millions who are not of his nationality, appeals, indeed, to the elect among all who can read. His lyric poetry is more personal, more intense, more nervous than that of any Greek; his satire is dedicated to the cause of general ideas, which did not exist for Aristophanes. He is not less witty than his Greek forerunner, and he always fought for political progress and personal liberty, whereas the enemy of Euripides and Socrates most frequently fought for a past that was gone beyond recall, a past to which he himself most certainly did not belong. XVII HEINE Heine's prose is not on the same level with his verse. In his most famous prose book, the _Reisebilder_, he shows himself to be a pupil of Sterne; in later works, where he has attained to greater independence, he is always witty and lively, but seldom properly qualified to treat the subjects of his choice. Whether he is writing on German philosophy for French readers, or on French art for Germans, he does it in equally dilettante fashion. Judged as journalism, his writing was always excellent, but he is too strong, too great a man to be classified as a journalist. Too much has been made of Heine's superficiality by the pedants among his detractors. He was not a hard worker, but he was by no means idle, and he possessed a fund of solid and varied knowledge. Still, it is only as a poet that he is great; most of his prose writings treat of the passing topics of the day; and his fame has been actually injured by the publication of his letters, which, as a rule, present him to us in an unfavourable light, namely entirely taken up with his own interests. Pecuniary difficulties are a tiresome subject, even when they happen to be the pecuniary difficulties of a genius. Heine, as every one knows, did not live to be an old man. He was carried off in the prime of his mental powers by a terrible disease. He had always been delicate and suffering; in his youth he was plagued by severe headaches, and was obliged to be so moderate in the matter of drink that his friends used laughingly to declare that he contented himself with _smelling_ a bottle of Rhenish wine which he kept in his room. His nervous system was undermined while he was still a young man, but it is certain that this was to a much less extent the result of excesses than is generally believed, for Heine is a real _fanfaron des vices_, given to perpetual boasting of his own depravity. He was attacked by the disease which is so frequently the fate of those who have lived lives of unbroken mental productivity. An affection of the spine, with paralysis first of the eyelids and in course of time of almost the whole body, consigned him to that "mattress-grave" in Paris, where he lay for nearly eight years. His life, which can neither be called a great nor a happy one, falls of itself into two distinctly defined parts--the life in Germany till the Revolution of July, and the life in Paris from 1831 till his death in 1856. It was a life led without calculation, but not without instinctive perception of the direction in which possibilities of development for his talent lay; it is hardly probable that Heine would have attained to his great cosmopolitan fame, or even that he would have become so eminent a satiric poet, if he had lived in his native country all his life. His youthful years in Germany are passed under the oppression of the reaction--his _Reisebilder_ won popularity as an expression of the general political dissatisfaction--but he soon makes up his mind that it is useless to meddle with politics. The Revolution of July puts new life into everything; Heine goes off to Paris, settles there, and is kept there by the embargo placed upon his works in all the states of the German Confederation. The Guizot Government secretly give him the small pension which enables him to live in comparative comfort. His acceptance of this laid him open to accusations, which, though they were not altogether groundless, were in many points quite unjustifiable. It must be borne in mind that Heine did not understand the art of making money; and even if he had, it would have been of little use to him. Many thousands of pounds must have been made by the sale of his books, but he himself made over the most profitable of them all, the _Buch der Lieder_, to Campe in payment of an old debt of 50 Louis d'ors, and was all his life long dependent on the unwilling assistance of his rich uncle. If he, and if the little Parisian grisette whom he married, had had more idea of economy, it might have been unnecessary for him to accept Government support. The fact of his accepting it no doubt occasionally prevented him from criticising the French ministry freely in German newspapers, but it had no other bad result, and least of all did it induce him to write anything he did not mean. From French soil he waged uninterrupted, unremitting intellectual warfare with the European reaction. In this respect he may be called Byron's great successor. Only a few years after the sword of sarcasm, wielded in the cause of liberty, had slipped from the hands of the dying Byron, it was seized by Heine, who wielded it for a whole generation with equal skill and power. Yet for the eight last years it was a mortally wounded man who fought. At no time did he write truer, more incisive, more brilliant verse than when he lay nailed to the low, broad bed of torture in Paris. And never, so far as we know, has a great productive mind borne superhuman sufferings with more undaunted courage and endurance. The power of the soul over the body has seldom displayed itself so unmistakably. To bear such agonies as his in close-lipped silence would have been admirable; but to create, to bubble over with sparkling, whimsical jest and mockery, to let his spirit wander the world round in charming and profound reverie, while he himself lay crippled, almost lifeless, on his couch--this was great. He lay there shrunk to a skeleton, with his eyes closed, his hands almost powerless, his noble features painfully emaciated; the white, perfectly formed hands were nearly transparent; at times, when he spoke, a Mephistophelian smile passed over the suffering, martyr-like face. At last, as in the case of Tithonus of old, all that really remained of the man was his voice; but it was a voice of many notes, of many whimsies, many jests. He continued to be mentally active. It was as if the driving-wheel went on turning without steam, as if the lamp went on burning without oil. It is not true that he reverted to a connection with any church; but the suffering man clung to a kind of piety and faith in God which was a legacy from the days of his youth. At this faith he himself sometimes smiled. We have such a smile in the words with which on the last day of his life he tried to pacify an excited acquaintance: _Dieu me pardonnera--c'est son métier._ It is a touching proof of his strength of mind and of his filial affection that during his whole long illness he took the greatest care that all knowledge of his sufferings should be kept from his old mother in Hamburg; to the last he wrote her cheerful, amusing letters, and he caused any passages that might have awakened her suspicions to be taken out of the copies of his works that were sent to her. Another pleasant impression of his spiritual condition is conveyed by the circumstance that he, the most wanton-tongued of men and poets on the subject of love, changed during his illness into the tenderest and most spiritual exponent of that passion. The last year of his life was, as is well known, sweetened by the admiration and devotion of the young and beautiful woman who, though German born, made her appearance as a French authoress under the pseudonym of Camille Selden.[1] [1] Meissner: _Erinnerungen an Heinrich Heine_. Camille Selden: _Les derniers jours de Henri Heine_, 1884. She was then about twenty-eight, blue-eyed, fair-haired, and so charming, gentle, and attractive, that she won Heine's heart the first time she visited him. Soon he could not live without her; he was miserable if a few days passed without his seeing her, though he was often in such pain that he was obliged to request her to delay her visit. It is in the poems and letters to her, published after Heine's death, that we find that fervency, depth, and fulness of passion which we feel to be wanting in the rest of his love poetry. He calls her his spiritually affianced bride, whose life is bound up with his by the will of fate. United, they would have known what happiness is; separated, they are doomed to misery: "Ich weiss es jetzt. Bei Gott! du bist es, Die ich geliebt. Wie bitter ist es, Wenn im Momente des Erkennens Die Stunde schlägt des ew'gen Trennens! Der Willkomm ist zu gleicher Zeit Ein Lebewohl!"[2] [2] I know it now. By heaven! 'tis thou Whom I have loved. How bitter now, The moment we are joined for ever, To find the hour when we must sever! The welcome must at once give way To sad farewell! (BOWRING) Half laughing, half weeping, he bemoans the compulsory platonic affection of two lovers, to whom an embrace is an impossibility: "Worte! Worte! keine Thaten! Niemals Fleisch, geliebte Puppe, Immer Geist und keinen Braten, Keine Knödel in der Suppe!"[3] [3] Words, empty words, and never deeds! No roast for us, my puppet sweet, Not even dumplings in the soup; A feast of mind, but not of meat! When, at a rare time, she keeps him waiting, he is frantic with impatience: "Lass mich mit glüh'nden Zangen kneipen, Lass grausam schinden mein Gesicht, Lass mich mit Ruthen peitschen, stäupen-- Nur warten, warten lass mich nicht!"[4] [4] With red-hot irons scar my flesh, Pinch me with pincers glowing hot, Or have me heat with many stripes-- But oh! to wait compel me not! But the great mystic poem which celebrates the nuptials of the dead poet with the passion-flower that blossoms on his grave, is a poem of resignation, resignation in the presence of Death: "Du warst die Blume, du geliebtes Kind, An deinen Küssen musst' ich dich erkennen. So zärtlich keine Blumenlippen sind, So feurig keine Blumenthränen brennen. Geschlossen war mein Aug', doch angeblickt Hat meine Seel' beständig dein Gesichte, Du sahst mich an, beseeligt und verzückt Und geisterhaft beglänzt vom Mondenlichte."[5] [5] Thou wast that flower, beloved! I knew thee by thy kisses; no flower lips kiss so tenderly, no flower tears burn so scorchingly. My eyes were fast closed, but my soul gazed steadfastly upon thy face; and in the moonlight's ghostly sheen, blissful and trembling, thou did'st return my gaze. These images, these feelings, belong to an insubstantial world, a world like the blind man's, where there are kisses, but not from visible lips, and tears which fall from unseen eyes, a world fragrant with the perfume of flowers that cannot be touched, and illuminated by magic, spirit-like moonshine instead of the light of the sun. There is no substantiality and there is no sound: "Wir sprachen nicht, jedoch mein Herz vernahm Was du verschwiegen dachtest im Gemüthe-- Das ausgesprochene Wort ist ohne Scham, Das Schweigen ist der Liebe keusche Blüthe."[6] [6] We said not a word, but my heart felt all thy unspoken thoughts--the spoken word is a shameless thing, silence is love's chaste blossom. They held noiseless converse, but what they talked of we are forbidden to ask: "Frag, was er strahlet, den Karfunkelstein, Frag, was sie duften, Nachtviol' und Rosen-- Doch frage nie, wovon im Mondenschein Die Marterblume und ihr Todter kosen!"[7] [7] Ask the ruby to explain its fiery glow, ask violet and rose to analyse their perfume, but never seek to know of what the passion-flower and her dead lover talk so caressingly in the pale moonlight. Heine rises here to a level with Shelley, the sublimest of modern lyric poets. This is Shelley's note--the violin strain of an Ariel, clear and spirit-like and full, and entirely modern in its trembling, thrilling, almost morbid tenderness. XVIII LITERATURE AND PARTY Börne and many later critics have maintained that Heine was never in earnest about anything, and have condemned him accordingly. Setting aside slighter and unimportant causes, Börne's resentment was really aroused by what appeared to him to be Heine's determination not to espouse the cause of any party. He himself, as far as it was possible in those unparliamentary days, was an extreme partyman in literature. It is now a generally accepted, trite axiom, that art is its own aim and end, but then people were accustomed to look upon it as the handmaid of the great general aims of the day; and in all German literary productions of that period, important and unimportant, we feel exactly what it was that induced the writer to take up his pen. Even an author as strongly actuated by a purpose as Heine was, did not satisfy those who, like Börne, lived for their convictions. They applied to him the expression "talented but characterless" ("wohl ein Talent, aber kein Charakter"), which he ridicules so unmercifully in _Atta Troll_. Even in the introduction he alludes jestingly to the consolation for the great majority which is contained in the doctrine that respectable people are as a rule bad musicians, while, to make up for this, good musicians are anything but respectable people--and every one knows that respectability and not music is the important thing in this world. Elsewhere Heine maintains that it is, as a rule, a sign of a man's narrowmindedness when he is straightway discerned and held in high esteem by the narrow-minded majority as a man of character; the chief reason for such distinction being that a narrow, superficial, but always consistent philosophy of life is what the multitude most easily understands. Stoic firmness was assuredly not one of the qualities of Heine's nature. Allowing that in certain given circumstances he showed want of character, we proceed to what is really the vital question: Ought the poet to be a party-man? At the time when Heine was jeering in _Atta Troll_ at those who in their philanthropic and political ardour imagined strength of character to be a sufficient substitute for talent, a serious literary war was being waged in Germany over the question whether the poet ought to be a party-man or to take up a position superior to all parties. _Atta Troll_, which pours such ridicule on Freiligrath's youthful poems, appeared in the autumn of 1841; in November of the same year Freiligrath, who till then had been best known by oriental poems in Victor Hugo's style, and who had a short time previously accepted a pension from the King of Prussia, wrote, in a poem entitled _Año Spanien_ (on Diego Leon, the Spanish general shot in 1841) the following lines on the poet as such: "Er beugt sein Knie dem Helden Bonaparte, Und hört mit Zürnen d'Enghien's Todesschrei: Der Dichter steht auf einer höhern Warte Als auf den Zinnen der Partei."[1] This sentiment was condemned by Georg Herwegh in the poem _Die Partei (an Ferdinand Freiligrath_), the most striking lines of which are: "Partei! Partei! wer sollte sie nicht nehmen, Die noch die Mutter aller Siege war! Wie mag ein Dichter solch ein Wort verfehmen, Ein Wort, das alles Herrliche gebar! Nur offen wie ein Mann: Für oder wider? Und die Parole: Sklave oder frei? Selbst Götter stiegen vom Olymp hernieder Und kämpften auf den Zinnen der Partei."[2] A year later, in his poem _Duett der Pensionirten_, Herwegh taunted Freiligrath with accepting a pension from the King of Prussia, whereupon Freiligrath, as is well known, threw up his pension, joined the ranks of the political poets, and developed so rapidly into a Radical and revolutionary, that at the time of the outbreak in 1848, he was looked upon as the representative revolutionary poet in Germany. It is plain, then, that Freiligrath considered Herwegh to be in the right. Still this does not prove him to have been so. The question whether and to what extent the poet ought to be a party-man is a very complex one. It is so in the first instance because of the ambiguity of the word party, a word which Heine and Börne, Freiligrath and Herwegh employed with a different meaning at different times. The poet, even if he is a small-minded man, can only lose by pinning his faith to any narrow, political, party programme, to any social or religious theory. How is it possible that his ideals should exactly correspond with the limited, definite aims of any party! Thomas Moore was a Whig poet, Walter Scott a Tory poet, because, with all their great talent, they were not great minds. Byron went more to the root of things than either of them, or than either of the political parties--yet every one instinctively feels that it is absurd to say that Byron, as a poet, did not take a side in politics or religion. He did so even more markedly than Schiller, who also could not be said to belong to any political party, for one reason because there were none in the Germany of his day. There are certain branches of literature which plainly have nothing to do with party. The poet of love, as such, belongs to no political or religious party; though it is not impossible that he may belong to an art party, for as soon as there is any question of style in art, we at once encounter party again. But the moment he begins to treat a theme in which there is any trace of theory, of thought, of fundamental principle, he is obliged to choose his side, to rank himself among the disciples of this or that philosophy of life. When, however, as in Freiligrath's case, we have simply an assertion of the poet's right to admire Napoleon and yet to be incensed by the death of d'Enghien, party does not come into question at all; for all that is meant is, that the poet has not dispossessed himself of his right to judge the past with equity and to see the vices as well as the virtues of his heroes. The question of party, strictly so called, is not a question of the judging of the past, but of the shaping of the future; and no man can proceed in two directions at the same time. Another difficulty presents itself to us in the word party. It means, generally speaking, part of the population of one's own country. And the poet ought to belong to his country and his people, not only to part of them. Looked upon in this light, party is the narrower, country the wider conception, and if by party an actual political party, corresponding more or less perfectly to its name or its programme, is meant, then as a matter of course country is superior to party. But if we take the word party in the sense in which we use it when we speak of Schiller and of Byron as party-men, then party is a wider, a grander conception than country. For by country we understand a definitely bounded tract of land, definitely limited interests, a definitely circumscribed history; but by party in this sense we understand a system of ideas which, from their very nature, are not confined to any place--world-wide thoughts, the great general interests of humanity. And even if the party sided with represents only the great moving ideas of one age, an age is a wider, greater native land than a country; and the poet does his people a service by extending their horizon beyond their country's bounds. Börne and Heine were, in my opinion, both strong party-men, but none the less both zealous patriots, their patriotism quite uninjured by their partisanship. The official press of the day proclaimed Börne to be not only a mad Radical, but a libeller of his country. He had the dangerous habit of expressing all his opinions in such violent terms that they offended, wounded, or incited to action. There was an outcry of indignation when he wrote that any nation had a right to depose its king even if it were only because it had taken a dislike to the shape of his nose. And whole volumes of invective were called forth by his observations on the servility (_Bedientennatur_) of the Germans. He had gone so far as to call them "a nation of flunkeys." He himself writes: "What can I do with people who really seriously believe that I have advised the nations of Europe to depose their kings as soon as they take a dislike to their noses.... If I were to say: Gentlemen! I did not mean you to take me so literally, they would perhaps believe me--but that would avail me nothing. They would say: You ought to have remembered that you do not write for educated readers only, but that a large proportion of your readers are uneducated men. To this I would answer nothing but: Take me to prison! Then when I was brought into court I would say: Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile! (Cries of indignation. Crocodile! Order!) Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile! (Order! Judge: You are abusing your right of self-defence.) Gentlemen! The German is a crocodile--I beg of you to allow me to continue. When I use the word crocodile I am not hinting at savage instincts or crocodile tears. The German is tame and good-natured, and weeps tears that are as sincere as the tears of a whipped child. If I have applied the name of crocodile to the German, it is only on account of his skin, which does resemble that of the crocodile. It consists of hard scales, and is like a slated roof. Anything solid that falls upon it rebounds, anything liquid runs off. Suppose, now, gentlemen, that you wished to mesmerise such a crocodile, with the final intention of curing his weak nerves, but in the first instance of making him so clear sighted that he could see inside himself, discover his own disease, and find out the proper remedy for it. How would you set about it? Would you gently stroke the crocodile coat-of-mail with your warm hand? No, you would not be so foolish; you know that would make no impression on it. You would stamp on it, drive nails into it, and if that were not enough, you would fire a hundred bullets at it, calculating that ninety-nine of them would take no effect, and that the hundredth would bring about just the mild, modest results your mesmerism was intended to produce. This is what I have done."[3] One sees that Börne's strong language on the subject of German servility and indolence is simply the negative expression of his patriotism. It is a patriotism which as a rule finds only indirect expression, but we feel it as distinctly in his melancholy derision as in the enthusiastic demonstrations of others. As regards Heine, Börne's charges were, no doubt, to a certain extent well founded. The versatile poet's temperament made the monotonous struggle for a political conviction hard for him, and he was, as we have already shown, drawn two ways and rendered vague in his utterances by feeling himself to be at one and the same time a popular revolutionist and an enthusiastic aristocrat. But his objection to connecting himself with any of the existing political or religious parties was more a proof of his high intellectual standard than of anything else. His raillery in _Atta Troll_ at the canting preachers of the Opposition is delightful and perfectly justifiable; it only shows that he abhorred dogmatism in all its forms. Börne is wrong in assuming that Heine, the man, was false to his party, taking that word in its greater, wider, signification, namely, the ideas for which he contended. For to these he was faithful, even throughout the eight long years when he lay on his deathbed, with difficulty opening his paralysed eyelids to look for God in that heaven whose emptiness he himself had so sadly and defiantly described. And Heine was as true a patriot as Börne. Every reader of his works must remember the beautiful passage at the conclusion of the _Reisebilder_, in which he tells how the Emperor Maximilian sate in sore straits in the Tyrol, encompassed by his enemies, forgotten by his knights and courtiers. Suddenly the door of his prison cell was opened, and there entered a man in disguise, whom the Emperor recognised as Kunz von der Rosen, his faithful court jester. I feel it to be not only beautiful but true when Heine says: "O German fatherland! beloved German people! I am thy Kunz von der Rosen. The man whose only business it was to amuse thee, to cater for thy mirth in times of prosperity, makes his way into thy prison in time of need. Here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy strong sceptre and thy beautiful crown--dost thou not recognise me, my Emperor? ... Thou liest in fetters now, but in the end thy rightful cause will prevail; the day of deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning, my Emperor, the night is over; look out and see the ruddy dawn." If we beware of attaching too much importance to single expressions, to the wanton or arrogant outbursts scattered here and there throughout his works, we shall perceive that the feeling which finds classic expression in the words just quoted was very strong in Heine's breast. Neither his party standpoint, nor the admiration of things foreign which it entailed, affected a very sincere, deep love of his native land, which made exile in many ways a punishment to him. But he had not the kind of patriotism which he somewhere ascribes to the average German, the kind that narrows the heart, makes it shrink like leather in the cold. His was the patriotism that warms the heart and widens it until it is able to embrace the whole realm of civilization.[4] How could he help loving Germany! As he himself has said, and as we all must say each of his own country: "The truth is--Germany is ourselves." His whole nature and character were determined by his German birth and upbringing. The second half of his life being spent in an exile that was partly voluntary, partly compulsory--in so far a homeless man, that his works were prohibited throughout the German Confederation--the German language became to him a true, a grander, a real fatherland. He himself called the German tongue the most sacred of all possessions, the unsilenceable call to liberty, a new fatherland for him whom stupidity or malice has banished from the land of his birth. [1] He bows the knee to Bonaparte, the hero, yet d'Enghien's death-cry arouses his wrath: the poet observes from a higher watch-tower than the battlements of party. [2] What! not a party man! Is not strong party feeling the mother of all victory? How can a poet calumniate the word in which lies the germ of all the noblest deeds? Speak out like a man: Are you for or against us? Is your watchword slavery or freedom? The Gods themselves descended from Olympus and fought on the battlements of party. [3] _Letter from Paris_, Dec. 15, 1831. [4] Heine: _Werke_, vi. 51. _Cf_. xiv. 45, and xiii. 16. XIX IMMERMANN All who are familiar with Heine's works or letters are aware of the warm friendship and brotherhood in arms that united him in his youth to Karl Immermann. He proposed to Immermann to insert some of his epigrams in the _Reisebilder_, and as a matter of fact there are several pages of them in the book between the divisions _Norderney_ and _Das Buch Le Grand_. They satirise various literary personages and events of the day. The attacks on those writers who imitated Oriental forms of poetry incensed Platen, and induced him to write his dramatic satire, _Der romantische Oedipus_, which in its turn called forth Heine's well-known satire. It was very curious that Platen, in his irritation, should with one blow stamp as Romanticists the two men who, each in his own way, did so much (more than Platen himself) to unswathe from the wrappings of Romanticism a new spirit, a new art--the spirit, the art of modern poetry. Karl Immermann (born in 1796) was three years older than Heine. He was the son of a correct, austere Government official in Magdeburg, and was himself a man of strong character and solid culture, early imbued with that old Prussian spirit of which there was not a trace in Heine. They were contrasts in almost everything. Immermann fought in the battle of Waterloo as a volunteer, entered Paris with the army, afterwards retired with the rank of an officer, and studied law at the University of Halle. His strong feeling of justice led him into disputes with the powerful students' union, Teutonia, which had usurped a kind of moral authority over all the students, and enforced its principles, especially that of purity of life, in a domineering, brutal fashion. For several years he continued to oppose the practices of the Union, and more than once during this time was obliged to invoke the power of the law to protect him from the insults and persecution to which he was subjected by his antagonists. The consequence of this was that he was hated by the great majority as an informer--the more so as the political reactionaries took advantage of this opposition to the traditional malpractices of the students' unions, to attack, and, where it was possible, suppress the unions, a proceeding for which Immermann was in no way responsible. From this time onwards he stood alone. Much in his character, much of its dryness and peculiarity, had its origin in this isolation, which also favoured the development of pride and self-esteem. [Illustration: IMMERMANN] In 1819, Immermann was given a Government appointment (that of _Divisionsauditor_), in the town of Münster, in Westphalia, an old, strictly Catholic, provincial town, where at first he felt himself out of sympathy with every one and everything. But here, ere long, he made acquaintance with the woman who was to be the most powerful influence in his life. Elisa von Lützow was the wife of Brigadier-General Adolf von Lützow, the famous leader of the volunteer corps celebrated in Körner's song. By birth she was a Dane, a Countess Ahlefeldt-Laurvig of Tranekjær in the island of Langeland. When Immermann first saw her she was twenty-nine, and, according to the testimony of her contemporaries, a most fascinating woman, graceful, charming, intelligent, of aristocratic bearing, and yet genial. From her earliest youth she had made a deep impression on the men who came within her sphere. She had grown up the supposed heiress of great wealth, but in an unhappy home; her father and mother had become estranged from each other, and about the time she was fourteen they separated. Count Ahlefeldt, a favourite of Frederick VI., was a pleasure-loving man, a pasha with a constantly changing harem; he was a patron of music and of the drama, kept a private orchestra, and entertained companies of French and German actors at Tranekjær; so hospitable and recklessly extravagant was he that even his great wealth could not stand the drain upon it. What brought Elisa and Immermann together was her applying to him for legal advice when her father not only refused to make over to her what had been left her by her mother, who had died in 1812, but also to pay the yearly income which he had settled upon her. Count Ahlefeldt long refused his consent to his daughter's marriage with the poor and as yet undistinguished foreign officer, but he gave it in 1810, and when, in 1813, the youth of Prussia joyfully and enthusiastically rose to arms at the call of Frederick William III., and Lützow formed the famous volunteer corps known by his name, his wild and daring riflemen (_die wilde, verwegene Jagd_) found their Valkyrie in their leader's beautiful wife, who was worshipped by the whole regiment as a superior being. Elisa, who appears to have spoken German from her childhood, felt herself at home on German soil, became a faithful daughter of her new fatherland, and identified herself with its interests. She inspirited the brave, nursed the wounded with heroic devotion, was the confidante, helper, and comforter of the best among the young men. After a victory, the choicest of the booty was always presented to her. The lieutenant who first stepped into Napoleon's captured carriage after the fight at Belle-Alliance brought her, as a remembrance, a pair of gloves and two glasses of the Emperor's. After the conclusion of peace she lived with her husband in the different garrison towns to which he was transferred. In 1817 they came to Münster. The stiff, narrow-minded, bigoted tone of its society was antipathetic to her; but here, as elsewhere, she gathered round her a circle of enthusiastic admirers, who were charmed by her taste and by the keen intelligence which she displayed, without being a great talker--sometimes only by a smile and a nod. To Immermann she was like a revelation from a higher, nobler world, for which in his lonely, joyless life he had been longing. Lützow's quarters were in a castle-like building that had been a convent, with high windows and great folding doors. Here, surrounded by flowers, statues, books, birds, dogs, and admirers, she seemed like a noble lady of olden days, or one of those princesses of the Renaissance who attracted poets to their courts and inspired them. With the year 1825 came a great change in Elisa's life. The good-natured and chivalrous but volatile and impressionable Lützow fell so violently in love with an insignificant flirt that he requested his wife to set him at liberty again. This she was not prepared to do; but after she happened to overhear Lützow remark to a friend that when he was quite young he had made up his mind to marry a great heiress, a new light was thrown upon the determination he had shown in their early days to win her, and her feelings towards him changed. Her pride was hurt; she presently informed him that she would no longer stand in the way of his happiness, and agreed to a divorce, the reason of which she kept secret. Not an angry word passed between husband and wife. The divorce was pronounced in April 1825. Both before and after it Lützow wrote Elisa letters which testify to a most friendly feeling and warm admiration. It was an unlucky day for him when he took the step which separated them. He was universally blamed, and when it came to the point, his capricious enslaver would have nothing to say to him. He repented his delusion when it was too late. Some years afterwards, in order to make a home for himself again, he married his brother's widow, but this lady's temper was so bad that it made the last years of his life most unhappy. The divorce left Elisa homeless and solitary, and this led to gradually increasing intimacy with young Immermann, who saw in her his ideal, and was passionately desirous to make her his wife. But Elisa shuddered at the thought of a second marriage; the disillusionments of her wedded life had disgusted her with matrimony in general, and she reflected, moreover, that she was six years older than the young poet. When Immermann, in 1827, was promoted to the appointment of _Landesgerichtsrath_ in Düsseldorf, he passionately urged her to accompany him there. She agreed to do this, though she again refused to marry him; both, however, vowed never to think of marriage with any one else. The lovers inhabited a country house in the village of Derendorf, close to Düsseldorf, where they had their separate suites of apartments. This house, which lay in a great rose garden, they decorated with exquisite taste, and here they lived a full and happy life for a number of years. Düsseldorf was at that time the resort of many of the best artists in Germany, painters like Schadow, Lessing, Hildebrandt. Thither, too, came poets (like Grabbe), composers (Mendelssohn), art amateurs, and critics from all parts. Immermann's and Elisa von Ahlefeldt's house was a rendezvous for all these. In Elisa's circle in Münster, Immermann had distinguished himself as a clever reader of dramatic works; here he continued to give semipublic readings of the same description. This gradually developed a desire on his part to manage a theatre. He rehearsed a number of trial plays with the Düsseldorf theatrical company; artists from other parts came to his assistance; the great actor, Seydelmann from Berlin, played Nathan; Felix Mendelssohn put two operas on the stage for him and directed the performance. Elisa's father died in 1832. She did not inherit all the wealth that in her youth was expected to be her portion, but the cousin who succeeded to her father's title and property settled a handsome annuity on her. She and Immermann now travelled together--on the Rhine, to Dresden, in Holland; a tour which Immermann took alone is described in his _Reisejoumal_, which consists entirely of the letters he wrote to Elisa. Everything else was written beside her, and subjected to her affectionate but frequently severe criticism. After an existence of three years, Immermann's theatre, failing to obtain state aid, had to be closed. This was a great grief to him. He sought to distract himself by a tour in Franconian Switzerland. His _Fränkische Reise,_ the description of this tour, also consists of letters to Elisa. They were the last he wrote her. For during this absence he met, in Magdeburg, a girl of nineteen, Marianne Niemeyer by name, who made a very strong impression on him. When he rejoined Elisa he once more, to her surprise, asked her to marry him. As before, she refused. It would seem as if he had been pretty certain of the answer he would receive, and only desired to salve his conscience. For immediately afterwards, unknown to Elisa, he began a lively correspondence with Marianne, proposed to her, and was accepted. Elisa heard of his engagement from others, and at once resolved to leave Düsseldorf. She did so in August 1839, Immermann accompanying her and the friend with whom she travelled as far as Cologne. Till this time, in spite of her forty-nine years, she had retained her beauty; now she suddenly grew old. In October 1839 Immermann married; in August 1840 he died. Elisa survived him fifteen years.[1] It is quite obvious that the connection with Elisa, which for so many years was pleasurable and helpful to Immermann, in the end became burdensome to him. But it is unwarrantable to assert (as Goedeke has done) that it was the breaking off of this connection and his subsequent lawful marriage which first gave Immermann the creative vigour which he displayed in his last important work, _Münchhausen_. It was conceived and executed under Elisa's influence to quite the same extent as his other works. Her personality and the position in which he stood to her often and in many ways influenced his writings. She is supposed to have suggested his drama, _Petrarca_, which treats of Petrarch's love of Laura, and represents the irresistible strength of a passion inspired by a high-born lady even when the said lady is not free. Her views on the subject of love, and its unqualified justification as such, are said to be recognisable in the drama, _Cardenio und Celinde_. She was probably his model for the heroine of the comedy, _Du schelmische Gräfin_, and certainly the model for Johanne in the novel _Die Epigonen_. But all this is as nothing in comparison with the general development and refining influence which she exerted over him as an author. Immermann's is a curious fame. Of all his works only one is still read, his novel, _Münchhausen_; and only one part of this novel, the smaller half of it (now separated from the rest and published by itself), will carry his name down to posterity. This one small volume is in reality of more value than all the rest of his work. In its construction, _Münchhausen_, following the general rule of the Romantic tales, was intentionally disorderly; the book begins, for example, with the eleventh chapter. The hero, a Westphalian baron, is a descendant of the old lying Münchhausen, and, like him, a fantastic liar. The whole was meant to be a sort of satiric repertory of the various humbugs and nonsensicalities of the day, amongst which the author's humour might play at will. But out of all this irregular play of fancy, which corresponds to the title _Eine Geschichte in Arabesken_, there was gradually developed the great rural romance which has taken a place in German literature under the name of _Der Oberhof_. Its principal characters, the village magistrate (_der Hofschulze_) and the fair-haired Lisbeth, represent a new truth, a new creative art. They live and move on "the red soil" of Westphalia, and in their persons the German peasant is for the first time introduced into literature without the sentimentality of the pastoral idyll or the distortion of the opera ballet, undoubtedly conventionalised, but with caste and race individuality. There is a vigorous, fresh naturalness about these characters, which will never grow old. _Der Oberhof_ has taken its place as the original type of all the European peasant tales, and in certain points it is superior to any of them, old-fashioned in many ways as it now seems. Hundreds of fantastic threads connect this admirable story with the romance of Romanticism, but it is easy to cut them, and then we have before us as it were the hard crystal into which Romanticism finally condensed itself in Immermann's mind. It is the custom nowadays to regard the peasant tale as a direct offshoot of Romanticism. Yet it undoubtedly, both in France and in the North, marked the transition to an art which, was more true to nature than the Romantic. It signified a complete change of sphere in German art when Immermann gave up writing historical or fantastic dramas in iambic verse, the scenes of which were laid in countries which he had never seen, and portrayed ordinary human life in the little known province of Westphalia, where he had lived and exercised the functions of a judge. There were no railways in the Westphalia of those days, and no manufactures; but it was a country of patriarchal, wholesome manners and customs, and he had only to represent it with the faithfulness which illuminates, to produce an effect infinitely surpassing that of any of the earlier arbitrary creations of his poetic imagination. The wealthy peasant landowner, who is the principal personage in this story, is the prototype of all the sturdy, independent farmers of the German peasant tales, and of many in those of other countries. Excellent as many of Auerbach's characters of this type are, he surpasses them all in what may be called the historic greatness which is imparted to this character by the intimate relation which we feel to exist between it and the far back past of the country. This peasant appears on the background of traditions still in force, which link the present with almost forgotten times. He is a genuine peasant. He is not in the least amiable; he has had no time to cultivate amiability; from his boyhood, life has been too hard to allow of that. His distinguishing qualities are sound common sense, seriousness, obstinacy, pride of position, and permissible self-interest. There is a granite-like foundation to his character. He has the true peasant shrewdness, not to say shiftiness, in business; he is always ready to advise his neighbours how best to hold their own against the authorities when any forced sale of land is threatened, always on his guard against emissaries of the government, even when their mission is the construction of new roads or some such improvement; he is cold in his family relations, and has all the prejudices of the rustic. And yet he is great. He rules, and he always carries his point. He not only reigns over his own large estate like the stern, patriarchal kings of old, upholding good old customs, keeping his eye on every one and everything, admonishing in proverbs, rewarding with the honour of retention in his service; but, unquestionably the superior of all his neighbours, he has induced them to regard him as their leader, and has quietly, without disturbance or revolt of any kind, led them to free themselves from the supremacy of state authorities and to rule themselves under him as a sort of judge of the old Jewish type. In his district both law-suits and criminal cases are unknown; no one goes to law with his neighbour; no one is ever accused of a crime; one might take it to be an oasis of innocence and peace. It is far from being that; but since medieval times the secret courts of justice (_Vehmgerichte_) have existed here, and the peasants, under the influence of this great peasant, have agreed to uphold these, and thus privately provide for the maintenance of equity and justice among themselves. They assemble secretly at night in a lonely place and settle their own disputes. The sentences are accepted and executed without dispute. The only punishment awarded is a sort of excommunication of the malefactor, which is as severe a chastisement as any that could be imposed by a state judge. A peasant whom all avoid, whom no one will help, with whom no one will have any dealings, suffers from almost as strict isolation as the man confined in a prison cell. As a symbol of his power and dignity the old "Hofschulze" treasures a sword, which he believes to be what tradition calls it, the sword of Charlemagne, and which he regards as his most precious possession. His hand is on its hilt when he pronounces judgment. This sword, which was dug up somewhere in the neighbourhood, is really a perfectly common weapon, possibly two hundred years old; and we have an admirable description of how the old farmer is at times tormented by doubts of its antiquity, doubts which, with his peasant shrewdness, he tries to dispose of once for all. He tempts an antiquarian in the neighbourhood with the sight of a beautiful amphora, and then obliges him to give in payment for it a written certification that the sword had undoubtedly belonged to Charlemagne. The tragic catastrophe of the story is brought about in this way. A man who is now a vagrant had, in consequence of an intrigue with the daughter of the "Hofschulze," been attacked by her brother and had killed him in self-defence. This vagabond, to revenge himself on the "Hofschulze" for the sentence of excommunication which has ruined his life, steals the sword and hides it where no one can find it. The loss breaks the old man's spirit. All the mysteries of the secret court of justice are divulged, and he is obliged to stand his trial. Granted permission to make a last speech, he says: "Your Worship! I have no doubt that the clerk is noting me down in his minutes as a fool, and my sword and secret judgment-seat as foolery; for so, if I mistake not, I heard the young gentleman call the things that lie nearest to my heart. I would fain give some explanation regarding this foolery." And he goes on to say how, ever since he could think, he has observed that, after calamities such as hailstorms, floods, failure of crops, or cattle-plague, some of those gentlemen came to the district who not only understand how to write reports, but also how to judge everything much better than the people concerned; they described the calamity after it was past, but were never there at the time to help; and if a little money happened to be sent, it never reached those who needed it most. "One thing was more astonishing than all else. One or other of these government gentlemen would order things so in the district that we peasants could not refrain from laughing at it all. In a year or two the same gentleman would come driving in a carriage and four, with all kinds of ribbons and orders on his breast, looking as if he had helped to create the world. Thinking over all this in my plain way, I came to the conclusion that the government gentlemen were of little service to us peasants; nor did they come to do us service; they came to write, and they wrote until they wrote themselves into a carriage and four.... And then I thought (for all my life I have been given to thinking) that a steady, industrious man will always get on if he watches the wind and the weather, and attends to his business and is a good neighbour.... And first I accustomed myself, even in times of trouble, never to think of help; I paid my taxes and bore my own burdens ... and then I accustomed my neighbours to do the same. They followed my example; we settled our own affairs among ourselves, and many matters about which much ado would have been made elsewhere, were never heard of beyond the bounds of the parish.... By degrees we came to settling everything. A peasant has understanding enough to tell who has the best claim to a certain wall or strip of meadow. And when a house has been broken into, the village nearly always knows who has been the thief; but because it is not always possible to bring sufficient proof, a man well known to be a rascal may impudently and scandalously show his face and enjoy his booty, which its rightful owner never recovers. So we quietly took the law into our hands, and no one could accuse us of anything, for we injured no man; we only refused to hold any communication whatsoever with the evildoers whom we placed under the ban; and of this ban men were more afraid than of the judge's sentence and prison." "And," he concludes, "if other people would but do the same, if the townsmen, the merchants, the noblemen, the scholars, would but manage their own affairs, things would be better than they are. Men would no longer be like stupid children, for ever crying for father and mother, but every man would be like a prince in his own house and among his equals. And the king himself would then be a far mightier monarch, a ruler like no other, for he would rule over hundreds of thousands of princes," We have the feeling at the end of the story that, now the secret is divulged and the sword stolen, the days of popular justice are at an end. But the author gives us his own opinion on this subject by the mouth of the wise pastor, who declares that the independence which is the watch-word of this peasant and his friends is a reality which cannot be done away with by being divulged, that the idea which has united them, the idea that a man is dependent on his neighbours, not on strangers who stand in a perfectly artificial relation to him, does not require the support of the tribunal under the old lime-tree. In the peasant farmer himself, the mighty old yeoman, he sees the true sword of Charlemagne, which no thief can steal, the true backbone of the country. Observe that this is written by an author who was a magistrate and the son of a Prussian government official. A marked contrast to the strong, stern figure of the old peasant, but drawn with as sure a hand, is Lisbeth, the fair-haired, country girl who is the heroine of the tale. Young Count Oswald, who wanders about the country shooting, falls in love with her, and it is the eventful love-story of these two young people which forms the chief attraction of the book. Immermann had in his writings long shown himself to be a firm believer in the unbounded power of love over humanity, but here he tells the story of young love as he had never done before. We have the beat and glow of two innocent young hearts. The youth and maiden meet, full of budding, swelling, healthy presentiments and hopes. No renunciation or disappointment has as yet cooled one drop of their warm blood. The distance between them is bridged over in an original manner. The young sportsman, who has inherited from his parents a taste for shooting, along with absolute incapacity to hit anything, for once in his life succeeds in setting his mark on a living creature; he lodges a whole charge of small shot in the girl's shoulder. The shame and regret he feels give place in time to ardent love. When she has recovered and the two have discovered that they love each other, they go together one day into the wood. "'I want to ask your wounds to forgive me,' he said--undid her kerchief, and kissed the small red spots between her breast and her white shoulder. She did not resist; her little hands lay folded on her lap, and she sat quite still, a resigned victim of love; but she looked at him bashfully, entreatingly. He could not bear that look; he quickly covered breast and shoulders again with the kerchief, fell at her feet, pressed her knees to his heart, and then walked away a few steps to overcome his emotion." This suffers in translation. It must be read as it occurs in the original, this little field idyll, in which the lovers play like children; she stands up against him that he may measure her height; he plays with her curls; from time to time she gently whispers: "O du!" but this is all she can say; they make a meal on apples and bread, which they buy from a woman they meet, agreeing that novel writers lie when they assert that love lives on air; she eats from his hand and he from hers. It is all as natural and as good as anything of the same style in Auerbach, Keller, or Björnson. And Immermann's description of the sorrows of love is no less admirable. Nothing in the book surpasses the passage in which the old farmer tells Lisbeth that her lover is a young nobleman, and makes her understand that she must not expect him to marry her. Oswald has concealed his position and given himself out to be an ordinary forester, only with the intention of giving her a joyful surprise later. If she had taken time to think, she would have come to the conclusion that she need have no fear of his proving unfaithful. But the knowledge that her lover has lied is a blow that upsets her equilibrium, and Immermann profoundly remarks, "For love, as long as it is unshaken, is divine penetration ... but once shaken, once driven to conjecture and surmise, it is madness, which passes cathedrals without seeing them and takes molehills for mountains." This is a profound saying, because it is a true psychological appreciation of a feeling which is the product of unknown causes. Heine's psychology of love was very simple; when he complains, it is always of faithlessness as a wrong knowingly committed. Immermann here represents what may be called the somnambulistic action of the feeling, the instinct, unerring as that of the sleep-walker, which it possesses when undistracted by disturbing forces. Both in broad outline and in minute detail this first of the peasant novels is sterling poetry. The influence of fantastic Romanticism is still distinct; the secret tribunal, the sword of Charlemagne, the enthusiasm for old customs are Romantic features; even Lisbeth's fanciful pedigree--the fathering of this truthful young being on the old liar Münchhausen--betrays that the tale is an outgrowth of an earlier Romantic literature. All this, however, only throws into stronger relief the laborious, yet vigorous, process of condensation by which healthy, modern realistic appreciation and treatment of popular subjects was evolved out of the arbitrary fantasticality which immediately preceded it. Immermann is one of the company of authors, including Daniel Defoe, l'Abbé Prévost, the Danish poet Wessel, Chamisso, and Bernardin de St. Pierre, who prove that a single volume is enough to carry a writer's name down to posterity, even if everything else that he has written be quickly forgotten. As a matter of fact, only this one work of Immermann's lives. He wrote mock-heroic poems, such as _Tulifäntchen_, which was much appreciated in its day, but is now unreadable. He wrote works which, for their day, must be pronounced meritorious, but which are now given over to moth and rust, such as the drama _Merlin_ (1831), a great Romantic work in well-written verse, a sort of unsuccessful pendant to the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_ and the historic tragedy which was first known as _Das Trauerspiel in Tirol_ ("The Tragedy in the Tyrol"), but was re-named _Andreas Hofer_. The second of these plays is the better of the two; it is founded on Immermann's own youthful recollections of the formidable resistance encountered by the French in the Tyrol, and is written with both the ability and the will to present a faithful and impartial picture of the two hostile races, so unlike in their character and in their development. This work in its original form, as published in 1826, criticised by Börne in his _Dramaturgische Blätter_, and satirised by Platen in _Der romantische Oedipus_, is interesting, especially as a sort of mongrel, the offspring of Kleist's genius mated with Schiller's muse; for the hero reminds us of Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_, and the love affair between the Frenchman and the Tyrolese girl, with its tragic ending, of Kleist's _Die Hermannschlacht_. But the play was too devoid of any really profound, impressive originality to live long, and when, in 1831, Immermann re-wrote it, suppressing everything that had given offence or called forth adverse criticism--the whole love-story and the incident (again recalling Kleist) of the sword which the angel restored to Hofer in a dream--he himself took away what life there was in it. Pride, if nothing else, should have made him retain the character which Platen had tauntingly nicknamed the "Depeschenmordbrandehebruchstyrolerin." It was an unlucky chance which made bitter enemies of two lovers of liberty like Immermann and Platen, and two rare spirits like Platen and Heine. That which gave rise to the whole literary feud, to the clumsy, ugly attacks on Immermann and Heine in _Der romantische Oedipus_, to Immermann's retort, _Der im Irrgarten der Metrik umhertaumelnde Cavalier_ ("The Reeling Knight in the Labyrinth of Metre"), and to Heine's crushing attack on Platen in the _Reisebilder_, deadly from its very stench, was such a paltry trifle, such an insignificant though contemptuous distich, that only an arrogant and quarrelsome disposition like Platen's could have made it the occasion of a war with poisoned weapons. Platen's letters show what dire offence he took at the two lines by Immermann in the _Reisebilder_, which might be construed as referring to his ghazels, and how determined he was to revenge himself ruthlessly. Great and serene in the region of pure art, and a manly champion of political liberty, he displays in his onslaught on the men who had insulted him, an offensively boastful degree of self-admiration and an insolence which is partly the arrogance of rank and partly the recklessness of wounded vanity. His letter from Rome of the 18th of February 1828, shows that he really knew nothing about Immermann's _Das Trauerspiel in Tirol_, which he had determined to attack. _Der romantische Oedipus_ was almost finished when he wrote to Fugger: "Be sure to tell me something about Immermann's _Andreas Hofer_, something of the plot and any piquant nonsense. I need it for the end of my Fifth Act, where I make him go quite mad." The boundless contempt with which Platen treats Immermann in his play can thus, in spite of his protests, only be regarded as vindictiveness. As regards Heine, it is simply his Jewish birth with which Platen taunts him in both letters and play. In the play everything turns on this--Heine is the Petrarch of the Feast of Tabernacles, the pride of the synagogue. So personal is the satire that Nimmermann is made to say, that though he is content to be Heine's friend, he would not be his mistress, for his kisses reek of garlic, &c. From Platen's letters it is easy to see that he completely underestimated the strength of the antagonists whom he thus challenged. He feels that he is capable of "crushing that Jew, Heine," whenever he chooses to do so. When his friends try to persuade him that attacks on Heine because of his birth carry no weight, he replies, quite unmoved: "That he is, or was, a Jew is no moral offence, but a comical ingredient. Intelligent readers will judge whether or not I have turned it to account with Aristophanic cunning." So sure, so superior does he feel himself, that even in December 1828, immediately before he is utterly discomfited by Heine's return blow, he sees in him nothing but "an impudent Jew, a miserable scribbler and sans-culotte." His moral indignation at the first books of the _Reisebilder_ was, however, so great that he calls the author and his like "veritable Satans."[2] The treatment he met with was not undeserved; scorn was returned for scorn, and his underestimation of Heine and Immermann was cruelly avenged. The scurrilous part of Heine's attack injured himself most by exciting the disapprobation of his own friends and admirers. The fact that the names Immermann and Platen came to form a constellation of hate was actually due to the similarity of their natures, to the feeling of solitariness which, combined with a self-esteem that was always on the alert, made them prone to proclaim their own praises and to attack others with undue bitterness and with insufficient understanding. These two men, each in his own way, represent the transition from Romanticism to modern liberalism. Platen, who followed in the footsteps of the Romanticists in his assiduous cultivation of foreign forms, the oriental ghazel, the southern sonnet, the ancient Greek Aristophanic comedy and Pindaric ode, shortly before his early death wrote songs and poems (_Political Poems_, including the _Polish Songs_--posthumously published) which are on the highest level of spirited modern lyric poetry. And Immermann, who all his life had treated tragic or fantastic themes with Romantic extravagance or symbolism, not long before he died impregnated a piece of homely reality with a spirit of true poetry by which the following generation throughout the whole of Europe was influenced. [1] Ludmilla Assing: _Gräfin Elisa von Ahlefeldt_, 1857. [2] Platens _Werke_. Letters of 18th February, 12th March, and 13th December 1828. XX HEGELIANISM It was the Hegelian philosophy, in combination with the Revolution of July, which drove thinking men to take their part in the stirring life of modern history and politics. Not that Hegel himself sympathised with the Revolution of July. Such a violent interference with what to him now represented the rational state of things, could hardly appeal to him, in his sixtieth year, as the great Revolution had done. In politics he had long been a strong Conservative. But none the less certainly did the Revolution of July change the character of the Hegelian philosophy. It was the historical turning point, the historical crisis that was needed to transfer that philosophy from the lecture-room to the arena of life. One of the peculiarities of the philosophy was, that it was capable of diametrically opposite interpretations. From this time onwards we observe it to be one of the most powerful instruments in the remoulding, the reconstruction of life. We saw that it was so in the case of Heine, who never alludes to Hegel's conversion to Prussian Conservatism except to apologise for it; to him Hegel is always the great philosopher of the new era, the mighty sovereign of the realm of thought. [Illustration: HEGEL] Until Hegel was called to Berlin he had been unsuccessful as a teacher. He had attracted little attention at the other universities, and in his younger days had often lectured to only three or four students. Now he was at the height of his fame. Unlike Schelling, who reached maturity so early, and became so early barren, Hegel, the man of heavier, slower nature, entered the most momentous stage of his career with his forty-eighth year. Great expectations were formed of him, and he fulfilled them all. His insight was extraordinary; he seemed thoroughly to belong to his time, and yet to live as it were above it--familiar with all its ideas and judging them all with calm superiority and profound conviction. Hundreds upon hundreds of listeners streamed to his lecture-room. The young student who saw him for the first time thought him an odd-looking figure. He had aged early, his originally powerful figure was bent, and the impression he produced when he entered the lecture-room was that of old-fashioned middle-class respectability. He went to his desk, seated himself, became absorbed in his manuscript, turning over the large leaves and looking up and down them for what he wanted. His carriage was awkward and characterless, his expression listless, his face worn and wasted, not by passion but by the most arduous mental labour. But he had a fine, noble head, and when he turned his face, with a look of profound, dignified, yet simple earnestness towards his hearers, the imprint of high intellect was unmistakable. He began to speak, cleared his throat, coughed and stammered, had difficulty in finding his words. He had a strong Swabian accent, and a jerky, unrhythmical delivery; involved himself in long, intricate sentences which he seldom managed to bring to a satisfactory conclusion; sought long for the exact word required to express his meaning, but never failed to find it; and when found, it always struck his hearers as extraordinarily telling, whether it was a perfectly familiar or a very uncommon expression. In time this peculiar delivery simply served to make intelligible to the listener the extraordinary difficulty and intricacy of the mental process. There might be tiresome repetitions, but if the student let his attention wander and missed a few sentences, as likely as not he was punished by losing the thread of the discourse. For by means of apparently insignificant intermediate steps some thought had been made to betray its one-sidedness, its narrowness, to involve itself in contradictions, and these contradictions had to be, or were already, explained away. What struck one as peculiarly characteristic of his lecturing was the combination of two features: the speaker's concentration in his subject, which made it seem as if he spoke entirely for its sake; and his keen anxiety to make himself plainly understood, which made it seem as if after all he spoke chiefly for the sake of the hearer.[1] He was a wretched orator, this professor, but a wonderful thinker and expounder. The technical terms he employed were bewildering--that extraordinary terminology in which "an sich" meant according to its constitution, and "an und für sich," the completed, absolute existence; but his hearers became accustomed to it, and soon began to feel as if they were floating above the earth in abstractions so refined and so ingeniously complementary that the dialectic of Plato's _Parmenides_ seemed clumsy in comparison; at times as if they were penetrating ever deeper into ever more concrete subjects. The speaker's voice grew stronger, he looked round with a free, confident glance while, with a few pregnant words, he characterised an intellectual movement, an age, a nation, or some specially remarkable individual, such as that nephew of Rameau's who, without being named, is described in the _Phænomenology_. The novice who heard the famous thinker propound, without any illustration, the abstract ideas which applied to everything--spirit and nature, matter and mind--ideas of which it was said that they enclosed the seen and the unseen in their mysteriously but methodically woven net--might at first feel tempted to run away, or at any rate not to come back again. But he did come back, for the laborious delivery soon fascinated him, and he began to feel that he was making progress. Every now and then a lightning-flash of thought illuminated the darkness. The pupil began to comprehend that, in his master's mind, there was no question of this being a system like other systems, a more profound or more comprehensive plan of instruction than other plans, but that the man regarded himself as the originator of an entirely new science, which comprehended the whole of existence, explained everything, God and the world, and was the completion of everything; for the thoughts of all earlier thinkers were discernible in his system, as all the lower animal forms are traceable in the human embryo; everything that had gone before had prepared his way, all endeavours found their fulfilment in him; from this time forwards progress could only lie in the direction of more special development of the separate sections of the great completed plan. The pupil was henceforth under the master's magic spell. The very abstruseness of the terminology was now an attraction the more; difficulties acted as spurs; it seemed to him a point of honour, a matter of vital importance, that he should understand. And with what rapture he understood!--understood that the whole world of sense was only appearance; the great reality was thought. These separate, individual appearances were not real, not true, only the universal was real. I think, and by inevitable laws the progress of my thought leads me to the complete understanding of myself and of the world. I think my own thought, not regarding it as my own, but as the universal thought, as the thought of all other human intelligences in union with mine; I deprive them all of the individuality which appears to be essential but is not, and see in all these intelligences one intelligence, and in it the principle of existence. This first principle, which finds its highest expression in man, is that which permeates, which creates the world. This first principle, which works and creates blindly in nature, is in me conscious of itself. The absolute, the idea, that which is popularly known as God, is not a conscious or personal being, for consciousness and personality presuppose the existence of something outside the consciousness and personality; and yet it is not quite unconscious. Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness. I cease to live as a single, fortuitous human being, in order to feel the universal life live and pulsate in me. Logic, which has been nothing but a sort of childish scholastic discipline, which inculcated self-evident facts by the aid of barbaric formulæ (Barbara, Celarent, Ferio, Camestres, Baroco), logic, which had languished and died in ignominy long ago, came to life again in the doctrine of the thoughts of existence in their connection and their unity; for the first thought necessitated, produced the second, amalgamated with it into a third, which in its turn summoned up its antithesis, which was at the same time its complement. Thought of necessity produced thought, until the thought-serpent set its tooth into its own tail, thus forming one inviolable circle, from which the realms of nature and spirit again detached themselves, dropping as the rings dropped from Draupner, the ring of Odin. And all the sciences came and drank of the new metaphysic, as of a fountain of life, and all renewed their youth. And the system gradually rose before the disciple's eye, homogeneous, carefully articulated, severely symmetrical, of an internal infinity, a spiritual Organon, a gigantic Gothic cathedral, every little part of which repeated the whole, every little triad the great Trinity--thought, nature, and spirit. It rose, built upon the granite foundation of thought, all the buttresses and arches of the realm of nature supporting it as it mounted towards the spirit, soaring to heaven in the mighty three-storied tower of which religion formed the lowest, art the middle, and philosophy the highest course. But even more to the disciple than the system was the method. For the method, the imperative thought-process, was the key to earth and to heaven. It was by virtue of the method that he understood. It was by virtue of the method that he saw the history of the world to be a connected drama, one grand drama of liberation, in which every race had its part, and all the parts were interdependent. It was, after all, a truly great thought-poem, which men took for a scientific demonstration; a new species of poetry, more dramatic and more masterly in construction than that which Schelling's intellectual perception had revealed to him; a new intoxicant, more subtle and potent than that provided by the natural philosopher. The system has, indeed, collapsed, the machinery of the method, too fine and intricate, has come to pieces in our hands; only a few of the great fundamental thoughts remain. But he who in his early youth has passed through the Hegel period in his own mental experience, perfectly understands the rapturous enthusiasm of the youth of that day, and the strength they drew from these cosmic thoughts, world-ideas. Among Hegel's pupils about the year 1830 there were already master-thinkers like Hotho, Gans, Marheineke, Michelet; and almost all the men of mark who appeared in the most diverse intellectual domains from this time until far on in the Fifties, belonged at first to the Hegelian school--Rosenkranz and Werder, Strauss and Fischer, Feuerbach, Marx, and Lassalle. Cousin came from France, Heiberg from Denmark, Vera from Naples, to fit themselves for propagating his doctrines in their native countries. From the professorial chair in Berlin, the Hegelian philosophy spread throughout Germany, throughout the earth. Seldom or never has a spiritual monarch's throne stood so secure. At the time of Hegel's death (by cholera) in 1831, his followers compared him to Aristotle, to Alexander the Great, even to Christ. On the literature of the following decade, and in especial on the so-called Young Germany, Hegelianism acted as an emancipating spiritual power, a power that destroyed faith in religious dogma and freed the individual from the burden of the Christianity of the State church. We have already observed that even such an essentially lyric nature as Heinrich Heine's took on the tinge of Hegelianism in this respect, quite independently of the fact that his keen understanding was trained in the school of Hegel; in the peculiar turn of his wit we trace the influence of the Hegelian dialectic, which makes every idea pass over into its opposite (unity of opposites). But it was as a sort of modern Hellenism that the Hegelian philosophy exercised the most powerful influence upon young minds. What may be called Hegel's Hellenic influence was even stronger than Goethe's. The reader doubtless remembers the passage in Heine's book on Börne in which he writes on Börne's Nazarenic narrowness. He tells us that he calls it "Nazarenic" to avoid employing the words Jewish or Christian, words which to him convey the same meaning, because he does not use them to designate a faith but a disposition, a nature; and he places the word Nazarenic in opposition to the word Hellenic, which also to him signifies an innate or acquired disposition and view of things generally. In other words, all humanity is divided for him into Nazarenes and Hellenes, men with ascetic, image-hating dispositions, inclined to morbid spiritualisation, and men of cheerfully realistic temperament, inclined to genial self-development. And he designates himself a Hellene--a name which no Romanticist would ever have bestowed on himself. Hellenism in this sense emanated abundantly from Hegel. His whole intellectual bent is in the direction of that tendency of the time to present modern matter in antique manner, which we observe in Goethe when he writes his _Iphigenia_, and in Thorvaldsen when he represents the Princess Barjátinska in Greek dress. It was not by mere chance that Hegel and Thorvaldsen were born within a few months of each other in the year 1770. Nor was it a mere accident that Hegel best understood that side of Goethe's nature which turned towards Greece. Hegel had received his early training in his native country, Würtemberg, under two influences, that of eighteenth century enlightenment with its revolt against theology, and that of classic antiquity. Even as a schoolboy he was keenly interested in the study of the Greek language and literature; as a mere child he was devoted to the _Antigone_ of Sophocles, which in later life was to him the typical Greek work of art, and is constantly referred to in his writings. He declared the study of the ancient classics to be the real introduction to philosophy, and his own system as a whole he gradually moulded on the plan of the ancient systems. It stands in the same relation to the Aristotelian structure of thought in which Goethe's _Iphigenia_ stands to a play of Euripides, or Thorvaldsen's "Triumphal Procession of Alexander" to the frieze of the Parthenon. His primary natural disposition towards Christianity is shown in his studies and researches as a youthful theologian, the substance of which, taken from the original manuscripts, has been given to the public by Haym. In these early writings he maintains that the Greco-Roman religion was a religion for free men, that a free community, a free state, was the highest ideal of the Greek, an ideal to which he consecrated his labour and his life. The God of Christianity was only a substitute for lost republican liberty. Men had lost power; they could no longer will, but only wish and pray. And the more slavish they grew, the more was a God outside of themselves and above themselves a necessity to them. And it is Hegel's opinion that for us, in our days, has been reserved the task of demanding the return of those treasures--the property of man--that were flung up into heaven. In this he anticipates Heine and Feuerbach.[2] In his youth Hegel always sees Jewish antiquity through classic spectacles. He calls their ancient history "a condition of unmitigated ugliness." The great tragedy of the Jewish nation is, he says, a very different thing from a Greek tragedy; it neither awakens pity nor terror; for these feelings are only called forth by the fate following on the inevitable errors of a noble nature. He sees the history and fate of the Jews against a background of Sophoclean conception of life and Aristotelian theories. Such ideas as law and punishment are repugnant to him. The Christian doctrine of the forgiveness of sin he can only accept by converting it into the idea of fate reconciled by love. In other words, he can only admire the sufferings of Christ when he looks upon them as he looks upon the sufferings of Oedipus in Colonos, namely, as a fate overtaking the innocent, not as a sacrifice offered for the sins of others. All that he rescues for himself from the shipwreck of positive religion is the person and life-story of Jesus--that beautiful divine-human personal life which is to him an equivalent for the citizen-life of the ancient world. But his Jesus is not Jesus pure and simple, but a Jesus-Apollo such as Heine describes in his poem _Frieden_--the giant, who bears the red, flaming sun in his breast for a heart. We have a similar fusion of heathenism and Christianity in the well-known preface to _Romancero_, where Heine talks of his last genuflection "before the ever blessed goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo." For this is not Venus pure and simple, but Venus-Madonna. Thus Hegel himself is the originator of that pagan Hellenism, of which it was the fashion to accuse Young Germany. And in his philosophy we can even detect the spirit which might evolve such a watchword as "the emancipation of the flesh." This was a French expression introduced by Heine into German literature, which was eagerly taken up by his admirers and imitators, and was specially execrated by the enemies and denouncers of the new literature. It certainly might be suspected of an immoral meaning in Heine's mouth and of an ugly meaning in Heinrich Laube's; but amongst the best of the men of the young generation it meant nothing but what Goethe and Hegel, too, had in reality desired. Karl Gutzkow has insisted, and with reason, that only a low mind coupled with this expression ideas of licence for all bad passions. For the word flesh in itself conveyed no objectionable meaning. The New Testament says: "The Word was made flesh." Flesh, in the Christian acceptation of the word, means the natural, the unbaptised, the original man. Its emancipation in reality meant to the young enthusiasts of the day nothing more than the restoring of her rights to nature, war against what is contrary to nature. What they desired was to make the laws of nature the rule of conduct, to release nature from interdict and ban.[3] A neo-Hellenism realised in the Hegelian spirit was what was present to their minds. It did not seem a matter of great consequence to them that Hegel should end his days as a rigid Prussian Conservative, or that his _Philosophy of Right_ should recognise all existing institutions as "holy things," and make out the highest ethical conceptions to be "idols." He had underestimated the strength of the scientific doubt of the day. How many institutions still presented themselves as objects of veneration and faith to the normal mind of the period? Four at most--the monarchy, the church, marriage, and property. As regards these, Hegel's doctrine is as follows: He does not uphold the monarchy as a guarantee for continuity in the execution of great political plans; no, the monarch is to him simply the logically necessary pinnacle of the state-building, something like the dot over the i--a most inconsistent position of Hegel's; to him in all other instances the subjective (the personal) is only a transient form of energy, so that logically the monarch ought to be in time merged in the sovereignty of the State. His defence of monarchy is thus a concession to existing circumstances. Was it any wonder that the following generation drew its own logical conclusion? With regard to the Church, Hegel took up the position which was subsequently publicly taken up by his disciple Cousin as French Minister of State. He allowed his followers, the so-called Hegelians of the Left, men like Göschen, to demonstrate the harmony of his philosophy with the Bible and with ecclesiastical Christianity, actually in his review bestowing excessive praise on Göschen's aphorisms. The man who in his youthful letters to Schelling had attacked the philosophy of Kant because it could be made to lend itself to the service of orthodoxy, the man who had adjured Hölderlin never to make peace with dogma, now in his own religious philosophy took the ambiguous course of making out every dogma to be the symbol of a thought, and allowing the dogma to stand, with the explanation that it figuratively expressed the same truth as science. Was it any wonder that his pupils drew their own inferences? Marriage, Hegel regarded as an incident in family life, justified to much the same extent as family property. How it was brought about was of comparatively small importance; arrangement by the parents was probably the most moral way. In his aversion from the arbitrary action of the individual, he dwelt on the irrationality of the private individual's capricious fancy for this or that girl ("dass er sich gerade auf dieses Mädchen capricionire"). He spoke on this subject half like an old Spartan, half like a narrow old bourgeois, and the youth of the day, being neither Spartan nor narrow, did not accept his doctrine. Property Hegel considered morally justified only as the common property of the family. Only when it is not the possession of an individual is what he calls the egotism of greed overcome. Of course he vehemently condemns Communism. But an impetus had been given to logical conclusion-drawing, and the time came when Hegelians like Marx and Engels drew revolutionary conclusions from the philosophy of the apparently Conservative master. [1] Hotho: _Vorstudien für Leben und Kunst_, p. 383. Haym: _Hegel und seine Zeit_., p. 392. Scherer: _Mélanges d'histoire religieuse_, p. 299. [2] "Die Objectivität der Gottheit ist mit der Verdorbenheit und Sklaverei der Menschen in gleichem Schritt gegangen, und jene ist eigentlich nur eine Offenbarung dieses Geistes der Zeiten.... Ausser früheren Versuchen blieb es vorzüglich unseren Tagen aufbehalten, die Schätze, die an den Himmel geschleudert worden sind, als Eigenthum der Menschen wenigstens in der Theorie zu vindiciren; aber welches Zeitalter wird die Kraft haben, dieses Recht geltend zu machen und sich in den Besitz zu setzen?" The objectivity of the Divinity has gone hand in hand with the slavery and corruption of humanity, and is in reality only one sign of the spirit of the times.... Attempts have been made before, but it has been specially reserved for our age to vindicate at least in theory, as the property of man, the treasures which have been hurled up into heaven; but what age will have the power to enforce this right and to place man in possession of his own? [3] Karl Gutzkow: _Rückblicke auf mein Leben_, p. 135. XXI YOUNG GERMANY AND MENZEL When, from the all-embracing thought of Hegel, the noble art of Platen, the polished wit of Börne, the lyric and satiric genius of Heine, the classic fulness of Immermann's _Oberhof_, we pass on to the men to whom the name Young Germany was more particularly applied, we feel the change to be in the artistic sense a fall--a fall from the confidence and perfect skill of masters to the immaturity and makeshifts of beginners. And among the men of Young Germany there were those who were destined for ever to remain beginners. More especially is the transition from Heine to his successors felt like a fall from graceful, god-like audacity to clumsy youthful defiance of all established custom, all conventional morality. And yet the best of these men in their best moments displayed a self-devotion unknown to Heine. The Young Germany of accepted tradition includes neither Heine, Börne, and their contemporaries (who were regarded as its fathers), nor the circle of young scientific men who expressed their views in Ruge's and Echtermeyer's _Hallische Jahrbücher_, nor the group of political poets who in the Forties gave literary expression to the feelings which found practical expression in the deeds of 1848. The name in its traditional acceptation has a much narrower signification than that given to it in the present volume. Its originator was a very earnest, but not specially gifted North German author, Ludolf Wienbarg, born at Altona in 1803. In 1834, under the warlike title of _An Æsthetic Campaign_ (a title invented by Campe, the publisher), Wienbarg published a series of lectures which he had delivered in Kiel, and for which he had been deprived of his right to lecture, though their inoffensive matter and their unctuous manner were little calculated to produce excitement of any kind. To this book, which it is a hard task to wade through nowadays, is prefixed the dedication: "To the young Germany, not the old, I dedicate this book" (Dem jungen Deutschland, nicht dem alten, widme ich dieses Buch). This is all that men remember to-day of Wienbarg's lectures. By young Germany he meant all the young German minds that had broken with tradition in art, church, state, and society, and were devoting their literary talents to the furtherance of the reforms which they felt to be imperative. The programme he proposes for the new literature is alarming in its vagueness. Its conception of life is to be founded on a harmonious union of sensuality and spirituality. He proclaims a new Hellenism, in which the sensual will be more permeated by spirit than in the case of the Greeks, and the spiritual more permeated by the sensual than in the case of the Christians. But before literature can be born again, life itself must be. Not till the life around them has become healthy and harmonious, can the young generation produce a true work of art. There was, as we see, nothing new in these declamations and prophecies. Heine had already said the same thing in a hundred ways, comic or poetic; even Menzel in his first period had said the same with all the eloquence of the unsuccessful poet and violent partisan. Here it was expressed in the flowery language and with the rhetoric which seldom fails to produce its effect on immature minds. The only novelty lay in the fact that now for the first time the exponent of these ideas was a representative of that young generation who regarded Heine as the great author of the age, and that now for the first time expression was given to the theory that prose was the literary form of the new age, and of more value than poetry. Wienbarg's æsthetic theories resolve themselves into glorification of Heine, whom he proclaims to be the great, the greatest prose author. Not till now, he declares, under the influence of French prose, has German prose really been formed. Schiller's style he calls the language of the parade, and Goethe's the language of the court. All the earlier great authors, even Jean Paul, lived, according to him, within a magic circle, far removed from the stir of the world. What distinguishes the prose of a Heine, a Börne, a Menzel, a Laube, from that of the earlier writers is, in his opinion, the want of tranquillity, of placidity (Behaglichkeit), but it is this want that gives it its superiority, the superiority of life. Heine especially is praised for having disdained "the passing fame" of a lyric poet in order to play upon the colossal, cosmic instrument which lies under the hands of a master of German prose. First Mundt and then Laube, neither of whom was capable of writing a respectable verse, joined eagerly in this glorification of prose at the expense of poetry, the more willingly as by so doing they entered a protest against the Swabian school of poetry, the tardy offspring of Uhland's branch of Romanticism. Mundt positively elevated this cult of prose to the rank of the newest gospel. How little real ability Wienbarg possessed is clearly shown by his second work, _Zur neuesten Litteratur_, a collection of weak essays, in which the only thing we find to admire is his courageous fidelity to Heine at a time when envious rivals and moral doctrinaires had turned the tide of popular opinion against him. Wienbarg had called the name Young Germany into existence, but as yet it designated no exactly specified group of authors. Strangely enough it was first applied to definite individuals in connection with a public denunciation and harsh legal proceedings. The facts were as follows: A number of young authors had gradually brought themselves into notice, who were not exactly in league with each other, but whose common watchword was, spiritual emancipation. They all held aloof from Christianity and dreamed of a new, pantheistic religion for the new era. Many of them desired, under the name of "the emancipation of the flesh" or "rehabilitation of the flesh," the abolishment of the traditional code of morals, and more freedom in the conditions regulating the union and separation of the two sexes. Both the expression of this desire and the desire itself were, in the case of a man like Laube, unpleasantly epicurean, in the case of a man like Gutzkow, unnecessarily defiant and curiously morbid; with others again, such as Mundt, it took the form of championship of what he vaguely called the emancipation of woman, by which he merely meant more independence in home life and in marriage. By all these authors certain distinguished women were held in high honour--in France, George Sand, by whom they were strongly influenced; in Germany, Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz. They all talked much and loudly of the rights of youth, had all imbibed a certain faith in liberty from Hegel, and all owed their general political tendency to the Revolution of July. Their aim was to identify literature with life, as Hegel had reconciled idea with reality. They had no really profound sympathy with each other, and they soon went each his own way. They were widely enough separated as regarded their places of residence. Heine lived in Paris, Weinbarg at Kiel--entirely isolated; Gutzkow resided in South Germany, Mundt was in Berlin, Laube in Leipzig; and the distances separating these places were very considerable then. Laube was very soon in many ways an opponent of Gutzkow, and a cold, unpleasant critic of Mundt and Kühne. Mundt attacked Gutzkow. An accidental meeting between Laube and Gutzkow in the north of Italy in 1833 contributed to their estrangement rather than their reconcilement. There was no other community between these writers than that usually existing between men of the same age and calling; they were much less a political party than a literary coterie; nevertheless literature was not to them its own aim and end; they desired to devote themselves to the service of the spirit of the age.[1] This was the reason why they did not occupy themselves with the pure forms of literary art, neither with epic nor with lyric poetry, and but sparingly with dramatic. They all idolised the "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the times), and did homage to it in journalism and fiction, in critical and argumentative essays, in fanciful descriptions of travel, after the pattern of Heine's and Prince Pückler-Muskau's, and at times in long-winded novels. [Illustration: KARL GUTZKOW] The most able of them all was undoubtedly Karl Gutzkow, born in Berlin in 1811, a man of a tireless, energetic, inquiring spirit, absorbed in the thousand problems of modern life, a cross between an analytical critic and a poet, but a man to whom nothing came of itself and who achieved nothing with ease. His personality had no charm, his youth no freshness, his prose no rhythm. But he was bold, inventive, intelligent, and enterprising. He had the gift of pathos, but not the lyric gift; his style was effective, but unmelodious. His mind was specially open to ideas, to all the thoughts and spiritual movements that were abroad at that day. By nature he belonged to the ungainly, but his literary enthusiasm was so genuine, his ambition so great, and his will so strong, that he gradually became an intellectual centre and diffused his influence in many directions. There was a time, about the year 1840, when a great part of what was best in German literature took its tone from him and his adherents. We saw how it was the Revolution of July that awakened in him a desire to write. The following year, the great year of dismissals, imprisonments, and banishments in Prussia, put the pen into his hand. It was a time when every word underwent the strictest censorship; even the advertisements in the _Intelligenzblatt_ were carefully examined, in case they might contain some hidden political meaning. Gutzkow began by publishing a newspaper, _Forum der Journallitteratur_. He had been brought up on the Hegelian idea of the progress of the world towards ever greater liberty. As Gottschall has expressed it: "There swam before his eyes a constant succession of political sunrises and world-liberating theories." His newspaper reached a circulation of seventy copies, and was then given up. Wolfgang Menzel, at that time the acknowledged master of German criticism, had repeatedly invited Gutzkow to come to Stuttgart and assist him in the editorship of his _Litteraturblatt_, as he himself, having been elected a member of the Würtemberg Parliament, was no longer able to conduct it alone. In spite of his hatred of Goethe, nay, partly because of it, Menzel, at this period of his career, was revered by the youth of Germany much as Katkóf and Ploug in their first periods were revered in Russia and Denmark. He, above all others, was to them the man of the day, the friend of liberty. One of Gutzkow's aims in his newspaper had been to defend Menzel, the man after his own heart, against the attacks of his enemies--and Menzel had many enemies, for as a reviewer he was disputatious, quarrelsome, and abusive. But he was, or seemed to be, a man of sincere convictions. He urged the necessity for a profounder conception of patriotism and of religion than was then in vogue, but at the same time he was an ardent Liberal in politics, and as such an admirer of Börne and Heine, who looked upon him as a trusty companion in arms; in Parliament he championed all progressive measures, amongst others the emancipation of the Jews. Gutzkow, not yet much over twenty, short, slight, fair, and pale-faced, entered the presence of his lord and master, who was thirteen years older than himself, with a bashful reverence which he has compared to that of the student who appears before Mephistopheles-Faust in the first part of Goethe's drama. He saw a man with broad shoulders, a well developed chest, and dark hair, whose clean-shaven face reminded him of a Romish priest's. Round the mouth, with its ugly yellow teeth, a satiric smile played; the expression of the short-sighted eyes behind the spectacles was half defiant, half dignified. The man's temper seemed to be violent, his will inflexible. An expression of faun-like sensuality would come over his features when he talked of some erotic book, and yet Goethe's worldliness was as hateful to him as his indifference to politics, and he uncritically bowed the knee to men and phenomena that to his mind represented the mysterious. His character was a genuine priestly blend of irony and mysticism. He loved Voltaire, and enthusiastically admired Görres. Master and pupil agreed well at first, both in their social and in their business relations. Gutzkow, who lived now in one, now in another of the towns in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart, indefatigably reviewed the great parcels of books sent him by Menzel. He soon caught the brisk, sweeping journalistic style, and all went well. The youthful works which he himself published, naturally found a more than lenient critic in Menzel. Yet they were poor enough. _Briefe eines Narren an eine Närrin_ ("Letters from a Male to a Female Fool") are humorous effusions without originality, in a style which is partly an imitation of Jean Paul, partly of Heine; and _Maha Guru, the History of a God_, the description of the psychological condition of a Tibetan who is made Dalai-Lama and consequently worshipped as a divinity, is a piece of fantastic writing, now totally unreadable. Yet Menzel, when reviewing this latter book, chose from amongst the vignettes which alternately figured on the title-page of his review, a laurel wreath, and had Gutzkow's name twice printed within its circle. Gutzkow's intention in _Maha Guru_ was to show how the god who is supposed to be incarnated in the Dalai-Lama is subordinated to the man in him, the false divinity being completely thrown into the shade by the true nobility, true divinity of the human being. But besides this, the book was intended to be a philosophical-satirical romance in the old style, representing home institutions in foreign guise. The Tibetan theocracy was intended to suggest the European hierarchy, the Tibetan polyandry the European emancipation of woman. The foreign scenery, which Gutzkow had never seen, the foreign customs, which were not described for their own sake, could not interest. The book was suggested to him by the story of the French atheist, Billaud-Varennes, who escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, took refuge in America, and was there worshipped by the Indians as a god. His skill in catching, training, and stuffing birds made such an impression on them that they looked upon him as a second creator. But all this had little to do with Tibet, and the would-be gravity of Gutzkow's theme. Up to this time Young Germany and its fathers had not seemed to Menzel to be sacrilegious scoffers or bad patriots. Gutzkow's irreligion so far had not disturbed the good relations between him and his master. Menzel himself praised Börne's _Letters from Paris_, which were attacked on all sides, as manly utterances, and excused their strong expressions as outbursts of feeling which must not be too roughly dealt with; he compared them to the glow-worms which shine so beautifully on mild summer nights, but which turn into poor little grey insects when seized by rough hands. But it was inevitable that the tie between Gutzkow and Menzel should soon be loosed. From the first Gutzkow had received warnings not to involve himself too deeply with the Stuttgart author. Hegel himself, who took an interest in the young man, had said to him: "How can any one bind himself to a man like that?" The first disagreement between them was on the subject of Menzel's attitude to the South German lyric poets, the so-called Swabian school, followers of Uhland, a poet who not only enjoyed the fame which he most undoubtedly deserved, but a far greater. As a good Swabian, Menzel esteemed and supported these men--Gustav Schwab, Gustav Pfizer, Karl Mayer, &c.--as bulwarks of conventional piety and morality. But Gutzkow, with his keen sense of what was the life-idea of the time, Gutzkow, to whom literature was the church militant, had the greatest objection to such Sunday afternoon, gilt-edged poets, men who put into rhyme old, dead ballad themes, or their own petty, sentimental feelings, whilst they were cautiously watching over their interests as government servants aspiring to professorships or consistory counsellorships. When _Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann_ appeared, it became known how severely Goethe had judged his admirer Uhland's poetry. He would hear of nothing but the ballads, considering all the rest unworthy of notice. And a most contemptuously disparaging verdict upon the whole Swabian school, from Uhland to Pfizer, was presently published in _Goethe's Correspondence with Zelter_: he (Goethe) had never expected anything fresh or capable from that quarter; the fellows concealed their want of genius under the moral-religious-poetical beggar's cloak.[2] After this Gutzkow took courage and proclaimed that to him also this antiquated pastoral and cloistral Romanticism was an abomination. In an essay entitled _Goethe, Uhland, und Prometheus_ he made a violent attack on those poets who sought and "found their creed in their certificates of baptism, their morals in conventionality, their principles in established custom, and their poetry in the poetry of other people." What have you to offer us? he cried. Evening walks in the setting sun. Where is your effort to keep pace with the times? Meanwhile the reaction against the Revolution of July was in full progress everywhere. The policy of Prussia, as well as that of Austria, was controlled by Metternich; and when the youth of Germany began to understand on what side the power and the energy were, and probably would be for long to come, they went over to that side. Gutzkow says, that out of every hundred students at the University of Berlin at that time, ninety-seven were strong Conservatives; and every meeting with an old school or college companion, more especially if he happened to be a civil servant or an officer, left a most painful impression on his mind. In such circumstances it often happens that high-spirited, able young men lose their heads and commit rash actions for which they are blamed all their lives. Schleiermacher was dead, laid to rest with great ceremonial, mourned as a father of the Protestant Church, one of the saints of theology. It had long ago been said, and well said, of him, that his character answered to his name (Schleiermacher = veilmaker). By dint of ambiguities and uncertain utterances he had kept himself popular to the end of his days. No one had brought up against him that Romantic sin of his youth, the _Vertrauliche Briefe um Lucinde_ ("Confidential Letters on the Subject of Lucinde.") But now Gutzkow, who erroneously concluded that this forgotten book would be omitted from the edition of Schleiermacher's works then in preparation, could not resist the temptation to republish it, and to defend himself and his friends against the perpetual accusations of godless immorality by showing that their erotic views, and even their doctrine of the rehabilitation of the flesh, had been held by that man of God who was the revered lord and master of the theologians. This might have been a good tactical move if the youth, for he was still only twenty-three, had not written a foolish, boyish preface to the book. In it he addresses himself to the "watchmen of Zion," scoffs at their sanctimoniousness and spiritual coquetry, and thus adjures them:--"For one moment cast your priestly robes from you, forget that a man whom you still perpetually crucify was God, and listen to what happened once on a time elsewhere, in the world of liberty, youth, and fancy!" What had happened was the publication of Schlegel's _Lucinde_, that lewd skeleton, which in Gutzkow's eyes is glorious and classic, and of Schleiermacher's letters about it, which in Gutzkow's estimation are divine. The Letters speak for themselves. They absurdly over-estimate _Lucinde_, but the genuine human feeling in them is beautiful and courageous. In Gutzkow's preface everything is emphasised in a disagreeably defiant manner. He avers that love is of the nature of genius, maintains that priestly action neither adds to nor takes from the sacredness of marriage, tauntingly declaims against the cold prose of the ordinary marriage, "the water-soup weddings, the sordid procreation of children and struggle for mouldy bread." He winds up flippantly with: "Now tell me truly, Rosalie! Is it not since you have worn spurs on your little silk boots, since I have taught you how to throw your cloak over your shoulder, since I have invented a new sort of inexpressibles for you, so that every one takes you to be my youngest, dearly loved brother, is it not since then that you know what I meant by: I love you?" And not content with this female wearer of breeches, who is the realisation of his idea of the emancipation of woman, Gutzkow last of all plays out an atheistic trump; "Where is Franz?--Come here, dear boy. I know they baptized you secretly. Who is God? What! you don't know, you innocent atheist, you philosophic child! Oh, if the world too had only not known about God, how much happier it would have been!" No specially acute critical faculty is needed to detect the unreality in this student's braggadocio. The original of the Rosalie who was to follow Gutzkow about in page's dress was more probably the Kaled of Byron's _Lara_ than any Heidelberg or Berlin seamstress. It is easy to imagine what effect such a preface to such a book would produce on the general public and on orthodox journalism. Only a drop was needed to fill the cup of public indignation, and that drop Gutzkow did not fail to add. In 1835 he wrote _Wally, die Zweiflerin_ ("The Sceptic"), which is an exceedingly weak story, with a positively burlesque crucial episode, but which nevertheless influenced the course of events more powerfully than any other German literary work of the day. Strauss's _Life of Jesus_ had lately come out, and its resolution of the historical element in that life into myths, bold and fanciful to the verge of folly as the hypothesis was, had violently perturbed the thinking minds of Germany. Indignation was universal. A thousand-voiced cry of condemnation rose from the Eider to Switzerland. For many a year, in the public mind, there was a dark stain on the name of David Strauss. The book was talked about everywhere, and Gutzkow one evening began to discuss its problem with a young girl to whom he was attached. "Don't let us talk about that," she said, "the very thought drives me mad!" These words made a strong impression on him. Strauss's book itself had not satisfied him. Rationalist as he was, he felt the need for a historic Jesus, and betook himself to the study of Reimarus's old _Wolfenbüttel Fragments_, to which Lessing before him had devoted so much attention. He determined to publish a selection from these, but it was in vain that he applied with this intention to the most courageous of the German publishers, Campe. In spite of his bold political attitude, Campe dared not expose himself to the rancour of the Hamburg clergy, Pastor Goetze's successors in the cure of souls. It was about this time that the noble Charlotte Stieglitz committed suicide. The impression produced by this tragic event combined itself in Gutzkow's mind with the impressions made by his young friend's remark and by Reimarus's Biblical criticism--and _Wally, the Sceptic_, was the result. It is a childish book, this _Wally_, but it is innocent, honest, and artless. The heroine is a young lady moving in good society, who, in despair at not being able to overcome the religious doubts awakened in her mind by the man she loves, the sceptical, _blasé_ Cæsar, kills herself with a dagger. Gutzkow had been unable to withstand the temptation of reminding the venerable lights and defenders of the Church, the dignitaries of all the different classes of the Order of the Red Eagle, that there had once lived men named Hume, Voltaire, Lessing, &c. There was something fascinating to a young man in the idea of reminding such grand folks of such forgotten existences. But it ought to have been done with talent. In Gutzkow's novel the plot was a mere excuse for ventilating theories, _Wally_ was a weak imitation of _Lélia_, the last novel which George Sand had published. But its author was in the spring-tide of his youth. It seemed to him as if the whole world were growing young again. The glow of Hegel's sinking sun still illuminated the horizon, Bettina arose like a morning star, the ever-young wisdom of Rahel was scattered abroad over the earth after her death like fruitful dew, Lenau's and Rückert's early poems were like the song of the lark, Ruge's first critical articles and Feuerbach's first philosophic writings were like fresh spring breezes that cleared the air--the time seemed to him so sunny, so promising, so laden with fruit, that it was as it were symbolised by the two glorious summers of 1834 and 1835, with their rich harvests of corn and wine. And it was then he committed his first great youthful blunder. He was not satisfied with embodying his religious heterodoxy in his book; he also proclaimed his moral heterodoxy, his defiance of the accepted code of sexual morality--a very clumsy and immature defiance. But the best idea of how very innocently Gutzkow interpreted that watchword, "the emancipation of the flesh," which he himself employs, is to be gained from the notorious scene in _Wally_, which was intended by the author to express his worship of beauty. Wally loves Cæsar and is loved by him, but they cannot marry each other, because Wally has been obliged to betroth herself to the Sardinian ambassador. Cæsar entreats her that she will as it were symbolically celebrate a spiritual marriage with him by showing herself to him in all her naked beauty the night before her wedding. In an old German ballad, the heroine, Sigune, thus displays herself to Tchionatulander. No one will deny that Cæsar's request is insane and its fulfilment ridiculous. But the intention of the scene was so chaste and its execution so inoffensive, that only positive low-mindedness could have made it the occasion of calling for the assistance of the police. We read; "The cloak slips from the young hero's shoulders; his hair waves freely and luxuriantly. To the left there appears out of the sun-mist an image of intoxicating beauty--Sigune, displaying herself more bashfully than the Medicean Venus hides her nakedness. She stands there helpless, dazzled by the glamour of the love that besought this favour; her will is gone; she is the personification of shame, innocence, and self-abandonment. And in sign that this is a consecrated, holy scene, no roses bloom, but a high-stemmed lily has shot upwards close to her body, symbolically covering her as the flower of chastity. It all happened in one breathless, silent moment--it was sacrilege, but the sacrilege of innocence and of woeful, eternal renunciation." This is all. The relations between Gutzkow and Menzel were no longer what they had been. Now and again, in some preface or article, Gutzkow had ventured to make a small joke at the expense of his former patron, or a modest protest against one or other of his utterances. And in a more practical way Gutzkow had for some time past been a thorn in the side to Menzel. His literary supplement to the Frankfort newspaper, _Phoenix_, was a dangerous rival to Menzel's _Litteraturblatt._ But there was worse than this. Gutzkow had gradually got into friendly correspondence with the leaders of the new literature, Laube, Wienbarg, Mundt, &c, men who were rapidly taking possession of all the more important literary organs in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfort, and Hamburg. When, in 1835, Gutzkow and Wienbarg issued the prospectus of a literary review in the style of _Revue des Deux Mondes_, with almost all the most eminent literary names in Germany on its list of contributors--university professors like Boeckh, influential writers like Varnhagen, not to mention a talented author like Börne and a genius like Heine--Menzel felt the necessity for striking a telling blow. An invitation to subscribe to the _Deutsche Revue_ had been published. It was written by Gutzkow, in flowery, metaphoric language--declares that science is longing to escape from musty class-rooms into the free open air, that the bird of Minerva is no longer the owl, which is afraid of the light, but the eagle, which gazes steadfastly into the sun, &c., &c. Instead of confining his attack to this programme, which was inoffensive and in some respects promising, Menzel, in his _Litteraturblatt_ of the 11th and 13th September 1835, published a general manifesto against the company of young authors headed by Karl Gutzkow. The apology for this action, which he makes as an old man (in his _Memoirs_, p. 304), shows unquestionable proof of narrow-mindedness, but not of any honest conviction. To emphasise the cosmopolitan tendencies and French sympathies of Young Germany, he wrote of it as "La jeune Allemagne." He directed his principal attack against _Wally_, from which book he quoted a few disconnected passages to show that the whole novel was immoral and sacrilegious; the insignificant sensual element in the story, the Sigune scene, is made its main feature. "Only in the deepest mire of immorality, only in brothels, are such atheistic views hatched. They were in vogue among the philosophical parasites of the old French court. In the Palais Royal they were translated from the language of the court into that of the Jacobins. Herr Gutzkow has taken it upon himself to transplant once again into Germany that infamous French ape who, in the arms of a harlot, mocks at God, but he has done it in an age which, praise be to God, is more mature and more manly than the age of Voltaire. Even then vice was foiled by the natural disposition of our nation; now it will be even more impossible for it to effect an entrance. Literature will expel it, public opinion brand it.... If such a school for the most impudent immorality and the most refined falsehood is allowed to establish itself in Germany, if all the noble minds of the nation do not set themselves against it, if German publishers do not beware, but venture to offer such poison for sale and to praise their wares, we shall soon see the result.... But I will tread down your filth, though I know that I shall defile myself by doing so; I will bruise the head of the serpent that warms itself in the hot-bed of sensuality.... As long as I live, such infamous dishonouring of German literature shall not go unpunished.... And Menzel, the practical journalist, was not satisfied, like the ordinary author, with saying a thing once for all. He repeated his accusations in one number after another of his paper with growing emphasis, more abusive language, more venomous imputations, appealing more and more plainly to the State to interfere while it was yet time. On the 26th of October he wrote: "I know that their war against Christianity, against morality, against marriage is of no more significance than the war of young owls against the old sun. But a spark may give rise to a conflagration.... Upon the new literary judgment-seat in Frankfurt, Venus vulgivaga will be enthroned in place of justice ... never will these men, who only believe in the flesh, these priests of foulness, forgive an author for being purer than they are.... Is it possible to sit still and allow them to propagate French morality among us by word and deed? Under the mask of French republicanism, this libellous, infamous new Frankfurt school is introducing the most frightful immorality. The flesh, unbridled sensuality, the abolition of marriage, are their watchwords, and they not only write obscene books themselves, but serve up the old ones afresh.... They are to a certain extent disciples of Saint-Simon, they proclaim a still more dissolute republicanism, without any virtue, a hetæra-republic on the grandest scale.... As yet these principles are confined to the narrower, aristocratic circles of literature.... But to what do these doctrines appeal but to the bestiality and ferocity which, though they are still slumbering, would be so easily aroused in the great capitals and manufacturing towns, with their obscene haunts of drunkenness and depravity." On the 11th of November Menzel directly denounces the Prussian university professors who have been rash enough to promise Gutzkow their co-operation in his review: "Are the universities not State institutions? Does the Prussian State no longer protect Christianity, morality, marriage? We have heard so much of the moral, religious, Conservative spirit that prevails in Prussia. Are we now to see the most eminent professors of Berlin, Königsberg, and Halle following at the heels of an obscene Marat, who, like the real Marat, literally preaches the sacrament of 'the irresistible moment' and a republic of sans-culottes and sans-chemises? Are we to hear them raving with him against Christianity, morality, marriage, the family, modesty, against God and immortality, against German nationality and the established order of things?" And he concluded his outburst by applying the designation of a Jewish party to the good Germans, Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, Mundt, and Kühne, because of their sympathy with the ideas of Börne and Heine. Young Germany, he declared, was in reality Young Palestine. As a consequence of this denunciation, Karl Gutzkow was arrested on a charge of blasphemy and lewd writing, and Menzel was dishonourable enough to go on exciting public indignation against him whilst he was in confinement and the case was being tried at Mannheim. The sentence pronounced was, however, only ten weeks' imprisonment for attacking the existing religious institutions of Baden. But fear of the revolutionary movements which Menzel maintained would be the result of the teaching of Young Germany, induced the German Confederation to take action, and on the 10th of December 1835 the Federal Diet passed a resolution, which aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of the whole group of authors, young and old, which it comprehends under the designation Young Germany. It reads as follows: "In view of the fact that a school of literature has lately come into existence in Germany, a school now known by the name of 'Young Germany,' or 'the young literature,' whose aim is, by means of belletristic writings, accessible to all classes of readers, impudently to attack the Christian religion, to discredit the existing conditions of society, and to subvert all discipline and morality, the Council of the German Confederation (Bundesversammlung) ... has unanimously passed the following resolutions: (1) All the German Governments bind themselves to bring the penal and police statutes of their respective countries and the regulations regarding the abuse of the press in their strictest sense to bear against the authors, publishers, printers, and disseminators of the writings of the literary school known as 'Young Germany' or 'the young literature,' to which notably belong Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Theodor Mundt, as also by all lawful means to prevent the dissemination of the writings of this school by booksellers, lending libraries, or other means," &c., &c. It was in this manner that the appellation Young Germany first became familiar to the general public. It was the German Police-Confederation which, constituting itself a critical authority, stigmatised a group of authors, mentioned by name, as an immoral and injurious "school"--and this on the information of one single rival of these men in the favour of the reading public. Menzel was to Young Germany what Southey in his day was to the "Satanic school" in English literature, _alias_ Byron and Shelley, or Katkóf, a generation later, to the "traitorous school" in Russian literature--Herzen, Ogarev, and Bakunin. In disturbed times the informer is as necessary an appendage to the foreground figures as the envious rival and spy was to the hero of the old tragedies. [1] See Ludwig Geiger: _Das junge Deutschland und die preussische Censur_. Berlin, 1900. [2] "Wundersam ist es, wie sich diese Herrlein einen gewissen sittig-religiös-poetischen Bettlermantel so geschickt umzuschlagen wissen, dass, wenn auch der Ellenbogen herausguckt, man diesen Mangel für eine poetische Intention halten muss." The fellows manage to throw a kind of moral-religious-poetic beggar's cloak so cleverly round them, that, even if the bare elbow shows, we are obliged to consider this defect a poetic intention. XXII GUTZKOW, LAUBE, MUNDT The determination of the Federal Council to suppress the writings of Young Germany not only nipped the _Deutsche Revue_ in the bud, but also put an end to the existence of Mundt's _Litterarischer Zodiacus_, published in Leipzig, and prevented the publication of Laube's _Mitternachtszeitung_, which was to have appeared in Brunswick. Immediately after Menzel's first attack on Gutzkow and his friends, Mundt, with the valour of the prudent man, had written a series of severe articles against Heine, Gutzkow, and Wienbarg--but all to no purpose; his fate was sealed. It seemed for a time as if the resolution were intended not only to affect everything that the proscribed authors had already written, but everything that they might write in the future. An edict of the Prussian Government, dated 11th December 1835, expressly provides that "the _future_ literary productions of Heinrich Heine, wherever they may be published and in whatever language, are to be subject to the same regulations as the writings of Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Laube, and Mundt." And not only was every possible measure taken to silence the obnoxious authors, but (as in Russia, when a man is in disgrace with the Government) it was made illegal, even for those who desired to write disparagingly of them, to print their names. Mundt's name was erased from the list of contributors to the _Berliner Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik_, and in the announcements of Varnhagen and Mundt's edition of Knebel's _Literary Remains_, Varnhagen alone might be named as editor. Excessively strict precautions were at the same time taken with regard to foreign publications. A few inoffensive English and French newspapers were countenanced. In the case of all the others the expedient was resorted to of requiring the same postage to be paid for them as for letters, thereby raising the cost of such papers to at least 500 thalers (£75) per annum.[1] To the leaders of Young Germany the Government thus offered the compulsory choice between biding their time in defiant silence and purchasing other conditions for themselves by disowning their past and making humiliating promises for the future. No one who has had any experience of the average valour of the denizens of the literary world can feel surprised that few stood this test, that many accepted the second alternative. Neither Heine, Wienbarg, nor Gutzkow gave in; but many others made pitiable exhibitions of themselves. Crowds of the young authors who had plumed themselves upon their revolutionary-philosophical, their oppositionist-political ideas, now hastened to prove their philosophic commonplaceness, their political innocuousness. The name "Young Germany" had been an honourable name; but now that those who had borne it found themselves the objects of special police surveillance, they refused to acknowledge it, each declaring that he, at least, did not belong to the party, and that if he ever had done so, it was an old story, and he had since then become a most respectable member of society. In this case, as so often, it was proved that modern high-class education only provides desultory knowledge, does not form character, and least of all amongst those who make their living by their pens. August Lewald, who to all intents and purposes belonged to the group, procured the annulment of the prohibition of his periodical, _Europa_, by making a declaration that he had never printed anything inimical to the Government, to religion, or to morality, and was consequently in no wise compromised by any of the mischievous proceedings of Young Germany. Eduard Duller, who had been co-editor with Gutzkow of the paper, _Phoenix_, publicly disclaimed all sympathy with the aims of Young Germany and declared his principles to be perfectly different from those of his former fellow-workers. Theodor Mundt professed that he had always kept clear of "that manufactured category," Young Germany, as it was plain that such an appellation must sooner or later become a literary nickname (Ekelname); and in the preface to his new periodical, _Dioskuren für Wissenschaft und Kunst_, he declared that his aim was to counteract the literary excesses of recent times by the display of a settled conviction devoid of any principle of destructiveness (_worin nichts Verheerendes wuchert_). Meekest of all, perhaps, was Heinrich Laube, he who had been the most daring and defiant of the Young Germans, he whom Heine had called "one of those gladiators who die in the arena"--an appreciation which now seemed somewhat ridiculous. He affirmed, in the _Allgemeine Zeitung_, that in promising Dr. Gutzkow to contribute to his new review, he had never dreamt of aiding and abetting the party known by the name of Young Germany in its attacks on the existing conditions of society, much less in its attempts to disturb and overturn them. On the contrary, he had from the first plainly signified that he did not identify himself with the movement. On New Year's day, 1836, in the announcement of his _Mitternachtszeitung_, which he had obtained permission to publish on condition that his name did not appear as editor, he wrote that he had become another man, that literature was no longer to him an expression of political desires, that it was not his intention to take any part in the literary disputes of the moment, "the rough-and-tumble fights with uncombed hair and unwashed hands"; no, it had long been his idea to form "a neo-Romantic school," and in it he would have no disintegrating, destructive elements. He would support the existing, not make war upon it. He would not identify himself with Menzel (actually!) but neither could he take part with the so-called Young Germany. He who had been the most daring of them all was the quickest and most adroit in wheeling round. Day after day, too, as was to be expected, the newspapers contained declarations by the different university professors who had been incautious enough to promise their co-operation in the _Deutsche Revue_. Ulrici, Eduard Gans, Hotho, Rosenkranz and Trendelenburg, Hegelians and Anti-Hegelians, all, one after the other, cleared themselves from the charge of complicity. They repented with their official souls. They vied with each other in their utter repudiation of Gutzkow. Heine did not belong to the number of those who lose their courage or their heads in a difficulty. And in any case, partly because of his established reputation, partly because of the personal security ensured by his residence abroad, this interdict was not such a serious blow to him as to the others. On the 28th of January 1836, after receiving intimation of the prohibition of his books, he addressed a solemn protest to the Federal Diet, a proceeding about which he immediately afterwards jokes in a private letter to his publisher. In this protest he expresses his astonishment at having been judged without a trial, and without having been given any opportunity to defend himself. He reminds the Federal Diet that Martin Luther did not meet with such treatment at the hands of the Holy Roman Empire--not that he would think of comparing himself with Luther, "but the pupil naturally appeals to the precedent of his master." But what he especially desires to protest against is his compulsory silence (which he was privately determined to break as soon as possible) being taken for an admission of culpable intentions, or even for a disavowal of his earlier writings. To Laube, of whose new attitude he was still ignorant, he wrote about the same time that, in the matter of politics, it was, for the present, allowable to make any number of concessions, political forms being of no consequence as long as the conflict for the highest life-principles was still going on; but they must hold to their right of free discussion of religious and moral topics, or there would soon be an end of all Protestant liberty of thought. Laube, as we know, finding himself obliged to give in to a certain extent, gave in all round at once, struck simultaneously his political, religious, and moral flags. It was a slight consolation to the sufferers that the informer did not go unpunished. Heine wrote _Ueber den Denunzianten_ and Börne wrote _Menzel der Franzosenfresser_ ("The Frenchman-eater"), which is with reason regarded as his wittiest and at the same time most warm-hearted production. But the more severe punishment came from Heine, who threw himself upon his victim with all his tiger-like strength, and shook him till there was nothing left of him but a shapeless, ridiculous bundle. Heine points out how carefully Menzel has chosen the time for making his accusations, a time when the leaders of the movement were either in exile, or silent, or in safe keeping behind bolts and bars. He exposes Menzel's hypocrisy, showing how, as long as he was connected with Gutzkow, he looked on silently, though he knew Christianity to be in peril of its life. He is quite ready to give him credit for "a certain physical morality"--for a man can be virtuous alone, but to be vicious he must have a companion. Herr Menzel's personal appearance stands him in good stead when he is desirous to flee from vice. Heine has far too high an opinion of the good taste of vice to be able to believe that it would run after a Menzel. Poor Goethe was not so fortunately gifted in this particular. Of Menzel's political opinions Heine is afraid to speak for political reasons. Nor can he say what he thinks of his private life (as if by a printer's error _Privatschelmenleben_ is substituted for _Privatmenschenleben_) in the first instance for want of space. Never did Heine write anything at once so insulting and so crushing. And how did matters stand with Gutzkow, who at the early age of twenty-four had become a kind of centre of literary events, and upon whom "the Goliath of the Philistine army" had fallen? For a moment he was astonished and cast down. It was his first instructive experience of life. His sin was that he had expressed his feelings naïvely and honestly in a second-rate novel, and its result was that he now found himself denounced as a plague of society, mocked at by his enemies, forsaken and disowned by his friends. With perfect calm he heard himself compared to the men who had prepared for the enormities perpetrated at Minister under Jan van Leyden--division of property, marriage with twelve wives, &c. He was inexperienced enough to look forward to the legal proceedings against him with expectations of victory, and when he was arrested at Mannheim, he went to prison with a feeling of relief. In prison he did not hear the yelling of the press; he heard nothing but the squeaking of the mice that ran over his bed. He could lead a peaceful life, a life of uninterrupted, quiet production. He wrote his novel _Seraphine_ and a work entitled _Philosophic der That und des Ereignisses_ ("Philosophy of Action and Event"), a kind of criticism of Hegel's _Philosophy of History_. When he came out of prison he took up his life-work again with firm determination, but for a time wrote anonymously and expressed himself more cautiously. About a year before this he had fallen in love with a young girl in Berlin, and become engaged to her. But the Berlin newspapers called him an atheist. The young lady's mother was a foolish, hysterical woman. One day she would embrace Gutzkow, the next threaten to throw a knife at him and shriek to her daughter, "Choose between him and me!" As the wisdom of allowing her daughter to unite her fate with Gutzkow's became more and more questionable, the mother's amiable days became fewer, the unamiable more frequent, and in the end the young lady, as an obedient daughter, drew back altogether. This episode had made a tremendous impression on Gutzkow's young heart. It had taught him that to hold convictions contrary to those of the people one lives amongst isolates a man even in private life, and that he who sets the opinion of his neighbours at defiance cannot expect to be successful in life or in love. His friends behaved no better to him. No sooner was he released from prison than he was overwhelmed with reproaches and complaints by persons to whom he had previously promised literary employment, and who were now not only disappointed in their hopes, but compromised by the patronage he had extended to them. His first disappointment in love led to one of his best shorter stories, _Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam_. And the disappointment, combined with the general disillusionment, produced the frame of mind which characterises the dramatised version of the story which he published many years later under the title of _Uriel Acosta_--undoubtedly his best drama, probably his best work. The hero is a historic personage, Gabriel, afterwards Uriel Acosta, born in 1594, a religious philosopher of Jewish nationality. His parents were baptised Christians, but he himself, on account of his disbelief in Christianity, was obliged to leave his native land, Portugal, and take refuge in Holland. Then he threw in his lot with the Jews, but soon began to publish works in which the Jewish doctrines were as freely criticised as the Christian. For this he was condemned to pay fines, and in the end was sentenced to a most humiliating penance. After public acknowledgment and recantation of his errors, he was to lie on the ground at the threshold of the synagogue and allow himself to be trodden under foot by the whole congregation of the faithful. After seven years of persecution he submitted to the sentence, but immediately afterwards, in despair at having retracted his opinions, shot himself (in 1647). He was the forerunner, and, if we may believe tradition, the teacher of Spinoza. In the little old-fashioned story, _Der Sadducäer von Amsterdam_, the most important personages of the future drama are outlined. Judith, the vacillating and finally faithless woman, beloved of Acosta, was very evidently suggested by the inconstant Berlin lady. The style is artless and weak. Spinoza is introduced as follows: "She called, and her only child, a boy of seven, came running up to his uncle, whom he easily recognised in the moonlight. Bare your heads! That boy was Baruch Spinoza!" What attracted Gutzkow as a young man to this theme was evidently its pathos, its being the story of the first martyr for free-thought. In our days we read of such a life without being remarkably impressed by it. The spiritually emancipated know that all the advance that has been made amounts to this, that they are now tolerated. The life that they have lived has so accustomed them to hear all that they hold highest condemned, and all that they regard as base or foolish extolled, that no story of this kind affects them much. It was different with the generation of 1830 in Germany. Even the fact that Uriel Acosta sued for pardon and recanted did not lessen Gutzkow's interest in him. In the novel he writes: "We who have been, as it were, born into a state of constant martyrdom for the sake of our convictions, who have lived in it all our lives, must refrain from condemning a man who had the courage to protest against the dogmas of a fanatical, intolerant religion, but who, nevertheless, was capable of cringing beneath the hand that had chastised him." He depicts the confusion in Uriel's soul: Faith is the blind man's staff; his eyes are suddenly opened; but they are utterly unaccustomed to distinguish objects; they cannot, like the staff to which he has been so long accustomed, save him from falling; and so he gropes more helplessly than before. After the storm raised by Menzel had passed in all its fury over Gutzkow's head, the story of Acosta inevitably acquired quite a new significance for him. Considering it now, he saw not only its purely dramatic possibilities, but the correspondence of its main features with the main features of his own life story. He, too, had been placed under ban and interdict; he, too, after being cursed, had been deserted; he, too, had paid the penalty of intrepid thought; he, too, had been flung on the ground before the threshold of the injured Church, and the whole multitude had passed over him and trampled on him. In 1846, in Paris, under the influence of the acting of great tragedians, Gutzkow dramatised the story. He made various alterations in it. To increase the interest of the plot, he idealised the chief female character. In the tragedy of _Uriel Acosta_, Judith is the betrothed of another; Uriel is her master. But when the Rabbis, with solemn ceremony, pronounced the terrible curse, when all draw back from him and he is left alone on one side of the stage, whilst the words: "Fluch dem Freund Der Dir im Elend je die Treue hält! Nie giebt sich Dir ein liebend Herz des Weibes,"[2] are being spoken, she crosses the stage and places herself by his side with the famous and beautiful speech ending with the line: "Er _wird_ geliebt! Glaubt besseren Propheten!"[3] Of a personage who hardly appears at all in the novel, Gutzkow made an imperishable character, the best and most original in the drama, the aged Chief Rabbi, Ben Akiba. This old man has in reality only one conclusive speech, which he repeats again and again to Uriel and to the others: "Es war alles da." (This has all been before.) Admirable words! Ben Akiba is age, that has seen all these things before, seen the Church attacked, seen the Church triumphant, seen sceptics and champions arise, seen them humiliated, defeated, dead, and buried. The others believe that this is something new; it is all old, it all leads to no result. Ben Akiba is dogmatic conservatism in human form; he is experience, shaking its heavy head. If youth were to listen to him, despairing indifference would be the inevitable result. Uriel lets himself be persuaded to recant. He does it for his mother's and Judith's sake. His old, blind, believing mother comes to him, and in a scene which never fails to affect the audience, persuades him to recant and submit to the ignominious punishment--persuades only by her silent dignity and the strength of her love, without a single entreaty to do this or anything else for her sake. Uriel takes the step, hoping that it will remove a weight from his mother's heart and make it possible for him to marry Judith. But whilst he is still in prison preparing for the penance, his mother dies, and Judith is forced to marry Ben Jochai. He degrades himself in vain. Judith poisons herself, and he (the drama in this point keeping to fact) shoots himself. By reason of its theme, the tragedy of _Uriel Acosta_ occupies a unique place in the German literature of the day. It is a tragedy of free-thought, a drama that gives us a better idea than anything else does of the period which produced it--a period of energetic struggle for liberty, and of still more energetic oppression--and of the spirit of that Young Germany which was so gallant in advance, but so prone to defection and retractation. It is a play, too, which bears unmistakable testimony to its author's qualities of head and heart. Any one who compares Gutzkow's _Uriel Acosta_ with Heine's _Almansor_, will subscribe to the affirmation already made, that the best men of Young Germany in their best moments displayed a manly earnestness which we do not find in Heine. On the German stage _Uriel Acosta_ has now long been a favourite play. The pure style and the treatment of the subject remind us of Lessing's _Nathan der Weise_, but in energy and pathos Gutzkow in this case surpasses Lessing. In spite of some weak parts, such as the Spinoza scene, the dramatic construction is excellent. Of all Gutzkow's works, this play has had the widest circulation. It has been translated into all the Slavonic and all the Latin languages, into English, Hungarian, and Swedish. In Germany it was for a time, as Gutzkow himself aptly remarked, a sort of barometer indicating the state of public opinion. When the ecclesiastical reaction was in the ascendant, it was prohibited in many of the theatres. When there was a change of system, the prohibition was cancelled. It is significant that in Austria its performance was always permitted in the provinces, but that the Concordat with the Pope stood in the way of its being played in the Burg Theater of Vienna. As was to be expected, the play was long in reaching Denmark; it was first played there in the Nineties. After 1835 Gutzkow writes nothing childish or crude. From this time onwards he is the great, indefatigable literary worker; a student and critic who possessed the faculty of discerning and explaining the relation in which all characters, past or present, stood to the requirements and problems of his day; an acute distinguisher of the various drifts of the times; a psychologist distinguished for his understanding of individual character. His _Goethe_ (1836) is a thoughtful little work, in the first instance a protest against Menzel; his long series of portraits (_Zeitgenossen_, afterwards _Säkularbilder_) show qualities which somewhat later stood him in good stead as a novelist; his _Life of Börne_ (1840) is a tribute to the memory of that progenitor of Young Germany and a challenge to Heine, whose injudicious and ungenerous work on Börne had lowered him in the estimation of the young generation. A special interest attaches to Gutzkow's dramatic attempts from the fact that he and Laube were the first German authors of any position since the days of Kleist to connect themselves with the theatre and to win an honourable place for themselves on the German stage. Gutzkow makes a laboured beginning with sentimental dramas that no longer satisfy the public taste. His _Richard Savage, oder der Sohn einer Mutter_ (1839) is from beginning to end a high-flown extravaganza. A talented English poet, who has grown up in ignorance of his parentage, discovers his mother in a beautiful, brilliant, aristocratic woman of the world, who refuses to acknowledge him or to have anything whatever to do with him. The play is a series of representations of his fruitless attempts to win this mother's cold heart. _Werner, oder Herz und Welt_ (1840), is a pathetic, middle-class drama, turning on a theme on which Gutzkow rang many changes, the struggle in a man's heart between an old attachment and a more recently formed connection. Heinrich Werner has allowed himself to be adopted by people in a position above his own. He has been ennobled under the name of von Jordan, and has deserted a poor but charming young girl in order to marry a lady of position. But in his new, affluent circumstances, he misses his former plain, studious life, and, most of all, Marie Winter, the girl to whom he had been engaged, and whom he cannot forget. He suddenly meets her again as governess in his own house. He is long distracted between his duty to his wife and his attraction to this girl, whom he is determined to love only platonically, but whom he really loves above everything. At last things come to a crisis. The wife asserts her rights, rights that Heinrich refuses to acknowledge. His morality is a higher, a freer than hers. She "shudders at his principles." The knot is finally cut by a _deus ex machinâ_. A young friend of Heinrich's comes to an agreement with Marie that he and she will marry, and so prevent the breaking up of the family. The tragic motive is thus, we observe, deprived of its point. The first of Gutzkow's plays that it still gives one a reasonable amount of pleasure to see is _Zopf und Schwert_ ("Pigtail and Sword"), written in 1843. It is a play which has kept its place on the German stage, but which never gained a firm footing outside of Germany from the fact of its being a species of national drama. The beat of a Prussian's heart is felt in it. Gutzkow's aim was to represent Frederick William I. and his court in a comedy like those which Scribe was bringing out so successfully about the same time. The historic appreciation is, however, far from being so superficial as in Scribe's comedies. Gutzkow had an eye for the admirable as well as for the comical qualities of the miserly family tyrant, the monarch of Spartan severity. But the very fact of the play being a comedy made a really profound study of the character an impossibility. And it was not Gutzkow's habit, and still less was it Laube's, to investigate into historical characters and situations until they arrived at the historic, as opposed to the traditional truth. Their history was simply the vehicle of a more or less cleverly concocted plot. We have only to open the first volume of Carlyle's _Frederick the Great_ to find such an immensely more powerful and impressive picture of the eccentric Prussian king with his tall grenadiers, that Gutzkow's in comparison shrinks into a mild pleasantry. And we have only to look at a few pages of the Memoirs of Gutzkow's heroine, Wilhelmine of Bayreuth, to see that in the relations between her and her father there was no suggestion of comedy. But, putting aside all thought of historical correctness, we have a very pretty intrigue-play, with a historic colouring which cannot fail to appeal to lovers of Prussia. _Zopf und Schwert_ is a species of light-hearted pendant to Kleist's serious _Prins von Homburg_. Of the other plays written by Gutzkow in the Forties, _Das Urbild des Tartüffe_ ("The Prototype of Tartuffe") has been the most successful, but it is a much over-estimated work. A very charming little work is _Der Königslieutenant_, an unassuming play, written for Goethe's centenary, and treating of him in his youthful days. The long historical novels, _Die Ritter vom Geist_ ("The Knights of the Spirit"), _Der Zauberer von Rom_ ("The Roman Magician"), &c, which Gutzkow wrote during the reaction period after 1848, and which immensely strengthened his hold over the minds of his contemporaries, do not come within the scope of the present work. They were the forerunners of Spielhagen's long series of novels. Next to Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube (born in Sprottau, in Silesia, in 1806) was the most eminent member of the new group. He is a clear-cut type, a man with plenty of fresh, vigorous talent, exuberant spirits, an intuitive perception of what is effective, a gift of slight, but in most instances adequate character delineation, and, to start with, many daring but shallow and second-hand ideas. He is not devoid of feeling, nor totally devoid of earnestness, but his distinguishing quality is his brisk, energetic practicalness. Between 1826 and 1832 he studied theology at Halle and Breslau. In 1832 he embarked on the career of a journalist in Leipzig. In his unpedantic literary style, as also in his outward appearance, there was something that seemed to point to Slavonic blood in his veins. As a student he loved to go about in a Polish braided coat, and eccentric caps and cloaks of his own invention. He wrote with a fluency and vehemence, with a crude naturalness and a want of exactitude which were not German. His blood was hot and flowed quickly; he had the sanguine, choleric temperament, without a touch of melancholy. As a member of a student's union (Burschenschaft) and because he had given too free expression to his sympathy with the Revolution of July and its results in Germany, he was, in 1834, expelled from Saxony and sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in Berlin. In the introduction to his drama, _Monaldeschi_, we find an account of his life in prison, of the monotony of that beautiful summer of 1834, which he spent in his cell, without a book--nothing but a bed, a table, a stool, and a pitcher of water. He also gives an indirect and more effective description of the same experience in the Third Part of _Das junge Europa_, where Valerius, upon scraps of paper procured with the greatest difficulty, writes his impressions during a long confinement in a Prussian prison. We know what his conduct was after the Federal Council had prohibited his writings as belonging to the Young German school; but to judge him fairly we must remember that this blow came upon him immediately after his release, and that, in spite of his subsequent cautious behaviour, he was again, soon after his marriage in 1837, condemned to imprisonment for participation in the doings of the Burschenschaften. This time the punishment was mild, thanks apparently to the protection of Prince Pückler-Muskau. The place of imprisonment was a country house on the Prince's property of Muskau; for a cell he was given a hall; instead of a skylight he had eight windows, looking in three different directions. Even a short daily walk in the famous park was permitted. He might read and write as much as he chose. His wife shared his imprisonment. From this time onwards he shows extreme moderation in politics. When, in 1848, he is elected a member of the German National Assembly, he sides, not with the republican, but with the "hereditary-imperial" party. Laube makes his début in literature as a disciple of Heine. His _Reisenovellen_, a long series of volumes, are the direct offspring of the _Reisebilder_. But along with the influence of Heine we trace that of Heinse. From Heine Laube takes liveliness and ingenuity of style, and also to a certain extent the personal coxcombry by which we are sometimes very unpleasantly affected; but it is from Wilhelm Heinse, for whom he had an extreme admiration, and whose works he edited, that he derives the undisguised sensualism which displays itself in a positive cult of woman's outward charms constantly and loudly proclaimed. In Heinse's case this worship of female form and colouring, this adoration of the fleshly, is more primitive, more naïvely Bacchanalian, more sincerely religious, than in Laube's. Laube at times offends by coarseness, at times by an almost personal boastfulness of woman-killing qualities, and at times it is too perceptible that he is writing for the purpose of annoying his respectable neighbours. When, in his old age, he began to republish his youthful works, the new generation were astounded by the breaches of good taste which youthful readers some forty years before had admired, and many assented to the severe judgment which had lately been passed on him by Emil Kuh in the chapter on Young Germany contained in his book on Hebbel. But it is unfair to allow a little coarseness and want of taste here and there to keep us from estimating Laube's work in its integrity. In the _Reisenovellen_, in spite of the off-hand way in which they are written, there is little originality. At the very beginning, in the division entitled _Leipzig_, with its French sympathies and its reverence of Napoleon, there is too strong a suggestion of the _Reisebilder_. Laube, like Heine, in his childhood saw the great Emperor; so he gives us to understand, but in such an uncertain manner that we are left in doubt as to whether it was in a dream or in reality; and Laube, too, has--in the person of Gardy the dragoon--his drummer Legrand. Those who wish to get a real, full impression of what Laube was as a young man, ought to read his novel, _Das junge Europa_ (4 vols. 1833-37). A whole, long stage of his development is placed clearly before us in this now pardonably forgotten book, which retains its interest only for the historian. Its three parts--the Poets, The Soldiers, The Citizens--are three works differing very much from each other in kind and in quality. In the First Part the author is completely under the influence of Heinse's _Ardinghello_. "The Poets" is a sort of prose hymn to female beauty and free love, in the old-fashioned form of a novel in letters, which communicate the love fates of about a dozen people. When the reader has struggled through them, there is left on his mind an impression of the wild ecstatic desire of young, vigorous, hopeful men, and of the resolute self-surrender of young and daring or tender women, the impression of a generation in whose veins glows a desire for liberty--political, social, erotic--which breaks down all forms and all conventions. We see into an imaginary, romantic world, the world of Laube's youthful dreams, where there is abundance of power and of life, and of illusions as to the renovation of the world by means of revolutions of various kinds. It is a romance of beautiful bodies and beautiful souls, male and female, the essence of whose being is revolt against Christianity and against marriage. Between the First and the Second Part, a considerable change has evidently come over the author's views; he has received his impression of the strength of the reaction; he has ripened into a man. In the First Part one could hardly help mixing up the characters, for the men were only distinguished from each other by their more or less fiery, erotic, uncontrollable temperaments, the woman only by the dissimilarity of their physical charms; in the Second Part we are introduced into a world where a real struggle for national and political liberty is going on. The letter form is abandoned, and there are comparatively few characters. It is the revolt of Poland which is described; Valerius, one of the principal characters in the First Part, is led by his enthusiasm for liberty in general to join the Poles. The subject-matter is interesting, though here and there we have too much of the purely historical. The Poles as a people are described impartially and with a sure touch; their characteristics--the strong patriotic feeling inspiring high and low, the prejudices and tyranny of the nobility, the savagery and vigour of the lower classes--are depicted as they mirror themselves in the mind of the German volunteer. The distrust with which he, as a foreigner, is received, the want of liberal-mindedness in the devotees of liberty, which he observes more especially in their conduct to his friend, a Polish officer of Jewish descent, gradually dissipate the illusions which he had cherished of a golden future for Europe, the final outcome of the Revolution of July. There is a tragic tone throughout the book. We are shown how fruitless the rebellion of the Poles is, how it ends, as it was fated to end, in crushing defeat; and we are shown how the young Jew, Joel, in spite of his valiant endeavours on the battlefield to gain for himself those rights which his aristocratic countrymen enjoy, can never rise from his position as the pariah of Polish society. The woman he loves dares not give him her hand; a common peasant disdains his sympathy. After the revolt is suppressed, he puts off his uniform in despair and shoulders the pedlar's wallet. The Christians repudiate him, the Jews he himself long ago alienated by his alliance with the Christians, his humanity gives him no rights; there is nothing for it but to forget his learning, his philosophy, his scientific and military talent, and to wander from village to village, selling ribbons, as his forefathers did. This character has a special interest for Danes, as it evidently suggested to Goldschmidt some of the leading characteristics of the hero of his novel, _En Jöde_ ("A Jew"); he, too, becomes a Polish officer during the struggle for liberty, and he too, repulsed everywhere, in the bitterness of despair ends his career as a money-lender, outside the pale of society. The Third Part of _Das junge Europa_ ("The Citizens") is an inferior production. Its chief interest for us lies in what it tells us of two of the most enthusiastic, indomitable heroes of the First Part, Hippolyt and Constantin. Hippolyt is finally driven to despair by the civilisation of the modern world, which leaves no room for the great exception, but requires all to be alike small. The bold Constantin, who fought in the streets of Paris in the Days of July, makes his appearance not very many years later as a Prussian judge, inflexibly, fanatically severe in his dealings with political revolutionaries. Constantin enters into long explanations of the influences that have wrought the change in his convictions (this character was evidently drawn from the life); but the author is still so possessed by the ideals of his own youth, that he makes this man commit suicide in despair at having been unfaithful to these ideals. From the year 1849 till his death in the Eighties, Laube, as is well known, devoted all his powers to the theatre. He speedily became the best and most highly esteemed theatrical manager of Germany and Austria. As such he always retained a preference for the French drama. What he himself wrote for the stage is what will keep his name longest in remembrance. Of the many historical dramas which he produced, the most important--_Monaldeschi_ (1834), _Struensee_ (1844), and _Die Karlsschüler_ (1847)--are suggestive of the ideals of Young Germany as they took shape in Laube's mind. The last-mentioned play became popular and is still often put on the stage; the others are effective pieces in a style that is now obsolete. The character of Monaldeschi is a vigorous conception. He is the bold, unscrupulous adventurer, who has no higher aim than to make his way and to enjoy life to the full, but who understands the meaning of power, and desires to use his power worthily--the Hippolyt of _Das junge Europa_ in historic costume. With Queen Christina's more complex feminine character, Laube has not been so successful, though his representation of her has elements out of which a good actress could make a telling part. But the play as a whole is overweighted by the intolerable sentimentality of the love scenes (Monaldeschi has a romantic attachment to a certain Sylva Brahe), and it suffers as a work of art from its author's dread of offending a Philistine public's sense of propriety. The real relations between Christina and Monaldeschi are smoothed down into indistinctness. The sharp edges of historic fact are filed away to make the subject fit into the mould of theatrical Romanticism. In _Struensee_, the second of Laube's dramas in which the action passes at a Scandinavian court, still greater liberties have been taken with history and historical characters. Laube makes Struensee the noble, liberty-loving reformer, whose only fault is an excessive German humanity, which shrinks from shedding blood. Had he only been a trifle less high-minded and scrupulous, he might easily have remained in power. The weakness that is his ruin is his chivalrous, platonic devotion to Caroline Mathilde, who returns the sentiment in an equally innocent manner. Christian VII. is represented as an estimable, somewhat taciturn monarch, subject to attacks of melancholy. Struensee's fall is brought about entirely by Germans, who are partly envious of him, partly enraged because he will not comply with their unreasonable wishes; and the bitter moral of the play is, that the worst enemies of a German intellectual hero are his own countrymen--Germans have always had to suffer most from Germans, who show their want of patriotism even in their relations with foreigners. Quite apart from the historic inaccuracy of the character, the sentimentally erotic Struensee, with "his enthusiasm for all that is noble and beautiful," is a very impossible parvenu minister of state. Laube has tampered with facts to the extent of representing Struensee's death as the result of a shot fired, by order of Guldberg, at the moment of his arrest in the castle on the 17th of January 1772. The chief reason, and at the same time excuse, for all this perversion of facts lay in the necessity for presenting them in such a shape that the censorship might not forbid the play on account of the possibility of its giving offence to a friendly power. We get some idea of how severe this censorship was, when we read that, in spite of Laube's precautions, the performance of _Struensee_ was for many years prohibited in Prussia, out of consideration for the feelings of the Danish royal family. It is, nevertheless, impossible to understand why such a perfectly harmless and studiously, punctiliously, inoffensive play as _Die Karlsschüler_ should, immediately after its appearance in 1846, have been prohibited throughout Austria, Prussia, Hanover, Würtemberg, Hesse-Cassel, all the Grand Duchies and several of the Duchies. It is in reality nothing whatever but a panegyric on the youthful Schiller, in a representation of the well-known difficulties he got into as a young regimental surgeon in the service of Duke Karl of Würtemberg, ending with his flight from Stuttgart to Mannheim. It forms a parallel to Gutzkow's Goethe comedy, _Der Königslieutenant_, which it surpasses in dramatic vigour. In this case, too, Laube has sacrificed strict historic truth. Duke Karl's character is softened and toned down exactly as King Frederick William's was in Gutzkow's _Zopf und Schwert_. This is not only art which is compelled to be cautious, but art which has come into being under the oppression of a tradition which has insinuated itself into the very disposition of the artist. But the disposition was a cheerful, buoyant one, and the hand that wrote these scenes was light and skilful. Something of the lustre that surrounds its hero's name is shed upon the play. It is probable that as long as Schiller retains his great popularity in Germany, Germans will enjoy seeing this transcription of his youthful history--though they know many facts concerning that history now that were not known at the time _Die Karlsschüler_ was written. Such a play is not calculated to produce much effect out of Germany. After Gutzkow's and Laube's, Mundt's is the name that occurs most frequently when mention is made of the leaders of Young Germany. It is about the year 1835 that Mundt is most distinctly the mouthpiece of the feelings and ideas of that school. In 1835 he published _Charlotte Stieglitz, ein Denkmal_, the only one of his historical delineations which had any real influence on the minds of the youth of the day. This work, no doubt chiefly owing to its subject, but also to its pathetic, affectionately reverent treatment of that subject, took thousands of hearts by storm. In the same year appeared his _Madonna, Unterhaltungen mit einer Heiligen_ ("Converse with a Saint"), which, more than any other of his works, gives expression to the sentiments of Young Germany, and a clue to the character of its author. Theodor Mundt, born at Potsdam in 1808, was a man capable of enthusiastic, yet clear-sighted devotion to causes and to persons. He had Wienbarg's enthusiastic temperament (though not his bravery), with a much more highly gifted, many-sided mind. And yet there was no edge or pungency in his wit, no grace in his whimsicality, no method in his works, no conciseness in his style. His book on Charlotte Stieglitz is the only one of his works that has survived him, and it has done so thanks to its subject. He could be caustic and biting and unjust, as weak natures are apt to be, but even his most caustic tirades are not the expression of any warlike inclination; they are only penned in self-defence and self-assertion, are called forth by some misunderstanding on the part of an opponent, and are no more dangerous than the thrusts of an angry wether. It is surprising to the modern reader that a work like Mundt's _Madonna_ can ever have been considered a dangerous book. To understand how this could be, we must keep in mind that those in power at the time of its publication stood in terror of shadows. It is, however, a book which must not be overlooked by any one who is making a study of the period, for there is something typical in its expression of the thoughts and enthusiasms of the youth of the day. In its very formlessness, _Madonna_ is characteristic of Mundt, and of those whose literary taste was identical with his. It contains prose lyric effusions, descriptions of travel, personal confessions, world-revolutionising theories of the rehabilitation of the flesh by means of a hitherto unknown mystic creed--all this grouped round a central female figure and interwoven with her story. The book opens with a "post-horn symphony," well written in the old Romantic style, but not Romantic in tendency. It is a glorification of "movement," the shibboleth which Mundt invented and fell in love with. Movement is to him what progress and the struggle for freedom were to others--the watchword of the new era. He talks of the party of movement; the new literature is to him the literature of movement (_Bewegungslitteratur_); in a postscript to _Madonna_ he calls that book _ein Bewegungsbuch_. We perceive that the expression is perfectly neutral and innocent. The only readable part of _Madonna_ nowadays is the heroine's narrative of her life experiences. The author meets her in a little Bohemian village; when he first sees her, walking in a Roman Catholic procession, he is tremendously impressed by her extraordinary beauty. Later in the same day he accidently makes his way into her father's cottage, wins the narrow-minded, bigoted old man's heart (in a very improbable manner) by the unction with which he tells him the story of Casanova, who had at one time lived in that neighbourhood in the castle of Dux, receives an invitation to supper, and spends part of the night in a sentimental conversation with the daughter, whom he discovers to be a woman deserving, in his estimation, the name of saint--a secular or worldly saint (_eine Weltheilige_)--and who, in that capacity, embraces and kisses him, weeping hot tears. He is obliged to leave the neighbourhood next morning, but soon afterwards receives from her an immoderately lengthy letter--_Die Bekenntnisse einer weltlichen Seele_ ("The Confessions of a Worldly Soul")--in which she makes a frank revelation of herself and all her experiences. This beautiful girl is an unfortunate victim. She has been enticed by a relative, a depraved woman, to leave Teplitz, her native town, where she lived in poverty with her parents, and come to Dresden. There, under the pretext of providing for her future, this woman educated her for a rich debauchee, a man of high position, whose prey she was to become as soon as she was grown up. The time comes; all preparations are made; at night she is locked into a room with her benefactor and pursuer, whom she loathes. She forcibly breaks away from him, manages to get out, and, in her despair, seeing a light in the room of a young theological student who lives in the same house, takes refuge with him. She has long loved this young man and he her. Now with chaste passion she gives herself to him, and he cannot find it in his heart to repulse her. But on the following day, repenting as a Christian of his sin, he commits suicide. The young girl has to make her way on foot from Dresden to her native village in Bohemia, where, after her experience of the life and variety of a great town, she pines in sadness and loneliness. Her old father, with whom she lives, is a cripple and a fanatically bigoted Roman Catholic. The point in this story evidently lies in the innocence of the young girl's self-abandonment, innocence which the world calls guilt. To the author his heroine is a saint, a Madonna, the type of lovable womanliness. She is a carnal saint, undoubtedly; but it is his creed that we can conceive of nothing more holy, that there exists nothing more spiritual, than the carnal. And he propounds a neither new nor remarkable, but somewhat peculiarly formulated theory of the necessity for a fusion of flesh and spirit, for the abolition of the distinction between spiritual and carnal. "The world and the flesh must be reinstated in their rights, in order that the spirit may no longer have to live in the sixth storey, as it does in Germany." And he brings the narration of a very lengthy Bohemian legend of Libussa to a close with the jubilant cry: "The free woman is sovereign; let her decide, let her speak, for she has the right to speak! And sweet is the happiness of free love!" Mundt began as a Hegelian, but his Hegelianism has, as we see, turned into a sort of fantastic mysticism. Christ declared that his kingdom is not of this world, and yet he came to us and himself became world. God, out of love, entered into the flesh, and the world's flesh has become holy since it became God. Hence the kingdom of God flourishes over the wide earth, and yet it is, as Christ declared, not of this world, that is, not of the world which is flesh only, and which sets its face against the free "movement" of thought. Like an insufficiently trained pedant, Mundt involves himself in lengthy and confused polemics against "the beyond" which is without "the here," and against "the here" which refuses to know anything of "the beyond." He ends by enthusiastically proclaiming the praises of what he calls "the image" (as distinct from both spiritless matter and immaterial spirit): "O ye philosophers! what you want is the image.... I contend for the rehabilitation of the image."[4] If there ever was a man unsuited to be a leader and teacher of other men, it was this unctuous proclaimer of self-evident truths. _Madonna_ was followed by a long series of historical novels (a still longer series came from the pen of Mundt's wife, who wrote under the pseudonym of Louise Mühlbach), and a considerable number of critical and historical writings. Amongst these latter one of the best is his _Geschichte der Litteratur der Gegenwart_ ("History of Present Day Literature"), 1842, because in it he treats a subject with which he has a thorough acquaintance; but it, too, like all his other works, is formless, full of undigested material, and spoiled by would-be profundity. He reads, for instance, a special meaning into the fact that Hegel died of cholera. Hegel's system, he writes, was, like Casimir Périer's, a universally levelling _juste-milieu_ system: hence he, like Casimir Périer, was fated to die of this universally levelling malady. It was a malady which must be regarded as the physical expression of the general anguish of the times. Troubled and restless, the body had attacked its own intestines, and was at last obliged to pay the penalty of its craving to know and understand itself, by performing the last possible process of self-examination, that of vomiting itself up.[5] In a work entitled _Das junge Deutschland_, consisting for the most part of letters to the publisher, Feodor Wehl, the well-known theatrical manager, has endeavoured to give the reading world a more favourable idea of Mundt than that prevalent in our days; and he has succeeded in producing the impression that Mundt was a man with excellent intentions, many acquirements, and no small degree of enthusiasm in the causes that were sympathetic to him. He is not, and never will be considered, a great writer. The authors of the second rank, the rearguard of Young Germany, men like Gustav Kühne, Hermann Marggraff, and Alexander Jung, are in reality his equals. Their gifts lie, like his, partly in the direction of journalism, partly in that of creative authorship. They are men of character, cultivation, and distinct literary ability, animated by the same fundamental ideas as the men in the front ranks. The reader who takes up Kühne's _Weibliche und männliche Charaktere_ (1838) will be agreeably surprised by the vigour and brilliancy of his delineations, and by his accurate appreciations of public personages. His heroines are those of his school--Rahel, Bettina, Charlotte Stieglitz; but he sees them with his own eyes and describes them with unpretentious enthusiasm. Among the poets, who are the subjects of his laudatory criticism, are not only the great Radicals of a former generation like Shelley, not only all the singers of freedom of his own day, from Anastasius Grün to Karl Beck, but tranquil spirits like Rückert and Chamisso. He is not remarkably original, but he is impartial and unprejudiced. The same can be said of Hermann Marggraff. Though his book _Deutschlands jüngste Litteratur- und Culturepoche_ (1839), is written in the spirit of Young Germany, its author always reserves his right to perfectly independent judgment. He is a thoughtful, earnest critic and a good writer, always natural, at times brilliant. His errors are much more due to Conservative tendencies than to excessive modernity. Unless we single out the _enfants perdus_ of this new school--and there are such in every school--it cannot be said that its members gave any real occasion for the violent attacks made upon it. It is not Young Germany, but its assailants, who uniformly show the worst taste and exaggerate most grossly. Such an assailant was Tieck, now an elderly man. Several of his tales contain thrusts at Young Germany; that in which it is satirised most directly is _Der Wassermensch_; but the caricature is so overdone that it loses all effect. Florheim, the representative of Young Germany, is half crazy with enthusiasm for Frenchmen and Jews. He poses as the democrat and friend of freedom in a manner which we should consider foolish in an ordinary schoolboy. He maintains that in every concert programme the Marseillaise ought to have a place, to keep people from forgetting what is the one thing above all others. He would have portraits of the great heroes of liberty, Mirabeau, Washington, Franklin, Kosciuszko, &c, inserted in every printed book, even in cookery books. In every almanac, if he could have his will, July should be printed in red letters, to keep the glorious Revolution of July in ever fresh remembrance. And he hopes that all the truly noble will unite in insisting that the nouns, prince, lord, king, count, squire, &c, shall be written without capital letters, in order to show contempt for their signification. When the Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), the representative of intelligent Conservatism, asks Florheim how he and his ("Sie, die Sie sich das junge Deutschland nennen"--you who call yourselves Young Germany) hope to carry out their plans and plots against the existing order of things, he answers naïvely: "By perpetual abuse of all that stands in our way." And he goes on to show how it was thus they treated Goethe in the last years of his age--an assertion which is quite contrary to fact--and how, now that they are the "party of movement" and already in possession of the most important newspapers, they are in a position to form an invisible and yet open league spread over the whole of Germany, which shall ruin every author who is not of their way of thinking, and make the reputation of its own members by means of unscrupulous mutual laudations.[6] The reality was very different from this. The caricature has the double fault of not being like and not being amusing. Mundt took an ingenious revenge some years later by suggesting the performance of Tieck's fairy-tale comedies in Berlin. [1] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 1874, ii. 174, &c. [2] Cursed be the friend who is faithful to thee in trouble! Never shall a woman's loving heart cherish thee. [3] He _is_ beloved! Trust better prophets! [4] Th. Mundt: _Madonna_, pp. 142, 274, 326, 374, 406. [5] Mundt: _Litteratur der Gegenwart_, p. 353. [6] L. Tieck: _Gesammelte Novellen_, Breslau, 1855, i. 38, 79. XXXIII RAHEL, BETTINA, CHARLOTTE STIEGLITZ The representation of the relation between literature and politics, the history of literary events, and the delineation of the characters and work of the most eminent of the men who constituted Young Germany, do not sufficiently reveal to us the spirit, the psychical condition of the time. What is done, and what happens, is its outward manifestation. In books, effect is a first consideration; what is represented in them must be to a certain extent exaggerated, thrown into relief, if only for the sake of distinctness. To find the clue to the intellectual life _lived_ at any given period, we must get as close as possible to the living, feeling, individual, and we must not neglect to supplement the impression received from an observation of the leading men of the time by a study of its typical women. It is where there is more feeling than action, where, in spite of great originality, the formative, the fashioning power is too slight entirely to separate the production from the personality, that the student comes into closest contact with the life-springs of a period. A letter from a highly gifted woman tells us more of the living human being and its real emotions than a political speech or a tragedy. Not one of the few great women who ruled men's minds during the period under consideration produced a work of art; not one of them even attempted to. They neither wrote novels nor essays. Their literary influence was a directly personal influence, and their power of stirring men's minds was evidently due to the fact that something of the inmost essence of the period was expressed in their personalities. Their natures are unplastic, evasive; the contours of their spiritual lives are blurred and indistinct; this makes it difficult to delineate their characters, but makes it all the easier to feel the pulse of the time in their utterances. They help us to arrive at the result that the idea which shapes the lives of the most noble characters of this period, and which makes itself felt in the resistance they offered to the worship of rule and the tyranny of custom, is the idea that the one course worthy of a thinking, feeling, human being is independently and unconventionally to interpret human life, human relations, for himself, and to base his conduct on his own interpretation. This is not a new idea; it originated in Germany with Herder, descended from him to all the preachers of the gospel of Nature, including that Heinse who had such a strong influence upon some of the leaders of Young Germany, but was more especially developed and applied in all the relations of life by Goethe. A careful study of the characters of the most remarkable women of the time shows that the subterranean, hidden secret of the period between 1810 and 1838, what had happened deepest down, was that Goethe's theory of life had, point by point, displaced the Church theory and taken possession of all the men of great instincts, of all the really gifted minds of the day. Rahel Varnhagen von Ense is, beyond all comparison, the greatest of the women who occupied the attention of intellectual Germany in the Thirties and Forties. She died in March 1833, and in 1835 her husband published the three volumes of selections from her letters and journals which revealed to the great reading public what manner of woman she had been. This publication was followed by many others, of which she was the main theme. A less innately great, but much more talented woman than Rahel was Bettina von Arnim, who, in 1835, published _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child), a work which created a great sensation and was most favourably received. Rahel's name is remembered by the quiet, powerful influence she steadily exercised for so many years; Bettina's shines with the lustre of her brilliant talent and sparkling wit; the third woman who made a deep impression on the men and women of that day is remembered by one action, her suicide. This was Charlotte Stieglitz, who committed suicide in December 1834, and whose biography, diaries, and letters were published by Theodor Mundt in 1835. She was at once made the subject of studies and panegyrics by the new school. Gustav Kühne, in particular, wrote an admirable notice of her. It was her death which, as has been already mentioned, suggested Gutzkows _Wally_. Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen (family name originally Levin, afterwards Robert) was born in Berlin in 1771. She would thus seem to belong to quite another epoch than that of the Revolution of July; but it was not until after her death that she became a public personage, and entered, by means of her written words, into relations with the literary public. She was one of those rare beings whose inexhaustible vigour and freshness of mind enable them to understand everything and every one, to sympathise with the most dissimilar individuals and tendencies, to penetrate to the core of things; and whose wide and untiring sympathy wins for them all their life long the affection and admiration of the élite of their time, young and old. Rahel received the same homage from Karl Gutzkow that she had received from Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, from Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt. She had shown herself a fervid patriot during the war of liberation, superintending hospitals in Berlin and Prague; and she was admired by Heinrich Heine, who dedicated the Lyric Intermezzo in the _Buch der Lieder_ to her when she was fifty. She, who had been the intimate of the famous men of the beginning of the century, the Prince de Ligne, Fichte, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Fouqué, and many others, surprised every one by her enthusiastic appreciation of Victor Hugo's _Les Orientales_, and the writings of the Saint-Simonists. There is something great about such a life, undramatic though it be. It gives us a feeling of the many-sidedness of her character to remember the long list of persons, differing from each other in every possible way, with whom she was on intimate terms. There are depths in her nature which still surprise us, and vaguenesses quite incomprehensible to the modern mind. The magic of her nature lay in the spoken word, the momentary impression, the opportune utterance: so it is not easy to reconstruct. A strong influence emanated from her, yet her real life was introspective; she was a woman of distinctly aristocratic instincts and sentiments, and yet so tender hearted that her sympathies extended far and wide. The daughter of a rich Jewish merchant, as a girl plain-looking and without talent of any description, she grows up in her father's house in Berlin at a time when as yet the Jews had none of the rights of citizens. At the age of twenty-five she has already become an influential member of the best society of the capital, and from the age of thirty till her death her house is the intellectual centre of Berlin, and one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Her great attraction was her perfect originality and unconventionality. All human beings desire and love to see themselves mirrored in the mind of a greater human being, all crave for sympathy, all would fain be understood. And those who approached Rahel--princes and nobles, diplomats and philosophers, poets and scientists--felt instinctively that this young girl with the slight, graceful figure, the beautifully formed limbs, the thick, waving hair surrounding a face with an expression of suffering, but with a deep, steadfast look in its dark eyes, was worthy of their confidence, and this for the one and sufficient reason, that she was innocent of all prejudices. She gladly associates with a charming hetæra like Pauline Wiese, Prince Louis Fredinand's friend; is her and her cynical husband's and her princely lover's confidante. She has a sincere regard for a reactionary sensualist like Friedrich Gentz, warmly congratulates him when he, at the age of sixty, wins the affections of Fanny Elsler, sees in him the distinguished prose writer and the politician who had been of national importance at a critical moment. Human beings are to her, in Goethe's sense, natural products. That she, with her strict personal morality and Liberal tendencies, should have been able to rise to such a height of freedom from prejudice and gain such a wide horizon, was primarily due to her having been born in a sort of sanctuary outside the pale of society, that is to say in the house of a wealthy Berlin Jew. In intolerant, stiff old Prussia, the alien, despised, hooknosed money-lenders had sat behind their counters for some centuries, with no thought for anything but money--piling thaler upon thaler, buying bills, and lending money even to princes. With all their wealth they were ignorant, orthodox, superstitious. But during the period of enlightenment the influence of Moses Mendelssohn thoroughly aroused them. Their piety became a noble rationalism, and they comprehended the meaning of knowledge and culture. By the close of the eighteenth century they were giving their sons a perfectly new training, and society was also beginning to look upon these sons as men to whom reparation for a wrong was due. It was in the generation of these sons that the Jewish houses all at once opened their long closed doors, revealing interiors which in no way resembled the cramped middle-class German houses--spacious rooms with rich Oriental carpets and hangings; here and there a valuable painting, made over to father or grandfather by some prince in pecuniary difficulties; on the dinner tables gold and silver plate, the finest crystal sparkling upon lace-edged linen, choice viands, and the rarest wines. The mistress of the house and her daughters had received a higher and more refined education than others in their rank of life; they were deeply interested in theology, philosophy, and music; they had developed quickly under the influence of the mixed society which now frequented their house.[1] For here, as upon neutral ground, met all those whom society usually separated, members of all its different ranks and castes, and many whom it altogether excluded; German and foreign actresses had the entrance of no other middle-class houses in Berlin; here they were received on the same footing as the other guests. The princes frequented no other middle-class houses, if it were for no other reason than that the company they met there bored them. To these houses they came, attracted by the easy tone and by the wit of the women. It was a refined Bohemia. It was the first development of the cosmopolitan spirit in the Berlin of old Prussia. It is in these circles that Rahel grows up, early distinguished by her friendship with Prince Louis Ferdinand, the hero of the young generation of that day, son of Frederick the Great's youngest brother. He was about Rahel's own age, chivalrous, artistic, loose in his morals, brave to foolhardiness, a first-rate musician, and a first-rate cavalry general. Goethe describes him in his book on the campaign of 1793. Like all the princes of that day, he had been educated like a Frenchman, to the extent (as we know from some of his published letters) of not being able to spell German correctly; nevertheless he was an ardent enemy of Napoleon, and burned to match his troops against the great Emperor's. Like the Prince of Homburg in his day, he disobeyed an order to retreat, and, infuriated by the defeat at Saalfeld, refusing to flee, refusing to yield, was cut down by the French hussars. He confided his wild love adventures to Rahel, and found comfort, when suffering from the treachery of a faithless lady love, in tranquil, serious conversation with his sisterly friend. But Rahel was not always in a position to comfort others. In her young days she stood sorely in need of comfort herself. By nature she was of such an irritably nervous temperament that as a child she was with difficulty kept in life: "Let the air be too dense or too rare, too warm or too cold, and I am ill at once. And the slightest excitement has a still worse effect. I cannot imagine any one more sensitive." In nearly all her letters, immediately after the date, we find a detailed description of the weather and temperature: "Friday, 14th March, 1828.--A grey day, with south-west wind, damp and yet spring-like, though not inviting for a walk. Pigeons are flying. Every now and then a blue window appears in the sky; at this moment sunlight is coming through one of them." "23rd March, 1829.--The sun has broken through the clouds and is shining brightly; a cold, sharp, unmistakable north-east wind; impossible to go to the Thiergarten, where there is still ice and it is as cold as in a cellar." "17th April,--Noon; spring weather after rain; the trees turning green. To me the best time of the whole year--no flies or mosquitoes, no heat. Spring is approaching, wafting to us a thousand memories, and a thousand hopes which can never be fulfilled, but which are a necessity to us." Such natures deserve and arouse as much compassion as admiration. Her friend, W. von Burgsdorf, writes to her: "When I saw you for the first time, it struck me at once that you must have been educated by long suffering." It was true; she had had an infirm body, a melancholy youth, a severe father, and had early suffered humiliation. Her Jewish birth was the cause of great unhappiness to her--an unhappiness almost unworthy of her; she calls it a sword thrust into her heart by a supernatural being at the moment of her birth. Not one fibre in her nature attached her to the religious community to which by birth she belonged. The memory of its fanaticism and of the fanatical enmity displayed towards it was still fresh. As lately as 1756 the Jewish community in Berlin had expelled a child from the town for having carried a book for a Christian. And on the other side, even Moses Mendelssohn could not go out with his children without having stones thrown at them. With all the power of his intellect and will, Rahel's father had striven to overcome the sickly child's independence of character, and only her unusual elasticity and strength of mind enabled her to preserve her originality. When young she felt as if she had suffered so much there could not possibly be anything left in her to be bent or broken. It was inevitable that a woman with this passionate nature should love passionately and should suffer agony through her love. And she did not escape her fate. Twice, when she loved most ardently, she experienced as it were the feeling of being struck down with an assassin's knife and of living for years with the knife in the wound. At the age of twenty-four she formed a very strong attachment to Count Karl von Finckenstein, the son of a Prussian minister, a man a year younger than herself. They became engaged, and Rahel lived for some years solely for this love. Finckenstein was good-hearted, very much in love, and sincerely devoted to her, but his character was weak. He told her what he had to bear from his family, whose pride revolted against an alliance with a person of inferior position, and who were endeavouring to make him give her up. Rahel's pride was deeply wounded, and she gave him back his word. In character and intellect his superior, she could easily have vanquished his scruples if she had made up her mind to do so, but instead of this she set him free at once, and he was weak enough, attached though he was to her, to take the liberty she offered. She never overcame this first great humiliation. Three years passed, and she fell in love again, this time passionately, soul and senses, and the feeling was returned. Her second engagement was to Don Raphael Urquijo, a particularly attractive young attaché of the Spanish embassy in Berlin. The engagement lasted for a year. They were passionately attached to each other, but their characters were too unlike, he was too decidedly her inferior. He tormented and insulted her with his jealousy to such an extent that to preserve her self-respect she parted from him; but she did it with a feeling of crushing, maddening grief, a feeling of loneliness, of being left exposed to all the coldness of life without that shelter from it which she, with her woman's heart, could so ill dispense with. After Finckenstein's desertion, it had been proposed that she should make a _mariage de convenance_. Her answer was: "I cannot marry, for I cannot lie. Do not imagine that I am proud of myself for this; I cannot do it, just as I cannot play the flute.... He must have no prejudices, otherwise I could not stand it.... And he must not be stupid and compel me to lie and pretend that I admire him. I must be able to say exactly what I choose." For long the needs of her heart were only incompletely satisfied, and she applied herself all the more ardently to intellectual pursuits. It was a great hindrance to her that she had acquired so little knowledge. She herself talked about her dense ignorance. She was, of course, very far from being ignorant, but so much is certain, that she never acquired any real insight into what science is, and never thought a scientific thought. She had been taught as little Jewish dogma as history and geography. She says that she grew up like a tree in the forest, and that it was as impossible for her to learn religion as anything else. So she evolved a religion of her own, which, as Karl Hillebrand correctly observes, has something akin with Schopenhauer's doctrine; her ideas of a will in nature, of the misery of the world, of compassion as the only source of morality, are akin to his. She was a great admirer of Angelus Silesius and Saint-Martin; like Goethe she was an ardent Pantheist, She copies the German mystic's lines: "Alle Tugenden sind eine Tugend. Schau, alle Tugenden sind ein ohn' Unterschied. Willst du den Namen hör'n? Sie heisst Gerechtigkeit,"[2] and writes beneath them: "Weil sie Wahrheit ist Einfachheit, Unparteilichkeit, Selbstlosigkeit, Austheilung für Alle."[3] She saw everything in its unity, its entirety. There was something of the Delphic priestess in her nature. It is a pity that her words, disconnected from her personality as we have them, are so often dark oracular sayings. She was, says Karl Hillebrand, full of leniency towards the culpable, of sympathy with the slighted and humble, of compassion for the poor; the one thing she despised was correct mediocrity, and her contempt for this she displayed openly, even when by so doing she made enemies. Time passed, and she grew into the old maid; but years made no change in her appearance and did not diminish her wonderful power. For ten years she carried on a tender correspondence with her future husband, Varnhagen von Ense. He was fourteen years younger than herself, was first a brave officer, then a clever diplomatist, and finally an excellent, very aggressive writer; he had to distinguish himself in both war and peace before he could appear in the character of her fiancé without being entirely overlooked. She married him when she was forty-two, and had a perfectly happy married life for nineteen years. Rahel owes her literary distinction to the fact that she was the first in the literary circles of Berlin to comprehend and to proclaim Goethe's real greatness. Long before any decisive opinion on this vital question in German culture had been arrived at, Rahel, fully persuaded of Goethe's genius, completely under the spell of its power, proclaimed to all with whom she came into contact that this man was not to be compared with other men; that he stood alone--the loftiest intellect, the wisest counsellor and judge in all the affairs of life. This was at a time when Goethe as an author was only one among the crowd, and when others were ranked high above him. Long before the criticism of the brothers Schlegel established his position beyond dispute, Rahel had introduced the cult of the great, uncomprehended, misjudged genius in her circle in Berlin, had everywhere proclaimed the praises of his illuminating word, and declared his name to be a holy, a consecrated name. In 1795, when she is only twenty-four, she is so fortunate as to meet him at Teplitz. We learn from a letter from David Veit to Rahel, what Goethe said about her: "Yes, that now is a girl of remarkable intellect, a girl who is always thinking--and as to feeling--where is the like of her to be found? We were constantly together, and were on the most friendly, intimate terms." To Franz Horn, Goethe said: "She is a girl with a loving heart; she feels everything very strongly, and yet expresses herself very gently--we admire the originality and are charmed by the amiability." When Rahel is told this, she writes: "How can he know that I have feeling? Never in my life was it so difficult for me to show myself as I am. But why write thus? He is Goethe. And what he feels and says is true. I believe what he says of me.... When you see him, Horn, greet him from one who has always worshipped him, idolised him, even when no one else praised, understood, admired him. And if he wonders at a staid young woman sending him such a greeting, make him understand that her excessive reverence for him prevented her telling him how she reveres him. Tell him that this is not affectation, but true, tender feeling (_Pflaumenweichheit_). It is not my fault that others affect what in my case is serious earnest. Am I not right? Yes, yes! I worship him." Nothing further happens; there is not the slightest attempt on Rahel's part to keep up the acquaintance with Goethe, by correspondence, or any other means. She never mentions his person, only his genius. Twenty years pass, during which she sees nothing of him. Once, in 1811, Varnhagen sends Goethe some appreciations of his poetry written by Rahel. Goethe is much struck by them, pronounces the author to have a remarkable gift of instantaneously grasping, comprehending, connecting, helping, completing; but he never learns--Rahel having forbidden Varnhagen to tell--who the author of the manuscript is. In 1815, in the neighbourhood of Frankfort, Rahel sees Goethe again. There is something touching about this meeting. Goethe is now sixty-six. He is visiting his friend, Marianne von Willemer (the Suleika of the _Diwan_) at Willemer's country house "die Gerbermühle." Rahel, who is in Frankfort, accidentally sees him driving with his hosts, and in her sudden joyful surprise calls loudly: "There is Goethe." Twenty years, as already mentioned, have passed. It is a quarter past nine on the morning of the 8th of September. Rahel, who had been suffering from an affection of the eyes, has got up later than usual, and is standing half-dressed, brushing her teeth, when the landlord comes to say that a gentleman wishes to see her. Her maid hands her his card. It is Goethe. And out of pure respect, that he may not have to wait, she does not take time to dress herself properly, to make herself look presentable: "I told them to ask him to walk into the sitting-room, and only kept him waiting the time that it took me to put on a dressing-gown (_Unterrock_). It was a black quilted dressing-gown. I sacrificed myself so as not to keep him waiting one minute. It was my one thought. I did not even excuse my dress; I did nothing but thank him. I did not excuse myself, for it seemed to me that he must know that _I_ obliterated myself, that _he_ was my one consideration. Such was--alas!--the first impulse of my heart. Now, with the most passionate, most comical, most torturing remorse, I think otherwise." The feeling of being unsuitably, unbecomingly dressed, depressed her; she said nothing that was worthy of her. After all these years of love for him, of living in him, and longing for him, she saw him once and once only in private for a few minutes, and this was the turn things took. "But you must hear to the end how ridiculous I was," she writes to Varnhagen. "When he had gone I dressed most carefully and beautifully. I wanted to make up for everything. I put on a lovely white dress with a high collar, a lace veil, my Moscow shawl.... Now I can say as Prince Louis wrote: 'My market value has risen ten thousand thalers. Goethe has visited me.'" Rahel, after twenty years of waiting, after the worship of a lifetime, receiving Goethe in a quilted dressing-gown rather than keep him waiting ten minutes--this every one will confess to be a supreme expression of feminine heroism. After the perusal of many volumes of Rahel literature, this scene is what remains in one's mind as definitely characterising her. It gives the measure of her reverence, her understanding, and her capability of overcoming even the most justifiable vanity of her sex. It is to be regretted that a being with such rare attributes should have been entirely destitute of talent, of all creative, plastic power. Her ingenious and profound thoughts are scattered, as mere observations, throughout private letters and records which otherwise are of little interest to us nowadays. Probably none but enthusiastic devotees of the women's rights theories are capable of reading much of her at a time. Her nature was not the artistic nature. Its essence was truthfulness. She herself says: "In the great universal misery of this world, I have consecrated myself to one God, truth; and every time I have been saved, it has been by him." She was a staunch, reliable friend, yet, even at the risk of sinking in the estimation of others, she frankly and without shame confessed when the feeling of friendship had ceased to exist. Closely connected with her truthfulness was her simplicity; she made no pretence of being above common weaknesses, no secret of her love of sweets and her keen interest in the latest Paris fashions. And she was fortunate enough to feel what she deserved to feel, an undisturbed inward harmony, partly innate, partly acquired, a perfect consistency of her spiritual life with her convictions. This was what gave her her great and justifiable self-confidence. "Pedantry cannot exist within thirty miles of where I am," she used to say. We have seen how great her moral tolerance was; in intellectual matters she was equally forbearing. She neither demanded moral purity nor marked ability in those she esteemed; what she did demand was unaffectedness. She was unique in her keen recognition and appreciation of whatever was natural and original, however unassuming; and she herself, in spite of her searching intellect, was as naïve and fresh in perception and expression as a gifted child. When she was at the zenith of her reputation she was obliged to make herself unapproachable, to surround herself with all sorts of social barricades, that she might be free to choose her associates. She invariably chose individuals of markedly original character. One of her intimates, Count Tilly, writes to her: "I have a thousand polite messages to give you before I close. One person admires you; a second is devoted to you; a third is astonished by your words of wisdom; a fourth is grieved to say farewell to you, even when it is only a letter that must be brought to a close. It is I, myself, who am all these different persons." This little pleasantry serves to give us an idea of the varied impressions she produced. Rahel often reflected on the subject of originality. She writes: "If a person were to say, 'You imagine it is easy to be original--on the contrary, it costs no end of trouble and exertion,' he would be thought crazy. And yet the assertion would be a true one. Every one could be original, if only people did not carelessly cram their heads with half-digested maxims, which they pour forth again as carelessly." There had been eminent and interesting women in German intellectual society before Rahel. The latest were Caroline, Dorothea, and those others known to fame through the Romanticists. Rahel is the first great modern German woman, and the first to be completely conscious of her originality.[4] The pursuit of originality in her day was not without its accompanying danger. It is not the danger of affectation that I allude to. In all days and times there have been affected creatures who imagine that they are original when they help themselves to soup with their shoes. But the perpetual self-inspection and self-examination prevalent in Rahel's day produced a dangerous tendency to impute singularity to very ordinary feelings and impressions, a liability to become unaffectedly unnatural, like the beautiful Henriette Herz and many of her friends, whose outpourings have a haunting flavour of lamp-oil and ink. The fire-writing of originality is something very different. This is to be found in Bettina's _Goethe's Correspondence with a Child_. Bettina's letters are written in the fiery characters, the "singing flames" of passion. Bettina von Arnim, a sister of Clemens Brentano, wife of Achim von Arnim, by family and marriage connected with the Romanticists, nevertheless belongs as an authoress to the Young German school. Rahel admired and worshipped Goethe timidly, with a beating heart, a quiet, dignified seriousness. Bettina's admiration showed itself in an insinuating, half-sensuous, half-intellectual devotion, a determined bur-like adhesiveness, and flights of the wildest enthusiasm. In 1807, when she, as a native of the same town, made Goethe's acquaintance through his mother, she must have been twenty-three, but in her ways she was still a child, or rather a being midway between child and woman. She comes to Weimar, provides herself with a superfluous letter of introduction from Wieland, holds out both her hands to Goethe as soon as she sees him, and forgets herself altogether. He leads her to the sofa, seats himself beside her, talks about the Duchess Amalie's death, asks if she has read about it in the newspaper. "I never read newspapers," said I. "Indeed! I understood that you were interested in all that goes on at Weimar." "No, I am only interested in you, and I'm far too impatient to be a newspaper reader." "You are a kind, friendly girl." A long pause. She jumps up from the sofa and throws her arms round his neck. This little anecdote suffices to show the difference between her position to Goethe and Rahel's. From her childhood she had been distinguished by a youthful daring more often met with in boys than girls. At Marburg they still show a tower to the top of which she climbed, drawing the ladder up after her, so that she might be alone. Along with the agility of a young acrobat, she had something of Mignon's childlike, innocent devotion. She is Mignon in real life, as charming as ever, and far less serious. In 1835, when her _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde_ came out, Bettina was fifty. Arnim had died in 1831, Goethe in 1832. She had got back the letters written by herself to Goethe between 1808 and 1811, when an end was put to their intercourse by an act of discourtesy on her part towards Frau Goethe, and had taken even greater liberties with these letters than Goethe took in _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ with the experience of his past life. She expressed in them not only all that she had felt, but much that she now thought she ought to have felt; she gave to their intercourse a more passionate colouring than really belonged to it, and yet in the profoundest sense she was truthful. The letters were at first accepted as genuine. But strong suspicions were presently awakened by the fact of Bettina's having published poems, which were undoubtedly addressed to other women, as if they had been written to her; and there came a time when her letters lost all credit as historic documents, and everything in them was considered to be fictitious. In 1879, however, Loeper published the genuine letters written by Goethe to Bettina, and it was then seen that in them she had made almost no alteration; a few greetings were omitted and _thou_ was substituted for _you_--nothing more. In only one of the original letters is she addressed as _thou_, but that letter is the only one which Goethe did not dictate, but wrote with his own hand, so Bettina's alteration was not altogether unjustifiable. Goethe was in the habit of enclosing in his letters any poem which he had just written. Bettina was conceited enough to imagine that poems addressed to Minna Herzlieb (even those which played upon the name Herzlieb, and were consequently incomprehensible to her) and to Marianne von Willemer, were meant for her. This was an absurd but excusable mistake. It was inexcusable of her to transpose these poems into prose and incorporate them in her earlier letters, thereby producing the impression that Goethe had simply put her thoughts and feelings into verse. What she tells us of her intercourse with Goethe's mother, of her eagerness to gather from that mothers lips information about Goethe's childhood which might serve as an introduction to _Dichtung und Wahrheit_, and also what she tells about Beethoven and the relation in which she stood to him, is in all essentials absolutely true.[5] No one with any feeling for poetic enthusiasm who has read Bettina's book in his youth will ever forget the first impression produced by her style. There is a vitality about it, an animation, a refined wildness, a rhythmic ring and flow, which astound and fascinate. Turning from Rand's dark hieroglyphs, which suggest a thousand secrets to us, but which we seldom really understand, because the living life which was the commentary is no more, it is refreshing to bathe in this clear spring of naïve and charming devotion. Rahel is more profound and more realistic. But talent is such a marvellous thing. The pleasure it gives is great. We can and must excuse much for its sake. In these letters Bettina is twenty-three to twenty-five years old, Goethe fifty-eight to sixty. Hence her passion is not the ordinary human passion of a young woman for a young man. She has grown up with it; it is an inheritance from her mother, Maxe Brentano, who partly suggested Werther's Charlotte. She loves Goethe's mother, as a young woman always does love the mother of her beloved; she is grateful to her for having borne him--"how else should I have known him!" Her devotion to the son finds expression in letters to the mother, till she meets him; then she writes to himself. After that first embrace she looks upon him as her own. She writes to his mother: "It is possible to acquire a kind of possession of a man which no one can dispute. This I have done with Wolfgang. And it is what no one ever did before, in spite of all these love affairs you have told me about. Love is the key of the universe; through it the spirit learns to comprehend and to feel everything. How else could it learn!" These letters have been compared to ships laden with rich cargoes. Goethe is the guiding star on all their voyages. All her thoughts of him are thoughts of enthusiastic devotion: "I would I were sitting at his door like some poor beggar child, so that he might come out to give me a piece of bread. He would read in my eyes what I am, would take me into his arms and wrap his cloak round me to warm me. I know he would not tell me to go again; I should have my place in his house; years would pass, and no one would know where I was; years would pass and life would pass; I should see the whole world mirrored in his face, and more I should not need to learn." "Last May, when I saw him for the first time, he picked a young leaf from the vine at his window and held it against my cheek and said: 'Which is softer, the leaf or your cheek?' I was sitting on a stool at his feet. How often I have thought of that leaf, and of how he stroked my forehead and my face with it, and played with my hair, and said: 'I am a simple-minded man; it is easy to deceive me; there would be no glory in doing it.' There was nothing brilliant in these words, but I have lived that scene over again a thousand times in my thoughts; I shall drink it in all my life, as the eye drinks light--it was not intellectual converse, no! but to me it surpasses all the wisdom of the world." There is poetry in this exaltation and in the way in which she tells of his constant presence with her, of her longing for him, of her dumb jealousy of the famous women who came, as Madame de Staël did, to make his acquaintance; there is poetry in her distress at her inability to be of any use to him, and in her vivid appreciation of her own capacity. "I must tell you what I dreamt about you last night. I often have the same dream. I am going to dance for you. I have the feeling that my dance will be a success. A crowd has gathered round me. I look for you, and see you sitting alone, straight opposite to me; but you don't seem to see me. With golden shoes on my feet, my shining silver arms hanging listlessly by my side, I step forward in front of you, and wait. You lift your head, your eyes involuntarily rest upon me; with light steps I begin to trace magic circles, and you keep your eyes upon me. You follow me through all my bends and turns; I feel the triumph of success. All that you dimly feel I show you in my dance; you marvel at the wisdom it reveals. Presently I fling aside my airy mantle, and let you see my wings, and away I fly, up to the heights. It rejoices me that your eyes follow me, and I float down again and sink into your open arms." This symbolic description is both graceful and felicitous. In Bettina's Goethe-worship there is something of the same love of mounting and climbing that she displayed in her childhood. She climbed up on to the shoulder of the great Olympian's statue--a statue she was perpetually modelling--drew the ladder up after her, and sat there alone, revelling in the pleasure of being so near him. But it was not her Goethe-worship merely as such which made Bettina an ideal character, a Valkyrie, in the eyes of Young Germany. What won their hearts was the political liberalism to which she gave expression in her letters, and with which she in vain tried to imbue the sage who sat aloof in Weimar, her ardent admiration for the brave resistance of the Tyrolese to the domination of France, her eager desire for the well-being of humanity, for the extermination of poverty and all the other ills of society. It made a powerful impression when she, a worshipper of Goethe, but a more independent-minded one than Rahel, extolled Beethoven's republicanism as greater, worthier than Goethe's submissive loyalty. She tries to bring Goethe and Beethoven together; she wishes she could send Wilhelm Meister to the Tyrol, to Andreas Hofer, that he might learn to feel greater enthusiasm and to do manly deeds. In the commencement of Frederick William's reign she was in favour at court. There was a frank, friendly intimacy between her and the king; she had almost as much influence upon him as Humboldt, when there was any question of assisting talent or alleviating misery. But before long her feelings led her openly to declare socialistic principles. In 1843 she published _Dies Buch gehört dem König_ ("This Book belongs to the King"), a work in which she calls upon Frederick William to relieve the distress of his subjects. From her youth she had looked upon herself as the natural champion and advocate of the distressed. "The forsaken and unhappy possessed a magnetic attraction for her," says Hermann Grimm, who, as her son-in-law, knew her intimately. Her natural inclination to help others, arid the early impressions made on her mind by the French Revolution, produced those political sympathies to which she unhesitatingly gave utterance, in the naïve expectation of receiving support from royalty. In 1831, when the cholera raged in Berlin, she went fearlessly among the sick and suffering. Judging from the hard lot of the Berlin working classes, she came to the conclusion that the whole nation was in a bad way and in need of help. To her, liberty had always been a magic word. She believed that whenever the words "Let there be light!" resounded from the right quarter, liberty would manifest itself, and all the feelings and dreams of humanity would take shape in harmonious music, to the strains of which the peoples would march joyfully onwards. Her book, which in a little introductory parable she dedicates to the king, is written in the form of conversations. Goethe's mother is the chief speaker. There is much warm feeling in the book, and a considerable amount of information on the subject of the distress among the lower classes, but too little political insight to make it readable nowadays. The authoress reaches a climax with the words: "Our sign is the banner of liberty; its brightness lights up the black darkness of the times; its brilliancy dazzles and terrifies those who are on the shore, but we are glad and rejoice.... Dangers? Liberty knows no dangers! To it everything is possible. The storm itself, the wildest of all storms, is the captain of our ship."[6] Such sentiments were not likely to meet with a favourable reception at the Prussian court of that day. The book created a sensation, but put an end to the good understanding between Bettina and the king. It naturally only increased the political discontent of the masses, and a pretext was found for seizing her next book (on Clemens Brentano), because a repetition of the same sort of thing was feared. Long before this, however, Bettina had received the unanimous homage of the younger generation. Those interested should read Gutzkow's account of his first visit to her, Mundt's description of her, Kühne's poetical appreciation. Even Robert Prutz, severe as he is on all the representatives and models of Young Germany, numbers himself among her admirers. "Bettina's letters are," he says, "the last bright blaze of Romanticism, the sparkling, crackling fireworks with which it closes its great festival; but they are at the same time the funeral pile upon which it consumes itself, the pillar of fire which rises from its ashes--and shows us the way." The third woman whose life and character made a deep impression on the generation of 1830 was Charlotte Stieglitz, the daughter of a Leipzig merchant named Willhöft. As a child Charlotte was quiet and thoughtful, as a young girl there was something nun-like about her. In 1822 Heinrich Stieglitz, then in his twenty-first year, came to Leipzig to study philology. From no fault of his own he had been mixed up in the prosecution of the demagogues in Göttingen. He was a handsome young fellow, audacious, and, to judge by his looks, passionate; and he was a poet. Charlotte was then a beautiful girl of sixteen, whose appearance suggested the possession of that supernatural quality which the Germans in olden days ascribed to those women whom they believed to possess the gift of prophecy. She had a high, open, intellectual forehead, curly brown hair piled up in a tower-like coiffure, a thin, aquiline nose, a beautiful mouth, large, star-like brown eyes that looked brightly and bravely out into the world. She spoke low, but sang with a full, clear voice. Whatever else modern poets may have neglected, they have not neglected to impress upon all, but more especially upon women, that a poet is a superior being. When Charlotte fell in love with the handsome young Stieglitz, who was fascinated by her, she felt that she had learned what happiness is. The very idea of being the beloved of a poet, a real, living poet, was bliss. And to this poet of hers she consecrated her every feeling, her every thought, from the first time she saw him until, twelve years later, she stabbed herself to the heart for his sake. Even before they were engaged, the desire was ever present with her to be able, all unknown to him, to do something really difficult, really great for him. She had the feminine helpfulness, the motherliness, the housewifely understanding, and the brave cheerfulness which are among a woman's best qualities. The impression she produced was that of gentle high-mindedness. And this noble woman was unfortunate enough to mistake an effeminate Leipzig student for the ideal man of her day-dreams--a poet of inferior, perfectly mediocre talent, for a great artist. In order to be able to marry, Stieglitz was obliged to find employment. In 1827 he became a teacher in the Berlin Gymnasium and at the same time assistant librarian in the Royal Library, groaning immoderately over the restraint imposed on him by these occupations. He was gloomy, passionate, eager to distinguish himself as a poet, but any artistic gift he had was purely bookish and unrealistic; he had no perseverance or power of resistance in the struggle of life, but was one of those whom adversity prostrates. He had the outward appearance of a genius; in reality he was but a dull fellow. It was a tragic misunderstanding on Charlotte's part. She believes that he has an untamable, uncontrollable temperament. "You need not deny it," she writes; "you ought to have been a brigand-chief." And she calls him her dark, wild, poniard-wielder with the flashing eyes. During their long engagement they live in different towns. His letters are genial, natural, and affectionate; but one feels in them that he is not unhappy away from her. She, more warmblooded, pines for him, for his personal presence. Hers was the uncontrollable temperament--he was the genuine bookman, as unlike a robber-chief as any librarian on the face of the earth. About the same time as Victor Hugo in France, he feels the poetical attraction of the East, and, sitting in his library, makes as careful a study as he can of Oriental literature and civilisation. From this study result the _Bilder des Orients_, three volumes produced with much toil and trouble. There is a great deal of pretty and graphic writing in them, and it was unjust that they were so entirely overlooked; but the feeling which animates these Turkish and Persian poems, these Stamboul tragedies and scenes from Ispahan, these more than passable verses on the Greek war of liberation, is too commonplace, too tame; the marked individuality, the savagery which Charlotte saw in Heinrich Stieglitz is exactly what is wanting in them. It is all too literary. Shortly before their marriage in 1828, Charlotte, at her _fiancé's_ request, bought a poniard for him to wear on their wedding tour, the weapon with which, six years later, she took her own life. It was but a short time of unmixed happiness that she enjoyed after their marriage. But she completely identifies herself with her husband, and is miserable because he, the genius, is compelled to spend so much of his time and energy on his library work and teaching. She devotes much of hers to writing letters to their rich relations in Russia, who are ministers and privy-councillors, and to other patrons and friends, in the hope of improving his position. She encourages him indefatigably; she knows every one of his poems by heart, parodies one of them with affectionate playfulness. A certain scene in his tragedy, _Selim III._, is costing him much time and trouble. One day when he comes home, she leads him smilingly to his desk, where he finds it lying, completed--the fine scene between the Sultan's mother and the physician in the Third Act. From time to time there came over her what she calls her champagne-mood; she grieves that this is no longer the case with him. She writes a poem to him, with a present of six quills, exhorting him to be energetic and determined, and not to reflect too long before he begins: "Giess ein Füllhorn aus mit Früchten, Blüth und Früchte gieb zugleich, Weisheit sei in deinem Dichten, Witz und Jugend mach' es reich. Menschen lass uns drinnen finden, Menschen die gelebt, gedacht, Lass von Lieb' dich warm entzünden Und von Zorns Gewitternacht."[7] She firmly believes in the existence of mighty Titanic thoughts and imaginations in his soul, which it is difficult for him to persuade his lips to utter. Alas! he is not only uncommunicative, he is barren, and on the verge of insanity, at times possibly over the verge. He listens to her exhortations with indifference. She writes: "O Heinrich, for God's sake let us be inconsistent at times, let us blaze up wildly, despair madly, rise to the bliss of heaven, sink to the depths of hell--anything but be stolidly indifferent!" We feel the spiritual kinswoman, the admirer of Rahel, in these words. Harassed by the drudgery of his daily life, troubled by the sterility of his overrated talent, he was sometimes irritable, sometimes gloomily stolid. She tries every means to brace him. At one time she fancies that he is too lonely, that he requires the stimulation of more female society--and she is not jealous. She writes (October 1834): "I wish, Heinrich, that you could have more intercourse, either personal or by correspondence, with clever, womanly women. They are the poet's true public. It would be of interest to you to learn, frankly and truthfully, what they think of you and your works. Such intercourse would be both instructive and refreshing, a useful and agreeable diversion for you." She is determined that they are to travel, to go far afield. He throws up his appointments and they go off to St. Petersburg and Finland. But it is all in vain. As she and Stieglitz stood looking at the waterfall of Imatra in Finland, in July 1833, she spoke the following memorable words: "Is not this like a great thought which has strayed into these mountain solitudes? Feelings like mighty billows, thunderstorms, a hurricane, would be a suitable accompaniment to this tumbling, foaming water. How poor the song about the little violet would sound here, pretty as it is in itself! Like the mighty waterfall, this foaming, wildly excited time cries for mighty song. You will give what it demands...." In October 1835, when he was making perpetual complaint of the small pin-pricks of life, she said to him (as he himself has noted): "My careful observation of you has led me to the conclusion that whoever wishes to do you real service must provide a real, great sorrow for you. Nothing would do you so much good as that; nothing would so surely bring out your powers." Like most people whose minds are affected, Stieglitz had periods of violent excitement, after which he relapsed into his ordinary state of silent, almost animal-like brooding. Once when they were on a walking tour, he was so lost in his own thoughts, so indifferent to all else, that she left him and went off by herself, hoping that this would rouse him; but he did not even notice it. It was a kind of warning that her _final_ desertion of him would be of no avail; but it was a warning that she did not understand. Entirely possessed by the latest ideas of the day, persuaded that a poet ought to live in the world, to influence and be influenced by it, it was her constant desire to drive him to action. She said to him one day: "I long for your spiritual regeneration. You will be born again! I know you will! Would that I could hasten that birth--even if it were by artificial means! But how if my surgical operation miscarried!" And in December 1834 she writes in her diary that Goethe's life becomes fuller from the moment that Schiller enters into it, but that Goethe ought to have profited more by his friend's death, and would have done so, if he had not, according to his custom, determinedly refused to sorrow; if he had allowed the sorrow to enter into him, to become part of himself, the result would have been a renewal of youth as far as his poetical productivity was concerned. It was in this same month of December, 1834, that Stieglitz's disgust with life reached a sort of climax. His malady took the form of intellectual stagnation, of absolute incapacity to express himself. Charlotte begged him, as if he had been a child, rather to rave and storm as of old than to collapse in this terrible manner; but she begged in vain. It was then that she determined to employ the last means in her power, to take that step which she, with her innocent, high-flown ideas, felt it obligatory to take, in order that a great, simple sorrow might enter into his life, reawaken his genius, and give his poetry new themes. On the evening of the 29th she came home, knowing that she would have two hours to herself, threw her short fur cape and boa on the hall floor, hurried into her bedroom, locked the door of communication with the kitchen, undressed, washed herself, put on a clean night-dress, wrote a few lines to Heinrich expressing her belief that new life for him would arise out of this misfortune, and exhorting him no longer to be weak, but calm and strong and great. Then she lay down on the bed and with a firm hand plunged the dagger of their wedding tour into her heart. * * * * * One's first impression is that these women, Rahel, Bettina, and Charlotte, who all three became famous in the year 1835, have nothing in common. Rahel dies in 1833 at the age of sixty-one, and her real life-work, the first energetic vindication of Goethe's pre-eminence, belongs quite as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century. Bettina, who is fourteen years younger, does not come before the public till a year after Rahel's death; she combines the exalted enthusiasm and the unreality of Romanticism with the reforming tendencies of Young Germany. Charlotte's only achievement was to kill herself, a thing which has been done by women times without number, though probably never for the same reason. But when we look a little deeper, we find that they have many traits in common. They are all restless, with the restlessness distinctive of their day, which manifests itself, not in outward hurry and strain, but in strong emotions, not in the nervousness prevalent in our own day, but in perpetual introspection. Then there is the peculiarity that none of them transgress the laws of society, though none of them have any respect for these laws. And there is the wonderful, ideal fidelity which they all display. Rahel is Goethe's, from the first breath she draws as a grown-up woman to her last. Bettina is Goethe's, with such absorbing devotion that the scheme of erecting a colossal monument to him which she advocated in her first published work (a monument which she herself planned and had executed in miniature), becomes in her old age an _idée fixe_. Charlotte so entirely belongs to the man on whom her choice falls when she is sixteen, that she not only lives for him, but dies for him. Another thing they have in common is enthusiasm. Rahel's burns like a steady, sacred flame; Bettina's breaks out in a pyrotechnic display of ideas and visions; Charlotte's manifests itself in the resolute, uncomplaining sacrifice of her life. It is genius that they all worship; they have the enthusiastic German appreciation of poetic genius; their great desire is to do what in them lies to promote its recognition and glorification, or its development and emancipation; to this task they devote their lives, regardless of the worthiness or unworthiness of the object of their choice. Lastly, the thoughts and feelings of all three are remarkably original. These women resemble no other women. Never, to our knowledge, has there been such another reflective emotionalist as Rahel, such another sylph-like enthusiast as Bettina, such another suicide as Charlotte's, a suicide inspired by a lofty though false æsthetic principle. Those who look deeper into the matter and view these characters in the light of history, see in Rahel's introspection and self-reflection, the first form which woman's self-emancipation necessarily took in the Germany of this century; this height of intellectual independence had to be attained before the women in a country where they for centuries had been relegated to simple domesticity could rise to anything above it. In Bettina's triple enthusiasm, for Goethe, for the ideas of political liberalism, and for social reform, the student of history descries the transition stage between the era of art and the era of liberalism and socialism. And in Charlotte's suicide he sees an expression of the desire of the women of her day to snatch the men from their literary quietism and place them face to face with the seriousness, the tragedy of life. The whole era speaks when she says to Stieglitz that the song of the violet cannot be sung to the accompaniment of a great waterfall. None of these women could have developed as they did at any other period, and at no other period would they have been understood and appreciated as they were. To-day, already, we find it difficult to understand them. It is characteristic that the word _work_ finds no place in the description of their lives. They never learned anything methodically, and in their fear of being unfeminine are proud of this--as we observed in the case of Rahel. Even that accomplished linguist, Henriette Herz, is deeply offended because Jean Paul in one of his letters used the expression, "M. Herz and his learned wife." Charlotte Stieglitz has not the faintest idea that talent is developed by work, by obstinate industry, and not by bereavements. And Bettina, the bayadere, who imitates Mignon's egg-dance, has nothing whatever to do with work. This fact impresses itself on us when we are annoyed by the slovenly composition and the want of any real understanding of politics in her book for the king. About the year 1848 it began to be recognised that all this intellectuality would have been more solid, more real, more lasting, if these women had known something, had followed some course of study, taken up one or other branch of science. All this soaring thought would have been doubly valuable if it had in the first place been subjected to regular discipline. To soar without previous training is often mere waste of power. If Rahel had had a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon, she would have had a very different influence upon posterity. As it is, her ideas, obscure and lucid, chaff and seed-corn, are scattered to the winds. In the Thirties men still believed in an inspiration that could dispense with knowledge, in a morality of the heart which rendered any reform of the old social morality unnecessary, in a defiance of law which allowed all laws to hold good, but kept clear of them all. This state of matters Young Germany was bent upon altering. During the Forties men had arrived at the persuasion that there was something of greater value than sudden inspiration and a life of pure intellectuality. There was humble and daring work to be done in science and in politics. We see German philosophy develop in the direction of radicalism, and we come upon poets whose aim it is to prepare the way for political liberty. [1] Karl Hillebrand: _Zeiten, Völker und Menschen_, ii. 5. _Aus dem unzünftigen Schriftthum Deutschlands.--La société de Berlin. Revue des deux mondes_, 1870. [2] All virtues are one virtue; yea, verily, they are all one and the same. Wouldst thou know its name? Its name is justice. [3] Because justice is truth. Simplicity, fairness, unselfishness, a share for all. [4] _Rahel, ein Buch des Andenkens für Freunde_, i.-iii. _Briefwechsel zwischen Varnhagen und Rahel_, i.-ii. Varnhagen: _Gallerie von Bildnissen aus Rahels Umgang_, Ludmilla Assing: _Aus Rahels Herzensleben_. [5] _Briefe Goethe's an Sophie von la Roche und Bettina Brentano nebst dichterischen Beilagen_. 1879. [6] _Dies Buch gehört dem König_, p. 531. [7] Pour out thy horn of plenty; give us blossom and fruit together; let there be not only wisdom, but wit and youth in thy words. In thy pages let us find human beings, beings who have lived and thought; let love, let anger's lightning-flash kindle thy Muse's flame. XXIV FREDERICK WILLIAM OF PRUSSIA With the year 1840 the literary movement enters upon a new, more philosophic, and more political phase. Yet another generation had arisen, a generation which owed its profoundest culture to Hegel, and which, strangely enough, he had influenced chiefly in the direction of politics. Schelling in his day had declared art to be the highest manifestation of intellect. His principle, and that of the Romanticists, was that the artist is the true man. What art had been to Schelling, history was to Hegel--history, that eternal progress of the idea of liberty, that great liberty-epic. And what the work of art had been to Schelling, the State was to Hegel. To him the true, the perfect human being is not the artist, but the citizen of a constitutional State. This youngest generation was inspired by the Hegelian philosophy to make the reform of the State its aim. It held the adherents of the Young German school in light esteem, being of opinion that they had not stood bravely by their colours, either in philosophy or politics, that they were too belletristic, too epicurean. It would not join in the old cry for the rehabilitation of the flesh, would not even listen to it. Heine, in _Atta Troll_, had told the young generation that a man of character without talent was no better than a bear; the young men retorted that a man of talent without character was nothing but a monkey--possibly a very amusing monkey, but nothing more. That the Hegelian philosophy had again become a guiding principle was made plain when the periodical known as the _Hallische Jahrbücher_ was brought out by Ruge and Echtermeyer in 1838. This organ of the Hegelians of the Left disseminated the ideas which moulded not only the politicians but also the poets of the day. In all essentials the principles were the same as those in whose name Young Germany had taken the field, but they were now proclaimed with more scientific precision and more resoluteness. The elder men had to choose between joining the Young Hegelians and reprobating the principles of their own youth, as now proclaimed by others. As was only natural, they did not recognise their own opinions as propounded by these bellicose youths, and there was many a collision between the youngest generation and Gutzkow, Laube, and Mundt. The idea of the State now became the central idea of the day, the idea of the State as a living organism, realised in the consciousness of all its citizens. In the many philosophical, theological, æsthetic feuds waged by this new generation, the State and the necessity for its reform is always the burden of their cry. This was the season of preparation for that absorption in the idea of the State which is so characteristic of the Germany of later days, and which caused even a revolutionary (but a Hegelian revolutionary) like Lassalle to exclaim: "Do not malign the State! The State is God!" It is a sign of the nature of the literary development that the _Hallische Jahrbücher_ began as a philosophical, but was suppressed as a political periodical.[1] [1] _Cf_. R. Prütz: _Vorlesungen über die deutsche Litteratur der Gegenwart_. The new political ideas with which the nation was impregnated presently broke forth in poetry and song. The first political poetry appears in the same year as the _Jahrbücher_, and spreads political free-thought in far wider circles. At first it was for the most part rhetorical, and devoid of artistic value, but the common national feeling of the German countries had slumbered so long that the mere watch-words "liberty" and "fatherland" produced an electrical effect. On the 7th of June 1840, Frederick William IV. ascended the throne of Prussia. The new king presented in every respect a marked contrast to the man who, succeeding in 1797, had wielded the Prussian scepter for forty-two years. Frederick William III. had been the born soldier; his son was an artist by nature, with mediocre half-suppressed talents, a dilettante in art and science. The father had been a sober, modest, steadfast character; the son was a fanciful enthusiast, as impressionable as a woman. The father had been the devotee of duty, an upright, dry, narrow-minded man, the son was full of romantic ideas, clever, famous for his witty sallies. The father had been tall, slender, soldierlike, in his bearing and dress; the son had soft, rounded features, not unlike Queen Louisa's, was fat rather than muscular, quick and jerky in his movements, communicative, sociable, very talkative. The father had been a reliable man, the son was an interesting one. Though Frederick William IV., as Crown Prince, had had the best of instructors in all the branches of a military education, he did not take the lead in military matters. He was fond of calling himself a Prussian officer, but the strict, pedantic discipline inseparable from military service in time of peace, was wearisome to him, and at times he, a Hohenzollern, was even known to jeer at State parades. Now and again, however, it happened that he grew wildly enthusiastic. At a review, the music, the clash of weapons, the loud commands, the firing, produced in him a sort of poetic excitement. Carried away by military enthusiasm, he once, on the occasion of a big sham-fight, led the troops right into Berlin, regardless of the confusion thereby produced, and of the hundreds of window-panes shattered by the volleys fired in the streets.[2] [2] Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i. But for the most part it was with men of science and artists that the Crown Prince consorted--scholars such as Humboldt, historians like Ranke, painters like Cornelius, sculptors like Rauch. He was much interested in architecture, made a study of the antique styles in their application to ecclesiastical architecture of the Byzantine type, sketched plans, tried to produce imposing effects by means of colonnades and halls. He projected ideal landscapes, resembling scenes on the Italian shores of the Mediterranean. He criticised music and poetry. He specially encouraged and patronised the study of ancient German customs and of all ancient art which had devoted itself to the service of religion; and all this occupation with the past increased his distaste for the time in which he lived, and developed his inclination to restore the old order of things, or at any rate to oppose reforms inspired by the modern spirit. This inclination could not but be strengthened by the young prince's intercourse with clergymen, and with the small circle of romantically disposed aristocrats who were his familiar associates. From his childhood he had been religious. As a boy he had, during the war with Napoleon, learnt to believe in the sacredness of the old system of government, in the divine right of kings, and in the mission of Austria as heir of the Holy Roman Empire. He adopted the whole system of ideas and enthusiasms of which Joseph de Maistre was the first and ablest exponent. He studied Haller's _Restauration der Staatswissenschaft_. Ere long he came to look upon the crown as a mystic jewel, a combination of the priestly fillet of old with the dictator's golden wreath; the kingly office became in his eyes a sacred calling, the king himself a divinely inspired being. His ideal was a patriarchal relation between the king and his people, much the same ideal as that which was aimed at during the same period by the so-called Young England, the followers of Disraeli. Frederick William IV. was received by his people with all the confident expectation with which a nation that is still in its political childhood welcomes a new king. They believed of him what is believed of all crown princes, that his principles were more liberal than his father's. The hopes and expectations of the nation surrounded him with a sort of halo. He began, as kings are wont to do, with an act which appeared to justify the popular estimate of his character; he proclaimed a general amnesty for political offences. This led all to hope that he would fulfil the political desire of the country, that he would confer on Prussia that benefit which was regarded as a necessary condition of all progress, constitutional government. As already stated, the Prussian people were in possession of a distinct, definite, royal promise of a constitution, a promise the fulfilment of which had been dishonestly delayed. This made their hope all the stronger; they felt sure that this promise would now be redeemed. Soon after the new king's accession, the Estates of the Provinces of Posen and East and West Prussia were summoned to meet at Königsberg, for the purpose of paying homage to him. The Estates of East and West Prussia replied to the announcement of this meeting by sending in a most humble petition to the king, in which they besought him to maintain and to complete the system of representative government inaugurated by his glorious father, who, in this as in all else faithful to his promise, had introduced representative government in the provinces, but had left the completion of the work to his royal successor "whom the nation loves with the truest devotion, and on whom its dearest hopes are set" (in welchem die treueste Liebe und die innigsten Wünsche des Landes sich begegnen). The lower classes of citizens, all those who hoped that their trades and industries would profit by the approaching festivities at Königsberg, were highly incensed by this proceeding, which they considered calculated to offend the king. The higher classes, on the contrary, imagined that their gifted monarch would at once gladly accede to the legitimate desire of his people; no one was in a better position than he to understand the defects of the old system of representation. But neither those who dreaded an outburst of royal indignation nor those who expected a manifestation of royal liberal-mindedness proved to be right. Frederick William's vague answer was to the effect that the constitution of the Estates rested upon a national, historic foundation, that the king took a deep interest in the said institution, that he was firmly determined to pursue the path entered on by his predecessors, and that his faithful Estates might "place absolute confidence in his intentions" with regard to the institution of the Landtag (Parliament). Little of positive assurance as there was in this message, it was received with joy; it relieved one party from the dread of a stern rebuff, and encouraged the sanguine hopes of the other. The festival at Königsberg went off successfully, and was marked by general enthusiasm. Its most imposing incident occurred immediately after the deputies had repeated, word for word, the oath of allegiance read out to them. Hardly had the echo of the loud Amen pronounced by the four hundred voices died away, when the king was seen to rise from the throne, which stood upon an open balcony, come forward to the rails, raise his arm as if he were taking an oath, and begin to address the assembly. Every word of his speech was clearly audible. He promised to be a just judge, a faithful, painstaking, and merciful ruler, a Christian king like his ever-to-be-remembered father. The concluding sentence bears witness to his literary gift: "May God preserve our Prussian fatherland, for its own sake, for Germany's, and for the world's--our fatherland, which is made up of many parts, and yet is one whole, like that noble metal, a mixture of many others, but itself one metal, liable to no rust but the beautifying rust of centuries!" Astonishment that a King of Prussia should thus of his own free will give a promise to his people in return for theirs to him, combined with the impression produced by this ostensibly improvised address from such an animated and winning royal personage, to create a feeling of excited jubilation. Above on the balcony the queen burst into tears, down below the people wept, smiled through their tears, and pressed each other's hands. In the transport of the moment it was not observed that there was no definite political promise in the speech, nothing but liberal generalities and romantic phraseology. But the Königsberg festival was only a prelude to the great one held in Berlin. In the minds of the inhabitants of his capital a halo of golden promises still surrounded the person of the king. They were determined to do everything in their power to show their devotion, and to give the festival a character that was likely to be agreeable to him. The military element was not allowed to preponderate; something in the style of a medieval German municipal pageant was aimed at. The different guilds, numbering in all about 10,000 men, marched in procession, carrying their banners and emblems. As an agreeable little surprise for the king, a great projecting piece of masonry at the Rathaus (town hall) with which his carriage had come into collision one day when he was Crown Prince, was altogether removed. In the interval between the two festivals an incident occurred which could not but awaken in the mind of the nation a suspicion of the king's fickleness. On the 4th of October 1840, a royal order in council was published which intimated, to prevent any misunderstanding, that the king, in expressing his appreciation of the loyalty of the Estates, had by no means declared himself to be in favour of a representative constitution as formulated in the ordinance of the 22nd of May. The princes and nobles were to take the oath of allegiance in the palace, the citizens were to pay homage in the great square outside the so-called Lustgarten. But from early morning rain fell in torrents. For two whole hours the citizens stood outside the square, getting soaked through, whilst the king listened, indoors, to the speeches of princes, nobles, and clergy, and gave the rein to his own eloquence. At last he stepped out on the balcony. But on this occasion people were prepared to hear him speak; there was no question of improvisation. Berlin would have felt itself insulted if the king, who had made a speech at Königsberg, had received its homage in silence. And speak he did. Every one could see the motion of his hands, but the size of the square and the sound of the wind and the rain prevented his words being heard. Every time he stopped speaking, the attentive crowd, imagining that the speech was concluded, broke forth in loud acclamation; but the king waved his hand, and proceeded. The rain poured, but still he spoke. All watched his gesticulations. Four times the multitude shouted "Hurrah!" in the belief that he had done, and four times he began again. He promised to rule as one who feared God and loved man, with his eyes open when attending to the needs of the people and of the times, closed when called on to do justice--but the antithesis was lost in the whistle of the wind and the rush of the rain. He shouted: "Will you promise, while I am striving so to do, to stand by me, in prosperity and in adversity? If so, give an answer in that plainest, finest word of our mother-tongue, an honest 'Ja!'" Shouts of "Bravo! bravo!" from the square. They thought he had finished. But the king waved his hand and continued. At last he concluded by turning the downpour of rain to account in his peroration, by taking it as a favourable omen--though this also was lost on the audience. "So help me God, I will keep the promises which I have made here and at Königsberg! In sign hereof I raise my right hand to heaven. Proceed we now with our high festival, and may God's blessing fall like his fertilising rain upon us this day!" But God's fertilising rain completely extinguished the festive spirit, poured its chilling prose over both audience and orator. No one could observe that any promises were kept, but neither could any one name any particular promises that had been made by his Majesty. The new king and his government soon showed themselves in their true light. Eichhorn was nominated Minister of Public Worship (_Kultusminister_) in place of the late Count Altenstein, the patron of Hegel and the Hegelians. Eichhorn had already shown Pietistic leanings; it was reported that he intended to introduce strict regulations regarding the observation of holy-days, and possibly also rules of church discipline binding on all Government officials. The indignation roused by this report was so great that advantage was taken of the first possible opportunity to display it. Racine's _Athalie_ was put on the stage by the king's special request. There was no fault to be found with the play itself, but it had a religious subject and had been originally written for the inmates of a convent. On the occasion of its first performance, January 4th, 1841, it was hissed by the audience, a demonstration the meaning of which every one understood. People were much more exasperated with the minister than with the king; for no one doubted that the king was a sincerely religious man, whereas the life Eichhorn had lived and the company he had kept led them to conclude the opposite of him. And when it came to his making public use of the expression, "the Christian state," that is the state of which the unorthodox cannot be reckoned true citizens, war was waged against this "square circle," as the expression was called, with all the weapons of sober earnest and of mockery. Unfortunately the king had, a few months before this, in one of his fits of political liberalism, possibly influenced by his appreciation of wit, abolished the censorship of caricature-drawing. So now Eichhorn was to be seen everywhere, in the shape of a squirrel (_Eichhorn_ = squirrel) gnawing leaves, cracking the empty nut of the Christian Church, &c., &c. The ungrateful caricaturists did not even respect the king; and Heine, the greatest caricaturist of the age, ridiculed royal indecision in the following lines of _Der neue Alexander_: "Ich ward ein Zwitter, ein Mittelding, das weder Fleisch noch Fisch ist, Das von den Extremen unserer Zeit ein närrisches Gemisch ist. Ich bin nicht schlecht, ich bin nicht gut, nicht dumm und nicht gescheute, Und wenn ich gestern vorwärts ging, so geh ich rückwärts heute."[3] [3] I'm neither fish nor flesh, neither this nor that, but a queer compound of the extremes of the day; I'm not bad, I'm not good, not stupid and not clever; if I walked forwards yesterday, I'll walk backwards to-day. But Eichhorn was not content with Christianising the State, he aimed at Christianising science. He was particularly desirous to oust known Hegelians from all good and influential appointments, the Hegelian philosophy being distasteful to the king, because it left no play for his imagination. It was by the king's wish that Schelling was brought from Munich to Berlin to fill the professorial chair left vacant by the death of Hegel, that from that vantage ground he might propound his new philosophy, that _Philosophie der Offenbarung_ (Philosophy of Revelation) which, like some quack remedy, had been kept secret for years, and yet puffed as if it were to introduce a new era. He received a larger salary than had ever before been given to a Prussian university professor (it was declared that he was almost as well paid as a _premiere danseuse_); and it was certainly not the king's fault that, in spite of all Schelling's endeavours, there seemed no possibility of eradicating Hegelian unorthodoxy. As a matter of fact, Schelling was a failure. He could not but feel that he was regarded with contempt by the whole youth of a nation. Ch. Kapp wrote a clever description of the court thinker's various metamorphoses since the days of his youth, his apostasy from himself, the humbug in his reconciliation of faith and thought; and Ludwig Feuerbach, in his energetic language, styled him the philosophical Cagliostro of the nineteenth century, and his philosophy a theosophic farce. Eichhorn proceeded to take a variety of measures to counteract the progress of science. He set a fixed limit to the number of teachers at all the different Prussian universities, thereby reducing the number of private lecturers and increasing the influence of the Government. Professor Hoffman (von Fallersleben) was dismissed from the University of Breslau, because of some harmless jests at politics in his _Unpolitical Songs_--jovial, catching verses, which so exactly chimed in with the Liberal ideas of the middle-class citizen that they alarmed the authorities. The Biblical critic, Bruno Bauer's, two books on the authenticity of the Four Gospels cost him his post of lecturer at the University of Bonn. The servile Faculties carried out the wishes of the Government: they approved of free scientific inquiry, but could not approve of Bruno Bauer as a lecturer on _theology_. The Hegelian theologian, Marheineke of Berlin, undauntedly declared that he, too, was desirous that Bruno Bauer should be relieved from his post as lecturer, because he considered that such an eminent critic, a man of such thorough scientific training, should be promoted to a really influential appointment. But Bauer's fate was sealed. The Halle students petitioned that David Strauss might be appointed professor at their university. The answer to their petition was a reprimand, and the three students whose names headed the list of petitioners were expelled. After Gans's death, the noted reactionary Stahl (author of _Umkehr der Wissenschaft_) was appointed to his professorship in Berlin. It was somewhat humiliating for the Government that the students refused to listen to Stahl's first lecture; they drummed him out of the lecture-room. In the summer of 1841 there appeared in Switzerland a little book, entitled _Gedichte eines Lebendigen_ ("Poems of a Living Man"). It contained many an astounding verse; among others: "Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden! Alle sollen Schwerter werden! Gott im Himmel wird's verzeihn. Lasst, o lasst das Verseschweissen, Auf den Amboss legt das Eisen, Heiland soll das Eisen sein."[4] [4] Tear the crosses from the graves; 'Tis the sword alone that saves; God forgives the deed ye do. Leave, oh leave your rhyming trade; Steel on anvil must be laid-- Steel shall bring us safely through. (JOYNES.) And: "Brause, Gott, mit Sturmesodem durch die fürchterliche Stille, Gieb ein Trauerspiel der Freiheit für der Sklaverei Idylle! Lass das Herz doch wieder schlagen in der Brust der kalten Welt Und erweck ihr einen Rächer und erweck ihr einen Held!"[5] [5] Let thy tempest blow, O God, and put an end to this terrible calm! Give us a tragedy of liberty in place of this idyll of slavery! Set the heart of the clay-cold world beating again; raise up for her an avenger; awaken for her a hero! The collection was prefaced by a poetical challenge "To the Dead Man," namely Prince Pückler, who had written under this pseudonym. He was chosen as the representative of the careless pleasure-lovers who seek distraction in travel. The attack was unjust, but how fine it sounded! The anonymous author, whose name soon became public property, was a young man of twenty-four, Georg Herwegh, born in Würtemberg in 1817, and educated at the well-known Tübingen Institution. While serving his time in the army, Herwegh quarrelled with an officer, and was obliged to take refuge in Switzerland, where he lived for several years, associating with other refugees and other youthful Radicals. His poems, with their fresh, energetic, and yet vague Radicalism, at once made their mark, and attained an immense circulation in the course of a few months. The sentiment of these poems is somewhat mixed. Now it is with tyrants, now with Philistines, that their author is at war; at one time he discovers the enemies of the good cause in Germany itself, at another abroad; now he writes as a staunch Republican; again, following the example of Platen, he appeals earnestly, imploringly to the King of Prussia, warning him, but at the same time assuring him that it is not too late: "Du bist der Stern, auf den man schaut, Der letzte Fürst, auf den man baut."[6] [6] Thou art the star to which we turn our eyes, Of monarchs all the last in whom our hope yet lies. The public of that day overlooked the young poet's want of consistency; his enthusiasm was infectious, his melodious lyrical rhetoric irresistible. He was the first lyric poet who had taken men's hearts by storm since the days of Goethe and Schiller. From the Alps to the Baltic the young men sang: _Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden!_ In the autumn of 1842 Herwegh took a tour through Germany, with a practical aim in view. The work which he had begun as a poet, he desired to carry on as a journalist, a political writer; his journey was undertaken for the purpose of securing contributors to a monthly magazine to be entitled _Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz_ ("The German Messenger from Switzerland"); but it became a sort of triumphal progress; he was entertained at banquets in Cologne and Leipzig, and serenaded by the students of Jena; never before had such homage been paid to a German poet. Towards the end of October he arrived in Berlin, where he could not expect to make as great a sensation, especially as he had followed the advice of his companion, Ruge, and refused the advances of a very unprosperous Radical association. But something happened which made far more impression on the public mind than any popular demonstration could have done--the king expressed a wish to make Herwegh's personal acquaintance. So far the only public manifestation of Frederick William's æsthetic sympathies had been his patronage of Tieck and Rückert, both of whom he had invited to Berlin. Ludwig Tieck, now an old man, crippled with rheumatism, occasionally read aloud at Court and put plays on the stage; Friedrich Rückert was expected to assist in reorganising the study of Oriental languages at the University, but proved unfit for the task. Unprejudiced judgment in literary matters was certainly not traditional in the Hohenzollern family. There was only one possible precedent for the audience granted to Herwegh, and that was to be found in the present king's own private reply to the ode in which Platen conjured him to embrace the cause of unhappy Poland. In a cordial letter to the poet, Frederick William, then Crown Prince, expressed his hearty sympathy with the Poles and bewailed his inability to help. The ode addressed by Herwegh to the king implored him to put down clericalism; it was an agreeable surprise to find that this had given no offence. The audience took place on the 19th of November 1842. Herwegh was very silent, depressed by the situation. The king was, as usual, eloquent and communicative. He is reported to have said: "You are the second enemy whom I have received this year; the first was M. Thiers (who had threatened war in 1840, because of the support given by the great powers to the Sultan in his quarrel with the Egyptian Pacha); but it gives me greater pleasure to see you. We have our vocations, you and I; mine is to be a king, yours to be a poet. I shall be faithful to mine, as I trust you will be to yours. Nothing is more abhorrent to me than vacillation; I esteem an Opposition which is actuated by real conviction (wenn sie nur gesinnungsvoll ist)." Referring to Herwegh's youth, he prophesied "a Damascus day" for him, concluding with the words: "Until then, let us be honourable enemies." Such particulars of this meeting of king and poet as reached the ears of the public awakened feelings either of childish envy or childish indignation among the oppositionist writers of the day. It was considered that Herwegh ought (_à la_ Marquis Posa) to have taken advantage of the opportunity to demand political liberty for Prussia. A few days after the audience, Herwegh left Berlin. At Königsberg, where he was again entertained at a banquet, he was surprised to receive the news that his projected periodical, before its appearance, had been declared contraband in Prussia. It was a prohibition for which he might well have been prepared, for all books published abroad (his own poems included) were contraband, except those for which special licence had been granted. But already irritated by accusations of treason brought against him in one and another Radical newspaper, he was completely upset by this rebuff, and at once addressed an awkward, unmanly, would-be pathetic letter to the king. He pleaded the king's promise of honourable enmity, a promise which he declared to be broken by this prohibition; he would not ask the king to revoke this edict, though it was hard for him to see the child of his Muse menaced while yet in its mother's womb, and hard to have to live in a state of constant warfare with the law of the country; not that the prohibition did him any harm, for he was fortunate enough to be at that moment preparing the fifth edition of his poems, also a prohibited book; but he felt impelled to address a last, honest, impassioned appeal to the king; an appeal which, though private, was not merely his own, but that of thousands, &c, &c. The letter itself was stupid and indiscreet; its publication in a Leipzig newspaper a few weeks later was a piece of folly that avenged itself. In Stettin, Herwegh received orders to leave the country; policemen escorted him to the stage-coach, from which he was forbidden to alight in Halle. He had received a festive welcome in Prussia, but his leave-taking was of the coldest. The arch-scoffer Heine, in his poem, _Der Ex-lebendige_, has the following lines: "Aranchuez! in deinem Sand' Wie schnell die schönen Tage schwanden, Als ich vor König Philip stand Und seinen uckermarkschen Granden. Er hat mir Beifall zugenickt, Als ich gespielt den Marquis Posa, In Versen hab' ich ihn entzückt Doch ihm gefiel nicht meine Prosa."[7] [7] O my Aranchuez! how the days flew that I spent amidst thy sands! those days when I stood in the presence of King Philip and his Uckermark grandees. He nodded approval to me when I played Marquis Posa; my verses charmed him, but my prose he could not stand. And in _Die Audienz_ he jeers more mercilessly still at the Swabian suckling: "'Ich will, wie einst mein Heiland that, Am Anblick der Kinder mich laben. Lass zu mir kommen die Kindlein, zumal Das grosse Kind aus Schwaben.' So sprach der König, der Kämmerer lief Und kam zurück und brachte Herein das grosse Schwabenkind Das seinen Diener machte. Der König sprach: 'Du bist wohl ein Schwab? Das ist just keine Schande.' 'Gerathen! erwidert der Schwab, ich bin Geboren im Schwabenlande.' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 'Erbitte dir eine Gnade,' sprach Der König. Da kniete nieder Der Schwabe und rief: 'O geben Sie, Sire! Dem Volke die Freiheit wieder.' Der König stand erschüttert tief; Es war eine schöne Scene. Mit seinem Rockärmel wischte sich Der Schwab' aus dem Auge die Thräne. Der König sprach endlich: 'Ein schöner Traum! Leb' wohl und werde gescheidter! Und da du ein Somnambülericht bist, So geb' ich dir zwei Begleiter. Zwei sichre Gendarm', die sollen dich Bis an die Grenze führen. Leb' wohl, ich muss zur Parade geh'n, Schon hör ich die Trommel rühren.'"[8] [8] "I will, as my gracious Saviour did, Find the sight of the children pleasant; So suffer the children to come, and first The big one, the Swabian peasant." Thus spake the monarch; the chamberlain ran, And return'd, introducing slowly The stalwart child from Swabia's land, Who made a reverence lowly. Thus spake the king: "A Swabian art thou? There's no disgrace in that, surely?" "Quite right! I was born in Swabia's land," Replied the Swabian demurely. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . "One wish I will grant thee," the monarch said-- Then the Swabian in deep supplication Knelt down and exclaimed: "O sire, I pray grant Their freedom once more to the nation!" The monarch in deep amazement stood, The scene was really enthralling; With his sleeve the Swabian wiped from his eye The tear that was well-nigh falling. At last said the king: "In truth a fine dream! Farewell, and pray learn discretion; And as a somnambulist plainly thou art, Of thy person I'll give the possession To two trusty gendarmes, whose duty 'twill be To see thee safe over the border-- Farewell! I must hasten to join the parade, The drums are beating to order." (BOWRING.) It was not only humour that laughed, but envy and vindictiveness as well. Men wreaked vengeance on their own former enthusiasm. The Herwegh catastrophe was, moreover, attended by disastrous practical results. The _Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung_, the Opposition newspaper most widely read in Prussia, was suppressed the day after it published the letter to the king. The _Rheinische Zeitung_, the principal Liberal paper published in Prussia, itself very soon received its death-blow. And in Saxony, at the request of Prussia, Arnold Ruge's _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ (first known as the _Hallische Jahrbücher_), the leading periodical expressing the opinions of the reflective youth of the day, was also suppressed. One lesson the young generation learned from what had happened. It was no momentous matter that a young poet should have shown himself embarrassed and then unmanly in his relations with a king. But the men of this day had imagined themselves to have taken a great step in advance of the men of the Thirties; they believed that they possessed strength of character, whereas their elders had only been gifted with talent. Now it was borne in upon them, not only that poets are little calculated to make good political leaders, but also that the whole generation must discipline itself severely if it were to stand any firmer in the day of trial than its predecessors had done. So now thinkers and politicians by profession (in almost too many instances professors) took the lead. And the fact that the generation which now revolutionised the mind of Germany failed so miserably in the close of the struggle of 1848, is to be ascribed, not to want of strength of character, but to that idealism which is bred in the minds of men who have never ruled, to their belief in the irresistible powers of ideas and ideals to realise themselves, and to their contempt for that external brute force, which in theory was of minor importance, but which, vanquished in the first brush, calmly allowed itself to be disdained, and awaited the moment when, with renewed vigour, it returned to the attack. There was considerable difference of opinion as to the advisability of the various measures taken by Frederick William's ministers, but for the most part they were unfavourably criticised. Under every other question smouldered the question of the Prussian Constitution. The king's attempt to dispose of it by a rebuff had been unsuccessful, and the means which he and his advisers employed to put down the movement were extremely infelicitous. In the Silesian Landtag (Parliament) the chief magistrate and other representatives of the town of Breslau had proposed an address from the Silesian Estates on the subject of a general assembly of the Estates of the whole kingdom--a Reichstag. The king replied by a special announcement of the procedure to be observed on the occasion of his approaching visit to Silesia, intimating that no arrangements need be made for his festive reception and entertainment in Breslau, as he would accept nothing from that town. This in May, in reference to a journey to be taken in October, and festivities of which there had as yet been no offer! And the king entered Breslau in state and was fêted after all, though the festivities were not held specially on his account, but on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of Silesia with Prussia. He contented himself with deploring the absence in the invitation sent him of "expressions which would have given him heart-felt pleasure," and with declining to stay longer than a day or two on account of want of time. Yet the king stood in need of the consent of the Estates of the realm to the carrying out of a project of the utmost importance for the whole country. The time of railways had come, and two matters had to be arranged, a loan of the money needed for the construction of State railways, and a State guarantee to the constructors of private lines. According to a law passed by Hardenberg in 1820, the consent of the Estates of the realm was imperative in both cases. The king evolved an impossible plan; he proposed to convoke an assembly of six hundred representatives chosen from the different provincial Landtage, and to let this assembly play the part of Reichstände (Estates of the realm). Metternich was obliged to interfere, and prove the utter impracticability of the scheme.[9] [9] Sybel: _Die Begründung des deutschen Reiches_, i. 107. It was at this juncture that a small pamphlet, _Vier Fragen eines Ostpreussen_ ("Four Questions by an East-Prussian"), made a sensation throughout the whole of Germany. The little book appeared on the spiritual horizon like the first distant flash of lightning that preludes the storm. Purporting to be printed in Mannheim, it was scattered abroad everywhere in the end of February 1841. Such careful arrangements had been made that it found its way into the booksellers' windows of every town in Prussia on the same day--every town except Berlin, where it appeared a little later, a precaution taken to prevent confiscation before the general distribution. The Four Questions which it contained foreboded the downfall of absolute monarchy. They were: What did the Estates ask? What right had they to make such a request? What answer did they receive? What remains for them to do? The book's answer to the first question was that, as things now stood, the people had almost no share in their own government, although the general high level of education made it natural that they should wish it. And their desire for a representative constitution, for a national parliament, was made more ardent by the fact that they possessed no other means, such, for instance, as a free press, of expressing their opinions, and that they thoroughly distrusted the king's ministers because of their arbitrariness, servility, and pietistic tendencies. To the question: What right had the Estates to make such a demand? the author replied: The right of authority, an authority declared and recognised on the 22nd of May 1815. To the third question: What answer did they receive? the reply was: A recognition of their loyalty, a rejection of their proposal, and comforting promises of some vague future indemnification. The answer to the fourth question: What remains for the Estates to do? only occupied a line and a half. It was: To demand now as a demonstrable right what they had previously solicited as an act of grace. The earnest, impressive tone of the pamphlet, its appeal to the people's sense of justice and self-respect, aroused a keen desire to know the name of the anonymous author. He himself had sent his book to the king, with his name written on the title page: Dr. Johann Jacoby, physician in Königsberg. The king at once ordered criminal proceedings to be instituted against him. It appeared that he was a man of means, and a very highly esteemed physician. In 1831, during the first and most violent epidemic of cholera in Poland, he had gone there to study the disease. At a later period he had had a protracted quarrel with a Warsaw doctor, a regular quack, who, when the cholera broke out again in 1837, advertised his discovery of an infallible remedy for "this trivial, easily curable disease." Jacoby wrote a short scientific article in disparagement of this man. The quack wrote an answer full of insulting imputations, which he published in the Berlin newspapers. By the help of influential friends he not only managed to secure the prohibition of the publication of Jacoby's retort, but also to defeat the latter's successive appeals to the Berlin censor's superior, to the highest council of censorship, to Rochow, the Secretary of State, and to the king himself. The publishers in Hamburg, Leipzig, Grimma, Basle, and Berne, one and all refused to print the documents throwing light on this affair. Any other man would now have given up the attempt to get his reply to an attack in a contemptible newspaper article published. Not so Jacoby. Month followed upon month. The manuscript travelled thousands of miles, and was published at last in Paris, under the title of _Contribution to a Future Historical Account of the Censorship of the Press in Prussia_. Such was Jacoby's character. Here at last was found what Young Germany so sorely needed, what even Youngest Germany with its Herwegh had not produced, that first essential in public life--a man. At last the Germany of the Forties had found a strong political leader--not a statesman in the proper sense of the word, for time showed that he was incapable of accommodating himself to circumstances, that he could not be satisfied with aiming at the attainable; but a man of inflexible will, of absolute integrity, who with indomitable courage pressed onwards to his goal. The Government organs, the libellous press, began a systematic attack upon him. There was nothing to lay hold of in his blameless personality, but he was of Jewish descent. In a little pamphlet published by the local magnates of a small town in the neighbourhood of Königsberg under the title of _Stimme treuer Unterthanen seiner Majestät des Königs von Preussen_ ("Voice of a Few Faithful Subjects of his Majesty the King of Prussia"), we read: "Not from German, not from Christian lips did these words proceed.... East-Prussia would be disgraced if her sons had expressed such sentiments.... The seed of Jacob did not hearken to the voice of God, did not acknowledge his only begotten son, but put him to death; therefore they were cast off for ever, and scattered abroad among the nations of the earth." Presently, however, in all the booksellers' windows the portrait of Jacoby was to be seen; his face, with its clear-cut features, was surrounded by four marks of interrogation; he held his pen like a lance poised for attack. The significance of the man who thus made his appearance was felt by the poets, even by those with least strength of character, even by Dingelstedt, who was then preparing to barter his oppositionist principles for the title of _Hofrath_ (Privy Councillor). In Dingelstedt's fine collection of poems, _Nachtwächters Weltgang_, we find one with the heading: ????, evidently addressed to the King of Prussia: "Du weisst, was das bedeuten will? Du wirst sie mir nicht streichen? Es sind ja nur unschuldige--vier kleine Fragezeichen. Die wurzeln tief, die ragen hoch; wie die gerühmten Eichen Des freien deutschen Volkes stehn vier kleine Fragezeichen. Du wolltest sie zwar nimmer sehn in deinen weiten Reichen, Doch drängen sie sich immer auf, vier kleine Fragezeichen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Und einst, wenn du gestorben bist, als Stempel dann und Aichen Stehn gross an deinem Monument--vier kleine Fragezeichen."[10] [10] You know the meaning of these marks? You would never dream of erasing them--four innocent little marks of interrogation? Yet they strike deep root, they mount towards heaven, like the oak, the emblem of the great, free German nation. You have done your best to annihilate them throughout your wide realms, but they persistently appear again, these four little marks of interrogation.... In years to come, when you are dead, there will stand as sign and symbol on your monument--four little marks of interrogation. Herwegh, too, sang Jacoby's praises, as if he had a prevision that this was a man who, placed face to face with the King of Prussia, would play a more manly part than he himself had done. And the prevision was correct In November 1848, when the king replied to the deputation that waited on him to demand a change of ministers: "I will not listen to any communication on this subject," it was Jacoby who stepped forward and said: "It is the great misfortune of kings, that they will not listen to the truth." Herwegh's poem, which has a J. as headings, begins: "Und wieder ob den Landen Lag jüngst ein schwerer Bann: Da ist ein Mann erstanden, Ein ganzer, deutscher Mann. Ein deutscher und ein freier, Wer hätte das gedacht! Dass selbst die deutsche Leier Aus ihrem Schlaf erwacht."[11] [11] Our country in these latter days lay under a heavy ban; but, behold! there arose to deliver her one who with truth could be called a man. A German, and a freeman--who could have dreamt it? who could have looked for this awakening of the German lyre? The proceedings against Jacoby were carried on with extraordinary vigour. In less than four weeks he was brought up for examination twenty times; ninety-six witnesses gave evidence, shop-women, cooks, and school-children among the number. His real misdemeanour was merely a transgression of the press-laws, namely circumvention of censorship. But he was accused of instigation to disaffection--for which the punishment was two years' imprisonment and disfranchisement; of _lèse-majesté_--for which the punishment was four years' penal servitude; and of high treason--punishment, "death, with application of the most severe and deterrent pains and penalties." It was in his native town, Königsberg, that Jacoby was brought to trial; but the court there declared itself incompetent to deal with the case, seeing that it was one of high treason, and passed it on to the Kammergericht in Berlin. The Kammergericht, aware that the charge of high treason was untenable, also declared itself unqualified, and sent it back. The king was obliged to issue an order in council, requiring the Königsberg court to proceed with the trial. It was altogether to Jacoby's advantage to be tried by his fellow-citizens; but he disdained the idea of an illegal acquittal, and obstinately demanded to be tried by the Kammergericht in Berlin, since he was accused of high treason. His wish had to be complied with. He was condemned to two and a half years' imprisonment with hard labour and disfranchisement. But three years later the highest court of appeal pronounced a full and free acquittal. In the meantime all over Germany money was collected to present him with a civic wreath; subscriptions poured in; the names of eminent men headed the lists. Once more the Government was obliged to take action; the subscription lists were seized, the subscribers summoned, and a stop put to the whole proceeding. While the police and the censors were thus struggling to suppress the agitation for a free constitution, there was issued, on the 11th of August 1842, the most absurd regulation of which there is any record in the annals of an autocratically governed country--one of the country's own existing laws was added to the list of prohibited writings; it was forbidden to reprint the law of the 22nd of May 1815 (that relating to the institution of Estates of the Realm), because of its tendency to excite discontent. In September 1842, those Prussians who had hoped to see their country under the new king shake itself free from its humiliating relations with the Emperor Nicholas, learned that Frederick William IV., in Platen's day the warm, if platonic, friend of Poland, the hater of Russian tactics, was preparing for a journey to Warsaw to meet the Czar. On the return journey the king stopped at Kalisch to inspect the monument erected there in memory of the meeting between the sovereigns of Russia and Prussia in 1813. A Russian officer, General Berg (the future castigator of Poland), translated the inscriptions for him. One of them was: "May the Almighty give His blessing to the alliance and friendship between Russia and Prussia, that it may advance the peace and prosperity of both countries and inspire fear in their common enemies!" On hearing this inscription read, the king hastened up the steps of the monument and in the dust upon its side wrote with his finger the word: Amen![12] [12] Prutz: _Zehn Jahre_, i. pp. 237, 367, 516, &c. XXV THE NEUTRAL LITERATURE Nevertheless, Frederick William IV. was, and remained, the most intellectually gifted monarch of his day; his conversation gave evidence of both intelligence and imagination. It was a principle with him that all his feelings ought to be kingly; his published letters to Humboldt, written in amusing court jargon, are bright and clever; his sayings show quickness of apprehension, easily awakened compassion, ready wit.[1] Nor can it be said that he was out of touch with the German intellectual life and literature of the day; he showed favour to all the "good" writers, and disfavour to the "bad"; but it was not long before all Oppositionist writers were included in the latter class. In the beginning of the reign, Humboldt's was the dominating literary influence at court. Alexander von Humboldt, now eighty, the most famous scientist of the day, and a man of world-wide celebrity, kept the king well posted up in all the latest intellectual and scientific movements. His brother Wilhelm's liberal political theories had fallen into complete disrepute; to his own he dared not give expression at court; holding both superstition and reaction in abhorrence, he was a silent witness of much that was repugnant to him, though he now and again spoke his mind.[2] Honoured by the king and his intimates as the ornament of the court and the pride of his country, he took advantage of his position to further the cause of science and to say an occasional helpful word for this or that persecuted author. Published letters show that, before 1848, the king treated Humboldt with a sort of playful familiarity, though there was no real, deep sympathy between the two men. After 1848, when the Kreuzzeitung party became all-powerful, Humboldt gave expression to his annoyance at having lost his influence, in such remarks as, "It is no longer possible to amuse the king;" or, "the king persists in wasting fruitless affection on persons whom he has taken into favour." Amiability was not his characteristic at court; he was often sarcastic, and became angry when Ranke's political opinions found more favour than his. He was disliked by many, amongst others by the queen, who disapproved of his attachment to Louis Philippe and his family. He was in the habit of reading aloud all varieties of literature, but never his own writings; most frequently he read the _Journal des Débats_, whilst the king sat planning landscapes and architectural drawings. Another of those who read aloud to the royal family was Tieck, whom the king had brought to Berlin from Dresden. Though Tieck was considerably younger than Humboldt, court life was a burden to him because of his bodily infirmity. Shakespeare and Kleist were the authors he most frequently read from. The king ordered Tieck's own old fairy play, _Puss in Boots_, to be performed in Berlin, it was like the appearance of some antiquated spectre. At the king's instigation Tieck put the _Antigone_ of Sophocles on the stage, and Mendelssohn composed music for it. But Tieck was only one of literature's invalided soldiers. When the court dined in the garden of Sans Souci, he was afraid of draughts, even on the warmest days. Another once famous author of the Romantic period whom the king called to Berlin was La Motte Fouqué. Though not much over sixty, this writer had completely outlived his reputation. His romances seemed to the younger generation to belong to a pre-historic period. People were tired of tales of chivalry and the service of love (_Minnedienst_) told in a conventionally childish style; his unhistorical conception of past times and his sanctimoniousness aroused derision. Had it not been for the king's support, he would have died in want and oblivion. In 1841, chiefly on the recommendation of Varnhagen, the king invited to Berlin a great poet who did not belong to the Romantic school. This was Friedrich Rückert (1788-1866). Rückert was only fifty-three, but he did not belong to the period in which he lived; he was the expression in the literature of the day of that German universality which is unaffected by circumstances, of the gift of appropriation, absorption and imitation of the peculiarities of all other races. All his life long he shook poems out of his sleeve with a truly astonishing skill. As a young man he was initiated by Joseph von Hammer into the literatures of Arabia, Persia, and Turkey, and in 1826 he was appointed lecturer in Oriental languages at the University of Erlangen, but his duties as lecturer he constantly tried to evade. There is something about him which reminds us of Goethe in the Divan period, and something which he owes to the Schlegels and their indefatigable study and translation. The essay on philology, _Ueber das Wesen der Philologie_, which he wrote in 1811, shows the influence of Friedrich Schlegel's work on the wisdom of ancient India; for he starts from the idea of a "universal poetry," for which he considers the German language the most sympathetic vehicle. And universal, cosmopolitan poetry is exactly what this great master of style has given us. He, as the German patriot, makes his début with _Geharnischte Sonnette_ ("Armoured Sonnets"), polished and rather mannered verse. This book is followed by volume after volume of love-poems to various young women (five to six hundred poems). In the last and largest of these volumes, _Liebesfrühling_, inscribed to his fiancée, Louise Witthaus, feeling is predominant; everywhere else he is the didactic poet employing lyric forms, here he is the singer. But even here, set forms--as in the _Canzonets of the South_--stand in the way of the simple, natural outburst of feeling, and already Rückert's inclination to display his mastery over language shows itself in a hitherto unexampled free invention of new words and ease in interlacing within the limits of metre: "Welche Heldenfreudigkeit der Liebe, Welche Stärke muthigen Entsagens, Welche himmlisch erdentschwungene Triebe, Welche Gottbegeistrung des Ertragens! Welche Sich-Erhebung, Sich-Erwiedrung, Sich-Entäussrung, völl'ge Hin-sich-gebung, Seelenaustausch, Ineinanderlebung!" There is more of philological and technical than of purely poetical interest in such verse as this. But Rückert _was_ the philologist as poet. His predominating gift is the gift of language in its two developments--the capacity to learn languages and penetrate into their spirit, and the capacity, due to his profound penetration into the mysteries of his own language, to reproduce in German the best poetry written in other languages. He delighted in creating linguistic difficulties for himself to overcome. At one time we have him writing in the old German style that corresponded to his Albrecht Dürer curls, at another as a young officer of the time of Napoleon; now he is a Bedouin telling us Hariri's tales with marvellous skill, and again a Persian weaving his rhyme in the form of Ghazels or recreating the epic of Rustum and Sohrab. He appears before us as a Turk in caftan and turban, as a Chinaman with slippers and pig-tail; but most frequently and with most pleasure he sits as a Brahmin on the banks of the sacred Ganges, proclaiming in sonorous verse the thousand golden rules of a happy philosophy of life. It is said of Théophile Gautier that he was, intellectually speaking, equally at home in ancient Egypt, in the Russia of to-day, in Constantinople, and in Seville. This is only true to the extent that he was well acquainted with the climatic characteristics and the monuments of many foreign lands. It may be said with much profounder truth of Rückert, who comprehended the human beings through their literatures, understood their language and thought in their spirit. He never saw the foreign lands with his bodily eyes, therefore he has neither Gautier's colour, nor his power of graphic presentation; he views them all calmly, reflectively, with the eye of the mind, and gives us the mental pictures in an astonishing variety of metrical forms. Whoever desires to make acquaintance with excellent specimens of his art should read _Hariri's Makamehs_ (more particularly the division entitled _Jungfrau und Junge Frau_) or _Weisheit der Bramanen_. These works had gained Rückert a wide circle of readers and admirers in Berlin; but the town, with its restlessness, was antipathetic to him. He was to lecture on Oriental languages at the university, and his first lectures were attended by a curious crowd; but this crowd soon dwindled down to an audience of two or three, and Rückert gave up going to the university. He sat in his room in the third flat of a house in the Behrenstrasse and wrote poems in which he expressed his detestation of Berlin and its agitated, modern life. Even the Berlin of the royal romanticist was too modern for these celebrities of past days. At a somewhat later date the king extended his patronage to Christian Scherenberg, whose poems, more especially the battle-pieces _Waterloo_ and _Abukir_, were much admired at court--the author himself had to read them aloud. Even as an octogenarian, Scherenberg retained his place as a favourite in Berlin society. He was born in 1798. His life had been a hard struggle. After the dissolution of his unhappy marriage, he lived, from 1833 to 1840, in rooms in a small house at the corner of the Bendlerstrasse, looking towards the Zoological Gardens, in such poverty that he could not afford to buy firewood, and had to send his children to gather sticks in the Gardens. He wrote poems, tragedies, and comedies, for which he could never find a publisher; nevertheless he was so successful in his attempts to keep up the appearance of a gentleman, that his relations in Stettin believed he had won fame under an assumed name, and begged him to "remove his mask" and let them into the secret. All that his pen brought him was what he received for composing begging letters and for copying; the rest of his living he gained by acting as tutor to the families of the gardeners who lived in the neighbourhood, giving lessons which, according to agreement, were paid for in potatoes. A pretty story is told by Fontane in his _Life of Scherenberg_. Great hopes had been entertained in the Bendlerstrasse that a certain long-deferred payment would be made at Easter in the shape of a juicy roast of veal; but in place of this, the pupil, in his innocent desire to give pleasure, appeared with a lark in a little green cage. On Easter morning, 1840, Scherenberg himself carried the cage out to an open field, set the lark free, and wrote the sweet poem, one verse of which runs: "Du, Vöglein, singst, das ist das Deine, Hub leise ich zur Lerche an, Ich geb' dich frei, das ist das Meine, Ein Jeder bete, wie er kann."[3] The poor, struggling poet let the lark go, but kept its little clay water-dish as a remembrance, promoting it to be his ink-pot. At last his poems caught the fancy of the public, and the king, delighted with the originality and rugged energy of the battle-pieces, took their author into favour. The only thing connected with the time when he read aloud at court that Scherenberg could be persuaded to talk about, was the pleasure of the half-hour before the reading, spent in his friend Count Bismarck-Bohlen's room, where men joked and smoked, and afterwards drenched themselves with Eau de Cologne, because the king disliked the smell of tobacco. Many years later there was another potentate in Berlin at whose court Scherenberg was an attendant. This was Ferdinand Lassalle. At his house the poet met livelier companions, in whose society he not infrequently permitted himself to make fun of his royal and aristocratic patrons. It was in his nature to suit himself to his company; his court friends knew his weakness and excused him. Another favourite at the Prussian court, as indeed at all the courts of Europe, was Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau, who from time to time came to Berlin to visit the wife whom, though divorced from her, he still loved. He was a handsome man, aristocratic in appearance and manners, accomplished and versatile, a favourite with men because of his spirit and gaiety, irresistibly charming to women; the list of famous women who were devoted to him is a long one; it includes Sophie Gay, Henriette Sontag, Bettina, and Ida Hahn-Hahn. In much the same manner as the Prince de Ligne before him, Pückler-Muskau belonged, by right of his intellectual qualities, to the international aristocracy of Europe. His desire to shine did not lead him to over-estimate his powers, did not even preclude real modesty. He was a brilliant vagabond, a master of the art of living, and a skilled professional in one department of art strictly so-called, namely, landscape gardening. He was the first in Germany to desert the stiff, French style of laying out a garden, and to reinstate nature in her rights. His garden at Muskau soon became the model garden of Europe. There were many strange episodes in his life. Nothing could be much stranger than the story of his marriage. He was in love at the same time with two young girls, daughters of Count von Pappenheim, whose wife was a daughter of Chancellor Hardenberg. This lady, who was forty, nine years older than Pückler, herself conceived such a violent passion for him that she infected him with it. She gave up everything to become his, and he married her, but with the proviso that he was to be at complete liberty to dispose of his affections as he chose. The marriage turned out happily. But after they had lived together for ten years the couple amicably arranged a divorce, in the hope that the prince might find and marry a rich heiress, and thereby repair his fallen fortunes. With this aim in view he first visits London, then travels about in Germany. He writes daily to his divorced wife, his Lucie, keeping her faithfully informed of the progress he makes and of the difficulties he encounters in his pursuit of an heiress. Unable to capture one, he returns to Lucie, and they again live lovingly together for some years. After this he travels for six years, returning at the end of that time with a beautiful little slave, named Machbuba, whom he instals at Muskau. With this arrangement the princess was not altogether satisfied, though she had made it a rule never to plague him with jealousy. At the age of seventy she still loved and worshipped him, and in his intercourse with her he was always personified kindness, frankness, and cordiality. Prince Pückler had never had any serious thought of taking up the profession of author, but in 1830 he determined to publish anonymously the letters which he had written to Lucie during his travels in search of an heiress. They had a great success. There was a society tone about them very uncommon in German literature, an attractive carelessness of construction, due to the fact that they were not written for publication, a pleasing mixture of wisdom and frivolity. As already mentioned, many ascribed their authorship to Heine. Their writer was modern in the extreme, thoroughly _blasé_, an advanced Liberal, a freethinker in the literal sense of the word. For readers of to-day the four volumes of _Briefe eines Verstorbenen_ ("Letters of a Dead Man") have much the same value as Madame de Girardin's attractive five volumes, _Lettres parisiennes du Vicomte de Launay_. She is fresher and writes infinitely better than the prince. He has cosmopolitan experiences of classes and of countries that she knows nothing about. As a specimen of his style, those interested should read the unassuming account of his conversation with Goethe in Weimar, to be found in the third volume of the Letters. Pückler's enthusiastic reverence for Goethe has a genuine ring, and the same may be said of Goethe's answer to Pückler's polite speeches. Goethe at once begins to talk about Muskau (referred to in letters as M.), and commends attempts like Pückler's to awaken the feeling for beauty, dwells on the fact that the welfare of all would be rapidly advanced if only each in his own sphere, great or small, would work faithfully and lovingly--that is what Pückler is doing in Muskau, and he himself has done no more. Pückler's later volumes of travel, many in number, leave us quite cold. They lack the spontaneity of the Letters, and are still more destitute of that which could alone replace it, namely, literary talent. But until about the year 1840 they stood as high in the favour of the reading public as his first books, and their author's popularity was unbounded; he was, like Franz Liszt, known and admired everywhere. As late as 1854 Heine dedicates his _Lutetia_ to him in an enthusiastic preface, in which he calls him "mein hochgefeierter und wahlverwandter Zeitgenosse" (that highly honoured contemporary, to whom I feel myself spiritually akin). And in Varnhagen's diary for July 7, 1839, we read: "Prince Pückler's name acts like magic. It needs but to be mentioned, and the great world of all countries listens in suspense. His fame is stupendous, and the cleverer men are, the more they appreciate him." In 1834 Varnhagen had said of him that he possessed one quality in common with Young Germany, and that the most important, namely, absolute freedom of thought; at a later period he said that Pückler represented the upper house, Heine the lower house in modern German literature. Pückler's attitude to the House of Hohenzollern was one of chivalrous devotion. He never came to Berlin without waiting on the king. He appreciated Frederick William IV.'s culture and wit, but, being a pronounced Voltairean, to whom every priest was a hypocrite and all vague piety an abomination, the romantic strain in the king's character repelled him. Like Humboldt he often fled from the court and took refuge with Varnhagen, the keen observer and critic, who sat forgotten in his corner, writing in his Journal (a diary kept in Sainte-Beuve's manner) the history of the times. And in later years Pückler, too, was a regular guest at Lassalle's small dinner-parties, where he often did most of the talking; it is said that he was the only person privileged by Lassalle to do so.[4] To the authors already named we have only to add the aged Arndt, who in his day had been persecuted as a demagogue, and we have the complete list of the romantic, conservative, neutral, or aristocratic writers whom the most powerful king in Germany succeeded in attaching to his person. We see the length and the strength of the attachment. The Opposition attacked every author who had the very slightest connection with the court or with those in power. We have seen how Herwegh begins his first book with a defiant attack on Prince Pückler. He jeered even at Arndt--called him a sunset glow, incapable of illuminating the young world--and received a poetical reproof from Freiligrath for so doing. Freiligrath was the only one of the young poets whom the king at once (1841) placed under an obligation (Geibel was taken into favour a year or two later). General von Radowitz, who admired Freiligrath's poem "Löwenritt," in spite of its unnaturalness, induced the king to look favourably on its author and to grant him a pension of 300 thalers. Herwegh, not content with making merry at Freiligrath's expense in such lines as the following, where _Freiligrath_ is substituted for _Mühlenrad_ (mill-wheel): "Mir wird von alle dem so dumm, Als ging mir ein Freiligrath im Kopf herum,"[5] wrote in his _Duett der Pensionirten_: "_Geibel_: Bist du's? _Freiligrath_: Ja, willst du mich kennen? Ja, ich bin es in der That, Den Bediente Bruder nennen Bin der Sänger Freiligrath."[6] This was more than Freiligrath could stand. He threw up his pension, a step which was soon followed by his complete conversion. His volumes, _Ein Glaubensbekenntniss_ ("A Confession of Faith"), published in 1844, and _Ça ira_, published in 1846, show a steadily increasing passion of devotion to the revolutionary cause. He became the most honoured poet of the party. Immediately after the publication of _Ein Glaubensbekenntniss_ he was obliged to flee the country, going first to Brussels and then to London, where he earned his livelihood as a merchant. The following anecdote shows how popular he already was: From Brussels he had taken an excursion to Antwerp. There he and his friends went on board a barque that was lying in the river, ready to sail for Canton. While the boatswain was showing them over the ship, the captain, with some friends, came out of the cabin. Freiligrath's party made many excuses, but the courteous sailor bade them welcome, and invited them into the cabin. On one of the shelves of the little book-case stood Freiligrath's Poems. "Are you not pleased that your poems are going out to Canton?" asks one of his companions. "Eh!" says the captain. "This is Freiligrath? The real Freiligrath?" On his question being answered in the affirmative, the captain rushes to the speaking-tube: "Hoist the flags! Man the yards! and serve champagne on deck!"[7] The fermentation throughout Germany was rapidly becoming more violent. Ever since 1842 the Hungarians under Kossuth had been defying Metternich; in Bavaria the prestige of royalty had suffered from King Ludwig's amour with the ballet-dancer, Lola Montez; in German Switzerland the Radical and Jesuit parties were engaged in stern conflict. In Prussia the authority of the State Church was being vigorously asserted; Roman Catholicism was favoured, but all other dissenters were harassed. It was not only the Free-Catholics, a sect founded by Ronge, and the so-called Friends of Light, another free sect, founded by Wislicenus, that were regarded with disfavour; even Pietists were objected to, as not orthodox enough to suit the State requirements. One protest after another reached the king from those whose liberty in matters of conscience was threatened. And purely political agitation was on the increase too. The leaders of the opposition parties in all the States of Germany decried with one voice the old Federal constitution (_Bundesverfassung_). Louder and louder rose the cry in Prussia (the king having laid no great restrictions on the liberty of the press) for the promised new constitution. From abroad too came revolutionary impulses. Since 1846 Pius IX. had been giving himself out as a Liberal and an Italian patriot. Insurrections were breaking out all over Italy; Metternich was unable to prevent them, and they were destroying his prestige. German emigrants in Switzerland and North America did their best to fan the flame in Germany. Meantime the King of Prussia occupied himself with the institution of the new Order of the Swan and with architectural plans. He proposed the erection of a great Hermann monument on the Rhine, as a demonstration against constitutional France; and he set the builders to work again on the Cathedral of Cologne, after a pause of 300 years. This latter undertaking was considered symbolical, not from the national but from the ecclesiastical point of view. It gave Heine occasion for various protests and erroneous prophecies in _Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen_, and also gave occasion to Strauss's clever pamphlet, _Der Romantiker auf dem Trone der Cäsaren_, in which he manages to describe Julian the Apostate as the enthusiastic religious reactionary, in such a way that the parallel with Frederick William IV. suggests itself without being pointed out. The new literature, to which the king was distinctly inimical, soon began to return his enmity with interest. He established Tieck, the fretful, crippled old man, at Sans Souci as poet-laureate, and Schelling, the mystifier, in Berlin as _summus philosophus_. He caused the _Antigone_ of Sophocles and the _Medea_ of Euripides to be performed in the theatres of Berlin and Potsdam, in hopes of thereby counteracting the spirit of unrest in German literature. But that literature went its own way. [1] Examples of Frederick William's style of wit: When the king was at the play, lackeys stood in attendance outside the door of the royal box. One evening, when his Majesty, provoked by the tiresomeness of a new play, left his box before the close of the performance, he found one of the lackeys sitting on the floor of the passage, sound asleep, his head leant against the wall of the box. Instead of being angry, the king said: "Der hat gehorcht" (means both: He has listened, and: He has obeyed). In 1848, in the palmy days of the Revolution, the king was obliged to receive one deputation after another, sometimes of very pretentious and presumptuous common people. He addressed the members of one such deputation, one after the other. What are you?--A silk and woollen cloth warehouseman, your Majesty.--Most interesting occupation. And you?--A medical student.--Excellent preparation for taking part in the government of the country! And so on, all the time with a most polite, if ironical, smile. (Told me by an eye-witness.) [2] The king was at one time deeply interested in the mysteries of table-turning, but it was long before any of the palace tables could be persuaded to perform, a fact which did not surprise Humboldt. At last the king received him one morning with the exclamation: "Aha! what do you say now? We sat round the table for a full half-hour last night before it would move, but at last off it went, round and round, faster and faster. How do you explain that?" "Why, your Majesty, in all disputes it's the wiser of the two that gives in." (Related by Humboldt himself.) [3] O little bird, to sing 'tis thine, gently to the lark began; I set thee free, that deed is mine; We all must pray as best we can. [4] A. de Reumont: _Aus König Fr. Wilhelm IV. gesunden und kranken Tagen.--Briefe Alex. v. Humboldt's an Varnhagen von Ense.--Varnhagen von Ense's Tagebücher_.--Hillebrand: _Zeiten, Völker und Menschen II_. [5] All that is going on makes me as stupid as if a mill-wheel (a Freiligrath) were turning in my head. [6] "_Geibel_: Is this you? _Freiligrath_: Yes! will you recognise me? Truly it is I; servants now call me brother, yet I am the poet Freiligrath. [7] Schmidt-Weissenfels: _Freiligrath._ XXVI POLITICAL POETRY, PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION In Anastasius Grün's (Count Alexander von Auersperg's) volume, _Spaziergänge eines Wiener Poeten_ ("Walks of a Viennese Poet"), there is a poem, the title and the refrain of which is: Why? When new prohibitory enactments are pasted on the notice-board at the town-hall, a little man comes and reads them and quietly asks: Why? When the priests from their pulpits groan and howl at the sunlight, he asks: Why? When men go out to fight sparrows with halberts and spears, and use cannons to shoot larks, he asks: Why? And when they try, condemn, and execute himself, from his very grave is heard the question: Why? Something of this kind happened in Germany as soon as the patriarchal faith in monarchy was thoroughly shaken. When an act of violence, or a stupid act, or a subterfuge on the part of the Government killed a hope, out of the grave of that hope grew a Why. And every Why gave birth to others. The four questions of the East-Prussian were inadequate now; questions grew and multiplied like those invisible but dangerous animals which in an incredibly short time can undermine an organism. Why revere? Why trust? Why endure? And, first and foremost, why keep silence? When they are going to shake off the yoke, men begin by refusing to bear it silently. Suffering and wrath, desire and longing, now found vent in words, in song. Political verse, of which there had been occasional specimens among the work of Platen and Lenau, Uhland and Heine, now concentrates and crystallises itself into a separate species of poetry, a separate form of art. Political song of every variety is heard throughout the land. It is a time of growth; men of talent come to the surface in crowds--Hoffmann and Herwegh, Dingelstedt and Prutz, Freiligrath and Max Waldau, Karl Beck and Mofitz Hartmann--such a rich and fragant bloom as had never been seen in this domain before. Old Romanticists expressed their contempt for prose (_i.e._ political) poetry, dogmatic æsthetes declared these poets to be possessed of rhetoric and not of lyric talent; but all to no purpose; the very number of them, and the way in which they spontaneously fell into position as a group, showed that they had the very best, the only unchallengeable reason for coming into existence, namely, that they could not help it, that the spirit of the times was making its voice heard through them; and soon they also proved that they possessed the one and only right to exist, for they were able to hold their ground, they took their position as literary men, and gained the popular ear. They had had a single forerunner in the Thirties, the above-mentioned Austrian poet, Alexander Auersperg. His verse was imposing, somewhat overloaded with imagery, at times wanting in taste; nevertheless it had the true ring, and his pathos was genuine. Joseph II. is Auersperg's hero, and it is from the "enlightenment" standpoint that he regards that political liberty which he so eagerly desires. It is the power of the priesthood that specially arouses his wrath; but he distinguishes between _Pfaffen_ and _Priester_, attacks the worthless and sings the praises of the high-minded among the clergy. Upon lines like: "Stoss in's Horn, Herold des Krieges: Zu den Waffen, zu den Waffen! Kampf und Krieg der argen Horde heuchlerischer, dummer Pfaffen!"[1] follow others which extol the virtues of the really saintly priests. Still we feel that in his opinion more of the former than of the latter are to be found in his own day. He regards it as one of the signs of the times that the fat, animal priest has been succeeded by the lean, intelligent, ambitious one: _Die Dicken und die Dünnen._ "Fünfzig Jahre sind's, da riefen unsere Aeltern zu den Waffen, Krieg und Kampf den dicken, kugelrunden, feisten Pfaffen! Auch in Waffen stehn wir Enkel; jetzt doch muss die Lösung sein: Krieg und Kampf den dünnen, magern, spindelhagern Pfäffelein!"[2] In spirited verse the courageous poet attacked now Metternich, now the detective police, now the censorship. His poems display a frank, vigorous spirit of opposition, no hatred, no wild resentment; one feels that they are animated by anticipation of a glorious future and enthusiasm for the great men of the past. But Auersperg's plastic power is slight; he too often loses himself in a maze of allegory. The best of the political poetry of the Forties is, both intellectually and artistically, much superior to his. About a year after his famous journey, from the effects of which he had completely recovered, Georg Herwegh published a second volume of _Gedichte eines Lebendigen_ ("Poems of a Living Man"), in which some new and valuable qualities are combined with those characterising the first. There is more confidence and more fire, and both enthusiasms and animosities are less vague. We have fewer illusions, and a clearer understanding of ends and means; no more appeals to a king to lead the onward march of his people, or to God to give freedom and happiness to all the nations of the earth. Frederick William IV. had extinguished Herwegh's faith in princes, and Ludwig Feuerbach his faith in God. But we gain the impression that the dawning light in men's minds has broadened into the light of day. In the old dawn-songs, which Shakespeare has imitated in _Romeo and Juliet_, the young girl always tries to keep her lover with her by declaring that it is not sunlight but moonlight that he sees, not the lark but the nightingale that he hears. This idea is cleverly reversed in the poem _Morgenzuruf_ ("Cry of the Morning"): "Die Lerche war's, nicht die Nachtigall, Die eben am Himmel geschlagen: Schon schwingt er sich auf, der Sonnenball, Vom Winde des Morgens getragen. Der Tag, der Tag ist erwacht! Die Nacht, Die Nacht soll blutig verenden. Heraus wer an's ewige Licht noch glaubt, Ihr Schläfer, die Rosen der Liebe vom Haupt, Und ein flammendes Schwert um die Lenden!"[3] _Unglückliche Liebe_ ("Unhappy Love") is an epigram pointed against kings: "Nicht an den Königen liegt's--die Könige lieben die Freiheit, Aber die Freiheit liebt leider die Könige nicht."[4] The tone of Herwegh's previous volume, even in its apparently irreligious utterances, had been theistic. On the adjuration to tear the crosses from the graves and use them as swords, follows the line: "God forgives the deed ye do." But in this new volume we find a poem in which Feuerbach's praises are sung because he has attacked the doctrine of immortality, and a Song of the Heathen, which is more daring in its mockery than any similar poem of Heine's: "Die Heiden--'s ist doch Schade um solch Ingenium. Sie hiessen Vier gerade und nahmen Fünf für krumm. Auch hatt' die Jungfernschaft ein End, sobald die Magd ein Kind gebar, Dieweil das neue Testament noch nicht erfunden war." And, unlike Auersperg, who makes a distinction between the good and the bad priest, Herwegh holds the whole brotherhood in derision, mocks at Catholic and Protestant, shorn and unshorn, in the witty, untranslatable epigram: "Ob sie katholisch geschoren, ob protestantisch gescheitelt, Gleichviel--immer geräth man den Gesellen in's Haar." He had pricked before, now he stung; the singer of liberty had developed into a herald and preparer of the approaching revolution. If these powerful poems did not greatly move men's minds, it is to be ascribed to the fact that the deficiencies of Herwegh's personal character were subtly influencing his verse. They betray themselves in a certain straining after effect, in his evident satisfaction with his own witty sallies, and in his intellectual barrenness in every domain except that of polemics. This second volume of poems is not a collection which suggests that its author has any store of ideas, of imagination, to draw upon. When we read it, we understand his life; and his life helps us to understand this book, with which his career as a poet practically came to a close. All that he subsequently wrote, and he lived for thirty-two years longer, is contained in one small volume, published after his death. The poems of this last collection are full of wit and full of enthusiasm for liberty; they are written--hardly four in the year--by a man who to the day of his death remained faithful to his revolutionary youth. Though faithful enough to his past, Herwegh was no worker in the service of liberty. The latter part of his life was spent in idleness. His career as a poet and critic began in 1839[5] and culminated with _Gedichte eines Lebendigen_. He married a rich young Jewess, an enthusiastic admirer of his poetry. After the Revolution of February he took up the position of a leader in Paris, and invaded Baden at the head of a body of republican German and French workmen; on the 27th of April they were defeated by Würtembergian troops; thanks to his wife's courage, Herwegh escaped. Heine has given a bitingly sarcastic, but very unfair description of this campaign in _Simplicissimus I._ The simple, truthful account which Herwegh's wife has published since, of all the incidents of the revolt, and of the part which her husband played in it, proves that, even if he lacked the tactical skill which he laid no claim to possessing, he was a brave man. Herwegh now became a member of the emigrant colony in London, and lived the emigrants' perniciously idle life; they had literally nothing to do but concoct futile plans for new revolutions and fall in love with one another's wives. He afterwards lived in Paris and Zürich, always the same inactive life, persistently dissatisfied with the progress of events in Germany. Like Kinkel and like Moritz Hartmann, Herwegh was unable to the day of his death (1875) to reconcile himself to the great development of power attained by Germany at the expense of liberty. He never relinquished the ideals of his youth; retained a manly admiration even for Heine, who had held him up to derision. Being such as he was, it was only natural that Herwegh should from the very first be on the watch in the matter of his brother poets' fidelity to their flag and the genuineness of their liberalism. His attacks on Geibel and Freiligrath have already been noticed. He next turned upon Anastasius Grün (Auersperg), who had gone to Vienna in hopes of obtaining the appointment and rank of Chamberlain; his wife, by birth a Countess Attems, was invested with the Order of the Star of the Cross, and he wished to be able to accompany her to court. In stirring words Herwegh entreated him to retrace his steps: "Darf man den Tempel um ein Weib entweih'n, Mit einem Weib um goldne Götzen tanzen," &c[6] Dingelstedt retorted, defending Count Auersperg in a pretty poem: "O, sie will es nie begreifen, ihre Prosa und Gemeinheit, Das ein Geist wie Du, ein Name, bürgt für der Gesinnung Reinheit, Nur das Schlechte glaubt sie willig," &c.[7] The retort evaded the attack instead of repulsing it. No one seriously believed in a man like Auersperg having changed his convictions; the ground of Herwegh's attack was that, holding such convictions, he had solicited a court appointment. It was his own future position that Dingelstedt defended; he was the next poet upon whom Herwegh turned, with a satire that was all the fiercer because it was silent, or at least only indirectly expressed. Dingelstedt, like Herwegh, had been obliged to leave Germany to escape the consequences of writing political poems. The two poets met in Paris. There they one evening amused themselves by trying which could write the better verses on the subject of his own imaginary political conversion. Herwegh wrote the poem "Wohlgeboren" the burden of which is: What is the use of all this talk of liberty and fatherland, of all this enthusiasm, all this meddling with politics? What good has it done me? No, no! for the future I will be a quiet, respectable citizen: "Du sollst, verdammte Freiheit, mir Die Ruhe fürder nicht gefährden; Lisette, noch ein Gläschen Bier! Ich will ein guter Bürger werden."[8] This last line forms the refrain of all the verses. To outbid his friend, Dingelstedt wrote the poem "Hochwohlgeboren," which begins: "Ein guter Bürger willst du werden? Pfui Freund!--Ein guter, Bürger--Du? Das also war dein Ziel auf Erden, Dem stürmten deine Lieder zu? O nimm's zurück, das ekle Wort, Wer mag sich so gemein geberden! Nein, nein, mich reisst es weiter fort: Ich muss Geheimer Hofrath werden!"[9] In this poem, too, the last line of the first verse serves as refrain to all the others. Two years later Dingelstedt was Privy Councillor, librarian, and reader at the court of the King of Würtemberg. Herwegh contented himself with reprinting the two poems side by side. Franz Dingelstedt (born in 1814) represents one of the most curious types of the day. He is a revolutionary who ought to have been born in the purple, a Prince Pückler in the guise of a poor schoolmaster, a satirist who cannot dispense with appearances, a man of first-rate abilities with neither serious vices nor serious enthusiasm, but with ready wit and frequent poetic inspiration; early _blasé_, he retains a certain practical activity of mind to the last. He was born in the worst-governed country in Germany, Hesse-Cassel, under the hated administration of Hassenpflug, became master at one of its grammar-schools, aroused dissatisfaction by his emancipated opinions and conduct and the liberal tone of his poetry, was transferred and perpetually interfered with, and sent in his resignation in 1841, when he was twenty-seven. Only one year after Herwegh he published his first collection of political poetry, _Lieder eines kosmopolitischen Nachtwächters_ ("Songs of a Cosmopolitan Night-Watchman"). Good verse, clever poems, a good idea. The watchman in his uniform, armed with his spiked mace, his horn in his hand, goes his nightly round, and, pausing outside the houses, tells us what he sees and imagines within. He is a genuine night-watchman--thoroughly weary of the old woman at home, who is so ugly and so wrinkled, yet with whom he manages to live peaceably, for she sleeps by night and he by day; a genuine night-watchman, who sings the watchman's song about lights and fires; looks up at the prisoners, the political prisoners, peering through the iron bars and shaking them; shudders as he passes the cathedral with all its relics, where the wind is howling so loud in the organ pipes; and then laughs at himself for shuddering. It is twenty years since he was inside the building, he is none of your seat-holding church-goers. And yet he is not a genuine night-watchman. He has feelings and opinions which are not those of a man in his station. In one house a ball is going on; he listens to the music, and describes the dancing and the behaviour of the fashionable company. What a sensation it would create if he, lantern and mace in hand, snow on his cloak and cap, his cheeks burning and frost on his beard, were suddenly to appear among all these shadows! Outside another house stands the carriage of the great, the all-powerful, Minister of State. The coachman is wrapped in furs, but the poor uncovered horses are trembling with cold whilst their master is playing cards within--just as if they could not revenge themselves when he comes: "Ich rathe dir, lass die Karten ruhn, Und hüte dich fein, Ministerlein! Du hast es mit vier Hengsten zu thun, Bedenk', dass es keine Bürger sein."[10] There are many pathetic passages. In one of the suburbs the watchman passes a house where a poor wretch lies in his last agonies; he passes the lunatic asylum, and the dread of madness that always seizes him here is mingled with a strange feeling of attraction; he passes the cemetery, where his poor father, who took his own life, lies in a disdained, neglected corner; and on his way back he passes the palace, where the prince tosses sleeplessly on his pillow of down, while the sentry sleeps soundly standing in his box. A night-watchman might easily have had some of these feelings--he would never have expressed them thus; the mask is perpetually falling off. There are one or two most masterly and natural expressions of popular indignation, for example the tirade occasioned by the sight of light in the sickroom of a cringing courtier whose extortions have impoverished his country: "Warum er nicht schläft? warum er in Wuth die Spitzen am Hemde zerissen? Ein gutes Gewissen schläft überall gut, und nirgends ein schlechtes Gewissen. Er hat an des Landes Mark, die Schlang', sich voll gefressen, gesogen, Er hat--ein Menschenleben lang!--gestohlen, gelogen, betrogen."[11] But there are also expressions of hatred and exasperation which we feel belong to another class of society. We actually find the watchman giving frivolous advice to a beautiful young lady who has been married to an old reprobate, telling her how she may best revenge herself upon him. At times his thoughts and reveries take a higher flight. He is leaning on an old cannon, which stands on the rampart, shining and dumb. Once its wheels rolled over dead and living on the field of victory; once it gave the signal for the dread onslaught, for beside the touch-hole there is an N. surmounted by the imperial crown. Now its voice is only heard when some wretched prisoner has escaped from his dungeon, or on the occasion of his Majesty's birthday, or when a princess is born. "Patience!" cries the watchman to the cannon; "it may be that ere long thou wilt once more pour thy balls upon the enemy; but keep silent in the meantime, old veteran, or they will spike thee as they are gagging us." Here the mask is completely thrown off. After Dingelstedt had left Hesse-Cassel, he published _Nachtwächters Weltgang_ ("The Night-Watch man's World Patrol"), in which the poet is no longer the unsophisticated night-watchman--but the cultivated revolutionary. He falls foul of bad kings, of the governments of Hesse-Cassel, Prussia, and Hanover, and of false German patriotism: "What, gentlemen, is a German patriot?--A man who serves the Lord on Sunday and the king on week-days. What are the objects of his desire?--Office, a title, and a ribbon for himself, bread for his lawful offspring, and legitimate sovereigns for his country.--Away with you, German patriot! The temple is no place for you! You are a Judas, whose treacherous kiss has been the death of liberty!" A few months later Dingelstedt was a Privy Councillor and Councillor of Legation--held office, had a title, wore a ribbon. Naturally no one believed in any genuine conversion, and it is not surprising that his conduct was severely, and in some quarters spitefully, judged. The numerous documents relating to his character and life which have been published of late years (especially Julius Rodenberg's articles in the _Deutsche Rundschau_ of 1889-90) throw a more favourable light upon his action than that in which his contemporaries saw it. There was a want of fine feeling about it, it was unseemly, but it was not base. There was nothing wrong in the actual fact of his accepting the post of reader to a cultivated and amiable sovereign, the fault lay in his having so shortly beforehand proclaimed all sorts of democratic and radical principles which he was not prepared to stand by. He had the true artist's temperament, and yet was distinctly practical; he was pleasure-loving and ambitious, unable to bear permanently the humiliation of being poor and consequently ignored; he was above all else impressed, strongly impressed, by the belief that in following the path he had entered upon he was pursuing a _métier de dupe_. What did he gain by refusing, because of his principles, to accept good appointments and influential positions! What did the world gain by clever men on principle leaving titles, money, office, orders, and posts of honour to the stupid men! Was this the best way to improve matters? His great desire was to play the sovereign in some domain of art, to solve great scenic problems, to direct great theatres, to be the favoured of beautiful women. Was he at all likely to attain it as the exiled schoolmaster, the correspondent of the _Allgemeine Zeitung?_ Who would permanently hold in esteem the poor, independent journalist? who would not, in course of time, esteem the influential courtier? Of course there would be an outcry when he accepted the call--if only he had not written that wretched poem to Herwegh!--but what was needed was cool courage, ironical impenetrability, smiling indifference, and the calm superiority which allows one's opponents to bawl till they are tired; and these gifts he possessed. He became, as every one knows, not only a courtier, but in course of time manager of one court theatre after another--Stuttgart, Munich, Weimar--ending his career as the influential director of the Burgtheater in Vienna. Heine, who was not strict, but witty, wrote the incomparable poem "Verhofrätherei," which begins: "Verschlechtert sich nicht dein Herz und dein Stil, So magst du treiben jedwedes Spiel, Mein Freund, ich werde dich nie verkennen, Und soll ich dich auch Herr Hofrath nennen,"[12] It expresses a mournful understanding of Dingelstedt's conduct, and bitter contempt for the public to whom both he and Dingelstedt addressed themselves. Any one who desires to get a distinct and correct idea of Dingelstedt's intellectual personality should compare the clever, graphic account of his life, entitled _Münchener Bilderbuch_, with his own cyclus of poems entitled _Ein Roman_. These poems show us far more of his inmost nature than the verses of his early youth. But he had early experienced the mingled feeling of attraction to the great world and contempt for it. In the poem "Krähwinkel," he wrote of fashionable society: "Sie lügen, sie krakehlen, sie hassen sich bis auf's Blut, Zum Morden oder Stehlen fehlt ihnen nur der Muth. Sie möchten gern und wagen's nicht, das heisst denn Recht und Pflicht; Die denken können, sagen's nicht. Die Meisten denken nicht."[13] Now he tells the story of a society amour. In England, at a ball, the poet meets a lady of Hindoo blood, but English in every other respect. She is spiritually akin to himself, gloomy and cold and weary of life. They fall in love: "Wir klammerten uns, ob aus Zeitvertreib, Ob aus Verzweiflung, an einander an, Sie, ein verlornes, neugebornes Weib, Ich, ein verlorner, neugeborner Mann."[14] The word "Zeitvertreib" (pastime) is a little too weak, the word "Verzweiflung" (despair) is a shade too strong. There is German puerility in this insistence upon fashionable frivolity and blank despair. So much is certain; the two fall in love. We have plenty of passion, hot and wild--more of sensuality in it than love, voluptuous nights, secret pleasures, and coldly cynical front shown to the world; then separation, farewell, and oblivion; until one day in a conservatory in Amsterdam the decaying smell of a dead lotus-plant makes him feel faint. He is reminded of her, and presses one of the dead leaves to his lips as if it were the hand of a corpse. Such characters as Dingelstedt significantly illustrate their age, they do not create it. They are not the builders of the palace, they are its gilders. No doubt the work of the gilder first attracts the eye, and attracts far more eyes than the work of the builder, who in laying the foundation of the palace determines its whole construction; but there is also no doubt as to whose work is of the more importance. These pleasure-loving poets, often disillusioned so young, with no principles except the political convictions of which they sing and boast, and to which they generally prove unfaithful, are of social importance from the fact that they create the opinion of the moment, general political opinion, and thereby accelerate the slow reorganisation of society. But this outward reorganisation is not itself the principal matter; political opinion is not the prime mover. The outward revolution is a result of movements going on much deeper below the surface. Perhaps the most powerful impulse is given by philosophy with its quiet revolutionising of the religious view of life. In this domain of philosophic agitation there appeared in the summer of 1841 (the year in which Dingelstedt's first book was published, the year following the publication of Herwegh's first) an epoch-making thinker. In the work entitled _Das Wesen des Christenthums_ ("The Nature of Christianity") he formulates great thoughts, founds and expounds a philosophy of life which makes its influence felt in the spoken and written words of all who come after him, all at least whose minds attain their fullest development. Ludwig Feuerbach is the foundation-stone upon which for the next twenty years every one builds, everything is built. When I say of him that he was great, a great man and a great thinker, I myself resent the platitude. Great is a term which we hear so constantly applied to this, that, and the other thing, that we have come to be unaffected by it. There is not even any very keen appreciation among us of the quality of greatness. The sense for it is deadened by the cold, clammy manner in which the intellectually great are handled by those who write learned treatises on their work. Take up a history of philosophy, and you will find them all arranged and labelled, one looking exactly like the other. There they stand in a row, all treated with the same respect, and regarded with the same interest--Schelling, who was a genius and a charlatan; Trendelenburg, who accepted his appointment from Eichhorn and improved his opportunities after the death of Altenstein; Strauss, who was a second-rate thinker, and a bit of a pedant; Karl Vogt, who was a gifted gourmand; Lotze, who was an excellent professor of philosophy, but nothing more; and amongst the rest Feuerbach, one of a list, possibly labelled as inferior, onesided men, calling themselves ideal realists or something of the sort. The effect is demoralising. He was great. This means that there is a wide, open space round him on every side. It means that if we would understand him, we must separate him clearly in our minds from all those men, all those facts that jostle him in lesson-books and hand-books. That he was great means, that he is altogether upon another level. The moment we catch sight of him as he stands there alone, reverence takes possession of us. Simply natural as he was in intercourse with friends, there was yet something awe-inspiring about the man. Look at that face, in every feature of which there is genius and character--obstinate, energetic character. There is character in the mighty brow, in the small eyes, in the big, fan-shaped beard. There is power in it all, power and nobility, and manly beauty, stern as though cast in bronze. Himself a genius, he belongs to a notably talented family; the father one of the most distinguished criminal jurists of Germany; brother, sister, nephew, all gifted. He is born at Landshut in 1804; studies at Heidelberg; turns his attention to theology, first from the orthodox, afterwards from the critical standpoint; then to philosophy, first abstract, afterwards realistic, ever more realistic. He publishes his _Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit_ ("Thoughts on Death and Immortality") anonymously. The book is at first confiscated, but subsequently allowed to circulate. After it becomes known that he is the author, he applies in vain for professional appointments at several of the South German universities, and similar attempts made somewhat later in Berlin, France, Switzerland, and Greece prove equally fruitless, in spite of the support of noted savants. From 1836 onwards he lives a retired life in the country--till 1860 at Brückberg, near Ansbach, afterwards at Rechenberg, near Nuremberg. In his later years it is the life of a hermit. He corresponds with friends of his own class and stamp, and also with men of the people (such as Konrad Deubler of the Salzkammergut), who sometimes understand his writings better and feel them more deeply than the so-called cultivated class. In 1837 he married the love of his youth. It was not without influence on his life that, in the beginning of the Forties, a young girl, daughter of one of his friends, was for a time passionately attached to him, an attachment which he returned. His only course of lectures was delivered in 1848, at Heidelberg, but not at the university; there he was dreaded and shunned. In 1842 his friends had tried to get him appointed professor at Heidelberg; he at first took kindly to their plan, but afterwards frantically opposed it. "To try to make me a professor and that, too, in the ordinary way, the way in which any blockhead can be made one ... is to place me on a level with the fools that are posing as professors now, is to insult, to disgrace me.... The professor's desk is no place for a man with a head like mine. Do you know the proper place for my head? Guess! The block: for my brain is as keen and as peremptory as the executioner's sword, and I have no desire, no courage to do any deeds but those for which men risk the loss of their heads."[15] His friend had been advising him rather to call his work _Wesen der Théologie_ than _Wesen des Christenthums_. He answers: "I take no interest whatever in the overturning of theology. I concern myself only with great world-entities (welthistorische Wesen).... One must deal a mortal blow, must deny on principle. To act means to take life--with the determination, if necessary, to give one's own life in return." This is more resolute language than the poets used; these views are very different from theirs. Saint-René Taillandier animadverted on the fact that Feuerbach, holding such views, did not take part in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Feuerbach answered: "M. Taillandier! When another revolution breaks out and I take part in it, know, to the dismay of your godly soul, that that revolution will be victorious; the last day of the monarchy and the hierarchy will have come. Alas! I shall not live to take part in that revolution. But I am playing an active part in another great and victorious one, the results of which will not be evident till centuries have come and gone. For, according to my philosophy--which you know nothing about and presume to judge without having studied--according to my philosophy, which ignores gods, and, consequently, miracles wrought by means of political measures, space and time are necessary conditions of all being, all thought, and all action. It was not, as has been asserted in the Bavarian Reichsrathskammer, because the Parliament of Frankfort consisted of unbelievers that it was such a complete and shameful failure; as a matter of fact the majority of its members were believers--and surely God, too, respects a majority; it was a failure because it was destitute of the sense of place and time."[16] Notwithstanding the number of different stages through which Feuerbach passed in his progress towards realism, notwithstanding all that can with justice be said of the diversity of the positions he took up, his ground-thought, the key-stone of the vaulting upon which the whole rests, is as simple as it is great. It is this: Man cannot be conscious of a being that is higher than himself. If it were possible for man to be conscious of himself--that is, his being or nature--as finite, compared with another being apprehended as infinite, he would by this consciousness limit his own being, _i.e._ deny it. His consciousness would extend beyond the limits of his being, which is impossible, for consciousness is simply the self-affirmation of being. Instead, therefore, of saying with Hegel: Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness, we are compelled to say: Man's consciousness of God is man's self-consciousness; religion is man's first and indirect self-knowledge. It is universally acknowledged that the idea, God, can only be formulated by the aid of human predicates--God is love, God is goodness, knowledge, power, &c. The subject here is nothing but the personified predicate. The predicate is the original. What religion really means is this: Love is divine, _i.e._ of absolute worth, deserving of adoration; goodness, knowledge, power are divine. Hence belief in a God is belief in man as the essential being. The apparent axiom of religion is: I am nothing, measured with God; its real axiom is: Everything else is nothing measured with me; everything serves my purposes. By means of prayers and miracles, with God as intermediary, I have everything at my disposal. God is the creation of man's desire. The main desire of Christianity being unlimited happiness, bliss, God is the means whereby bliss is attained, or, more correctly, bliss and God are one. In a word; theology is anthropology, the theological problem is a psychological problem--which Feuerbach has solved in all essentials for all time. Viewed thus, his life-work is seen in its unity. Though it is not possible to express the whole in a few words, yet it is easy to feel that it is one single great thought, for which humanity is his debtor. When a young man stands in the Pantheon in Rome, lost in admiration of its dome, the most beautiful in the world, his most natural thought is: O, like the builder of this temple, to have, were it but once in one's life, an idea, simple and great as that which produced this cupola--to conceive some single fundamental principle, some simple and yet composite formula, capable of expansion to a whole scheme, of dimensions as grand as this firmament in miniature! One such thought, simple in its beginning, stupendous in its development, would give greatness enough to any human life. Feuerbach's was one of these fundamental thoughts. [1] Sound the trumpet, herald of war! To arms! To arms! War to the death with the wicked horde of stupid, hypocritical priests! [2] Fifty years ago our parents declared war against the fat and flabby priest; we, their children and grandchildren, have, like them, taken up arms against the cloth; but our cry is: Death to the lean and lanky priestlings! [3] 'Tis the lark, not the nightingale, that sings so clear; the great sun-ball is rising fast, borne by the winds of the morning. It is day! it is day! The night will end in blood. Awake, all ye who believe in the light eternal! Tear the rose-wreaths of love from your heads, and gird yourselves with swords of flame! [4] 'Tis not the fault of the Kings--_they_ are all lovers of freedom; But their misfortune is this: Freedom has no love for them. [5] His youthful writings are collected in _Gedichte und kritische Aufsätze_, 1845, 2 vols. [6] Would you desecrate the temple for the sake of a woman, dance with her before golden idols, &c. [7] Prosaic vulgar-mindedness cannot, will not, understand that thy name, a mind like thine, is a security for integrity of purpose; it is ready to believe only what is bad, &c. [8] No longer, damned Liberty, shalt thou disturb my peace of mind. Lisette! another glass of beer! For the future I'm a respectable citizen. [9] A respectable citizen! You an ordinary respectable citizen! Shame on you, my friend I Was this your aim in life? Is this the end of all your passionate song? Take back the offensive word, I pray; just imagine displaying such vulgar-mindedness! Mine is a nobler ambition: I am determined to be a Privy Councillor! [10] My advice to you is to drop the cards and look out for yourself, O minister! Remember that you have to do with four stallions, not four citizens! [11] You ask me why he lies sleepless? why in his rage he tears the lace from his pillow? A good conscience sleeps well everywhere, a bad conscience nowhere. He has sucked the blood of his country, gorged himself with its substance; during a whole long life he has stolen and lied and deceived. [12] If heart and style remain still true, I'll not object, whatever you do. My friend, I never will mistake you, E'en though a Councillor they make you. (BOWRING.) [13] They lie, they squabble, they hate one another with a deadly hatred; it is only want of courage that keeps them from robbing and murdering. They dare not do the things they long to do, and so they talk much about right and duty. Those that think keep their thoughts to themselves; most of them do not think. [14] We clung to each other-was it to pass the time, or was it in despair? she a lost, new-born woman, I a lost, new-born man. [15] _Briefwechsel zwischen Feuerbach und Christian Kapp_, 1876, p, 176. [16] _Wesen der Religion_, p. vii. XXVII REVOLUTIONARY POETRY The profoundest characteristic of that literature which in the Forties still continued to be known by the name of _Bewegungslitteratur_, is its utter want of connection with official Germany. It is the absence of any such connection that gives it its strength and its freshness. Official Germany is not to be taken here in the narrow sense of German officialdom; it means all that part of the people--German or any other--which in normal circumstances appears to be the whole people, and as such sets the stamp of nationality on all that is produced by that people, the same stamp which it has set on all that has emanated from it in the past. With what a later period has called _Bildungsphilisterei_ (cultured philistinism), the most eminent literary men of the period in question have no connection whatever. There is no corresponding group of personalities and writings in Scandinavian literature. Even the Radical poetry of the Scandinavian students became official in the course of a very few years. The most gifted of the German poets of the day are independent, or make themselves independent, of official Germany, and bear like men the consequences of the position they take up. Among those who declare their independence, the most interesting figure is Freiligrath, born in Detmold in 1810. Fair, blue-eyed, massively built, and shaggy-maned, he is the true son of Westphalia. His father, a schoolmaster, educated him against his will as a merchant, and to his commercial education and pursuits are to be ascribed his freedom from classical reminiscences, his exclusively modern literary culture, his understanding of the foreign climes and countries with which commerce brings us into communication, and his distinctly modern turn of thought. Freiligrath is not, like Hoffmann von Fallersleben, his predecessor in the field of political poetry, only a prolific song writer; he is a genuine, inspired poet. Hoffmann, who had made a study of the old German songs and ballads, and was himself a man of simple, popular tastes, poured forth an inexhaustible stream of polemical verse, directed against the squirearchy and bureaucracy, but he repeated himself with the monotony of the popular poet. Freiligrath wrote comparatively little, but every one of his poems has its distinct individuality. He is influenced by that modern French and English poetry of which he has given us so many admirable translations, and makes his debut as a descriptive poet of the Victor Hugo school, but soon develops a distinct literary individuality. He possesses in a very high degree two qualities which are seldom found united, the faculty of picturesque description and intensity of feeling. The former leads him to depict themes from foreign lands, full of glowing colour, the latter displays itself when he sings of home and fatherland. In his revolutionary period his warm feeling became powerful pathos, and his gift of graphic delineation was exclusively devoted to the service of hostility and ire. In his youth, in Amsterdam (1831), the sea and the shipping made a deep impression on him. In his dreams he followed all the vessels that glided out of the harbour bound for Africa, for India, for Turkey, for America. He was seized by the desire to describe these foreign climes as they appeared in his imagination, and Hugo's _Les Orientales_ not only suggested the colours to be employed in the treatment of such themes, but also the metrical form. Freiligrath alone among German poets tried to master the alexandrines beloved of Frenchmen, despised in Germany, and to vindicate their beauty. Strangely enough, in spite of his usually correct ear, he so entirely misapprehended the peculiarity of this metre that he always writes it in pure iambics, a practice which Germans have continued. He was possessed by the longing to roam--out into the wide world, across the great ocean. Instead of German "garret poetry," he wrote, in his garret, scenes laid in the deserts of Africa and the primeval forests of America. He attempted tropical local colouring, which was at times successful, at times unnatural; his linguistic specialty was new and remarkable rhymes, produced with the assistance of resonant foreign words like "Sykomore," "Tricolore," &c. His good verses were like living, his bad, in their lifeless splendour, like stuffed humming-birds. But this African Freiligrath is not the best Freiligrath. Freiligrath, the Liberal patriot, is greatly his superior. After Herwegh's political challenge had roused him, he took himself to task, tested with simple-minded fairness those sympathies and tendencies of his nature as to which he himself was not yet absolutely clear, and discovered in the depths of his being an unquenchable desire for liberty and a sympathy with the oppressed which on occasion could develop into burning indignation and hatred. His genius chose the revolutionary path, pursued it at full speed, and finally spread its wings and flew. _Marseillaise_ after _Marseillaise_ came from the poet's pen. O these hymns of 1848! they are enthusiasm itself, the enthusiasm that begets enthusiasm. In the earlier ones we have fierceness, faith, revolutionary piety, fiery sarcasm, the intoxicated jubilation of victory; in the later, noble despair, sublime in its expression. But the poems which anticipate the Revolution and incite to it are also worth reading. Take, for instance, the volume entitled _Ça ira_, published in 1846. In each of the poems of which it consists a symbolical picture is graphically elaborated. In the first, a ship is setting sail; her name is Revolution, she is the black fire-ship that sends her rockets aboard that hypocritical craft, the Church, and then points her guns at the silver fleet of Wealth. In another we have a symbolical idea borrowed from Thomas Moore: the ice-palace of despotism, which will crack, and break up, and melt away as soon as spring comes. In _Wie man's macht_ ("How the Thing is Done") the poet describes the storming of the arsenal of a capital with such infectious ardour, so dramatically and vividly, that we see it all, are ourselves in the thick of the fray. As the Revolution which he foresees draws nearer and nearer, his poetry becomes more and more up to date. He describes a Rhine steamer, which has the King and Queen of Prussia on board. The steamer is a picture of German society. The company on deck are enjoying the fresh air, the bright sunshine, the beautiful scenery of the Rhine; but down below in the engine-room stand the proletariat, in the shape of engineer and stoker, masters of the volcano that drives the ship onwards. One push, one blow from them, and the whole edifice of which the king is the crown, collapses; the deck is blown to fragments, the flames mount to the clouds--but not yet, thou angry element, not to-day! In such a poem as _Freie Presse_ the course of events is anticipated: the insurrection is on the point of breaking out; one day more, and there will be fighting in the streets. Ammunition being short, the owner of the printing works orders his workmen to melt down all the alphabets. And presently the hissing, glowing mass is flowing into the bullet moulds. The times are such that only in the form of bullets can the types emancipate humanity. The days of Young Germany were over, but now it seemed as if Germany herself had grown young. Robert Prutz (born in 1816 at Stettin) received that classical education which had been denied to Freiligrath. A critical student of philosophy and history, he wrote upon many subjects, but it is only as a political poet that he has any abiding significance. He was one of the young men who ardently vented their opinions in Ruge's _Hallische Jahrbücher_, the result in his case being banishment. He is the Feuerbachian as poet. His political poetry, from the absolute directness with which it follows its aim, is apt to be somewhat dry and unimaginative, but his sober and yet warm love of liberty attracts us. If you once learn to like him, it will be a thorough liking; you will even highly prize his latest collection of poems, _Aus der Heimath_, a book which has been foolishly condemned as sensual; it cannot be denied that he showed bad taste in dedicating it to his wife. In his best work, a little Aristophanic masterpiece entitled _Die politische Wochenstube_ ("The Political Lying-in Room"), Zürich, 1843, Prutz, Holberg's warmest German admirer,[1] has succeeded in epitomising the wit, the irony, the endeavour, and the hopes of the younger generation. It was only natural that a poet with Prutz's classical training should adopt the Aristophanic method, the pity was that he followed it too closely. His play became in consequence a jewel of price for a select circle of readers instead of food for the multitude. It is the production of a young, hopeful dreamer, whose faith in a glorious future for Germany was quite as lively and as strong as the pleasure he felt in demolishing with his sarcasm what was decrepit and decayed; the burlesque figures and conceits stand out against an idealistic golden background because the poet sees the sun of the future rising and shining behind them. The action passes partly in, partly outside of the house of a doctor who keeps a kind of private lying-in hospital, where young ladies of the upper classes at times take refuge. Of late his business has not thriven. It had flourished when Pietism flourished in Königsberg; much pious embracing had gone on then, which, with God's blessing, had borne fruit; but now that the State Church has set itself to suppress Pietism, his wards stand empty. He will soon be driven to apply for a post on the staff of the Prussian official newspaper; those who are fit for nothing else can always earn their bread in its service. The Doctor's servant, Kilian, who is famishing, asks for food. The Doctor advises him to have his stomach removed, takes out his knife to do the operation, tells him that he will never feel hungry again, and that he will confer an inestimable benefit on humanity if he can show himself as a living proof that the operation is possible. For what is the rock on which virtue splits nowadays? Why did Freiligrath take a pension? Why did Dingelstedt allow himself to be branded. The stomach, and nothing but the stomach is to blame for everything. In the meantime Herr Schlaukopf (Mr. Sly) has come on the scene, disguised as a beggar. He declaims some patriotic sentiment, in the style of the Niebelungenlied, on the subject of Hermann the Cheruscan, and then asks for a contribution for the statue of that national hero. The Doctor is incautious enough to call the statue a scarecrow, a hideous sentry brandishing a spit, on which Schlaukopf declares that he shall pay for these words by at least twelve years' imprisonment with hard labour. They fight, the Doctor pulls off Schlaukopfs false nose, and thereupon recognises in him the friend of his youth, the quondam socialist, singer of liberty, republican, and regicide, now advanced to the post of "Wirklicher-geheimer-königlicher Leibspion" (Real Private Royal Body-spy). They fall into each other's arms, and Schlaukopf tells his errand, but not till he has assured himself that the Doctor holds no awkward or seditious political beliefs. The Doctor, recognising the importance of the man with whom he has to do, falls on his knees and swears that he believes nothing except that crown-pieces are round. Then Schlaukopf divulges the secret: "Germany, our mother-country, the Germany of Frederick and of Luther, the fair-haired queen, is with child." The Doctor is at first incredulous. Is it not dropsy, the result of all the water-drinking introduced by these new total abstinence associations? No, she is pregnant, and the only surprising thing about it is that the fact has not been announced in the newspapers, which usually inform the public when queens and princesses are in that condition. And now Schlaukopf communicates the joyful intelligence that the Doctor, as an experienced accoucheur, has been chosen to attend Germania; he, and no other, is to deliver her. The Doctor dances for joy, demands that he shall be rewarded with perquisites and an order, requests Schlaukopf to bring the lady--but see, she comes! Slaves, who represent the enthralled people, bear her in in a golden chair. She is fair, with a fat, amiable face, a wide mouth, and eyes of watery blue. All salute and do homage to her as Germania. But from a confidential conversation between her and Schlaukopf we learn that she is not the person she gives herself out to be. He asks her if she is really pregnant; she replies that he ought to know best, he and the others whom he has introduced to her. It seems that he has taken her from the street and trained her to play her part. She is the official Germania--and she has done everything that her artful masters have ordered her to do, has bowed, and knelt, and pattered prayers at command. And now, at command, she is pregnant. Schlaukopf abuses her, and threatens to beat her; she taunts him and threatens in return to run away and leave him to find another Germania where he best can. Meanwhile in the darkness of night a stranger has appeared in the street in front of the house, a woman with a harassed, hunted look, who declares that she knows not where to lay her outlawed head. "I," she says, "the legitimate queen, must, like a common vagrant, hide my royal head in the darkness of night, whilst she who has been exalted in my stead and impudently allows herself to be called by my name, sleeps voluptuously on silken pillows. Ye stones, be my pillow! For my people, like their queen, have to lie on stone." Through the night comes a cry, "Germania!" The woman in the house and the woman on the street answer at the same moment. Wrangling and confusion ensue, the gendarmes arrive, and an attempt is made to discover which of the two has taken a name that does not belong to her. "Not I!" cries the stranger to Schlaukopf. She maintains that he has stolen her name and decked his brazen-faced paramour with it, and concludes: "Shame on you both! I alone am the real, the true Germania!" Kilian finds it impossible to believe that any one so slender and emaciated can be Germania, but the serfs are thrilled to the heart by the sweet sound of her voice. The diplomatic Schlaukopf alone keeps his countenance: "Allein, so thut ein wenig nur die Augen auf, Zu sehen braucht Ihr diese da und jene nur, So ist's ja klärlicb, welche hier die Rechte sei: In Lumpen jene, diese jedoch im seidnen Rock; Die abgemagert, hungerbleich, ein Schattenbild, Verbannt zu Bettlern, selber eine Bettlerin; Höchst stattlich diese, wohlgenährt, anmuthiglich, In hoher Herren ehrender Festgenossenschaft, Ja selbst gesegneten Leibes ist, wie Ihr seht."[2] To this comparison between her rival's magnificence and her own poverty the stranger answers with dignity: "Wohl spotte mein! In meine Wunde lege du Die blutbefleckten, diebsgewandten Finger mir! Auf meine Lumpen speie du, und rühme dich Weil ich ein armes, heimathlos vertriebnes Weib; Du weisst am besten, wessen Hand mein Blut vergoss, Und wer vom Haupt die Krone mir gerissen hat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ihr bautest du Paläste, mir Gefängnisse. Ihr schmeichelten deine Schergen, mich verfolgten sie-- Dir aber sag ich, Schattenkönigin, o du, Die du mit Zittern meines Namens dich erfrechst: Hinweg! verbirg dich! Räume du den Platz, der mir Allein gebührt! Denn eure Herrscherin bin ich."[3] And the serfs bend low in homage to the woman who comes, not in regal purple, but in rags like their own, saying to each other: "May not this be the long-looked-for redresser of our wrongs, she who is to break our yoke asunder and awaken the sleeping world with the lightning flash of liberty?" But now the two women are called upon to prove their respective claims. Schlaukopf exclaims: "It is the legitimist principle we are called on to defend!" and proceeds to prompt official Germania. That fat, fair lady, who boasts that she bears the future of Germany in her womb and claims in consequence to be treated with consideration and reverence, repeats a long rigmarole, supposed to be the story of her life: In the gray of eld she lay on bear-skins in the forest, drinking foaming mead and eating beech-nuts and acorns. "Beech-nuts and acorns!" cry the Doctor, Kilian, and Schlaukopf. "It is she." Then she tells how she was sent to school to the priests, had her nose flattened against the crucifix, became _christlich-germanisch_, endowed monasteries, built churches, kissed the Pope's toe, &c, &c., and once more the Doctor, Kilian, and Schlaukopf cry: "It is she!" She tells what a peaceable, governable disposition she developed, how she allowed any one that liked to box her ears, how her loyalty has now reached such a pitch that if her master but whistle, she comes, stands on her hind legs, fetches the stick--"In a word, I am a well-trained poodle." And again we hear the jubilant chorus: "It is she!" She concludes: "God and the king willing, I shall be in the future what I have been in the past. By government order I am now, as you see, with child. O gendarmes, take my part! Recognise me as the one, true, Germania, as the thoroughbred German, and be assured that in return I will bring up my son as a gendarme!" The gendarmes are of opinion that she has made out a good case, and Schlaukopf is beginning to boast that the vagrant has been silenced, when she in turn lifts up her voice. She does not understand the art of self-praise, she says, nor has she much to praise herself for; the future will show what she is. "I cannot deny," she continues, "that she who stands there is a Germania; she is official Germany, the Germany of the Government, of the Federal Diet; but the Germany of the German people she is not; they do not know her, they do not care a straw for her rotten genealogical tree. If you would know which is the true Germania, ask these fettered serfs!" At this moment the other Germania is seized with violent pains. She suddenly explodes with a loud report and disappears in a cloud of smoke, which, as it gradually disperses, takes the shape of pilgrim monks, of romantic poets who sing the praises of the holy Middle Ages, of geese who lament that the Order of the Swan is not yet instituted, of moderate Liberals singing the chorus: "Immer langsam voran, immer langsam voran! Dass der preussische Fortschritt nachkommen kann!"[4] Then the serfs break their chains, cast themselves on the ground before the poor stranger, and do homage to her as the true Germania, who is still a virgin, but who one day will give birth to the ruler of the future.... The emblematical picture is a very fine, powerful one, and moreover it is true. The German Empire of to-day is not the offspring of the oppressed, divided Germany that was then extolled as pregnant with future greatness; it is the outcome of the much-despised, the harshly suppressed endeavours after liberty and unity. It is a mistake, however, to have represented the true Germania with no past, with all her power and glory in the future; though such a break of historical continuity did not in those days seem the impossibility that it does in ours. One of the truths proclaimed by this Radical polemical poem admits of no controversion, namely, that the official fatherland, the official country, everywhere lays claim to all that the genius of the people in times past has produced, to all their great men, even those whose lives were one constant rebellion against it. It banished, imprisoned, executed them--no matter; now it wears their portraits next its heart. And the official fatherland claims, and always has claimed, to bear the future in its womb. It not only maintains that the present existence of all and of everything is inseparably bound up with its existence, but that it is pregnant with the new age and is consequently entitled to receive the respectful care that is the due of a pregnant queen. For the thinking men of any people there is, besides this fatherland, another, one that is not recognised, that is often disowned. It does not deck itself with the national colours; for it the national song is not sung. It exists wherever people feel and act in the spirit that has been the spirit of the best of the country's sons. It has the allegiance of all the thinking youth. Those of low degree have more part and lot in it than those in place and power. To it alone the future belongs. [1] The name of one of Holberg's best known comedies is _The Lying-in Room_ ("Barselstuen"). [2] To know which is the true Germania, you need but use your eyes. Look first at one and then the other. Is not the one in rags, the other clad in silk? the one starving and pale, a mere shadow, driven to house with beggars, herself a beggar; the other stately, plump, and pleasant to the sight, consorting with right honourable gentlemen; with child moreover, as you plainly see? [3] Yes, mock at me! Put your pilfering, blood-stained fingers into my wounds! Spit on my rags, and proclaim me to be a poor, banished, homeless woman. You know best whose hand shed my blood and tore the crown from my head.... For her you built palaces, for me prisons. Your menials flattered her, me they persecuted. And you, trembling phantom queen, who have the effrontery to call yourself by my name, away! hide yourself! make room for the rightful sovereign! make room for me! [4] Slowly onward, slowly onward in the race! That Prussian progress may be able to keep pace! XXVIII REVOLUTIONARY POETRY There were real poets, aspiring spirits, who did not follow the general trend of literature at this period. There were men like Eduard Mörike (born in 1804), the last scion of the Swabian School, who broke the bounds of its narrow tradition, and in his lyric verse may rather be regarded as an offshoot of the Goethe stem--a genuinely gifted poet, the idyllic, arch, melancholy singer of the inner life, author of the immortal poem, _Denk es, O Seele!_ And there were men like Otto Ludwig, the Thuringian, and Friedrich Hebbel, the Ditmarschian, the two most robust originals in modern German literature, who were both born in 1813, and both developed their very dissimilar peculiarities after 1848--two gnarled, leafy oaks standing without the forest's bounds. The only mark of the period in which they were youths is the peculiar defiant gloom which lies deep down in both natures. Specially their own is a kind of melancholy keen-sightedness, inclining towards bold realism. They are the heralds of the realism of a later, unpolitical age. But they have not the characteristic common to all the political poets of their own age--sunny enthusiasm, a natural bias towards public life, towards the radical reform, or, if necessary, the complete revolution of society. This bias, in combination with the philosophic lucidity due to the influence of Hegel and Feuerbach, is perhaps most remarkably observable in an author whose writings are, undeservedly, beginning to be somewhat neglected nowadays, an author who, dying at the early age of thirty-one, did not live to see the Revolution of March. This is Friedrich von Sallet, a young German officer of extraordinary strength of character, whose solid, comprehensive culture was due to his own unaided efforts. In him the profound thought of his age is united with its extreme, passionate Liberalism. After his dismissal from the army in 1831, he devoted himself entirely to literature. His best known work is his _Laien-Evangelium_, a kind of devotional book for free-thinkers, a series of poems in which he gives a symbolical modern interpretation to the various events of the Gospels. He begins each poem with some story or lesson from the Bible, and then proceeds to show the living, eternal kernel in it, and to cast away the historical or mythical husks. The interpretations are at times rather far-fetched, and the employment of but one metre throughout the whole book undeniably tends to monotony. In its general conception the work reminds us of another, older book, Leopold Schefer's _Laien-Brevier_; but the contrast is great between Schefer's comfortable satisfaction with the divine government of the universe, and Sallet's impatient inclination to interfere with the natural course of events. We are also slightly reminded of Rückert's _Weisheit der Bramanen_; but Sallet's wisdom is a wrathful wisdom, no peaceful collection of golden rules of life like Rückert's, but fiery denunciation of deceit and stupidity. In his introductory poem Sallet compares those who had written Oriental poetry before him to the Kings of the East, who offered gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the Light of the world, and then fell back again into their Oriental dream-life. Now, he says, light is once more dawning, thought is once more rousing from their slumber both East and West. In his eager advocacy of his ideals, he is too indifferent to colouring, too Western; his book is spoiled by its too modern, directly didactic tone. The collection of poems known as _Gedichte_ is a much finer one. Here again the political poems are the most important. He describes a sleeping giant, on whose head and breast foolish dwarfs are disporting themselves. They sit on chairs in his open mouth and pay compliments to each other; spread their tables and dine upon his stomach; declare that it is his duty to sleep--if he does not, they will punish him with pin-pricks. They believe that God has created the great giant solely that they may disport themselves merrily on the top of him, the truth being that if he were to awake and rise there would be an end of them. The poet himself is tickling the giant's nose with his paper in hopes that he will perhaps sneeze; that alone would play the deuce with them. He cries: "Awake and see how they are daring to behave; it will be an easy matter for you to drive them away." And he concludes: "I know perfectly well what the giant's name is, but I have my reasons for not divulging it." In another poem, _Ecce Homo_, instead of appealing to the people as a people, he appeals to man as man: "There stands the old, grey cathedral, and there the old, fortified royal castle, looking down on wandering humanity passing beneath them, one generation after another. Song is heard from the one, fealty is sworn in the other, from century to century; we seem, in comparison with them, but insects of a day. And therefore fools preach veneration for these houses of cards. For what are they but card-castles, built for himself by man in his childhood! He built them, and he can knock them down, and build others in their stead. Heaven and earth are but soft clay, which man can mould as he inclines." At times Sallet writes in a lighter, more playful tone: "What is the name of the old man to whom people everywhere, but these good Germans in particular, are devoted, though he has never done anything worth doing? He stands in the pulpit, he drills the soldiers, he administers justice, he lectures at the universities, and his voice carries weight in the councils of the State. Taking a hundred steps to do what could be done with one jump is called in his language 'the good old ways and customs'; this is what he approves of, but if you produce anything original and great, his wrath is aroused and he scolds and storms till men begin to be afraid of you. He is wanting both in brains and backbone, the old gentleman, and yet he rules almost absolutely, and to oppose him successfully one would need to be as strong as a lion. There is no reason for concealing his name; it is Old Routine." Among the _Gedichte_ are also clever parodies, such as the one in which the poet attacks the censor, by whom he was perpetually worried: "Kennst Du das Land, wo Knut und Kantschu blühn, Den Steiss von Zarenliebe machend glühn, Wo man das Zeitungsblatt schwarz überstreicht, Dass preussisch' Landtagsgift in's Volk nicht schleicht, Kennst du es wohl? Dahin, dahin, Möcht' ich mit dir, geliebter Censor, fliehn." He is even more wroth with the cowardly prophet than with the censor: "Ever so slight a blow with your hand," he says, "and the mummy falls to pieces, once it has been brought up from the airless subterranean halls to the light of day; it will stand intact so long as no hand is raised against it." He is furious with those who declare that things will happen of themselves, that historical evolution, &c, will bring them about. Nothing irritates him so much as to hear people say: "A change _must_ come; things _cannot_ go on as they are doing." "Since the beginning of the world," he says, "nothing has ever happened of itself." He could not, on account of the censorship, attack monarchy directly, but he gives us, in excellent verse, the parable of the bear. Much in the same manner as wolves are kept in the Capitol in Rome, the bear is kept in Berne as the emblem of the city. On this practice Sallet founds his fable: "The people of the Canton of Berne in days of old kept a bear. They let him live on the fat of the land, but they took good care to keep his claws cut in case he should take it into his head to tear them to pieces. When asked to explain what good the bear did them, they answered with surprise: 'Explain! Why, what should he do! He eats his fill, he moves about majestically, he growls--he is our bear, and that is enough.' If questioned as to why they kept him, they gave answer: 'Because our fathers did. If the race were to die out, all would be over with us.' If any one ventured once again to ask why, they only shouted; 'Hold your tongue, or we'll beat out your brains.' "One day loud cries were heard throughout the town; the citizens thronged together--the bear lay dead. He had died suddenly; they had no new bear ready to take his place, and everywhere the dolorous cry resounded: 'It is all over with the Canton of Berne! Up and away, brave hunters! Get us a new bear! "In vain the hunters explore the mountains and the ravines; they cannot find a bear. But in spite of this, wonderful to relate, corn and grapes ripen, fruit grows on the trees--it seems as if nature were utterly indifferent to the woe of Berne. The sun, though it saw the bear lie dead, still rises every morning--the world still stands. What can be the meaning of it?" Witty as the fable is, it will hardly convince any supporter of monarchy of the uselessness of that institution. Sallet only attacks the foolish worship of the supposedly indispensable symbol, without making any attempt to dispute the most frequently employed argument in favour of monarchy, namely, the benefit which results from the withdrawal of the highest of all positions from competition. He puts his whole soul into another poem, _Aut--Aut_, a poem which became a sort of watchword for the youth of the day. Its most characteristic verses are: "Die ihr den grossen Kampf der Zeit Ausfechten wollt, herbei ihr Ritter! Sprecht, welcher Sach' ihr euch geweiht, Sprecht frei durchs offne Helmgegitter! Entweder--oder! Für Fürstenmacht, für Volkesrecht? Für Geisteslicht, für Pfaffendunkel? Republikaner oder Knecht? Ja oder nein! nur kein Gemunkel! Entweder--oder!"[1] And the poem concludes with an allusion to the time now fast approaching when the last on one side or the other with cloven skull will bite the dust. Sallet did not live to take part in the great, decisive encounter for which he so ardently longed. He died in 1843. Not long after his death the storm-clouds begin to thicken and the birds to fly low. We are approaching 1848. Literature follows in Sallet's path. From all parts of Germany comes the cry: "Let deeds follow upon words!" We hear it not only from the poets of North Germany, the Rhineland, and Switzerland; three poets of far-off Austria, Karl Beck, Alfred Meissner, Moritz Hartmann join in the chorus. Karl Beck, the son of a Hungarian and a Hungarian Jewess, born at Baja in 1817, first studied medicine in Vienna, but gave that up, devoted himself to literature under the auspices of Gustav Kühne, and produced a succession of poetical works which attracted attention by their faithful and vivid delineation of Hungarian scenery and Hungarian national character. As regards this aspect of his work, Beck may be classed with the Hungarian national poet, Petöfi, a man five years his junior; but as the poet of liberty, he must be regarded as a disciple of Börne--the only one who was of any importance as a poet. Like Börne he is the champion of the Jewish race, of the proletariat, and of political liberty. In his writing we have the Old Testament style and pathos combined with the influence of the newest French and German oppositionist literature. In Austrian poetry Anastasius Grün and Lenau are his immediate predecessors. He had not the culture of a Prutz, but his writing is distinguished by fervid colouring, emotional glow, graphic power, and wrathful enthusiasm. He was, however, one of those who, hailing the outbreak of the Revolution with joy, changed the key-note of their song after the victory of the reaction. After the magnificent revolt of Hungary had been crushed, he addressed a poem to the Emperor of Austria in which he flatters the victor, and entreats him to have mercy on the captive heroes. This poem enraged his old companions in arms. They called to mind that he who was now playing the part of a loyal subject of the Emperor of Austria had, before the collapse, been a republican and a socialist.[2] Alfred Meissner (born at Teplitz in 1822) and Moritz Hartmann (born at Duschnitz in 1821), Bohemia's two best lyric poets, are both inspired by the most ardent desire for political liberty. It is unfair to allow the unpleasant ending to Meissner's literary career to blind us to his unquestionably genuine poetical talent. It is both pitiable and monstrous that one of Germany's best lyric poets should, after an honourable youth, have descended so low as to buy the manuscripts of an inferior novel-writer and publish them under his own name, but it does not detract from his worth as author of the fine poems which undoubtedly are his own. As specimens of a revolutionary eloquence which was, and with reason, irresistible to the youth of the Forties, read his glowing lines to the memory of Byron and George Sand. Moritz Hartmann, Meissner's countryman and contemporary, is a figure cast in different metal; there is no flaw in him; he is a hero as well as an unusually gifted poet. No other German poet has loved liberty so faithfully and passionately from his earliest youth to the day of his death, or risked his life for it so daringly and so often. Hartmann, who was one of the handsomest men it is possible to imagine, was born of Jewish parents in the little town of Duschnitz. The family was of Spanish origin, the name Hartmann being a translation of Duros. Moritz was sent to school in Prague, where, as a boy, he witnessed the banished King Charles the Tenth's melancholy entrance into the town. At the early age of thirteen he emancipated himself from the religious faith of his family, and while still a mere child was deeply affected by the news of the discomfiture of the Polish revolutionists. As a student he became acquainted with Lenau, to whom he devoted himself with the enthusiasm of a boy and a disciple. From his childhood he spoke both Czech and German, and his first book of poems, _Kelch und Schwert_ ("Chalice and Sword"), contains abundant indication of his love for the Czech language, which he ranks with Polish, and extols as superior to Russian. But when it comes to the question of Czech political sympathy with Russia and hatred of everything German, he is entirely the German. In _Kelch und Schwert_ (1845) the Bohemian predominates. The little introductory poem tells us as much: "Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande, Glaube, dass ich Gottes Blut genossen, Liebe fühl' ich in mein Herz gegossen, Lieb' ist Gottes Blut--mein Herz sein _Kelch_. Der ich komm' aus dem Hussitenlande, Glaube an die fleischgewordnen Worte, Dass Gedanken werden zur Kohorte Und jedwedes Lied ein heilig _Schwert?_[3] A native of that country from which the emancipating doctrines of Huss have been banished, he feels himself a Hussite, and interprets the old Hussite war-cry, the right of the laity to receive the chalice in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, in a modern spirit, almost the spirit of Feuerbach. In a poem on the German "songs of liberty" he tells the lyric poets of Germany that song is not the hammer that will shatter a prince's heart; also that liberty is a woman, and not to be won by words alone. He feels for the Poles as if he were himself a Pole. We are made aware that he loves a Polish lady, and that through his love to her he has become in his heart her countryman. The poem, _To C----a_, is one of the most beautiful that sympathy with Poland has produced. Hartmann can at times be prolix and commonplace, but much more frequently he is concise and dramatic. Some of his scenes impress themselves indelibly on the reader's mind. Read, for instance, _Die Drei_, the poem of the three exiles who meet in a lonely inn on the plains of Hungary. They are sitting silent over their wine in the stillness of night, when some one suddenly raises his glass and cries: "Our country!" Of the three, one is a gipsy, one a Jew, and one a Pole. They have no country; they look at their glasses and sit silent as before. Even more impassioned than his pity for Poland is his pity for Bohemia, "the poor stag that is bleeding to death in the depths of a forest." Nothing is left to the Bohemians but their music, that sweet music which awakes compassion for them everywhere, which sings and sobs and melts men's hearts with its mysterious melodies. We may say of this first book of poems what the poet himself has said of the following: "Not a song in it but has been kissed on the brow by liberty, the most beautiful and noble of all muses." He already gives frank expression to his hatred of Metternich's Austria, that Austria which in 1848, in his _Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius_, he was to call the Bastille of the nations, within whose walls the silence of death is only broken by the clank of fetters. The sensation created by _Kelch und Schwert_ meant exile for Hartmann. He had, in the first instance, transgressed the laws of Austria by publishing in a foreign town a work which had not been submitted to Austrian censorship. He knew that if he were to return from Leipzig, where he had been living for some time, in intercourse with Kühne and Laube, he was liable to be arrested on the frontier. But he could not resist the desire to see his mother again, and succeeded in making his way secretly to his native town. It was not possible to conceal his presence there; a traitor betrayed him, and he was obliged, before many days had passed, to make his escape by a back-door while the police were forcing their way into the house. In his _Zeitlosen_ there is a set of poems entitled _Heimkehr und Flucht_, in which he describes this youthful escapade, and thus proudly delineates his own character: "Und als der Verrath mich ausgewittert Und als die Häscher herangekommen, Da hat die bleiche Mutter gezittert, Der Schwester Aug' in Thänen geschwommen. Ich aber sprach: Die Thränen verwischet, Wir müssen scheiden und von einander, Und da mich rings die Gefahr umzischet, In Flammen werd' ich zum Salamander. Ich bin geboren, ich, für Gefahren, Sie lauern immer auf meinem Gange Wie Wegelagrer in dunklen Schaaren; Doch kenn' ich nimmer die Furcht, die bange. Ich bin zu Gefahren bestimmt und geboren, Sie lieben mich, wie Löwen den Meister. Ich hab' sie alle heraufbeschworen, Sie dienen mir, wie dem Zaubrer die Geister."[4] On account of the prologue which he spoke at the Schiller Festival at Leipzig on the 11th of November 1847, a festival which was in reality a demonstration in favour of the liberty of the press, Hartmann was accused of high treason and of offering affront to the Emperor of Austria. In 1848, as soon as the revolution broke out, he hastened to Prague. He and two friends, of whom Alfred Meissner was one, were sent as a deputation to Vienna. He has given an exquisitely humorous account of their audience with Archduke Franz Karl, who received them because his brother, the Emperor, was ill, and who was perfectly unable to understand what they wanted.[5] When the rabble, during the disturbances in Prague, attempted to storm the Jewish quarter and slaughter its inhabitants, it was Hartmann who rushed to the university, persuaded a body of armed students to accompany him, and with their assistance defended the quarter against the maddened crowd until the grenadiers arrived.[6] In the Parliament of Frankfort Hartmann voted with the extreme Left; his aim was the unity of Germany as a republic. He spoke seldom, but attracted much attention; he was known as the handsomest man in the Parliament. Kinkel describes him at this time as a handsome, amiable man, with firm convictions; "the Southern imagination of the Austrian gave him fluency of speech, his German training had given him solidity; with Jewish cosmopolitanism he combined a steadfast patriotism which not unfrequently found utterance in proud words." At first he took part enthusiastically in the proceedings of the Parliament. Afterwards, when these became both tedious and barren, and the assembly showed its incapability of laying any great and lasting new foundation, his disappointment found vent in the witty, impressive _Reimchronik_, a work written in the metre of Hans Sachs. Hartmann, however, was not only a man of words, but a man of deeds. In the engagement in the streets of Frankfort on the 18th of September, he exposed himself a hundred times to the bullets of both parties in his endeavours to arrange a truce. After the revolution had broken out in Vienna, he and Froebel went there as deputies from Frankfort to the provisional government to express the sympathies of the national assembly, and Hartmann entered the army of the revolution as a common soldier. When Vienna was defending itself desperately against the Croats, he one day, with apparently certain death before him, joined a party that were determined to march through a severe fire to gain possession of a mill, and was made officer and leader when the original leader fell. After the fall of Vienna he escaped, thanks to the protection of a lady of high position, who procured him a falsified passport. He returned to his duties in the Parliament of Frankfort, and, when it broke up, went with the protesting party to Stuttgart. There this last remnant of the Parliament was dispersed by force of arms. All Hartmann's work, including the youthful poetry written before 1848, bears the mark of his resolute character. In the volume, _Neuere Gedichte_, published in 1847, which as a whole is unpolitical, we find in the division _Ost und West_ wild omens of the coming European storm--for example, the irate poem to the King of Prussia, in which Hartmann, deprecating Platen's and Herwegh's respectful attitude, cries shame upon him for delivering up the Poles to the Russian knout, and that other very touching poem, _Hüter, ist die Nacht bald hin?_ ("Watchman, is the Night nigh past?"), which is one long sigh of impatient desire for the dawning of the new era. And now that Bohemia and Hungary, Franconia and North Germany, were lifting up their voices in one great chorus--the voices of thinkers and of poets blending in unison--the youth of the country, as soon as they awakened to intellectual life, were impelled to join that chorus; from the boy on the school-bench to the oldest student, their minds were re-attuned, attuned to the key of revolution. Now they suddenly began not only to imbibe a revolutionary spirit from the works of the revolutionary writers of the day, but to read one into the writings of approved neutral and conservative authors long since dead. At a given moment it became their persuasion that all literature called to arms, even that old classic literature which was living its immortal life in handsome bindings on the bookshelves. A certain frame of mind is the result of our reading of all books. What had he been, that Schiller whose writings had been put into their hands when they were children? What but a revolutionary, the motto of whose first book was the famous saying that what medicines cannot cure, cold steel cures, and what cold steel cannot cure, fire cures. Did the spirit of his works in any single point harmonise with the royal Prussian or the Austrian imperial spirit? What had Goethe's youthful attitude been but one of Titanic defiance? Did not even the work of his old age, the second part of _Faust_, end with the wish that he could see a free people on free soil? He had loathed the Berlin of Frederick II., would not his detestation of the Berlin of Frederick William IV. be greater still? From the writings of Hegel, who had begun life as a revolutionary and ended it as an ultra-conservative, they drew all the conclusions which he himself had left undrawn. Feuerbach had declared that he would have nothing to do with politics, nevertheless they transposed his philosophic decapitation of the historical state into the region of practical politics. Yes, the clouds were gathering. In place of the swallows, the heraldic eagles of Prussia and Austria were flying low. The monarchs attempted in vain to exorcise the tempest. Frederick William IV. convened a general Landtag (Parliament) in April 1847. With his convictions he could not do otherwise than open it with a speech in which, in spite of all concessions, real and apparent, he made it clear that he was not prepared to take the decisive step which his people demanded of him. "No power on earth," he cried, "will make me consent to the exchange of the natural relation between a king and his people for a conventional, constitutional relation; never with my will shall a written paper interfere between Almighty God and this country, rule us with its paragraphs, and supercede ancient, sacred loyalty."[7] The time had come. The assembly demanded annual Parliaments and complete fulfilment of the promises made in 1815 and 1829. Jacoby, Heinrich Simon, Gervinus, and others criticised the king's proposals and rejected them. Then the storm broke--first in Switzerland, where in November 1847 the Liberal cantons armed and suppressed the Jesuitical _Sonderbund_ (league of the Catholic cantons), then with overpowering force in Paris, then in all the German and many of the other European capitals. As thunder in a mountainous country echoes from hill to hill, so the thunder of the revolution echoed from one European country to another in the mad and holy year, 1848. [1] Ye knights who have made ready to take part in the great battle of the day, lift your visors and speak clearly: On which side are you fighting? Either--or! Is it for the power of the sovereign or the rights of the people? For spiritual light or priestly superstition? Are you republicans or thralls? No evasion! Answer plainly! Either--or! [2] _Cf_. Moritz Hartmann: _Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius_. Chap. v. "Apostel und Apostaten." [3] I, who am of the land of the Hussites, believe that I have drunk the blood of God; love has been poured into my heart; love is God's blood, my heart his _chalice_. I, who am of the land of the Hussites, believe in the word made flesh, believe that thoughts become armed cohorts, that every song is a holy _sword_. [4] The traitorous friend had tracked me down, the minions of the law had come; my mother turned pale and trembled, my sister's eyes were bathed in tears. But I said: "Dry these foolish tears; my time has come and I must go; the flames of danger hiss around me--I become a salamander in their fiery glow." I was born for danger; dangers, thick and dark, beset my path, yet I know no fear; are they not my destiny? They love me as the lion loves his tamer; 'tis I who have conjured them up, and they serve me as spirits do the magician. [5] Moritz Hartmann: _Gesammelte Werke_, x. p. 16, &c. [6] Alfred Marchand: _Les poètes lyriques de l'Autriche_. Hartmann: _Gesammelte Werke_, x. p. 23, &c. [7] Keiner Macht der Erde soll es gelingen, das natürliche Verhältnis zwischen Fürst und Volk in ein conventionelles, constitutionelles zu verwandeln, und nun und nimmermehr werde ich es zugeben, dass zwischen unserm Herrgott im Himmel und dieses Land ein geschriebenes Blatt sich eindrängt, um uns mit seinen Paragraphen zu regieren und die alte heilige Treue zu ersetzen. XXIX THE REVOLUTION "Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss-- Im Hochland wider die Pfaffen! Da kam, die fallen wird und muss, Ja, die Lawine kam in Schuss-- Drei Länder in den Waffen! Schon kann die Schweiz von Siegen ruhn: Das Urgebirg und die Nagelfluhn Zittern vor Lust bis zum Kerne! Drauf ging der Tanz in Welschland los-- Die Scyllen und Charybden, Vesuv und Aetna brachen los: Ausbruch auf Ausbruch, Stoss auf Stoss! --'Sehr bedenklich, Euer Liebden!' Also schallt's von Berlin nach Wien Und von Wien zurück nach Berlin-- Sogar dem Nickel graut es! (Nickel, _i.e._ Czar Nicholas.) Und nun ist denn auch abermals Das Pflaster aufgerissen, Auf dem die Freiheit, nackten Stahls Aus der lumpigen Pracht des Königssaals Zwei Könige schon geschmissen."[1] Thus sang Freiligrath in February 1848, a few days after the revolution in Paris. A long shudder, of pain and at the same time of relief, passed through the whole of Germany. It was as if a window had been opened, and air had reached the lungs of Europe. Example, the one power that can do miracles, was forcing the German people to action. They were also impelled by the fear that absolutism would now venture its last move, would declare Germany to be endangered by the revolution in France, and compel the people of Prussia and Austria to take up arms against the French republic. In Austria intolerance had gone as far as it could go. In 1846 Metternich's government had actually placed the _Herzensergüsse_ of the Emperor Joseph II., collected and published by a banished patriot, on the list of contraband books. And now the disturbances in the Austro-Italian provinces, which were endangering the credit of the state and the industries of the country, brought dissatisfaction with Metternichs rule to a climax. The decisive defeat he had met with in Switzerland, namely, the collapse of that Jesuitical "Sonderbund" which with all his might he had supported against the Radicals, had given the last blow to men's faith in his invincibility. In one of the provinces of Prussia, Silesia, bureaucratic misgovernment had just produced terrible consequences. Typhus, the result of starvation, had raged for months among the miserably poor industrial population before those in power had made any attempt to remedy the state of matters. Hundreds of dead and dying lay by the roadsides. In the cold of January, poor, solitary wretches starved in their hovels, and naked children pined to death beside the corpses of their parents; no one came to their aid, for the ignorant local authorities had, in order to prevent the spread of infection, made it a punishable offence to enter any infected house. All this time the government officials only appeared to collect the taxes, which they did with harsh regardlessness of circumstances; and when the Governor was attacked because no remedial measures had been taken from August 1847 to the end of January 1848, he answered that no formal appeal for assistance had been made. In such circumstances the political leaders of the middle classes found it an easy matter to rouse their own class to action, and the working classes, hoping to improve their position, and exasperated by arbitrary police regulations, everywhere followed in the footsteps of the middle classes. It is difficult for the present generation to enter into the feelings of the men of 1848. The frame of mind which prevailed in Denmark at that time cannot be regarded as typical. There, as elsewhere, it undoubtedly was the instinct of national self-preservation and pride that asserted itself. But whereas the other countries rose in revolt against hereditary rule and coercion, in Denmark a revolt was suppressed by the power of the hereditary monarchy and of insulted national feeling. There was no thought of revolution in the minds of the Danes; it was for old rights they fought, not for new ideas. Everywhere else in Europe the oppressed peoples revolted. It was long since anything but evil had fallen to their lot, since they had witnessed the triumph of anything but wrong, use-and-wont, and falsehood. Actual and detestable had with them come to be almost synonymous terms. But they had a faith that could remove mountains and a hope that could shake the earth. Liberty, Parliament, national unity, liberty of the press, republic, were to them magic words, at the very sound of which their hearts leaped like the heart of a youth who suddenly sees his beloved. The aspiring spirits of the generation of to-day do not feel thus. They know that stupidity is a ferocious animal, and the hardest of all to kill--that cowardice, the agile slave that stands at the beck of power, is as strong as courage itself when there is any question of defending ancient privilege--that what is known by the name of progress is a feeble snail. The simpleton in the fable bought a raven that he might see for himself if it was true that ravens live for two hundred years. The friends of progress in our days know beforehand that all the raven-black lies and raven-trickeries of all the privilege-rookeries, great and small, will outlive them--for how many hundred years they cannot tell. At a rare time they have seen good victorious, but never have they heard it acknowledged that it is _their_ good which has triumphed. They have always seen truth first abused, then if possible killed--if that proved impossible, maimed and recognised. Therefore they have little hope. Many of them, indeed, have killed hope in their own breasts, as we kill a nerve that gives us too much pain. They have been disappointed too often. The men of 1848 had never relinquished their hope in the future. They had been oppressed, and they had suffered so long that they had grown accustomed to see brute force and hypocrisy triumphant, accustomed to live in a sort of spiritual twilight. But they believed in the coming day. And now, suddenly, they saw it. First a gleam, then a ray, then a flame, then the whole horizon, as far as the eye could reach, a sea of light. For the first time they heard loud, ringing voices proclaim liberty to be the right of the people, without a voice raised in opposition; and for the first time, with wondering eyes, they saw power, that hitherto immovable mass, the giant bearer of oppression and falsehood, begin to stir like some gigantic elephant, writhe and turn and shake itself, throw off its riders, and move ponderously in the direction of the high-spirited, ardent friends of liberty, the men of the new day, who stood ready to fling themselves on its back and force it to trample down all the ancient abuses. For the younger men especially it was a moment without compare, a sight that intoxicated them, that drove them wild. They shouted, they sang, they rejoiced, and in their wild exultation they felt it a necessity to act, to risk all, to give their lives if need be--anything, everything, except be behindhand in greeting and ushering in the dawning day of liberty. True it is that democratic illusions held high revelry; true it is that there prevailed a touchingly naïve belief in the infallibility of popular instincts; and true it is that the ability of theorists to settle practical difficulties was greatly overestimated. But the first impulse was irresistible, the original instinct was correct. Those who really possessed capacity became leaders, took the command without any fuss or parade, and were obeyed, not because of their outward authority, but because their real superiority was felt by all. The score of students who commanded on the barricades in Berlin may be given as an instance. Many a so-called very ordinary man for a few days of his life showed himself to be a hero. During the first months some of the finest qualities of humanity displayed themselves and shone with astonishing lustre. It was in Austria that the revolutionary movement began, immediately after the arrival of the news of the Revolution of February in Paris. A speech made by Kossuth in the Hungarian Parliament on the 3rd of March, demanding constitutional government for all the provinces of the Empire, inaugurated the revolution both in Buda-Pesth and Vienna. On the 11th of March a similar demand was made by the Czechs in Prague, and before this, on the 6th of March, the Austrian Industrial Union had presented a petition to Archduke Franz Karl, the presumptive heir to the throne, requesting Metternich's dismissal, and also demanding liberty of the press, the right of voting supplies, of taking part in legislation, &c. On this followed what has been called the petition storm. Every day, every hour new petitions to the Emperor poured in. On the 12th of March the students held a great meeting at the University, the result of which was also a petition to the Emperor, demanding liberty of the press, religious liberty, and liberty of instruction. The Emperor received the deputation the following day, but gave an undecided answer. In these unforeseen circumstances the 13th of March, the opening day of the Lower Austrian Convention of the Estates, arrived and found the Government unprepared. The populace crowded into the enclosure of the assembly hall, where Kossuth's speech was read aloud amidst excited rejoicings and shouts of "Hurrah for the constitution!" A party forced their way into the hall and began to smash the furniture and throw it out on to the heads of the soldiers; even Archduke Albrecht, who was in command, was struck by a block of wood. Then the order was given to fire, and the first Revolution of Vienna broke out. The Italian troops fired, but the Austrians unscrewed their bayonets amidst the joyful shouts of the crowd. At the Castle the gunners, instead of shooting, placed themselves in front of their guns--as we read in one of the poems of the day, Rick's _Das Lied vom braven Kanonier_: "Vor der Burg in glühender Front, Des blutgen Befehls gewärtig, Vor der Burg in glühender Front, Da stehn die Kanonen fertig. Schon zittern die Thore, sie brechen schier, Jetzt gilt's, du braver Kanonier! Und du trittst vor die Mündung hin, Als wolltest du fesseln den Würger-- Und du rufst mit begeistertem Sinn: Erst mich! dann den wehrlosen Bürger!-- Dann schweigt das Commando, beschämt vor dir. Hab Dank, du braver Kanonier!"[2] Towards evening it became clear to Metternich that no concessions would now avail. He who for forty years had led the policy of Austria hurriedly gave in his resignation and made his escape in disguise in the imperial laundry cart. At nine o'clock the same evening the troops were withdrawn from Vienna (exactly a week before the same thing happened in Berlin), and citizens and students mounted guard everywhere. The arsenal was opened, and in one day arms were served out to 25,000 men. There was some severe fighting in the outskirts of the town. So fiercely resolute were the populace that, all unarmed, they pressed in upon and disarmed two companies of grenadiers who were defending the entrance to Metternichs villa. Those who resisted were trampled under foot. That same evening the abolition of the censorship and liberty of the press were publicly announced. The intimation produced a feeling of intense relief--it was as if a gag had been removed from the mouth of the nation. The newspapers, as a matter of course, instantaneously began to give expression to the popular political ideas. It had hitherto been impossible to treat even in poetic form any subject with a social or political tendency; Austria had resembled a forest where the voices of the birds were silent. Now suddenly pipe and call, whistle and song, were heard from every bush and tree, a mighty and confused chorus.[3] Poems of liberty were published in all the languages of Austria--German and Czech, Slavonian and Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, and Italian. So eager were men to make use of their new liberty that a whole bevy of poems, superscribed _Erstes censurfreies Gedicht_ ("First poem printed after the abolition of the censure"), appeared simultaneously. The one generally accepted as the first is Frankl's _Die Universität_. During the night between the 14th and 15th of March, one of the professors, fearing an outbreak of the prisoners, requested the armed students to despatch a guard to one of the prisons. Twenty students were at once sent, under the command of Ludwig August Frankl. Whilst he stood on guard that young man gave expression to the feelings of the day in the song: "Was kommt heran mit kühnem Gange? Die Waffe blinkt, die Fahne weht, Es naht mit hellem Trommelklange Die Universität. . . . . . . . . . . Das freie Wort, das sie gefangen, Seit Joseph arg verhöhnt, verschmäht, Vorkämpfend sprengte seine Spangen Die Universität." In 1890, on his eightieth birthday, Frankl published a large volume of able poetry; during his long life he has been an unusually productive poet and writer of biography; he has been presented with the freedom of Vienna and of three other European and Asiatic towns; but this song, of which in course of time at least a hundred thousand copies were printed, was what founded his reputation. It was not, however, really the first poem printed after the abolition of the censorship, for on the previous night Castelli had written his song of the _Garde-National._ In the German language alone there are three or four poems which lay claim to the same distinction. One of these is the song of the Vienna student brigade,_ Erwacht, erwacht o Brüder! Ein grosser Morgen tagt_ ("Awake, awake, O brothers! a great morning is dawning"), and another is Fr. Gerhard's _Die freie Presse_, which begins: "Die Presse frei! Die Glocken lasst ertönen Und läutet Jubel überall! Und ruft's hinaus zu Deutschlands fernsten Söhnen Die Presse frei, erstürmt der Freiheit Wall![4] Simultaneously with these poems, which express such an innocent, exuberant delight at being able to speak and write without restraint, there appeared others full of the most childish gratitude to the weak-minded Emperor. In them he is "the good Emperor," "our good Ferdinand," &c, &c. People were ready to forget immediately that every single concession had been, not granted, but forcibly extorted, or else they believed naïvely that this was the way to make their late oppressors forget it. In one of the many songs in praise of the Emperor we read: "Heil dir, mein Kaiser! in all der Lust Zu der sich dein Volk ermannt hat, Sei Dir vor Allen ein Heil gebracht, Den es immer als edel erkannt hat."[5] On the 16th of March the Hungarian deputation, 150 magnates with Kossuth at their head, rode into Vienna, through the Prater, welcomed with deafening cheers and showers of flowers. That day the number of armed citizens had risen to 60,000. In the afternoon a herald appeared on the balcony of the Castle and read the following proclamation: "We, Ferdinand the First, by the grace of God Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary and Bohemia, of Lombardy and Venice, of Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Illyria, &c, have now, in agreement with the wishes of our faithful people, decided to take certain steps." On this introduction follows the announcement of the liberty of the press, the formation of the National Guard, and the convention of an assembly of deputies for the purpose of drafting "that constitution which we have determined to bestow on our country." Saphir sang: "Schwert aus der Scheid, aus dem Herzen das Lied! Stimmt an das Lied der Lieder! Jauchzend ertön' es durch Reihe und Glied, Jauchzend durch jubelnde Brüder! Blank wie die Waffe und hell wie der Stahl Klinge das Lied von der Garde-National."[6] Even the mocking-birds, we see, on this occasion ceased from mocking and found voice to join in the universal chorus. In the persistent employment of the French word, _Garde Nationale_, we have an example of the importation and imitation which so largely characterised the movement. In turning over the pages of a collection of the German political poems, several thousand in number, which were published in 1848 in Vienna alone, we come upon many unknown names, but also upon almost all that were well known at that time and on many that were destined to become famous. We are struck by a poem of Bauernfeld's, _Wien an die Provinzen_, weak from a literary point of view, but significant from its indication of the first sign of reaction, namely, an attempt made in the provinces to shake off what was called the tyranny of the capital; in other words, to counteract the influence of the example set by victorious, free Vienna. Friedrich Uhl, at a later period editor of the _Wiener Abendpost_, the official organ of the Government, writes a lament for the fallen revolutionary heroes: "Das schwarze Band, den schwarzen Flor Lasst in den Lüften wallen, Den Todten singt ein Klagelied, Die für die Freiheit gefallen."[7] There are poems to Lenau, the most popular of living Austrian poets, bewailing that the singer of liberty is now insane and silent, his ears deaf to the victors' joyful shouts. Richard Wagner, as yet unknown to fame, sends a "Greeting from Saxony to Vienna": "Ihr habt der Freiheit Art erkannt; Nicht halb wird sie gewonnen; Ist uns ihr kleinstes Glied entwandt, Schnell ist sie ganz zeronnen. Dies kleinste Glied ist unsre Ehre, Ehrlos ist, wer es lässt, Mit hellen Waffen, guter Wehre, Drum hieltet Ihr es fest."[8] Amongst the writers of serious poems we find names like Grillparzer and Hebbel; Saphir and Dingelstedt write mock-heroic elegies on the last of the censors, both of them parodies of Schiller's _Nadowessische Todesklage_; and there are no end of satiric thrusts at the King of Prussia, who, curiously enough, was considered to have acted heretofore in a more reactionary spirit, and now to be granting concessions more unwillingly than the Austrian Emperor. Since the beginning of March Berlin had been in a state of the wildest excitement. Directly after the Revolution of February the _Kreuzzeitung_ published an article advocating war with France. It awakened extreme anxiety; people asked each other if long-suffering Prussia was actually to be compelled to take up arms against the French Republic. It was in these days that all Germany began to deck itself in black, red, and gold, the colours symbolising unity and liberty. Freiligrath wrote of them: "In Kümmerniss und Dunkelheit Da mussten wir sie bergen, Nun haben wir sie doch befreit, Befreit aus ihren Särgen; Ha, wie das blitzt und rauscht und rollt! Hurrah, du Schwarz, du Roth, du Gold! Pulver ist schwarz, Blut ist roth, Golden flackert die Flamme!"[9] On the 7th of March the first great public meeting was held at In den Zelten. It was resolved to present an address to the King, demanding that he should immediately convene the Landtag and grant a constitution. The address ended with the words: "No war with France! Lawful liberty in our own country! Fraternal union of the whole great German nation!" On the 12th of March a regiment of cavalry charged the crowds at In den Zelten and dispersed them, but they collected again in town, built barricades, and attempted to seize a gunsmith's shop in the Jägerstrasse. Two men were killed in front of the Opera House. Under the windows of the Castle the people shouted "Liberty! Liberty of the press!" and insulted the sentries. On the 14th of March a general Landtag was summoned. So far things had been managed on the whole peaceably; but on the 15th of March the soldiers, who were worn out with night-watching, and with having to hold themselves in constant readiness in the barracks, began to behave roughly to the crowd, to strike with the butt-ends of their guns, &c. Small barricades which some boys had erected at the corner of the Kurstrasse and the Gertraudenstrasse were charged by the Cuirassier Guards from Potsdam, and the boys were cruelly handled. At one o'clock on the 18th of March a royal proclamation was read in front of the Castle. It declared that Germany was to be from henceforth not a federation of States, but one federated State (Staatenbund--Bundesstaat), with a common Parliament, a common army, free-trade, liberty of emigration, and liberty of the press. At the end of each sentence the crowd answered with thundering hurrahs. Cries were heard of "Away with the soldiers!" and some stones were thrown. The famous General von Pfuel, who was in command, forbade the soldiers to fire, ordered the dragoons to dismount, and praised the discipline they showed in obeying at once, furious as they were. When the town seemed quiet he went home for a short time. During his absence, in consequence of an order given, no one knows by whom, though the embittered populace during the following days laid the blame of it on the Prince of Prussia, the future Emperor William, a regiment of dragoon guards arrived. The crowd shouted "Away!" The dragoons wheeled round, and the crowd were beginning to cry "Bravo!" when suddenly the soldiers charged in amongst them with naked swords. At the same moment a battalion of infantry marched out at the Castle gate, drew up in line, and also charged with levelled bayonets. Some shots were fired--possibly by accident. With loud shrieks the crowd instantaneously dispersed. Only a moment before joy had been at its height; strangers had been embracing each other, waving their hats, and shouting "Hurrah for the King"; now, as if at a preconcerted signal, barricades sprang up, as they had done in Vienna, over the whole town. There were two hundred of them, built of paving-stones, gutter-planking, and carts. The town was a camp. Men fired on the troops from every roof; those who could not get guns, threw stones. Every axe, every thick stick became a weapon.[10] The roofs were torn off corner houses, and paving-stones were carried up in baskets. The students met, armed, in front of the University, fastened tri-coloured cockades in their caps, and proceeded to man the barricades. Powder and shot, axes and iron bars, were provided by the merchants. On the evening of the 18th, the artillery opened fire in the Königstrasse. The King looked on from the windows of the Castle, incensed by the deputations that came entreating him to withdraw the troops, but at times condescending to jest; what specially annoyed him was the sight of the tri-coloured flags waving on the barricades. He was ready, he said, to concede much to entreaty, nothing to illegal violence. Varnhagen, in his Diary, describes what he saw and heard from his windows that night: "Asmall body of citizens under trusty leaders held the streets, doubly watchful because their numbers were so few. For a number of hours absolute darkness and silence prevailed; then, towards morning, the sound of far-off drums was heard; troops were evidently approaching. The citizen combatants were instantly on the alert; we could hear them whispering. A youthful voice gave the word of command: 'To the roofs, gentlemen!' and every man went to his post. This calm, determined command, given with noble simplicity, rang terrible and yet inspiring through the darkness. One felt the dangers which those who obeyed it were braving, for the general resistance was becoming weaker, and it seemed as if they were doomed, after a fruitless struggle, to meet an ignominious death, either by a fall from the roof, by the soldiers' bayonets, or by the hand of the executioner." Varnhagen concludes: "The heroic courage and determination of these daring youths was most undoubtedly worthy of all admiration"--weighty words, coming from the pen of an old, experienced officer. On the night between the 18th and 19th of March, wherever barricades were being erected or repaired, the windows were illuminated. But the moment troops entered the street all was darkness. The soldiers hewed and sabred right and left in the houses which they entered, and showed mediæval brutality in their treatment of prisoners. Towards morning the arsenal of the Garde-Landwehr regiment was captured by the insurgents; they found that the locks of the guns had been destroyed, but all the smiths of the quarter set to work and repaired the damage. At last, in the course of the morning, a royal proclamation headed _An meine lieben Berliner!_ was circulated, in which an attempt was made to explain the events of the day before as being the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding, "It had been necessary to clear the square in front of the Castle with cavalry, ordered to advance at a walking pace and with sheathed swords (_im Schritt und mit eingesteckter Waffe_); two infantry muskets had about this time gone off by accident, fortunately injuring no one; a company of evil-disposed individuals, chiefly strangers, had taken advantage of this unfortunate occurrence to stir up ideas of revenge in the minds of the excited crowd; the troops had used their weapons, but not until driven to do so by being repeatedly fired at. The King promises that the troops shall be withdrawn from Berlin, and concludes with the hope that both parties will forget what has happened."[11] Meanwhile the struggle raged on with frightful exasperation on both sides. In treating with the deputations that waited on him on the morning of the 19th of March, the King attempted to make his promise of withdrawing the troops conditional on the dismantling of the barricades. But in the end everything was conceded--change of ministry, release of the prisoners taken during the night, and withdrawal of the troops. Amidst the shouts of the rejoicing crowd, to muffled beat of drum and Chorale-music, the soldiers were marched off to Potsdam, feeling that they had sustained a deadly insult at the hands of their royal commander-in-chief. An enormous crowd thronged to the Castle, partly consisting of those who hoped by the force of numbers to exercise pressure on their vanquished rulers, partly of curious idlers; all the funeral processions from the streets where there had been fighting also made their way there. The corpses were borne on biers, or, where the numbers were too great, conveyed in open waggons, decorated with flowers, ribbons, and scarves, the corpses too being decked with flowers. Every available space in the neighbourhood of the Castle was closely packed. The crowd demanded to see the King. With a pale face he stepped out on the balcony. "Set the prisoners free!" shouted the crowd, and he was actually obliged to order the release of all those who were confined in the cellars of the Castle. The next proceeding was the carrying of many of the most severely wounded insurrectionists into the Castle, where their wounds were dressed. Now the funeral processions began to arrive, a sight by which the crowd was thrown into a state of the wildest agitation. Whilst the corpses were being carried into one of the apartments on the first floor of the Castle, one orator after another addressed the people. The speech which met with most approval was one made by Karl Gutzkow, the refrain of which was "general arming of the citizens." This the newly appointed ministers, who were moving about among the crowd, vainly attempting to pacify them, were loth to concede, but they were soon compelled to do so, for a scene which occurred at this juncture made it impossible to resist the demands of the people. A new funeral procession arrived--four corpses were borne on flower-decked biers through the crowd, their bloody wounds exposed to view for the purpose of rousing the beholders to revenge. The biers were deposited below the King's balcony, and the bearers raised a wild shout of "The King! The Queen!" which found a thousand-fold echo among the crowd. Two of the new ministers, Schwerin and Arnim, tried in vain to gain a hearing; their voices were drowned in the cry of "The King! The Queen!" When the King and Queen actually appeared, on the balcony the people's frenzy knew no bounds. The King to speak, but the bearers held high the biers with their bloody burdens, and the crowd yelled "Off with your hat!" And as each corpse was carried past the King was obliged to uncover.[12] In Freiligrath's grand poem, _Die Todten an die Lebenden_, written in the following year, the year of disillusion, we read: "Die Kugel mitten durch die Brust, die Stirne breit gespalten, So habt Ihr uns auf blutgem Brett hoch in die Luft gehalten! Hoch in die Luft mit wildem Schrei, das unsre Schmerzgeberde Den, der zu tödten uns befahl, ein Fluch auf ewig werde! Dass er sie sehe Tag und Nacht, im Wachen und im Traume-- Im Oeffnen seines Bibelbuchs und im Champagnerschaume! Dass wie ein Brandmal sie sich tief in seine Seele brenne: Dass nirgendwo und nimmermehr er vor ihr fliehen könne! Dass jeder qualverzogene Mund, dass jede rothe Wunde Ihn schrecke noch, ihn ängste noch in seiner letzten Stunde!"[13] On the 21st of March, at noon, the King rode out at the Castle gate with a black, red, and gold band on his arm, and himself distributed black, red, and gold favours. He was followed by the royal princes and the Ministers, who were in despair at the humiliating proceeding; at his side rode a veterinary surgeon, Urban by name. One of his generals had in vain attempted to dissuade him from taking this step. He answered: "Non, non, c'est décidé, nous allons monter à cheval." Presently he drew rein and spoke as follows: "I am usurping no man's right when I declare that I believe myself called to be the saviour of the unity and liberty of Germany--that unity and liberty, based on a free constitution, I will defend with the aid of German loyalty." At the University he called for the professors and students, and said to them: "Schreiben Sie sich's auf, meine Herren! Write down my words to you, for they are for posterity. I place myself at the head of the German nation; with its unity and liberty the existence of Prussia is henceforth inseparably bound up. Write that down!" At the arsenal, when he was again pouring forth promises, a piercing voice suddenly cried: "Don't believe him, he is lying; he has always lied, and he is lying now. Tear me in pieces if you like, but I say he is lying--don't believe him!" In Vienna, a few days later, the following poem appeared: "PREUSSISCHE MISSVERSTAENDNISSE. Im grossen ungläubigen Altberlin sind nun die Wunder zu Hause, Da wird geschossen, gestürmt, gebrannt zwei Tage ohne Pause, Bis tausende liegen im rothen Sand. Den König betrübt die Wendniss: Die Flinten gingen von selber los. Das war nur ein Missverständniss. Durch's grosse, ungläubige Altberlin gehn wunderbare Witze, Ein König hüllt sich in Schwarz-Roth-Gold und stellt sich an Deutschlands Spitze, Ein König wird Ober-Demagog mit deutsch einheitlicher Sendniss, Doch Deutschland lacht und ruft mit Macht: Das ist ein Missverständniss."[14] Another poem that bears witness to the irritated, sarcastic feeling provoked by the events of these days is entitled _Erlkönig_, and begins: "Wer schiesst noch so spät auf's Volk ohne Wehr? Es ist ein König mit seinem Heer. Er hält sein Volk so treu im Arm, Er fasst es so sicher mit seinen Gendarmes. O Bürger, o Bürger, o hörest du nicht Was Erlkönig in der Zeitung verspricht," &c. The Revolution of March in the capitals of Germany did not call forth any particularly fine poetical effusions; it gave rise chiefly to street songs, inflammatory and ephemeral verse; but the counter revolutions, the terrible re-capture of Vienna in October and of Berlin in November 1848, inspired a whole host of fine poems. The poets also found inspiration in the martyr deaths of individual liberationists, who either fell in fight or were murdered judicially after the suppression of the revolution. The insurrection of Hungary, too, with its suppression by the Russian army, awakened a sympathy which found expression in touching poems. The enthusiastic ecstasy in Vienna was of short duration. The democrats did not consider the free constitution free enough. A central political committee was formed as a sort of check on the government. The existence of such a body was declared to be illegal, but popular pressure compelled the government to retract this declaration and to suspend the constitution. In the beginning of May the Emperor fled to Innsbruck. An attempt was made to disband the student brigade, but as this led to a renewal of barricade fighting, the ministry were obliged to desist. The Emperor returned in August. During all this time the capital was in a most excited state; the revolution had put a stop to every kind of business, and the want of employment increased discontent and restlessness. A deep impression was made by the intelligence of the events of June in Paris, Cavaignac's victory being regarded as equivalent to the suppression of the revolution in France. About the same time came the news that Jellatschitsch, the Ban of Croatia, was preparing to invade Hungary. Intercepted letters showed that in this proceeding he had the support of the Court of Vienna and of Latour, the Minister of War; and the consequence was that Count Lamberg, Latour's envoy, was torn to pieces by the mob on his arrival at Pesth (September 28), and Latour himself, having declared his intention of despatching troops to Hungary, was killed (October 7) by the enraged populace of Vienna. In his poem, _Der 7 Oktober_, which is a eulogy of the murdered man, Dingelstedt takes the opportunity to dissociate himself from the revolution and all its doings. The Emperor now fled from Vienna for the second time. Whilst Radetzky suppressed the insurrection in Lombardy, Windischgrätz, who had been appointed commander-in-chief, surrounded the capital with his troops. In a struggle which lasted from the 24th to the 29th of October the outworks and outlying parts of the town were captured, and the city had already been driven by want of provisions and ammunition to agree to the unconditional capitulation demanded by Windischgrätz, when the cry was heard in the streets: "The Hungarians are coming." They had been seen from the tower of St. Stephen's Church. There was great rejoicing. The agreement to surrender was disregarded, the arms which had already been given up were again seized at the arsenals, and sorties were made to support the Hungarians, whose cannonading was now heard. But the Hungarian army was completely routed by Jellatschitsch. Windischgrätz entered Vienna on the 31st of October, followed by Jellatschitsch on the 2nd of November. A state of siege was proclaimed, and court-martials, sentences of death, and executions became the order of the day. Simultaneously with the elections for the first German Parliament in Frankfort-on-Main, elections went on in Prussia for the Prussian Constitutional Assembly, which was opened by the King in May. This body numbered few eminent members, the best men having been sent to Frankfort. Berlin was in an almost anarchic condition; the arsenal was stormed and plundered, the political clubs terrorised and coerced the Assembly. It rejected the constitution proposed by the government as not sufficiently democratic. The result of this was a first change of ministry. The new ministry made proposals which coincided more closely with the wishes of the Assembly, but found themselves unable to agree to the demand of the majority that it should be made a point of honour with all officers who disapproved of the new constitution to leave the army. A third ministry, with Pfuel for its leader, was formed. On the last day of October, while the Assembly was debating an appeal to the government "to support, by every means in its power, the cause of popular liberty, at present endangered in Vienna," a mob broke in on the meeting, attempted to influence its decision by violent means, and insulted the Pfuel ministry. Then this ministry too resigned, and on the 2nd of November the King put the reins of government into the hands of a war ministry, with his step-uncle, Count Brandenburg, at its head. This new government decreed the transference of the Assembly from Berlin to Brandenburg, and brought the troops that had just returned from Denmark under General Wrangel to Berlin. The citizens were disarmed and a state of siege was proclaimed. The revolutions of Vienna and Berlin had been fruitless; alike fruitless were the proceedings of the first German Parliament (Reichstag), which met at Frankfort on the 18th of May 1848, and was forcibly dispersed by troops at Stuttgart on the 18th of June 1849. The President it chose, Archduke John, did his best to subject it to the domination of Austria; it made a vain offer of the imperial crown of Germany to Frederick William IV. in April 1849; its sacred inviolability was disregarded as early as November 1848, when Windischgrätz ordered the execution of one of its members, Robert Blum, at Brigittenau; it lost importance as a representative assembly by the gradual desertion of its conservative members. When it was dispersed at Stuttgart, the reaction was once more triumphant throughout Europe: "Da sah man die letzten der Getreuen, Die ausgeharrt beim Heiland, zerstreuen Sich, wandernd nach alien Seiten und Winden, Das Wort des Heiles zu verkünden, Wohl wissend, dass ein langes Exil Und Armuth, Noth und Dulden ihr Ziel, Und Qual und Tod und Kerkermauern. 'Das Wort des Heils wird sie überdauern' Das merkt euch, ihr Knechte und blutigen Horden: Das Wort ist Fleisch und ist Gott geworden.[15] Thus sang Moritz Hartmann, one of the last of the faithful. He rightly felt that the ideas survived the outward changes. By the end of 1848 the poets of the revolution had nothing left to sing of but fallen heroes and extinguished hopes. Among these poets Freiligrath and Hartmann rank highest, and as typical of the elegies written on the fallen heroes, we may take the verses composed by these two authors on Robert Blum, whose firm, gentle character, simplicity, and prudence, stamped him in the minds of his contemporaries as the ideal of a popular leader. In his _Reimchronik_ Hartmann writes mournfully: "So ruhe sanft und gut, mein Robert! Nicht braucht's der Wunsch, dass leicht dir werde Die blutgetränkte Wiener Erde, Der Boden, den du dir erobert. Du bist nicht todt, trotz aller Klage Des deutschen Volks, trotz aller Lieder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ein Mythus geht: der Robert lebt, Der Robert Blum, den sie erschossen Und jedes deutsche Herz erbebt: Das theure Blut ist nicht geflossen-- Die Hoffnung raunt uns in die Ohren: Entflort, entflort die Trikoloren, Noch, noch ist Deutschland nicht verloren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Allüberall ist der dabei! Er wendet mit den Geisterhänden Und fängt mit seiner Brust das Blei, Das uns die Fürstenväter senden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Und wandeln muss er, bis entrafft Das deutsche Volk sich dem Verräther Bis er entfürstet und entpfafft Den heilgen Boden seiner Väter."[16] And a week after Blum's death, Freiligrath writes the magnificent verses on the commemoration service in the Cathedral of Cologne, where the mighty organ pealed forth Neukomm's requiem music: "Und heut in diesem selben Köln zum Weh'n des Winterwindes Und zu der Orgel Brausen schallt das Grablied dieses Kindes. Nicht singt die Ueberlebende, die Mutter, es dem Sohne: Das ganze schmerzbewegte Köln singt es mit festem Tone. Es spricht: Du, deren Schoos ihn trug, bleib still auf deinem Kammer! Vor deinem Gott, du graues Haupt, ausströme deinen Jammer; Auch ich bin seine Mutter, Weib! Ich und noch eine Hohe-- Ich und die Revolution, die hohe, lichterlohe! Bleib du daheim mit deinem Schmerz! wir wahren seine Ehre-- Des Robert Requiem singt Köln, die revolutionäre. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Was greift ihr zu den Schwertern nicht, Ihr Singer und Ihr Beter? Was werdet Ihr Posaunen nicht, Ihr ehr'nen Orgeltuben, Den jüngsten Tag ins Ohr zu schrein den Henkern und den Buben? Den Henkern, die ihn hingestreckt auf der Brigittenaue-- Auf festen Knien lag er da im ersten Morgenthaue! Dann sank er hin--hin in sein Blut--lautlos!--heut vor acht Tagen! Zwei Kugeln haben ihm die Brust, eine das Haupt zerschlagen."[17] It is to Hartmann's _Reimchronik des Pfaffen Mauritius_ that we must have recourse if we desire to view all the successive events and impressions of 1848 in the mirror of poetry. Many of the details of this poem have become difficult to understand; the reader of to-day comes upon lists of names, of whose owners he knows little or nothing--men like Bassermann, the parliamentary debater, and Hansemann, the financier, in their day famous members of the Parliament of Frankfort, now forgotten--but from parts of it, without the assistance of any commentary, he gains a vivid impression of men's feelings, of their exalted frame of mind, in that year of revolution. Very affecting is a final outburst, in which the poet bewails the want of men: "Ich seh' Gelehrte und Professoren Und Präsidenten und Assessoren, Weinküfer seh' ich und Redakteure Superintendenten und Accoucheure Und Börsenleute und Zeitungsschreiber, Astronomen und Steuereintreiber, Lumpenhändler und Alterthumskenner, Biedermänner, Hansemänner, Bassermänner-- Allein wo sind die _Männer_, die _Männer?_ "[18] When Hartmann wrote these words he was living on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, a banished man, and the best men of Germany and Austria who had survived the great discomfiture were either in prison or, like himself, in exile. 1848 is a year of no decisive political significance, although it was in this year that the old order of things was for the first time disturbed simultaneously in almost every country of Europe. The local revolutions of 1789 and 1830, whatever they resulted in, were successful revolutions, but the general European revolution of 1848 was nothing in any single country but an unsuccessful attempt. Yet 1848 is a year of great spiritual significance. After it men feel and think and write quite otherwise than they did before it. In literature it is the red line of separation that divides our century and marks the beginning of a new era. It was a year of jubilee, like that instituted by the old Hebrew law, that fiftieth year, in which the trumpet was to be sounded throughout all the land, which was to be hallowed, and in which liberty was to be proclaimed "throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof" (Lev. xxv. 8, &c). This year, with its quick heart-beat, its all-subduing youthful ardour, was, like that Bible year of jubilee, a year of returning into possession, a year of redemption, in which "they that had been sold were redeemed again." To this day we imbibe youthful enthusiasm from its days of March and learn important lessons from its days of November. It is the year of jubilee, the year of mourning, the boundary year. [1] 'Twas in the mountains the first shot was fired--in the mountains, against the priests! That shot loosened the avalanche--three countries sprang to arms! Switzerland can already rest on her laurels; the eternal mountains are trembling to their centres with joy. The sport soon spread to Italy--Scylla and Charybdis, Vesuvius and Etna broke loose; explosion upon explosion, blow upon blow!' "This is becoming serious, my royal, my imperial brother!" is the message from Vienna to Berlin, from Berlin to Vienna; even Nick begins to tremble. And now the paving-stones are once more torn up, the stones of those streets on to which ere now two kings have been ruthlessly flung by armed liberty. [2] In front of the castle in threatening line stand the cannon, awaiting the word of command--the gates are shuddering and yielding--the moment has come, brave gunner! Forward to the muzzle he goes, as if the order had been to stop the mouths of the destroyers; fearlessly he cries: "First me, then the defenceless citizen!"--No farther command is given. Thou hast shamed them! All thanks to thee, brave gunner! [3] Frhr. von Helfert: _Wiener Parnass im Jahre_ 1848. [4] The press is free! Peal the bells! sound the glad tidings far and wide! Proclaim to the farthest-off of Germany's sons: The press is free, the ramparts of liberty are stormed! [5] All hail to thee, my Emperor! Full of joy in their accomplished work, thy people greet thee, whom they have always known to be of noble mind. [6] As your swords leap from their scabbards, let a song, O my brothers, come from your hearts! Let the song of songs resound through your rejoicing ranks--bright as burnished armour, clear as ringing steel, the song of the Garde-National! [7] Let the black draperies flutter in the wind, and let a sad lament resound for those who have laid down their lives in the cause of liberty. [8] Ye have rightly understood the nature of liberty; we cannot half possess her; if we but let her little finger be taken from us, she will soon be gone. That little finger is our honour. Who lets that go knows not what honour is. Therefore with strong arms and good swords ye have defended it. [9] In secret hiding-place and gloom Long time we have concealed it; But now at last the day is come, The day that has revealed it. Ha! how the smoke is round it rolled! Hurrah! thou Black and Red and Gold! Powder is black, Blood is red, Golden glows the flame! (JOYNES.) [10] _Des deutschen Volkes Erhebung im Jahre_ 1848, _sein Kampf um freie Institutionen und sein Siegesjubel._ Von J. Lasker und Fr. Gerhard. Danzig, 1848. [11] Eine Rotte von Bösewichtern, meist aus Fremden bestehend, die sich seit einer Woche, obgleich aufgesucht, doch zu verbergen gewusst haben, haben diesen Umstand im Sinne ihrer argen Pläne durch augenscheinliche Lüge verdreht und die erhitzten Gemüther von vielen meiner treuen und lieben Berliner mit Rachegedanken um vermeintlich vergossenes Blut erfullt und sind so die greulichen Urheber von Blutvergiessen geworden. [12] _Des deutschen Volkes Erhebung_, p. 54. Varnhagen: _Tagebücher_, Adolf Streckfuss: _Erinnerungen aus dem Jahre_ 1848; _Der Zeitgeist_, 1889, Nr. 51. [13] With bullets through and through our breast--our forehead split with spike and spear, So bear us onward shoulder-high, laid dead upon a blood-stained bier; Yea, shoulder-high above the crowd, that on the man that bade us die, Our dreadful death-distorted face may be a bitter curse for aye; That he may see it day and night, or when he wakes or when he sleeps, Or when he opes his holy book, or when with wine high revel keeps; That ever like a scorching brand that sight his secret soul may burn; That he may ne'er escape its curse, nor know to whom for aid to turn; That always each disfeatured face, each gaping wound his sight may sear, And brood above his bed of death, and curdle all his blood with fear! [14] PRUSSIAN MISUNDERSTANDINGS. The big, incredulous town of Berlin has become the home of miracles. For two whole days they have been shooting, storming, burning there without a pause; thousands are lying in the bloody dust. The King is distressed by what has occurred; he says: "The guns went off of themselves; the whole has been a misunderstanding." In the old, incredulous town of Berlin strange tricks are being played; a King decks himself in black, red, and gold, and declares himself to be the leader of Germany, the arch-demagogue, chosen of heaven to bring about German unity. But Germany only laughs and shouts: "This is a misunderstanding." [15] Then the last of the faithful, who had remained true to their saviour, scattered to the four winds of heaven, to proclaim the word of salvation, knowing full well that what awaited them was exile and poverty, want and suffering, torture, imprisonment, and death. "The word of salvation will survive them"; note this, ye slaves, ye bloody hordes: The word has become flesh, has become God. [16] Rest peacefully, rest well, my Robert! No need is there for us to wish that light upon thy breast may lie the blood-drenched earth of Vienna, the soil thy valour captured. Thou art not dead, despite the loud laments and songs of mourning of the German people.... From mouth to mouth spreads the report: "Our Robert lives, that Robert Blum the tyrants shot"--and every German heart beats high. That precious blood has not been shed; hope whispers in our ears: "The tri-coloured standard is trailed in the dust, but Germany is not lost."... He is with us everywhere! With his spirit hands he turns back the bullets, or receives them in his breast--these bullets rained on us by our paternal rulers.... A wanderer he, until the German people have released themselves from the betrayer's grip, until he has cleared the sacred land of his fathers, of princes and of priests. [17] In this same city of Cologne, 'mid moaning winds of winter wild, To-day in deepest organ-tones resounds the grave-song of this child. 'Tis not the mother bow'd in grief who sings it o'er her fallen son; Nay, all Cologne bewails the death of him whose toil too soon is done. With solemn woe the city speaks: Thou who didst bear the noble dead, Remain to weep within thy home, and bow to earth thine aged head; I also am his mother! Yea, and yet a mightier one than I, I and the Revolution's self, for whom he laid him down to die. Stay thou within and nurse thy woe. 'Tis we will do him honour here; 'Tis we will watch and requiem sing for thy dead son upon his bier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why grasp ye not your swords in wrath, O ye that sing and ye that pray? Ye organ-pipes, to trumpets turn, and fight the scoundrels with your breath, And din into their dastard ears the dreadful news of sudden death, Those scoundrels who the order gave, the cruel murder dared to do-- The hero leant him on his knee in that autumnal morning's dew, Then silent fell upon his face in blood--'tis eight short days ago-- Two bullets smote him on the breast, and laid his head for ever low. (JOYNES.) [18] I see scientists and professors, presidents and assessors, wine merchants and editors, superintendents and accoucheurs; I see financiers and journalists; I see astronomers and tax-collectors, rag merchants and antiquarians; I see Messrs. Biedermann, Hansemann, Bassermann--but where are the _men_, the _men?_ XXX CONCLUSION It is a mighty panorama, this, which the study of the feelings and thoughts of Germany, first oppositionist, then revolutionary, between 1815 and 1848, unrolls to our view. We see the spirit of Metternich, a spirit of shallowness, brooding over Austria and the whole of Germany. We follow the new intellectual movement from the time when it first finds expression at the Wartburg Festival in 1817. We see how the assassination of Kotzebue gives occasion to the open persecution of Liberalism and introduces a long period of ruthless reaction and oppression, during which Goethe is regarded as the Quietist foe of liberty and lauded or denounced as such, and German philosophy under the auspices of Hegel becomes, in a rather questionable manner, conservative. The oppositionist tendency finds occasional expression in the writings of poets like Chamisso, Platen, and Heine, but the general intellectual condition is one of depression, relieved by outbursts of self-ridicule. The state of stagnation is put an end to by the news of the Revolution of July 1830, which electrifies public feeling and gives both poets and prose writers new courage and fresh inspiration. The remembrance of Byron's life and death influences men in the same direction, and the Polish revolt awakens sympathy and enthusiasm in spite of the part that Germany takes in the annihilation of Poland as a nation. Börne becomes the most eminent advocate of Liberalism in politics, holds high the banner of liberty and justice, shows a noble example in the matter of strength of character and conviction, but at the same time displays a naïve and fanatical optimism which proves that his is not the temperament required in a statesman. In Heine, the greatest poet of the period, we feel the vibration of its every nerve. In him modern poetry casts off the swaddling-clothes of Romanticism. In love, in appreciation of nature, in his political, social, and religious views, in his descriptive, poetic, and satiric style, he is the man of our own day--fitter, as we pointed out, than any other to grapple with modern life in its hardness and ugliness, its charm and its restlessness, and its wealth of violent contrasts. About the same time, in a different and yet kindred manner, Immermann, in his best book, marks the transition to a more realistic style of art. The Revolution of July had not only changed the tone of literature, it had also altered the character of the Hegelian philosophy, which from this time onwards is to be regarded as one of the strongest influences in the revolutionising of men's conception of life; from the doctrines of the master who died such a strong Conservative, his pupils draw reformatory or revolutionary inferences and principles. And now, with the echoes of the Revolution of July sounding in their ears, appear a group of young authors; they are influenced by the philosophy of Hegel and the poetry of Goethe, this last interpreted as anti-Christian; Heine and Börne are their masters, Rahel and George Sand their muses; they come to be known by the name of Young Germany. They desire to assimilate literature with life, to subvert existing religious and moral doctrines, to introduce a freer morality in the matter of marriage and divorce and a new species of pantheistic piety. The impeachment of these men by Menzel in 1835 is the signal for a new series of persecutions directed against all that in that day went by the name of the literature of movement (Bewegungslitteratur). Very few of the representatives of the young generation show strength of character when thus put to the test, but both the highly gifted men (Gutzkow) and those of moderate ability (Laube, &c.) develop their talents amidst these persecutions, and works are produced which accurately mirror the hopes and struggles of the age, the thoughts and feelings, temptations, mistakes, and victories of the individual. Between the years 1830 and 1840 something has been happening quietly, deep down in men's minds--Goethe's poetry and Goethe's philosophy of life, at first championed exclusively by enthusiastic women, have been steadily gaining influence over the cultivated, making them proof against theological impressions but receptive to all great human ideas. The cult of Goethe leads by degrees, even in the case of women, to the cult of political liberty and social reform. In 1840 German philosophy begins to develop in the direction of Radicalism, and the poets begin openly to advocate the cause of political liberty. The men of this new generation, too, owe their philosophic training to Hegel, but they have metamorphosed his doctrine into an atheistical, anti-monarchical doctrine. They regard the standpoint of Young Germany with contempt as being purely belletristic, and busy themselves with the nature of Christianity and the idea of the state. On the throne of Prussia at this juncture sits a king with a curiously complex character and many talents, a typical transition figure, whose personality, especially in its relation to the literature and intellectual life of the day, is of great interest. In the south of Germany it is Metternich, in the north it is Frederick William IV., who outwardly regulates the course of events. We see literary and political celebrities being attracted by him, coming into collision with him, and rebounding from him. The invalids of literature, men like Tieck and Schelling, pass their last days under his protection; Herwegh and Freiligrath are first attracted and then repelled by him; Jacoby attacks him, Dingelstedt ridicules him. And now we follow the development of political poetry, from its founder Anastasius Grün to Herwegh and Dingelstedt, observing what a deep impression such a thinker as Ludwig Feuerbach makes on the intellectual life of his contemporaries. Men like Freiligrath and Prutz, Sallet and Hartmann, are the petrels that foretell the storm; in 1848 we hear the song of certain gifted poets high above the roar of the political hurricane, and we also notice that these unexampled occurrences transform men of minor or undeveloped talent into organs of the great movement of the hour. During our study of this fragment of literary history we have passed in review a whole gallery of remarkable figures, devoting careful attention to the most important or most typical. We saw how Napoleon's great personality, in its legendary form, exercised almost as powerful an influence on men's minds as Byron's. Of the great intellectual forces of the eighteenth century, Goethe, Jean Paul, Heinse, and Hegel are those by which our period is most perceptibly influenced. Some of the Romanticists influence as teachers and masters (Wilhelm Schlegel, Brentano, Chamisso), others as antagonists (Tieck). Börne and Heine, geniuses of most dissimilar types, by virtue of that polemical quality which was an essential characteristic of both, influence the whole period. What a wealth of remarkable, original characters! Glance at our gallery of women--Rahel and Bettina, the friends of Goethe; Börne's friends, Henrietta Herz and Jeannette Wohl; Heine's La Mouche, Immermann's Elisa, and Princess Pückler and Charlotte Stieglitz--gifted women and devoted wives! Or let your eyes wander over our collection of male portraits--authors and men of the world, like Varnhagen and Pückler; stiff, stately figures, like Platen and Immermann; others that are all life and fire, like Börne and Heine; manly eccentrics, like Jacoby; kingly figures, like Feuerbach; grimacing fanatics, like Menzel; independent poets great and small, like Rückert, Hebbel, Ludwig, and Scherenberg; agitators, like Wienbarg and Gutzkow; men of pliant talent, like Laube and Mundt; weak desponders, like Stieglitz; bold singers of liberty, like Hoffmann and Freiligrath; immature characters, like Herwegh; problematic characters, like Dingelstedt and Meissner; brave men, like Sallet, Hartmann, and Prutz. Even when their productions are not of the highest quality, we study the men themselves with interest. * * * * * And yet what is presented in this volume can only be fully understood by those who read it in its connection with the earlier volumes of the work of which it forms a part, who regard it in the light of the last act of a great historic drama. The plan of the work is indicated in the introduction to the first volume, and is strictly adhered to throughout all six. The author's intention, as explained in the first lines of his work, was, by means of the study of certain main groups and main movements in European literature, to outline a psychology of the first half of the nineteenth century. The year 1848, which, as a historical turning-point, marks a conclusion for the time being, was indicated as the point to which he intended to pursue his subject. The six groups which, according to the original plan, have been portrayed, are, the French Emigrant Literature, German Romanticism, the French Reaction, English Naturalism, French Romanticism, and Young Germany. Each one of the six parts of the work has in the course of years either been re-written or revised. The author's first proceeding was to separate and classify the chief literary movements of the first half of the century, his next to find their general direction or law of progression, a starting point, and a central point. The direction he discovered to be a great rhythmical ebb and flow--the gradual dying out and disappearing of the ideas and feelings of the eighteenth century until authority, the hereditary principle, and ancient custom once more reigned supreme, then the reappearance of the ideas of liberty in ever higher mounting waves. The starting point was now self-evident, namely, the group of French literary works denominated the Emigrant Literature, the first epoch-making one of which bears the date 1800. The central point was equally unmistakable. From the literary point of view it was Byron's death, from the political that Greek war of liberation in which he fell. This double event is epoch-making in the intellectual life and the literature of the Continent. The concluding point was also clearly indicated, namely, the European revolution of 1848. Byron's death forming the central point of the work, the school of English literature to which he belongs, became as it were the hinge on which it turned. The main outlines now stood out clearly: the incipient reaction in the case of the emigrants, held in check by the revolutionary ideas still in vogue; the growth of the reaction in the Germany of the Romanticists; its culmination and triumph during the first year of the Restoration in France; the turn of the tide discernible in what is denominated English Naturalism; the change which takes place in all the great writers of France shortly before the Revolution of July, a change which results in the formation of the French Romantic school; and, lastly, the development in German literature which issues in the events of March 1848. It is self-evident that the standpoint here adopted is a personal one. It is the personal point of view, the personal treatment, which presents literary personages and works thus grouped and ordered, thus contrasted, thus thrown into relief or cast into shadow. Regarded impersonally, the literature of a half-century is nothing but a chaos of hundreds of thousands of books in many languages. The personal standpoint is not, however, an arbitrary one. It has been the author's aim to do justice, as far as in him lay, to every single person and phenomenon he has described. No attempt has been made to fit any of them into larger or smaller places than they actually occupied. It is no whim or preconceived intention of the author that has given the work its shape. The power which has grouped, contrasted, thrown into relief or suppressed, lengthened or shortened, placed in full light, in half light, or in shadow, is none other than that never entirely conscious power to which we usually give the name of art. THE END 
15447	----	of James Hayward. A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY by HENRY A. BEERS Author of _A Suburban Pastoral_, _The Ways of Vale_, etc. "Was unsterblich im Gesang soll leben Muss im Leben untergehen." --Schiller PREFACE Historians of French and German literature are accustomed to set off a period, or a division of their subject, and entitle it "Romanticism" or "the Romantic School." Writers of English literary history, while recognizing the importance of England's share in this great movement in European letters, have not generally accorded it a place by itself in the arrangement of their subject-matter, but have treated it cursively, as a tendency present in the work of individual authors; and have maintained a simple chronological division of eras into the "Georgian,", the "Victorian," etc. The reason of this is perhaps to be found in the fact that, although Romanticism began earlier in England than on the Continent and lent quite as much as it borrowed in the international exchange of literary commodities, the native movement was more gradual and scattered. It never reached so compact a shape, or came so definitely to a head, as in Germany or France. There never was precisely a "romantic school" or an all-pervading romantic fashion in England. There is, therefore, nothing in English corresponding to Heine's fascinating sketch "Die Romantische Schule," or to Théophile Gautier's almost equally fascinating and far more sympathetic "Histoire du Romantisme." If we can imagine a composite personality of Byron and De Quincey, putting on record his half affectionate and half satirical reminiscences of the contemporary literary movement, we might have something nearly equivalent. For Byron, like Heine, was a repentant romanticist, with "radical notions under his cap," and a critical theory at odds with his practice; while De Quincey was an early disciple of Wordsworth and Coleridge,--as Gautier was of Victor Hugo,--and at the same time a clever and slightly mischievous sketcher of personal traits. The present volume consists, in substance, of a series of lectures given in elective courses in Yale College. In revising it for publication I have striven to rid it of the air of the lecture room, but a few repetitions and didacticisms of manner may have inadvertently been left in. Some of the methods and results of these studies have already been given to the public in "The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," by my present associate and former scholar, Professor William Lyon Phelps. Professor Phelps' little book (originally a doctorate thesis) follows, in the main, the selection and arrangement of topics in my lectures. _En revanche_ I have had the advantage of availing myself of his independent researches on points which I have touched but slightly; and particularly of his very full treatment of the Spenserian imitations. I had at first intended to entitle the book "Chapters toward a History of English Romanticism, etc."; for, though fairly complete in treatment, it makes no claim to being exhaustive. By no means every eighteenth-century writer whose work exhibits romantic motives is here passed in review. That very singular genius William Blake, _e.g._, in whom the influence of "Ossian," among other things, is so strongly apparent, I leave untouched; because his writings--partly by reason of their strange manner of publication--were without effect upon their generation and do not form a link in the chain of literary tendency. If this volume should be favorably received, I hope before very long to publish a companion study of English romanticism in the nineteenth century. H.A.B. _October, 1898._ CONTENTS Chapter I. The Subject Defined II. The Augustans III. The Spenserians IV. The Landscape Poets V. The Miltonic Group VI. The School of Warton VII. The Gothic Revival VIII. Percy and the Ballads IX. Ossian X. Thomas Chatterton XI. The German Tributary A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM CHAPTER I. The Subject Defined To attempt at the outset a rigid definition of the word _romanticism_ would be to anticipate the substance of this volume. To furnish an answer to the question--What is, or was, romanticism? or, at least, What is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes herein, and the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary documents, and to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form for himself any full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will hardly find himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or romanticism. There are words which connote so much, which take up into themselves so much of the history of the human mind, that any compendious explanation of their meaning--any definition which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description--must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? _Definitio est negatio_. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else--tell in a clause what it is _not_; but to add a positive content to the definition--to tell what romanticism _is_, will require a very different and more gradual process.[1] Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with. Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added to this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve our turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition which Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a certain definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of the Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is called Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are misleading, and have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3] Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently. Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that _romantic_, when used as a term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous points of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of the Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic. The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouqué's "Der Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less certainly romantic in their inspiration. But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities, attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval in subject. Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity, restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness and severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear, definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and artists is marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail, at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run into the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not uncommon, therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar, characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The Revolt of Islam." But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who have so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop here. It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular meaning. In common speech, classic has come to signify almost anything that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined somewhat in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature and art; pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best Greek and Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors, or their works." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and authority." In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic; the "Pilgrim's Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is customarily recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form their style upon is a classic.[4] Contrariwise the word _romantic_, as popularly employed, expresses a shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for _sentimental, fanciful_, _wild_, _extravagant_, _chimerical_, all evident derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of _romance_ is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of _romans_. The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the favorite kind of writing in Provençal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of chivalrous adventure that was called _par excellence_, _a roman_, _romans_, or_ romance_. The adjective _romantic_ is much later, implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing of its peculiarities. It first came into general use in the latter half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, was marked from birth with that shade of disapproval which has been noticed in popular usage. The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was cultivated during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental fictions of La Calprenède, Scudéri, Gomberville, and D'Urfé--was the fantastic improbability of their adventures. Hence the common acceptation of the word _romantic_ in such phrases as "a romantic notion," "a romantic elopement," "an act of romantic generosity." The application of the adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the abstract _romanticism_ was, of course, very much later; as the literary movement, or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough developed to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in England as in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came from abroad, from the polemical literature which attended the career of the German _romanticismus _and the French _romantisme_. While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the words _classic_ and _romantic_, and some of the analyses that have been attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and another romantic. Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite tendencies or elements which are present in varying proportions in all good art. It is the essential function of classical art and literature, he thought, to take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance. "What is classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as a measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least, never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is classical in art or literature is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity." On the other hand, he defines the romantic characteristics in art as consisting in "the addition of strangeness to beauty"--a definition which recalls Bacon's saying, "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." "The desire of beauty," continues Pater, "being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper." This critic, then, would not confine the terms _classic_ and _classicism_ to the literature of Greece and Rome and to modern works conceived in the same spirit, although he acknowledges that there are certain ages of the world in which the classical tradition predominates, _i.e._, in which the respect for authority, the love of order and decorum, the disposition to follow rules and models, the acceptance of academic and conventional standards overbalance the desire for strangeness and novelty. Such epochs are, _e.g._, the Augustan age of Rome, the _Siècle de Louis XIV_, in France, the times of Pope and Johnson in England--indeed, the whole of the eighteenth century in all parts of Europe. Neither would he limit the word _romantic_ to work conceived in the spirit of the Middle Ages. "The essential elements," he says, "of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is as the accidental effect of these qualities only, that it seeks the Middle Ages; because in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty to be won by strong imagination out of things unlikely or remote." "The sense in which Scott is to be called a romantic writer is chiefly that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure and sought it in the Middle Age." Here again the essayist is careful to explain that there are certain epochs which are predominately romantic. "Outbreaks of this spirit come naturally with particular periods: times when . . . men come to art and poetry with a deep thirst for intellectual excitement, after a long _ennui_." He instances, as periods naturally romantic, the time of the early Provençal troubadour poetry: the years following the Bourbon Restoration in France (say, 1815-30); and "the later Middle Age; so that the medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed to Greek or Roman poetry, as romantic to classical poetry." In Pater's use of the terms, then, classic and romantic do not describe particular literature, or particular periods in literary history, so much as certain counterbalancing qualities and tendencies which run through the literatures of all times and countries. There were romantic writings among the Greeks and Romans; there were classical writings in the Middle Ages; nay, there are classical and romantic traits in the same author. If there is any poet who may safely be described as a classic, it is Sophocles; and yet Pater declares that the "Philoctetes" of Sophocles, if issued to-day, would be called romantic. And he points out--what indeed has been often pointed out--that the "Odyssey"[7] is more romantic than the "Iliad:" is, in fact, rather a romance than a hero-epic. The adventures of the wandering Ulysses, the visit to the land of the lotus-eaters, the encounter with the Laestrygonians, the experiences in the cave of Polyphemus, if allowance be made for the difference in sentiments and manners, remind the reader constantly of the medieval _romans d'aventure_. Pater quotes De Stendhal's saying that all good art was romantic in its day. "Romanticism," says De Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to the nations the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure: classicism, on the contrary, presents them with what gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great grand-fathers"--a definition which is epigrammatic, if not convincing.[8] De Stendhal (Henri Beyle) was a pioneer and a special pleader in the cause of French romanticism, and, in his use of the terms, romanticism stands for progress, liberty, originality, and the spirit of the future; classicism, for conservatism, authority, imitation, the spirit of the past. According to him, every good piece of romantic art is a classic in the making. Decried by the classicists of to-day, for its failure to observe traditions, it will be used by the classicists of the future as a pattern to which new artists must conform. It may be worth while to round out the conception of the term by considering a few other definitions of _romantic_ which have been proposed. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in an article in the _Atlantic Monthly_[9] for March, 1886, inquired, "What do we mean by romantic?" Goethe, he says, characterized the difference between classic and romantic "as equivalent to [that between] healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed 'naïve and sentimental.'[10] The greater part [of the German critics] regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, which was partly true, but explained nothing. None of the definitions given could be accepted as quite satisfactory."[11] Dr. Hedge himself finds the origin of romantic feeling in wonder and the sense of mystery. "The essence of romance," he writes, "is mystery"; and he enforces the point by noting the application of the word to scenery. "The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads, one knows not whither, are romantic: the public highway is not." "The winding secret brook . . . is romantic, as compared with the broad river." "Moonlight is romantic, as contrasted with daylight." Dr. Hedge attributes this fondness for the mysterious to "the influence of the Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense." This charm of wonder or mystery is perhaps only another name for that "strangeness added to beauty" which Pater takes to be the distinguishing feature of romantic art. Later in the same article, Dr. Hedge asserts that "the essence of romanticism is aspiration." Much might be said in defense of this position. It has often been pointed out, _e.g._, that a Gothic cathedral expresses aspiration, and a Greek temple satisfied completeness. Indeed if we agree that, in a general way, the classic is equivalent to the antique, and the romantic to the medieval, it will be strange if we do not discover many differences between the two that can hardly be covered by any single phrase. Dr. Hedge himself enumerates several qualities of romantic art which it would be difficult to bring under his essential and defining category of wonder or aspiration. Thus he announces that "the peculiarity of the classic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer"; while "the romantic is self-reflecting." "Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject . . . is the prominent feature of the classic style. The modern writer gives you not so much the things themselves as his impression of them." Here then is the familiar critical distinction between the objective and subjective methods--Schiller's _naiv and sentimentalisch_--applied as a criterion of classic and romantic style. This contrast the essayist develops at some length, dwelling upon "the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the classic style, where the medium is lost in the object"; and "on the other hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring of the romantic style." A further distinguishing mark of the romantic spirit, mentioned by Dr. Hedge in common with many other critics, is the indefiniteness or incompleteness of its creations. This is a consequence, of course, of its sense of mystery and aspiration. Schopenbauer said that music was the characteristic modern art, because of its subjective, indefinite character. Pursuing this line of thought, Dr. Hedge affirms that "romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates to plastic art. . . It [music] presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals beyond the capacity of canvas or stone. Plastic art acts on the intellect, music on the feelings; the one affects us by what it presents, the other by what it suggests. This, it seems to me, is essentially the difference between classic and romantic poetry"; and he names Homer and Milton as examples of the former, and Scott and Shelley of the latter school. Here then we have a third criterion proposed for determining the essential _differentia_ of romantic art. First it was mystery, then aspiration; now it is the appeal to the emotions by the method of suggestion. And yet there is, perhaps, no inconsistency on the critic's part in this continual shifting of his ground. He is apparently presenting different facets of the same truth; he means one thing by this mystery, aspiration, indefiniteness, incompleteness, emotion suggestiveness: that quality or effect which we all feel to be present in romantic and absent from classic work, but which we find it hard to describe by any single term. It is open to any analyst of our critical vocabulary to draw out the fullest meanings that he can, from such pairs of related words as classic and romantic, fancy and imagination, wit and humor, reason and understanding, passion and sentiment. Let us, for instance, develop briefly this proposition that the ideal of classic art is completeness[12] and the ideal of romantic art indefiniteness, or suggestiveness. A.W. Schlegel[13] had already made use of two of the arts of design, to illustrate the distinction between classic and romantic, just as Dr. Hedge uses plastic art and music. I refer to Schlegel's famous saying that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the romantic drama picturesque. A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond what it expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination. It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of day. There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment about it. But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness. The workman lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him. Is a Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is "Hamlet" explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, painting, poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow and color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a few figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out in bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few clean, simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible in language and mostly describable in sensuous images. The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the distance recedes in the middle of the scene. This love of perspective is repeated in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows, and obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault. In our poetry, in our religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness and the tomb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful. Their decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its deformities rather than to prolong its reminders. The presence of the corpse was pollution. No Greek could have conceived such a book as the "Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy." It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference between the antique and the medieval. He says: "It must not be supposed that ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and romantic, on the other, are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching to romantic shall be found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any classic page in the literature of modern Europe. . . The literary line of demarcation is not identical with the chronological one." And just as Pater says that the Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr. Hedge says that "the story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth century." Medievalism he regards as merely an accident of romance: Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but Byron, in his mood. So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for classic subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of subject than of treatment. . . In classical writing every idea is called up to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent atmosphere. Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the romantic writer is one of excitement, while the temper of the classical writer is one of self-possession. . . On the one hand there is calm, on the other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one style are strength of grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment; the virtues of the other style are glow of the spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr. Colvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this contrast between the "accurate and firm definition of things" in classical writers and the "thrilling vagueness and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating, vibrating or colored light--the "halo"--with which the romantic writer invests his theme. "The romantic manner, . . . with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed and measured preciseness of statement. . . But on the other hand the romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does not, to inferior work. Second-rate conceptions excitedly and approximately put into words derive from it an illusive attraction which may make them for a time, and with all but the coolest judges, pass as first-rate. Whereas about true classical writing there can be no illusion. It presents to us conceptions calmly realized in words that exactly define them, conceptions depending for their attraction, not on their halo, but on themselves." As examples of these contrasting styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and "Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "The Lotus Eaters," in which Homeric subjects are treated respectively in the classic and the romantic manner. Alfred de Musset, himself in early life a prominent figure among the French romanticists, wrote some capital satire upon the baffling and contradictory definitions of the word _romantisme_ that were current in the third and fourth decades of this century.[18] Two worthy provincials write from the little town of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre to the editor of the "Revue des Deux Mondes," appealing to him to tell them what romanticism means. For two years Dupuis and his friend Cotonet had supposed that the term applied only to the theater, and signified the disregard of the unities. "Shakspere, for example makes people travel from Rome to London, and from Athens to Alexandria in a quarter of an hour. His heroes live ten or twenty years between two acts. His heroines, angels of virtue during a whole scene, have only to pass into the _coulisses_, to reappear as wives, adulteresses, widows, and grandmothers. There, we said to ourselves, is the romantic. Contrariwise, Sophocles makes Oedipus sit on a rock, even at the cost of great personal inconvenience, from the very beginning of his tragedy. All the characters come there to find him, one after the other. Perhaps he stands up occasionally, though I doubt it; unless, it may be, out of respect for Theseus, who, during the entire play, obligingly walks on the high-way, coming in or going out continually. . . There, we said to ourselves, is the classic." But about 1828, continues the letter, "we learned that there were romantic poetry and classical poetry, romantic novels and classical novels, romantic odes and classical odes; nay, a single line, my dear sir, a sole and solitary line of verse might be romantic or classic, according as the humor took it. When we received this intelligence, we could not close our eyes all night. Two years of peaceful conviction had vanished like a dream. All our ideas were turned topsy-turvy; for it the rules of Aristotle were no longer the line of demarcation which separated the literary camps, where was one to find himself, and what was he to depend upon? How was one to know, in reading a book, which school it belonged to? . . . Luckily in the same year there appeared a famous preface, which we devoured straightway[19]. . . This said very distinctly that romanticism was nothing else than the alliance of the playful and the serious, of the grotesque and the terrible, of the jocose and the horrible, or in other words, if you prefer, of comedy and tragedy." This definition the anxious inquirers accepted for the space of a year, until it was borne in upon them that Aristophanes--not to speak of other ancients--had mixed tragedy and comedy in his drama. Once again the friends were plunged in darkness, and their perplexity was deepened when they were taking a walk one evening and overheard a remark made by the niece of the _sous-prefet_. This young lady had fallen in love with English ways, as was--somewhat strangely--evidenced by her wearing a green veil, orange-colored gloves, and silver-rimmed spectacles. As she passed the promenaders, she turned to look at a water-mill near the ford, where there were bags of grain, geese, and an ox in harness, and she exclaimed to her governess, "_Voilà un site romantique_." This mysterious sentence roused the flagging curiosity of MM. Dupuis and Contonet, and they renewed their investigations. A passage in a newspaper led them to believe for a time that romanticism was the imitation of the Germans, with, perhaps, the addition of the English and Spanish. Then they were tempted to fancy that it might be merely a matter of literary form, possibly this _vers brisé_ (run-over lines, _enjambement_) that they are making so much noise about. "From 1830 to 1831 we were persuaded that romanticism was the historic style (_genre historique_) or, if you please, this mania which has lately seized our authors for calling the characters of their novels and melodramas Charlemagne, Francis I., or Henry IV., instead of Amadis, Oronte, or saint-Albin. . . From 1831 to the year following we thought it was the _genre intime,_ about which there was much talk. But with all the pains that we took we never could discover what the _genre intime_ was. The 'intimate' novels are just like the others. They are in two volume octavo, with a great deal of margin. . . They have yellow covers and they cost fifteen francs." From 1832 to 1833 they conjectured that romanticism might be a system of philosophy and political economy. From 1833 to 1834 they believed that it consisted in not shaving one's self, and in wearing a waistcoat with wide facings very much starched. At last they bethink themselves of a certain lawyer's clerk, who had first imported these literary disputes into the village, in 1824. To him, they expose their difficulties and ask for an answer to the question, What is romanticism? After a long conversation, they receive this final definition. "Romanticism, my dear sir! No, of a surety, it is neither the disregard of the unities, nor the alliance of the comic and tragic, nor anything in the world expressible by words. In vain you grasp the butterfly's wing; the dust which gives it its color is left upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the infinite and the starry," etc., etc. Then M. Ducoudray, a magistrate of the department, gives his theory of romanticism, which he considers to be an effect of the religious and political reaction under the restored Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII, and Charles X. "The mania for ballads, arriving from Germany, met the legitimist poetry one fine day at Ladvocat's bookshop; and the two of them, pickax in hand, went at nightfall to a churchyard, to dig up the Middle Ages." The taste for medievalism, M. Ducoudray adds, has survived the revolution of 1830, and romanticism has even entered into the service of liberty and progress, where it is a manifest anachronism, "employing the style of Ronsard to celebrate railroads, and imitating Dante when it chants the praises of Washington and Lafayette." Dupuis was tempted to embrace M. Ducoudray's explanation, but Cotonet was not satisfied. He shut himself in, for four months, at the end of which he announced his discovery that the true and only difference between the classic and the romantic is that the latter uses a good many adjectives. He illustrates his principle by giving passages from "Paul and Virginia" and the "Portuguese Letters," written in the romantic style. Thus Musset pricks a critical bubble with the point of his satire; and yet the bubble declines to vanish. There must really be some more substantial difference than this between classic and romantic, for the terms persist and are found useful. It may be true that the romantic temper, being subjective and excited, tends to an excess in adjectives; the adjective being that part of speech which attributes qualities, and is therefore most freely used by emotional persons. Still it would be possible to cut out all the adjectives, not strictly necessary, from one of Tieck's _Märchen_ without in the slightest degree disturbing its romantic character. It remains to add that romanticism is a word which faces in two directions. It is now opposed to realism, as it was once opposed to classicism. As, in one way, its freedom and lawlessness, its love of novelty, experiment, "strangeness added to beauty," contrast with the classical respect for rules, models, formulae, precedents, conventions; so, in another way, its discontent with things as they are, its idealism, aspiration, mysticism contrast with the realist's conscientious adherence to fact. "Ivanhoe" is one kind of romance; "The Marble Faun" is another.[20] [1] Les définitions ne se posent pas _a priori_, si ce n'est peutêtre en mathématiques. En histoire, c'est de l'étude patiente de is la réalité qu'elles se dégagent insensiblement. Si M. Deschanel ne nous a pas donné du _romantisme_ la définition que nous réclamions tout à l'heure, c'est, à vrai dire, que son enseignement a pour objet de préparer cette définition même. Nous la trouverons où elle doit être, à la fin du cours et non pas à début.--_F. Brunetière: "Classiques et Romantiques, Études Critiques," _Tome III, p. 296. [2] Was war aber dis romantische Schule in Deutschland? Sie war nichts anders als die Wiedererweckung der Poesie des Mittelalters, wie sie sich in dessen Liedern, Bild- und Bauwerken, in Kunst und Leben, manifestiert hatte.--_Die romanticsche Schule (Cotta edition)_, p. 158. [3] "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13. [4] Un classique est tout artiste à l'ecole de qui nous pouvons nous mettre sans craindre que ses leçons on ses exemples nous fourvoient. Ou encore, c'est celui qui possède . . . des qualités dont l'imitation, si elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal.--_F. Brunetière, "Études Critiques,"_ Tome III, p. 300. [5] Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the word _romantic _is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."--_English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, _p. 148, _note_. [6] "Romanticism," _Macmillan's Magazine_, Vol. XXXV. [7] The Odyssey has been explained throughout in an allegorical sense. The episode of Circe, at least, lends itself obviously to such interpretation. Circe's cup has become a metaphor for sensual intoxication, transforming men into beasts; Milton, in "Comus," regards himself as Homer's continuator, enforcing a lesson of temperance in Puritan times hardly more consciously than the old Ionian Greek in times which have no other record than his poem. [8] "Racine et Shakespeare, Études en Romantisme" (1823), p. 32, ed. of Michel Lévy Frères, 1954. Such would also seem to be the view maintained by M. Émile Deschanel, whose book "Le Romantisme des Classiques" (Paris, 1883) is reviewed by M. Brunetière in an article already several times quoted. "Tous les classiques," according to M. Deschanel--at least, so says his reviewer--"ont jadis commencé par être des romantiques." And again: "Un _romantique_ seraut tout simplement un classique en route pour parvenir; et, réciproquement, un classique ne serait de plus qu'un romantique arrivé." [9] "Classic and Romantic," Vol. LVII. [10] See Schiller's "Ueber naive and sentimentalische Dichtung." [11] Le mot de romantisme, après cinquante ans et plus de discussions passionnées, ne laisse pas d'être encore aujourd'hui bien vague et bien flottant.--_Brunetière, ibid._ [12] Ce qui constitue proprement un classique, c'est l'équilibre en lui de toutes les facultés qui concourent à la perfection de l'oeuvre d'art.--_Brunetière, ibid._ [13] "Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Litteratur." [14] Far to the west the long, long vale withdrawn, Where twilight loves to linger for a while. --_Beattie's "Minstrel."_ [15] The modernness of this "latest born of the myths" resides partly in its spiritual, almost Christian conception of love, partly in its allegorical theme, the soul's attainment of immortality through love. The Catholic idea of penance is suggested, too, in Psyche's "wandering labors long." This apologue has been a favorite with platonizing poets, like Spenser and Milton. See "The Faïrie Queene," book iii. canto vi. stanza 1., and "Comus," lines 1002-11 [16] "Selections from Walter Savage Landor," Preface, p. vii. [17] See also Walter Bagehot's essay on "Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art," "Literary Studies, Works" (Hartford, 1889), Vol I. p. 200. [18] Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet (1836), "Oeuvres Complètes" (Charpentier edition, 1881), Tome IX. p. 194. [19] Preface to Victor Hugo's "Cromwell," dated October, 1827. The play was printed, but not acted, in 1828. [20] In modern times romanticism, typifying a permanent tendency of the human mind, has been placed in opposition to what is called realism. . . [But] there is, as it appears to us, but one fundamental note which all romanticism . . . has in common, and that is a deep disgust with the world as it is and a desire to depict in literature something that is claimed to be nobler and better.--_Essays on German Literature, by H. H. Boyesen_, pp. 358 and 356. CHAPTER II. The Augustans The Romantic Movement in England was a part of the general European reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. This began somewhat earlier in England than in Germany, and very much earlier than in France, where literacy conservatism went strangely hand in hand with political radicalism. In England the reaction was at first gradual, timid, and unconscious. It did not reach importance until the seventh decade of the century, and culminated only in the early years of the nineteenth century. The medieval revival was only an incident--though a leading incident--of this movement; but it is the side of it with which the present work will mainly deal. Thus I shall have a great deal to say about Scott; very little about Byron, intensely romantic as he was in many meanings of the word. This will not preclude me from glancing occasionally at other elements besides medievalism which enter into the concept of the term "romantic." Reverting then to our tentative definition--Heine's definition--of romanticism, as the reproduction in modern art and literature of the life of the Middle Ages, it should be explained that the expression, "Middle Ages," is to be taken here in a liberal sense. Contributions to romantic literature such as Macpherson's "Ossian," Collins' "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," and Gray's translations form the Welsh and the Norse, relate to periods which antedate that era of Christian chivalry and feudalism, extending roughly from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, to which the term, "Middle Ages," more strictly applies. The same thing is true of the ground-work, at least, of ancient hero-epics like "Beowulf" and the "Nibelungen Lied," of the Icelandic "Sagas," and of similar products of old heathen Europe which have come down in the shape of mythologies, popular superstitions, usages, rites, songs, and traditions. These began to fall under the notice of scholars about the middle of the last century and made a deep impression upon contemporary letters. Again, the influence of the Middle Age proper prolonged itself beyond the exact close of the medieval period, which it is customary to date from the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The great romantic poets of Italy, Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, wrote in the full flush of the pagan revival and made free use of the Greek and Roman mythologies and the fables of Homer, Vergil, and Ovid; and yet their work is hardly to be described as classical. Nor is the work of their English disciples, Spenser and Sidney; while the entire Spanish and English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (down to 1640, and with an occasional exception, like Ben Jonson) is romantic. Calderon is romantic; Shakspere and Fletcher are romantic. If we agree to regard medieval literature, then, as comprising all the early literature of Europe which drew its inspiration from other than Greek-Latin sources, we shall do no great violence to the usual critical employment of the word. I say _early_ literature, in order to exclude such writings as are wholly modern, like "Robinson Crusoe," or "Gulliver's Travels," or Fielding's novels, which are neither classic nor romantic, but are the original creation of our own time. With works like these, though they are perhaps the most characteristic output of the eighteenth century, our inquiries are not concerned. It hardly needs to be said that the reproduction, or imitation, of mediaeval life by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticists, contains a large admixture of modern thought and feeling. The brilliant pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouqué give no faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions of the modern world. The offspring of the modern imagination, acting upon medieval material, may be a perfectly legitimate, though not an original, form of art. It may even have a novel charm of its own, unlike either parent, but like Euphorion, child of Faust by Helen of Troy, a blend of Hellas and the Middle Age. Scott's verse tales are better poetry than the English metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Tennyson has given a more perfect shape to the Arthurian legends than Sir Thomas Malory, their compiler, or Walter Map and Chrestien de Troyes, their possible inventors. But, of course, to study the Middle Ages, as it really was, one must go not to Tennyson and Scott, but to the "Chanson de Roland," and the "Divine Comedy," and the "Romaunt of the Rose," and the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart. And the farther such study is carried, the more evident it becomes that "mediaeval" and "romantic" are not synonymous. The Middle Ages was not, at all points, romantic: it is the modern romanticist who makes, or finds, it so. He sees its strange, vivid peculiarities under the glamour of distance. Chaucer's temper, for instance, was by no means romantic. This "good sense" which Dryden mentions as his prominent trait; that "low tone" which Lowell praises in him, and which keeps him close to the common ground of experience, pervade his greatest work, the "Canterbury Tales," with an insistent realism. It is true that Chaucer shared the beliefs and influences of his time and was a follower of its literary fashions. In his version of the "Romaunt of the Rose," his imitations of Machault, and his early work in general he used the mediaeval machinery of allegory and dreams. In "Troilus and Cresseide" and the tale of "Palamon and Arcite," he carries romantic love and knightly honor to a higher pitch than his model, Boccaccio. But the shrewdly practical Pandarus of the former poem--a character almost wholly of Chaucer's creation--is the very embodiment of the anti-romantic attitude, and a remarkable anticipation of Sancho Panza; while the "Rime of Sir Thopas" is a distinct burlesque of the fantastic chivalry romances.[2] Chaucer's pages are picturesque with tournament, hunting parties, baronial feasts, miracles of saints, feats of magic; but they are solid, as well, with the everyday life of fourteenth-century England. They have the _naïveté_ and garrulity which are marks of mediaeval work, but not the quaintness and grotesquerie which are held to be marks of romantic work. Not archaic speech, but a certain mental twist constitutes quaintness. Herbert and Fuller are quaint; Blake is grotesque; Donne and Charles Lamb are willfully quaint, subtle, and paradoxical. But Chaucer is always straight-grained, broad, and natural. Even Dante, the poet of the Catholic Middle Ages; Dante, the mystic, the idealist, with his intense spirituality and his passion for symbolism, has been sometimes called classic, by virtue of the powerful construction of his great poem, and his scholastic rigidity of method. The relation between modern romanticizing literature and the real literature of the Middle Ages, is something like that between the literature of the renaissance and the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome. But there is this difference, that, while the renaissance writers fell short of their pattern, the modern schools of romance have outgone their masters--not perhaps in the intellectual--but certainly in the artistic value of their product. Mediaeval literature, wonderful and stimulating as a whole and beautiful here and there in details of execution, affords few models of technical perfection. The civilization which it reflected, though higher in its possibilities than the classic civilization, had not yet arrived at an equal grade of development, was inferior in intelligence and the natured results of long culture. The epithets of Gothic ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, which the eighteenth-century critics applied so freely to all the issue of the so-called dark ages, were not entirely without justification. Dante is almost the only strictly mediaeval poet in whose work the form seems adequate to the content; for Boccaccio and Petrarca stand already on the sill of the renaissance. In the arts of design the case was partly reversed. If the artists of the renaissance did not equal the Greeks in sculpture and architecture, they probably excelled them in painting. On the other hand, the restorers of Gothic have never quite learned the secret of the mediaeval builders. However, if the analogy is not pushed too far, the romantic revival may be regarded as a faint counterpart, the fragments of a half-forgotten civilization were pieced together; Greek manuscripts sought out, cleaned, edited, and printed: statues, coins, vases dug up and ranged in museums: debris cleared away from temples, amphitheaters, basilicas; till gradually the complete image of the antique world grew forth in august beauty, kindling an excitement of mind to which there are few parallels in history; so, in the eighteenth century, the despised ages of monkery, feudalism, and superstition began to reassert their claims upon the imagination. Ruined castles and abbeys, coats of mail, illuminated missals, manuscript romances, black-letter ballads, old tapestries, and wood carvings acquired a new value. Antiquaries and virtuosos first, and then poets and romancers, reconstructed in turn an image of medieval society. True, the later movement was much the weaker of the two. No such fissure yawned between modern times and the Middle Ages as had been opened between the ancient world and the Middle Ages by the ruin of the Roman state and by the barbarian migrations. Nor had ten centuries of rubbish accumulated over the remains of mediaeval culture. In 1700 the Middle Ages were not yet so very remote. The nations and languages of Europe continued in nearly the same limits which had bounded them two centuries before. The progress in the sciences and mechanic arts, the discovery and colonizing of America, the invention of printing and gunpowder, and the Protestant reformation had indeed drawn deep lines between modern and mediaeval life. Christianity, however, formed a connecting link, though, in Protestant countries, the continuity between the earlier and later forms of the religion had been interrupted. One has but to compare the list of the pilgrims whom Chaucer met at the Tabard, with the company that Captain Sentry or Peregrine Pickle would be likely to encounter at a suburban inn, to see how the face of English society had changed between 1400 and 1700. What has become of the knight, the prioress, the sumner, the monk, pardoner, squire, alchemist, friar; and where can they or their equivalents be found in all England? The limitations of my subject will oblige me to treat the English romantic movement as a chapter in literary history, even at the risk of seeming to adopt a narrow method. Yet it would be unphilosophical to consider it as a merely aesthetic affair, and to lose sight altogether of its deeper springs in the religious and ethical currents of the time. For it was, in part, a return of warmth and color into English letters; and that was only a symptom of the return of warmth and color--that is, of emotion and imagination--into English life and thought: into the Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding to these on the Continent were German pietism, the transcendental philosophy of Kant and his continuators, and the emotional excesses of works like Rousseau's "Nouvelle Héloise" and Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther." Romanticism was something more, then, than a new literary mode; a taste cultivated by dilettante virtuosos, like Horace Walpole, college recluses like Gray, and antiquarian scholars like Joseph and Thomas Warton. It was the effort of the poetic imagination to create for itself a richer environment; but it was also, in its deeper significance, a reaching out of the human spirit after a more ideal type of religion and ethics than it could find in the official churchmanship and the formal morality of the time. Mr. Leslie Stephen[3] points out the connection between the three currents of tendency known as sentimentalism, romanticism, and naturalism. He explains, to be sure, that the first English sentimentalists, such as Richardson and Sterne, were anything but romantic. "A more modern sentimentalist would probably express his feelings[4] by describing some past state of society. He would paint some ideal society in mediaeval times and revive the holy monk and the humble nun for our edification." He attributes the subsequent interest in the Middle Ages to the progress made in historical inquiries during the last half of the eighteenth century, and to the consequent growth of antiquarianism. "Men like Malone and Stevens were beginning those painful researches which have accumulated a whole literature upon the scanty records of our early dramatists. Gray, the most learned of poets, had vaguely designed a history of English poetry, and the design was executed with great industry by Thomas Warton. His brother Joseph ventured to uphold the then paradoxical thesis that Spenser was as great a man as Pope. Everywhere a new interest was awakening in the minuter details of the past." At first, Mr. Stephen says, the result of these inquiries was "an unreasonable contempt for the past. The modern philosopher, who could spin all knowledge out of his own brain; the skeptic, who had exploded the ancient dogma; or the free-thinker of any shade, who rejoiced in the destruction of ecclesiastical tyranny, gloried in his conscious superiority to his forefathers. Whatever was old was absurd; and Gothic--an epithet applied to all medieval art, philosophy, or social order--became a simple term of contempt." But an antiquarian is naturally a conservative, and men soon began to love the times whose peculiarities they were so diligently studying. Men of imaginative minds promptly made the discovery that a new source of pleasure might be derived from these dry records. . . The 'return to nature' expresses a sentiment which underlies . . . both the sentimental and romantic movements. . . To return to nature is, in one sense, to find a new expression for emotions which have been repressed by existing conventions; or, in another, to return to some simpler social order which had not yet suffered from those conventions. The artificiality attributed to the eighteenth century seems to mean that men were content to regulate their thoughts and lives by rules not traceable to first principles, but dependent upon a set of special and exceptional conditions. . . To get out of the ruts, or cast off the obsolete shackles, two methods might be adopted. The intellectual horizon might be widened by including a greater number of ages and countries; or men might try to fall back upon the thoughts and emotions common to all races, and so cast off the superficial incrustation. The first method, that of the romanticists, aims at increasing our knowledge: the second, that of the naturalistic school, at basing our philosophy on deeper principles.[5] The classic, or pseudo-classic, period of English literature lasted from the middle of the seventeenth till the end of the eighteenth century. Inasmuch as the romantic revival was a protest against this reigning mode, it becomes necessary to inquire a little more closely what we mean when we say that the time of Queen Anne and the first two Georges was our Augustan or classical age. In what sense was it classical? And was it any more classical than the time of Milton, for example, or the time of Landor? If the "Dunciad," and the "Essay on Man," are classical, what is Keats' "Hyperion"? And with what propriety can we bring under a common rubric things so far asunder as Prior's "Carmen Seculare" and Tennyson's "Ulysses," or as Gay's "Trivia" and Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon"? Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different side from our nineteenth-century poets. Their classicism was of a special type. It was, as has been often pointed out, more Latin than Greek, and more French than Latin.[6] It was, as has likewise been said, "a classicism in red heels and a periwig." Victor Hugo speaks of "cette poésie fardée, mouchetée, poudrée, du dix-huitième siècle, cette litèrature à paniers, à pompons et à falbalas."[7] The costumes of Watteau contrast with the simple folds of Greek drapery very much as the "Rape of the Lock," contrasts with the Iliad, or one of Pope's pastorals with an idyl of Theocritus. The times were artificial in poetry as in dress-- "Tea-cup times of hood and hoop, And when the patch was worn." Gentlemen wore powdered wigs instead of their own hair, and the power and the wig both got into their writing. _Perruque_ was the nickname applied to the classicists by the French romanticists of Hugo's generation, who wore their hair long and flowing--_cheveaux mérovigiennes_--and affected an _outré_ freedom in the cut and color of their clothes. Similarly the Byronic collar became, all over Europe, the symbol of daring independence in matters of taste and opinion. Its careless roll, which left the throat exposed, seemed to assist the liberty of nature against cramping conventions. The leading Queen Anne writers are so well known that a somewhat general description of the literary situation in England at the time of Pope's death (1744) will serve as an answer to the question, how was the eighteenth century classical. It was remarked by Thomas Warton[8] that, at the first revival of letters in the sixteenth century, our authors were more struck by the marvelous fables and inventions of ancient poets than by the justness of their conceptions and the purity of their style. In other words, the men of the renaissance apprehended the ancient literature as poets: the men of the _Éclaircissement_ apprehended them as critics. In Elizabeth's day the new learning stimulated English genius to creative activity. In royal progresses, court masques, Lord Mayors' shows, and public pageants of all kinds, mythology ran mad. "Every procession was a pantheon." But the poets were not careful to keep the two worlds of pagan antiquity and mediaeval Christianity distinct. The art of the renaissance was the flower of a double root, and the artists used their complex stuff naïvely. The "Faërie Queene" is the typical work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and personified vices and virtues. The "machinery" of Homer and Vergil--the "machinery" of the "Seven Champions of Christendom" and the "Roman de la Rose"! This was not shocking to Spenser's contemporaries, but it seemed quite shocking to classical critics a century later. Even Milton, the greatest scholar among English poets, but whose imagination was a strong agent, holding strange elements in solution, incurred their censure for bringing Saint Peter and the sea-nymphs into dangerous juxtaposition in "Lycidas." But by the middle of the seventeenth century the renaissance schools of poetry had become effete in all European countries. They had run into extravagances of style, into a vicious manner known in Spain as Gongorism, in Italy as Marinism, and in England best exhibited in the verse of Donne and Cowley and the rest of the group whom Dr. Johnson called the metaphysical poets, and whose Gothicism of taste Addison ridiculed in his _Spectator_ papers on true and false wit. It was France that led the reform against this fashion. Malherbe and Boileau insisted upon the need of discarding tawdry ornaments of style and cultivating simplicity, clearness, propriety, decorum, moderation; above all, good sense. The new Academy, founded to guard the purity of the French language, lent its weight to the precepts of the critics, who applied the rules of Aristotle, as commented by Longinus and Horace, to modern conditions. The appearance of a number of admirable writers--Corneille, Molière, Racine, Bossuet, La Fontaine, La Bruyère--simultaneously with this critical movement, gave an authority to the new French literature which enabled it to impose its principles upon England and Germany for over a century. For the creative literature of France conformed its practice, in the main, to the theory of French criticism; though not, in the case of Regnier, without open defiance. This authority was re-enforced by the political glories and social _éclat_ of the _siècle de Louis Quatorze_ It happened that at this time the Stuart court was in exile, and in the train of Henrietta Maria at Paris, or scattered elsewhere through France, were many royalist men of letters, Etherege, Waller, Cowley, and others, who brought back with them to England in 1660 an acquaintance with this new French literature and a belief in its aesthetic code. That French influence would have spread into England without the aid of these political accidents is doubtless true, as it is also true that a reform of English versification and poetic style would have worked itself out upon native lines independent of foreign example, and even had there been so such thing as French literature. Mr. Gosse has pointed out couplets of Waller, written as early as 1623, which have the formal precision of Pope's; and the famous passage about the Thames in Denham's "Cooper's Hill" (1642) anticipates the best performance of Augustan verse: "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full." However, as to the general fact of the powerful impact of French upon English literary fashions, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, there can be no dispute.[9] This change of style was symptomatic of a corresponding change in the national temper. It was the mission of the eighteenth century to assert the universality of law and, at the same time, the sufficiency of the reason to discover the laws, which govern in every province: a service which we now, perhaps, undervalue in our impatience with the formalism which was its outward sign. Hence its dislike of irregularity in art and irrationality in religion. England, in particular, was tired of unchartered freedom, of spiritual as well as of literary anarchy. The religious tension of the Commonwealth period had relaxed--men cannot be always at the heroic pitch--and theological disputes had issued in indifference and a skepticism which took the form of deism, or "natural religion." But the deists were felt to be a nuisance. They were unsettling opinions and disturbing that decent conformity with generally received beliefs which it is the part of a good citizen to maintain. Addison instructs his readers that, in the absence of certainty, it is the part of a prudent man to choose the safe side and make friends with God. The freethinking Chesterfield[10] tells his son that the profession of atheism is ill-bred. De Foe, Swift, Richardson, Fielding, Johnson all attack infidelity. "Conform! Conform!" said in effect the most authoritative writers of the century. "Be sensible: go to church: pay your rates: don't be a vulgar deist--a fellow like Toland who is poor and has no social position. But, on the other hand, you need not be a fanatic or superstitious, or an enthusiast. Above all, _pas de zèle!_" "Theology," says Leslie Stephen, "was, for the most part, almost as deistical as the deists. A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of skepticism. . . A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted and no questions asked. . . With Shakspere, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every step our friends vanish into the abyss of ever present mystery. To all such thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes as resolutely as possible. . . The absence of any deeper speculative ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor whence we come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life. . . Knowledge of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, are the staple of the best literature of the time."[11] The God of the deists was, in truth, hardly more impersonal than the abstraction worshiped by the orthodox--the "Great Being" of Addison's essays, the "Great First Cause" of Pope's "Universal Prayer," invoked indifferently as "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord." Dryden and Pope were professed Catholics, but there is nothing to distinguish their so-called sacred poetry from that of their Protestant contemporaries. Contrast the mere polemics of "The Hind and the Panther" with really Catholic poems like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical "Argument against the Abolition of Christianity." Among the Queen Anne wits Addison was the man of most genuine religious feeling. He is always reverent, and "the feeling infinite" stirs faintly in one or two of his hymns. But, in general, his religion is of the rationalizing type, a religion of common sense, a belief resting upon logical deductions, a system of ethics in which the supernatural is reduced to the lowest terms, and from which the glooms and fervors of a deep spiritual experience are almost entirely absent. This "parson in a tie-wig" is constantly preaching against zeal, enthusiasm, superstition, mysticism, and recommending a moderate, cheerful, and reason religion.[12] It is instructive to contrast his amused contempt for popular beliefs in ghosts, witches, dreams, prognostications, and the like, with the reawakened interest in folk lore evidenced by such a book as Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft." Queen Anne literature was classical, then, in its lack of those elements of mystery and aspiration which we have found described as of the essence of romanticism. It was emphatically a literature of this world. It ignored all vague emotion, the phenomena of subconsciousness, "the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound," the shadow that rounds man's little life, and fixed its attention only upon what it could thoroughly comprehend.[13] Thereby it escaped obscurity. The writings of the Augustans in both verse and prose are distinguished by a perfect clearness, but it is a clearness without subtlety or depth. They never try to express a thought, or to utter a feeling, that is not easily intelligible. The mysticism of Wordsworth, the incoherence of Shelley, the darkness of Browning--to take only modern instances--proceed, however, not from inferior art, but from the greater difficulty of finding expression for a very different order of ideas. Again the literature of the Restoration and Queen Anne periods--which may be regarded as one, for present purposes--was classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of _the_ world, of the _beau monde_, high life, fashion, society, the court and the town, the salons, clubs, coffee-houses, assemblies, ombre-parties. It was social, urban, gregarious, intensely though not broadly human. It cared little for the country or outward nature, and nothing for the life of remote times and places. Its interest was centered upon civilization and upon that peculiarly artificial type of civilization which it found prevailing. It was as indifferent to Venice, Switzerland, the Alhambra, the Nile, the American forests, and the islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture. Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14] Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal, abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gérard de Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as "The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred, whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle Taprobane," are touches of the picturesque which anticipate a more modern mood than Addison's. "The difference," says Matthew Arnold, "between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul." The representative minds of the eighteenth century were such as Voltaire, the master of persiflage, destroying superstition with his _souriere hideux_; Gibbon, "the lord of irony," "sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer"; and Hume, with his thorough-going philosophic skepticism, his dry Toryism, and cool contempt for "zeal" of any kind. The characteristic products of the era were satire, burlesque, and travesty: "Hudibras," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Way of the World," "Gulliver's Travels" and "The Rape of the Lock." There is a whole literature of mockery: parodies like Prior's "Ballad on the Taking of Namur" and "The Country Mouse and the City Mouse"; Buckingham's "Rehearsal" and Swift's "Meditation on a Broomstick"; mock-heroics, like the "Dunciad" and "MacFlecknoe" and Garth's "Dispensary," and John Phillips' "Splendid Shilling" and Addison's "Machinae Gesticulantes"; Prior's "Alma," a burlesque of philosophy; Gay's "Trivia" and "The Shepherd's Week," and "The Beggars' Opera"-a "Newgate pastoral"; "Town Eclogues" by Swift and Lady Montague and others. Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hardness, shallowness, and levity. The polite cynicism of Congreve, the ferocious cynicism of Swift, the malice of Pope, the pleasantry of Addison, the early worldliness of Prior and Gay are seldom relieved by any touch of the ideal. The prose of the time was excellent, but the poetry was merely rhymed prose. The recent Queen Anne revival in architecture, dress, and bric-a-brac, the recrudescence of society verse in Dobson and others, is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that the present generation has entered upon a prosaic reaction against romantic excesses and we are finding our picturesque in that era of artifice which seemed so picturesque to our forerunners. The sedan chair, the blue china, the fan, farthingale, and powdered head dress have now got the "rime of age" and are seen in fascinating perspective, even as the mailed courser, the buff jerkin, the cowl, and the cloth-yard shaft were seen by the men of Scott's generation. Once more, the eighteenth century was classical in its respect for authority. It desired to put itself under discipline, to follow the rules, to discover a formula of correctness in all the arts, to set up a tribunal of taste and establish canons of composition, to maintain standards, copy models and patterns, comply with conventions, and chastise lawlessness. In a word, its spirit was academic. Horace was its favorite master--not Horace of the Odes, but Horace of the Satires and Epistles, and especially Horace as interpreted by Boileau.[17] The "Ars Poetica" had been englished by the Earl of Roscommon, and imitated by Boileau in his "L'Art Poetique," which became the parent of a numerous progeny in England; among others as "Essay on Satire" and an "Essay on Poetry," by the Earl of Mulgrave;[18] an "Essay on Translated Verse" by the Earl of Roscommon, who, says Addison, "makes even rules a noble poetry";[19] and Pope's well-known "Essay on Criticism." The doctrine of Pope's essay is, in brief, follow Nature, and in order that you may follow nature, observe the rules, which are only "Nature methodized," and also imitate the ancients. "Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem; To copy nature is to copy them." Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature and Homer were the same. Accordingly, "he checks the bold design, And rules as strict his labor'd work confine." Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur. Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21] without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!] Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared less about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22] There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that was almost as influential. French critical gave the law: Boileau, Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis, Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read. Three writers of high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described, in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor variations. Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer's duty to be "correct." It was well indeed to be "bold," but bold with discretion. Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an inferior artist. He was to be admired, but not approved. Homer, again, it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had more "fire." Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to Tasso. But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the "Henriade." As for "Paradise Lost," he could not read it through. William Walsh, "the muses' judge and friend," advised the youthful Pope that "there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality his particular study." "The best of the moderns in all language," he wrote to Pope, "are those that have the nearest copied the ancients." Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the "Essay on Criticism" as one who had "taught his muse to sing, Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing." But what was correct? In the drama, _e.g._, the observance of the unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally practiced. Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope, exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of which the unities of time and place were defended. Yet Johnson, in his own tragedy "Irene," conformed to the rules of Aristotle. He pronounced "Cato" "unquestionably the noblest production of Addison's genius," but acknowledge that its success had "introduced, or confirmed among us, the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance and chill philosophy." On the other hand Addison had small regard for poetic justice, which Johnson thought ought to be observed. Addison praised old English ballads, which Johnson thought mean and foolish; and he guardedly commends[23] "the fairy way of writing," a romantic foppery that Johnson despised.[24] Critical opinion was pronounced in favor of separating tragedy and comedy, and Addison wrote one sentence which condemns half the plays of Shakspere and Fletcher: "The tragi-comedy, which is the product of the English theater, is one the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet's thought."[25] Dryden made some experiments in tragi-comedy, but, in general, classical comedy was pure comedy--the prose comedy of manners--and classical tragedy admitted no comic intermixture. Whether tragedy should be in rhyme, after the French manner, or in blank verse, after the precedent of the old English stage, was a moot point. Dryden at first argued for rhyme and used it in his "heroic plays"; and it is significant that he defended its use on the ground that it would act as a check upon the poet's fancy. But afterward he grew "weary of his much-loved mistress, rhyme," and went back to blank verse in his later plays. As to poetry other than dramatic, the Restoration critics were at one in judging blank verse too "low" for a poem of heroic dimensions; and though Addison gave it the preference in epic poetry, Johnson was its persistent foe, and regarded it as little short of immoral. But for that matter, Gray could endure no blank verse outside of Milton. This is curious, that rhyme, a mediaeval invention, should have been associated in the last century with the classical school of poetry; while blank verse, the nearest English equivalent of the language of Attic tragedy, was a shibboleth of romanticizing poets, like Thomson and Akenside. The reason was twofold: rhyme came stamped with the authority of the French tragic alexandrine; and, secondly, it meant constraint where blank verse meant freedom, "ancient liberty, recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming."[26] Pope, among his many thousand rhymed couplets, has left no blank verse except the few lines contributed to Thomson's "Seasons." Even the heroic couplet as written by earlier poets was felt to have been too loose in structure. "The excellence and dignity of it," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us how to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it."[27] All through the classical period the tradition is constant that Waller was the first modern English poet, the first correct versifier. Pope is praised by Johnson because he employed but sparingly the triplets and alexandrines by which Dryden sought to vary the monotony of the couplet; and he is censured by Cowper because, by force of his example, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art." Henceforth the distich was treated as a unit: the first line was balanced against the second, and frequently the first half of the line against the second half. "To err is human, to forgive divine." "And so obliging, that he ne'er obliged." "Charms strike the eye, but merit wins the soul," etc., etc. This type of verse, which Pope brought to perfection, and to which he gave all the energy and variety of which it was capable, so prevailed in our poetry for a century or more that one almost loses sight of the fact that any other form was employed. The sonnet, for instance, disappeared entirely, until revived by Gray, Stillingfleet, Edwards, and Thomas Warton, about the middle of the eighteenth century.[28] When the poets wished to be daring and irregular, they were apt to give vent in that species of pseudo-Pindaric ode which Cowley had introduced--a literary disease which, Dr. Johnson complained, infected the British muse with the notion that "he who could do nothing else could write like Pindar." Sir Charles Eastlake in his "History of the Gothic Revival" testifies to this formal spirit from the point of view of another art than literature. "The age in which Batty Langley lived was an age in which it was customary to refer all matters of taste to rule and method. There was one standard of excellence in poetry--a standard that had its origin in the smooth distichs of heroic verse which Pope was the first to perfect, and which hundreds of later rhymers who lacked his nobler powers soon learned to imitate. In pictorial art, it was the grand school which exercised despotic sway over the efforts of genius and limited the painter's inventions to the field of Pagan mythology. In architecture, Vitruvius was the great authority. The graceful majesty of the Parthenon--the noble proportions of the temple of Theseus--the chaste enrichment which adorns the Choragic monument of Lysicrates, were ascribed less to the fertile imagination and refined perceptions of the ancient Greek, than to the dry and formal precepts which were invented centuries after their erection. Little was said of the magnificent sculpture which filled the metopes of the temple of the Minerva; but the exact height and breadth of the triglyphs between them were considered of the greatest importance. The exquisite drapery of caryatids and canephorae, no English artist, a hundred years ago, thought fit to imitate; but the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch with the utmost nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and uncontrolled taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the theories propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic. The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . . Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico might be."[29] This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play; or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_. Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of an epic. Is it the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin _in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that an epic ought not? Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his _Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment. Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at "Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid. When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that "Virtue alone is happiness below;" or, with Young, that "Procrastination is the thief of time;" or, with Johnson, that "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is rhetoric, not poetry. The closing lines of "The Dunciad"--so strangely overpraised by Thackeray--with their metallic clank and grandiose verbiage, are not truly imaginative. The poet is simply working himself up to a climax of the false sublime, as an orator deliberately attaches a sounding peroration to his speech. Pope is always "heard," never "overheard." The poverty of the classical period in lyrical verse is particularly significant, because the song is the most primitive and spontaneous kind of poetry, and the most direct utterance of personal feeling. Whatever else the poets of Pope's time could do, they could not sing. They are the despair of the anthologists.[30] Here and there among the brilliant reasoners, _raconteurs_, and satirists in verse, occurs a clever epigrammatist like Prior, or a ballad writer like Henry Carey, whose "Sally in Our Alley" shows the singing, and not talking, voice, but hardly the lyric cry. Gay's "Blackeyed Susan" has genuine quality, though its _rococo_ graces are more than half artificial. Sweet William is very much such an opera sailor-man as Bumkinet or Grubbinol is a shepherd, and his wooing is beribboned with conceits like these: "If to fair India's coast we sail, Thy eyes are seen in diamonds bright, Thy breath is Afric's spicy gale, Thy skin is ivory so white. Thus every beauteous prospect that I view, Wakes in my soul some charm of lovely Sue." It was the same with the poetry of outward nature as with the poetry of human passion.[31] In Addison's "Letter from Italy," in Pope's "Pastorals," and "Windsor Forest," the imagery, when not actually false, is vague and conventional, and the language abounds in classical insipidities, epithets that describe nothing, and generalities at second hand from older poets, who may once, perhaps, have written with their "eyes upon the object." Blushing Flora paints the enameled ground; cheerful murmurs fluctuate on the gale; Eridanus through flowery meadows strays; gay gilded[32] scenes and shining prospects rise; while everywhere are balmy zephyrs, sylvan shades, winding vales, vocal shores, silver floods, crystal springs, feathered quires, and Phoebus and Philomel and Ceres' gifts assist the purple year. It was after this fashion that Pope rendered the famous moonlight passage in his translation of the Iliad: "Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, A flood of glory bursts from all the skies," etc. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," says Wordsworth, "reciting these verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity." The poetic diction against which Wordsworth protested was an outward sign of the classical preference for the general over the concrete. The vocabulary was Latinized because, in English, the _mot propre_ is commonly a Saxon word, while its Latin synonym has a convenient indefiniteness that keeps the subject at arm's length. Of a similar tendency was the favorite rhetorical figure of personification, which gave a false air of life to abstractions by the easy process of spelling them with a capital letter. Thus: "From bard to bard the frigid caution crept, Till Declamation roared whilst Passion slept; Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread, Philosophy remained though Nature fled,. . . Exulting Folly hailed the joyful day, And Pantomime and Song confirmed her sway."[33] Everything was personified; Britannia, Justice, Liberty, Science, Melancholy, Night. Even vaccination for the smallpox was invoked as a goddess, "Inoculation, heavenly maid, descend!"[34] But circumstances or periphrasis was the capital means by which the Augustan poet avoided precision and attained nobility of style. It enabled him to speak of a woman as a "nymph," or a "fair"; of sheep as "the fleecy care"; of fishes as "the scaly tribe"; and of a picket fence as a "spiculated paling." Lowell says of Pope's followers: "As the master had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was common. This they contrived by the ready expedient of the periphrasis. They called everything something else. A boot with them was "'The shining leather that encased the limb.' "Coffee became "'The fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown.'"[35] "For the direct appeal to Nature, and the naming of specific objects," says Mr. Gosse,[36] "they substituted generalities and second-hand allusions. They no longer mentioned the gillyflower and the daffodil, but permitted themselves a general reference to Flora's vernal wreath. It was vulgar to say that the moon was rising; the gentlemanly expression was, 'Cynthia is lifting her silver horn!' Women became nymphs in this new phraseology, fruits became 'the treasures of Pomona,' a horse became 'the impatient courser.' The result of coining these conventional counters for groups of ideas was that the personal, the exact, was lost in literature. Apples were the treasures of Pomona, but so were cherries, too, and if one wished to allude to peaches, they also were the treasures of Pomona. This decline from particular to general language was regarded as a great gain in elegance. It was supposed that to use one of these genteel counters, which passed for coin of poetic language, brought the speaker closer to the grace of Latinity. It was thought that the old direct manner of speaking was crude and futile; that a romantic poet who wished to allude to caterpillars could do so without any exercise of his ingenuity by simply introducing the word 'caterpillars,' whereas the classical poet had to prove that he was a scholar and a gentleman by inventing some circumlocution, such as 'the crawling scourge that smites the leafy plain.'. . . In the generation that succeeded Pope really clever writers spoke of a 'gelid cistern,' when they meant a cold bath, and 'the loud hunter-crew' when they meant a pack of foxhounds." It would be a mistake to suppose that the men of Pope's generation, including Pope himself, were altogether wanting in romantic feeling. There is a marked romantic accent in the Countess of Winchelsea's ode "To the Nightingale"; in her "Nocturnal Reverie"; in Parnell's "Night Piece on Death," and in the work of several Scotch poets, like Allan Ramsay and Hamilton of Bangour, whose ballad, "The Braces of Yarrow," is certainly a strange poem to come out of the heart of the eighteenth century. But these are eddies and back currents in the stream of literary tendency. We are always in danger of forgetting that the literature of an age does not express its entire, but only its prevailing, spirit. There is commonly a latent, silent body of thought and feeling underneath which remains inarticulate, or nearly so. It is this prevailing spirit and fashion which I have endeavored to describe in the present chapter. If the picture seems to lack relief, or to be in any way exaggerated, the reader should consult the chapters on "Classicism" and "The Pseudo-Classicists" in M. Pellisier's "Literary Movement in France," already several times referred to. They describe a literary situation which had a very exact counterpart in England. [1] As another notable weakness of the age is its habit of looking, to the past ages--not understanding them all the while . . . so Scott gives up nearly the half of his intellectual power to a fond yet purposeless dreaming over the past; and spends half his literary labors in endeavors to revive it, not in reality, but on the stage of fiction: endeavors which were the best of the kind that modernism made, but still successful only so far as Scott put under the old armor the everlasting human nature which he knew; and totally unsuccessful so far as concerned the painting of the armor itself, which he knew _not_. . . His romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false.--_Ruskin, "Modern Painters,"_ Vol. III. p. 279 (First American Edition, 1860). [2] See also the sly hit at popular fiction in the _Nonnë Prestës Tale_: "This story is also trewe, I undertake, As is the book of Launcelot de Lake, That women hold in ful gret reverence." [3] "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Vol. II. chap xii, section vii. [4] Sentimentalism approaches its subject through the feelings; romanticism through the imagination. [5] Ruskin, too indicates the common element in romanticism and naturalism--a desire to escape from the Augustan formalism. I condense the passage slightly: "To powder the hair, to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick walls and pictures to brown stains. Reaction from this state was inevitable, and accordingly men steal out to the fields and mountains; and, finding among these color and liberty and variety and power, rejoice in all the wildest shattering of the mountain side, as an opposition to Gower Street. It is not, however, only to existing inanimate nature that our want of beauty in person and dress has driven us. The imagination of it, as it was seen in our ancestors, haunts us continually. We look fondly back to the manners of the age sought in the centuries which we profess to have surpassed in everything. . . This romantic love of beauty, forced to seek in history and in external nature the satisfaction it cannot find in ordinary life."--_Modern Painters_, Vol. III. p. 260. [6] Although devout in their admiration for antiquity, the writers of the seventeenth century have by no means always clearly grasped the object of their cult. Though they may understand Latin tradition, they have certainly never entered into the freer, more original spirit of Greek art. They have but an incomplete, superficial conception of Hellenism. . . Boileau celebrates but does not understand Pindar. . . The seventeenth century comprehended Homer no better than Pindar. What we miss in them is exactly what we like best in his epopee--the vast living picture of semi-barbarous civilization. . . No society could be less fitted than that of the seventeenth century to feel and understand the spirit of primitive antiquity. In order to appreciate Homer, it was thought necessary to civilize the barbarian, make him a scrupulous writer, and convince him that the word "ass" is a "very noble" expression in Greek--_Pellisier: "The Literary Movement in France" (Brinton's translation, _1897), pp. 8-10. So Addison apologizes for Homer's failure to observe those qualities of nicety, correctness, and what the French call _bienséance_ (decorum,) the necessity of which had only been found out in later times. See _The Spectator_, No. 160. [7] Preface to "Cromwell." [8] "History of English Poetry," section lxi. Vol III. p. 398 (edition of 1840). [9] See, for a fuller discussion of this subject, "From Shakspere to Pope: An Inquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England," by Edmund Gosse, 1885. [10] The cold-hearted, polished Chesterfield is a very representative figure. Johnson, who was really devout, angrily affirmed that his celebrated letters taught: "the morality of a whore with the manners of a dancing-master." [11] "History of English Thought in the Eighteen Century," Vol. II. chap. xii. Section iv. See also "Selections from Newman," by Lewis E. Gates, Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. (1895). [12] See especially _Spectator_, Nos. 185, 186, 201, 381, and 494. [13] The classical Landor's impatience of mysticism explains his dislike of Plato, the mystic among Greeks. Diogenes says to Plato: "I meddle not at present with infinity or eternity: when I can comprehend them, I will talk about them," "Imaginary Conversations," 2d series, Conversation XV. Landor's contempt for German literature is significant. [14] "Selections from Newman," Introduction, pp. xlvii-xlviii. [15] Racine observes that good sense and reason are the same in all ages. What is the result of this generalization? Heroes can be transported from epoch to epoch, from country to country, without causing surprise. Their Achilles is no more a Greek than is Porus an Indian; Andromache feels and talks like a seventeenth-century princess: Phaedra experiences the remorse of a Christian.--_Pellissier, "Literary Movement in France,"_ p. 18. In substituting men of concrete, individual lives for the ideal figures of tragic art, romanticism was forced to determine their physiognomy by a host of local, casual details. In the name of universal truth the classicists rejected the coloring of time and place; and this is precisely what the romanticists seek under the name of particular reality.--_Ibid._ p. 220. Similarly Montezuma's Mexicans in Dryden's "Indian Emperor" have no more national individuality than the Spanish Moors in his "Conquest of Granada." The only attempt at local color in "Aurungzebe"--an heroic play founded on the history of a contemporary East Indian potentate who died seven years after the author--is the introduction of the _suttee_, and one or two mentions of elephants. [16] See "Les Orientales" (Hugo) and Nerval's "Les Nuits de Rhamadan" and "La Légende du Calife Hakem." [17] The rules a nation, born to serve, obeys; And Boileau still in right of Horace sways. --_Pope, "Essay on Criticism,"_ [18] These critical verse essays seem to have been particularly affected by this order of the peerage; for, somewhat later, we have one, "On Unnatural Flights in Poetry," by the Earl of Lansdowne--"Granville the polite." [19] "Epistle to Sacheverel." [20] "Essay on Addison." [21] Sweet hour of twilight!--in the solitude Of the pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er, To where the last Caesarian fortress stood, Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground to me, How have I loved the twilight hour and thee! --_Don Juan_ [22] I must entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that one verse of Vergil is worth all the _clinquant _or tinsel of Tasso.--_Spectator_, No. 5. [23] _Spectator_, No. 419. [24] See his "Life of Collins." [25] _Spectator_, No. 40. [26] "The Verse": Preface to "Paradise Lost." [27] Dedicatory epistle to "The Rival Ladies." [28] Mr. Gosse says that a sonnet by Pope's friend Walsh is the only one "written in English between Milton's in 1658, and Warton's about 1750," Ward's "English Poets," Vol. III, p. 7. The statement would have been more precise if he had said published instead of _written_. [29] "History of the Gothic Revival," pp. 49-50 (edition of 1872). [30] Palgrave says that the poetry of passion was deformed, after 1660, by "levity and an artificial time"; and that it lay "almost dormant for the hundred years between the days of Wither and Suckling and the days of Burns and Cowper," "Golden Treasury" (Sever and Francis edition, 1866). pp. 379-80. [31] Excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and the "Seasons" [1667-1726] does not contain a single new image of external nature.--_Wordsworth. Appendix to Lyrical Ballads_, (1815). [32] _Gild_ is a perfect earmark of eighteenth-century descriptive verse: the shore is gilded and so are groves, clouds, etc. Contentment gilds the scene, and the stars gild the gloomy night (Parnell) or the glowing pole (Pope). [33] Johnson, "Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane," 1747. [34] See Coleridge, "Biographia Literaria," chap. Xviii [35] Essay on Pope, in "My Study Windows." [36] "From Shakespere to Pope," pp. 9-11. CHAPTER III. The Spenserians Dissatisfaction with a prevalent mood or fashion in literature is apt to express itself either in a fresh and independent criticism of life, or in a reversion to older types. But, as original creative genius is not always forthcoming, a literary revolution commonly begins with imitation. It seeks inspiration in the past, and substitutes a new set of models as different as possible from those which it finds currently followed. In every country of Europe the classical tradition had hidden whatever was most national, most individual, in its earlier culture, under a smooth, uniform veneer. To break away from modern convention, England and Germany, and afterward France, went back to ancient springs of national life; not always, at first, wisely, but in obedience to a true instinct. How far did any knowledge or love of the old romantic literature of England survive among the contemporaries of Dryden and Pope? It is not hard to furnish an answer to this question. The prefaces of Dryden, the critical treatises of Dennis, Winstanley, Oldmixon, Rymer, Langbaine, Gildon, Shaftesbury, and many others, together with hundreds of passages in prologues and epilogues to plays; in periodical essays like the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_; in verse essays like Roscommon's, Mulgrave's and Pope's; in prefaces to various editions of Shakspere and Spenser; in letters, memoirs, etc., supply a mass of testimony to the fact that neglect and contempt had, with a few exceptions, overtaken all English writers who wrote before the middle of the seventeenth century. The exceptions, of course, were those supreme masters whose genius prevailed against every change of taste: Shakspere and Milton, and, in a less degree, Chaucer and Spenser. Of authors strictly mediaeval, Chaucer still had readers, and there were reprints of his works in 1687, 1721, and 1737,[1] although no critical edition appeared until Tyrwhitt's in 1775-78. It is probable, however, that the general reader, if he read Chaucer at all, read him in such modernized versions as Dryden's "Fables" and Pope's "January and May." Dryden's preface has some admirable criticism of Chaucer, although it is evident, from what he says about the old poet's versification, that the secret of Middle English scansion and pronunciation had already been lost. Prior and Pope, who seem to have been attracted chiefly to the looser among the "Canterbury Tales," made each a not very successful experiment at burlesque imitation of Chaucerian language. Outside of Chaucer, and except among antiquarians and professional scholars, there was no remembrance of the whole _corpus poetarum_ of the English Middle Age: none of the metrical romances, rhymed chronicles, saints' legends, miracle plays, minstrel ballads, verse homilies, manuals of devotion, animal fables, courtly or popular allegories and love songs of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Nor was there any knowledge or care about the masterpieces of medieval literature in other languages than English; about such representative works as the "Nibelungenlied," the "Chanson de Roland," the "Roman de la Rose," the "Parzival" of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the "Tristan" of Gottfried of Strasburg, the "Arme Heinrich" of Harmann von Aue, the chronicles of Villehardouin, Joinville, and Froissart, the "Morte Artus," the "Dies Irae," the lyrics of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadour, and of the minnesinger Walter von der Vogelweide, the Spanish Romancero, the poems of the Elder Edda, the romances of "Amis et Amile" and "Aucassin et Nicolete," the writings of Villon, the "De Imitatione Christi" ascribed to Thomas à Kempis. Dante was a great name and fame, but he was virtually unread. There is nothing strange about this; many of these things were still in manuscript and in unknown tongues, Old Norse, Old French, Middle High German, Middle English, Mediaeval Latin. It would be hazardous to assert that the general reader, or even the educated reader, of to-day has much more acquaintance with them at first hand than his ancestor of the eighteenth century; or much more acquaintance than he has with Aeschuylus, Thucydides, and Lucretius, at first hand. But it may be confidently asserted that he knows much more _about_ them; that he thinks them worth knowing about; and that through modern, popular versions of them--through poems, historical romances, literary histories, essays and what not--he has in his mind's eye a picture of the Middle Age, perhaps as definite and fascinating as the picture of classical antiquity. That he has so is owing to the romantic movement. For the significant circumstance about the attitude of the last century toward the whole medieval period was, not its ignorance, but its incuriosity. It did not want to hear anything about it.[2] Now and then, hints Pope, an antiquarian pedant, a university don, might affect an admiration for some obsolete author: "Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green.'"[3] But, furthermore, the great body of Elizabethan and Stuart literature was already obsolescent. Dramatists of the rank of Marlowe and Webster, poets like George Herbert and Robert Herrick--favorites with our own generation--prose authors like Sir Thomas Browne--from whom Coleridge and Emerson drew inspiration--had fallen into "the portion of weeds and outworn faces." Even writers of such recent, almost contemporary, repute as Donne, whom Carew had styled "--a king who ruled, as he thought fit, The universal monarch of wit": Or as Cowley, whom Dryden called the darling of his youth, and who was esteemed in his own lifetime a better poet than Milton; even Donne and Cowley had no longer a following. Pope "versified" some of Donne's rugged satires, and Johnson quoted passages from him as examples of the bad taste of the metaphysical poets. This in the "Life of Cowley," with which Johnson began his "Lives of the Poets," as though Cowley was the first of the moderns. But, "Who now reads Cowley?" asks Pope in 1737.[4] The year of the Restoration (1660) draws a sharp line of demarcation between the old and the new. In 1675, the year after Milton's death, his nephew, Edward Philips, published "Theatrum Poetarum," a sort of biographical dictionary of ancient and modern authors. In the preface, he says: "As for the antiquated and fallen into obscurity from their former credit and reputation, they are, for the most part, those that have written beyond the verge of the present age; for let us look back as far as about thirty or forty years, and we shall find a profound silence of the poets beyond that time, except of some few dramatics." This testimony is the more convincing, since Philips was something of a _laudator temporis acti_. He praises several old English poets and sneers at several new ones, such as Cleaveland and Davenant, who were high in favor with the royal party. He complains that nothing now "relishes so well as what is written in the smooth style of our present language, taken to be of late so much refined"; that "we should be so compliant with the French custom, as to follow set fashions"; that the imitation of Corneille has corrupted the English state; and that Dryden, "complying with the modified and gallantish humour of the time," has, in his heroic plays, "indulged a little too much to the French way of continual rime." One passage, at least, in Philips' preface has been thought to be an echo of Milton's own judgment on the pretensions of the new school of poetry. "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse; even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing. True native poetry is another; in which there is a certain air and spirit which perhaps the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend, much less is it attainable by any study or industry. Nay, though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly observed, yet still this _tour entrejeant_--this poetic energy, if I may so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. Let us observe Spenser, with all his rusty, obsolete words, with all his rough-hewn clouterly verses; yet take him throughout, and we shall find in him a graceful and poetic majesty. In like manner, Shakspere in spite of all his unfiled expressions, his rambling and indigested fancies--the laughter of the critical--yet must be confessed a poet above many that go beyond him to literature[5] some degrees." The laughter of the critical! Let us pause upon the phrase, for it is a key to the whole attitude of the Augustan mind toward "our old tragick poet." Shakspere was already a national possession. Indeed it is only after the Restoration that we find any clear recognition of him, as one of the greatest--as perhaps himself the very greatest--of the dramatists of all time. For it is only after the Restoration that criticism begins. "Dryden," says Dr. Johnson, "may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine, upon principles, the merit of composition. . . Dryden's 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy' [1667] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing."[6] The old theater was dead and Shakspere now emerged from amid its ruins, as the one unquestioned legacy of the Elizabethan age to the world's literature. He was not only the favorite of the people, but in a critical time, and a time whole canons of dramatic art were opposed to his practice, he united the suffrages of all the authoritative leader of literacy opinion. Pope's lines are conclusive as to the veneration in which Shakspere's memory was held a century after his death. "On Avon's banks, where flowers eternal blow, If I but ask, if any weed can grow; One tragic sentence if I dare deride Which Betterton's grave action dignified . . . How will our fathers rise up in a rage, And swear, all shame is lost in George's age."[7] The Shaksperian tradition is unbroken in the history of English literature and of the English theater. His plays, in one form or another, have always kept the stage even in the most degenerate condition of public taste.[8] Few handsomer tributes have been paid to Shakspere's genius than were paid in prose and verse, by the critics of our classical age, from Dryden to Johnson. "To begin then with Shakspere," says the former, in his "Essay of Dramatic Poesy," "he was the man who, of all modern and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul." And, in the prologue to his adaptation of "The Tempest," he acknowledges that "Shakspere's magic could not copied be: Within that circle none durst walk but he." "The poet of whose works I have undertaken the revision," writes Dr. Johnson, "may now begin to assume the dignity of an ancient, and claim the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration."[9] "Each change of many-colored life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."[10] Yet Dryden made many petulant, and Johnson many fatuous mistakes about Shakspere; while such minor criticasters as Thomas Rymer[11] and Mrs. Charlotte Lenox[12] uttered inanities of blasphemy about the finest touches in "Macbeth" and "Othello." For if we look closer, we notice that everyone who bore witness to Shakspere's greatness qualified his praise by an emphatic disapproval of his methods. He was a prodigious genius, but a most defective artist. He was the supremest of dramatic poets, but he did not know his business. It did not apparently occur to anyone--except, in some degree, to Johnson--that there was an absurdity in this contradiction; and that the real fault was not in Shakspere, but in the standards by which he was tried. Here are the tests which technical criticism has always been seeking to impose, and they are not confined to the classical period only. They are used by Sidney, who took the measure of the English buskin before Shakspere had begun to write; by Jonson, who measured socks with him in his own day; by Matthew Arnold, who wanted an English Academy, but in whom the academic vaccine, after so long a transmission, worked but mildly. Shakspere violated the unities; his plays were neither right comedies nor right tragedies; he had small Latin and less Greek; he wanted art and sometimes sense, committing anachronisms and Bohemian shipwrecks; wrote hastily, did not blot enough, and failed of the grand style. He was "untaught, unpractised in a barbarous age"; a wild, irregular child of nature, ignorant of the rules, unacquainted with ancient models, succeeding--when he did succeed--by happy accident and the sheer force of genius; his plays were "roughdrawn," his plots lame, his speeches bombastic; he was guilty on every page of "some solecism or some notorious flaw in sense."[13] Langbaine, to be sure, defends him against Dryden's censure. But Dennis regrets his ignorance of poetic art and the disadvantages under which he lay from not being conversant with the ancients. If he had known his Sallust, he would have drawn a juster picture of Caesar; and if he had read Horace "Ad Pisones," he would have made a better Achilles. He complains that he makes the good and the bad perish promiscuously; and that in "Coriolanus"--a play which Dennis "improved" for the new stage--he represents Menenius as a buffoon and introduces the rabble in a most undignified fashion.[14] Gildon, again, says that Shakspere must have read Sidney's "Defence of Posey" and therefore, ought to have known the rules and that his neglect of them was owing to laziness. "Money seems to have been his aim more than reputation, and therefore he was always in a hurry . . . and he thought it time thrown away, to study regularity and order, when any confused stuff that came into his head would do his business and fill his house."[15] It would be easy, but it would be tedious, to multiply proofs of this patronizing attitude toward Shakspere. Perhaps Pope voices the general sentiment of his school, as fairly as anyone, in the last words of his preface.[16] "I will conclude by saying of Shakspere that, with all his faults and with all the irregularity of his _drama_, one may look upon his works, in comparison of those that are more finished and regular, as upon an ancient, majestic piece of Gothic architecture compared with a neat, modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and solemn. . . It has much the greater variety, and much the nobler apartments, though we are often conducted to them by dark, odd and uncouth passages. Nor does the whole fail to strike us with greater reverence, though many of the parts are childish, ill-placed and unequal to its grandeur." This view of Shakspere continued to be the rule until Coleridge and Schlegel taught the new century that this child of fancy was, in reality, a profound and subtle artist, but that the principles of his art--as is always the case with creative genius working freely and instinctively--were learned by practice, in the concrete, instead of being consciously thrown out by the workman himself into an abstract _theoria_; so that they have to be discovered by a reverent study of his work and lie deeper than the rules of French criticism. Schlegel, whose lectures on dramatic art were translated into English in 1815, speaks with indignation of the current English misunderstanding of Shakspere. "That foreigners, and Frenchmen in particular, who frequently speak in the strangest language about antiquity and the Middle Age, as if cannibalism had been first put an end in Europe by Louis XIV., should entertain this opinion of Shakspere might be pardonable. But that Englishmen should adopt such a calumniation . . . is to me incomprehensible."[17] The beginnings of the romantic movement in England were uncertain. There was a vague dissent from current literary estimates, a vague discontent with reigning literary modes, especially with the merely intellectual poetry then in vogue, which did not feed the soul. But there was, at first, no conscious, concerted effort toward something of creative activity. The new group of poets, partly contemporaries of Pope, partly successors to him--Thomson, Shenstone, Dyer, Akenside, Gray, Collins, and the Warton brothers--found their point of departure in the loving study and revival of old authors. From what has been said of the survival of Shakspere's influence it might be expected that his would have been the name paramount among the pioneers of English romanticism. There are several reasons why this was not the case. In the first place, the genius of the new poets was lyrical or descriptive, rather than dramatic. The divorce between literature and the stage had not yet, indeed, become total; and, in obedience to the expectation that every man of letters should try his hand at play-writing, Thomson, at least, as well as his friend and disciple Mallet, composed a number of dramas. But these were little better than failures even at the time; and while "The Seasons" has outlived all changes of taste, and "The Castle of Indolence" has never wanted admirers, tragedies like "Agamemnon" and "Sophonisba" have been long forgotten. An imitation of Shakspere to any effective purpose must obviously have take the shape of a play; and neither Gray nor Collins nor Akenside, nor any of the group, was capable of a play. Inspiration of a kind, these early romanticists did draw from Shakspere. Verbal reminiscences of him abound in Gray. Collins was a diligent student of his works. His "Dirge in Cymbeline" is an exquisite variation on a Shaksperian theme. In the delirium of his last sickness, he told Warton that he had found in an Italian novel the long-sought original of the plot of "The Tempest." It is noteworthy, by the way, that the romanticists were attracted to the poetic, as distinguished from the dramatic, aspect of Shakspere's genius; to those of his plays in which fairy lore and supernatural machinery occur, such as "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Again, the stage has a history of its own, and, in so far as it was now making progress of any kind, it was not in the direction of a more poetic or romantic drama, but rather toward prose tragedy and the sentimental comedy of domestic life, what the French call _la tragédie bourgeoise_ and _la comédie larmoyante_. In truth the theater was now dying; and though, in the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan, it sent up one bright, expiring gleam, the really dramatic talent of the century had already sought other channels in the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. After all, a good enough reason why the romantic movement did not begin with imitation of Shakspere is the fact that Shakspere is inimitable. He has no one manner that can be caught, but a hundred manners; is not the poet of romance, but of humanity; nor medieval, but perpetually modern and contemporaneous in his universality. The very familiarity of his plays, and their continuous performance, although in mangled forms, was a reason why they could take little part in a literary revival; for what has never been forgotten cannot be revived. To Germany and France, at a later date, Shakspere came with the shock of a discovery and begot Schiller and Victor Hugo. In the England of the eighteenth century he begot only Ireland's forgeries. The name inscribed in large letters on the standard of the new school was not Shakspere but Spenser. If there is any poet who is _par excellence_ the poet of romance, whose art is the antithesis of Pope's, it is the poet of the "Faërie Queene." To ears that had heard from childhood the tinkle of the couplet, with its monotonously recurring rhyme, its inevitable caesura, its narrow imprisonment of the sense, it must have been a relief to turn to the amplitude of Spencer's stanza, "the full strong sail of his great verse." To a generation surfeited with Pope's rhetorical devices--antithesis, climax, anticlimax--and fatigued with the unrelaxing brilliancy and compression of his language; the escape from epigrams and point (snap after snap, like a pack of fire-crackers), from a style which has made his every other line a proverb or current quotation--the escape from all this into Spenser's serene, leisurely manner, copious Homeric similes, and lingering detail must have seemed most restful. To go from Pope to Spenser was to exchange platitudes, packed away with great verbal cunning in neat formulas readily portable by the memory, for a wealth of concrete images: to exchange saws like, "A little learning is a dangerous thing," for a succession of richly colored pictures by the greatest painter among English poets. It was to exchange the most prosaic of our poets--a poet about whom question has arisen whether he is a poet at all--for the most purely poetic of our poets, "the poet's poet." And finally, it was to exchange the world of everyday manners and artificial society for an imaginary kingdom of enchantment, "out of space, out of time." English poetry has oscillated between the poles of Spenser and Pope. The poets who have been accepted by the race as most truly national, poets like Shakspere, Milton, and Byron, have stood midway. Neither Spenser nor Pope satisfies long. We weary, in time, of the absence of passion and intensity in Spenser, his lack of dramatic power, the want of actuality in his picture of life, the want of brief energy and nerve in his style; just as we weary of Pope's inadequate sense of beauty. But at a time when English poetry had abandoned its true function--the refreshment and elevation of the soul through the imagination--Spenser's poetry, the poetry of ideal beauty, formed the most natural corrective. Whatever its deficiencies, it was not, at any rate, "conceived and composed in his wits." Spenser had not fared so well as Shakspere under the change which came over public taste after the Restoration. The age of Elizabeth had no literary reviews or book notices, and its critical remains are of the scantiest. But the complimentary verses by many hands published with the "Faërie Queene" and the numerous references to Spenser in the whole poetic literature of the time, leave no doubt as to the fact that his contemporaries accorded him the foremost place among English poets. The tradition of his supremacy lasted certainly to the middle of the seventeenth century, if not beyond. His influence is visible not only in the work of professed disciples like Giles and Phineas Fletcher, the pastoral poet William Browne, and Henry More, the Cambridge Platonist, but in the verse of Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, and many others. Milton confessed to Dryden that Spenser was his "poetical father." Dryden himself and Cowley, whose practice is so remote from Spenser's, acknowledged their debt to him. The passage from Cowley's essay "On Myself" is familiar: "I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never read any book but of devotion--but there was wont to lie) Spenser's works. This I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there (thought my understanding had little to do with all this), and, by degrees, with the tinkling of the rime and dance of the numbers; so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably as a child is made an eunuch." It is a commonplace that Spenser has made more poets than any other one writer. Even Pope, whose empire he came back from Fairyland to overthrow, assured Spence that he had read the "Faërie Queene" with delight when he was a boy, and re-read it with equal pleasure in his last years. Indeed, it is too readily assumed that writers are insensible to the beauties of an opposite school. Pope was quite incapable of appreciating it. He took a great liking to Allan Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd"; he admired "The Seasons," and did Thomson the honor to insert a few lines of his own in "Summer." Among his youthful parodies of old English poets is one piece entitled "The Alley," a not over clever burlesque of the famous description of the Bower of Bliss.[18] As for Dryden, his reverence for Spenser is qualified by the same sort of critical disapprobation which we noticed in his eulogies of Shakspere. He says that the "Faërie Queene" has no uniformity: the language is not so obsolete as is commonly supposed, and is intelligible after some practice; but the choice of stanza is unfortunate, though in spite of it, Spenser's verse is more melodious than any other English poet's except Mr. Waller's.[19] Ambrose Philips--Namby Pamby Philips--whom Thackeray calls "a dreary idyllic cockney," appealed to "The Shepherd's Calendar" as his model, in the introduction to his insipid "Pastorals," 1709. Steele, in No. 540 of the _Spectator_ (November 19, 1712), printed some mildly commendatory remarks about Spenser. Altogether it is clear that Spenser's greatness was accepted, rather upon trust, throughout the classical period, but that this belief was coupled with a general indifference to his writings. Addison's lines in his "Epistle to Sacheverel; an Account of the Greatest English Poets," 1694, probably represent accurately enough the opinion of the majority of readers: "Old Spenser next, warmed with poetic rage, In ancient tales amused a barbarous age; An age that, yet uncultivated and rude, Wher'er the poet's fancy led, pursued, Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods, To dens of dragons and enchanted woods. But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, Can charm an understanding age no more. The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, While the dull moral lies too plain below, We view well pleased at distance all the sights Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields and fights, And damsels in distress and courteous knights, But when we look too near, the shades decay And all the pleasing landscape fades away." Addison acknowledged to Spence that, when he wrote this passage, he had never read Spenser! As late as 1754 Thomas Warton speaks of him as "this admired but neglected poet,"[20] and Mr. Kitchin asserts that "between 1650 and 1750 there are but few notices of him, and a very few editions of his works."[21] There was a reprint of Spenser's works--being the third folio of the "Faërie Queene"--in 1679, but no critical edition till 1715. Meanwhile the title of a book issued in 1687 shows that Spenser did not escape that process of "improvement" which we have seen applied to Shakspere: "Spenser Redivivus; containing the First Book of the 'Faëry Queene.' His Essential Design Preserved, but his Obsolete Language and Manner of Verse totally laid aside. Delivered in Heroic Numbers by a Person of Quality." The preface praises Spenser, but declares that "his style seems no less unintelligible at this day than the obsoletest of our English or Saxon dialect." One instance of this deliverance into heroic numbers must suffice: "By this the northern wagoner had set His sevenfold team behind the steadfast star That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firm is fixed, and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are." --_Spenser_.[22] In 1715 John Hughes published his edition of Spenser's works in six volumes. This was the first attempt at a critical text of the poet, and was accompanied with a biography, a glossary, an essay on allegorical poetry, and some remarks on the "Faërie Queene." It is curious to find in the engravings, from designs by Du Guernier, which illustrate Hughes' volumes, that Spenser's knights wore the helmets and body armor of the Roman legionaries, over which is occasionally thrown something that looks very much like a toga. The lists in which they run a tilt have the façade of a Greek temple for a background. The house of Busyrane is Louis Quatorze architecture, and Amoret is chained to a renaissance column with Corinthian capital and classical draperies. Hughes' glossary of obsolete terms includes words which are in daily use by modern writers: aghast, baleful, behest, bootless, carol, craven, dreary, forlorn, foray, guerdon, plight, welkin, yore. If words like these, and like many which Warton annotates in his "Observations," really needed explanation, it is a striking proof, not only of the degree in which our older poets had been forgotten, but also of the poverty to which the vocabulary of English poetry had been reduced by 1700. In his prefatory remarks to the "Faërie Queene," the editor expresses the customary regrets that the poet should have chosen so defective a stanza, "so romantick a story," and a model, or framework for the whole, which appears so monstrous when "examined by the rules of epick poetry"; makes the hackneyed comparison between Spenser's work and Gothic architecture, and apologizes for his author, on the ground that, at the time when he wrote, "the remains of the old Gothick chivalry were not quite abolished." "He did not much revive the curiosity of the public," says Johnson, in his life of Hughes; "for near thirty years elapsed before his edition was reprinted." Editions of the "Faërie Queene" came thick and fast about the middle of the century. One (by Birch) was issued in 1751, and three in 1758; including the important edition by Upton, who, of all Spenser's commentators, has entered most elaborately into the interpretation of the allegory. In the interval had appeared, in gradually increasing numbers, that series of Spenserian imitations which forms an interesting department of eighteenth-century verse. The series was begun by a most unlikely person, Matthew Prior, whose "Ode to the Queen," 1706, was in a ten-lined modification of Spenser's stanza and employed a few archaisms like _weet_ and _ween_, but was very unspenserian in manner. As early as the second decade of the century, the horns of Elfland may be heard faintly blowing in the poems of the Rev. Samuel Croxall, the translator of Aesop's "Fables." Mr. Gosse[23] quotes Croxall's own description of his poetry, as designed "to set off the dry and insipid stuff" of the age with "a whole piece of rich and glowing scarlet." His two pieces "The Vision," 1715, and "The Fair Circassian," 1720, though written in the couplet, exhibit a rosiness of color and a luxuriance of imagery manifestly learned from Spenser. In 1713 he had published under the pseudonym of Nestor Ironside, "An Original Canto of Spenser," and in 1714 "Another Original Canto," both, of course, in the stanza of the "Faërie Queene." The example thus set was followed before the end of the century by scores of poets, including many well-known names, like Akenside, Thomson, Shenstone, and Thomas Warton, as well as many second-rate and third-rate versifiers.[24] It is noteworthy that many, if not most, of the imitations were at first undertaken in a spirit of burlesque; as is plain not only from the poems themselves, but from the correspondence of Shenstone and others.[25] The antiquated speech of an old author is in itself a challenge to the parodist: _teste_ our modern ballad imitations. There is something ludicrous about the very look of antique spelling, and in the sound of words like _eftsoones_ and _perdy_; while the sign _Ye Olde Booke Store_, in Old English text over a bookseller's door, strikes the public invariably as a most merry conceited jest; especially if the first letter be pronounced as a _y_, instead of, what it really is, a mere abbreviation of _th_. But in order that this may be so, the language travestied should not be too old. There would be nothing amusing, for example, in a burlesque imitation of Beowulf, because the Anglo-Saxon of the original is utterly strange to the modern reader. It is conceivable that quick-witted Athenians of the time of Aristophanes might find something quaint in Homer's Ionic dialect, akin to that quaintness which we find in Chaucer; but a Grecian of to-day would need to be very Attic indeed, to detect any provocation to mirth in the use of the genitive in-oio, in place of the genitive in-ou. Again, as one becomes familiar with an old author, he ceases to be conscious of his archaism: the final _e_ in Chaucer no longer strikes him as funny, nor even the circumstance that he speaks of little birds as _smalë fowlës_. And so it happened, that poets in the eighteenth century who began with burlesque imitation of the "Faërie Queen" soon fell in love with its serious beauties. The only poems in this series that have gained permanent footing in the literature are Shenstone's "Schoolmistress" and Thomson's "Cast of Indolence." But a brief review of several other members of the group will be advisable. Two of them were written at Oxford in honor of the marriage of Frederick, Prince of Wales in 1736: one by Richard Owen Cambridge;[26] the other by William Thompson, then bachelor of arts and afterward fellow of Queen's College. Prince Fred, it will be remembered, was a somewhat flamboyant figure in the literary and personal gossip of his day. He quarreled with his father, George II, who "hated boetry and bainting," and who was ironically fed with soft dedication by Pope in his "Epistle to Augustus"; also with his father's prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, "Bob, the poet's foe." He left the court in dudgeon and set up an opposition court of his own where he rallied about him men of letters, who had fallen into a neglect that contrasted strangely with their former importance in the reign of Queen Anne. Frederick's chief ally in this policy was his secretary, George Lord Lyttelton, the elegant if somewhat amateurish author of "Dialogues of the Dead" and other works; the friend of Fielding, the neighbor of Shenstone at Hagley, and the patron of Thomson, for whom he obtained the sinecure post of Surveyor of the Leeward Islands. Cambridge's spousal verses were in a ten-lined stanza. His "Archimage," written in the strict Spenserian stanza, illustrates the frequent employment of this form in occasional pieces of a humorous intention. It describes a domestic boating party on the Thames, one of the oarsmen being a family servant and barber-surgeon, who used to dress the chaplain's hair: "Als would the blood of ancient beadsman spill, Whose hairy scalps he hanged in a row Around his cave, sad sight to Christian eyes, I trow." Thompson's experiments, on the contrary, were quite serious. He had genuine poetic feeling, but little talent. In trying to reproduce Spenser's richness of imagery and the soft modulation of his verse, he succeeds only in becoming tediously ornate. His stanzas are nerveless, though not unmusical. His college exercise, "The Nativity," 1736, is a Christmas vision which comes to the shepherd boy Thomalin, as he is piping on the banks of Isis. It employs the pastoral machinery, includes a masque of virtues,--Faith, Hope, Mercy, etc.,--and closes with a compliment to Pope's "Messiah." The preface to his "Hymn to May," has some bearing upon our inquiries: "As Spenser is the most descriptive and florid of all our English writers, I attempted to imitate his manner in the following vernal poem. I have been very sparing of the antiquated words which are too frequent in most of the imitations of this author. . . His lines are most musically sweet, and his descriptions most delicately abundant, even to a wantonness of painting, but still it is the music and painting of nature. We find no ambitious ornaments or epigrammatical turns in his writings, but a beautiful simplicity which pleases far above the glitter of pointed wit." The "Hymn to May" is in the seven-lined stanza of Phineas Fletcher's "Purple Island"; a poem, says Thompson, "scarce heard of in this age, yet the best in the allegorical way (next to 'The Fairy Queen') in the English language." William Wilkie, a Scotch minister and professor, of eccentric habits and untidy appearance, published, in 1759, "A Dream: in the Manner of Spenser," which may be mentioned here not for its own sake, but for the evidence that it affords of a growing impatience of classical restraints. The piece was a pendant to Wilkie's epic, the "Epigoniad." Walking by the Tweed, the poet falls asleep and has a vision of Homer, who reproaches him with the bareness of style in his "Epigoniad." The dreamer puts the blame upon the critics, "Who tie the muses to such rigid laws That all their songs are frivolous and poor." Shakspere, indeed, "Broke all the cobweb limits fixed by fools"; but the only reward of his boldness "Is that our dull, degenerate age of lead Says that he wrote by chance, and that he scare could read." One of the earlier Spenserians was Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar, who published, in 1739, "On the Abuse of Travelling: A Canto in Imitation of Spenser."[27] Another imitation, "Education," appeared in 1751. West was a very tame poet, and the only quality of Spenser's which he succeeded in catching was his prolixity. He used the allegorical machinery of the "Faërie Queene" for moral and mildly satirical ends. Thus, in "The Abuse of Traveling," the Red Cross Knight is induced by Archimago to embark in a painted boat steered by Curiosity, which wafts him over to a foreign shore where he is entertained by a bevy of light damsels whose leader "hight Politessa," and whose blandishments the knight resists. Thence he is conducted to a stately castle (the court of Louis XV. whose minister--perhaps Cardinal Fleury?--is "an old and rankled mage"); and finally to Rome, where a lady yclept Vertù holds court in the ruins of the Colosseum, among mimes, fiddlers, pipers, eunuchs, painters, and _ciceroni_. Similarly the canto on "Education" narrates how a fairy knight, while conducting his young son to the house of Paidia, encounters the giant Custom and worsts him in single combat. There is some humor in the description of the stream of science into which the crowd of infant learners are unwillingly plunged, and upon whose margin stands "A _birchen_ grove that, waving from the shore, Aye cast upon the tide its falling bud And with its bitter juice empoisoned all the flood." The piece is a tedious arraignment of the pedantic methods of instruction in English schools and colleges. A passage satirizing the artificial style of gardening will be cited later. West had a country-house at Wickham, in Kent, where, says Johnson,[28] "he was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt; who, when they were weary of faction and debates, used at Wickham to find books and quiet, a decent table and literary conversation. There is at Wickham, a walk made by Pitt." Like many contemporary poets, West interested himself in landscape gardening, and some of his shorter pieces belong to that literature of inscriptions to which Lyttelton, Akenside, Shenstone, Mason, and others contributed so profusely. It may be said for his Spenserian imitations that their archaisms are unusually correct[29]--if that be any praise--a feature which perhaps recommended them to Gray, whose scholarship in this, as in all points, was nicely accurate. The obligation to be properly "obsolete" in vocabulary was one that rested heavily on the consciences of most of these Spenserian imitators. "The Squire of Dames," for instance, by the wealthy Jew, Moses Mendez, fairly bristles with seld-seen costly words, like _benty_, _frannion_, etc., which it would have puzzled Spenser himself to explain. One of the pleasantest outcomes of this literary fashion was William Shenstone's "Schoolmistress," published in an unfinished shape in 1737 and, as finally completed, in 1742. This is an affectionate half-humorous description of the little dame-school of Shenstone's--and of everybody's--native village, and has the true idyllic touch. Goldsmith evidently had it in memory when he drew the picture of the school in his "Deserted Village."[30] The application to so humble a theme of Spenser's stately verse and grave, ancient words gives a very quaint effect. The humor of "The Schoolmistress" is genuine, not dependent on the more burlesque, as in Pope's and Cambridge's experiments; and it is warmed with a certain tenderness, as in the incident of the hen with her brood of chickens, entering the open door of the schoolhouse in search of crumbs, and of the grief of the little sister who witnesses her brother's flogging, and of the tremors of the urchins who have been playing in the dame's absence: "Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold, 'Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold." But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson. It is the privilege of genius to be original even in its imitations. Thomson took shape and hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a value quite independent of its success as a reproduction. "The Castle of Indolence," 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in plot. There is a magic art in the description of the "land of drowsy-head," with its "listless climate" always "atween June and May,"[32] its "stockdove's plaint amid the forest deep," its hillside woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its murmur of the distance main. The nucleus of Thomson's conception is to be found in Spenser's House of Morpheus ("Faërie Queene," book i. canto i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of Tennyson's Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the poetry of the eighteenth century: "Was nought around but images of rest: Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between; And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest, From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green, Where never yet was creeping creatures seen. "Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played And hurlëd everywhere their waters sheen; That, as they bickered through the sunny glade, Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made." "The Castle of Indolence" had the romantic iridescence, the "atmosphere" which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse. That is to say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words. The secret of this art the poet himself cannot communicate. But poetry of this kind cannot be translated into prose--as Pope's can--any more than music can be translated into speech, without losing its essential character. Like Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely pictorial. But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not higher in kind, than anything in Spenser. The fairyland of Spenser is an unreal, but hardly an unearthly region. He seldom startles by glimpses behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in Milton's "Airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of "The Castle of Indolence:" "As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles, Placed far amid the melancholy main (Whether it be lone fancy him beguiles, Or that aerial beings sometimes deign To stand embodied to our sense plain), The whilst in ocean Phoebus dips his wain, A vast assembly moving to and fro, Then all at once in air dissolves the wondrous show." It may be guessed that Johnson and Boswell, in their tour to the Hebrides or Western Islands, saw nothing of the "spectral puppet play" hinted at in this passage--the most imaginative in any of Spenser's school till we get to Keats' "Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn." William Julius Mickle, the translator of the "Lusiad," was a more considerable poet than any of the Spenserian imitators thus far reviewed, with the exception of Thomson and the possible exception of Shenstone. He wrote at least two poems that are likely to be remembered. One of these was the ballad of "Cumnor Hall" which suggested Scott's "Kenilworth," and came near giving its name to the novel. The other was the dialect song of "The Mariner's Wife," which Burns admired so greatly: "Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, His breath like caller air, His very foot has music in't, As he comes up the stair, For there's nae luck about the house, There is nae luck at a', There's little pleasure in the house When our gudeman's awa',"[33] Mickle, like Thomson, was a Scotchman who came to London to push his literary fortunes. He received some encouragement from Lyttelton, but was disappointed in his hopes of any substantial aid from the British Maecenas. His biographer informs us that "about his thirteenth year, on Spenser's 'Faërie Queene' falling accidentally in his way, he was immediately struck with the picturesque descriptions of that much admired ancient bard and powerfully incited to imitate his style and manner."[34] In 1767 Mickle published "The Concubine," a Spenserian poem in two cantos. In the preface to his second edition, 1778, in which the title was changed to "Syr Martyn," he said that: "The fullness and wantonness of description, the quaint simplicity, and, above all, the ludicrous, of which the antique phraseology and manner of Spenser are so happily and peculiarly susceptible, inclined him to esteem it not solely as the best, but the only mode of composition adapted to his subject." "Syr Martyn" is a narrative poem not devoid of animation, especially where the author forgets his Spenser. But in the second canto he feels compelled to introduce an absurd allegory, in which the nymph Dissipation and her henchman Self-Imposition conduct the hero to the cave of Discontent. This is how Mickle writes when he is thinking of the "Faërie Queene": "Eke should he, freed from fous enchanter's spell, Escape his false Duessa's magic charms, And folly quaid, yclept an hydra fell Receive a beauteous lady to his arms; While bards and minstrels chaunt the soft alarms Of gentle love, unlike his former thrall: Eke should I sing, in courtly cunning terms, The gallant feast, served up by seneschal, To knights and ladies gent in painted bower or hall." And this is how he writes when he drops his pattern: "Awake, ye west winds, through the lonely dale, And, Fancy, to thy faerie bower betake! Even now, with balmy freshness, breathes the gale, Dimpling with downy wing the stilly lake; Through the pale willows faltering whispers wake, And evening comes with locks bedropt with dew; On Desmond's moldering turrets slowly shake The trembling rye-grass and the harebell blue, And ever and anon fair Mulla's plaints renew." A reader would be guilty of no very bad guess who should assign this stanza--which Scott greatly admired--to one of he Spenserian passages that prelude the "Lady of the Lake." But it is needless to extend this catalogue any farther. By the middle of the century Spenserian had become so much the fashion as to provoke a rebuke from Dr. Johnson, who prowled up and down before the temple of the British Muses like a sort of classical watch-dog. "The imitation of Spenser," said the _Rambler_ of May 14, 1751, "by the influence of some men of learning and genius, seems likely to gain upon the age. . . To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach, for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was, in his own words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use that Jonson boldly pronounces him _to have written no language_. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing: tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length. . . Life is surely given us for other purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten."[35] In his "Life of West," Johnson says of West's imitations of Spenser, "Such compositions are not to be reckoned among the great achievements of intellect, because their effect is local and temporary: they appeal not to reason or passion, but to memory, and presuppose an accidental or artificial state of mind. An imitation of Spenser is nothing to a reader, however acute, by whom Spenser has never been perused." The critic is partly right. The nice points of a parody are lost upon a reader unacquainted with the thing parodied. And as for serious imitations, the more cleverly a copyist follows his copy, the less value his work will have. The eighteenth-century Spenserians, like West, Cambridge, and Lloyd, who stuck most closely to their pattern, oblivion has covered. Their real service was done in reviving a taste for a better kind of poetry than the kind in vogue, and particularly in restoring to English verse a stanza form, which became so noble an instrument in the hands of later poets, who used it with as much freedom and vigor as if they had never seen the "Faërie Queene." One is seldom reminded of Spenser while reading "Childe Harold"[36] or "Adonais" or "The Eve of Saint Agnes"; but in reading West or Cambridge, or even in reading Shenstone and Thomson, one is reminded of him at every turn. Yet if it was necessary to imitate anyone, it might be answered to Dr. Johnson that it was better to imitate Spenser than Pope. In the imitation of Spenser lay, at least, a future, a development; while the imitation of Pope was conducting steadily toward Darwin's "Botanic Garden." It remains to notice one more document in the history of this Spenserian revival, Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queen," 1754. Warton wrote with a genuine delight in his subject. His tastes were frankly romantic. But the apologetic air which antiquarian scholars assumed, when venturing to recommend their favorite studies to the attention of a classically minded public, is not absent from Warton's commentary. He writes as if he felt the pressure of an unsympathetic atmosphere all about him. "We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to try every composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. Critical taste is universally diffused, and we require the same order and design which every modern performance is expected to have, in poems where they never were regarded or intended. . . If there be any poem whose graces please because they are situated beyond the reach of art[37] . . . it is this. In reading Spenser, if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." "In analyzing the plan and conduct of this poem, I have so far tried it by epic rules, as to demonstrate the inconveniences and incongruities which the poet might have avoided, had he been more studious of design and uniformity. It is true that his romantic materials claim great liberties; but no materials exclude order and perspicacity." Warton assures the reader that Spenser's language is not "so difficult and obsolete as it is generally supposed to be;" and defends him against Hume's censure,[38] that "Homer copied true natural manners . . . but the pencil of the English poet was employed in drawing the affectations and conceits and fopperies of chivalry." Yet he began his commentary with the stock denunciations of "Gothic ignorance and barbarity." "At the renaissance it might have been expected that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical composition . . . a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded. . . But it was a long time before such a change was effected. We find Ariosto, many years after the revival of letters, rejecting truth for magic, and preferring the ridiculous and incoherent excursions of Boiardo to the propriety and uniformity of the Grecian and Roman models. Nor did the restoration of ancient learning produce any effectual or immediate improvement in the state of criticism. Beni, one of the most celebrated critics of the sixteenth century, was still so infatuated with a fondness for the old Provençal vein, that he ventured to write a regular dissertation, in which he compares Ariosto with Homer." Warton says again, of Ariosto and the Italian renaissance poets whom Spenser followed, "I have found no fault in general with their use of magical machinery; notwithstanding I have so far conformed to the reigning maxims of modern criticism as to recommend classical propriety." Notwithstanding this prudent determination to conform, the author takes heart in his second volume to speak out as follows about the pseudo-classic poetry of his own age: "A poetry succeeded in which imagination gave way to correctness, sublimity of description to delicacy of sentiment, and majestic imagery to conceit and epigram. Poets began now to be more attentive to words than to things and objects. The nicer beauties of happy expression were preferred to the daring strokes of great conception. Satire, that bane of the sublime, was imported from France. The muses were debauched at court; and polite life and familiar manners became their only themes." By the time these words were written Spenser had done his work. Color, music, fragrance were stealing back again into English song, and "golden-tongued romance with serene lute" stood at the door of the new age, waiting for it to open. [1] A small portion of "The Canterbury Tales." Edited by Morell. [2] The sixteenth [_sic. Quaere_, seventeenth?] century had an instinctive repugnance for the crude literature of the Middle Ages, the product of so strange and incoherent a civilization. Here classicism finds nothing but grossness and barbarism, never suspecting that it might contain germs, which, with time and genius, might develop into a poetical growth, doubtless less pure, but certainly more complex in its harmonies, and of a more expressive form of beauty. The history of our ancient poetry, traced in a few lines by Boileau, clearly shows to what degree he either ignored or misrepresented it. The singular, confused architecture of Gothic cathedrals gave those who saw beauty in symmetry of line and purity of form but further evidence of the clumsiness and perverted taste of our ancestors. All remembrances of the great poetic works of the Middle Ages is completely effaced. No one supposes in those barbarous times the existence of ages classical also in their way; no one imagines either their heroic songs or romances of adventure, either the rich bounty of lyrical styles or the naïve, touching crudity of the Christian drama. The seventeenth century turned disdainfully away from the monuments of national genius discovered by it; finding them sometimes shocking in their rudeness, sometimes puerile in their refinements. These unfortunate exhumations, indeed, only serve to strengthen its cult for a simple, correct beauty, the models of which are found in Greece and Rome. Why dream of penetrating the darkness of our origin? Contemporary society is far too self-satisfied to seek distraction in the study of a past which it does not comprehend. The subjects and heroes of domestic history are also prohibited. Corneille is Latin, Racine is Greek; the very name of Childebrande suffices to cover an epopee with ridicule.--_Pellissier_, pp. 7-8. [3] "Epistle to Augustus." [4] "Epistle of Augustus." [5] _I.e._, learning. [6] "Life of Dryden." [7] "Epistle to Augustus." [8] The tradition as to Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton is almost equally continuous. A course of what Lowell calls "penitential reading," in Restoration criticism, will convince anyone that these four names already stood out distinctly, as those of the four greatest English poets. See especially Winstanley, "Lives of the English Poets," 1687; Langbaine, "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets," 1691; Dennis, "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712; Gildon, "The Complete Art of Poetry," 1718. The fact mentioned by Macaulay, that Sir Wm. Temple's "Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning" names none of the four, is without importance. Temple refers by name to only three English "wits," Sidney, Bacon, and Selden. This very superficial performance of Temple's was a contribution to the futile controversy over the relative merits of the ancients and moderns, which is now only of interest as having given occasion to Bentley to display his great scholarship in his "Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris," (1698), and to Swift to show his powers of irony in "The Battle of the Books" (1704). [9] Preface to the "Plays of Shakspere," 1765. [10] Prologue, spoken by Garrick at the opening of Drury Lane Theater, 1747. [11] "The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined," 1678. [12] "Shakspere Illustrated," 1753. [13] See Dryden's "Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy" and "Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada." [14] "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakspere," 1712. [15] "The Art of Poetry," pp. 63 and 99. _Cf_. Pope, "Epistle to Augustus": "Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, And grew immortal in his own despite." [16] Pope's "Shakspere," 1725. [17] For a fuller discussion of this subject, consult "A History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere," in the supplemental volume of Knight's Pictorial Edition. Editions of Shakspere issued within a century following the Restoration were the third Folio, 1664; the fourth Folio, 1685; Rowe's (the first critical edition, with a Life, etc.) 1709 (second edition, 1714); Pope's, 1725 (second edition, 1728); Theobald's, 1733; Hanmer's 1744; Warburton-Pope's, 1747; and Johnson's 1765. Meanwhile, though Shakspere's plays continued to be acted, it was mostly in doctored versions. Tate changed "Lear" to a comedy. Davenant and Dryden made over "The Tempest" into "The Enchanted Island," turning blank verse into rhyme and introducing new characters, while Shadwell altered it into an opera. Dryden rewrote "Troilus and Cressida"; Davenant, "Macbeth." Davenant patched together a thing which he called "The Law against Lovers," from "Measure for Measure" and "Much Ado about Nothing." Dennis remodeled the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as "The Comical Gallant"; Tate, "Richard II." as "The Sicilian Usurper"; and Otway, "Romeo and Juliet," as "Caius Marius." Lord Lansdowne converted "The Merchant of Venice" into "The Jew of Venice," wherein Shylock was played as a comic character down to the time of Macklin and Kean. Durfey tinkered "Cymbeline." Cibber metamorphosed "King John" into "Papal Tyranny," and his version was acted till Macready's time. Cibber's stage version of "Richard III." is played still. Cumberland "engrafted" new features upon "Timon of Athens" for Garrick's theater, about 1775. In his life of Mrs. Siddons, Campbell says that "Coriolanus" "was never acted genuinely from the year 1660 till the year 1820" (Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I. p. 315). He mentions a revision by Tate, another by Dennis ("The Invader of his Country"), and a third brought out by the elder Sheridan in 1764, at Covent Garden, and put together from Shakspere's tragedy and an independent play of the same name by Thomson. "Then in 1789 came the Kemble edition in which . . . much of Thomson's absurdity is still preserved." [18] "Faërie Queene," II. xii. 71 [19] "Essay on Satire." Philips says a good word for the Spenserian stanza: "How much more stately and majestic in epic poems, especially of heroic argument, Spenser's stanza . . . is above the way either of couplet or alternation of four verses only, I am persuaded, were it revived, would soon be acknowledged."--_Theatrum Poetatarum_, Preface, pp. 3-4. [20] "Observations on the Faëry Queene," Vol. II. p. 317. [21] "The Faëry Queene," Book I., Oxford, 1869. Introduction, p. xx. [22] "Canto" ii. stanza i. "Now had Bootes' team far passed behind The northern star, when hours of night declined." --_Person of Quality_ [23] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 139. [24] For a full discussion of this subject the reader should consult Phelps' "Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement," chap. iv., "The Spenserian Revival." A partial list of Spenserian imitations is given in Todd's edition of Spenser, Vol. I. But the list in Prof. Phelps' Appendix, if not exhaustive, is certainly the most complete yet published and may be here reproduced. 1706: Prior: "Ode to the Queen." 1713-21: Prior(?): "Colin's Mistakes." 1713 Croxall: "An Original Canto of Spenser." 1714: Croxall: "Another Original Canto." 1730 (_circa_): Whitehead: "Vision of Solomon," "Ode to the Honorable Charles Townsend," "Ode to the Same." 1736: Thompson: "Epithalamium." 1736: Cambridge: "Marriage of Frederick." 1736-37: Boyse: "The Olive," "Psalm XLII." 1737: Akenside: "The Virtuoso." 1739: West: "Abuse of Traveling." 1739: Anon.: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1740: Boyse: "Ode to the Marquis of Tavistock." 1741 (_circa_): Boyse: "Vision of Patience." 1742: Shenstone: "The Schoolmistress." 1742-50: Cambridge: "Archimage." 1742: Dodsley: "Pain and Patience." 1743: Anon.: "Albion's Triumph." 1744 (_circa_): Dodsley: "Death of Mr. Pope." 1744: Akenside: "Ode to Curio." 1746: Blacklock: "Hymn to Divine Love," "Philantheus." 1747: Mason: Stanzas in "Musaeus." 1747: Ridley: "Psyche." 1747: Lowth: "Choice of Hercules." 1747: Upton: "A New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen." 1747: Bedingfield: "Education of Achilles." 1747: Pitt: "The Jordan." 1748: T. Warton, Sr.: "Philander." 1748: Thomson: "The Castle of Indolence." 1749: Potter: "A Farewell Hymn to the Country." 1750: T. Warton: "Morning." 1751: West: "Education." 1751: T. Warton: "Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick." 1751: Mendes: "The Seasons," 1751: Lloyd: "Progress of Envy." 1751: Akenside: "Ode." 1751: Smith: "Thales." 1753: T. Warton: "A Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser." 1754: Denton: "Immortality." 1755: Arnold: "The Mirror." 1748-58: Mendez: "Squire of Dames." 1756: Smart: "Hymn to the Supreme Being." 1757: Thompson: "The Nativity," "Hymn to May." 1758: Akenside: "To Country Gentlemen of England." 1759: Wilkie: "A Dream" 1759: Poem in "Ralph's Miscellany." 1762: Denton: "House of Superstition." 1767: Mickle: "The Concubine." 1768: Downman: "Land of the Muses." 1771-74: Beattie: "The Ministrel." 1775: Anon.: "Land of Liberty." 1775: Mickle: Stanzas from "Introduction to the Lusiad." [25] See Phelps, pp. 66-68. [26] See the sumptuous edition of Cambridge's "Works," issued by his son in 1803. [27] "Mr. Walpole and I have frequently wondered you should never mention a certain imitation of Spenser, published last year by a namesake of yours, with which we are all enraptured and enmarvelled."--_Letter form Gray to Richard West_, Florence, July 16, 1740. There was no relationship between Gilbert West and Gray's Eton friend, though it seems that the former was also an Etonian, and was afterwards at Oxford, "whence he was seduced to a more airy mode of life," says Dr. Johnson, "by a commission in a troop of horse, procured him by his uncle." Cambridge, however, was an acquaintance of Gray, Walpole, and Richard West, at Eton. Gray's solitary sonnet was composed upon the death of Richard West in 1742; and it is worth noting that the introduction to Cambridge's works are a number of sonnets by his friend Thomas Edwards, himself a Spenser lover, whose "sugared sonnets among his private friends" begin about 1750 and reach the number of fifty. [28] "Life of West." [29] Lloyd, in "The Progress of Envy," defines _wimpled_ as "hung down"; and Akenside, in "The Virtuoso," employs the ending _en_ for the singular verb! [30] Cf. "And as they looked, they found their horror grew." --Shenstone. "And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew." --Goldsmith. "The noises intermixed, which thence resound, Do learning's little tenement betray." --Shenstone. "There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule." etc. --Goldsmith. [31] The poem was projected, and perhaps partly written, fourteen or fifteen years earlier. [32] _Cf_. Tennyson's "land in which it seemed always afternoon."--_The Lotus Eaters_. [33] Mickle's authorship of this song has been disputed in favor of one Jean Adams, a poor Scotch school-mistress, whose poems were printed at Glasgow in 1734. [34] Rev. John Sim's "Life of Mickle" in "Mickle's Poetical Works," 1806, p. xi. [35] _Cf._ Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 35. "It has been fashionable of late to imitate Spenser; but the likeness of most of these copies hath consisted rather in using a few of his ancient expressions than in catching his real manner. Some, however, have been executed with happiness, and with attention to that simplicity, that tenderness of sentiment and those little touches of nature that constitute Spenser's character. I have a peculiar pleasure in mentioning two of them, 'The Schoolmistress' by Mr. Shenstone, and 'The Education of Achilles' by Mr. Bedingfield. And also, Dr. Beattie's charming 'Minstrel.' To these must be added that exquisite piece of wild and romantic imagery, Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence.'" [36] Byron, to be sure, began his first canto with conscious Spenserian. He called his poem a "romaunt," and his valet, poor Fletcher, a "stanch yeomán," and peppered his stanzas thinly with _sooths_ and _wights_ and_ whiloms_, but he gave over this affectation in the later cantos and made no further excursions into the Middle Ages. [37] Pope's, "Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art." --_Essay on Criticism_. [38] "History of England," Vol. II. p. 739. CHAPTER IV. The Landscape Poets There is nothing necessarily romantic in literature that concerns itself with rural life or natural scenery. Yet we may accept, with some qualification, the truth of Professor McClintock's statement, that the "beginning and presence of a creative, romantic movement is almost always shown by the love, study, and interpretation of physical nature."[1] Why this should be true, at all events of the romantic movement that began in the eighteenth century, is obvious enough. Ruskin and Leslie Stephen have already been quoted, as witnesses to the fact that naturalism and romanticism had a common root: the desire, namely, to escape into the fresh air and into freer conditions, from a literature which dealt, in a strictly regulated way, with the indoor life of a highly artificial society. The pastoral had ceased to furnish any relief. Professing to chant the praises of innocence and simplicity, it had become itself utterly unreal and conventional, in the hands of cockneys like Philips and Pope. When the romantic spirit took possession of the poetry of nature, it manifested itself in a passion for wildness, grandeur, solitude. Of this there was as yet comparatively little even in the verse of Thomson, Shenstone, Akenside, and Dyer. Still the work of these pioneers in the "return to nature" represents the transition, and must be taken into account in any complete history of the romantic movement. The first two, as we have seen, were among the earliest Spenserians: Dyer was a landscape painter, as well as a poet; and Shenstone was one of the best of landscape gardeners. But it is the beginnings that are important. It will be needless to pursue the history of nature poetry into its later developments; needless to review the writings of Cowper and Crabbe, for example,--neither of whom was romantic in any sense,--or even of Wordsworth, the spirit of whose art, as a whole, was far from romantic. Before taking up the writers above named, one by one, it will be well to notice the general change in the forms of verse, which was an outward sign of the revolution in poetic feeling. The imitation of Spenser was only one instance of a readiness to lay aside the heroic couplet in favor of other kinds which it had displaced, and in the interests of greater variety. "During the twenty-five years," says Mr. Goss, "from the publication of Thomson's 'Spring' ['Winter'] in 1726, to that of Gray's 'Elegy' in 1751, the nine or ten leading poems or collections of verse which appeared were all of a new type; somber, as a rule, certainly stately, romantic in tone to the extreme, prepared to return, ignorantly indeed, but with respect, to what was 'Gothic' in manners, architecture, and language; all showing a more or less vague aspiration towards the nature, and not one composed in the heroic couplet hitherto so vigorously imposed on serious verse. 'The Seasons,' 'Night Thoughts' and 'The Grave' are written in blank verse: 'The Castle of Indolence' and 'The Schoolmistress' in Spenserian stanza; 'The Spleen' and 'Grongar Hill' in octosyllabics, while the early odes of Gray and those of Collins are composed in a great variety of simple but novel lyric measures."[2] The only important writer who had employed blank verse in undramatic poetry between the publication of "Paradise Regained" in 1672, and Thomson's "Winter" in 1726, was John Philips. In the brief prefatory note to "Paradise Lost," the poet of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," forgetting or disdaining the graces of his youthful muse, had spoken of rhyme as "the invention of a barbarous age," as "a thing trivial and of no true musical delight." Milton's example, of course, could not fail to give dignity and authority to the majestic rhythm that he had used; and Philips' mock-heroic "The Splendid Shilling" (1701), his occasional piece, "Blenheim" (1705), and his Georgic "Cyder" (1706), were all avowed imitation of Milton. But the well-nigh solitary character of Philips' experiments was recognized by Thomson, in his allusion to the last-named poem: "Philips, Pomona's bard, the second thou Who nobly durst, in rime-unfettered verse, With British freedom sing the British song."[3] In speaking of Philips' imitations of Milton, Johnson said that if the latter "had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to believe he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation of numbers into his work."[4] Johnson hated Adam Smith, but when Boswell mentioned that Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow University, had given the preference to rhyme over blank verse, the doctor exclaimed, "Sir, I was once in company with Smith and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him." In 1725 James Thomson, a young Scotchman, came to London to push his literary fortunes. His countryman, David Malloch,--or Mallet, as he called himself in England,--at that time private tutor in the family of the Duke of Montrose, procured Thomson introductions into titled society, and helped him to bring out "Winter," the first installment of "The Seasons," which was published in 1726. Thomson's friend and biographer (1762) the Rev. Patrick Murdoch, says that the poem was "no sooner read than universally admired; those only excepted who had not been used to feel, or to look for anything in poetry beyond a _point_ of satirical or epigrammatic wit, a smart antithesis richly trimmed with rhyme." This is a palpable hit at the stronger contrast than between Thomson and Pope, not alone in subject and feeling, but in diction and verse. Thomson's style is florid and luxuriant, his numbers flowing and diffuse, while Pope had wonted the English ear to the extreme of compression in both language and meter. Pope is among the most quotable of poets, while Thomson's long poem, in spite of its enduring popularity, has contributed but a single phrase to the stock of current quotation: "To teach the young idea how to shoot." "Winter" was followed by "Summer" in 1727, "Spring" in 1728, and the completed "Seasons" in 1730. Thomson made many changes and additions in subsequent editions. The original "Seasons" contained only 3902 lines (exclusive of the "Hymn"), while the author's final revision of 1746 gave 5413. One proof that "The Seasons" was the work of a fresh and independent genius is afforded by the many imitations to which it soon gave birth. In Germany, a passage from Brockes' translation (1745) was set to music by Haydn. J. P. Uz (1742) and Wieland each produced a "Frühling," in Thomson's manner; but the most distinguished of his German disciples was Ewald Christian von Kleist, whose "Fruhling" (1749) was a description of a country walk in spring, in 460 hexameter lines, accompanied, as in Thomson's "Hymn," with a kind of "Gloria in excelsis," to the creator of nature. "The Seasons" was translated into French by Madame Bontemps in 1759, and called forth, among other imitations, "Les Saisons" of Saint Lambert, 1769 (revised and extended in 1771.) In England, Thomson's influence naturally manifested itself less in direct imitations of the scheme of his poem than in the contagion of his manner, which pervades the work of many succeeding poets, such as Akenside, Armstrong, Dyer, Somerville and Mallet. "There was hardly one verse writer of any eminence," says Gosse,[5] "from 1725-50, who was not in some manner guided or biased by Thomson, whose genius is to this day fertile in English literature." We have grown so accustomed to a more intimate treatment and a more spiritual interpretation of nature, that we are perhaps too apt to undervalue Thomson's simple descriptive or pictorial method. Compared with Wordsworth's mysticism, with Shelley's passionate pantheism, with Byron's romantic gloom in presence of the mountains and the sea, with Keats' joyous re-creation of mythology, with Thoreau's Indian-like approach to the innermost arcana--with a dozen other moods familiar to the modern mind--it seems to us unimaginative. Thomson has been likened, as a colorist, to Rubens; and possibly the glow, the breadth, and the vital energy of his best passages, as of Rubens' great canvases, leave our finer perceptions untouched, and we ask for something more esoteric, more intense. Still there are permanent and solid qualities in Thomson's landscape art, which can give delight even now to an unspoiled taste. To a reader of his own generation, "The Seasons" must have come as the revelation of a fresh world of beauty. Such passages as those which describe the first spring showers, the thunderstorm in summer, the trout-fishing, the sheep-washing, and the terrors of the winter night, were not only strange to the public of that day, but were new in English poetry. That the poet was something of a naturalist, who wrote lovingly and with his "eye upon the object," is evident from a hundred touches, like "auriculas with shining meal"; "The yellow wall-flower stained with iron brown;" or, "The bittern knows his time, with bill engulfed, To shake the sounding marsh."[6] Thomson's scenery was genuine. His images of external nature are never false and seldom vague, like Pope's. In a letter to Lyttelton,[7] he speaks of "the Muses of the great simple country, not the little fine-lady Muses of Richmond Hill." His delineations, if less sharp and finished in detail than Cowper's, have greater breadth. Coleridge's comparison of the two poets is well known: "The love of nature seems to have led Thomson to a cheerful religion, and a gloomy religion to have led Cowper to a love of nature. . . In chastity of diction and the harmony of blank verse, Cowper leaves Thomson immeasurably below him; yet I still feel the latter to have been the born poet." The geologist Hugh Miller, who visited Lyttelton's country seat at Hagley in 1845, describes the famous landscape which Thomson had painted in "Spring": "Meantime you gain the height from whose fair brow The bursting prospect spreads immense around, And, snatched o'er hill and dale and wood and lawn, And verdant field and darkening heath between, And villages embosomed soft in trees, And spiry town, by surging columns marked Of household smoke, your eye extensive roams. . . To where the broken landscape, by degrees Ascending, roughens into rigid hills, O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, That skirt the blue horizon, dusky rise." "That entire prospect," says Miller,[8]--"one of the finest in England, and eminently characteristic of what is best in English scenery--enabled me to understand what I had used to deem a peculiarity--in some measure a defect--in the landscapes of the poet Thomson. It must have often struck the Scotch reader that, in dealing with very extended prospects, he rather enumerates than describes. His pictures are often mere catalogues, in which single words stand for classes of objects, and in which the entire poetry seems to consist in an overmastering sense of vast extent, occupied by amazing multiplicity. . . Now the prospect from the hill at Hagley furnished me with the true explanation of this enumerative style. Measured along the horizon, it must, on the lowest estimate, be at least fifty miles in longitudinal extent; measured laterally, from the spectator forwards, at least twenty. . . The real area must rather exceed than fall short of a thousand square miles: the fields into which it is laid out are small, scarcely averaging a square furlong in superficies. . . With these there are commixed innumerable cottages, manor-houses, villages, towns. Here the surface is dimpled by unreckoned hollows; there fretted by uncounted mounds; all is amazing, overpowering multiplicity--a multiplicity which neither the pen nor the pencil can adequately express; and so description, in even the hands of a master, sinks into mere enumeration. The picture becomes a catalogue." Wordsworth[9] pronounced "The Seasons" "a work of inspiration," and said that much of it was "written from himself, and nobly from himself," but complained that the style was vicious. Thomson's diction is, in truth, not always worthy of his poetic feeling and panoramic power over landscape. It is academic and often tumid and wordy, abounding in Latinisms like _effusive_, _precipitant_, _irriguous_, _horrific_, _turgent_, _amusive_. The lover who hides by the stream where his mistress is bathing--that celebrated "serio-comic bathing"--is described as "the latent Damon"; and when the poet advises against the use of worms for trout bait, he puts it thus: "But let not on your hook the tortured worm Convulsive writhe in agonizing folds," etc. The poets had now begun to withdraw from town and go out into the country, but in their retirement to the sylvan shades they were accompanied sometimes, indeed, by Milton's "mountain nymph, sweet Liberty," but quite as frequently by Shenstone's nymph, "coy Elegance," who kept reminding them of Vergil. Thomson's blank verse, although, as Coleridge says, inferior to Cowper's, is often richly musical and with an energy unborrowed of Milton--as Cowper's is too apt to be, at least in his translation of Homer.[10] Mr. Saintsbury[11] detects a mannerism in the verse of "The Seasons," which he illustrates by citing three lines with which the poet "caps the climax of three several descriptive passages, all within the compass of half a dozen pages," viz.: "And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave." "And Mecca saddens at the long delay." "And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." It would be easy to add many other instances of this type of climacteric line, _e.g. _("Summer," 859), "And Ocean trembles for his green domain." For the blank verse of "The Seasons" is a blank verse which has been passed through the strainer of the heroic couplet. Though Thomson, in the flow and continuity of his measure, offers, as has been said, the greatest contrast to Pope's system of versification; yet wherever he seeks to be nervous, his modulation reminds one more of Pope's antithetical trick than of Shakspere's or Milton's freer structure. For instance ("Spring," 1015): "Fills every sense and pants in every vein." or (_Ibid._ 1104): "Flames through the nerves and boils along the veins." To relieve the monotony of a descriptive poem, the author introduced moralizing digressions: advice to the husbandman and the shepherd after the manner of the "Georgics"; compliments to his patrons, like Lyttelton, Bubb Dodington, and the Countess of Hertford; and sentimental narrative episodes, such as the stories of Damon and Musidora,[12] and Celadon and Amelia in "Summer," and of Lavinia and Palemon[13] in "Autumn"; while ever and anon his eye extensive roamed over the phenomena of nature in foreign climes, the arctic night, the tropic summer, etc. Wordsworth asserts that these sentimental passages "are the parts of the work which were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."[14] They strike us now as insipid enough. But many coming attitudes cast their shadows before across the page of "The Seasons." Thomson's denunciation of the slave trade, and of cruelty to animals, especially the caging of birds and the coursing of hares; his preference of country to town; his rhapsodies on domestic love and the innocence of the Golden Age; his contrast between the misery of the poor and the heartless luxury of the rich; all these features of the poem foretoken the sentimentalism of Sterne and Goldsmith, and the humanitarianism of Cowper and Burns. They anticipate, in particular, that half affected itch of simplicity which titillated the sensibilities of a corrupt and artificial society in the writings of Rousseau and the idyllic pictures of Bernardin de St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." Thomson went so far in this vein as to decry the use of animal food in a passage which recalls Goldsmith's stanza:[15] "No flocks that range the valley free To slaughter I condemn: Taught by the power that pities me, I learn to pity them." This sort of thing was in the air. Pope was not a sentimental person, yet even Pope had written "The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."[16] It does not appear that Thomson was personally averse to a leg of mutton. His denunciations of luxury, and his praise of early rising[17] and cold bathing[18] sound rather hollow from the lips of a bard--"more fat than bard beseems"-who used to lie abed till noon, and who, as Savage told Johnson, "was perhaps never in cold water in his life." Johnson reports, not without some spice of malice, that the Countess of Hertford, "whose practice it was to invite every summer some poet into the country, to hear her verses and assist her studies," extended this courtesy to Thomson, "who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and therefore never received another summons."[19] The romantic note is not absent from "The Seasons," but it is not prominent. Thomson's theme was the changes of the year as they affect the English landscape, a soft, cultivated landscape of lawns, gardens, fields, orchards, sheep-walks, and forest preserves. Only now and then that attraction toward the savage, the awful, the mysterious, the primitive, which marks the romantic mood in naturalistic poetry, shows itself in touches like these. "High from the summit of a craggy cliff, Hung o'er the deep, such as amazing frowns On utmost Kilda's shore, whose lonely race Reigns the setting sun to Indian worlds."[20] "Or where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls, Boils round the naked, melancholy isles Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."[21] Compare also the description of the thunderstorm in the mountains ("Summer," 1156-68), closing with the lines: "Far seen the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze, And Thule bellows through her utmost isles." The Western Islands appear to have had a peculiar fascination for Thomson. The passages above quoted, and the stanza from "The Castle of Indolence," cited on page 94, gave Collins the clew for his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands," which contained, says Lowell, the whole romantic school in the germ. Thomason had perhaps found the embryon atom in Milton's "stormy Hebrides," in "Lycidas," whose echo is prolonged in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper"-- "Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides." Even Pope--he had a soul--was not unsensitive to this, as witness his "Loud as the wolves, on Orcas' stormy steep, Howl to the roarings of the Northern deep."[22] The melancholy which Victor Hugo pronounces a distinguishing badge of romantic art, and which we shall see gaining more and more upon English poetry as the century advanced, is also discernible in "The Seasons" in a passage like the following: "O bear me then to vast embowering shades, To twilight groves and visionary vales, To weeping grottos and prophetic glooms; Where angel-forms athwart the solemn dusk Tremendous sweep, or seem to sweep along; And voices more than human, through the void, Deep-sounding, seize the enthusiastic ear;"[23] or this, which recalls "Il Penseroso": "Now all amid the rigors of the year, In the wild depth of winter, while without The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat Between the groaning forest and the shore, Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, A rural, sheltered, solitary scene; Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit And hold high converse with the mighty dead."[24] The revival again, of the preternatural and of popular superstitions as literary material, after a rationalizing and skeptical age, is signalized by such a passage as this: "Onward they pass, o'er many a panting height, And valley sunk and unfrequented, where At fall of eve the fairy people throng, In various game and revelry to pass The summer night, as village stories tell. But far around they wander from the grave Of him whom his ungentle fortune urged Against his own sad breast to life the hand Of impious violence. The lonely tower Is also shunned, whose mournful chambers hold, So night-struck fancy dreams, the yelling ghost." It may not be uninstructive to note the occurrence of the word _romantic_ at several points in the poem: "glimmering shades and sympathetic glooms, Where the dim umbrage o'er the falling stream Romantic hangs."[25] This is from a passage in which romantic love once more comes back into poetry, after its long eclipse; and in which the lover is depicted as wandering abroad at "pensive dusk," or by moonlight, through groves and along brooksides.[26] The word is applied likewise to clouds, "rolled into romantic shapes, the dream of waking fancy"; and to the scenery of Scotland--"Caledonia in romantic view." In a subtler way, the feeling of such lines as these is romantic: "Breathe your still song into the reaper's heart, As home he goes beneath the joyous moon;" or these, of the comparative lightness of the summer night: "A faint, erroneous ray, Glanced from the imperfect surfaces of things, Flings half an image on the straining eye." In a letter to Stonehewer (June 29, 1760), Gray comments thus upon a passage from Ossian: "'Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind: _Their songs are of other worlds._' "Did you never observe (_while rocking winds are piping loud_) that pause, as the gust is re-collecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive note, like the soul of an Aeolian harp? I do assure you, there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit. Thomson had an ear sometimes; he was not deaf to this, and has described it gloriously, but given it another, different turn, and of more horror. I cannot repeat the lines: it is in his 'Winter.'" The lines that Gray had in mind were probably these (191-94): "Then, too, they say, through all the burdened air, Long groans are heard, shrill sounds and distant sighs That, uttered by the demon of the night, Warn the devoted wretch of woe and death." Thomson appears to have been a sweet-tempered, indolent man, constant in friendship and much loved by his friends. He had a little house and grounds in Kew Lane where he used to compose poetry on autumn nights and loved to listen to the nightingales in Richmond Garden; and where, sang Collins, in his ode on the poet's death (1748), "Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore, When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest." Collins had been attracted to Richmond by Thomson's residence there, and forsook the neighborhood after his friend's death. Joseph Warton, in his "Essay on Pope" (1756), testified that "The Seasons" had been "very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the beauties of nature and landscape." One evidence of this diffused taste was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening. This was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says "It is not forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there was nothing in Europe like it": he adds that "our skill in gardening and laying out grounds" is "the only taste we can call our own, the only proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure." "Neither Italy nor France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."[28] Gray's "not forty years" carries us back with sufficient precision to the date of "The Seasons" (1726-30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening. That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced by the names _Englische Garten_, _jardin Anglais_, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it manifests (_objektivirt_) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought to the purest possible expression of its ideas, _i.e._, of its own being. In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight alleys, arched walks, etc." It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch garden--as it was variously called--antedated the Augustan era, which simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in the _Spectator_ (No. 414) and Pope himself in the _Guardian_ (No. 173) ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of the Duke of Chandos. "His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suffering eye inverted nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees; With here a fountain, never to be played; And there a summer house, that knows no shade; Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers; There gladiators fight, or die in flowers; Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn, And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn." Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial smoothness, and the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots, bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships--called "topiary work" (_opus topiarium_). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr. _boulingrin_) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall, which shut the garden off from the surrounding country. "When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of Versailles, with clipped hedges, _berceaux_ and trellis work. . . The measured walk, the quincunx and the _étoile_ imposed their unsatisfying sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it, there were nine thousand pots of asters, or _la reine Marguerite_. . . At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31] Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe--the country seat of Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham--of the new. He says that mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or Wheatley, "Observations on Modern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32] entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks, Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount Irwin," 1767. Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of the past. "O how unlike the scene my fancy forms, Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene Which once was called a garden! Britain still Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid From geometric skill, they vainly strove By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears To form with verdure what the builder formed With stone. . . Hence the sidelong walls Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box, Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . . The terrace mound uplifted; the long line Deep delved of flat canal."[33] But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and "At the awful sound The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green, Broidered with crispëd knots, the tonsile yews Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more To fling its wasted crystal through the sky, But pours salubrious o'er the parchëd lawn." The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden, with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the _rococo_ beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced. We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips' "Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion" (1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744), Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem is an object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry. Especially harrowing are the author's struggles to be poetic while describing the various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures. "Ingrateful sure, When such the theme, becomes the poet's task: Yet must he try by modulation meet Of varied cadence and selected phrase Exact yet free, without inflation bold, To dignify that theme." Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the "sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the "--fell tube Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast Satanic engine!" When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum: "--the structure rude where Winter pounds, In conic pit his congelations hoar, That Summer may his tepid beverage cool With the chill luxury." This species of verbiage is the earmark of all eighteenth-century poetry and poets; not only of those who used the classic couplet, but equally of the romanticizing group who adopted blank verse. The best of them are not free from it, not even Gray, not even Collins; and it pervades Wordsworth's earliest verses, his "Descriptive Sketches" and "Evening Walk" published in 1793. But perhaps the very worst instance of it is in Dr. Armstrong's "Economy of Love," where the ludicrous contrast between the impropriety of the subject and the solemn pomp of the diction amounts almost to _bouffe_. In emulation of "The Seasons" Mason introduced a sentimental love story--Alcander and Nerina--into his third book. He informs his readers (book II. 34-78) that, in the reaction against straight alleys, many gardeners had gone to an extreme in the use of zigzag meanders; and he recommends them to follow the natural curves of the footpaths which the milkmaid wears across the pastures "from stile to stile," or which --"the scudding hare Draws to her dew-sprent seat o'er thymy heaths." The prose commentary on Mason's poem, by W. Burgh,[34] asserts that the formal style of garden had begun to give way about the commencement of the eighteenth century, though the new fashion had but very lately attained to its perfection. Mason mentions Pope as a champion of the true taste,[35] but the descriptions of his famous villa at Twickenham, with its grotto, thickets, and artificial mounds, hardly suggest to the modern reader a very successful attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure, Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country a great share of the year. Even Shenstone--whose place is commended by Mason--Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of Lyttelton's big park at Hagley. The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature; to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for _jets d'eau_ in marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his "Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer. The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few minutes, immured between Lord D----'s high shorn yew hedges, which run exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be allowed that make a discovery of art. . . The taste of the citizen and of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his rivulets in _jets d'eau_; in short, admires no part of nature but her ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They discover art in nature's province." There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity. Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a _protégé_ of Lord Burlington to whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted (see _ante_ p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:" "--where not nice art in curious knots, But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess, And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed, Or held by fringëd banks in crystal lakes. Compose a rural seat of various hue." But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his pleasure in "_trim_ gardens," while in Collins, "Ease and health retire To breezy lawn or forest deep." Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a straight line." Kent "leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a greater landscape gardener." At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a _fermé ornée_. There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad, sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye will be pleased, and to thicken the plantation where there is something to be hidden, demands any great powers of mind, I will not enquire." The doctor reports that Lyttelton was jealous of the fame which the Leasowes soon acquired, and that when visitors to Hagley asked to see Shenstone's place, their host would adroitly conduct them to inconvenient points of view--introducing them, _e.g._, at the wrong end of a walk, so as to detect a deception in perspective, "injuries of which Shenstone would heavily complain."[40] Graves, however, denies that any rivalry was in question between the great domain of Hagley and the poet's little estate. "The truth of the case," he writes, "was that the Lyttelton family went so frequently with their company to the Leasowes, that they were unwilling to break in upon Mr. Shenstone's retirement on every occasion, and therefore often went to the principal points of view, without waiting for anyone to conduct them regularly through the whole walks. Of this Mr. Shenstone would sometimes peevishly complain." Shenstone describes in his "Thoughts on Gardening," several artifices that he put in practice for increasing the apparent distance of objects, or for lengthening the perspective of an avenue by widening it in the foreground and planting it there with dark-foliaged trees, like yews and firs, "then with trees more and more fady, till they end in the almond-willow or silver osier." To have Lord Lyttelton bring in a party at the small, or willow end of such a walk, and thereby spoil the whole trick, must indeed have been provoking. Johnson asserts that Shenstone's house was ruinous and that "nothing raised his indignation more than to ask if there were any fishes in his water." "In time," continues the doctor, "his expenses brought clamors about him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his groves were haunted by beings very different from fawns and fairies;" to wit, bailiffs; but Graves denies this. The fame of the Leasowes attracted visitors from all parts of the country--literary men like Spence, Home, and Dodsley; picturesque tourists, who came out of curiosity; and titled persons, who came, or sent their gardeners, to obtain hints for laying out their grounds. Lyttelton brought William Pitt, who was so much interested that he offered to contribute two hundred pounds toward improvements, an offer that Shenstone, however, declined. Pitt had himself some skill in landscape gardening, which he exercised at Enfield Chase and afterward at Hayes.[41] Thomson, who was Lyttelton's guest at Hagley every summer during the last three or four years of his life, was naturally familiar with the Leasowes. There are many references to the "sweet descriptive bard," in Shenstone's poems[42] and a seat was inscribed to his memory in a part of the grounds known as Vergil's Grove. "This seat," says Dodsley, "is placed upon a steep bank on the edge of the valley, from which the eye is here drawn down into the flat below by the light that glimmers in front and by the sound of various cascades, by which the winding stream is agreeably broken. Opposite to this seat the ground rises again in an easy concave to a kind of dripping fountain, where a small rill trickles down a rude niche of rock work through fern, liverwort, and aquatic weeds. . . The whole scene is opaque and gloomy."[43] English landscape gardening is a noble art. Its principles are sound and of perpetual application. Yet we have advanced so much farther in the passion for nature than the men of Shenstone's day that we are apt to be impatient of the degree of artifice present in even the most skillful counterfeit of the natural landscape. The poet no longer writes odes on "Rural Elegance," nor sings "The transport, most allied to song, In some fair valley's peaceful bound To catch soft hints from Nature's tongue, And bid Arcadia bloom around; Whether we fringe the sloping hill, Or smooth below the verdant mead; Or in the horrid brambles' room Bid careless groups of roses bloom; Or let some sheltered lake serene Reflect flowers, woods and spires, and brighten all the scene." If we cannot have the mountains, the primeval forest, or the shore of the wild sea, we can at least have Thomson's "great simple country," subdued to man's use but not to his pleasure. The modern mood prefers a lane to a winding avenue, and an old orchard or stony pasture to a lawn decorated with coppices. "I do confess," says Howitt, "that in the 'Leasowes' I have always found so much ado about nothing; such a parade of miniature cascades, lakes, streams conveyed hither and thither; surprises in the disposition of woods and the turn of walks. . . that I have heartily wished myself out upon a good rough heath." For the "artificial-natural" was a trait of Shenstone's gardening no less than of his poetry. He closed every vista and emphasized every opening in his shrubberies and every spot that commanded a prospect with come object which was as an exclamation point on the beauty of the scene: a rustic bench, a root-house, a Gothic alcove, a grotto, a hermitage, a memorial urn or obelisk dedicated to Lyttelton, Thomson, Somerville,[44] Dodsley, or some other friend. He supplied these with inscriptions expressive of the sentiments appropriate to the spot, passages from Vergil, or English or Latin verses of his own composition. Walpole says that Kent went so far in his imitation of natural scenery as to plant _dead_ trees in Kensington Garden. Walpole himself seems to approve of such devices as artificial ruins, "a feigned steeple of a distant church or an unreal bridge to disguise the termination of water." Shenstone was not above these little effects: he constructed a "ruinated priory" and a temple of Pan out of rough, unhewn stone; he put up a statue of a piping faun, and another of the Venus dei Medici beside a vase of gold fishes. Some of Shenstone's inscriptions have escaped the tooth of time. The motto, for instance, cut upon the urn consecrated to the memory of his cousin, Miss Dolman, was prefixed by Byron to his "Elegy upon Thyrza": "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse!" The habit of inscription prevailed down to the time of Wordsworth, who composed a number for the grounds of Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton. One of Akenside's best pieces is his "Inscription for a Grotto," which is not unworthy of Landor. Matthew Green, the author of "The Spleen," wrote a poem of some 250 lines upon Queen Caroline's celebrated grotto in Richmond Garden. "A grotto," says Johnson, apropos of that still more celebrated one at Pope's Twickenham villa, "is not often the wish or pleasure of an Englishman, who has more frequent need to solicit than exclude the sun"; but the increasing prominence of the mossy cave and hermit's cell, both in descriptive verse and in gardening, was symptomatic. It was a note of the coming romanticism, and of that pensive, elegiac strain which we shall encounter in the work of Gray, Collins, and the Wartons. It marked the withdrawal of the muse from the world's high places into the cool sequestered vale of life. All through the literature of the mid-century, the high-strung ear may catch the drip-drip of spring water down the rocky walls of the grot. At Hagley, halfway up the hillside, Miller saw a semi-octagonal temple dedicated to the genius of Thomson. It stood in a grassy hollow which commanded a vast, open prospect and was a favorite resting place of the poet of "The Seasons." In a shady, secluded ravine he found a white pedestal, topped by an urn which Lyttelton had inscribed to the memory of Shenstone. This contrast of situation seemed to the tourist emblematic. Shenstone, he says, was an egotist, and his recess, true to his character, excludes the distant landscape. Gray, who pronounced "The Schoolmistress" a masterpiece in its kind, made a rather slighting mention of its author.[45] "I have read an 8vo volume of Shenstone's letters; poor man! He was always wishing for money, for fame and other distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living, against his will, in retirement and in a place which his taste had adorned, but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it." Gray unquestionably profited by a reading of Shenstone's "Elegies," which antedate his own "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751). He adopted Shenstone's stanza, which Shenstone had borrowed from the love elegies of a now forgotten poet, James Hammond, equerry to Prince Frederick and a friend of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. "Why Hammond or other writers," says Johnson, "have thought the quatrain of ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the elegy is gentleness and tenuity, but this stanza has been pronounced by Dryden. . .to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our language affords."[46] Next after "The Schoolmistress," the most engaging of Shenstone's poems is his "Pastoral Ballad," written in 1743 in four parts and in a tripping anapestic measure. Familiar to most readers is the stanza beginning: "I have found out a gift for my fair, I have found where the wood-pigeons breed." Dr. Johnson acknowledged the prettiness of the conceit: "So sweetly she bade me adieu, I thought that she bade me return;" and he used to quote and commend the well-known lines "Written at an Inn at Henley: "Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn." As to Shenstone's blank verse--of which there is not much--the doctor says: "His blank verses, those that can read them may probably find to be like the blank verses of his neighbors." Shenstone encouraged Percy to publish his "Reliques." The plans for the grounds at Abbotsford were somewhat influenced by Didsley's description of the Leasowes, which Scott studied with great interest. In 1744 Mark Akenside, a north country man and educated partly in Scotland, published his "Pleasures of Imagination," afterwards rewritten as "The Pleasures of the Imagination" and spoiled in the process. The title and something of the course of thought in the poem were taken from Addison's series of papers on the subject (_Spectator_, Nos. 411-421). Akenside was a man of learning and a physician of distinction. His poem, printed when he was only twenty-three, enjoyed a popularity now rather hard to account for. Gray complained of its obscurity and said it was issued nine years too early, but admitted that now and then it rose "even to the best, particularly in description." Akenside was harsh, formal, and dogmatic, as a man. Smollett caricatured him in "Peregrine Pickle." Johnson hated his Whig principles and represents him, when settled at Northampton, as "having deafened the place with clamors for liberty."[47] He furthermore disliked the class of poetry to which Akenside's work belonged, and he told Boswell that he couldn't read it. Still he speaks of him with a certain cautious respect, which seems rather a concession to contemporary opinion than an appreciation of the critic's own. He even acknowledges that Akenside has "few artifices of disgust than most of his brethren of the blank song." Lowell says that the very title of Akenside's poem pointed "away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain paths and less dogmatic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births. Without it, the 'Lines Written at Tintern Abbey' might never have been." One cannot read "The Pleasures of Imagination" without becoming sensible that the writer was possessed of poetic feeling, and feeling of a kind that we generally agree to call romantic. His doctrine at least, if not his practice, was in harmony with the fresh impulse which was coming into English poetry. Thus he celebrates heaven-born genius and the inspiration of nature, and decries "the critic-verse" and the effort to scale Parnassus "by dull obedience." He invokes the peculiar muse of the new school: "Indulgent _Fancy_, from the fruitful banks Of Avon, whence thy rosy fingers cull Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf Where Shakspere lies." But Akenside is too abstract. In place of images, he presents the reader with dissertations. A poem which takes imagination as its subject rather than its method will inevitably remain, not poetry but a lecture on poetry--a theory of beauty, not an example of it. Akenside might have chosen for his motto Milton's lines: "How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbëd, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute." Yet he might have remembered, too, what Milton said about the duty of poetry to be simple, sensuous, and passionate. Akenside's is nothing of these; it is, on the contrary obscure, metaphysical, and, as a consequence, frigid. Following Addison, he names greatness and novelty, _i.e._, the sublime and the wonderful, as, equally with beauty, the chief sources of imaginative pleasure, and the whole poem is a plea for what we are now accustomed to call the ideal. In the first book there is a passage which is fine in spirit and--though in a less degree--in expression: "Who that from Alpine heights his laboring eye Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave Through mountains, plains, through empires black with shade. And continents of sand, will turn his gaze To mark the windings of a scanty rill That murmurs at his feet? The high-born soul Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing Beneath its native quarry. Tired of earth And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm; Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens; Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast, Sweeps the long trace of day." The hint for this passage was furnished by a paragraph in Addison's second paper (_Spectator_, 412) and the emotion is the same to which Goethe gives utterance in the well-known lines of "Faust"; "Doch jedem ist es eingeboren Dass sein Gefühl hinauf und vorwärts dringt," etc. But how greatly superior in sharpness of detail, richness of invention, energy of movement is the German to the English poet! Akenside ranks among the earlier Spenserians by virtue of his "Virtuoso" (1737) and of several odes composed in a ten-lined variation on Spenser's stanza. A collection of his "Odes" appeared in 1745--the year before Collins' and Joseph Warton's-and a second in 1760. They are of little value, but show here and there traces of Milton's minor poetry and that elegiac sentiment, common to the lyrical verse of the time, noticeable particularly in a passage on the nightingale in Ode XV, book i;, "To the Evening Star." "The Pleasures of Imagination" was the parent of a numerous offspring of similarly entitled pieces, among which are Joseph Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," and Rogers' "Pleasures of Memory." In the same year with Thomson's "Winter" (1726) there were published in two poetical miscellanies a pair of little descriptive pieces, "Grongar Hill" and "The Country Walk," written by John Dyer, a young Welshman, in the octosyllabic couplet of Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Pensoroso." ("Grongar Hill," as first printed was a sort of irregular ode with alternate rhyming; but it was much improvised in later editions, and rewritten throughout in couplets.) Dyer was a landscape painter who had been educated at Westminster school, studied under Richardson at London, and spent some time wandering about the mountains of Wales in the practice of his art. "Grongar Hill" is, in fact, a pictorial poem, a sketch of the landscape seen from the top of his favorite summit in South Wales. It is a slight piece of work, careless and even slovenly in execution, but with an ease and lightness of touch that contrast pleasantly with Thomson's and Akenside's ponderosity. When Dyer wrote blank verse he slipped into the Thomsonian diction, "cumbent sheep" and "purple groves pomaceous." But in "Grongar Hill"--although he does call the sun Phoebus--the shorter measure seems to bring shorter words, and he has lines of Wordsworthian simplicity-- "The woody valleys warm and low, The windy summit, wild and high." or the closing passage, which Wordsworth alludes to in his sonnet on Dyer--"Long as the thrush shall pipe on Grongar Hill": "Grass and flowers Quiet treads On the meads and mountain heads. . . And often, by the murmuring rill, Hears the thrush while all is still, Within the groves of Grongar Hill." Wordsworth was attracted by Dyer's love of "mountain turf" and "spacious airy downs" and "naked Snowdon's wide, aerial waste." The "power of hills" was on him. Like Wordsworth, too, he moralized his song. In "Grongar Hill," the ruined tower suggests the transience of human life: the rivers running down to the sea are likened to man's career from birth to death; and Campbell's couplet, "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view And robes the mountain in its azure hue,"[48] is thought to owe something to Dyer's "As yon summits soft and fair, Clad in colors of the air Which to those who journey near Barren, brown and rough appear, Still we tread the same coarse way, The present's still a cloudy day." Dyer went to Rome to pursue his art studies and, on his return in 1740, published his "Ruins of Rome" in blank verse. He was not very successful as a painter, and finally took orders, married, and settled down as a country parson. In 1757 he published his most ambitious work, "The Fleece," a poem in blank verse and in four books, descriptive of English wool-growing. "The subject of 'The Fleece,' sir," pronounced Johnson, "cannot be made poetical. How can a man write poetically of serges and druggets?" Didactic poetry, in truth, leads too often to ludicrous descents. Such precepts as "beware the rot," "enclose, enclose, ye swains," and "-the utility of salt Teach thy slow swains"; with prescriptions for the scab, and advice as to divers kinds of wool combs, are fatal. A poem of this class has to be _made_ poetical, by dragging in episodes and digressions which do not inhere in the subject itself but are artificially associated with it. Of such a nature is the loving mention--quoted in Wordsworth's sonnet--of the poet's native Carmarthenshire "-that soft tract Of Cambria, deep embayed, Dimetian land, By green hills fenced, by Ocean's murmur lulled." Lowell admired the line about the Siberian exiles, met "On the dark level of adversity." Miltonic reminiscences are frequent in Dyer. Sabrina is borrowed from "Comus"; "bosky bourn" and "soothest shepherd" from the same; "the light fantastic toe" from "L'Allegro"; "level brine" and "nor taint-worm shall infect the yearning herds," from "Lycidas"; "audience pure be thy delight, though few," from "Paradise Lost." "Mr. Dyer," wrote Gray to Horace Walpole in 1751, "has more of poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number; but rough and injudicious." Akenside, who helped Dyer polish the manuscript of "The Fleece," said that "he would regulate his opinion of the reigning taste by the fate of Dyer's 'Fleece'; for if that were ill received, he should not think it any longer reasonable to expect fame from excellence." The romantic element in Dyer's imagination appears principally in his love of the mountains and of ancient ruins. Johnson cites with approval a sentence in "The Ruins of Rome": "At dead of night, The hermit oft, midst his orisons, hears Aghast the voice of Time disparting towers."[49] These were classic ruins. Perhaps the doctor's sympathy would not have been so quickly extended to the picture of the moldering Gothic tower in "Grongar Hill," or of "solitary Stonehenge gray with moss," in "The Fleece." [1] W. D. McClintock, "The Romantic and Classical in English Literature," _Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV, p. 187. [2] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 207. [3] "Autumn," lines 645-47. [4] "Life of Philips." [5] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 221 [6] _Cf_. Chaucer: "And as a bitoure bumbleth in the mire." --_Wyf of Bathes Tale_. [7] Phillimore's "Life of Lyttelton," Vol. I, p. 286. [8] "First Impression of England," p. 135. [9] Appendix to Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads," [10] There are, of course, Miltonic reminiscences in "The Seasons." The moon's "spotted disk" ("Autumn," 1091) is Milton's "spotty globe." The apostrophe to light ("Spring" 90-96) borrows its "efflux divine" from Milton's "bright effluence of bright essence increate" ("Paradise Lost," III. 1-12) And _cf._ "Autumn," 783-84: "--from Imaus stretcht Athwart the roving Tartar's sullen bounds," with P.L., III, 431-32; and "Winter," 1005-08. "--moors Beneath the shelter of an icy isle, While night o'erwhelms the sea." with P.L., I. 207-208. [11] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. p. 171. [12] There were originally _three_ damsels in the bathing scene! [13] It was to this episode that Pope supplied the lines (207-14) "Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty's self," etc., which form his solitary essay in blank verse. Thomson told Collins that he took the first hint of "The Seasons" from the names of the divisions--Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter--in Pope's "Pastorals." [14] Appendix to Preface to Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." [15] "The Hermit." [16] "Essay on Man," Epistle I. [17] "Falsely luxurious, will not man awake?" etc. --_Summer_, 67. [18] "Nor, when cold winter keens the brightening flood, Would I, weak shivering, linger on the brink." --_Ibid._ 1259-60. [19] "Life of Thomson." [20] "Spring," 755-58. [21] "Autumn," 862-65. [22] "Epistle of Augustus." [23] "Autumn," 1030-37. _Cf._ Cowper's "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless contiguity of shade!" [24] "Winter," 424-32. [25] "Spring," 1026-28. [26] Shakspere's "broom groves whose shade the dismist bachelor loves;" Fletcher's "Fountain heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves," and his "Moonlight walks when all the fowls Are safely housed, save bats and owls." [27] Letter to Howe, September 10. [28] Letter to Howe, November, 1763. [29] Alicia Amherst ("History of Gardening in England," 1896, p. 283) mentions a French and an Italian work, entitled respectively "Plan de Jardins dans le gout Anglais," Copenhagen, 1798; and "Del Arte dei Giardini Inglesi," Milan, 1801. "This passion for the imitation of nature," says the same authority, "was part of the general reaction which was taking place, not only in gardening but in the world of literature and of fashion. The extremely artificial French taste had long taken the lead in civilized Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the shackles of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also pioneers of this school of nature. Dyer, in his poem of 'Grongar Hill,' and Thomson, in his 'Seasons,' called up pictures which the gardeners and architects of the day strove to imitate." See in this work, for good examples of the formal garden, the plan of Belton House, Lincoln, p. 245; of Brome Hall, Suffolk; of the orangery and canal at Euston, p. 201; and the scroll work patterns of turf and parterres on pp. 217-18. [30] In Temple's gardens at Moor Park, Hertfordshire, _e.g._, there were terraces covered with lead. Charles II. imported some of Le Notre's pupils and assistants, who laid out the grounds at Hampton Court in the French taste. The maze at Hampton Court still existed in Walpole's time (1770). [31] It is worth noticing that Batty Langley, the abortive restorer of Gothic, also recommended the natural style of landscape gardening as early as 1728 in his "New Principles of Gardening." [32] "History of Gardening in England." [33] I. 384-404. [34] "The Works of William Mason," in 4 vols., London, 1811. [35] See Pope's paper in the _Guardian_ (173) for some rather elaborate foolery about topiary work. "All art," he maintains, "consists in the imitation and study of nature." "We seem to make it our study to recede from nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most regular and formal shapes, but," etc., etc. Addison, too, _Spectator_ 414, June 25, 1712, upholds "the rough, careless strokes of nature" against "the nice touches and embellishments of art," and complains that "our British gardeners, instead of humoring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure." See also _Spectator_, 477, for a pretty scheme of a garden laid out with "the beautiful wildness of nature." Gilbert West's Spenserian poem "Education," 1751 (see _ante_, p. 90) contains an attack, in six stanzas, upon the geometric garden, from which I give a single stanza. "Alse other wonders of the sportive shears, Fair nature mis-adorning, there were found: Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers, With sprouting urns and budding statues crowned; And horizontal dials on the ground, In living box by cunning artists traced; And gallies trim, on no long voyage bound But by their roots there ever anchored fast, All were their bellying sails out-spread to every blast." [36] "Essays on Men and Manners," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II. Dodsley's edition. [37] "On Modern Gardening," Works of the Earl of Orford, London, 1798, Vol. II. [38] Graves, "Recollections of Shenstone," 1788. [39] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. 271. [40] "Life of Shenstone." [41] See _ante_, p. 90, for his visits to Gilbert West at Wickham. [42] See especially "A Pastoral Ode," and "Verses Written toward the Close of the Year 1748." [43] "A Description of the Leasowes by R. Dodsley," Shenstone's Works, Vol. II, pp. 287-320 (3d ed.) This description is accompanied with a map. For other descriptions consult Graves' "Recollections," Hugh Miller's "First Impressions of England," and Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets" (1846), Vol. I. pp. 258-63. The last gives an engraving of the house and grounds. Miller, who was at Hagley--"The British Tempe"-and the Leasowes just a century after Shenstone began to embellish his paternal acres, says that the Leasowes was the poet's most elaborate poem, "the singularly ingenious composition, inscribed on an English hillside, which employed for twenty long years the taste and genius of Shenstone." [44] See "Lady Luxborough's Letters to Shenstone," 1775, for a long correspondence about an urn which _she_ was erecting to Somerville's memory. She was a sister of Bolingbroke, had a seat at Barrels, and exchanged visits with Shenstone. [45] "Letter to Nichols," June 24, 1769. [46] Dryden's "Annus Mirabilis," Davenant's "Gondibert," and Sir John Davies' "Nosce Teipsum" were written in this stanza, but the universal currency of Gray's poem associated it for many years almost exclusively with elegiac poetry. Shenstone's collected poems were not published till 1764, though some of them had been printed in Dodsley's "Miscellanies." Only a few of his elegies are dated in the collected editions (Elegy VIII, 1745; XIX, 1743; XXI, 1746), but Graves says that they were all written before Gray's. The following lines will recall to every reader corresponding passages in Gray's "Churchyard": "O foolish muses, that with zeal aspire To deck the cold insensate shrine with bays! "When the free spirit quits her humble frame To tread the skies, with radiant garlands crowned; "Say, will she hear the distant voice of Fame, Or hearing, fancy sweetness in the sound?" --_Elegy II_. "I saw his bier ignobly cross the plain." --_Elegy III_. "No wild ambition fired their spotless breast." --_Elegy XV_. "Through the dim veil of evening's dusky shade Near some lone fane or yew's funereal green," etc. --_Elegy IV_. "The glimmering twilight and the doubtful dawn Shall see your step to these sad scenes return, Constant as crystal dews impearl the lawn," etc. --_Ibid_. [47] "Life of Akenside." [48] "Pleasures of Hope." [49] _cf._ Wordsworth's "Some casual shout that broke the silent air, Or the unimaginable touch of time." --_Mutability: Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, XXXIV. CHAPTER V. The Miltonic Group That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser's is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was "classical" in a way of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him. This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me," he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he thus apprised the reader of his purpose: "Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes, Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, Brennumque Arviragunque duces, priscumque Belinum, Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Iörgernen; Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorlöis arma, Merlini dolus."[2] The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from passages in "Paradise Lost"[3] and even in "Paradise Regained."[4] But with his increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated finally to Hebraic themes and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics and Aeschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew classical as he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet. Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is used--though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it--that counted for most in the history of the romantic movement. Professor Masson contradicts the common assertion, that "Paradise Lost" was first written into popularity by Addison's Saturday papers. While that series was running, Tonson brought out (1711-13) an ediction of Milton's poetical works which was "the ninth of 'Paradise Lost,' the eight of 'Paradise Regained,' the seventh of 'Samson Agonistes' and the sixth of the minor poems." The previous issues of the minor poems had been in 1645, 1673, 1695, 1705, and 1707. Six editions in sixty-eight years is certainly no very great showing. After 1713 editions of Milton multiplied rapidly; by 1763 "Paradise Lost" was in its forty-sixth, and the minor poems in their thirtieth.[5] Addison selected an occasional passage from Milton's juvenile poems, in the _Spectator_; but from all obtainable evidence, it seems not doubtful that they had been comparatively neglected, and that, although reissued from time to time in complete editions of Milton's poetry, they were regarded merely as pendents to "Paradise Lost" and floated by its reputation. "Whatever causes," says Dryden, "Milton alleges for the abolishing of rime . . . his own particular reason is plainly this, that rime was not his talent: he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it: which is manifest in his 'Juvenilia' or verses written in his youth; where his rime is always constrained and forced and comes hardly from him." Joseph Warton, writing in 1756,[6] after quoting copiously from the "Nativity Ode," which, he says, is "not sufficiently read nor admired," continues as follows: "I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much less celebrated than 'L'Allegro' and "Il Penseroso,"[7] which are now universally known,; but which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they were set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And indeed this volume of Milton's miscellaneous poems has not till very lately met with suitable regard. Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remarking that these juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as well as his Latin elegies, are of a strain far more exalted than any the former author can boast?" The first critical edition of the minor poems was published in 1785, by Thomas Warton, whose annotations have been of great service to all later editors. As late as 1779, Dr. Johnson spoke of these same poems with an absence of appreciation that now seems utterly astounding. "Those who admire the beauties of this great poem sometimes force their own judgment into false admiration of his little pieces, and prevail upon themselves to think that admirable which is only singular." Of Lycidas he says: "In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting. . . Surely no man could have fancied that he read 'Lycidas' with pleasure, had he not known its author." He acknowledges that "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" are "noble efforts of imagination"; and that, "as a series of lines," "Comus" "may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it." But he makes peevish objections to its dramatic probability, finds its dialogues and soliloquies tedious, and unmindful of the fate of Midas, solemnly pronounces the songs--"Sweet Echo" and "Sabrina fair"--"harsh in their diction and not very musical in their numbers"! Of the sonnets he says: "They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad."[8] Boswell reports that, Hannah More having expressed her "wonder that the poet who had written 'Paradise Lost' should write such poor sonnets," Johnson replied: "Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry stones." The influence of Milton's minor poetry first becomes noticeable in the fifth decade of the century, and in the work of a new group of lyrical poets: Collins, Gray, Mason, and the brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton. To all of these Milton was master. But just as Thomson and Shenstone got original effects from Spenser's stanza, while West and Cambridge and Lloyd were nothing but echoes; so Collins and Gray--immortal names--drew fresh music from Milton's organ pipes, while for the others he set the tune. The Wartons, indeed, though imitative always in their verse, have an independent and not inconsiderable position in criticism and literary scholarship, and I shall return to them later in that connection. Mason, whose "English Garden" has been reviewed in chapter iv, was a small poet and a somewhat absurd person. He aped, first Milton and afterward Gray, so closely that his work often seems like parody. In general the Miltonic revival made itself manifest in a more dispersed and indirect fashion than the Spenserian; but there was no lack of formal imitations, also, and it will be advisable to notice a few of these here in the order of their dates. In 1740 Joseph Warton, then an Oxford undergraduate, wrote his blank-verse poem "The Enthusiast, or the Lover of Nature." The work of a boy of eighteen, it had that instinct of the future, of the set of the literary current, not uncommon in youthful artists, of which Chatterton's precocious verses are a remarkable instance. Composed only ten years later than the completed "Seasons," and five years before Shenstone began to lay out his miniature wilderness at the Leasowes, it is more distinctly modern and romantic in its preference of wild nature to cultivated landscape, and of the literature of fancy to the literature of reasons. "What are the lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakspere's warblings wild?" asks the young enthusiast, in Milton's own phrase. And again "Can Kent design like Nature?. . . Though he, by rules unfettered, boldly scorns Formality and method, round and square Disdaining, plans irregularly great?. . . "Versailles May boast a thousand fountains that can cast The tortured waters to the distant heavens; Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice Abrupt and shaggy, whence a foamy stream, Like Anio, tumbling roars; or some black heath Where straggling stands the mournful juniper, Or yew tree scathed." The enthusiast haunts "dark forests" and loves to listen to "hollow winds and ever-beating waves" and "sea-mew's clang." Milton appears at every turn, not only in single epithets like "Lydian airs," "the level brine," "low-thoughted cares," "the light fantastic dance," but in the entire spirit, imagery, and diction of the poem. A few lines illustrate this better than any description. "Ye green-robed Dryads, oft at dusky eve By wondering shepherds seen; to forest brown, To unfrequented meads and pathless wilds Lead me from gardens decked with art's vain pomp. . . But let me never fall in cloudless night, When silent Cynthia in her silver car Through the blue concave slides,. . . To seek some level mead, and there invoke Old midnight's sister, contemplation sage (Queen of the rugged brow and stern-fixed eye), To lift my soul above this little earth, This folly-fettered world: to purge my ears, That I may hear the rolling planet's song And tuneful turning spheres." Mason's Miltonic imitations, "Musaeus," "Il Bellicoso" and "Il Pacifico" were written in 1744--according to the statement of their author, whose statements, however, are not always to be relied upon. The first was published in 1747; the second "surreptitiously printed in a magazine and afterward inserted in Pearch's miscellany," finally revised and published by the author in 1797; the third first printed in 1748 in the Cambridge verses on the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. These pieces follow copy in every particular. "Il Bellicoso," _e.g._, opens with the invocation. "Hence, dull lethargic Peace, Born in some hoary beadsman's cell obscure!" The genealogies of Peace and War are recited, and contrasted pictures of peaceful and warlike pleasures presented in an order which corresponds as precisely as possible to Milton's in "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." "Then, to unbend my mind, I'll roam Amid the cloister's silent gloom; Or, where ranged oaks their shades diffuse, Hold dalliance with my darling Muse, Recalling oft some heaven-born strain That warbled in Augustan reign; Or turn, well pleased, the Grecian page, If sweet Theocritus engage, Or blithe Anacreon, mirthful wight, Carol his easy love-lay light. . . And joys like these, if Peace inspire Peace, with thee I string the lyre."[9] "Musaeus" was a monody on the death of Pope, employing the pastoral machinery and the varied irregular measure of "Lycidas." Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, under the names of Tityrus, Colin Clout, and Thyrsis, are introduced as mourners, like Camus and St. Peter in the original. Tityrus is made to lament the dead shepherd in very incorrect Middle English. Colin Clout speaks two stanzas of the form used in the first eclogue of "The Shepherd's Calendar," and three stanzas of the form used in "The Faërie Queene." Thyrsis speaks in blank verse and is answered by the shade of Musaeus (Pope) in heroic couplets. Verbal travesties of "Lycidas" abound--"laureate hearse," "forego each vain excuse," "without the loan of some poetic woe," etc.; and the closing passage is reworded thus: "Thus the fond swain his Doric oat essayed, Manhood's prime honors rising on his cheek: Trembling he strove to court the tuneful Maid, With stripling arts and dalliance all too weak, Unseen, unheard beneath an hawthorn shade. But now dun clouds the welkin 'gan to streak; And now down dropt the larks and ceased their strain: They ceased, and with them ceased the shepherd swain." In 1746 appeared a small volume of odes, fourteen in number, by Joseph Warton, and another by William Collins.[10] The event is thus noticed by Gray in a letter to Thomas Wharton: "Have you seen the works of two young authors, a Mr. Warton and a Mr. Collins, both writers of odes? It is odd enough, but each is the half of a considerable man, and one the counterpart of the other. The first has but little invention, very poetical choice of expression and a good ear. The second, a fine fancy, modeled upon the antique, a bad ear, a great variety of words and images with no choice at all. They both deserve to last some years, but will not." Gray's critical acuteness is not altogether at fault in this judgment, but half of his prophecy has failed, and his mention of Collins is singularly inappreciative. The names of Collins and Gray are now closely associated in literary history, but in life the two men were in no way connected. Collins and the Wartons, on the other hand, were personal friends. Joseph Warton and Collins had been schoolfellows at Winchester, and it was at first intended that their odes, which were issued in the same month (December), should be published in a volume together. Warton's collection was immediately successful; but Collins' was a failure, and the author, in his disappointment, burned the unsold copies. The odes of Warton which most nearly resemble Milton are "To Fancy," "To Solitude," and "To the Nightingale," all in the eight-syllabled couplet. A single passage will serve as a specimen of their quality: "Me, Goddess, by the right hand lead Sometimes through the yellow mead, Where Joy and white-robed Peace resort And Venus keeps her festive court: Where Mirth and Youth each evening meet, And lightly trip with nimble feet, Nodding their lily-crowned heads; Where Laughter rose-lip'd Hebe leads," etc.[11] Collins' "Ode to Simplicity" is in the stanza of the "Nativity Ode," and his beautiful "Ode to Evening," in the unrhymed Sapphics which Milton had employed in his translation of Horace's "Ode to Pyrrha." There are Miltonic reminiscences like "folding-star," "religious gleams," "play with the tangles of her hair," and in the closing couplet of the "Ode to Fear," "His cypress wreath my meed decree, And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee." But, in general, Collins is much less slavish than Warton in his imitation. Joseph Warton's younger brother, Thomas, wrote in 1745, and published in 1747, "The Pleasures of Melancholy," a blank-verse poem of three hundred and fifteen lines, made up, in nearly equal parts, of Milton and Akenside, with frequent touches of Thomson, Spenser, and Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." Warton was a lad of seventeen when his poem was written: it was published anonymously and was by some attributed to Akenside, whose "Pleasures of Imagination" (1744) had, of course, suggested the title. A single extract will suffice to show how well the young poet knew his Milton: "O lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, Her favorite midnight haunts. . . Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, When through some western window the pale moon _Pours her long-levelled rule streaming light:_ While sullen sacred silence reigns around, Save the lone screech-owl's note, who build his bower Amid the moldering caverns dark and damp;[12] Or the calm breeze, that rustles in the leaves Of flaunting ivy, that with mantle green Invests some wasted tower. . . Then when the sullen shades of evening close Where _through the room_ a blindly-glimmering gloom The _dying embers_ scatter, far remote From Mirth's mad shouts, that through the illumined roof Resound with festive echo, let me sit Blessed with the lowly cricket's drowsy dirge. . . This sober hour of silence will unmask False Folly's smile, that like the dazzling spells Of wily Comus cheat the unweeting eye With _blear illusion,_ and persuade to drink That charmëd cup which _Reason's mintage fair_ _ Unmoulds_, and stamps the monster on the man." I italicize the most direct borrowings, but both the Wartons had so saturated themselves with Milton's language, verse, and imagery that they ooze out of them at every pore. Thomas Warton's poems, issued separately from time to time, were first published collectively in 1777. They are all imitative, and most of them imitative of Milton. His two best odes, "On the First of April" and "On the Approach of Summer," are in the familiar octosyllabics. "Haste thee, Nymph! and hand in hand, With thee lead a buxom band; Bring fantastic-footed joy, With Sport, that yellow-tressëd boy," etc.[13] In Gray and Collins, though one can hardly read a page without being reminded of Milton, it is commonly in subtler ways than this. Gray, for example, has been careful to point out in his notes his verbal obligations to Milton, as well as to Shakspere, Cowley, Dryden, Pindar, Vergil, Dante, and others; but what he could not well point out, because it was probably unconscious, was the impulse which Milton frequently gave to the whole exercise of his imagination. It is not often that Gray treads so closely in Milton's footsteps as he does in the latest of his poems, the ode written for music, and performed at Cambridge in 1769 on the installation of the Duke of Grafton as Chancellor; in which Milton is made to sing a stanza in the meter of the "Nativity Ode"; "Ye brown o'er-arching groves That Contemplation loves, Where willowy Camus lingers with delight; Oft at the blush of dawn I trod your level lawn, Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright, In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." Not only the poets who have been named, but many obscure versifiers are witnesses to this Miltonic revival. It is usually, indeed, the minor poetry of an age which keeps most distinctly the "cicatrice and capable impressure" of a passing literary fashion. If we look through Dodsley's collection,[14] we find a _mélange_ of satires in the manner of Pope, humorous fables in the manner of Prior, didactic blank-verse pieces after the fashion of Thomson and Akenside, elegiac quatrains on the model of Shenstone and Gray, Pindaric odes _ad nauseam_, with imitations of Spenser and Milton.[15] To the increasing popularity of Milton's minor poetry is due the revival of the sonnet. Gray's solitary sonnet, on the death of his friend Richard West, was composed in 1742 but not printed till 1775, after the author's death. This was the sonnet selected by Wordsworth, to illustrate his strictures on the spurious poetic diction of the eighteenth century, in the appendix to the preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads." The style is noble, though somewhat artificial: the order of the rhymes conforms neither to the Shaksperian nor the Miltonic model. Mason wrote fourteen sonnets at various times between 1748 and 1797; the earlier date is attached, in his collected works, to "Sonnet I. Sent to a Young Lady with Dodsley's Miscellanies." They are of the strict Italian or Miltonic form, and abound in Miltonic allusions and wordings. All but four of Thomas Edwards' fifty sonnets, 1750-65, are on Milton's model. Thirteen of them were printed in Dodsley's second volume. They have little value, nor have those of Benjamin Stillingfleet, some of which appear to have been written before 1750. Of much greater interest are the sonnets of Thomas Warton, nine in number and all Miltonic in form. Warton's collected poems were not published till 1777, and his sonnets are undated, but some of them seem to have been written as early as 1750. They are graceful in expression and reflect their author's antiquarian tastes. They were praised by Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb; and one of them, "To the River Lodon," has been thought to have suggested Coleridge's "To the River Otter--" "Dear native stream, wild streamlet of the west--" as well, perhaps, more remotely Wordsworth's series, "On the River Duddon." The poem of Milton which made the deepest impression upon the new school of poets was "Il Penseroso." This little masterpiece, which sums up in imagery of "Attic choice" the pleasures that Burton and Fletcher and many others had found in the indulgence of the atrabilious humor, fell in with a current of tendency. Pope had died in 1744, Swift in 1745, the last important survivors of the Queen Anne wits; and already the reaction against gayety had set in, in the deliberate and exaggerated solemnity which took possession of all departments of verse, and even invaded the theater; where Melpomene gradually crowded Thalia off the boards, until sentimental comedy--_la comedie larmoyante_--was in turn expelled by the ridicule of Garrick, Goldsmith, and Sheridan. That elegiac mood, that love of retirement and seclusion, which have been remarked in Shenstone, became now the dominant note in English poetry. The imaginative literature of the years 1740-60 was largely the literature of low spirits. The generation was persuaded, with Fletcher, that "Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." But the muse of their inspiration was not the tragic Titaness of Dürer's painting: "The Melencolia that transcends all wit."[16] rather the "mild Miltonic maid," Pensive Meditation. There were various shades of somberness, from the delicate gray of the Wartons to the funereal sable to Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44) and Blair's "Grave" (1743). Goss speaks of Young as a "connecting link between this group of poets and their predecessors of the Augustan age." His poem does, indeed, exhibit much of the wit, rhetorical glitter, and straining after point familiar in Queen Anne verse, in strange combination with a "rich note of romantic despair."[17] Mr. Perry, too, describes Young's language as "adorned with much of the crude ore of romanticism. . . At this period the properties of the poet were but few: the tomb, an occasional raven or screech-owl, and the pale moon, with skeletons and grinning ghosts. . . One thing that the poets were never tired of, was the tomb. . . It was the dramatic--can one say the melodramatic?--view of the grave, as an inspirer of pleasing gloom, that was preparing readers for the romantic outbreak."[18] It was, of course, in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), that this elegiac feeling found its most perfect expression. Collins, too has "more hearse-like airs than carols," and two of his most heartfelt lyrics are the "Dirge in Cymbeline" and the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson." And the Wartons were perpetually recommending such themes, both by precept and example.[19] Blair and Young, however, are scarcely to be reckoned among the romanticists. They were heavy didactic-moral poets, for the most part, though they touched the string which, in the Gothic imagination, vibrates with a musical shiver to the thought of death. There is something that accords with the spirit of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, with Gray's "ivy-mantled tower"--his "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"--in the paraphernalia of the tomb which they accumulate so laboriously; the cypress and the yew, the owl and the midnight bell, the dust of the charnel-house, the nettles that fringe the grave-stones, the dim sepulchral lamp and gliding specters. "The wind is up. Hark! how it howls! Methinks Till now I never heard a sound so dreary, Doors creak and windows clap, and night's foul bird, Rocked in the spire, screams loud: the gloomy aisles, Black-plastered and hung 'round with shreds of scutcheons And tattered coats-of-arms, send back the sound, Laden with heavier airs, from the low vaults, The mansions of the dead."[20] Blair's mortuary verse has a certain impressiveness, in its gloomy monotony, not unlike that of Quarles' "Divine Emblems." Like the "Emblems," too, "The Grave," has been kept from oblivion by the art of the illustrator, the well-known series of engravings by Schiavonetti from designs by Wm. Blake. But the thoughtful scholarly fancy of the more purely romantic poets haunted the dusk rather than the ebon blackness of midnight, and listened more to the nightingale than to the screech-owl. They were quietists, and their imagery was crepuscular. They loved the twilight, with its beetle and bat, solitude, shade, the "darkening vale," the mossy hermitage, the ruined abbey moldering in its moonlit glade, grots, caverns, brooksides, ivied nooks, firelight rooms, the curfew bell and the sigh of the Aeolian harp.[21] All this is exquisitely put in Collins' "Ode to Evening." Joseph Warton also wrote an "Ode to Evening," as well as one "To the Nightingale." Both Wartons wrote odes "To Solitude." Dodsley's "Miscellanies" are full of odes to Evening, Solitude, Silence, Retirement, Contentment, Fancy, Melancholy, Innocence, Simplicity, Sleep; of Pleasures of Contemplation (Miss Whately, Vol. IX. p. 120) Triumphs of Melancholy (James Beattie, Vol. X. p. 77), and similar matter. Collins introduced a personified figure of Melancholy in his ode, "The Passions." "With eyes upraised, as one inspired, Pale Melancholy sat retired; And from her wild, sequestered seat, In notes by distance made more sweet, Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul; And dashing soft from rocks around, Bubbling runnels joined the sound; Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole, Or o'er some haunted stream, with fond delay, Round a holy calm diffusing Love of peace and lonely musing, In hollow murmurs died away." Collins was himself afflicted with a melancholia which finally developed into madness. Gray, a shy, fastidious scholar, suffered from inherited gout and a lasting depression of spirits. He passed his life as a college recluse in the cloistered retirement of Cambridge, residing at one time in Pembroke, and at another in Peterhouse College. He held the chair of modern history in the university, but never gave a lecture. He declined the laureateship after Cibber's death. He had great learning, and a taste most delicately correct; but the sources of creative impulse dried up in him more and more under the desiccating air of academic study and the increasing hold upon him of his constitutional malady. "Melancholy marked him for her own." There is a significant passage in one of his early letters to Horace. Walpole (1737): "I have, at the distance of half a mile, through a green lane, a forest (vulgar call it a common) all my own, at least as good as so, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices. . . Both vale and hill are covered with most venerable beeches and other very reverend vegetables that, like most other ancient people, are always dreaming out their old stories to the winds. . . At the foot of one of these, squats ME, I, (il penseroso) and there grow to the trunk for a whole morning."[22] To Richard West he wrote, in the same year, "Low spirits are my true and faithful companions"; and, in 1742, "Mine is a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy, for the most part . . . but there is another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt." When Gray sees the Eton schoolboys at their sports, he is sadly reminded: "--how all around them wait The ministers of human fate And black Misfortune's baleful train."[23] "Wisdom in sable garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of man resembles the insect race: "Brushed by the hand of rough mischance, Or chilled by age, their airy dance They leave, in dust to rest."[25] Will it be thought too trifling an observation that the poets of this group were mostly bachelors and _quo ad hoc_, solitaries? Thomson, Akenside, Shenstone, Collins, Gray, and Thomas Warton never married. Dyer, Mason, and Joseph Warton, were beneficed clergymen, and took unto themselves wives. The Wartons, to be sure, were men of cheerful and even convivial habits. The melancholy which these good fellows affected was manifestly a mere literary fashion. They were sad "only for wantonness," like the young gentlemen in France. "And so you have a garden of your own," wrote Gray to his young friend Nicholls, in 1769, "and you plant and transplant, and are dirty and amused; are you not ashamed of yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster; nor ever shall be either dirty or amused as long as I live." Gray never was; but the Wartons were easily amused, and Thomas, by all accounts, not unfrequently dirty, or at least slovenly in his dress, and careless and unpolished in his manners, and rather inclined to broad humor and low society. Romantically speaking, the work of these Miltonic lyrists marks an advance upon that of the descriptive and elegiac poets, Thomson, Akenside, Dyer, and Shenstone. Collins is among the choicest of English lyrical poets. There is a flute-like music in his best odes--such as the one "To Evening," and the one written in 1746--"How sleep the brave," which are sweeter, more natural, and more spontaneous than Gray's. "The Muse gave birth to Collins," says Swinburne; "she did but give suck to Gray." Collins "was a solitary song-bird among many more or less excellent pipers and pianists. He could put more spirit of color into a single stroke, more breath of music into a single note, than could all the rest of the generation into all the labors of their lives."[26] Collins, like Gray, was a Greek scholar, and had projected a history of the revival letters. There is a classical quality in his verse--not classical in the eighteenth-century sense--but truly Hellenic; a union, as in Keats, of Attic form with romantic sensibility; though in Collins, more than in Keats, the warmth seems to comes from without; the statue of a nymph flushed with sunrise. "Collins," says Gosse, "has the touch of a sculptor; his verse is clearly cut and direct: it is marble pure, but also marble cold."[27] Lowell, however, thinks that Collins "was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique flavor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold."[28] These estimates are given for what they are worth. The coldness which is felt--or fancied--in some of Collins' poetry comes partly from the abstractness of his subjects and the artificial style which he inherited, in common with all his generation. Many of his odes are addressed to Fear, Pity, Mercy, Liberty, and similar abstractions. The pseudo-Pindaric ode, is, in itself, an exotic; and, as an art form, is responsible for some of the most tumid compositions in the history of English verse. Collins' most current ode, though by no means his best one, "The Passions," abounds in those personifications which, as has been said, constituted, in eighteenth century poetry, a sort of feeble mythology: "wan Despair," "dejected Pity," "brown Exercise," and "Music sphere-descended maid." It was probably the allegorical figures in Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," "Sport that wrinkled care derides," "spare Fast that oft with gods doth diet," etc., that gave a new lease of life to this obsolescent machinery which the romanticists ought to have abandoned to the Augustan schools. The most interesting of Collins' poems, from the point of view of these inquiries, is his "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland." This was written in 1749, but as it remained in manuscript till 1788, it was of course without influence on the minds of its author's contemporaries. It had been left unfinished, and some of the printed editions contained interpolated stanzas which have since been weeded away. Inscribed to Mr. John Home, the author of "Douglas," its purpose was to recommend to him the Scottish fairy lore as a fit subject for poetry. Collins justifies the selection of such "false themes" by the example of Spenser, of Shakspere, (in "Macbeth"), and of Tasso "--whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung." He mentions, as instances of popular beliefs that have poetic capabilities, the kelpie, the will-o'-the-wisp, and second sight. He alludes to the ballad of "Willie Drowned in Yarrow," and doubtless with a line of "The Seasons" running in his head,[29] conjures Home to "forget not Kilda's race," who live on the eggs of the solan goose, whose only prospect is the wintry main, and among whose cliffs the bee is never heard to murmur. Perhaps the most imaginative stanza is the ninth, referring to the Hebrides, the chapel of St. Flannan and the graves of the Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian kings in Icolmkill: "Unbounded is thy range; with varied skill Thy muse may, like those feathery tribes which spring From their rude rocks, extend her skirting wing, Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle, To that hoar pile which still its ruins shows; In whose small vaults a pygmy folk is found, Whose bones the delver with his spade upthrows, And culls them, wondering, from the hallowed ground; Or thither, where, beneath the showery west, The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid; Once foes, perhaps, together now they rest, No slaves revere them and no wars invade. Yet frequent now at midnight's solemn hour, The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold, And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power, In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold, And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold." Collins' work was all done by 1749; for though he survived ten years longer, his mind was in eclipse. He was a lover and student of Shakspere, and when the Wartons paid him a last visit at the time of his residence with his sister in the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral, he told Thomas that he had discovered the source of the "Tempest," in a novel called "Aurelio and Isabella," printed in 1588 in Spanish, Italian, French, and English. No such novel has been found, and it was seemingly a figment of Collins' disordered fancy. During a lucid interval in the course of this visit, he read to the Wartons, from the manuscript, his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands"; and also a poem which is lost, entitled, "The Bell of Arragon," founded on the legend of the great bell of Saragossa that tolled of its own accord whenever a king of Spain was dying. Johnson was also a friend of Collins, and spoke of him kindly in his "Lives of the Poets," though he valued his writings little. "He had employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjects of fancy; and by indulging some peculiar habits of thought, was eminently delighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature, and to which the mind is reconciled only by a passive acquiescence in popular traditions. He loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters; he delighted to rove through the meanders of enchantment, to gaze on the magnificence of golden palaces, to repose by the water-falls of Elysian gardens. This was, however, the character rather of his inclination than his genius; the grandeur of wildness and the novelty of extravagance were always desired by him, but were not always attained."[30] Thomas Gray is a much more important figure than Collins in the intellectual history of his generations; but this superior importance does not rest entirely upon his verse, which is hardly more abundant than Collins', though of a higher finish. His letters, journals, and other prose remains, posthumously published, first showed how long an arc his mind had subtended on the circle of art and thought. He was sensitive to all fine influences that were in the literary air. One of the greatest scholars among English poets, his taste was equal to his acquisitions. He was a sound critic of poetry, music, architecture, and painting. His mind and character both had distinction; and if there was something a trifle finical and old-maidish about his personality--which led the young Cantabs on one occasion to take a rather brutal advantage of his nervous dread of fire--there was also that nice reserve which gave to Milton, when _he_ was at Cambridge, the nickname of the "lady of Christ's." A few of Gray's simpler odes, the "Ode on the Spring," the "Hymn to Adversity" and the Eton College ode, were written in 1742 and printed in Dodsley's collection in 1748. The "Elegy" was published in 1751; the two "sister odes," "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard," were struck off from Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill in 1757. Gray's popular fame rests, and will always rest, upon his immortal "Elegy." He himself denied somewhat impatiently that it was his best poem, and thought that its popularity was owing to its subject. There are not wanting critics of authority, such as Lowell and Matthew Arnold, who have pronounced Gray's odes higher poetry than his "Elegy." "'The Progress of Poesy,'" says Lowell, "overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. . . It was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that, more than anything else, called men back to the legitimate standard."[31] With all deference to such distinguished judges, I venture to think that the popular instinct on this point is right, and even that Dr. Johnson is not so wrong as usual. Johnson disliked Gray and spoke of him with surly injustice. Gray, in turn, could not abide Johnson, whom he called _Ursa major_. Johnson said that Gray's odes were forced plants, raised in a hot-house, and poor plants at that. "Sir, I do not think Gray a first-rate poet. He has not a bold imagination, nor much command of words. The obscurity in which he has involved himself will not persuade us that he is sublime. His 'Elegy in a Churchyard' has a happy selection of images, but I don't like what are called his great things." "He attacked Gray, calling him a 'dull fellow.' Boswell: 'I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.' Johnson: 'Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.' He then repeated some ludicrous lines, which have escaped my memory, and said, 'Is not that GREAT, like his odes?'. . . 'No, sir, there are but two good stanzas in Gray's poetry, which are in his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." He then repeated the stanza-- "'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,'" etc. "In all Gray's odes," wrote Johnson, "there is a kind of cumbrous splendor which we wish away. . . These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments; they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is labored into harshness. The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. . . His art and his struggle are too visible and there is too little appearance of ease and nature. . . In the character of his 'Elegy,' I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtlety and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claims to poetical honors. The 'Churchyard' abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo." There are noble lines in Gray's more elaborate odes, but they do make as a whole that mechanical, artificial impression of which Johnson complains. They have the same rhetorical ring, the worked-up fervor in place of genuine passion, which was noted in Collins' ode "On the Passions." Collins and Gray were perpetually writing about the passions; but they treated them as abstractions and were quite incapable of exhibiting them in action. Neither of them could have written a ballad, a play, or a romance. Their odes were bookish, literary, impersonal, retrospective. They had too much of the ichor of fancy and too little red blood in them. But the "Elegy" is the masterpiece of this whole "Il Penseroso" school, and has summed up for all English readers, for all time, the poetry of the tomb. Like the "Essay on Man," and "Night Thoughts" and "The Grave," it is a poem of the moral-didactic order, but very different in result from these. Its moral is suffused with emotion and expressed concretely. Instead of general reflections upon the shortness of life, the vanity of ambition, the leveling power of death, and similar commonplaces, we have the picture of the solitary poet, lingering among the graves at twilight (_hora datur quieti_), till the place and the hour conspire to work their effect upon the mind and prepare it for the strain of meditation that follows. The universal appeal of its subject and the perfection of its style have made the "Elegy" known by heart to more readers than any other poem in the language. Parody is one proof of celebrity, if not of popularity, and the "sister odes" were presently parodied by Lloyd and Colman in an "Ode to Obscurity" and an "Ode to Oblivion." But the "Elegy" was more than celebrated and more than popular; it was the most admired and influential poem of the generation. The imitations and translations of it are innumerable, and it met with a response as immediate as it was general.[32] One effect of this was to consecrate the ten-syllabled quatrain to elegiac uses. Mason altered the sub-title of his "Isis" (written in 1748) from "An Elegy" to "A Monologue," because it was "not written in alternate rimes, which since Mr. Gray's exquisite 'Elegy in the Country Church-yard' has generally obtained, and seems to be more suited to that species of poem."[33] Mason's "Elegy written in a Church-yard in South Wales" (1787) is, of course, in Gray's stanza and, equally of course, introduces a tribute to the master: "Yes, had he paced this church-way path along, Or leaned like me against this ivied wall, How sadly sweet had flowed his Dorian song, Then sweetest when it flowed at Nature's call."[34] It became almost _de rigueur_ for a young poet to try his hand at a churchyard piece. Thus Richard Cumberland, the dramatist, in his "Memoirs," records the fact that when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1752 he made his "first small offering to the press, following the steps of Gray with another church-yard elegy, written on St. Mark's Eve, when, according to rural tradition, the ghost of those who are to die within the year ensuing are seen to walk at midnight across the churchyard."[35] Goldsmith testifies to the prevalence of the fashion when, in his "Life of Parnell," he says of that poet's "Night Piece on Death"[36] that, "with very little amendment," it "might be made to surpass all those night-pieces and church-yard scenes that have since appeared." But in this opinion Johnson, who says that Parnell's poem "is indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's 'Churchyard,'" does not agree; nor did the public.[37] Gray's correspondence affords a record of the progress of romantic taste for an entire generation. He set out with classical prepossessions--forming his verse, as he declared, after Dryden--and ended with translations from Welsh and Norse hero-legends, and with an admiration for Ossian and Scotch ballads. In 1739 he went to France and Italy with Horace Walpole. He was abroad three years, though in 1741 he quarreled with Walpole at Florence, separated from him and made his way home alone in a leisurely manner. Gray is one of the first of modern travelers to speak appreciatively of Gothic architecture, and of the scenery of the Alps, and to note those strange and characteristic aspects of foreign life which we now call picturesque, and to which every itinerary and guidebook draws attention. Addison, who was on his travels forty years before, was quite blind to such matters. Not that he was without the feeling of the sublime: he finds, _e.g._, an "agreeable horror" in the prospect of a storm at sea.[38] But he wrote of his passage through Switzerland as a disagreeable and even frightful experience; "a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can't imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain." "Let any one reflect," says the _Spectator_,[39] "on the disposition of mind he finds in himself at his first entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his imagination is filled with something great and amazing; and, at the same time, consider how little, in proportion, he is affected with the inside of a Gothic cathedral, though it be five times larger than the other; which can arise from nothing else but the greatness of the manner in the one, the meanness in the other."[40] Gray describes the cathedral at Rheims as "a vast Gothic building of a surprising beauty and lightness, all covered over with a profusion of little statues and other ornaments"; and the cathedral at Siena, which Addison had characterized as "barbarous," and as an instance of "false beauties and affected ornaments," Gray commends as "labored with a Gothic niceness and delicacy in the old-fashioned way." It must be acknowledged that these are rather cold praises, but Gray was continually advancing in his knowledge of Gothic and his liking for it. Later in life he became something of an antiquarian and virtuoso. He corresponded with Rev. Thomas Wharton, about stained glass and paper hangings, which Wharton, who was refitting his house in the Gothic taste, had commissioned Gray to buy for him of London dealers. He describes, for Wharton's benefit, Walpole's new bedroom at Strawberry Hill as "in the best taste of anything he has yet done, and in your own Gothic way"; and he advises his correspondent as to the selection of patterns for staircases and arcade work. There was evidently a great stir of curiosity concerning Strawberry Hill in Gray's coterie, and a determination to be Gothic at all hazards; and the poet felt obliged to warn his friends that zeal should not outrun discretion. He writes to Wharton in 1754: "I rejoice to find you at last settled to your heart's content, and delight to hear you talk of giving your house some _Gothic ornaments_ already. If you project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors; and don't let me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the gentlemen at the ten pinnacles, or with the church porch at his door." Again, to the same (1761): "It is mere pedantry in Gothicism to stick to nothing but altars and tombs, and there is no end to it, if we are to sit upon nothing but coronation chairs, nor drink out of nothing but chalices or flagons." Writing to Mason in 1758 about certain incongruities in one of the latter's odes, he gives the following Doresque illustration of his point. "If you should lead me into a superb Gothic building, with a thousand clustered pillars, each of them half a mile high, the walls all covered with fret-work, and the windows full of red and blue saints that had neither head nor tail, and I should find the Venus de Medici in person perked up in a long niche over the high altar, as naked as she was born, do you think it would raise or damp my devotions?"[41] He made it a favorite occupation to visit and take drawings from celebrated ruins and the great English cathedrals, particularly those in the Cambridge fens, Ely and Peterboro'. These studies he utilized in a short essay on Norman architecture, first published by Mitford in 1814, and incorrectly entitled "Architectura Gothica." Reverting to his early letters from abroad one is struck by the anticipation of the modern attitude, in his description of a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, which he calls "one of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes."[42] "I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. . . One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noonday."[43] Walpole's letter of about the same date, also to West,[44] is equally ecstatic. It is written "from a hamlet among the mountains of Savoy. . . Here we are, the lonely lords of glorious desolate prospects. . . But the road, West, the road! Winding round a prodigious mountain, surrounded with others, all shagged with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below a torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks!. . . Now and then an old foot bridge, with a broken rail, a leaning cross, a cottage or the ruin of an hermitage! This sounds too bombast and too romantic to one that has not seen it, too cold for one that has." Or contrast with Addison's Italian letters passages like these, which foretoken Rogers and Byron. We get nothing so sympathetic till at least a half century later. "It is the most beautiful of Italian nights. . . There is a moon! There are starts for you! Do not you hear the fountain? Do not you smell the orange flowers? That building yonder is the convent of St. Isidore; and that eminence with the cypress-trees and pines upon it, the top of Mt. Quirinal."[45] "The Neapolitans work till evening: then take their lute or guitar and walk about the city, or upon the sea shore with it, to enjoy the _fresco_. One sees their little brown children jumping about stark naked and the bigger ones dancing with castanets, while others play on the cymbal to them."[46] "Kennst dud as Land," then already? The "small voices and an old guitar, Winning their way to an unguarded heart"? And then, for a prophecy of Scott, read the description of Netley Abbey,[47] in a letter to Nicholls in 1764. "My ferryman," writes Gray in a letter to Brown about the same ruin, "assured me that he would not go near it in the night time for all the world, though he knew much money had been found there. The sun was all too glaring and too full of gauds for such a scene, which ought to be visited only in the dusk of the evening." "If thou woulds't view fair Melrose aright Go visit it by the pale moonlight, For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins, Gray." In 1765, Gray visited the Scotch Highlands and sent enthusiastic histories of his trip to Wharton and Mason. "Since I saw the Alps, I have seen nothing sublime till now." "The Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the mountains 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." Again in 1770, the year before his death, he spent six weeks on a ramble through the western counties, descending the Wye in a boat for forty miles, and visiting among other spots which the muse had then, or has since, made illustrious, Hagley and the Leasowes, the Malvern Hills and Tintern Abby. But the most significant of Gray's "Lilliputian travels," was his tour of the Lake Country in 1769. Here he was on ground that has since become classic; and the lover of Wordsworth encounters with a singular interest, in Gray's "Journal in the Lakes," written nearly thirty years before the "Lyrical Ballads," names like Grasmere, Winander, Skiddaw, Helvellyn, Derwentwater, Borrowdale, and Lodore. What distinguishes the entries in this journal from contemporary writing of the descriptive kind is a certain intimacy of comprehension, a depth of tone which makes them seem like nineteenth-century work. To Gray the landscape was no longer a picture. It had sentiment, character, meaning, almost personality. Different weathers and different hours of the day lent it expressions subtler than the poets had hitherto recognized in the broad, general changes of storm and calm, light and darkness, and the successions of the seasons. He heard Nature when she whispered, as well as when she spoke out loud. Thomson could not have written thus, nor Shenstone, nor even, perhaps, Collins. But almost any man of cultivation and sensibility can write so now; or, if not so well, yet with the same accent. A passage or two will make my meaning clearer. "To this second turning I pursued my way about four miles along its borders [Ulswater], beyond a village scattered among trees and called Water Mallock, in a pleasant, grave day, perfectly calm and warm, but without a gleam of sunshine. Then, the sky seeming to thicken, the valley to grown more desolate, and evening drawing on, I returned by the way I came to Penrith. . . While I was here, a little shower fell, red clouds came marching up the hills from the east, and part of a bright rainbow seemed to rise along the side of Castle Hill. . . The calmness and brightness of the evening, the roar of the waters, and the thumping of huge hammers at an iron forge not far distant, made it a singular walk. . . In the evening walked alone down to the lake after sunset and saw the solemn coloring of night draw on, the last gleam of sunshine fading away on the hilltops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the day-time.[48] Wished for the moon, but she was dark to me and silent, hid in her vacant inter-lunar cave."[49] "It is only within a few years," wrote Joseph Warton in 1782, "that the picturesque scenes of our own country, our lakes, mountains, cascades, caverns, and castles, have been visited and described."[50] It was in this very year that William Gilpin published his "Observations on the River Wye," from notes taken upon a tour in 1770. This was the same year when Gray made his tour of the Wye, and hearing that Gilpin had prepared a description of the region, he borrowed and read his manuscript in June, 1771, a few weeks before his own death. These "Observations" were the first of a series of volumes by Gilpin on the scenery of Great Britain, composed in a poetic and somewhat over-luxuriant style, illustrated by drawings in aquatinta, and all described on the title page as "Relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty." They had great success, and several of them were translated into German and French.[51] [1] "An Apology for Smectymnuus." [2] Lines 162-168. See also "Mansus," 80-84. [3] "What resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son, Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptized or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont, or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabbia." --_Book I_, 579-587. [4] "Faery damsels met in forest wide By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore." --_Book II_, 359-361. [5] "Masson's Life of Milton," Vol. VI. P. 789 [6] "Essay on Pope," Vol. I. pp. 36-38 (5th edition). In the dedication to Young, Warton says: "The Epistles (Pope's) on the Characters of Men and Women, and your sprightly Satires, my good friend, are more frequently perused and quoted than 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' of Milton." [7] The Rev. Francis Peck, in his "New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton," in 1740, says that these two poems are justly admired by foreigners as well as Englishmen, and have therefore been translated into all the modern languages. This volume contains, among other things, "An Examination of Milton's Style"; "Explanatory and Critical Notes on Divers Passages of Milton and Shakspere"; "The Resurrection," a blank verse imitation of "Lycidas," "Comus," "L'Allegro" and "Il Penserosa," and the "Nativity Ode." Peck defends Milton's rhymed poems against Dryden's strictures. "He was both a perfect master of rime and could also express something by it which nobody else ever thought of." He compares the verse paragraphs of "Lycidas" to musical bars and pronounces its system of "dispersed rimes" admirable and unique. [8] "Life of Milton." [9] "Il Pacifico: Works of William Mason," London, 1811, Vol. I. p. 166. [10] "Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects." [11] "To Fancy." [12] _Cf_. Gray's "Elegy," first printed in 1751: "Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower, The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient, solitary reign." [13] "On the Approach of Summer." The "wattled cotes," "sweet-briar hedges," "woodnotes wild," "tanned haycock in the mead," and "valleys where mild whispers use," are transferred bodily into this ode from "L'Allegro." [14] Three volumes appeared in 1748; a second edition, with Vol. IV. added in 1749, Vols. V. and VI. in 1758. There were new editions in 1765, 1770, 1775, and 1782. Pearch's continuations were published in 1768 (Vols. VII. and VIII.) and 1770 (Vols. IX. and X.); Mendez's independent collection in 1767; and Bell's "Fugitive Poetry," in 18 volumes, in 1790-97. [15] The reader who may wish to pursue this inquiry farther will find the following list of Miltonic imitations useful: Dodsley's "Miscellany," I. 164, Pre-existence: "A Poem in Imitation of Milton," by Dr. Evans. This is in blank verse, and Gray, in a letter to Walpole, calls it "nonsense." II. 109. "The Institution of the Order of the Garter," by Gilbert West. This is a dramatic poem, with a chorus of British bards, which is several times quoted and commended in Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope." West's "Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline," is a "Lycidas" imitation. III. 214, "Lament for Melpomene and Calliope," by J. G. Cooper; also a "Lycidas" poem. IV. 50, "Penshurst," by Mr. F. Coventry: a very close imitation of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." IV. 181, "Ode to Fancy," by the Rev. Mr. Merrick: octosyllables. IV. 229, "Solitude, an Ode," by Dr. Grainger: octosyllables. V. 283, "Prologue to Comus," performed at Bath, 1756. VI. 148, "Vacation," by----, Esq.: "L'Allegro," very close-- "These delights, Vacation, give, And I with thee will choose to live." IX. (Pearch) 199, "Ode to Health," by J. H. B., Esq.: "L'Allegro." X. 5, "The Valetudinarian," by Dr. Marriott; "L'Allegro," very close. X. 97, "To the Moon," by Robert Lloyd: "Il Penseroso," close. Parody is one of the surest testimonies to the prevalence of a literary fashion, and in Vol X. p 269 of Pearch, occurs a humorous "Ode to Horror," burlesquing "The Enthusiast" and "The Pleasures of Melancholy," "in the allegoric, descriptive, alliterative, epithetical, hyperbolical, and diabolical style of our modern ode wrights and monody-mongers," form which I extract a passage: "O haste thee, mild Miltonic maid, From yonder yew's sequestered shade. . . O thou whom wandering Warton saw, Amazed with more than youthful awe, As by the pale moon's glimmering gleam He mused his melancholy theme. O Curfew-loving goddess, haste! O waft me to some Scythian waste, Where, in Gothic solitude, Mid prospects most sublimely rude, Beneath a rough rock's gloomy chasm, Thy sister sits, Enthusiasm." "Bell's Fugitive Poetry," Vol. XI, (1791), has a section devoted to "poems in the manner of Milton," by Evans, Mason, T. Warton and a Mr. P. (L'Amoroso). [16] See James Thomson's "City of Dreadful Night," xxi. Also the frontispiece to Mr. E. Stedman's "Nature of Poetry" (1892) and pp. 140-41 of the same. [17] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 209, 212. [18] "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century," pp. 375, 379. [19] Joseph mentions as one of Spenser's characteristics, "a certain pleasing melancholy in his sentiments, the constant companion of an elegant taste, that casts a delicacy and grace over all his composition," "Essay on Pope," Vol. II. p. 29. In his review of Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," he says: "the effect and influence of Melancholy, who is beautifully personified, on every object that occurs and on every part of the convent, cannot be too much applauded, or too often read, as it is founded on nature and experience. That temper of mind casts a gloom on all things. "'But o'er the twilight grows and dusky caves,' etc." --_Ibid_, Vol. I. p. 314. [20] "The Grave," by Robert Blair. [21] The aeolian harp was a favorite property of romantic poets for a hundred years. See Mason's "Ode to an Aeolus's Harp" (Works, Vol. I. p. 51). First invented by the Jesuit, Kircher, about 1650, and described in his "Musurgia Universalis," Mason says that it was forgotten for upwards of a century and "accidentally rediscovered" in England by a Mr. Oswald. It is mentioned in "The Castle of Indolence" (i. xl) as a novelty: "A certain music never known before Here lulled the pensive melancholy mind"-- a passage to which Collins alludes in his verses on Thomson's death-- "In yon deep bed of whispering reeds His airy harp shall now be laid." See "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" I. 341-42 (1805) "Like that wild harp whose magic tone Is wakened by the winds alone." And Arthur Cleveland Coxe's (_Christian Ballads_, 1840) "It was a wind-harp's magic strong, Touched by the breeze in dreamy song," And the poetry of the Annuals _passim_. [22] _Cf._ the "Elegy": "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech," etc. [23] "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." [24] "Hymn to Adversity" [25] "Ode on the Spring." [26] "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III. pp. 278-82. [27] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 233. [28] "Essay on Pope." [29] See _ante_, p. 114. [30] "Life of Collins." [31] Essay on "Pope." [32] Mr. Perry enumerates, among English imitators, Falconer, T. Warton, James Graeme, Wm. Whitehead, John Scott, Henry Headly, John Henry Moore, and Robert Lovell, "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 391. Among foreign imitations Lamartine's "Le Lac" is perhaps the most famous. [33] "Mason's Works," Vol. I. p. 179. [34] _Ibid._, Vol. I. p. 114. [35] _Cf_. Keats' unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," [36] Parnell's collected poems were published in 1722. [37] Not the least interesting among the progeny of Gray's "Elegy" was "The Indian Burying Ground" of the American poet, Philip Freneau (1752-1832). Gray's touch is seen elsewhere in Freneau, _e.g._, in "The Deserted Farm-house." "Once in the bounds of this sequestered room Perhaps some swain nocturnal courtship made: Perhaps some Sherlock mused amid the gloom, Since Love and Death forever seek the shade." [38] _Spectator_, No. 489. [39] No. 415. [40] John Hill Burton, in his "Reign of Queen Anne" give a passage from a letter of one Captain Burt, superintendent of certain road-making operations in the Scotch Highlands, by way of showing how very modern a person Carlyle's picturesque tourist is. The captain describes the romantic scenery of the glens as "horrid prospects." It was considerably later in the century that Dr. Johnson said, in answer to Boswell's timid suggestion that Scotland had a great many noble wild prospects, "I believe, sir, you have a great many, Norway, too, has noble wild prospects, and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high-road that leads him to England." [41] See also Gray's letter to Rev. James Brown (1763) inclosing a drawing, in reference to a small ruined chapel at York Minster; and a letter (about 1765) to Jas. Bentham, Prebendary of Ely whose "Essay on Gothic Architecture" has been wrongly attributed to Gray. [42] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1739. [43] To Richard West, 1739. [44] Gray, Walpole, and West had been schoolfellows and intimates at Eton. [45] To West, 1740. [46] To Mrs. Dorothy Gray, 1740. [47] "Pearch's Collection" (VII. 138) gives an elegiac quatrain poem on "The Ruins of Netley Abbey," by a poet with the suggestive name of George Keate; and "The Alps," in heavy Thomsonian blank verse (VII. 107) by the same hand. [48] "A soft and lulling sound is heard Of streams inaudible by day." _The White Doe of Rylstone, Wordsworth_. [49] "Samson Agonistes." [50] "Essay on Pope" (5th ed.), Vol. II. p. 180. [51] These were, in order of publication: "The Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland" (2 vols.), 1789; "The Highlands of Scotland," 1789; "Remarks on Forest Scenery," 1791; "The Western Parts of England and the Isle of Wight," 1798; "The Coasts of Hampshire," etc., 1804; "Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex," etc., 1809. The last two were posthumously published. Gilpin, who was a prebendary of Salisbury, died in 1804. Pearch's "Collection" (VII. 23) has "A Descriptive Poem," on the Lake Country, in octosyllabic couplets, introducing Keswick, Borrowdale, Dovedale, Lodore, Derwentwater, and other familiar localities. CHAPTER VI. The School of Warton In the progress of our inquiries, hitherto, we have met with little that can be called romantic in the narrowest sense. Though the literary movement had already begun to take a retrospective turn, few distinctly mediaeval elements were yet in evidence. Neither the literature of the monk nor the literature of the knight had suffered resurrection. It was not until about 1760 that writers began to gravitate decidedly toward the Middle Ages. The first peculiarly mediaeval type that contrived to secure a foothold in eighteenth-century literature was the hermit, a figure which seems to have had a natural attraction, not only for romanticizing poets like Shenstone and Collins, but for the whole generation of verse writers from Parnell to Goldsmith, Percy and Beattie--each of whom composed a "Hermit"--and even for the authors of "Rasselas" and "Tom Jones," in whose fictions he becomes a stock character, as a fountain of wisdom and of moral precepts.[1] A literary movement which reverts to the past for its inspiration is necessarily also a learned movement. Antiquarian scholarship must lead the way. The picture of an extinct society has to be pieced together from the fragments at hand, and this involves special research. So long as this special knowledge remains the exclusive possession of professional antiquaries like Gough, Hearne, Bentham, Perry, Grose,[2] it bears no fruit in creative literature. It produces only local histories, surveys of cathedrals and of sepulchral monuments, books about Druidic remains, Roman walls and coins, etc., etc. It was only when men of imagination and of elegant tastes were enlisted in such pursuits that the dry stick of antiquarianism put forth blossoms. The poets, of course, had to make studies of their own, to decipher manuscripts, learn Old English, visit ruins, collect ballads and ancient armor, familiarize themselves with terms of heraldry, architecture, chivalry, ecclesiology and feudal law, and in other such ways inform and stimulate their imaginations. It was many years before the joint labors of scholars and poets had reconstructed an image of medieval society, sharp enough in outline and brilliant enough in color to impress itself upon the general public. Scott, indeed, was the first to popularize romance; mainly, no doubt, because of the greater power and fervor of his imagination; but also, in part, because an ampler store of materials had been already accumulated when he began work. He had fed on Percy's "Reliques" in boyhood; through Coleridge, his verse derives from Chatterton; and the line of Gothic romances which starts with "The Castle of Otranto" is remotely responsible for "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." But Scott too was, like Percy and Walpole, a virtuoso and collector; and the vast apparatus of notes and introductory matter in his metrical tales, and in the Waverley novels, shows how necessary it was for the romantic poet to be his own antiquary. As was to be expected, the zeal of the first romanticists was not always a zeal according to knowledge, and the picture of the Middle Age which they painted was more of a caricature than a portrait. A large share of medieval literature was inaccessible to the general reader. Much of it was still in manuscript. Much more of it was in old and rare printed copies, broadsides and black-letter folios, the treasure of great libraries and of jealously hoarded private collections. Much was in dialects little understood-forgotten forms of speech-Old French, Middle High German, Old Norse, medieval Latin, the ancient Erse and Cymric tongues, Anglo-Saxon. There was an almost total lack of apparatus for the study of this literature. Helps were needed in the shape of modern reprints of scarce texts, bibliographies, critical editions, translations, literary histories and manuals, glossaries of archaic words, dictionaries and grammars of obsolete languages. These were gradually supplied by working specialists in different fields of investigation. Every side of medieval life has received illustration in its turn. Works like Tyrwhitt's edition of Chaucer (1775-78); the collections of mediaeval romances by Ellis (1805), Ritson (1802), and Weber (1810); Nares' and Halliwell's "Archaic Glossary" (1822-46), Carter's "Specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Paintings" (1780-94), Scott's "Demonology and Witchcraft" (1830), Hallam's "Middle Ages" (1818), Meyrick's "Ancient Armour" (1824), Lady Guest's "Mabinogion" (1838), the publications of numberless individual scholars and of learned societies like the Camden, the Spenser, the Percy, the Chaucer, the Early English Text, the Roxburgh Club,--to mention only English examples, taken at random and separated from each other by wide intervals of time,--are instances of the labors by which mediaeval life has been made familiar to all who might choose to make acquaintance with it. The history of romanticism, after the impulse had once been given, is little else than a record or the steps by which, one after another, new features of that vast and complicated scheme of things which we loosely call the Middle Ages were brought to light and made available as literary material. The picture was constantly having fresh details added to it, nor is there any reason to believe that it is finished yet. Some of the finest pieces of mediaeval work have only within the last few years been brought to the attention of the general reader; _e.g._, the charming old French story in prose and verse, "Aucassin et Nicolete," and the fourteenth-century English poem, "The Perle." The future holds still other phases of romanticism in reserve; the Middle Age seems likely to be as inexhaustible in novel sources of inspiration as classical antiquity has already proved to be. The past belongs to the poet no less than the present, and a great part of the literature of every generation will always be retrospective. The tastes and preferences of the individual artist will continue to find a wide field for selection in the rich quarry of Christian and feudal Europe. It is not a little odd that the book which first aroused, in modern Europe, an interest in Norse mythology should have been written by a Frenchman. This was the "Introduction à l'Histoire de Dannemarc," published in 1755 by Paul Henri Mallet, a native of Geneva and sometime professor of Belles Lettres in the Royal University at Copenhagen. The work included also a translation of the first part of the Younger Edda, with an abstract of the second part and of the Elder Edda, and versions of several Runic poems. It was translated into English, in 1770, by Thomas Percy, the editor of the "Reliques," under the title, "Northern Antiquities; or a Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion, and Laws of the ancient Danes." A German translation had appeared a few years earlier and had inspired the Schleswig-Holsteiner, Heinrich Wilhem von Gerstenberg, to compose his "Gedicht eines Skalden," which introduced the old Icelandic mythology into German poetry in 1766. Percy had published independently in 1763 "Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, translated from the Icelandic Language." Gray did not wait for the English translation of Mallet's book. In a letter to Mason, dated in 1758, and inclosing some criticisims on the latter's "Caractacus" (then in MS.), he wrote, "I am pleased with the Gothic Elysium. Do you think I am ignorant about either that, or the _hell_ before, or the _twilight_.[3] I have been there and have seen it all in Mallet's 'Introduction to the History of Denmark' (it is in French), and many other places." It is a far cry from Mallet's "System of Runic Mythology" to William Morris' "Sigurd the Volsung" (1877), but to Mallet belongs the credit of first exciting that interest in Scandinavian antiquity which has enriched the prose and poetry not only of England but of Europe in general. Gray refers to him in his notes on "The Descent of Odin," and his work continued to be popular authority on its subject for at least half a century. Scott cites it in his annotations on "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). Gray's studies in Runic literature took shape in "The Fatal Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin," written in 1761, published in 1768. These were paraphrases of two poems which Gray found in the "De Causis Contemnendae Mortis" (Copenhagen, 1689) of Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician of the seventeenth century. The first of them describes the Valkyrie weaving the fates of the Danish and Irish warriors in the battle of Clontarf, fought in the eleventh century between Sigurd, Earl of Orkney, and Brian, King of Dublin; the second narrates the descent of Odin to Niflheimer, to inquire of Hela concerning the doom of Balder.[4] Gray had designed these for the introductory chapter of his projected history of English poetry. He calls them imitations, which in fact they are, rather than literal renderings. In spite of a tinge of eighteenth-century diction, and of one or two Shaksperian and Miltonic phrases, the translator succeeded fairly well in reproducing the wild air of his originals. His biographer, Mr. Gosse, promises that "the student will not fail . . . in the Gothic picturesqueness of 'The Descent of Odin,' to detect notes and phrases of a more delicate originality than are to be found even in his more famous writings; and will dwell with peculiar pleasure on those passages in which Gray freed himself of the trammels of an artificial and conventional taste, and prophesied of the new romantic age that was coming." Celtic antiquity shared with Gothic in this newly around interest. Here too, as in the phrase about "the stormy Hebrides," "Lycidas" seems to have furnished the spark that kindled the imaginations of the poets. "Where were ye, nymphs, when the remorseless deep Closed o'er the head of your loved Lycidas? For neither were ye playing on the steep Where your old bards, the famous Druids lie, Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream." Joseph Warton quotes this passage twice in his "Essay on Pope" (Vol I., pp. 7 and 356, 5th ed.), once to assert its superiority to a passage in Pope's "Pastorals": "The mention of places remarkably romantic, the supposed habitation of Druids, bards and wizards, is far more pleasing to the imagination, than the obvious introduction of Cam and Isis." Another time, to illustrate the following suggestion: "I have frequently wondered that our modern writers have made so little use of the druidical times and the traditions of the old bards. . . Milton, we see, was sensible of the force of such imagery, as we may gather from this short but exquisite passage." As further illustrations of the poetic capabilities of similar themes, Warton gives a stanza from Gray's "Bard" and some lines from Gilbert West's "Institution of the Order of the Garter" which describe the ghosts of the Druids hovering about their ruined altars at Stonehenge: "--Mysterious rows Of rude enormous obelisks, that rise Orb within orb, stupendous monuments Of artless architecture, such as now Oft-times amaze the wandering traveler, By the pale moon discerned on Sarum's plain." He then inserts two stanzas, in the Latin of Hickes' "Thesaurus," of an old Runic ode preserved by Olaus Wormius (Ole Worm) and adds an observation upon the Scandinavian heroes and their contempt of death. Druids and bards now begin to abound. Collins' "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," _e.g._, commences with the line "In yonder grave a Druid lies." In his "Ode to Liberty," he alludes to the tradition that Mona, the druidic stronghold, was long covered with an enchantment of mist--work of an angry mermaid: "Mona, once hid from those who search the main, Where thousand elfin shapes abide." In Thomas Warton's "Pleasures of Melancholy," Contemplation is fabled to have been discovered, when a babe, by a Druid "Far in a hollow glade of Mona's woods," and borne by him to his oaken bower, where she "--loved to lie Oft deeply listening to the rapid roar Of wood-hung Menai, stream of druids old." Mason's "Caractacus" (1759) was a dramatic poem on the Greek model, with a chorus of British bards, and a principal Druid for choragus. The scene is the sacred grove in Mona. Mason got up with much care the description of druidic rites, such as the preparation of the adder-stone and the cutting of the mistletoe with a gold sickle, from Latin authorities like Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, Strabo, and Suetonius. Joseph Warton commends highly the chorus on "Death" in this piece, as well as the chorus of bards at the end of West's "Institution of the Garter." For the materials of his "Bard" Gray had to go no farther than historians and chroniclers such as Camden, Higden, and Matthew of Westminster, to all of whom he refers. Following a now discredited tradition, he represents the last survivor of the Welsh poetic guild, seated, harp in hand, upon a crag on the side of Snowdon, and denouncing judgment on Edward I, for the murder of his brothers in song. But in 1764 Gray was incited, by the publication of Dr. Evans' "Specimens,"[5] to attempt a few translations from the Welsh. The most considerable of these was "The Triumphs of Owen," published among Gray's collected poems in 1768. This celebrates the victory over the confederate fleets of Ireland, Denmark, and Normandy, won about 1160 by a prince of North Wales, Owen Ap Griffin, "the dragon son on Mona." The other fragments are brief but spirited versions of bardic songs in praise of fallen heroes: "Caràdoc," "Conan," and "The Death of Hoel." They were printed posthumously, though doubtless composed in 1764. The scholarship of the day was not always accurate in discriminating between ancient systems of religion, and Gray, in his letters to Mason in 1758, when "Caractacus" was still in the works, takes him to task for mixing the Gothic and Celtic mythologies. He instructs him that Woden and his Valhalla belong to "the doctrine of the Scalds, not of the Bards"; but admits that, "in that scarcity of Celtic ideas we labor under," it might be permissible to borrow from the Edda, "dropping, however, all mention of Woden and his Valkyrian virgins," and "without entering too minutely on particulars"; or "still better, to graft any wild picturesque fable, absolutely of one's own invention, upon the Druid stock." But Gray had not scrupled to mix mythologies in "The Bard," thereby incurring Dr. Johnson's censure. "The weaving of the winding sheet he borrowed, as he owns, from the northern bards; but their texture, however, was very properly the work of female powers, as the art of spinning the thread of life in another mythology. Theft is always dangerous: Gray has made weavers of the slaughtered bards, by a fiction outrageous and incongruous."[6] Indeed Mallet himself had a very confused notion of the relation of the Celtic to the Teutonic race. He speaks constantly of the old Scandinavians as Celts. Percy points out the difference, in the preface to his translation, and makes the necessary correction in the text, where the word Celtic occurs--usually by substituting "Gothic and Celtic" for the "Celtic" of the original. Mason made his contribution to Runic literature, "Song of Harold the Valiant," a rather insipid versification of a passage from the "Knytlinga Saga," which had been rendered by Bartholin into Latin, from him into French by Mallet, and from Mallet into English prose by Percy. Mason designed it for insertion in the introduction to Gray's abortive history of English poetry. The true pioneers of the mediaeval revival were the Warton brothers. "The school of Warton" was a term employed, not without disparaging implications, by critics who had no liking for antique minstrelsy. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas Warton, vicar of Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of Magdalen and Professor of Poetry at Oxford; which latter position was afterward filled by the younger of his two sons. It is interesting to note that a volume of verse by Thomas Warton, Sr., posthumously printed in 1748, includes a Spenserian imitation and translations of two passages from the "Song of Ragner Lodbrog," an eleventh-century Viking, after the Latin version quoted by Sir Wm. Temple in his essay "Of Heroic Virtue";[7] so that the romantic leanings of the Warton brothers seem to be an instance of heredity. Joseph was educated at Winchester,--where Collins was his schoolfellow--and both of the brothers at Oxford. Joseph afterward became headmaster of Winchester, and lived till 1800, surviving his younger brother ten years. Thomas was always identified with Oxford, where he resided for forty-seven years. He was appointed, in 1785, Camden Professor of History in the university, but gave no lectures. In the same year he was chosen to succeed Whitehead, as Poet Laureate. Both brothers were men of a genial, social temper. Joseph was a man of some elegance; he was fond of the company of young ladies, went into general society, and had a certain renown as a drawing-room wit and diner-out. He used to spend his Christmas vacations in London, where he was a member of Johnson's literary club. Thomas, on the contrary, who waxed fat and indolent in college cloisters, until Johnson compared him to a turkey cock, was careless in his personal habits and averse to polite society. He was the life of a common room at Oxford, romped with the schoolboys when he visited Dr. Warton at Winchester, and was said to have a hankering after pipes and ale and the broad mirth of the taproom. Both Wartons had an odd passion for military parades; and Thomas--who was a believer in ghosts--used secretly to attend hangings. They were also remarkably harmonious in their tastes and intellectual pursuits, eager students of old English poetry, Gothic architecture, and British antiquities. So far as enthusiasm, fine critical taste, and elegant scholarship can make men poets, the Wartons were poets. But their work was quite unoriginal. Many of their poems can be taken to pieces and assigned, almost line by line and phrase by phrase, to Milton, Thomson, Spenser, Shakspere, Gray. They had all of our romantic poet Longfellow's dangerous gifts of sympathy and receptivity, without a tenth part of his technical skill, or any of his real originality as an artist. Like Longfellow, they loved the rich and mellow atmosphere of the historic past: "Tales that have the rime of age, And chronicles of eld." The closing lines of Thomas Warton's sonnet "Written in a Blank Leaf of Dugdale's Monasticon"[8]--a favorite with Charles Lamb--might have been written by Longfellow: "Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways Of hoar Antiquity, but strewn with flowers." Joseph Warton's pretensions, as a poet, are much less than his younger brother's. Much of Thomas Warton's poetry, such as his _facetiae_ in the "Oxford Sausage" and his "Triumph of Isis," had an academic flavor. These we may pass over, as foreign to our present inquiries. So, too, with most of his annual laureate odes, "On his Majesty's Birthday," etc. Yet even these official and rather perfunctory performances testify to his fondness for what Scott calls "the memorials of our forefathers' piety or splendor." Thus, in the birthday odes for 1787-88, and the New Year ode for 1787, he pays a tribute to the ancient minstrels and to early laureates like Chaucer and Spenser, and celebrates "the Druid harp" sounding "through the gloom profound of forests hoar"; the fanes and castles built by the Normans; and the "--bright hall where Odin's Gothic throne With the broad blaze of brandished falchions shone." But the most purely romantic of Thomas Warton's poems are "The Crusade" and "The Grave of King Arthur." The former is the song which "The lion heart Plantagenet Sang, looking through his prison-bars," when the minstrel Blondel came wandering in search of his captive king. The latter describes how Henry II., on his way to Ireland, was feasted at Cilgarran Castle, where the Welsh bards sang to him of the death of Arthur and his burial in Glastonbury Abbey. The following passage anticipates Scott: "Illumining the vaulted roof, A thousand torches flamed aloof; From many cups, with golden gleam, Sparkled the red metheglin's stream: To grace the gorgeous festival, Along the lofty-windowed hall The storied tapestry was hung; With minstrelsy the rafters rung Of harps that with reflected light From the proud gallery glittered bright: While gifted bards, a rival throng, From distant Mona, nurse of song, From Teivi fringed with umbrage brown, From Elvy's vale and Cader's crown, From many a shaggy precipice That shades Ierne's hoarse abyss, And many a sunless solitude Of Radnor's inmost mountains rude, To crown the banquet's solemn close Themes of British glory chose." Here is much of Scott's skill in the poetic manipulation of place-names, _e.g._, "Day set on Norham's castled steep, And Tweed's fair river, broad and deep, And Cheviot's mountains lone"-- names which leave a far-resounding romantic rumble behind them. Another passage in Warton's poem brings us a long way on toward Tennyson's "Wild Tintagel by the Cornish sea" and his "island valley of Avilion." "O'er Cornwall's cliffs the tempest roared: High the screaming sea-mew soared: In Tintaggel's topmost tower Darkness fell the sleety shower: Round the rough castle shrilly sung The whirling blast, and wildly flung On each tall rampart's thundering side The surges of the tumbling tide, When Arthur ranged his red-cross ranks On conscious Camlan's crimsoned banks: By Mordred's faithless guile decreed Beneath a Saxon spear to bleed. Yet in vain a Paynim foe Armed with fate the mightly blow; For when he fell, an elfin queen, All in secret and unseen, O'er the fainting hero threw Her mantle of ambrosial blue, And bade her spirits bear him far, In Merlin's agate-axled car, To her green isle's enameled steep Far in the navel of the deep." Other poems of Thomas Warton touching upon his favorite studies are the "Ode Sent to Mr. Upton, on his Edition of the Faery Queene," the "Monody Written near Stratford-upon-Avon," the sonnets, "Written at Stonehenge," "To Mr. Gray," and "On King Arthur's Round Table," and the humorous epistle which he attributes to Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, denouncing the bishops for their recent order that fast-prayers should be printed in modern type instead of black letter, and pronouncing a curse upon the author of "The Companion to the Oxford Guide Book" for his disrespectful remarks about antiquaries. "May'st thou pore in vain For dubious doorways! May revengeful moths Thy ledgers eat! May chronologic spouts Retain no cipher legible! May crypts Lurk undiscovered! Nor may'st thou spell the names Of saints in storied windows, nor the dates Of bells discover, nor the genuine site Of abbots' pantries!" Warton was a classical scholar and, like most of the forerunners of the romantic school, was a trifle shame-faced over his Gothic heresies. Sir Joshua Reynolds had supplied a painted window of classical design for New College, Oxford; and Warton, in some complimentary verses, professes that those "portraitures of Attic art" have won him back to the true taste;[9] and prophesies that henceforth angels, apostles, saints, miracles, martyrdoms, and tales of legendary lore shall-- "No more the sacred window's round disgrace, But yield to Grecian groups the shining space. . . Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain, And brought my bosom back to truth again. . . For long, enamoured of a barbarous age, A faithless truant to the classic page-- Long have I loved to catch the simple chime Of minstrel harps, and spell the fabling rime; To view the festive rites, the knightly play, That decked heroic Albion's elder day; To mark the mouldering halls of barons bold, And the rough castle, cast in giant mould; With Gothic manners, Gothic arts explore, And muse on the magnificence of yore. But chief, enraptured have I loved to roam, A lingering votary, the vaulted dome, Where the tall shafts, that mount in massy pride, Their mingling branches shoot from side to side; Where elfin sculptors, with fantastic clew, O'er the long roof their wild embroidery drew; Where Superstition, with capricious hand, In many a maze, the wreathëd window planned, With hues romantic tinged the gorgeous pane, To fill with holy light the wondrous fane."[10] The application of the word "romantic," in this passage, to the mediaeval art of glass-staining is significant. The revival of the art in our own day is due to the influence of the latest English school of romantic poetry and painting, and especially to William Morris. Warton's biographers track his passion for antiquity to the impression left upon his mind by a visit to Windsor Castle, when he was a boy. He used to spend his summers in wandering through abbeys and cathedrals. He kept notes of his observations and is known to have begun a work on Gothic architecture, no trace of which, however, was found among his manuscripts. The Bodleian Library was one of his haunts, and he was frequently seen "surveying with quiet and rapt earnestness the ancient gateway of Magdalen College." He delighted in illuminated manuscripts and black-letter folios. In his "Observations on the Faëry Queene"[11] he introduces a digression of twenty pages on Gothic architecture, and speaks lovingly of a "very curious and beautiful folio manuscript of the history of Arthur and his knights in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, written on vellum, with illuminated initials and head-pieces, in which we see the fashion of ancient armour, building, manner of tilting and other particulars." Another very characteristic poem of Warton's is the "Ode Written at Vale-Royal Abbey in Cheshire," a monastery of Cistercian monks, founded by Edward I. This piece is saturated with romantic feeling and written in the stanza and manner of Gray's "Elegy," as will appear from a pair of stanzas, taken at random: "By the slow clock, in stately-measured chime, That from the messy tower tremendous tolled, No more the plowman counts the tedious time, Nor distant shepherd pens the twilight fold. "High o'er the trackless heath at midnight seen, No more the windows, ranged in array (Where the tall shaft and fretted nook between Thick ivy twines), the tapered rites betray." It is a note of Warton's period that, though Fancy and the Muse survey the ruins of the abbey with pensive regret, "severer Reason"--the real eighteenth-century divinity--"scans the scene with philosophic ken," and--being a Protestant--reflects that, after all, the monastic houses were "Superstition's shrine" and their demolition was a good thing for Science and Religion. The greatest service, however, that Thomas Warton rendered to the studies that he loved was his "History of English Poetry from the Twelfth to the Close of the Sixteenth Century." This was in three volumes, published respectively in 1774, 1777, and 1781. The fragment of a fourth volume was issued in 1790. A revised edition in four volumes was published in 1824, under the editorship of Richard Price, corrected, augmented, and annotated by Ritson, Douce, Park, Ashby, and the editor himself. In 1871 appeared a new revision (also in four volumes) edited by W. Carew Hazlitt, with many additions, by the editor and by well-known English scholars like Madden, Skeat, Furnivall, Morris, and Thomas and Aldis Wright. It should never be forgotten, in estimating the value of Warton's work, that he was a forerunner in this field. Much of his learning is out of date, and the modern editors of his history--Price and Hazlitt--seem to the discouraged reader to be chiefly engaged, in their footnotes and bracketed interpellations, in taking back statements that Warton had made in the text. The leading position, _e.g._, of his preliminary dissertation, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe"--deriving it from the Spanish Arabs--has long since been discredited. But Warton's learning was wide, if not exact; and it was not dry learning, but quickened by the spirit of a genuine man of letters. Therefore, in spite of its obsoleteness in matters of fact, his history remains readable, as a body of descriptive criticism, or a continuous literary essay. The best way to read it is to read it as it was written--in the original edition--disregarding the apparatus of notes, which modern scholars have accumulated about it, but remembering that it is no longer an authority and probably needs correcting on every page. Read thus, it is a thoroughly delightful book, "a classic in its way," as Lowell has said. Southey, too, affirmed that its publication formed an epoch in literary history; and that, with Percy's "Reliques," it had promoted, beyond any other work, the "growth of a better taste than had prevailed for the hundred years preceding." Gray had schemed a history of English poetry, but relinquished the design to Warton, to whom he communicated an outline of his own plan. The "Observations on English Metre" and the essay on the poet Lydgate, among Gray's prose remains, are apparently portions of this projected work. Lowell, furthermore, pronounces Joseph Warton's "Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope" (1756) "the earliest public official declaration of war against the reigning mode." The new school had its critics, as well as its poets, and the Wartons were more effective in the former capacity. The war thus opened was by no means as internecine as that waged by the French classicists and romanticists of 1830. It has never been possible to get up a very serious conflict in England, upon merely aesthetic grounds. Yet the same opposition existed. Warton's biographer tells us that the strictures made upon his essay were "powerful enough to damp the ardor of the essayist, who left his work in an imperfect state for the long space of twenty-six years," _i.e._, till 1782, when he published the second volume. Both Wartons were personal friends of Dr. Johnson; they were members of the Literary Club and contributors to the _Idler_ and the _Adventurer_. Thomas interested himself to get Johnson the Master's degree from Oxford, where the doctor made him a visit. Some correspondence between them is given in Boswell. Johnson maintained in public a respectful attitude toward the critical and historical work of the Wartons; but he had no sympathy with their antiquarian enthusiasm or their liking for old English poetry. In private he ridiculed Thomas' verses, and summed them up in the manner ensuing: "Whereso'er I turn my view, All is strange yet nothing new; Endless labor all along, Endless labor to be wrong; Phrase that time has flung away, Uncouth words in disarray, Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet, Ode and elegy and sonnet." And although he added, "Remember that I love the fellow dearly, for all I laugh at him," this saving clause failed to soothe the poet's indignant breast, when he heard that the doctor had ridiculed his lines. An estrangement resulted which Johnson is said to have spoken of even with tears, saying "that Tom Warton was the only man of genius he ever knew who wanted a heart." Goldsmith, too, belonged to the conservative party, though Mr. Perry[12] detects romantic touches in "The Deserted Village," such as the line, "Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe," or "On Torno's cliffs or Pambamarca's side." In his "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning" (1759) Goldsmith pronounces the age one of literary decay; he deplores the vogue of blank verse--which he calls an "erroneous innovation"--and the "disgusting solemnity of manner" that it has brought into fashion. He complains of the revival of old plays upon the stage. "Old pieces are revived, and scarcely any new ones admitted. . . The public are again obliged to ruminate over those ashes of absurdity which were disgusting to our ancestors even in an age of ignorance. . . What must be done? Only sit down contented, cry up all that comes before us and advance even the absurdities of Shakspere. Let the reader suspend his censure; I admire the beauties of this great father of our stage as much as they deserve, but could wish, for the honor of our country, and for his own too, that many of his scenes were forgotten. A man blind of one eye should always be painted in profile. Let the spectator who assists at any of these new revived pieces only ask himself whether he would approve such a performance, if written by a modern poet. I fear he will find that much of his applause proceeds merely from the sound of a name and an empty veneration for antiquity. In fact, the revival of those _pieces of forced humor, far-fetched conceit and unnatural hyperbole which have been ascribed to Shakspere_, is rather gibbeting than raising a statue to his memory." The words that I have italicized make it evident that what Goldsmith was really finding fault with was the restoration of the original text of Shakspere's plays, in place of the garbled versions that had hitherto been acted. This restoration was largely due to Garrick, but Goldsmith's language implies that the reform was demanded by public opinion and by the increasing "veneration for antiquity." The next passage shows that the new school had its _claque_, which rallied to the support of the old British drama as the French romanticists did, nearly a century later, to the support of Victor Hugo's _melodrames_.[13] "What strange vamped comedies, farcical tragedies, or what shall I call them--speaking pantomimes have we not of late seen?. . . The piece pleases our critics because it talks Old English; and it pleases the galleries because it has ribaldry. . . A prologue generally precedes the piece, to inform us that it was composed by Shakspere or old Ben, or somebody else who took them for his model. A face of iron could not have the assurance to avow dislike; the theater has its partisans who understand the force of combinations trained up to vociferation, clapping of hands and clattering of sticks; and though a man might have strength sufficient to overcome a lion in single combat, he may run the risk of being devoured by an army of ants." Goldsmith returned to the charge in "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), where Dr. Primrose, inquiring of the two London dames, "who were the present theatrical writers in vogue, who were the Drydens and Otways of the day," is surprised to learn that Dryden and Rowe are quite out of fashion, that taste has gone back a whole century, and that "Fletcher, Ben Jonson and all the plays of Shakspere are the only things that go down." "How," cries the good vicar, "is it possible the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humor, those overcharged characters which abound in the works you mention?" Goldsmith's disgust with this affectation finds further vent in his "Life of Parnell" (1770). "He [Parnell] appears to me to be the last of that great school that had modeled itself upon the ancients, and taught English poetry to resemble what the generality of mankind have allowed to excel. . . His productions bear no resemblance to those tawdry things which it has, for some time, been the fashion to admire. . . His poetical language is not less correct than his subjects are pleasing. He found it at that period in which it was brought to its highest pitch of refinement; and ever since his time, it has been gradually debasing. It is, indeed, amazing, after what has been done by Dryden, Addison, and Pope, to improve and harmonize our native tongue, that their successors should have taken so much pains to involve it into pristine barbarity. These misguided innovators have not been content with restoring antiquated words and phrases, but have indulged themselves in the most licentious transpositions and the harshest constructions; vainly imagining that, the more their writings are unlike prose, the more they resemble poetry. They have adopted a language of their own, and call upon mankind for admiration. All those who do not understand them are silent; and those who make out their meaning are willing to praise, to show they understand." This last sentence is a hit at the alleged obscurity of Gray's and Mason's odes. To illustrate the growth of a retrospective habit in literature Mr. Perry[14] quotes at length from an essay "On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets," by Vicesimus Knox, sometimes master of Tunbridge school, editor of "Elegant Extracts" and honorary doctor of the University of Pennsylvania. Knox's essays were written while he was an Oxford undergraduate, and published collectively in 1777. By this time the romantic movement was in full swing. "The Castle of Otranto" and Percy's "Reliques" had been out more than ten years; many of the Rowley poems were in print; and in this very year, Tyrwhitt issued a complete edition of them, and Warton published the second volume of his "History of English Poetry." Chatterton and Percy are both mentioned by Knox. "The antiquarian spirit," he writes, "which was once confined to inquiries concerning the manners, the buildings, the records, and the coins of the ages that preceded us, has now extended itself to those poetical compositions which were popular among our forefathers, but which have gradually sunk into oblivion through the decay of language and the prevalence of a correct and polished taste. Books printed in the black letter are sought for with the same avidity with which the English antiquary peruses a monumental inscription, or treasures up a Saxon piece of money. The popular ballad, composed by some illiterate minstrel, and which has been handed down by tradition for several centuries, is rescued from the hands of the vulgar, to obtain a place in the collection of the man of taste. Verses which, a few years past, were thought worthy the attention of children only, or of the lowest and rudest orders, are now admired for that artless simplicity which once obtained the name of coarseness and vulgarity." Early English poetry, continues the essayist, "has had its day, and the antiquary must not despise us if we cannot peruse it with patience. He who delights in all such reading as is never read, may derive some pleasure from the singularity of his taste, but he ought still to respect the judgment of mankind, which has consigned to oblivion the works which he admires. While he pores unmolested on Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and Occleve, let him not censure our obstinacy in adhering to Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Pope. . . Notwithstanding the incontrovertible merit of many of our ancient relics of poetry, I believe it may be doubted whether any one of them would be tolerated as the production of a modern poet. As a good imitation of the ancient manner, it would find its admirers; but, considered independently, as an original, it would be thought a careless, vulgar, inartificial composition. There are few who do not read Dr. Percy's own pieces, and those of other late writers, with more pleasure than the oldest ballad in the collection of that ingenious writer." Mr. Percy quotes another paper of Knox in which he divides the admirers of English poetry into two parties: "On one side are the lovers and imitators of Spenser and Milton; and on the other, those of Dryden, Boileau, and Pope"; in modern phrase, the romanticists and the classicists. Joseph Warton's "Essay on Pope" was an attempt to fix its subject's rank among English poets. Following the discursive method of Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faerie Queen," it was likewise an elaborate commentary on all of Pope's poems _seriatim_. Every point was illustrated with abundant learning, and there were digressions amounting to independent essays on collateral topics: one, _e.g._, on Chaucer, one on early French Metrical romances; another on Gothic architecture: another on the new school of landscape gardening, in which Walpole's essay and Mason's poem are quoted with approval, and mention is made of the Leasowes. The book was dedicated to Young; and when the second volume was published in 1782, the first was reissued in a revised form and introduced by a letter to the author from Tyrwhitt, who writes that, under the shelter of Warton's authority, "one may perhaps venture to avow an opinion that poetry is not confined to rhyming couplets, and that its greatest powers are not displayed in prologues and epilogues." The modern reader will be apt to think Warton's estimate of Pope quite high enough. He places him, to be sure, in the second rank of poets, below Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, yet next to Milton and above Dryden; and he calls the reign of Queen Anne the great age of English poetry. Yet if it be recollected that the essay was published only twelve years after Pope's death, and at a time when he was still commonly held to be, if not the greatest poet, at least the greatest artist in verse, that England had ever produced, it will be seen that Warton's opinions might well be thought revolutionary, and his challenge to the critics a bold one. These opinions can be best exhibited by quoting a few passages from his book, not consecutive, but taken here and there as best suits the purpose. "The sublime and the pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy. What is there transcendently sublime or pathetic in Pope?. . . He early left the more poetical provinces of his art, to become a moral, didactic, and satiric poet. . . And because I am, perhaps, unwilling to speak out in plain English, I will adopt the following passage of Voltaire, which, in my opinion, as exactly characteristizes Pope as it does his model, Boileau, for whom it was originally designed. 'Incapable peut-être du sublime qui élève l'áme, et du sentiment qui l'attendrit, mais fait pour éclairer ceux à qui la nature accorda l'un et l'autre; laborieux, sévère, précis, pur, harmonieux, il devint enfin le poëte de la Raison.'. . . A clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a poet; the most solid observations on human life, expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality and not poetry. . . It is a creative and glowing imagination, _acer spiritus ac vis_, and that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted and very uncommon character." Warton believes that Pope's projected epic on Brutus, the legendary found of Britain, "would have more resembled the 'Henriade' than the 'Iliad,' or even the 'Gierusalemme Liberata'; that it would have appeared (if this scheme had been executed) how much, and for what reasons, the man that is skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies of his contemporaries, is, THEREFORE, disqualified for representing the ages of heroism, and that simple life which alone epic poetry can gracefully describe. . . Wit and satire are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are eternal." The largest portion of Pope's work, says the author's closing summary, "is of the didactic, moral, and satiric kind; and consequently not of the most poetic species of poetry; when it is manifest that good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention. . . He stuck to describing modern manners; but those manners, because they are familiar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of the Muse. He gradually became one of the most correct, even, and exact poets that ever wrote. . . Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled. The perusal of him affects not our minds with such strong emotions as we feel from Homer and Milton; so that no man of a true poetical spirit is master of himself while he reads them. . . He who would think the 'Faerie Queene,' 'Palamon and Arcite,' the 'Tempest' or 'Comus,' childish and romantic might relish Pope. Surely it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, he is the great poet of Reason, the first of ethical authors in verse." To illustrate Pope's inferiority in the poetry of nature and passion, Warton quotes freely by way of contrast, not only from Spenser and Milton, but from such contemporaries of his own as Thomson, Akenside, Gray, Collins, Dyer, Mason, West, Shenstone, and Bedingfield. He complains that Pope's "Pastorals" contains no new image of nature, and his "Windsor Forest" no local color; while "the scenes of Thomson are frequently as wild and romantic as those of Salvator Rosa, varied with precipices and torrents and 'castled cliffs' and deep valleys, with piny mountains and the gloomiest caverns." "When Gray published his exquisite ode on Eton College . . . little notice was taken of it; but I suppose no critic can be found that will not place it far above Pope's 'Pastorals.'" A few additional passages will serve to show that this critic's literary principles, in general, were consciously and polemically romantic. Thus he pleads for the _mot précis_--that shibboleth of the nineteenth-century romanticists--for "_natural, little_ circumstances" against "those who are fond of _generalities_"; for the "lively painting of Spenser and Shakspere," as contrasted with the lack of picturesqueness and imagery in Voltaire's "Henriade." He praises "the fashion that has lately obtained, in all the nations of Europe, of republishing and illustrating their old poets."[15] Again, commenting upon Pope's well-known triplet, "Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full-resounding line, The long majestic march and energy divine!" he exclaims: "What! Did Milton contribute nothing to the harmony and extent of our language?. . . Surely his verses vary and resound as much, and display as much majesty and energy, as any that can be found in Dryden. And we will venture to say that he that studies Milton attentively, will gain a truer taste for genuine poetry than he that forms himself on French writers and their followers." Elsewhere he expresses a preference for blank verse over rhyme, in long poems on subjects of a dignified kind.[16] "It is perpetually the nauseous cant of the French critics, and of their advocates and pupils, that the English writers are generally incorrect. If correctness implies an absence of petty faults, this perhaps may be granted; if it means that, because their tragedians have avoided the irregularities of Shakspere, and have observed a juster economy in their fables, therefore the 'Athalia,' for instance, is preferable to 'Lear,' the notion is groundless and absurd. Though the 'Henriade' should be allowed to be free from any very gross absurdities, yet who will dare to rank it with the 'Paradise Lost'?. . . In our own country the rules of the drama were never more completely understood than at present; yet what uninteresting, though faultless, tragedies have we lately seen!. . . Whether or no the natural powers be not confined and debilitated by that timidity and caution which is occasioned by a rigid regard to the dictates of art; or whether that philosophical, that geometrical and systematical spirit so much in vogue, which has spread itself from the sciences even into polite literature, by consulting only reason, has not diminished and destroyed sentiment, and made our poets write from and to the head rather than the heart; or whether, lastly, when just models, from which the rules have necessarily been drawn, have once appeared, succeeding writers, by vainly and ambitiously striving to surpass those . . . do not become stiff and forced." One of these uninteresting, though faultless tragedies was "Cato," which Warton pronounces a "sententious and declamatory drama" filled with "pompous Roman sentiments," but wanting action and pathos. He censures the tameness of Addison's "Letter from Italy."[17] "With what flatness and unfeelingness has he spoken of statuary and painting! Raphael never received a more phlegmatic eulogy." He refers on the other hand to Gray's account of his journey to the Grande Chartreuse,[18] as worthy of comparison with one of the finest passages in the "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard." This mention of Addison recalls a very instructive letter of Gray on the subject of poetic style.[19] The romanticists loved a rich diction, and the passage might be taken as an anticipatory defense of himself against Wordsworth's strictures in the preface to the "Lyrical Ballads." "The language of the age," wrote Gray, "is never the language of poetry, except among the French, whose verse . . . differs in nothing from prose. Our poetry has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost everyone that has written has added something, by enriching it with foreign idioms and derivatives; nay, sometimes words of their own composition or invention. Shakspere and Milton have been great creators in this way . . . our language has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In truth Shakspere's language is one of his principal 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 picture." He then quotes a passage from "Richard III.," and continues, "Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern dramatics. To me they appear untranslatable, and if this be the case, our language is greatly degenerated." Warton further protests against the view which ascribed the introduction of true taste in literature to the French. "Shakspere and Milton imitated the Italians and not the French." He recommends also the reintroduction of the preternatural into poetry. There are some, he says, who think that poetry has suffered by becoming too rational, deserting fairyland, and laying aside "descriptions of magic and enchantment," and he quotes, _à propos_ of this the famous stanza about the Hebrides in "The Castle of Indolence."[20] The false refinement of the French has made them incapable of enjoying "the terrible graces of our irregular Shakspere, especially in his scenes of magic and incantations. These _Gothic_ charms are in truth more striking to the imagination than the classical. The magicians of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser have more powerful spells than those of Apollonius, Seneca, and Lucan. The enchanted forest of Ismeni is more awfully and tremendously poetical than even the grove which Caesar orders to be cut down in Lucan (i. iii. 400), which was so full of terrors that, at noonday or midnight, the priest himself dared not approach it-- "'Dreading the demon of the grove to meet.' "Who that sees the sable plumes waving on the prodigious helmet in the Castle of Otranto, and the gigantic arm on the top of the great staircase, is not more affected than with the paintings of Ovid and Apuleius? What a group of dreadful images do we meet with in the Edda! The Runic poetry abounds in them. Such is Gray's thrilling Ode on the 'Descent of Odin.'" Warton predicts that Pope's fame as a poet will ultimately rest on his "Windsor Forest," his "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard," and "The Rape of the Lock." To this prophecy time has already, in part, given the lie. Warton preferred "Windsor Forest" and "Eloisa" to the "Moral Essays" because they belonged to a higher kind of poetry. Posterity likes the "Moral Essays" better because they are better of their kind. They were the natural fruit of Pope's genius and of his time, while the others were artificial. We can go to Wordsworth for nature, to Byron for passion, and to a score of poets for both, but Pope remains unrivaled in his peculiar field. In other words, we value what is characteristic in the artist; the one thing which he does best, the precise thing which he can do and no one else can. But Warton's mistake is significant of the changing literary standards of his age; and his essay is one proof out of many that the English romantic movement was not entirely without self-conscious aims, but had its critical formulas and its programme, just as Queen Anne classicism had. [1] Dr. Johnson had his laugh at this popular person: "'Hermit hoar, in solemn cell Wearing out life's evening gray, Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell What is bliss, and which the way?' "Thus I spoke, and speaking sighed, Scarce suppressed the starting tear: When the hoary sage replied, '_Come, my lad, and drink some beer._'" [2] "Grose's Antiquities of Scotland" was published in 1791, and Burns wrote "Tam o'Shanter" to accompany the picture of Kirk Alloway in this work. See his poem, "On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations through Scotland." [3] "Ragnarök," or "Götterdämmerung," the twilight of the Gods [4] For a full discussion of Gray's sources and of his knowledge of Old Norse, the reader should consult the appendix by Professor G. L. Kittredge to Professor W. L. Phelps' "Selections from Gray" (1894, pp. xl-1.) Professor Kittredge concludes that Gray had but a slight knowledge of Norse, that he followed the Latin of Bartholin in his renderings; and that he probably also made use of such authorities as Torfaeus' "Orcades" (1697), Ole Worm's "Literatura Runica" (Copenhagen, 1636), Dr. George Hickes' monumental "Thesaurus" (Oxford, 1705), and Robert Sheringham's "De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio" (1716). Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1716) has a verse translation, "The Waking of Angantyr," from the English prose of Hickes, of a portion of the "Hervarar Saga." Professor Kittredge refers to Sir William Temple's essays "Of Poetry" and "Of Heroic Virtue." "Nichols' Anecdotes" (I. 116) mentions, as published in 1715, "The Rudiments of Grammar for the English Saxon Tongue; with an Apology for the study of Northern Antiquities." This was by Mrs. Elizabeth Elstob, and was addressed to Hickes, the compiler of the "Thesaurus." [5] "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards, translated into English," by Rev. Evan Evans, 1764. The specimens were ten in number. The translations were in English prose. The originals were printed from a copy which Davies, the author of the Welsh dictionary, had made of an ancient vellum MS. thought to be of the time of Edward II, Edward III, and Henry V. The book included a Latin "Dissertatio de Bardis," together with notes, appendices, etc. The preface makes mention of Macpherson's recently published Ossianic poems. [6] "Life of Gray." [7] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 73, 141-42. [8] Wm Dugdale published his "Monasticon Anglicanum," a history of English religious houses, in three parts, in 1655-62-73. It was accompanied with illustrations of the costumes worn by the ancient religious orders, and with architectural views. The latter, says Eastlake, were rude and unsatisfactory, but interesting to modern students, as "preserving representations of buildings, or portions of buildings, no longer in existence; as, for instance, the _campanile_, or detached belfry of Salisbury, since removed, and the spire of Lincoln, destroyed in 1547." [9] "Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds' Painted Window." _Cf._ Poe, "To Helen": "On desperate seas long wont to roam Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome." [10] This apology should be compared with Scott's verse epistle to Wm Ereskine, prefixed to the third canto of "Marmion." "For me, thus nurtured, dost thou ask The classic poet's well-conned task?" etc. Scott spoke of himself in Warton's exact language, as a "truant to the classic page." [11] See _ante_, pp. 99-101_._ [12] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 397. [13] Lowell mentions the publication of Dodsley's "Old Plays," (1744) as, like Percy's "Reliques," a symptom of the return of the past. Essay on "Gray." [14] "Eighteenth Century Literature," pp. 401-03. [15] It is curious, however, to find Warton describing Villon as "a pert and insipid ballad-monger, whose thoughts and diction were as low and illiberal as his life," Vol. II. p. 338 (Fifth Edition, 1806). [16] Warton quotes the follow bathetic opening of a "Poem in Praise of Blank Verse" by Aaron Hill, "one of the very first persons who took notice of Thomson, on the publication of 'Winter'": "Up from Rhyme's poppied vale! And ride the storm That thunders in blank verse!" --Vol. II. p. 186. [17] See _ante_, p. 57. [18] See _ante_, p. 181. [19] To Richard West, April, 1742. [20] See _ante_, p. 94. CHAPTER VII. The Gothic Revival. One of Thomas Warton's sonnets was addressed to Richard Hurd, afterward Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, and later of Worcester. Hurd was a friend of Gray and Mason, and his "Letters on Chivalry and Romance" (1762) helped to initiate the romantic movement. They perhaps owed their inspiration, in part, to Sainte Palaye's "Mémoires sur l'ancienne Chevalerie," the first volume of which was issued in 1759, though the third and concluding volume appeared only in 1781. This was a monumental work and, as a standard authority, bears much the same relation to the literature of its subject that Mallet's "Histoire de Dannemarc" bears to all the writing on Runic mythology that was done in Europe during the eighteenth-century. Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte Palaye was a scholar of wide learning, not only in the history of mediaeval institutions but in old French dialects. He went to the south of France to familiarize himself with Provençal: collected a large library of Provençal books and manuscripts, and published in 1774 his "Histoire de Troubadours." Among his other works are a "Dictionary of French Antiquities," a glossary of Old French, and an edition of "Aucassin et Nicolete." Mrs. Susannah Dobson, who wrote "Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry" (1795), made an English translation of Sainte Palaye's "History of the Troubadours" in 1779, and of his "Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry" in 1784. The purpose of Hurd's letters was to prove "the pre-eminence of the Gothic manners and fictions, as adapted to the ends of poetry, above the classic." "The greatest geniuses of our own and foreign countries," he affirms, "such as Ariosto and Tasso in Italy, and Spenser and Milton in England, were seduced by these barbarities of their forefathers; were even charmed by the Gothic romances. Was this caprice and absurdity in them? Or may there not be something in the Gothic Romance peculiarly suited to the view of a genius and to the ends of poetry? And may not the philosophic moderns have gone too far in their perpetual ridicule and contempt of it?" After a preliminary discussion of the origin of chivalry and knight-errantry and of the ideal knightly characteristics, "Prowess, Generosity, Gallantry, and Religion," which he derives from the military necessities of the feudal system, he proceeds to establish a "remarkable correspondency between the manners of the old heroic times, as painted by their romancer, Homer, and those which are represented to us in the books of modern knight-errantry." He compares, _e.g._, the Laestrygonians, Cyclopes_, _Circes, and Calypsos of Homer, with the giants, paynims, sorceresses encountered by the champions of romance; the Greek aoixoi with the minstrels; the Olympian games with tournaments; and the exploits of Hercules and Theseus, in quelling dragons and other monsters, with the similar enterprises of Lancelot and Amadis de Gaul. The critic is daring enough to give the Gothic manners the preference over the heroic. Homer, he says, if he could have known both, would have chosen the former by reason of "the improved gallantry of the feudal times, and the superior solemnity of their superstitions. The gallantry which inspirited the feudal times was of a nature to furnish the poet with finer scenes and subjects of description, in every view, than the simple and uncontrolled barbarity of the Grecian. . . There was a dignity, a magnificence, a variety in the feudal, which the other wanted." An equal advantage, thinks Hurd, the romancers enjoyed over the pagan poets in the point of supernatural machinery. "For the more solemn fancies of witchcraft and incantation, the horrors of the Gothic were above measure striking and terrible. The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic." Evidently the despised "Gothick" of Addison--as Mr. Howells puts it--was fast becoming the admired "Gothic" of Scott. This pronunciamento of very advanced romantic doctrine came out several years before Percy's "Reliques" and "The Castle of Otranto." It was only a few years later than Thomas Warton's "Observations on the Faërie Queene" and Joseph's "Essay on Pope," but its views were much more radical. Neither of the Wartons would have ventured to pronounce the Gothic manners superior to the Homeric, as materials for poetry, whatever, in his secret heart, he might have thought.[1] To Johnson such an opinion must have seemed flat blasphemy. Hurd accounts for the contempt into which the Gothic had fallen on the ground that the feudal ages had never had the good fortune to possess a great poet, like Homer, capable of giving adequate artistic expression to their life and ideals. _Carent vate sacro_. Spenser and Tasso, he thinks, "came too late, and it was impossible for them to paint truly and perfectly what was no longer seen or believed. . . As it is, we may take a guess of what the subject was capable of affording to real genius from the rude sketches we have of it in the old romancers. . . The ablest writers of Greece ennobled the system of heroic manners, while it was fresh and flourishing; and their works being masterpieces of composition, so fixed the credit of it in the opinion of the world, that no revolution of time and taste could afterward shake it. Whereas the Gothic, having been disgraced in their infancy by bad writers, and a new set of manners springing up before there were any better to do them justice, they could never be brought into vogue by the attempts of later poets." Moreover, "the Gothic manners of chivalry, as springing out of the feudal system, were as singular as that system itself; so that when that political constitution vanished out of Europe, the manners that belonged to it were no longer seen or understood. There was no example of any such manners remaining on the face of the earth. And as they never did subsist but once, and are never likely to subsist again, people would be led of course to think and speak of them as romantic and unnatural." Even so, he thinks that the Renaissance poets, Ariosto and Spenser, owe their finest effects not to their tinge of classical culture but to their romantic materials. Shakspere "is greater when he uses Gothic manners and machinery, than when he employs classical." Tasso, to be sure, tried to trim between the two, by giving an epic form to his romantic subject-matter, but Hurd pronounces his imitations of the ancients "faint and cold and almost insipid, when compared with his original fictions. . . If it was not for these _lies_ [_magnanima mensogna_] of Gothic invention, I should scarcely be disposed to give the 'Gierusalemme Liberata' a second reading." Nay, Milton himself, though finally choosing the classic model, did so only after long hesitation. "His favorite subject was Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. On this he had fixed for the greater part of his life. What led him to change his mind was partly, as I suppose, his growing fanaticism; partly his ambition to take a different route from Spenser; but chiefly, perhaps, the discredit into which the stories of chivalry had now fallen by the immortal satire of Cervantes. Yet we see through all his poetry, where his enthusiasm flames out most, a certain predilection for the legends of chivalry before the fables of Greece." Hurd says that, if the "Faërie Queene" be regarded as a Gothic poem, it will be seen to have unity of design, a merit which even the Wartons had denied it. "When an architect examines a Gothic structure by the Grecian rules he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules by which; when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have its merit, as well as the Grecian." The essayist complains that the Gothic fables fell into contempt through the influence of French critics who ridiculed and disparaged the Italian romancers, Ariosto and Tasso. The English critics of the Restoration--Davenant, Hobbes, Shaftesbury--took their cue from the French, till these pseudo-classical principles "grew into a sort of a cant, with which Rymer and the rest of that school filled their flimsy essays and rumbling prefaces. . . The exact but cold Boileau happened to say something about the _clinquant_ of Tasso," and "Mr. Addison,[2] who gave the law in taste here, took it up and sent it about," so that "it became a sort of watchword among the critics." "What we have gotten," concludes the final letter of the series, "by this revolution, is a great deal of good sense. What we have lost is a world of fine fabling, the illusion of which is so grateful to the _charméd spirit_ that, in spite of philosophy and fashion 'Faery' Spenser still ranks highest among the poets; I mean with all those who are earlier come of that house, or have any kindness for it." We have seen that, during the classical period, "Gothic," as a term in literary criticism, was synonymous with barbarous, lawless, and tawdry. Addison instructs his public that "the taste of most of our English poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic."[3] After commending the French critics, Bouhours and Boileau, for their insistence upon good sense, justness of thought, simplicity, and naturalness he goes on as follows: "Poets who want this strength of genius, to give that majestic simplicity to nature which we so much admire in the works of the ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign ornaments, and not to let any piece of wit, of what kind soever, escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who, like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavored to supply its place with all the extravagances of an irregular fancy." In the following paper (No. 63), an "allegorical vision of the encounter of True and False Wit," he discovers, "in a very dark grove, a monstrous fabric, built after the Gothic manner and covered with innumerable devices in that barbarous kind of sculpture." This temple is consecrated to the God of Dullness, who is "dressed in the habit of a monk." In his essay "On Taste" (No. 409) he says, "I have endeavored, in several of my speculations, to banish this Gothic taste which has taken possession among us." The particular literary vice which Addison strove to correct in these papers was that conceited style which infected a certain school of seventeenth-century poetry, running sometimes into such puerilities as anagrams, acrostics, echo-songs, rebuses, and verses in the shape of eggs, wings, hour-glasses, etc. He names, as special representatives of this affectation, Herbert, Cowley, and Sylvester. But it is significant that Addison should have described this fashion as Gothic. It has in reality nothing in common with the sincere and loving art of the old builders. He might just as well have called it classic; for, as he acknowledges, devices of the kind are to be found in the Greek anthology, and Ovid was a poet given to conceits. Addison was a writer of pure taste, but the coldness and timidity of his imagination, and the maxims of the critical school to which he belonged, made him mistake for spurious decoration the efflorescence of that warm, creative fancy which ran riot in Gothic art. The grotesque, which was one expression of this sappy vigor, was abhorrent to Addison. The art and poetry of his time were tame, where Gothic art was wild; dead where Gothic was alive. He could not sympathize with it, nor understand it. "Vous ne pouvez pas le comprendre; vous avez toujours haï la vie." I have quoted Vicesimus Knox's complaint that the antiquarian spirit was spreading from architecture and numismatics into literature.[4] We meet with satire upon antiquaries many years before this; in Pope, in Akenside's Spenserian poem "The Virtuoso" (1737); in Richard Owen Cambridge's "Scribleriad" (1751): "See how her sons with generous ardor strive, Bid every long-lost Gothic art revive,. . . Each Celtic character explain, or show How Britons ate a thousand years ago; On laws of jousts and tournaments declaim, Or shine, the rivals of the herald's fame. But chief that Saxon wisdom be your care, Preserve their idols and their fanes repair; And may their deep mythology be shown By Seater's wheel and Thor's tremendous throne."[5] The most notable instance that we encounter of virtuosity invading the neighboring realm of literature is in the case of Strawberry Hill and "The Castle of Otranto." Horace Walpole, the son of the great prime minister, Robert Walpole, was a person of varied accomplishments and undoubted cleverness. He was a man of fashion, a man of taste, and a man of letters; though, in the first of these characters, he entertained or affected a contempt for the last, not uncommon in dilettante authors and dandy artists, who belong to the _beau monde_ or are otherwise socially of high place, _teste_ Congreve, and even Byron, that "rhyming peer." Walpole, as we have seen, had been an Eton friend of Gray and had traveled--and quarreled--with him upon the Continent. Returning home, he got a seat in Parliament, the entrée at court, and various lucrative sinecures through his father's influence. He was an assiduous courtier, a keen and spiteful observer, a busy gossip and retailer of social tattle. His feminine turn of mind made him a capital letter-writer; and his correspondence, particularly with Sir Horace Mann, English ambassador at Florence, is a running history of backstairs diplomacy, court intrigue, subterranean politics, and fashionable scandal during the reigns of the second and third Georges. He also figures as an historian of an amateurish sort, by virtue of his "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors," "Anecdotes of Painting," and "Historic Doubts on Richard III." Our present concern with him, however, lies quite outside of these. It was about 1750 that Walpole, who had bought a villa at Strawberry Hill, on the Thames near Windsor, which had formerly belonged to Mrs. Chenevix, the fashionable London toy-woman, began to turn his house into a miniature Gothic castle, in which he is said to have "outlived three sets of his own battlements." These architectural experiments went on for some twenty years. They excited great interest and attracted many visitors, and Walpole may be regarded as having given a real impetus to the revival of pointed architecture. He spoke of Strawberry Hill as a castle, but it was, in fact, an odd blend of ecclesiastical and castellated Gothic applied to domestic uses. He had a cloister, a chapel, a round tower, a gallery, a "refectory," a stair-turret with Gothic balustrade, stained windows, mural scutcheons, and Gothic paper-hangings. Walpole's mock-gothic became something of a laughing-stock, after the true principles of medieval architecture were better understood. Since the time when Inigo Jones, court architect to James I., came back from Italy, where he had studied the works of Palladio; and especially since the time when his successor, Sir Christopher Wren, had rebuilt St. Paul's in the Italian Renaissance style, after the great fire of London in 1664, Gothic had fallen more and more into disuse. "If in the history of British art," says Eastlake, "there is one period more distinguished than another for the neglect of Gothic, it was certainly the middle of the eighteenth century." But architecture had this advantage over other arts, it had left memorials more obvious and imposing. Medieval literature was known only to the curious, to collectors of manuscript romances and black-letter ballads. The study of medieval arts like tempera painting, illuminating, glass-staining, wood-carving, tapestry embroidery; of the science of blazonry, of the details of ancient armor and costumes, was the pursuit of specialists. But Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral, and York Minster, ruins such as Melrose and Fountain Abbeys, Crichton Castle, and a hundred others were impressive witnesses for the civilization that had built them and must, sooner or later, demand respectful attention. Hence it is not strange that the Gothic revival went hand in hand with the romantic movement in literature, if indeed it did not give it its original impulse. "It is impossible," says Eastlake,[6] speaking of Walpole, "to peruse either the letters or the romances of this remarkable man, without being struck by the unmistakable evidence which they contain of his medieval predilections. His 'Castle of Otranto' was perhaps the first modern work of fiction which depended for its interest on the incidents of a chivalrous age, and it thus became the prototype of that class of novel which was afterward imitated by Mrs. Radcliffe and perfected by Sir Walter Scott. The feudal tyrant, the venerable ecclesiastic, the forlorn but virtuous damsel, the castle itself with its moats and drawbridge, its gloomy dungeons and solemn corridors, are all derived from a mine of interest which has since been worked more efficiently and to better profit. But to Walpole must be awarded the credit of its discovery and first employment." Walpole's complete works[7] contain elaborate illustrations and ground plans of Strawberry Hill. Eastlake give a somewhat technical account of its constructive features, its gables, buttresses, finials, lath and plaster parapets, wooden pinnacles and, what its proprietor himself describes as his "lean windows fattened with rich saints." From this I extract only the description of the interior, which was "just what one might expect from a man who possessed a vague admiration for Gothic without the knowledge necessary for a proper adaptation of its features. Ceilings, screens, niches, etc., are all copied, or rather parodied, from existing examples, but with utter disregard for the original purpose of the design. To Lord Orford, Gothic was Gothic, and that sufficed. He would have turned an altar-slab into a hall-table, or made a cupboard of a piscine, with the greatest complacency, if it only served his purpose. Thus we find that in the north bed-chamber, when he wanted a model for his chimney-piece, he thought he could not do better than adopt the form of Bishop Dudley's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He found a pattern for the piers of his garden gate in the choir of Ely Cathedral." The ceiling of the gallery borrowed a design from Henry VII.'s Chapel; the entrance to the same apartment from the north door of St. Alban's; and one side of the room from Archbishop Bourchier's tomb at Canterbury. Eastlake's conclusion is that Walpole's Gothic, "though far from reflecting the beauties of a former age, or anticipating those which were destined to proceed from a re-development of the style, still holds a position in the history of English art which commands our respect, for it served to sustain a cause which had otherwise been well-nigh forsaken." James Fergusson, in his "History of the Modern Styles of Architecture," says of Walpole's structures: "We now know that these are very indifferent specimens of the true Gothic art, and are at a loss to understand how either their author or his contemporaries could ever fancy that these very queer carvings were actual reproductions of the details of York Minster, or other equally celebrated buildings, from which they were supposed to have been copied." Fergusson adds that the fashion set by Walpole soon found many followers both in church and house architecture, "and it is surprising what a number of castles were built which had nothing castellated about them except a nicked parapet and an occasional window in the form of a cross." That school of bastard Gothic illustrated by the buildings of Batty Langley, and other early restorers of the style, bears an analogy with the imitations of old English poetry in the last century. There was the same prematurity in both, the same defective knowledge, crudity, uncertainty, incorrectness, feebleness of invention, mixture of ancient and modern manners. It was not until the time of Pugin[8] that the details of the medieval building art were well enough understood to enable the architect to work in the spirit of that art, yet not as a servile copyist, but with freedom and originality. Meanwhile, one service that Walpole and his followers did, by reviving public interest in Gothic, was to arrest the process of dilapidation and save the crumbling remains of many a half-ruinous abbey, castle, or baronial hall. Thus, "when about a hundred years since, Rhyddlan Castle, in North Wales, fell into the possession of Dr. Shipley, Dean of St. Asaph, the massive walls had been prescriptively used as stone quarries, to which any neighboring occupier who wanted building materials might resort; and they are honey-combed all round as high as a pick-ax could reach."[9] "Walpole," writes Leslie Stephen, "is almost the first modern Englishman who found out that our old cathedrals were really beautiful. He discovered that a most charming toy might be made of medievalism. Strawberry Hill, with all its gimcracks, its pasteboard battlements and stained-paper carvings, was the lineal ancestor of the new law-courts. The restorers of churches, the manufacturers of stained glass, the modern decorators and architects of all varieties, the Ritualists and the High Church party, should think of him with kindness. . . That he was quite conscious of the necessity for more serious study, appears in his letters; in one of which, _e.g._, he proposes a systematic history of Gothic architecture such as has since been often executed."[10] Mr. Stephen adds that Walpole's friend Gray "shared his Gothic tastes, with greatly superior knowledge." Walpole did not arrive at his Gothicism by the gate of literature. It was merely a specialized development of his tastes as a virtuoso and collector. The museum of curiosities which he got together at Strawberry Hill included not only suits of armor, stained glass, and illuminated missals, but a miscellaneous treasure of china ware, enamels, faïence, bronzes, paintings, engravings, books, coins, bric-a-brac, and memorabilia such as Cardinal Wolsey's hat, Queen Elizabeth's glove, and the spur that William III. wore at the Battle of the Boyne. Walpole's romanticism was a thin veneering; underneath it, he was a man of the eighteenth century. His opinions on all subjects were, if not inconsistent, at any rate notoriously whimsical and ill-assorted. Thus in spite of his admiration for Gray and his--temporary--interest in Ossian, Chatterton, and Percy's ballads, he ridiculed Mallet's and Gray's Runic experiments, spoke contemptuously of Spenser, Thomson, and Akenside, compared Dante to "a Methodist parson in bedlam," and pronounced "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books."[11] He said that poetry died with Pope, whose measure and manner he employed in his own verses. It has been observed that, in all his correspondence, he makes but a single mention of Froissart's "Chronicle," and that a sneer at Lady Pomfret for translating it. Accordingly we find, on turning to "The Castle of Otranto," that, just as Walpole's Gothicism was an accidental "sport" from his general virtuosity; so his romanticism was a casual outgrowth of his architectural amusements. Strawberry Hill begat "The Castle of Otranto," whose title is fitly chosen, since it is the castle itself that is the hero of the book. The human characters are naught. "Shall I even confess to you," he writes to the Rev. William Cole (March 9, 1765), "what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled, like mine, with Gothic story), and that, on the uppermost banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands. . . In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o'clock, till half an hour after one in the morning." "The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story," was published in 1765.[12] According to the title page, it was translated from the original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto--a sort of half-pun on the author's surname--by W. Marshall, Gent. This mystification was kept up in the preface, which pretended that the book had been printed at Naples in black-letter in 1529, and was found in the library of an old Catholic family in the north of England. In the preface to his second edition Walpole described the work as "an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern": declared that, in introducing humorous dialogues among the servants of the castle, he had taken nature and Shakspere for his models; and fell foul of Voltaire for censuring the mixture of buffoonery and solemnity in Shakspere's tragedies. Walpole's claim to having created a new species of romance has been generally allowed. "His initiative in literature," says Mr. Stephen, "has been as fruitful as his initiative in art. 'The Castle of Otranto,' and the 'Mysterious Mother,' were the progenitors of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, and probably had a strong influence upon the author of 'Ivanhoe.' Frowning castles and gloomy monasteries, knights in armor and ladies in distress, and monks, and nuns, and hermits; all the scenery and characters that have peopled the imagination of the romantic school, may be said to have had their origin on the night when Walpole lay down to sleep, his head crammed full of Wardour Street curiosities, and dreamed that he saw a gigantic hand in armor resting on the banisters of his staircase." It is impossible at this day to take "The Castle of Otranto" seriously, and hard to explain the respect with which it was once mentioned by writers of authority. Warburton called it "a master-piece in the Fable, and a new species likewise. . . The scene is laid in Gothic chivalry; where a beautiful imagination, supported by strength of judgment, has enabled the reader to go beyond his subject and effect the full purpose of the ancient tragedy; _i.e._, to purge the passions by pity and terror, in coloring as great and harmonious as in any of the best dramatic writers." Byron called Walpole the author of the last tragedy[13] and the first romance in the language. Scott wrote of "The Castle of Otranto": "This romance has been justly considered, not only as the original and model of a peculiar species of composition attempted and successfully executed by a man of great genius, but as one of the standard works of our lighter literature." Gray in a letter to Walpole (December 30, 1764), acknowledging the receipt of his copy, says: "It makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o' nights." Walpole's masterpiece can no longer make anyone cry even a little; and instead of keeping us out of bed, it sends us there--or would, if it were a trifle longer. For the only thing that is tolerable about the book is its brevity, and a certain rapidity in the action. Macaulay, who confesses its absurdity and insipidity, says that no reader, probably, ever thought it dull. "The story, whatever its value may be, never flags for a single moment. There are no digressions, or unreasonable descriptions, or long speeches. Every sentence carries the action forward. The excitement is constantly renewed." Excitement is too strong a word to describe any emotion which "The Castle of Otranto" is now capable of arousing. But the same cleverness which makes Walpole's correspondence always readable saves his romance from the unpardonable sin--in literature--of tediousness. It does go along and may still be read without a too painful effort. There is nothing very new in the plot, which has all the stock properties of romantic fiction, as common in the days of Sidney's "Arcadia" as in those of Sylvanus Cobb. Alfonso, the former lord of Otranto, had been poisoned in Palestine by his chamberlain Ricardo, who forged a will making himself Alfonso's heir. To make his peace with God, the usurper founded a church and two convents in honor of St. Nicholas, who "appeared to him in a dream and promised that Ricardo's posterity should reign in Otranto until the rightful owner should be grown too large to inhabit the castle." When the story opens, this prophecy is about to be fulfilled. The tyrant Manfred, grandson of the usurper, is on the point of celebrating the marriage of his only son, when the youth is crushed to death by a colossal helmet that drops, from nobody knows where, into the courtyard of the castle. Gigantic armor haunts the castle piecemeal: a monstrous gauntlet is laid upon the banister of the great staircase; a mailed foot appears in one apartment; a sword is brought into the courtyard on the shoulders of a hundred men. And finally the proprietor of these fragmentary apparitions, in "the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude," throws down the walls of the castle, pronounces the words "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso," and with a clap of thunder ascends to heaven. Theodore is, of course, the young peasant, grandson of the crusader by a fair Sicilian secretly espoused _en route_ for the Holy Land; and he is identified by the strawberry mark of old romance, in this instance the figure of a bloody arrow impressed upon his shoulder. There are other supernatural portents, such as a skeleton with a cowl and a hollow voice, a portrait which descends from its panel, and a statue that bleeds at the nose. The novel feature in the "Castle of Otranto" was its Gothic setting; the "wind whistling through the battlements"; the secret trap-door, with iron ring, by which Isabella sought to make her escape. "An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. The wind extinguished her candle, but an imperfect ray of clouded moonshine gleamed through a cranny in the roof of the vault and fell directly on the spring of the trap-door." But Walpole's medievalism was very thin. He took some pains with the description of the feudal cavalcade entering the castle gate with the great sword, but the passage is incorrect and poor in detail compared with similar things in Scott. The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to such a subject as "The Castle of Otranto."[14] Walpole's tragedy, "The Mysterious Mother," has not even that degree of importance which secures his romance a niche in literary history. The subject was too unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother," indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action is a castle at Narbonne and the _châtelaine_ is the heroine of the play. The other characters are knights, friars, orphaned damsels, and feudal retainers; there is mention of cloisters, drawbridges, the Vaudois heretics, and the assassination of Henri III. and Henri IV.; and the author's Whig and Protestant leanings are oddly evidenced in his exposure of priestly intrigues. "The Castle of Otranto" was not long in finding imitators. One of the first of these was Clara Reeve's "Champion of Virtue" (1777), styled on its title-page "A Gothic Story," and reprinted the following year as "The Old English Baron." Under this latter title it has since gone through thirteen editions, the latest of which, in 1883, gave a portrait of the author. Miss Reeve had previously published (1772) "The Phoenix," a translation of "Argenis," "a romance written in Latin about the beginning of the seventeenth century, by John Barclay, a Scotchman, and supposed to contain an allegorical account of the civil wars of France during the reign of Henry III."[15] "Pray," inquires the author of "The Champion of Virtue" in her address to the reader, "did you ever read a book called, 'The Castle of Otranto'? If you have, you will willingly enter with me into a review of it. But perhaps you have not read it? However, you have heard that it is an attempt to blend together the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient romance and modern novel. . . The conduct of the story is artful and judicious; and the characters are admirably drawn and supported; the diction polished and elegant; yet with all these brilliant advantages, it palls upon the mind. . . The reason is obvious; the machinery is so violent that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost _verge_ of probability, the effect had been preserved. . . For instance, we can conceive and allow of the appearance of a ghost; we can even dispense with an enchanted sword and helmet, but then they must keep within certain limits of credibility. A sword so large as to require a hundred men to lift it, a helmet that by its own weight forces a passage through a court-yard into an arched vault . . . when your expectation is wound up to the highest pitch, these circumstances take it down with a witness, destroy the work of imagination, and, instead of attention, excite laughter. . . In the course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects might be avoided." Accordingly Miss Reeve undertook to admit only a rather mild dose of the marvelous in her romance. Like Walpole she professed to be simply the editor of the story, which she said that she had transcribed or translated from a manuscript in the Old English language, a now somewhat threadbare device. The period was the fifteenth century, in the reign of Henry VI., and the scene England. But, in spite of the implication of its sub-title, the fiction is much less "Gothic" than its model, and its modernness of sentiment and manners is hardly covered with even the faintest wash of mediaevalism. As in Walpole's book, there are a murder and a usurpation, a rightful heir defrauded of his inheritance and reared as a peasant. There are a haunted chamber, unearthly midnight groans, a ghost in armor, and a secret closet with its skeleton. The tale is infinitely tiresome, and is full of that edifying morality, fine sentiment and stilted dialogue--that "old perfumed, powdered D'Arblay conversation," as Thackeray called it--which abound in "Evelina," "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and almost all the fiction of the last quarter of the last century. Still it was a little unkind in Walpole to pronounce his disciple's performance tedious and insipid, as he did. This same lady published, in 1785, a work in two volumes entitled "The Progress of Romance," a sort of symposium on the history of fiction in a series of evening conversations. Her purpose was to claim for the prose romance an honorable place in literature; a place beside the verse epic. She discusses the definitions of romance given in the current dictionaries, such as Ainsworth's and Littleton's _Narratio ficta--Scriptum eroticum--Splendida fabula_; and Johnson's "A military fable of the Middle Ages--A tale of wild adventures of war and love." She herself defines it as "An heroic fable," or "An epic in prose." She affirms that Homer is the father of romance and thinks it astonishing that men of sense "should despise and ridicule romances, as the most contemptible of all kinds of writing, and yet expatiate in raptures on the beauties of the fables of the old classic poets--on stories far more wild and extravagant and infinitely more incredible." After reviewing the Greek romances, like Heliodorus' "Theagenes and Chariclea," she passes on to the chivalry tales of the Middle Ages, which, she maintains, "were by no means so contemptible as they have been represented by later writers." Our poetry, she thinks, owes more than is imagined to the spirit of romance. "Chaucer and all our old writers abound with it. Spenser owes perhaps his immortality to it; it is the Gothic imagery that gives the principal graces to his work. . . Spenser has made more poets than any other writer of our country." Milton, too, had a hankering after the romances; and Cervantes, though he laughed Spain's chivalry away, loved the thing he laughed at and preferred his serious romance "Persiles and Sigismonda" to all his other works. She gives a list, with conjectural dates, of many medieval romances in French and English, verse and prose; but the greater part of the book is occupied with contemporary fiction, the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Crébillon, Marivaux, Rousseau, etc. She commends Thomas Leland's historical romance "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury" (1762), as "a romance in reality, and not a novel:--a story like those of the Middle Ages, composed of chivalry, love, and religion." To her second volume she appended the "History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt," englished from the French of Vattier, professor of Arabic to Louis XIV., who had translated it from a history of ancient Egypt written in Arabic. This was the source of Landor's poem, "Gebir." When Landor was in Wales in 1797, Rose Aylmer-- "Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes, May weep but never see"-- lent him a copy of Miss Reeve's "Progress of Romance," borrowed from a circulating library at Swansea. And so the poor forgotten thing retains a vicarious immortality, as the prompter of some of the noblest passages in modern English blank verse and as associated with one of the tenderest passages in Landor's life. Miss Reeve quotes frequently from Percy's "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels," mentions Ossian and Chatterton and refers to Hurd, Warton, and other authorities. "It was not till I had completed my design," she writes in her preface, "that I read either Dr. Beattie's 'Dissertation on Fable and Romance' or Mr. Warton's 'History of English Poetry.'" The former of these was an essay of somewhat more than a hundred pages by the author of "The Minstrel." It is of no great importance and follows pretty closely the lines of Hurd's "Letters on Chivalry and Romance," to which Beattie repeatedly refers in his footnotes. The author pursues the beaten track in inquiries of the kind: discusses the character of the Gothic tribes, the nature of the feudal system, and the institutions of chivalry and knight-errantry. Romance, it seems, was "one of the consequences of chivalry. The first writers in this way exhibited a species of fable different from all that had hitherto appeared. They undertook to describe the adventures of those heroes who professed knight-errantry. The world was then ignorant and credulous and passionately fond of wonderful adventures and deeds of valor. They believed in giants, dwarfs, dragons, enchanted castles, and every imaginable species of necromancy. These form the materials of the old romance. The knight-errant was described as courteous, religious, valiant, adventurous, and temperate. Some enchanters befriended and others opposed him. To do his mistress honor, and to prove himself worthy of her, he was made to encounter the warrior, hew down the giant, cut the dragon in pieces, break the spell of the necromancer, demolish the enchanted castle, fly through the air on wooden or winged horses, or, with some magician for his guide, to descend unhurt through the opening earth and traverse the caves in the bottom of the ocean. He detected and punished the false knight, overthrew or converted the infidel, restored the exiled monarch to his dominions and the captive damsel to her parents; he fought at the tournament, feasted in the hall, and bore a part in the warlike processions." There is nothing very startling in these conclusions. Scholars like Percy, Tyrwhitt, and Ritson, who, as collectors and editors, rescued the fragments of ancient ministrelsy and gave the public access to concrete specimens of mediaeval poetry, performed a more useful service than mild clerical essayists, such as Beattie and Hurd, who amused their leisure with general speculations about the origin of romance and whether it came in the first instance from the troubadours or the Saracens or the Norsemen. One more passage, however, may be transcribed from Beattie's "Dissertation," because it seems clearly a suggestion from "The Castle of Otranto." "The castles of the greater barons, reared in a rude but grand style of architecture, full of dark and winding passages, of secret apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be haunted with spirits, and undermined by subterraneous labyrinths as places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the crevices of old walls and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy doors on rusty hinges of iron; the shrieking of bats and the screaming of owls and other creatures that resort to desolate or half-inhabited buildings; these and the like circumstances in the domestic life of the people I speak of, would multiply their superstitions and increase their credulity; and among warriors who set all danger at defiance, would encourage a passion for wild adventure and difficult enterprise." One of the books reviewed by Miss Reeve is worth mentioning, not for its intrinsic importance, but for its early date. "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, An Historical Romance," in two volumes, and published two years before "The Castle of Otranto," is probably the first fiction of the kind in English literature. Its author was Thomas Leland, an Irish historian and doctor of divinity.[16] "The outlines of the following story," begins the advertisement, "and some of the incidents and more minute circumstances, are to be found in some of the ancient English histories." The period of the action is the reign of Henry III. The king is introduced in person, and when we hear him swearing "by my Halidome," we rub our eyes and ask, "Can this be Scott?" But we are soon disabused, for the romance, in spite of the words of the advertisement, is very little historical, and the fashion of it is thinly wordy and sentimental. The hero is the son of Henry II. and Fair Rosamond, but his speech is Grandisonian. The adventures are of the usual kind: the _dramatis personae_ include gallant knights who go a-tilting with their ladies' gloves upon their casques, usurpers, villains, pirates, a wicked monk who tries to poison the hero, an oppressed countess, a distressed damsel disguised as a page, a hermit who has a cave in a mountain side, etc. The Gothic properties are few; though the frontispiece to the first volume represents a cowled monk raising from the ground the figure of a swooning knight in complete armor, in front of an abbey church with an image of the Virgin and Child sculptured in a niche above the door; and the building is thus described in the text: "Its windows crowded with the foliage of their ornaments, and dimmed by the hand of the painter; its numerous spires towering above the roof, and the Christian ensign on its front, declared it a residence of devotion and charity." An episode in the story narrates the death of a father by the hand of his son in the Barons' War of Henry III. But no farther advantage is taken of the historic background afforded by this civil conflict, nor is Simon de Montfort so much as named in the whole course of the book. Clara Reeve was the daughter of a clergyman. She lived and died at Ipswich (1725-1803). Walter Scott contributed a memoir of her to "Ballantyne's Novelists' Library," in which he defended Walpole's frank use of the supernatural against her criticisms, quoted above, and gave the preference to Walpole's method.[17] She acknowledged that her romance was a "literary descendant of 'Otranto';" but the author of the latter, evidently nettled by her strictures, described "The Old English Baron," as "Otranto reduced to reason and probability," and declared that any murder trial at the Old Bailey would have made a more interesting story. Such as it is, it bridges the interval between its model and the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Lewis' "Monk" (1795), and Maturin's "Fatal Revenge, or the Family of Montorio" (1807).[18] Anne Radcliffe--born Ward in 1764, the year of "Otranto"--was the wife of an editor, who was necessarily absent from home much of the time until late at night. A large part of her writing was done to amuse her loneliness in the still hours of evening; and the wildness of her imagination, and the romantic love of night and solitude which pervades her books, are sometimes accounted for in this way. In 1809 it was currently reported and believed that Mrs. Radcliffe was dead. Another form of the rumor was that she had been insane by continually poring over visions of horror and mystery. Neither report was true; she lived till 1823, in full possession of her faculties, although she published nothing after 1797. The circulation of such stories shows how retired, and even obscure, a life this very popular writer contrived to lead. It would be tedious to give here an analysis of these once famous fictions _seriatim_.[19] They were very long, very much alike, and very much overloaded with sentiment and description. The plots were complicated and abounded in the wildest improbabilities and in those incidents which were once the commonplaces of romantic fiction and which realism has now turned out of doors: concealments, assassinations, duels, disguises, kidnappings, escapes, elopements, intrigues, forged documents, discoveries of old crimes, and identifications of lost heirs. The characters, too, were of the conventional kind. There were dark-browed, crime-stained villains--forerunners, perhaps of Manfred and Lara, for the critics think that Mrs. Radcliffe's stories were not without important influence on Byron.[20] There were high-born, penitent dames who retired to convents in expiation of sins which are not explained until the general raveling of clews in the final chapter. There were bravoes, banditti, feudal tyrants, monks, inquisitors, soubrettes, and simple domestics _a la_ Bianca, in Walpole's romance. The lover was of the type adored by our great-grandmothers, handsome, melancholy, passionate, respectful but desperate, a user of most choice English; with large black eyes, smooth white forehead, and jetty curls, now sunk, Mr. Perry says, to the covers of prune boxes. The heroine, too, was sensitive and melancholy. When alone upon the seashore or in the mountains, at sunset or twilight, or under the midnight moon, or when the wind is blowing, she overflows into stanza or sonnet, "To Autumn," "To Sunset," "To the Bat," "To the Nightingale," "To the Winds," "To Melancholy," "Song of the Evening Hour." We have heard this pensive music drawing near in the strains of the Miltonic school, but in Mrs. Radcliffe the romantic gloom is profound and all-pervading. In what pastures she had fed is manifest from the verse captions that head her chapters, taken mainly from Blair, Thomson, Warton, Gray, Collins, Beattie, Mason, and Walpole's "Mysterious Mother." Here are a few stanzas from her ode "To Melancholy": "Spirit of love and sorrow, hail! Thy solemn voice from far I hear, Mingling with evening's dying gale: Hail, with thy sadly pleasing tear! "O at this still, this lonely hour-- Thine own sweet hour of closing day-- Awake thy lute, whose charmful power Shall call up fancy to obey: "To paint the wild, romantic dream That meets the poet's closing eye, As on the bank of shadowy stream He breathes to her the fervid sigh. "O lonely spirit, let thy song Lead me through all thy sacred haunt, The minster's moonlight aisles along Where specters raise the midnight chant." In Mrs. Radcliffe's romances we find a tone that is absent from Walpole's: romanticism plus sentimentalism. This last element had begun to infuse itself into general literature about the middle of the century, as a protest and reaction against the emotional coldness of the classical age. It announced itself in Richardson, Rousseau, and the youthful Goethe; in the _comédie larmoyante_, both French and English; found its cleverest expression in Sterne, and then, becoming a universal vogue, deluged fiction with productions like Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," Miss Burney's "Evelina," and the novels of Jane Porter and Mrs. Opie. Thackeray said that there was more crying in "Thaddeus of Warsaw" than in any novel he ever remembered to have read.[21] Emily, in the "Mysteries of Udolpho" cannot see the moon, or hear a guitar or an organ or the murmur of the pines, without weeping. Every page is bedewed with the tear of sensibility; the whole volume is damp with it, and ever and anon a chorus of sobs goes up from the entire company. Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines are all descendents of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, but under more romantic circumstances. They are beset with a thousand difficulties; carried off by masked ruffians, immured in convents, held captive in robber castles, encompassed with horrors natural and supernatural, persecuted, threatened with murder and with rape. But though perpetually sighing, blushing, trembling, weeping, fainting, they have at bottom a kind of toughness that endures through all. They rebuke the wicked in stately language, full of noble sentiments and moral truths. They preserve the most delicate feelings of propriety in situations the most discouraging. Emily, imprisoned in the gloomy castle of Udolpho, in the power of ruffians whose brawls and orgies fill night and day with horror, in hourly fear for her virtue and her life, sends for the lord of the castle,--whom she believes to have murdered her aunt,--and reminds him that, as her protectress is now dead, it would not be proper for her to stay any longer under his roof thus unchaperoned, and will he please, therefore, send her home? Mrs. Radcliffe's fictions are romantic, but not usually mediaeval in subject. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho," the period of the action is the end of the sixteenth century; in the "Romance of the Forest," 1658; in "The Italian," about 1760. But her machinery is prevailingly Gothic and the real hero of the story is commonly, as in Walpole, some haunted building. In the "Mysteries of Udolpho" it is a castle in the Apennines; in the "Romance of the Forest," a deserted abbey in the depth of the woods; in "The Italian," the cloister of the Black Penitents. The moldering battlements, the worm-eaten tapestries, the turret staircases, secret chambers, underground passages, long, dark corridors where the wind howls dismally, and distant doors which slam at midnight all derive from "Otranto." So do the supernatural fears which haunt these abodes of desolation; the strains of mysterious music, the apparitions which glide through the shadowy apartments, the hollow voices that warn the tyrant to beware. But her method here is quite different from Walpole's; she tacks a natural explanation to every unearthly sight or sound. The hollow voices turn out to be ventriloquism; the figure of a putrefying corpse which Emily sees behind the black curtain in the ghost chamber at Udolpho is only a wax figure, contrived as a _memento mori_ for a former penitent. After the reader has once learned this trick he refuses to be imposed upon again, and, whenever he encounters a spirit, feels sure that a future chapter will embody it back into flesh and blood. There is plenty of testimony to the popularity of these romances. Thackeray says that a lady of his acquaintance, an inveterate novel reader, names Valancourt as one of the favorite heroes of her youth. "'Valancourt? And who was he?' cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmamma's' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. . . Enquire at Mudie's or the London Library, who asks for the 'Mysteries of Udolpho' now."[22] Hazlitt said that he owed to Mrs. Radcliffe his love of moonlight nights, autumn leaves and decaying ruins. It was, indeed, in the melodramatic manipulation of landscape that this artist was most original. "The scenes that savage Rosa dashed" seemed to have been her model, and critics who were fond of analogy called her the Salvator Rosa of fiction. It is here that her influence on Byron and Chateaubriand is most apparent.[23] Mrs. Radcliffe's scenery is not quite to our modern taste, any more than are Salvator's paintings. Her Venice by moonlight, her mountain gorges with their black pines and foaming torrents, are not precisely the Venice and the Alps of Ruskin; rather of the operatic stage. Still they are impressive in their way, and in this department she possessed genuine poetic feels and a real mastery of the art of painting in distemper. Witness the picture of the castle of Udolpho, on Emily's first sight of it, and the hardly less striking description, in the "Romance of the Forest," of the ruined abbey in which the La Motte family take refuge: "He approached and perceived the Gothic remains of an abbey: it stood on a kind of rude lawn, overshadowed by high and spreading trees, which seemed coeval with the building, and diffused a romantic gloom around. The greater part of the pile appeared to be sinking into ruins, and that which had withstood the ravages of time showed the remaining features of the fabric more awful in decay. The lofty battlements, thickly enwreathed with ivy, were half demolished and become the residence of birds of prey. Huge fragments of the eastern tower, which was almost demolished, lay scattered amid the high grass, that waved slowly in the breeze. 'The thistle shook its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind.'[24] A Gothic gate, richly ornamented with fretwork, which opened into the main body of the edifice, but which was now obstructed with brushwood, remained entire. Above the vast and magnificent portal of this gate arose a window of the same order, whose pointed arches still exhibited fragments of stained glass, once the pride of monkish devotion. La Motte, thinking it possible it might yet shelter some human being, advanced to the gate and lifted a massy knocker. The hollow sounds rung through the emptiness of the place. After waiting a few minutes, he forced back the gate, which was heavy with iron-work, and creaked harshly on its hinges. . . From this chapel he passed into the nave of the great church, of which one window, more perfect than the rest, opened upon a long vista of the forest, through which was seen the rich coloring of evening, melting by imperceptible gradations into the solemn gray of upper air." Mrs. Radcliffe never was in Italy or Switzerland or the south of France; she divined the scenery of her romances from pictures and descriptions at second hand. But she accompanied her husband in excursions to the Lakes and other parts of England, and in 1794 made the tour of the Rhine.[25] The passages in her diary, recording these travels, are much superior in the truthfulness and local color of their nature sketching to anything in her novels. Mrs. Radcliffe is furthermore to be credited with a certain skill in producing terror, by the use of that favorite weapon in the armory of the romanticists, mystery. If she did not invent a new shudder, as Hugo said of Baudelaire, she gave at least a new turn to the old-fashioned ghost story. She creates in her readers a feeling of impending danger, suspense, foreboding. There is a sense of unearthly presences in these vast, empty rooms; the silence itself is ominous; echoes sound like footfalls, ghostly shadows lurk in dark corners, whispers come from behind the arras, as it stirs in the gusts of wind.[26] The heroine is afraid to look in the glass lest she should see another face there beside her own; her lamp expires and leaves her in the dark just as she is coming to the critical point in the manuscript which she has found in an old chest, etc., etc., But the tale loses its impressiveness as soon as it strays beyond the shade of the battlements. The Gothic castle or priory is still, as in Walpole, the nucleus of the story. Two of these romances, the earliest and the latest, though they are the weakest of the series, have a special interest for us as affording points of comparison with the Waverly novels. "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" is the narrative of a feud between two Highland clans, and its scene is the northeastern coast of Scotland, "in the most romantic part of the Highlands," where the castle of Athlin--like Uhland's "Schloss am Meer"--stood "on the summit of a rock whose base was in the sea." This was a fine place for storms. "The winds burst in sudden squalls over the deep and dashed the foaming waves against the rocks with inconceivable fury. The spray, notwithstanding the high situation of the castle, flew up with violence against the windows. . . The moon shone faintly by intervals, through broken clouds, upon the waters, illumining the white foam which burst around. . . The surges broke on the distant shores in deep resounding murmurs, and the solemn pauses between the stormy gusts filled the mind with enthusiastic awe." Perhaps the description slightly reminds of the picture, in "Marmion," of Tantallon Castle, the hold of the Red Douglases on the German Ocean, a little north of Berwick, whose frowning towers have recently done duty again in Stevenson's "David Balfour." The period of the action is but vaguely indicated; but, as the weapons used in the attack on the castle are bows and arrows, we may regard the book as mediaeval in intention. Scott says that the scene of the romance was Scotland in the dark ages, and complains that the author evidently knew nothing of Scottish life or scenery. This is true; her castles might have stood anywhere. There is no mention of the pipes or the plaid. Her rival chiefs are not Gaelic caterans, but just plain feudal lords. Her baron of Dunbayne is like any other baron; or rather, he is unlike any baron that ever was on sea or land or anywhere else except in the pages of a Gothic romance. "Gaston de Blondville" was begun in 1802 and published posthumously in 1826, edited by Sergeant Talfourd. Its inspiring cause was a visit which the author made in the autumn of 1802 to Warwick Castle and the ruins of Kenilworth. The introduction has the usual fiction of an old manuscript found in an oaken chest dug up from the foundation of a chapel of Black Canons at Kenilworth: a manuscript richly illuminated with designs at the head of each chapter--which are all duly described--and containing a "trew chronique of what passed at Killingworth, in Ardenn, when our Soveren Lord the Kynge kept ther his Fest of Seynt Michel: with ye marveylous accident that there befell at the solempnissacion of the marriage of Gaston de Blondeville. With divers things curious to be known thereunto purtayning. With an account of the grete Turney there held in the year MCCLVI. Changed out of the Norman tongue by Grymbald, Monk of Senct Marie Priori in Killingworth." Chatterton's forgeries had by this time familiarized the public with imitations of early English. The finder of this manuscript pretends to publish a modernized version of it, while endeavoring "to preserve somewhat of the air of the old style." This he does by a poor reproduction, not of thirteenth-century, but of sixteenth-century English, consisting chiefly in inversions of phrase and the occasional use of a _certes_ or _naithless_. Two words in particular seem to have struck Mrs. Radcliffe as most excellent archaisms: _ychon_ and _his-self_, which she introduces at every turn. "Gaston de Blondville," then, is a tale of the time of Henry III. The king himself is a leading figure and so is Prince Edward. Other historical personages are brought in, such as Simon de Montfort and Marie de France, but little use is made of them. The book is not indeed, in any sense, an historical novel like Scott's "Kenilworth," the scene of which is the same, and which was published in 1821, five years before Mrs. Radcliffe's. The story is entirely fictitious. What differences it from her other romances is the conscious attempt to portray feudal manners. There are elaborate descriptions of costumes, upholstery, architecture, heraldic bearings, ancient military array, a tournament, a royal hunt, a feast in the great hall at Kenilworth, a visit of state to Warwick Castle, and the session of a baronial court. The ceremony of the "voide," when the king took his spiced cup, is rehearsed with a painful accumulation of particulars. For all this she consulted Leland's "Collectanea," Warton's "History of English Poetry," the "Household Book of Edward IV.," Pegge's "Dissertation on the Obsolete Office of Esquire of the King's Body," the publications of the Society of Antiquaries and similar authorities, with results that are infinitely tedious. Walter Scott's archaeology is not always correct, nor his learning always lightly borne; but, upon the whole, he had the art to make his cumbrous materials contributory to his story rather than obstructive of it. In these two novels we meet again all the familiar apparatus of secret trap-doors, sliding panels, spiral staircases in the thickness of the walls, subterranean vaults conducting to a neighboring priory or a cavern in the forest, ranges of deserted apartments where the moon looks in through mullioned casements, ruinous turrets around which the night winds moan and howl. Here, too, once more are the wicked uncle who seizes upon the estates of his deceased brother's wife, and keeps her and her daughter shut up in his dungeon for the somewhat long period of eighteen years; the heroine who touches her lute and sings in pensive mood, till the notes steal to the ear of the young earl imprisoned in the adjacent tower; the maiden who is carried off on horseback by bandits, till her shrieks bring ready aid; the peasant lad who turns out to be the baron's heir. "His surprise was great when the baroness, reviving, fixed her eyes mournfully upon him and asked him to uncover his arm." Alas! the surprise is not shared by the reader, when "'I have indeed found my long-lost child: that strawberry,'"[27] etc., etc. "Gaston de Blondville" has a ghost--not explained away in the end according to Mrs. Radcliffe's custom. It is the spirit of Reginald de Folville, Knight Hospitaller of St. John, murdered in the Forest of Arden by Gaston de Blondville and the prior of St. Mary's. He is a most robust apparition, and is by no means content with revisiting the glimpses of the moon, but goes in and out at all hours of the day, and so often as to become somewhat of a bore. He ultimately destroys both first and second murderer: one in his cell, the other in open tournament, where his exploits as a mysterious knight in black armor may have given Scott a hint for his black knight at the lists of Ashby-de-la-Zouche in "Ivanhoe" (1819). His final appearance is in the chamber of the king, with whom he holds quite a long conversation. "The worm is my sister," he says: "the mist of death is on me. My bed is in darkness. The prisoner is innocent. The prior of St. Mary's is gone to his account. Be warned." It is not explained why Mrs. Radcliffe refrained from publishing this last romance of hers. Perhaps she recognized that it was belated and that the time for that sort of thing had gone by. By 1802 Lewis' "Monk" was in print, as well as several translations from German romances; Scott's early ballads were out, and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." That very year saw the publication of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." By 1826 the Waverley novels had made all previous fiction of the Gothic type hopelessly obsolete. In 1834 two volumes of her poems were given to the world, including a verse romance in eight cantos, "St. Alban's Abbey," and the verses scattered through her novels. By this time Scott and Coleridge were dead; Byron, Shelley, and Keats had been dead for years, and Mrs. Radcliffe's poesies fell upon the unheeding ears of a new generation. A sneer in "Waverley" (1814) at the "Mysteries of Udolpho" had hurt her feelings;[28] but Scott made amends in the handsome things which he said of her in his "Lives of the Novelists." It is interesting to note that when the "Mysteries" was issued, the venerable Joseph Warton was so much entranced that he sat up the greater part of the night to finish it. The warfare between realism and romance, which went on in the days of Cervantes, as it does in the days of Zola and Howells, had its skirmished also in Mrs. Radcliffe's time. Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey," written in 1803 but published only in 1817, is gently satirical of Gothic fiction. The heroine is devoted to the "Mysteries of Udolpho," which she discusses with her bosom friend. "While I have 'Udolpho' to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable. O the dreadful black veil! My dear Isabella, I am sure there must be Laurentina's skeleton behind it." "When you have finished 'Udolpho,'" replies Isabella, "we will read 'The Italian' together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you. . . I will read you their names directly. Here they are in my pocket-book. 'Castle of Wolfenbach,' 'Clermont,' 'Mysterious Warnings,' 'Necromancer of the Black Forest,' 'Midnight Bell,' 'Orphan of the Rhine,' and 'Horrid Mysteries.'" When introduced to her friend's brother, Miss Morland asks him at once, "Have you ever read 'Udolpho,' Mr. Thorpe?" But Mr. Thorpe, who is not a literary man, but much given to dogs and horses, assures her that he never reads novels; they are "full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since 'Tom Jones,' except the 'Monk.'" The scenery about Bath reminds Miss Morland of the south of France and "the country that Emily and her father traveled through in the 'Mysteries of Udolpho.'" She is enchanted at the prospect of a drive to Blaize Castle, where she hopes to have "the happiness of being stopped in their way along narrow, winding vaults by a low, grated door; or even of having their lamp--their only lamp--extinguished by a sudden gust of wind and of being left in total darkness." She visits her friends, the Tilneys, at their country seat, Northanger Abbey, in Glouchestershire; and, on the way thither, young Mr. Tilney teases her with a fancy sketch of the Gothic horrors which she will unearth there: the "sliding panels and tapestry"; the remote and gloomy guest chamber, which will be assigned her, with its ponderous chest and its portrait of a knight in armor: the secret door, with massy bars and padlocks, that she will discover behind the arras, leading to a "small vaulted room," and eventually to a "subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St. Anthony scarcely two miles off." Arrived at the abbey, she is disappointed at the modern appearance of her room, but contrives to find a secret drawer in an ancient ebony cabinet, and in this a roll of yellow manuscript which, on being deciphered, proves to be a washing bill. She is convinced, notwithstanding, that a mysterious door at the end of a certain gallery conducts to a series of isolated chambers where General Tilney, who is supposed to be a widower, is keeping his unhappy wife immured and fed on bread and water. When she finally gains admission to this Bluebeard's chamber and finds it nothing but a suite of modern rooms, "the visions of romance were over. . . Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them, perhaps, that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England was to be looked for." [1] But compare the passage last quoted with the one from Warton's essay _ante_, p. 219. [2] See _ante_, p. 49. [3] _Spectator_, No. 62. [4] See _ante_, p. 211. [5] "Works of Richard Owen Cambridge," pp. 198-99. Cambridge was one of the Spenserian imitators. See _ante_, p. 89, _note_. In Lady Luxborough's correspondence with Shenstone there is much mention of a Mr. Miller, a neighboring proprietor, who was devoted to Gothic. On the appearance of "The Scribleriad," she writes (January 28, 1751), "I imagine this poem is not calculated to please Mr. Miller and the rest of the Gothic gentlemen; for this Mr. Cambridge expresses a dislike to the introducing or reviving tastes and fashions that are inferior to the modern taste of our country." [6] "History of the Gothic Revival," p. 43. [7] "Works of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford," in five volumes, 1798. "A Description of Strawberry Hill," Vol. II. pp. 395-516. [8] Pugin's "True Principles of Gothic Architecture" was published in 1841. [9] "Sketches of Eminent Statesmen and Writers," A. Hayward (1880). In a note to "Marmion" (1808) Scott said that the ruins of Crichton Castle, remarkable for the richness and elegance of its stone carvings, were then used as a cattle-pen and a sheep-fold. [10] "Hours in a Library," Second Series: article, "Horace Walpole." [11] Letter to Bentley, February 23, 1755. [12] Five hundred copies, says Walpole, were struck off December 24, 1764. [13] "The Mysterious Mother," begun 1766, finished 1768. [14] "The Castle of Otranto" was dramatized by Robert Jephson, under the title "The Count of Narbonne," put on at Covent Garden Theater in 1781, and afterward printed, with a dedication to Walpole. [15] James Beattie, "Dissertation on Fable and Romance." "Argenius," was printed in 1621. [16] "The Dictionary of National Biography" miscalls it "Earl of Canterbury," and attributes it, though with a query, to _John_ Leland. [17] See also, for a notice of this writer, Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters." [18] Maturin's "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) had some influence on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac. [19] Following is a list of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances: "The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne" (1789); "Sicilian Romance" (1790); "Romance of the Forest" (1791); "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794); "The Italian" (1797); "Gaston de Blondville" (1826). Collections of her poems were published in 1816, 1834, and 1845. [20] See "Childe Harold," canto iv, xviii. [21] "Roundabout Papers," "A Peal of Bells." "Monk" Lewis wrote at sixteen a burlesque novel, "Effusions of Sensibility," which remained in MS. [22] "O Radcliffe, thou once wert the charmer Of girls who sat reading all night: They heroes were striplings in armor, Thy heroines, damsels in white." --_Songs, Ballads and Other Poems_. By Thos. Haynes Bayly, London, 1857, p. 141. "A novel now is nothing more Than an old castle and a creaking door, A distant hovel, Clanking of chains, a gallery, a light, Old armor and a phantom all in white, And there's a novel." --_George Colman, "The Will."_ [23] Several of her romances were dramatized and translated into French. It is curious, by the way, to find that Goethe was not unaware of Walpole's story. See his quatrain "Die Burg von Otranto," first printed in 1837. "Sind die Zimmer sämmtlich besetzt der Burg von Otranto: Kommt, voll innigen Grimmes, der erste Riesenbesitzer Stuckweis an, and verdrängt die neuen falschen Bewohner. Wehe! den Fliehenden, weh! den Bleibenden also geschiet es." [24] Ossian. [25] See her "Journey through Holland," etc. (1795) [26] _cf._ Keats, "The Eve of Saint Agnes": "The arras rich with hunt and horse and hound Flattered in the besieging wind's uproar, And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." [27] "Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne." [28] See Julia Kavanagh's "English Women of Letters." CHAPTER VIII. Percy and the Ballads. The regeneration of English poetic style at the close of the last century came from an unexpected quarter. What scholars and professional men of letters had sought to do by their imitations of Spenser and Milton, and their domestication of the Gothic and the Celtic muse, was much more effectually done by Percy and the ballad collectors. What they had sought to do was to recall British poetry to the walks of imagination and to older and better models than Dryden and Pope. But they could not jump off their own shadows: the eighteenth century was too much for them. While they anxiously cultivated wildness and simplicity, their diction remained polished, literary, academic to a degree. It is not, indeed, until we reach the boundaries of a new century that we encounter a Gulf Stream of emotional, creative impulse strong enough and hot enough to thaw the classical icebergs till not a floating spiculum of them is left. Meanwhile, however, there occurred a revivifying contact with one department, at least, of early verse literature, which did much to clear the way for Scott and Coleridge and Keats. The decade from 1760 to 1770 is important in the history of English romanticism, and its most important title is Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets," published in three volumes in 1765. It made a less immediate and exciting impression upon contemporary Europe than MacPherson's "Poems of Ossian," but it was more fruitful in enduring results. The Germans make a convenient classification of poetry into _Kunstpoesie_ and _Volkspoesie_, terms which may be imperfectly translated as literary poetry and popular poetry. The English _Kunstpoesie_ of the Middle Ages lay buried under many superincumbent layers of literary fashion. Oblivion had overtaken Gower and Occleve, and Lydgate and Stephen Hawes, and Skelton, and Henryson and James I. of Scotland, and well-nigh Chaucer himself--all the mediaeval poetry of the schools, in short. But it was known to the curious that there was still extant a large body of popular poetry in the shape of narrative ballads, which had been handed down chiefly by oral transmission, and still lived in the memories and upon the lips of the common people. Many of these went back in their original shapes to the Middle Ages, or to an even remoter antiquity, and belonged to that great store of folk-lore which was the common inheritance of the Aryan race. Analogues and variants of favorite English and Scottish ballads have been traced through almost all the tongues of modern Europe. Danish literature is especially rich in ballads and affords valuable illustrations of our native ministrelsy.[1] It was, perhaps, due in part to the Danish settlements in Northumbria and to the large Scandinavian admixture in the Northumbrian blood and dialect, that "the north countrie" became _par excellence_ the ballad land: Lowland Scotland--particularly the Lothians--and the English bordering counties, Northumberland, Westmoreland, and Cumberland; with Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, in which were Barndale and Sherwood Forests, Robin Hood's haunts. It is not possible to assign exact dates to these songs. They were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were composed. In the Middle Ages they were sung to the harp by wandering minstrels. In later times they were chanted or recited by ballad-singers at fairs, markets, ale-houses, street-corners, sometimes to the accompaniment of a fiddle or crowd. They were learned by ancient dames, who repeated them in chimney corners to children and grandchildren. In this way some of them were preserved in an unwritten state, even to the present day, in the tenacious memory of the people, always at bottom conservative and, under a hundred changes of fashion in the literary poetry which passes over their heads, clinging obstinately to old songs and beliefs learned in childhood, and handing them on to posterity. Walter Scott got much of the material for his "Ministrelsy of the Border" from the oral recitation of pipers, shepherds, and old women in Ettrick Forest. Professor Child's--the latest and fullest ballad collection--contains pieces never before given in print or manuscript, some of them obtained in America![2] Leading this subterranean existence, and generally thought unworthy the notice of educated people, they naturally underwent repeated changes; so that we have numerous versions of the same story, and incidents, descriptions, and entire stanzas are borrowed and lent freely among the different ballads. The circumstance, _e.g._, of the birk and the briar springing from the graves of true lovers and intertwisting their branches occurs in the ballads of "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet," "Lord Lovel," "Fair Janet," and many others. The knight who was carried to fairyland through an entrance in a green hillside, and abode seven years with the queen of fairy, recurs in "Tam Lin," "Thomas Rymer,"[3] etc. Like all folk-songs, these ballads are anonymous and may be regarded not as the composition of any one poet, but as the property, and in a sense the work, of the people as a whole. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heart-break or blood-shed, they bear no author's name, but are _ferae naturae_ and have the flavor of wild game. They were common stock, like the national speech; everyone could contribute toward them: generations of nameless poets, minstrels, ballad-singers modernized their language to suit new times, altered their dialect to suit new places, accommodated their details to different audiences, English or Scotch, and in every way that they thought fit added, retrenched, corrupted, improved, and passed them on. Folk-poetry is conventional; it seems to be the production of a guild, and to have certain well understood and commonly expected tricks of style and verse. Freshness and sincerity are almost always attributes of the poetry of heroic ages, but individuality belongs to a high civilization and an advanced literary culture. Whether the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" are the work of one poet or of a cycle of poets, doubtless the rhetorical peculiarities of the Homeric epics, such as the recurrent phrase and the conventional epithet (the rosy-fingered dawn, the well-greaved Greeks, the swift-footed Achilles, the much-enduring Odysseus, etc.) are due to this communal or associative character of ancient heroic song. As in the companies of architects who built the mediaeval cathedrals, or in the schools of early Italian painters, masters and disciples, the manner of the individual artist was subdued to the tradition of his craft. The English and Scottish popular ballads are in various simple stanza forms, the commonest of all being the old _septenarius_ or "fourteener," arranged in a four-lined stanza of alternate eights and sixes, thus: "Up then crew the red, red cock, And up and crew the gray; The eldest to the youngest said ''Tis time we were away.'"[4] This is the stanza usually employed by modern ballad imitators, like Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner," Scott in "Jock o' Hazeldean," Longfellow in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Macaulay in the "Lays of Ancient Rome," Aytoun in the "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Many of the stylistic and metrical peculiarities of the ballads arose from the fact that they were made to be sung or recited from memory. Such are perhaps the division of the longer ones into fits, to rest the voice of the singer; and the use of the burden or refrain for the same purpose, as also to give the listeners and bystanders a chance to take up the chorus, which they probably accompanied with a few dancing steps.[5] Sometimes the burden has no meaning in itself and serves only to mark time with a _Hey derry down_ or an _O lilly lally_ and the like. Sometimes it has more or less reference to the story, as in "The Two Sisters": "He has ta'en three locks o' her yellow hair-- Binnorie, O Binnorie-- And wi' them strung his harp sae rare-- By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie." Again it has no discoverable relation to the context, as in "Riddles Wisely Expounded"-- "There was a knicht riding frae the east-- _Jennifer gentle and rosemarie_-- Who had been wooing at monie a place-- _As the dew flies over the mulberry tree._" Both kinds of refrain have been liberally employed by modern balladists. Thus Tennyson in "The Sisters": "We were two sisters of one race, _The wind is howling in turret and tree;_ _ _She was the fairer in the face, _O the earl was fair to see."_ While Rossetti and Jean Ingelow and others have rather favored the inconsequential burden, an affectation travestied by the late Mr. C. S. Calverley: "The auld wife sat at her ivied door, (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese) A thing she had frequently done before; And her spectacles lay on her aproned knees. "The farmer's daughter hath soft brown hair (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese), And I met with a ballad, I can't say where, Which wholly consisted of lines like these."[6] A musical or mnemonic device akin to the refrain was that sing-song species of repetend so familiar in ballad language: "She had na pu'd a double rose, a rose but only twa." "They had na sailed a league, a league, A league but barely three. "How will I come up? How can I come up? How can I come to thee?" An answer is usually returned in the identical words of the question; and as in Homer, a formula of narration or a commonplace of description does duty again and again. Iteration in the ballads is not merely for economy, but stands in lieu of the metaphor and other figures of literary poetry: "'O Marie, put on your robes o' black, Or else your robes o' brown, For ye maun gang wi' me the night, To see fair Edinbro town.' "'I winna put on my robes o' black, Nor yet my robes o' brown; But I'll put on my robes o' white, To shine through Edinbro town.'" Another mark of the genuine ballad manner, as of Homer and _Volkspoesie_ in general, is the conventional epithet. Macaulay noted that the gold is always red in the ballads, the ladies always gay, and Robin Hood's men are always his merry men. Doughty Douglas, bold Robin Hood, merry Carlisle, the good greenwood, the gray goose wing, and the wan water are other inseparables of the kind. Still another mark is the frequent retention of the Middle English accent on the final syllable in words like contrié, barón, dinére, felàwe, abbày, rivére, monéy, and its assumption by words which never properly had it, such as ladý, harpér, weddíng, watér, etc.[7] Indeed, as Percy pointed out in his introduction, there were "many phrases and idioms which the minstrels seem to have appropriated to themselves, . . . a cast of style and measure very different from that of contemporary poets of a higher class." Not everything that is called a ballad belongs to the class of poetry that we are here considering. In its looser employment the word has signified almost any kind of song: "a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow," for example. "Ballade" was also the name of a somewhat intricate French stanza form, employed by Gower and Chaucer, and recently reintroduced into English verse by Dobson, Lang, Goose, and others, along with the virelay, rondeau, triolet, etc. There is also a numerous class of popular ballads--in the sense of something made _for_ the people, though not _by_ the people--are without relation to our subject. These are the street ballads, which were and still are hawked about by ballad-mongers, and which have no literary character whatever. There are satirical and political ballads, ballads versifying passages in Scripture or chronicle, ballads relating to current events, or giving the history of famous murders and other crimes, of prodigies, providences, and all sorts of happenings that teach a lesson in morals: about George Barnwell and the "Babes in the Wood," and "Whittington and his Cat," etc.: ballads like Shenstone's "Jemmy Dawson" and Gay's "Black-eyed Susan." Thousands of such are included in manuscript collections like the "Pepysian," or printed in the publications of the Roxburghe Club and the Ballad Society. But whether entirely modern, or extant in black-letter broadsides, they are nothing to our purpose. We have to do here with the folk-song, the _traditional_ ballad, product of the people at a time when the people was homogeneous and the separation between the lettered and unlettered classes had not yet taken place: the true minstrel ballad of the Middle Ages, or of that state of society which in rude and primitive neighborhoods, like the Scottish border, prolonged mediaeval conditions beyond the strictly mediaeval period. In the form in which they are preserved, a few of our ballads are older than the seventeenth or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though in their origin many of them are much older. Manuscript versions of "Robin Hood and the Monk" and "Robin Hood and the Potter" exist, which are referred to the last years of the fifteenth century. The "Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode" was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1489. The "Not-Brown Maid" was printed in "Arnold's Chronicle" in 1502. "The Hunting of the Cheviot"--the elder version of "Chevy Chase"--was mentioned by Philip Sidney in his "Defence of Poesie" in 1850.[8] The ballad is a narrative song, naïve, impersonal, spontaneous, objective. The singer is lost in the song, the teller in the tale. That is its essence, but sometimes the story is told by the lyrical, sometimes by the dramatic method. In "Helen of Kirkconnell" it is the bereaved lover who is himself the speaker: in "Waly Waly," the forsaken maid. These are monologues; for a purely dialogue ballad it will be sufficient to mention the power and impressive piece in the "Reliques" entitled "Edward." Herder translated this into German; it is very old, with Danish, Swedish, and Finnish analogues. It is a story of parricide, and is narrated in a series of questions by the mother and answers by the son. The commonest form, however, was a mixture of epic and dramatic, or direct relation with dialogue. A frequent feature is the abruptness of the opening and the translations. The ballad-maker observes unconsciously Aristotle's rule for the epic poet, to begin _in medias res_. Johnson noticed this in the instance of "Johnny Armstrong," but a stronger example is found in "The Banks of Yarrow:" "Late at e'en, drinking the wine, And ere they paid the lawing, They set a combat them between, To fight it in the dawing." With this, an indirect, allusive way of telling the story, which Goethe mentions in his prefatory note to "Des Sängers Fluch," as a constant note of the "Volkslied." The old ballad-maker does not vouchsafe explanations about persons and motives; often he gives the history, not expressly nor fully, but by hints and glimpses, leaving the rest to conjecture; throwing up its salient points into a strong, lurid light against a background of shadows. The knight rides out a-hunting, and by and by his riderless horse comes home, and that is all: "Toom[9] hame cam the saddle But never cam he." Or the knight himself comes home and lies down to die, reluctantly confessing, under his mother's questioning, that he dined with his true-love and is poisoned.[10] And again that is all. Or "--In behint yon auld fail[11] dyke, I wot there lies a new-slain knight; And naebody kens that he lies there, But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair. "His hound is to the hunting game, His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame, His lady's ta'en another mate, So we may mak our dinner sweet." A whole unuttered tragedy of love, treachery, and murder lies back of these stanzas. This method of narration may be partly accounted for by the fact that the story treated was commonly some local country-side legend of family feud or unhappy passion, whose incidents were familiar to the ballad-singer's audience and were readily supplied by memory. One theory holds that the story was partly told and partly sung, and that the links and expositions were given in prose. However this may be, the artless art of these popular poets evidently included a knowledge of the uses of mystery and suggestion. They knew that, for the imagination, the part is sometimes greater than the whole. Gray wrote to Mason in 1757, "I have got the old Scotch ballad [Gil Maurice] on which 'Douglas' [Home's tragedy, first played at Edinburgh in 1756] was founded. It is divine. . . Aristotle's best rules are observed in it in a manner which shews the author never had heard of Aristotle. It begins in the fifth act of the play. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing what it is about; and yet, when you come to the end, it is impossible not to understand the whole story." It is not possible to recover the conditions under which these folk-songs "made themselves,"[12] as it were, or grew under the shaping hands of generations of nameless bards. Their naïve, primitive quality cannot be acquired: the secret is lost. But Walter Scott, who was steeped to the lips in balladry, and whose temper had much of the healthy objectivity of an earlier age, has succeeded as well as any modern. Some of his ballads are more perfect artistically than his long metrical romances; those of them especially which are built up from a burden or fragment of old minstrel song, like "Jock o' Hazeldean"[13] and the song in "Rokeby": "He turned his charger as he spake Upon the river shore, He gave the bride-reins a shake, Said 'Adieu for evermore, My love! And adieu for evermore!'" Here Scott catches the very air of popular poetry, and the dovetailing is done with most happy skill. "Proud Maisie is in the Wood" is a fine example of the ballad manner of story-telling by implication.[14] As regards their subject-matter, the ballads admit of a rough classification into the historical, or _quasi_-historical, and the purely legendary or romantic. Of the former class were the "riding-ballad" of the Scottish border, where the forays of moss-troopers, the lifting of blackmail, the raids and private warfare of the Lords of the Marches, supplied many traditions of heroism and adventure like those recorded in "The Battle of Otterburn," "The Hunting of the Cheviot," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Kinmont Willie," "The Rising in the North" and "Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas." Of the fictitious class, some were shortened, popularized, and generally degraded versions of the chivalry romances, which were passing out of favor among educated readers in the sixteenth century and fell into the hands of the ballad-makers. Such, to name only a few included in the "Reliques," were "Sir Lancelot du Lake," "The Legend of Sir Guy," "King Arthur's Death" and "The Marriage of Sir Gawaine." But the substance of these was not of the genuine popular stuff, and their personages were simply the old heroes of court poetry in reduced circumstances. Much more impressive are the original folk-songs, which strike their roots deep into the ancient world of legend and even of myth. In this true ballad world there is a strange commingling of paganism and Catholic Christianity. It abounds in the supernatural and the marvelous. Robin Hood is a pious outlaw. He robs the fat-headed monks, but will not die unhouseled and has great devotion to Our Blessed Lady; who appears also to Brown Robyn, when he is cast overboard, hears his confession and takes his soul to Heaven.[15] When mass has been sung and the bells of merry Lincoln have rung, Lady Maisry goes seeking her little Hugh, who has been killed by the Jew's daughter and thrown into Our Lady's draw-well fifty fathom deep, and the boy answers his mother miraculously from the well.[16] Birds carry messages for lovers[17] and dying men,[18] or show the place where the body lies buried and the corpse-candles shine.[19] The harper strings his harp with three golden hairs of the drowned maiden, and the tune that he plays upon them reveals the secret of her death.[20] The ghosts of the sons that have perished at sea come home to take farewell of their mother.[21] The spirit of the forsaken maid visits her false lover at midnight;[22] or "the dead comes for the quick,"[23] as in Burger's weird poem. There are witches, fairies, and mermaidens[24] in the ballads: omens, dreams, spells,[25] enchantments, transformations,[26] magic rings and charms, "gramarye"[27] of many sorts; and all these things are more effective here than in poets like Spenser and Collins, because they are matters of belief and not of make-believe. The ballads are prevailingly tragical in theme, and the tragic passions of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong as death, jealousy cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak here with their native accent: "There are seven forsters at Pickeram Side, At Pickeram where they dwell, And for a drop of thy heart's bluid They wad ride the fords of hell."[28] "O little did my mother think, The day she cradled me, What lands I was to travel through, What death I was to dee."[29] The maiden asks her buried lover: "Is there any room at your head, Sanders? Is there any room at your feet? Or any room at your twa sides, Where fain, fain would I sleep?"[30] "O waly, waly, but love be bonny A little time while it is new;[31] But when 'tis auld it waxeth cauld And fades awa' like morning dew. . . "And O! if my young babe were born, And set upon the nurse's knee, And I mysel' were dead and gane, And the green grass growing over me!" Manners in this world are of a primitive savagery. There are treachery, violence, cruelty, revenge; but there are also honor, courage, fidelity, and devotion that endureth to the end. "Child Waters" and "Fair Annie" do not suffer on a comparison with Tennyson's "Enid" and Chaucer's story of patient Griselda ("The Clerkes Tale") with which they have a common theme. It is the medieval world. Marauders, pilgrims, and wandering gleemen go about in it. The knight stands at his garden pale, the lady sits at her bower window, and the little foot page carries messages over moss and moor. Marchmen are riding through the Bateable Land "by the hie light o' the moon." Monks are chanting in St. Mary's Kirk, trumpets are blowing in Carlisle town, castles are burning; down in the glen there is an ambush and swords are flashing; bows are twanging in the greenwood; four and twenty ladies are playing at the ball, and four and twenty milk-white calves are in the woods of Glentanner--all ready to be stolen. About Yule the round tables begin; the queen looks over the castle-wall, the palmer returns from the Holy Land, Young Waters lies deep in Stirling dungeon, but Child Maurice is in the silver wood, combing his yellow locks with a silver comb. There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and though the tradition has associated itself with definite localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness. And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and a wholesome, outdoor feeling: "In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song: "To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hillis hee, And shadow hem in the levës grene, Under the grene-wode tre."[33] Although a few favorite ballads such as "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The Children in the Wood," and some of the Robin Hood ones had long been widely, nay almost universally familiar, they had hardly been regarded as literature worthy of serious attention. They were looked upon as nursery tales, or at best as the amusement of peasants and unlettered folk, who used to paste them up on the walls of inns, cottages, and ale-houses. Here and there an educated man had had a sneaking fondness for collecting old ballads--much as people nowadays collect postage stamps. Samuel Pepys, the diarist, made such a collection, and so did John Selden, the great legal antiquary and scholar of Milton's time. "I have heard," wrote Addison, "that the late Lord Dorset, who had the greatest wit tempered with the greatest candor, and was one of the finest critics as well as the best poets of his age, had a numerous collection of old English ballads, and a particular pleasure in the reading of them. I can affirm the same of Mr. Dryden." Dryden's "Miscellany Poems" (1684) gave "Gilderoy," "Johnnie Armstrong," "Chevy Chase," "The Miller and the King's Daughter," and "Little Musgrave and the Lady Barnard." The last named, as well as "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament" and "Fair Margaret and Sweet William,"[34] was quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Knight of the Burning Pestle," (1611). Scraps of them are sung by one of the _dramatis personae_, old Merrythought, whose speciality is a damnable iteration of ballad fragments. References to old ballads are numerous in the Elizabethan plays. Percy devoted the second book of his first series to "Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere." In the seventeenth century a few ballads were printed entire in poetic miscellanies entitled "Garlands," higgledy-piggledy with pieces of all kinds. Professor Child enumerates nine ballad collections before Percy's. The only ones of any importance among these were "A Collection of Old Ballads" (Vols I. and II. in 1723, Vol III. In 1725), ascribed to Ambrose Philips; and the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay's, "Tea Table Miscellany," (in 4 vols., 1714-40) and "Evergreen" (2 vols., 1724). The first of these collections was illustrated with copperplate engravings and supplied with introductions which were humorous in intention. The editor treated his ballads as trifles, though he described them as "corrected from the best and most ancient copies extant"; and said that Homer himself was nothing more than a blind ballad-singer, whose songs had been subsequently joined together and formed into an epic poem. Ramsay's ballads were taken in part from a manuscript collection of some eight hundred pages, made by George Bannatyne about 1570 and still preserved in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. In Nos. 70, 74, and 85, of the _Spectator_, Addison had praised the naturalness and simplicity of the popular ballads, selecting for special mention "Chevy Chase"--the later version--"which," he wrote, "is the favorite ballad of the common people of England; and Ben Jonson used to say he had rather have been the author of it than of all his works"; and "the 'Two Children in the Wood,' which is one of the darling songs of the common people, and has been the delight of most Englishmen in some part of their age." Addison justifies his liking for these humble poems by classical precedents. "The greatest modern critics have laid it down as a rule that an heroic poem should be founded upon some important precept of morality adapted to the constitution of the country in which the poet writes. Homer and Virgil have formed their plans in this view." Accordingly he thinks that the author of "Chevy Chase" meant to point a moral as to the mischiefs of private war. As if it were not precisely the _gaudium certaminis_ that inspired the old border ballad-maker! As if he did not glory in the fight! The passage where Earl Percy took the dead Douglas by the hand and lamented his fallen foe reminds Addison of Aeneas' behavior toward Lausus. The robin red-breast covering the children with leaves recalls to his mind a similar touch in one of Horace's odes. But it was much that Addison, whose own verse was so artificial, should have had a taste for the wild graces of folk-song. He was severely ridiculed by his contemporaries for these concessions. "He descended now and then to lower disquisitions," wrote Dr. Johnson," and by a serious display of the beauties of 'Chevy Chase,' exposed himself to the ridicule of Wagstaff, who bestowed a like pompous character on 'Tom Thumb'; and to the contempt of Dennis, who, considering the fundamental position of his criticism, that 'Chevy Chase' pleases and ought to please because it is natural, observes that 'there is a way of deviating from nature . . . by imbecility, which degrades nature by faintness and diminution'. . . In 'Chevy Chase' . . . there is a chill and lifeless imbecility. The story cannot possibly be told in a manner that shall make less impression on the mind."[35] Nicholas Rowe, the dramatist and Shakspere editor, had said a good word for ballads in the prologue to "Jane Shore" (1713): "Let no nice taste despise the hapless dame Because recording ballads chant her name. Those venerable ancient song enditers Soared many a pitch above our modern writers. . . Our numbers may be more refined than those, But what we've gained in verse, we've lost in prose. Their words no shuffling double meaning knew: Their speech was homely, but their hearts were true. . . With rough, majestic force they moved the heart, And strength and nature made amends for art." Ballad forgery had begun early. To say nothing of appropriations, like Mallet's, of "William and Margaret," Lady Wardlaw put forth her "Hardyknut" in 1719 as a genuine old ballad, and it was reprinted as such in Ramsay's "Evergreen." Gray wrote to Walpole in 1760, "I have been often told that the poem called 'Hardicanute' (which I always admired and still admire) was the work of somebody that lived a few years ago. This I do not at all believe, though it has evidently been retouched by some modern hand." Before Percy no concerted or intelligent effort had been made toward collecting, preserving, and editing the _corpus poetarum_ of English minstrelsy. The great mass of ancient ballads, so far as they were in print at all, existed in "stall copies," _i.e._, single sheets of broadsides, struck off for sale by balladmongers and the keepers of book-stalls. Thomas Percy, the compiler of the "Reliques," was a parish clergyman, settled at the retired hamlet of Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire. For years he had amused his leisure by collecting ballads. He numbered among his acquaintances men of letters like Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Grainger, Farmer, and Shenstone. It was the last who suggested the plan of the "Reliques" and who was to have helped in its execution, had not his illness and death prevented. Johnson spent a part of the summer of 1764 on a visit to the vicarage of Easton Maudit, on which occasion Percy reports that his guest "chose for his regular reading the old Spanish romance of 'Felixmarte of Hircania,' in folio, which he read quite through." He adds, what one would not readily suspect, that the doctor, when a boy, "was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life. . . I have heard him attribute to these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession." Percy talked over his project with Johnson, who would seem to have given his approval, and even to have added his persuasions to Shenstone's. For in the preface to the first edition of the "Reliques," the editor declared that "he could refuse nothing to such judges as the author of the _Rambler_ and the late Mr. Shenstone"; and that "to the friendship of Mr. Johnson he owes many valuable hints for the conduct of his work." And after Ritson had questioned the existence of the famous "folio manuscript," Percy's nephew in the advertisement to the fourth edition (1794), cited "the appeal publicly made to Dr. Johnson . . . so long since as in the year 1765, and never once contradicted by him." In spite of these amenities, the doctor had a low opinion of ballads and ballad collectors. In the _Rambler_ (No. 177) he made merry over one Cantilenus, who "turned all his thoughts upon old ballads, for he considered them as the genuine records of the natural taste. He offered to show me a copy of 'The Children in the Wood,' which he firmly believed to be of the first edition, and by the help of which the text might be freed from several corruptions, if this age of barbarity had any claim to such favors from him." "The conversation," says Boswell, "having turned on modern imitations of ancient ballads, and someone having praised their simplicity, he treated them with that ridicule which he always displayed when that subject was mentioned." Johnson wrote several stanzas in parody of the ballads; _e.g._, "The tender infant, meek and mild, Fell down upon a stone: The nurse took up the squealing child, But still the child squealed on." And again: "I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand; And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand." This is quoted by Wordsworth,[36] who compares it with a stanza from "The Children in the Wood": "Those pretty babes, with hand in hand, Went wandering up and down; But never more they saw the man Approaching from the town." He says that in both of these stanzas the language is that of familiar conversation, yet one stanza is admirable and the other contemptible, because the _matter_ of it is contemptible. In the essay supplementary to his preface, Wordsworth asserts that the "Reliques" was "ill suited to the then existing taste of city society, and Dr. Johnson . . . was not sparing in his exertions to make it an object of contempt": and that "Dr. Percy was so abashed by the ridicule flung upon his labors . . . that, though while he was writing under a mask he had not wanted resolution to follow his genius into the regions of true simplicity and genuine pathos (as is evinced by the exquisite ballad of 'Sir Cauline' and by many other pieces), yet when he appeared in his own person and character as a poetical writer, he adopted, as in the tale of 'The Hermit of Warkworth,' a diction scarcely distinguishable from the vague, the glossy and unfeeling language of his day." Wordsworth adds that he esteems the genius of Dr. Percy in this kind of writing superior to that of any other modern writer; and that even Bürger had not Percy's fine sensibility. He quotes, in support of this opinion, two stanzas from "The Child of Elle" in the "Reliques," and contrasts them with the diluted and tricked-out version of the same in Bürger's German. Mr. Hales does not agree in this high estimate of Percy as a ballad composer. Of this same "Child of Elle" he says: "The present fragment of a version may be fairly said to be now printed for the first time, as in the 'Reliques' it is buried in a heap of 'polished' verses composed by Percy. That worthy prelate, touched by the beauty of it--he had a soul--was unhappily moved to try his hand at its completion. A wax-doll-maker might as well try to restore Milo's Venus. There are thirty-nine lines here. There are two hundred in the thing called the 'Child of Elle' in the 'Reliques.' But in those two hundred lines all the thirty-nine originals do not appear. . . On the whole, the union of the genuine and the false--of the old ballad with Percy's tawdry feebleness--makes about as objectionable a _mésalliance_ as in the story itself is in the eyes of the father."[37] The modern ballad scholars, in their zeal for the purity of the text, are almost as hard upon Percy as Ritson himself was. They say that he polished "The Heir of Linne" till he could see his own face in it; and swelled out its 126 lines to 216--"a fine flood of ballad and water."[38] The result of this piecing and tinkering in "Sir Cauline"--which Wordsworth thought exquisite--they regard as a heap of tinsel, though they acknowledge that "these additional stanzas show, indeed, an extensive acquaintance with old balladry and a considerable talent of imitation." From the critical or scholarly point of view, these strictures are doubtless deserved. It is an editor's duty to give his text as he finds it, without interpolations or restorations; and it is unquestionable that Percy's additions to fragmentary pieces are full of sentimentalism, affectation, and the spurious poetic diction of his age. An experienced ballad amateur can readily separate, in most cases, the genuine portions from the insertions. But it is unfair to try Percy by modern editorial canons. That sacredness which is now imputed to the _ipsissima verba_ of an ancient piece of popular literature would have been unintelligible to men of that generation, who regarded such things as trifles at best, and mostly as barbarous trifles--something like wampum belts, or nose-rings, or antique ornaments in the _goût barbare et charmant des bijoux goths_. Percy's readers did not want torsos and scraps; to present them with acephalous or bobtailed ballads--with _cetera desunt_ and constellations of asterisks--like the manuscript in Prior's poem, the conclusion of which was eaten by the rats--would have been mere pedantry. Percy knew his public, and he knew how to make his work attractive to it. The readers of that generation enjoyed their ballad with a large infusion of Percy. If the scholars of this generation prefer to take theirs without, they know where to get it. The materials for the "Reliques" were drawn partly from the Pepys collection at Magdalen College, Cambridge; from Anthony Wood's, made in 1676, in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; from manuscript and printed ballads in the Bodleian, the British Museum, the archives of the Antiquarian Society, and private collections. Sir David Dalrymple sent a number of Scotch ballads, and the editor acknowledged obligations to Thomas Warton and many others. But the nucleus of the whole was a certain folio manuscript in a handwriting of Charles I.'s time, containing 191 songs and ballads, which Percy had begged, then still very young, from his friend Humphrey Pitt, of Prior's-Lee in Shropshire. When he first saw this precious document, it was torn, unbound, and mutilated, "lying dirty on the floor under a bureau in the parlor, being used by the maids to light the fire." The first and last leaves were wanting, and "of 54 pages near the beginning, half of every leaf hath been torn away."[39] Percy had it bound, but the binders trimmed off the top and bottom lines in the process. From this manuscript he professed to have taken "the greater part" of the pieces in the "Reliques." In truth he took only 45 of the 176 poems in his first edition from this source. Percy made no secret of the fact that he filled _lacunae_ in his originals with stanzas, and, in some cases, with nearly entire poems of his own composition. But the extent of the liberties that he took with the text, although suspected, was not certainly known until Mr. Furnivall finally got leave to have the folio manuscript copied and printed.[40] Before this time it had been jealously guarded by the Percy family, and access to it had been denied to scholars. "Since Percy and his nephew printed their fourth edition of the 'Reliques' from the manuscript in 1794," writes Mr. Furnivall in his "Forewords," "no one has printed any piece from it except Robert Jamieson--to whom Percy supplied a copy of 'Child Maurice' and 'Robin Hood and the Old Man' for his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' (1806)--and Sir Frederic Madden, who was allowed--by one of Percy's daughters--to print 'The Grene Knight,' 'The Carle of Carlisle' and 'The Turk and Gawin' in his 'Syr Gawaine' for the Bannatyne Club, 1839." Percy was furiously assailed by Joseph Ritson for manipulating his texts; and in the 1794 edition he made some concessions to the latter's demand for a literal rescript, by taking off a few of the ornaments in which he had tricked them. Ritson was a thoroughly critical, conscientious student of poetic antiquities and held the right theory of an editor's functions. In his own collection of early English poetry he rendered a valuable service to all later inquiries. These included "Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry," 1791; "Ancient Songs," 1792; "Scottish Songs," 1794; "Robin Hood," 1795; besides editions of Laurence Minot's poems, and of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," as well as other titles. He was an ill-tempered and eccentric man: a vegetarian, a free-thinker, a spelling reformer,[41] and latterly a Jacobin. He attacked Warton as well as Percy, and used to describe any clerical antagonist as a "stinking priest." He died insane in 1803. Ritson took issue with the theory maintained in Percy's introductory "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels," viz.: that the minstrels were not only the singers, but likewise the authors of the ballads. But Ritson went so far in his rage against Percy as to deny the existence of the sacred Folio Manuscript, until convinced by abundant testimony that there was such a thing. It was an age of forgeries, and Ritson was not altogether without justification in supposing that the author of "The Hermit of Warkworth" belonged in the same category with Chatterton, Ireland, and MacPherson. Percy, like Warton, took an apologetic tone toward his public. "In a polished age, like the present," he wrote, "I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity and many artless graces, which, in the opinion of no mean critics, have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties." Indeed how should it have been otherwise? The old ballads were everything which the eighteenth century was not. They were rough and wild, where that was smooth and tame; they dealt, with fierce sincerity, in the elementary passions of human nature. They did not moralize, or philosophize, or sentimentalize; were never subtle, intellectual, or abstract. They were plain English, without finery or elegance. They had certain popular mannerisms, but none of the conventional figures of speech or rhetorical artifices like personifications, periphrasis, antithesis, and climax so dear to the Augustan heart. They were intent on the story--not on the style--and they just told it and let it go for what it was worth. Moreover, there are ballads and ballads. The best of them are noble in expression as well as feeling, unequaled by anything in our medieval poetry outside of Chaucer; unequaled by Chaucer himself in point of intensity, in occasional phrases of a piercing beauty: "The swans-fethers that his arrowe bar With his hart-blood they were wet."[42] "O cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf, A wat the wild fule boded day; The salms of Heaven will be sung, And ere now I'll be missed away."[43] "If my love were an earthly knight, As he's an elfin gray, A wad na gie my sin true love For no lord that ye hae."[44] "She hang ae napkin at the door, Another in the ha, And a' to wipe the trickling tears, Sae fast as they did fa."[45] "And all is with one chyld of yours, I feel stir at my side: My gowne of green, it is too strait: Before it was too wide."[46] Verse of this quality needs no apology. But of many of the ballads, Dennis' taunt, repeated by Dr. Johnson, is true; they are not merely rude, but weak and creeping in style. Percy knew that the best of them would savor better to the palates of his contemporaries if he dressed them with modern sauces. Yet he must have loved them, himself, in their native simplicity, and it seems almost incredible that he could have spoken as he did about Prior's insipid paraphrase of the "Nut Brown Maid." "If it had no other merit," he says of that most lovely ballad, "than the having afforded the ground-work to Prior's 'Henry and Emma,' this ought to preserve it from oblivion." Prior was a charming writer of epigram, society verse, and the humorous _conte_ in the manner of La Fontaine; but to see how incapable he was of the depth and sweetness of romantic poetry, compare a few lines of the original with the "hubbub of words" in his modernized version, in heroic couplets: "O Lord, what is this worldes blisse That changeth as the mone! The somer's day in lusty May Is derked before the none. I hear you say farewel. Nay, nay, We departe not so soon: Why say ye so? Wheder wyle ye goo? Alas! what have ye done? Alle my welfare to sorrow and care Shulde change if ye were gon; For in my minde, of all mankynde, I love but you alone." Now hear Prior, with his Venus and flames and god of love: "What is our bliss that changeth with the moon, And day of life that darkens ere 'tis noon? What is true passion, if unblest it dies? And where is Emma's joy, if Henry flies? If love, alas! be pain, the pain I bear No thought can figure and no tongue declare. Ne'er faithful woman felt, nor false one feigned The flames which long have in my bosom reigned. The god of love himself inhabits there With all his rage and dread and grief and care, His complement of stores and total war, O cease then coldly to suspect my love And let my deed at least my faith approve. Alas! no youth shall my endearments share Nor day nor night shall interrupt my care; No future story shall with truth upbraid The cold indifference of the nut-brown maid; Nor to hard banishment shall Henry run While careless Emma sleeps on beds of down. View me resolved, where'er thou lead'st, to go: Friend to thy pain and partner of thy woe; For I attest fair Venus and her son That I, of all mankind, will love but thee alone." There could be no more striking object lesson than this of the plethora from which English poetic diction was suffering, and of the sanative value of a book like the "Reliques." "To atone for the rudeness of the more obsolete poems," and "to take off from the tediousness of the longer narratives," Percy interspersed a few modern ballads and a large number of "little elegant pieces of the lyric kind" by Skelton, Hawes, Gascoigne, Raleigh, Marlowe, Shakspere, Jonson, Warner, Carew, Daniel, Lovelace, Suckling, Drayton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Wotton, and other well-known poets. Of the modern ballads the only one with any resemblance to folk-poetry was "The Braes o' Yarrow" by William Hamilton of Bangour, a Scotch gentleman who was "out in the forty-five." The famous border stream had watered an ancient land of song and story, and Hamilton's ballad, with its "strange, fugitive melody," was not unworthy of its traditions. Hamilton belongs to the Milton imitators by virtue of his octosyllabics "Contemplation."[47] His "Braes o' Yarrow" had been given already in Ramsey's "Tea Table Miscellany," The opening lines-- "Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride, Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow"-- are quoted in Wordsworth's "Yarrow Unvisited," as well as a line of the following stanza: "Sweet smells the birk, green grows, green grows the grass, Yellow on Yarrow's bank the gowan: Fair hangs the apple frae the rock, Sweet the wave of Yarrow flowin'." The first edition of the "Reliques" included one acknowledged child of Percy's muse, "The Friar of Orders Grey," a short, narrative ballad made up of song snatches from Shakspere's plays. Later editions afforded his longer poem, "The Hermit of Warkworth," first published independently in 1771. With all its imperfections--perhaps partly in consequence of its imperfections--the "Reliques" was an epoch-making book. The nature of its service to English letters is thus stated by Macaulay, in the introduction to his "Lays of Ancient Rome": "We cannot wonder that the ballads of Rome should have altogether disappeared, when we remember how very narrowly, in spite of the invention of printing, those of our own country and those of Spain escaped the same fate. There is, indeed, little doubt that oblivion covers many English songs equal to any that were published by Bishop Percy; and many Spanish songs as good as the best of those which have been so happily translated by Mr. Lockhart. Eighty years ago England possessed only one tattered copy of 'Child Waters' and 'Sir Cauline,' and Spain only one tattered copy of the noble poem of the 'Cid.' The snuff of a candle, or a mischievous dog, might in a moment have deprived the world forever of any of those fine compositions. Sir Walter Scott, who united to the fire of a great poet the minute curiosity and patient diligence of a great antiquary, was but just in time to save the precious reliques of the Minstrelsy of the Border." But Percy not only rescued, himself, a number of ballads from forgetfulness; what was equally important, his book prompted others to hunt out and publish similar relics before it was too late. It was the occasion of collections like Herd's (1769), Scott's (1802-03), and Motherwell's (1827), and many more, resting on purer texts and edited on more scrupulous principles than his own. Futhermore, his ballads helped to bring about a reform in literary taste and to inspire men of original genius. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Scott, all acknowledged the greatest obligations to them. Wordsworth said that English poetry had been "absolutely redeemed" by them. "I do not think there is a writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligations to the 'Reliques.' I know that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy that it is so with my friends; and, for myself, I am happy in this occasion to make a public avowal of my own."[48] Without the "Reliques," "The Ancient Mariner," "The Lady of the Lake," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Stratton Water," and "The Haystack in the Floods" might never have been. Perhaps even the "Lyrical Ballads" might never have been, or might have been something quite unlike what they are. Wordsworth, to be sure, scarcely ranks among romantics, and he expressly renounces the romantic machinery: "The dragon's wing, The magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower."[49] What he learned from the popular ballad was the power of sincerity and of direct and homely speech. As for Scott, he has recorded in an oft-quoted passage the impression that Percy's volumes made upon him in his school-days: "I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge plantain tree in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbor in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was, in this instance, the same thing; and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." The "Reliques" worked powerfully in Germany, too. It was received in Lessing's circle with universal enthusiasm,[50] and fell in with that newly aroused interest in "Volkslieder" which prompted Herder's "Stimmen der Völker" (1778-79).[51] Gottfried August Bürger, in particular, was a poet who may be said to have been made by the English ballad literature, of which he was an ardent student. His poems were published in 1778, and included five translations from Percy: "The Child of Elle" ("Die Entführung"), "The Friar of Orders Grey" ("Graurock"), "The Wanton Wife of Bath" ("Frau Schnips"), "King John and the Abbot of Canterbury" ("Der Kaiser und der Abt"), and "Child Waters" ("Graf Walter"). A. W. Schlegel says that Burger did not select the more ancient and genuine pieces in the "Reliques"; and, moreover, that he spoiled the simplicity of the originals in his translations. It was doubtless in part the success of the "Reliques" that is answerable for many collections of old English poetry put forth in the last years of the century. Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Ritson's publications have been already mentioned. George Ellis, a friend and correspondent of Walter Scott, and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, who was sometimes called "the Sainte Palaye of England," issued his "Specimens of Early English Poets" in 1790; edited in 1796 G. L. Way's translations from French _fabliaux_ of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and printed in 1805 three volumes of "Early English Metrical Romances." It is pleasant to record that Percy's labors brought him public recognition and the patronage of those whom Dr. Johnson used to call "the great." He had dedicated the "Reliques" to Elizabeth Percy, Countess of Northumberland. Himself the son of a grocer, he liked to think that he was connected by blood with the great northern house whose exploits had been sung by the ancient minstrels that he loved. He became chaplain to the Duke of Northumberland, and to King George III.; and, in 1782, Bishop of Dromore in Ireland, in which see he died in 1811. This may be as fit a place as any to introduce some mention of "The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," by James Beattie; a poem once widely popular, in which several strands of romantic influence are seen twisted together. The first book was published in 1771, the second in 1774, and the work was never completed. It was in the Spenserian stanza, was tinged with the enthusiastic melancholy of the Wartons, followed the landscape manner of Thomson, had elegiac echoes of Gray, and was perhaps not unaffected, in its love of mountain scenery, by MacPherson's "Ossian." But it took its title and its theme from a hint in Percy's "Essay on the Ancient Minstrels."[52] Beattie was Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen. He was an amiable, sensitive, deeply religious man. He was fond of music and of nature, and was easily moved to rears; had "a young girl's nerves," says Taine, "and an old maid's hobbies." Gray, who met him in 1765, when on a visit to the Earl of Strathmore at Glammis Castle, esteemed him highly. So did Dr. Johnson, partly because of his "Essay on Truth" (1770), a shallow invective against Hume, which gained its author an interview with George III. and a pension of two hundred pounds a year. Beattie visited London in 1771, and figured there as a champion of orthodoxy and a heaven-inspired bard. Mrs. Montagu patronized him extensively. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait, with his "Essay on Truth" under his arm, and Truth itself in the background, an allegoric angel holding the balances in one hand, and thrusting away with the other the figures of Prejudice, Skepticism, and Folly. Old Lord Lyttelton had the poet out to Hagley, and declared that he was Thomson come back to earth, to sing of virtue and of the beauties of nature. Oxford made him an LL.D.: he was urged to take orders in the Church of England; and Edinburgh offered him the chair of Moral Philosophy. Beattie's head was slightly turned by all this success, and he became something of a tuft-hunter. But he stuck faithfully to Aberdeen, whose romantic neighborhood had first inspired his muse. The biographers tell a pretty story of his teaching his little boy to look for the hand of God in the universe, by sowing cress in a garden plot in the shape of the child's initials and leading him by this gently persuasive analogy to read design in the works of nature. The design of "The Minstrel" is to "trace the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age," a youthful shepherd who "lived in Gothic days." But nothing less truly Gothic or medieval could easily be imagined than the actual process of this young poet's education. Instead of being taught to carve and ride and play the flute, like Chaucer's squire who "Cowde songes make and wel endite, Juste and eek daunce, and wel purtraye and write," Edwin wanders alone upon the mountains and in solitary places and is instructed in history, philosophy, and science--and even in Vergil--by an aged hermit, who sits on a mossy rock, with his harp beside him, and delivers lectures. The subject of the poem, indeed, is properly the education of nature; and in a way it anticipates Wordsworth's "Prelude," as this hoary sage does the "Solitary" of "The Excursion." Beattie justifies his use of Spenser's stanza on the ground that it "seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the poem." He makes no attempt, however, to follow Spenser's "antique expressions." The following passage will illustrate as well as any the romantic character of the whole: "When the long-sounding curfew from afar Loaded with loud lament the lonely gale, Young Edwin, lighted by the evening star, Lingering and listening, wandered down the vale. There would he dream of graves and corses pale, And ghosts that to the charnel-dungeon throng, And drag a length of clanking chain, and wail, Till silenced by the owl's terrific song, Or blast that shrieks by fits the shuddering aisles along. "Or when the settling moon, in crimson dyed, Hung o'er the dark and melancholy deep, To haunted stream, remote from man, he hied, Where fays of yore their revels wont to keep; And there let Fancy rove at large, till sleep A vision brought to his entrancëd sight. And first a wildly murmuring wind gan creep Shrill to his ringing ear; then tapers bright, With instantaneous gleam, illumed the vault of night. "Anon in view a portal's blazing arch Arose; the trumpet bids the valves unfold; And forth a host of little warriors march, Grasping the diamond lance and targe of gold. Their look was gentle, their demeanor bold, And green their helms, and green their silk attire; And here and there, right venerably old, The long-robed minstrels wake the warbling wire, And some with mellow breath the martial pipe inspire."[53] The influence of Thomson is clearly perceptible in these stanzas. "The Minstrel," like "The Seasons," abounds in insipid morality, the commonplaces of denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the praise of simplicity and innocence. The titles alone of Beattie's minor poems are enough to show in what school he was a scholar: "The Hermit," "Ode to Peace," "The Triumph of Melancholy," "Retirement," etc., etc. "The Minstrel" ran through four editions before the publication of its second book in 1774. [1] Svend Grundtvig's great collection, "Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser," was published in five volumes in 1853-90. [2] Francis James Child's "English and Scottish Popular Ballads," issued in ten parts in 1882-98 is one of the glories of American scholarship. [3] _Cf._ The Tannhäuser legend and the Venusberg. [4] "The Wife of Usher's Well." [5] It should never be forgotten that the ballad (derived from _ballare--to dance)_ was originally not a written poem, but a song and dance. Many of the old tunes are preserved. A number are given in Chappell's "Popular Music of the Olden Time," and in the appendix to Motherwell's "Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern" (1827). [6] "A Ballad." One theory explains these meaningless refrains as remembered fragments of older ballads. [7] Reproduced by Rossetti and other moderns. See them parodied in Robert Buchanan's "Fleshly School of Poets": "When seas do roar and skies do pour, Hard is the lot of the sailór Who scarcely, as he reels, can tell The sidelights from the binnacle." [8] "I never heard the old song of Percie and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crouder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar!" [9] Empty: "Bonnie George Campbell." [10] "Lord Randall." [11] Turf: "The Twa Corbies." [12] I use this phrase without any polemic purpose. The question of origins is not here under discussion. Of course at some stage in the history of any ballad the poet, the individual artist, is present, though the precise ration of his agency to the communal element in the work is obscure. For an acute and learned view of this topic, see the Introduction to "Old English Ballads," by Professor Francis B. Gummere (Atheneum Press Series), Boston, 1894. [13] From "Jock o' Hazel Green." "Young Lochinvar" is derived from "Katherine Janfarie" in the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." [14] "Scott has given us nothing more complete and lovely than this little song, which unites simplicity and dramatic power to a wildwood music of the rarest quality. No moral is drawn, far less any conscious analysis of feeling attempted: the pathetic meaning is left to be suggested by the mere presentment of the situation. Inexperienced critics have often named this, which may be called the Homeric manner, superficial from its apparent simple facility."--_Palgrave: "Golden Treasury"_ (Edition of 1866), p. 392. [15] "Brown Robyn's Confession." Robin Hood risks his life to take the sacrament. "Robin Hood and the Monk." [16] "Sir Hugh." _Cf._ Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale." [17] "The Gay Goshawk." [18] "Johnnie Cock." [19] "Young Hunting." [20] "The Twa Sisters." [21] "The Wife of Usher's Well." [22] "Fair Margaret and Sweet William." [23] "Sweet William's Ghost." [24] "Clerk Colven." [25] "Willie's Lady." [26] "Kemp Owyne" and "Tam Lin." [27] "King Estmere." [28] "Johnnie Cock." [29] "Mary Hamilton." [30] "Sweet William's Ghost." [31] "The Forsaken Bride." _Cf._ Chaucer: "Love is noght old as when that it is newe." --_Clerkes Tale._ [32] What character so popular as a wild prince--like Prince Hal--who breaks his own laws, and the heads of his own people, in a democratic way? [33] "Robin Hood and the Monk." [34] For a complete exposure of David Mallet's impudent claim to the authorship of this ballad, see Appendix II. to Professor Phelps' "English Romantic Movement." [35] "Life of Addison." [36] Preface to second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads." [37] "Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript" (1867), Vol. II. Introductory Essay by J. W. Hales on "The Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth Century." [38] _Ibid._ [39] "Advertisement to the Fourth Edition." [40] In four volumes, 1867-68. [41] Spelling reform has been a favorite field for cranks to disport themselves upon. Ritson's particular vanity was the past participle of verbs ending in _e; e.g., perceiveed._ _Cf._ Landor's notions of a similar kind. [42] "The Hunting of the Cheviot." [43] "Sweet William's Ghost." [44] "Tam Lin." [45] "Fair Annie." [46] "Child Waters." [47] See Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 33-35. [48] Appendix to the Preface to the 2nd edition of "Lyrical Ballads." [49] "Peter Bell." [50] Scherer: "Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur," p. 445. [51] In his third book Herder gave translations of over twenty pieces in the "Reliques," besides a number from Ramsay's and other collections. His selections from Percy included "Chevy Chase," "Edward," "The Boy and the Mantle," "King Estmere," "Waly, Waly," "Sir Patric Spens," "Young Waters," "The Bonny Earl of Murray," "Fair Margaret and Sweet William," "Sweet William's Ghost," "The Nut-Brown Maid," "The Jew's Daughter," etc., etc.; but none of the Robin Hood ballads. Herder's preface testifies that the "Reliques" was the starting-point and the kernel of his whole undertaking. "Der Anblick dieser Sammlung giebts offenbar dass ich eigentlich von _Englishchen_ Volksliedern ausging und auf sie zurückkomme. Als vor zehn und mehr Jahren die 'Reliques of Ancient Poetry' mir in die Hände fielen, freuten mich einzelne Stücke so sehr, dass ich sie zu übersetzen versuchte."--_Vorrede zu den Volksliedern. Herder's Sämmtlichee Werke_, Achter Theil, s. 89 (Carlsruhe, 1821). [52] Stanzas 44-46, book i. bring in references to ballad literature in general and to "The Nut-Brown Maid" and "The Children in the Wood" in particular. [53] Book I. stanzas 32-34. CHAPTER IX. Ossian In 1760 appeared the first installment of MacPherson's "Ossian."[1] Among those who received it with the greatest curiosity and delight was Gray, who had recently been helping Mason with criticisms on his "Caractacus," published in 1759. From a letter to Walpole (June 1760) it would seem that the latter had sent Gray two manuscript bits of the as yet unprinted "Fragments," communicated to Walpole by Sir David Dalrymple, who furnished Scotch ballads to Percy. "I am so charmed," wrote Gray, "with the two specimens of Erse poetry, that I cannot help giving you the trouble to inquire a little farther about them; and should wish to see a few lines of the original, that I may form some slight idea of the language, the measures and the rhythm. Is there anything known of the author or authors; and of what antiquity are they supposed to be? Is there any more to be had of equal beauty, or at all approaching it?" In a letter to Shonehewer (June 29,) he writes: "I have received another Scotch packet with a third specimen . . . full of nature and noble wild imagination."[2] And in the month following he writes to Wharton: "If you have seen Stonehewer, he has probably told you of my old Scotch (rather Irish) poetry. I am gone mad about them. They are said to be translations (literal and in prose) from the _Erse_ tongue, done by one MacPherson, a young clergyman in the Highlands. He means to publish a collection he has of these specimens of antiquity, if it be antiquity; but what plagues me, is, I cannot come at any certainty on that head. I was so struck, so _extasié_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into Scotland to make a thousand enquiries." This is strong language for a man of Gray's coolly critical temper; but all his correspondence of about this date is filled with references to Ossian which enable the modern reader to understand in part the excitement that the book created among Gray's contemporaries. The letters that he got from MacPherson were unconvincing, "ill-wrote, ill-reasoned, calculated to deceive, and yet not cunning enough to do it cleverly." The external evidence disposed him to believe the poems counterfeit; but the impression which they made was such that he was "resolved to believe them genuine, spite of the Devil and the Kirk. It is impossible to convince me that they were invented by the same man that writes me these letters. On the other hand, it is almost as hard to suppose, if they are original, that he should be able to translate them so admirably." On August 7 he writes to Mason that the Erse fragments have been published five weeks ago in Scotland, though he had not received his copy till the last week. "I continue to think them genuine, though my reasons for believing the contrary are rather stronger than ever." David Hume, who afterward became skeptical as to their authenticity, wrote to Gray, assuring him that these poems were in everybody's mouth in the Highlands, and had been handed down from father to son, from an age beyond all memory and tradition. Gray's final conclusion is very much the same with that of the general public, to which the Ossianic question is even yet a puzzle. "I remain still in doubt about the authenticity of these poems, tho' inclining rather to believe them genuine in spite of the world. Whether they are the inventions of antiquity, or of a modern Scotchman, either case is to me alike unaccountable. _Je m'y perds._" We are more concerned here with the impression which MacPherson's books, taking them just as they stand, made upon their contemporary Europe, than with the history of the controversy to which they gave rise, and which is still unsettled after more than a century and a quarter of discussion. Nevertheless, as this controversy began immediately upon their publication, and had reference not only to the authenticity of the Ossianic poems, but also to their literary value; it cannot be altogether ignored in this account. The principal facts upon which it turned may be given in a nut-shell. In 1759 Mr. John Home, author of the tragedy of "Douglas," who had become interested in the subject of Gaelic poetry, met in Dumfriesshire a young Scotchman, named James MacPherson, who was traveling as private tutor to Mr. Graham of Balgowan. MacPherson had in his possession a number of manuscripts which, he said, were transcripts of Gaelic poems taken down from the recital of old people in the Highlands. He translated two of these for Home, who was so much struck with them that he sent or showed copies to Dr. Hugh Blair, Professor of Rhetoric in the University of Edinburgh. At the solicitation of Dr. Blair and Mr. Home, MacPherson was prevailed upon to make further translations from the materials in his hands; and these, to the number of sixteen, were published in the "Fragments" already mentioned, with a preface of eight pages by Blair. They attracted so much attention in Edinburgh that a subscription was started, to send the compiler through the Highlands in search of more Gaelic poetry. The result of the researches was "Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books: Together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the son of Fingal. Translated from the Gaelic language by James MacPherson," London, 1762; together with "Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books," etc., etc., London, 1763. MacPherson asserted that he had made his versions from Gaelic poems ascribed to Ossian or Oisin, the son of Fingal or Finn MacCumhail, a chief renowned in Irish and Scottish song and popular legend. Fingal was the king of Morven, a district of the western Highlands, and head of the ancient warlike clan or race of the Feinne or Fenians. Tradition placed him in the third century and connected him with the battle of Gabhra, fought in 281. His son, Ossian, the warrior-bard, survived all his kindred. Blind and old, seated in his empty hall, or the cave of the rock; alone save for the white-armed Malvina, bride of his dead son, Oscar, he struck the harp and sang the memories of his youth: "a tale of the times of old." MacPherson translated--or composed--his "Ossian" in an exclamatory, abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling somewhat the English of Isaiah and others of the books of the prophets. The manners described were heroic, the state of society primitive. The properties were few and simple; the cars of the heroes, their spears, helmets, and blue shields; the harp, the shells from which they drank in the hall, etc. Conventional compound epithets abound, as in Homer: the "dark-bosomed" ships, the "car-borne" heroes, the "white-armed" maids, the "long-bounding" dogs of the chase. The scenery is that of the western Highlands; and the solemn monotonous rhythm of MacPherson's style accorded well with the tone of his descriptions, filling the mind with images of vague sublimity and desolation: the mountain torrent, the dark rock in the ocean, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on the windy heath, the blue stream of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal. It was noticed that there was no mention of the wolf, common in ancient Caledonia; nor of the thrush or lark or any singing bird; nor of the salmon of the sealochs, so often referred to in modern Gaelic poetry. But the deer, the swan, the boar, eagle, and raven occur repeatedly. But a passage or two will exhibit the language and imagery of the whole better than pages of description. "I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fire had resounded in the halls, and the voice of the people is heard no more. The stream of Clutha was removed from its place by the fall of the walls. The thistle shook there its lonely head; the moss whistled to the wind. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank grass of the wall waved round its head. Desolate is the dwelling of Moina, silence is in the house of her fathers. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers. They have but fallen before us; for, one day, we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers to-day; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield."[3] "They rose rustling like a flock of sea-fowl when the waves expel them from the shore. Their sound was like a thousand streams that meet in Cona's vale, when, after a stormy night, they turn their dark eddies beneath the pale light of the morn. As the dark shades of autumn fly over hills of grass; so, gloomy, dark, successive came the chiefs of Lochlin's[4] echoing woods. Tall as the stag of Morven, moved stately before them the King.[5] His shining shield is on his side, like a flame on the heath at night; when the world is silent and dark, and the traveler sees some ghost sporting in the beam. Dimly gleam the hills around, and show indistinctly their oaks. A blast from the troubled ocean removed the settled mist. The sons of Erin appear, like a ridge of rocks on the coast; when mariners, on shores unknown are trembling at veering winds."[6] The authenticity of the "Fragments" of 1760 had not passed without question; but MacPherson brought forward entire epics which, he asserted, were composed by a Highland bard of the third century, handed down through ages by oral tradition, and finally committed--at least in part--to writing and now extant in manuscripts in his possession, there ensued at once a very emphatic expression of incredulity. Among the most truculent of the disbelievers was Dr. Johnson. He had little liking for Scotland, still less for the poetry of barbarism. In his tour of the Western Islands with Boswell in 1773, he showed an insensibility, and even a kind of hostility, to the wild beauties of Highland scenery, which gradually affects the reader with a sense of the ludicrous as he watches his sturdy figure rolling along on a small Highland pony by sequestered Loch Ness, with its fringe of birch trees, or between the prodigious mountains that frown above Glensheal; or seated in a boat off the Mull of Cantyre, listening to the Erse songs of the rowers: "Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides." "Dr. Johnson," says Boswell, "owned he was now in a scene of as wild nature as he could see; but he corrected me sometimes in my inaccurate observations. 'There,' said I, 'is a mountain like a cone.' Johnson: 'No, sir. It would be called so in a book, but when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top, but one side of it is larger than the other.' Another mountain I called immense. Johnson: 'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.'" Johnson not only disputed the antiquity of MacPherson's "Ossian," but he denied it any poetic merit. Dr. Blair having asked him whether he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems, he answered: "Yes, sir: many men, many women and many children." "Sir," he exclaimed to Reynolds, "a man might write such stuff forever, if he would _abandon_ his mind to it." To Mr. MacQueen, one of his Highland hosts, he said: "I look upon MacPherson's 'Fingal' to be as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with." Johnson's arguments were mostly _a priori_. He asserted that the ancient Gael were a barbarous people, incapable of producing poetry of the kind. Long epics, such as "Fingal" and "Temora," could not be preserved in memory and handed down by word of mouth. As to ancient manuscripts which MacPherson pretended to have, there was not a Gaelic manuscript in existence a hundred years old. It is now quite well established that Dr. Johnson was wrong on all these points. To say nothing of the Homeric poems, the ancient Finns, Scandinavians, and Germans were as barbarous as the Gael; yet they produced the Kalewala, the Edda, and the Nibelungen Lied. The Kalewala, a poem of 22, 793 lines--as long as the Iliad--was transmitted orally from a remote antiquity and first printed in 1849. As to Gaelic manuscripts, there are over sixty in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh, varying in age from three hundred to five hundred years.[7] There is, _e.g._, the "Glenmasan Manuscript" of the year 1238, containing the story of "Darthula,"[8] which is the groundwork of the same story in MacPherson's "Ossian." There is the important "Dean of Lismore's Book," a manuscript collection made by Dean MacGregory of Lismore, Argyleshire, between 1512 and 1529, containing 11,000 lines of Gaelic poetry, some of which is attributed to Ossian or Oisin. One of the poems is identical in substance with the first book of MacPherson's "Temora;" although Mr. Campbell says, "There is not one line in the Dean's book that I can identify with any line in MacPherson's Gaelic."[9] Other objections to the authenticity of MacPherson's translations rested upon internal evidence, upon their characteristics of thought and style. It was alleged that the "peculiar tone of sentimental grandeur and melancholy" which distinguishes them, is false to the spirit of all known early poetry, and is a modern note. In particular, it was argued, MacPherson's heroes are too sensitive to the wild and sublime in nature. Professor William R. Sullivan, a high authority on Celtic literature, says that in the genuine and undoubted remains of old Irish poetry belonging to the Leinster or Finnian Cycle and ascribed to Oisin, there is much detail in descriptions of arms, accouterments, and articles of indoor use and ornament, but very little in descriptions of outward nature.[10] On the other hand, the late Principal Shairp regards this "sadness of tone in describing nature" as a strong proof of authenticity. "Two facts," he says, "are enough to convince me of the genuineness of the ancient Gaelic poetry. The truthfulness with which it reflects the melancholy aspects of Highland scenery, the equal truthfulness with which it expresses the prevailing sentiment of the Gael, and his sad sense of his people's destiny. I need no other proofs that the Ossianic poetry is a native formation, and comes from the primeval heart of the Gaelic race."[11] And he quotes, in support of his view, a well-known passage from Matthew Arnold's "Study of Celtic Literature": "The Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion, of this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, MacPherson's 'Ossian,' carried, in the last century, this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticise MacPherson's 'Ossian' here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in the book as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of MacPherson's 'Ossian,' she may have stolen from that _vetus et major Scotia_--Ireland; I make no objection. But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it; and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Lora, and Selma with its silent halls! We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose any one of the better passages in MacPherson's 'Ossian,' and you can see, even at this time of day, what an apparition of newness and of power such a strain must have been in the eighteenth century." But from this same kind of internal evidence, Wordsworth draws just the opposite conclusion. "The phantom was begotten by the snug embrace of an impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition. It traveled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin consistence took its course through Europe upon the breath of popular applause.[12]. . . Open this far-famed book! I have done so at random, and the beginning of the epic poem 'Temora,' in eight books, presents itself. 'The blue waves of Ullin roll in light. The green hills are covered with day. Trees shake their dusky heads in the breeze. Gray torrents pour their noisy streams. Two green hills with aged oaks surround a narrow plain. The blue course of a stream is there. On its banks stood Cairbar of Atha. His spear supports the king: the red eyes of his fear are sad. Cormac rises on his soul with all his ghastly wounds. . .' Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute, independent singleness. In MacPherson's work it is exactly the reverse: everything (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened, yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. To say that the characters never could exist; that the manners are impossible; and that a dream has more substance than the whole state of society, as there depicted, is doing nothing more than pronouncing a censure which MacPherson defied. . . Yet, much as these pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the country. No succeeding writer appears to have caught from them a ray of inspiration; no author in the least distinguished has ventured formally to imitate them, except the boy Chatterton, on their first appearance. . . This incapability to amalgamate with the literature of the Island is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless. Contrast, in this respect, the effect of MacPherson's publication with the 'Reliques' of Percy, so unassuming, so modest in their pretensions." Other critics have pointed out a similar indistinctness in the human actors, no less than in the landscape features of "Fingal" and "Temora." They have no dramatic individuality, but are all alike, and all extremely shadowy. "Poor, moaning, monotonous MacPherson" is Carlyle's alliterative description of the translator of "Ossian"; and it must be confessed that, in spite of the deep poetic feeling which pervades these writings, and the undeniable beauty of single passages, they have damnable iteration. The burden of their song is a burden in every sense. Mr. Malcolm Laing, one of MacPherson's most persistent adversaries, who published "Notes and Illustrations to Ossian" in 1805, essayed to show, by a minute analysis of the language, that the whole thing was a fabrication, made up from Homer, Milton, the English Bible, and other sources. Thus he compared MacPherson's "Like the darkened moon when she moves, a dim circle, through heaven, and dreadful change is expected by men," with Milton's "Or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs." Laing's method proves too much and might be applied with like results to almost any literary work. And, in general, it is hazardous to draw hard and fast conclusions from internal evidence of the sort just reviewed. Taken altogether, these objections do leave a strong bias upon the mind, and were one to pronounce upon the genuineness of MacPherson's "Ossian," as a whole, from impressions of tone and style, it might be guessed that whatever element of true ancient poetry it contains, it had been thoroughly steeped in modern sentiment before it was put before the public. But remembering Beowulf and the Norse mythology, one might hesitate to say that the songs of primitive, heroic ages are always insensible to the sublime in nature; or to admit that melancholy is a Celtic monopoly. The most damaging feature of MacPherson's case was his refusal or neglect to produce his originals. The testimony of those who helped him in collecting and translating leaves little doubt that he had materials of some kind; and that these consisted partly of old Gaelic manuscripts, and partly of transcriptions taken down in Gaelic from the recitation of aged persons in the Highlands. These testimonies may be read in the "Report of the Committee of the Highland Society," Edinburgh, 1805.[13] It is too voluminous to examine here, and it leaves unsettled the point as to the precise use which MacPherson made of his materials, whether, _i.e._, he gave literal renderings of them, as he professed to do; or whether he manipulated them--and to what extent--by piecing fragments together, lopping, dove-tailing, smoothing, interpolating, modernizing, as Percy did with his ballads. He was challenged to show his Gaelic manuscripts, and Mr. Clerk says that he accepted the challenge. "He deposited the manuscripts at his publishers', Beckett and De Hondt, Strand, London. He advertised in the newspapers that he had done so; offered to publish them if a sufficient number of subscribers came forward; and in the _Literary Journal_ of the year 1784, Beckett certifies that the manuscripts had lain in his shop for the space of a whole year."[14] But this was more than twenty years after. Mr. Clerk does not show that Johnson or Laing or Shaw or Pinkerton, or any of MacPherson's numerous critics, ever saw any such advertisement, or knew where the manuscripts were to be seen; or that--being ignorant of Gaelic--it would have helped them if they had known; and he admits that "MacPherson's subsequent conduct, in postponing from time to time the publication, when urged to it by friends who had liberally furnished him with means for the purpose . . . is indefensible." In 1773 and 1775, _e.g._, Dr. Johnson was calling loudly for the production of the manuscripts. "The state of the question," he wrote to Boswell, February 7, 1775, "is this. He and Dr. Blair, whom I consider as deceived, say that he copied the poem from old manuscripts. His copies, if he had them--and I believe him to have none--are nothing. Where are thee manuscripts? They can be shown if they exist, but they were never shown. _De non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem est ratio._" And during his Scotch trip in 1773, at a dinner at Sir Alexander Gordon's, Johnson said: "If the poems were really translated, they were certainly first written down. Let Mr. MacPherson deposit the manuscripts in one of the colleges at Aberdeen, where there are people who can judge; and if the professors certify their authenticity, then there will be an end of the controversy. If he does not take this obvious and easy method, he gives the best reason to doubt." Indeed the subsequent history of these alleged manuscripts casts the gravest suspicion on MacPherson's good faith. A thousand pounds were finally subscribed to pay for the publication of the Gaelic texts. But these MacPherson never published. He sent the manuscripts which were ultimately published in 1807 to his executor, Mr. John Mackenzie; and he left one thousand pounds by his will to defray the expense of printing them. After MacPherson's death in 1796, Mr. Mackenzie "delayed the publication from day to day, and at last handed over the manuscripts to the Highland Society,"[15] which had them printed in 1807, nearly a half century after the first appearance of the English Ossian.[16] These, however, were not the identical manuscripts which MacPherson had found, or said that he had found, in his tour of exploration through the Highlands. They were all in his own handwriting or in that of his amanuenses. Moreover the Rev. Thomas Ross was employed by the society to transcribe them and conform the spelling to that of the Gaelic Bible, which is modern. The printed text of 1807, therefore, does not represent accurately even MacPherson's Gaelic. Whether the transcriber took any further liberties than simply modernizing the spelling cannot be known, for the same mysterious fate that overtook MacPherson's original collections followed his own manuscript. This, after being at one time in the Advocates' Library, has now utterly disappeared. Mr. Campbell thinks that under this double process of distillation--a copy by MacPherson and then a copy by Ross--"the ancient form of the language, if it was ancient, could hardly survive."[17] "What would become of Chaucer," he asks, "so maltreated and finally spelt according to modern rules of grammar and orthography? I have found by experience that an alteration in 'spelling' may mean an entire change of construction and meaning, and a substitution of whole words." But the Gaelic text of 1807 was attacked in more vital points than its spelling. It was freely charged with being an out-and-out fabrication, a translation of MacPherson's English prose into modern Gaelic. This question is one which must be settled by Gaelic scholars, and these still disagree. In 1862 Mr. Campbell wrote: "When the Gaelic 'Fingal,' published in 1807, is compared with any one of the translations which purport to have been made from it, it seems to me incomparably superior. It is far simpler in diction. It has a peculiar rhythm and assonance which seem to repel the notion of a mere translation from English, as something almost absurd. It is impossible that it can be a translation from MacPherson's English, unless there was some clever Gaelic poet[18] then alive, able and willing to write what Eton schoolboys call 'full-sense verses.'" The general testimony is that MacPherson's own knowledge of Gaelic was imperfect. Mr. Campbell's summary of the whole matter--in 1862--is as follows: "My theory then is, that about the beginning of the eighteenth century, or the end of the seventeenth, or earlier, Highland bards may have fused floating popular traditions into more complete forms, engrafting their own ideas on what they found; and that MacPherson found their works, translated and altered them; published the translation in 1760;[19] made the Gaelic ready for the press; published some of it in 1763,[20] and made away with the evidence of what he had done, when he found that his conduct was blamed. I can see no other way out of the maze of testimony." But by 1872 Mr. Campbell had come to a conclusion much less favorable to the claims of the Gaelic text. He now considers that the English was first composed by MacPherson and that "he and other translators afterward worked at it and made a Gaelic equivalent whose merit varies according to the translator's skill and knowledge of Gaelic."[21] On the other hand, Mr. W. F. Skene and Mr. Archibald Clerk, are confident that the Gaelic is the original and the English the translation. Mr. Clerk, who reprinted the Highland Society's text in 1870,[22] with a literal translation of his own on alternate pages and MacPherson's English at the foot of the page, believes implicitly in the antiquity and genuineness of the Gaelic originals. "MacPherson," he writes, "got much from manuscripts and much from oral recitation. It is most probable that he has given the minor poems exactly as he found them. He may have made considerable changes in the larger ones in giving them their present form; although I do not believe that he, or any of his assistants, added much even in the way of connecting links between the various episodes." To a reader unacquainted with Gaelic, comparing MacPherson's English with Mr. Clerk's, it certainly looks unlikely that the Gaelic can be merely a translation from the former. The reflection in a mirror cannot be more distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, _e.g._, the closing passage of the second "Duan," or book, of "Fingal." "An arrow found his manly breast. He sleeps with his loved Galbina at the noise of the sounding surge. Their green tombs are seen by the mariner, when he bounds on the waves of the north."--_MacPherson_. "A ruthless arrow found his breast. His sleep is by thy side, Galbina, Where wrestles the wind with ocean. The sailor sees their graves as one, When rising on the ridge of the waves." --_Clerk_ But again Mr. Archibald Sinclair, a Glasgow publisher, a letter from whom is given by Mr. Campbell in his "Tales of the West Highlands," has "no hesitation in affirming that a considerable portion of the Gaelic which is published as the original of his [MacPherson's] translation, is actually translated back from the English." And Professor Sullivan says: "The so-called originals are a very curious kind of mosaic, constructed evidently with great labor afterward, in which sentences or parts of sentences of genuine poems are cemented together in a very inferior word-paste of MacPherson's own."[23] It is of course no longer possible to maintain what Mr. Campbell says is the commonest English opinion, viz., that MacPherson invented the characters and incidents of his "Ossian," and that the poems had no previous existence in any shape. The evidence is overwhelming that there existed, both in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands traditions, tales, and poems popularly attributed to Oisin, the son of Finn MacCumhail. But no poem has been found which corresponds exactly to any single piece in MacPherson; and Sullivan cites, as one proof of the modern and spurious character of these versions, the fact that they mingle names from the ancient hero-cycle, like Darthula, Cuthullin, and Conlach, with names belonging to the Finnian cycle, as is never the case in the authentic and undoubted remains of Celtic poetry. Between 1760, the date of MacPherson's "Fragments," and 1807, the date of the Highland Society's text, there had been published independently nine hundred lines of Ossianic verse in Gaelic in Gillie's collection, 1786, and Stewart's, 1804. In 1780 Dr. Smith had published his "Ancient Lays," a free translation from Gaelic fragments, which he subsequently printed (1787) under the title "Sean Dàna," Smith frankly took liberties with his originals, such as we may suppose that MacPherson took with his; but he made no secret of this and, by giving the Gaelic on which his paraphrase rested, he enabled the public to see how far his "Ancient Lays," were really ancient, and how far they were built up into poetic wholes by his own editorial labors.[24] Wordsworth's assertion of the failure of MacPherson's "Ossian" to "amalgamate with the literature of this island" needs some qualifications. That it did not enter into English literature in a formative way, as Percy's ballads did, is true enough, and is easy of explanation. In the first place, it was professedly a prose translation from poetry in another tongue, and could hardly, therefore, influence the verse and diction of English poetry directly. It could not even work upon them as directly as many foreign literatures have worked; as the ancient classical literatures, _e.g._, have always worked; or as Italian and French and German have at various times worked; for the Gaelic was practically inaccessible to all but a few special scholars. Whatever its beauty or expressiveness, it was in worse case than a dead language, for it was marked with the stigma of barbarism. In its palmiest days it had never been what the Germans called a _Kultursprache_; and now it was the idiom of a few thousand peasants and mountaineers, and was rapidly becoming extinct even in its native fastnesses. Whatever effect was to be wrought by the Ossianic poems upon the English mind, was to be wrought in the dress which MacPherson had given them. And perhaps, after all, the tumid and rhetorical cast of MacPherson's prose had a great deal to do with producing the extraordinary enthusiasm with which his "wild paraphrases," as Mr. Campbell calls them, were received by the public. The age was tired of polish, of wit, of over-civilization; it was groping toward the rude, the primitive, the heroic; had begun to steep itself in melancholy sentiment and to feel a dawning admiration of mountain solitudes and the hoary past. Suddenly here was what it had been waiting for--"a tale of the times of old"; and the solemn, dirge-like chant of MacPherson's sentences, with the peculiar manner of his narrative, its repetitions, its want of transitions, suited well with his matter. "Men had been talking under their breath, and in a mincing dialect so long," says Leslie Stephen, "that they were easily gratified and easily imposed upon by an affectation of vigorous and natural sentiment." The impression was temporary, but it was immediate and powerful. Wordsworth was wrong when he said that no author of distinction except Chatterton had ventured formally to imitate Ossian. A generation after the appearance of the "Fragments" we find the youthful Coleridge alluding to "Ossian" in the preface[25] to his first collection of poems (1793), which contains two verse imitations of the same, as _ecce signum_: "How long will ye round me be swelling, O ye blue-tumbling waves of the sea? Not always in caves was my dwelling, Nor beneath the cold blast of the tree," etc., etc.[26] In Byron's "House of Idleness" (1807), published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is a piece of prose founded on the episode of Nisus and Euryalus in the "Aeneid" and entitled "The Death of Calmar and Orla--An Imitation of MacPherson's Ossian." "What form rises on the roar of clouds? Whose dark ghost gleams in the red stream of tempests? His voice rolls on the thunder. 'Tis Orla, the brown chief of Orthona. . . Lovely wast thou, son of blue-eyed Morla," etc. After reading several pages of such stuff, one comes to feel that Byron could do this sort of thing about as well as MacPherson himself; and indeed, that Johnson was not so very far wrong when he said that anyone could do it if he would abandon his mind to it. Chatterton applied the Ossianic verbiage in a number of pieces which he pretended to have translated from the Saxon: "Ethelgar," "Kenrick," "Cerdick," and "Gorthmund"; as well as in a composition which he called "Godred Crovan," from the Manx dialect, and one from the ancient British, which he entitled "The Heilas." He did not catch the trick quite so successfully as Byron, as a passage or two from "Kenrick" will show: "Awake, son of Eldulph! Thou that sleepest on the white mountain, with the fairest of women; no more pursue the dark brown wolf: arise from the mossy bank of the falling waters: let thy garments be stained in blood, and the streams of life discolor thy girdle. . . Cealwulf of the high mountain, who viewed the first rays of the morning star, swift as the flying deer, strong as a young oak, fiery as an evening wolf, drew his sword; glittering like the blue vapors in the valley of Horso; terrible as the red lightning bursting from the dark-brown clouds, his swift bark rode over the foaming waves like the wind in the tempest." In a note on his Ossianic imitation, Byron said that Mr. Laing had proved Ossian an impostor, but that the merit of MacPherson's work remained, although in parts his diction was turgid and bombastic.[27] A poem in the "Hours of Idleness," upon the Scotch mountain "Lachin Y Gair," has two Ossianic lines in quotation points-- "Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?" Byron attributed much importance to his early recollections of Highland scenery, which he said had prepared him to love the Alps and "blue Friuli's mountains," and "the Acroceraunian mountains of old name." But the influence of Ossian upon Byron and his older contemporaries was manifested in subtler ways than in formal imitations. It fell in with that current of feeling which Carlyle called "Wertherism," and helped to swell it. It chimed with the tone that sounds through the German _Sturm und Drang_ period; that impatience of restraint, that longing to give full swing to the claims of the elementary passions, and that desperation when these are checked by the arrangements of modern society, which we encounter in Rousseau and the young Goethe. Hence the romantic gloom, the Byronic _Zerrissenheit_, to use Heine's word, which drove the poet from the rubs of social life to waste places of nature and sometimes to suicide. In such a mood the mind recurred to the language of Ossian, as the fit expression of its own indefinite and stormy griefs. "Homer," writes Werther, "has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian. Through what a world does this angelic bard carry me! With him I wander over barren wastes and frightful wilds; surrounded by whirlwinds and hurricanes, trace by the feeble light of the moon the shades of our noble ancestors; hear from the mountainous heights, intermingled with the roaring of waves and cataracts, their plaintive tones stealing from cavernous recesses; while the pensive monody of some love-stricken maiden, who heaves her departing sighs over the moss-clad grave of the warrior by whom she was adored, makes up the inarticulate concert. I trace this bard, with his silver locks, as he wanders in the valley and explores the footsteps of his fathers. Alas! no vestige remains but their tombs. His thought then hangs on the silver moon, as her sinking beams play upon the rippling main; and the remembrance of deeds past and gone recurs to the hero's mind--deeds of times when he gloried in the approach of danger, and emulation nerved his whole frame; when the pale orb shone upon his bark, laden with the spoils of his enemy, and illuminated his triumphant return. When I see depicted on his countenance a bosom full of woe; when I behold his heroic greatness sinking into the grave, and he exclaims, as he throws a glance at the cold sod which is to lie upon him: 'Hither will the traveler who is sensible of my worth bend his weary steps, and seek the soul-enlivening bard, the illustrious son of Fingal; his foot will tread upon my tomb, but his eyes shall never behold me'; at this time it is, my dear friend, that, like some renowned and chivalrous knight, I could instantly draw my sword; rescue my prince from a long, irksome existence of languor and pain; and then finish by plunging the weapon into my own breast, that I might accompany the demi-god whom my hand had emancipated."[28] In his last interview with Charlotte, Werther, who had already determined upon suicide, reads aloud to her, from "The Songs of Selma," "that tender passage wherein Armin deplores the loss of his beloved daughter. 'Alone on the sea-beat rocks, my daughter was heard to complain. Frequent and loud were her cries. What could her father do? All night I stood on the shore. I saw her by the faint beam of the moon,'" etc. The reading is interrupted by a mutual flood of tears. "They traced the similitude of their own misfortune in this unhappy tale. . . The pointed allusion of those words to the situation of Werther rushed with all the electric rapidity of lightning to the inmost recesses of his soul." It is significant that one of Ossian's most fervent admirers was Chateaubriand, who has been called the inventor of modern melancholy and of the primeval forest. Here is a passage from his "Génie du Christianisme":[29] "Under a cloudy sky, on the coast of that sea whose tempests were sung by Ossian, their Gothic architecture has something grand and somber. Seated on a shattered altar in the Orkneys, the traveler is astonished at the dreariness of those places: sudden fogs, vales where rises the sepulchral stone, streams flowing through wild heaths, a few reddish pine trees, scattered over a naked desert studded with patches of snow; such are the only objects which present themselves to his view. The wind circulates among the ruins, and their innumerable crevices become so many tubes, which heave a thousand sighs. Long grasses wave in the apertures of the domes, and beyond these apertures you behold the flitting clouds and the soaring sea-eagle. . . Long will those four stones which mark the tombs of heroes on the moors of Caledonia, long will they continue to attract the contemplative traveler. Oscar and Malvina are gone, but nothing is changed in their solitary country. 'Tis no longer the hand of the bard himself that sweeps the harp; the tones we hear are the slight trembling of the strings, produced by the touch of a spirit, when announcing at night, in a lonely chamber, the death of a hero. . . So when he sits in the silence of noon in the valley of his breezes is the murmur of the mountain to Ossian's ear: the gale drowns it often in its course, but the pleasant sound returns again." In Byron's passion for night and tempest, for the wilderness, the mountains, and the sea, it is of course impossible to say how large a share is attributable directly to MacPherson's "Ossian," or more remotely, through Chateaubriand and other inheritors of the Ossianic mood. The influence of any particular book becomes dispersed and blended with a hundred currents that are in the air. But I think one has often a consciousness of Ossian in reading such passages as the famous apostrophe to the ocean in "Childe Harold"-- "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!"-- Which recalls the address to the sun in Carthous--"O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers,"--perhaps the most hackneyed _locus classicus_ in the entire work; or as the lines beginning, "O that the desert were my dwelling place;"[30] or the description of the storm in the Jura: "And this is in the night: Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber. Let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight A portion of the tempest and of thee."[30] Walter Scott, while yet a lad, made acquaintance with Ossian through Dr. Blacklock, and was at first delighted; but "the tawdry repetitions of the Ossianic phraseology," he confesses, "disgusted me rather sooner than might have been expected from my age." He afterward contributed an essay on the authenticity of the poems to the proceedings of the Speculative Club of Edinburgh. In one sense of the word Scott was the most romantic of romanticists; but in another sense he was very little romantic, and there was not much in his sane, cheerful, and robust nature upon which such poetry as Ossian could fasten.[31] It is just at this point, indeed, that definitions diverge and the two streams of romantic tendency part company. These Carlyle has called "Wertherism" and "Götzism"[32] _i.e._ sentimentalism and mediaevalism, though so mild a word as sentimentalism fails to express adequately the morbid despair to which "Werther" gave utterance, and has associations with works of a very different kind, such as the fictions of Richardson and Sterne. In England, Scott became the foremost representative of "Götzism," and Byron of "Wertherism." The pessimistic, sardonic heroes of "Manfred," "Childe Harold," and "The Corsair" were the latest results of the "Il Penseroso" literature, and their melodramatic excesses already foretokened a reaction. Among other testimonies to Ossian's popularity in England are the numerous experiments at versifying MacPherson's prose. These were not over-successful and only a few of them require mention here. The Rev. John Wodrow, a Scotch minister, "attempted" "Carthon," "The Death of Cuthullin" and "Darthula" in heroic couplets, in 1769; and "Fingal" in 1771. In the preface to his "Fingal," he maintained that there was no reasonable doubt of the antiquity and authenticity of MacPherson's "Ossian." "Fingal"--which seems to have been the favorite--was again turned into heroic couplets by Ewen Cameron, in 1776, prefaced by the attestations of a number of Highland gentlemen to the genuineness of the originals; and by an argumentative introduction, in which the author quotes Dr. Blair's _dictum_ that Ossian was the equal of Homer and Vergil "in strength of imagination, in grandeur of sentiment, and in native majesty of passion." National pride enlisted most of the Scotch scholars on the affirmative side of the question, and made the authenticity of Ossian almost an article of belief. Wodrow's heroics were merely respectable. The quality of Cameron's may be guessed from a half dozen lines: "When Moran, one commissioned to explore The distant seas, came running from the shore And thus exclaimed--'Cuthullin, rise! The ships Of snowy Lochlin hide the rolling deeps. Innumerable foes the land invade, And Swaran seems determined to succeed.'" Whatever impressiveness belonged to MacPherson's cadenced prose was lost in these metrical versions, which furnish a perfect _reductio ad absurdum_ of the critical folly that compared Ossian with Homer. Homer could not be put in any dress through which the beauty and interest of the original would not appear. Still again, in 1786, "Fingal" was done into heroics by a Mr. R. Hole, who varied his measures with occasional ballad stanzas, thus: "But many a fair shall melt with woe At thy soft strain in future days, And many a manly bosom glow, Congenial to thy lofty lays." These versions were all emitted in Scotland. But as late as 1814 "Fingal" appeared once more in verse, this time in London, and in a variety of meters by Mr. George Harvey; who, in his preface, expressed the hope that Walter Scott would feel moved to cast "Ossian" into the form of a metrical romance, like "Marmion" or "The Lay of the Last Minstrel." The best English poem constructed from MacPherson is "The Six Bards of Ossian Versified," by Sir Egerton Brydges (dated in 1784).[33] The passage selected was the one which Gray so greatly admired,[34] from a note to "Croma," in the original "Fragments." Six bards who have met at the hall of a chieftain, on an October night, go out one after another to observe the weather, and return to report their observations, each ending with the refrain "Receive me from the night, my friends." The whole episode is singularly arresting, and carries a conviction of reality too often wanting in the epic portions of MacPherson's collection. Walpole, at first, was nearly as much charmed by the "Fragments" as Gray had been. He wrote to Dalrymple that they were real poetry, natural poetry, like the poetry of the East. He liked particularly the synonym for an echo--"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem, that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, in a letter dated March, 1783, has become quite incredible to him; but Mrs. Montagu--the founder of the Blue Stocking Club--still "holds her feast of shells in her feather dressing-room." The Celtic Homer met with an even warmer welcome abroad than at home. He was rendered into French,[35] German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and possibly other languages. Bonaparte was a great lover of Ossian, and carried about with him a copy of Cesarotti's Italian version. A resemblance has been fancied between MacPherson's manner and the grandiloquent style of Bonaparte's bulletins and dispatches.[36] In Germany Ossian naturally took most strongly. He was translated into hexameters by a Vienna Jesuit named Michael Denis[37] and produced many imitations. Herder gave three translations from "Ossian" in his "Stimmen der Völker" (1778-79) and prefixed to the whole collection an essay "Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker" written in 1773. Schiller was one of the converts; Klopstock and his circle called themselves "bards"; and an exclamatory and violent mannerism came into vogue, known in German literary history as _Bardengebrüll_. MacPherson's personal history need not be followed here in detail. In 1764 he went to Pensacola as secretary to Governor Johnston. He was afterward a government pamphleteer, writing against Junius and in favor of taxing the American colonies. He was appointed agent to the Nabob of Arcot; sat in Parliament for the borough of Camelford, and built a handsome Italian villa in his native parish; died in 1796, leaving a large fortune, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In 1773 he was ill-advised enough to render the "Iliad" into Ossianic prose. The translation was overwhelmed with ridicule, and probably did much to increase the growing disbelief in the genuineness of "Fingal" and "Temora." [1] "Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language." Edinburgh, MDCCLX. 70 pp. [2] This was sent him by MacPherson and was a passage not given in the "Fragments." [3] From "Carthon." [4] Scandinavia [5] An unconscious hexameter. [6] From "Fingal" book ii. [7] See the dissertation by Rev. Archibald Clerk in his "Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a literal translation into English." 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1870. [8] This story as been retold, from Irish sources, in Dr. R. D. Joyce's poem of "Deirdrè," Boston, 1876. [9] See "Leabhar na Feinne, Heroic Gaelic Ballads, Collected in Scotland, chiefly from 1512 to 1871. Arranged by J. F. Campbell," London, 1872. Selections from "The Dean of Lismore's Book" were edited and published at Edinburgh in 1862, by Rev. Thomas MacLauchlan, with a learned introduction by Mr. W. F. Skene. [10] Article on "Celtic Literature" in the "Encyclopedia Britannica." [11] "Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (American Edition). [12] Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads." Taine says that Ossian "with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers_."--_English Literature_, Vol. II. p. 220 (American Edition). [13] The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of poems, which they had been able to obtain, contained often the substance, and sometimes the "literal expression (the _ipsissima verba_)" of passages given by MacPherson. "But," continues the "Report," "the Committee has not been able to obtain any one poem the same in title and tenor with the poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting passages which he did not find; and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by striking out passages, by softening incidents, by refining the language: in short, by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear." [14] "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See _ante_, p. 313. [15] Clerk. [16] "The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., London, 1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbé Cesarotti (translated). Four hundred and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the alleged original of the seventh book of "Temora," had been published with that epic in 1763. [17] "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Edinburgh, 1862. Vol. IV. P. 156. [18] He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of MacPherson's helpers. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." [19] "Fragments," etc. [20] Seventh book of "Temora." See _ante_, p. 321. [21] "Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii. [22] See _ante_, p. 313, note. [23] "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "Celtic Literature." [24] For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" question, see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems," 1868; and an article on "Ossian" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, XXIV. 113-25. [25] "The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of itself." [26] "The Complaint of Ninathoma." [27] For some MS. Notes of Byron in a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps' "English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54. [28] "Sorrows of Werther," Letter lxviii. [29] "Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii. chapter vii. part iv. [30] "Childe Harold," canto iii. [31] The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog Luath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to "Cath-Loda" in the notes on "The Vision," show that Burns knew his Ossian. [32] From Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen." [33] See "Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. pp. 87-96. [34] See _ante_, p. 117. [35] There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810: by Lacaussade in 1842; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 1801. [36] See Perry's "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417. [37] One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He was born at Schärding, Bavaria, in 1729. CHAPTER X. Thomas Chatterton. The history of English romanticism has its tragedy: the life and death of Thomas Chatterton-- "The marvelous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."[1] The story has been often told, but it may be told again here; for, aside from its dramatic interest, and leaving out of question the absolute value of the Rowley poems, it is most instructive as to the conditions which brought about the romantic revival. It shows by what process antiquarianism became poetry. The scene of the story was the ancient city of Bristol--old Saxon _Bricgestowe_, "place of the bridge"--bridge, namely, over the Avon stream, not far above its confluence with the Severn. Here Chatterton was born in 1752, the posthumous son of a dissipated schoolmaster, whose ancestors for a hundred and fifty years had been, in unbroken succession, sextons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Perhaps it may be more than an idle fancy to attribute to heredity the bent which Chatterton's genius took spontaneously and almost from infancy; to guess that some mysterious ante-natal influence--"striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound"--may have set vibrating links of unconscious association running back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chatterton was the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary stood by his cradle and rocked it; and if he did not inherit with his blood, or draw in with his mother's milk a veneration for her ancient pile; at least the waters of her baptismal font[2] seemed to have signed him with the token of her service. Just as truly as "The Castle of Otranto" was sprung from Strawberry Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary's Church. Chatterton's father had not succeeded to the sextonship, but he was a sub-chanter in Bristol Cathedral, and his house and school in Pile Street were only a few yards from Redcliffe Church. In this house Chatterton was born, under the eaves almost of the sanctuary; and when his mother removed soon after to another house, where she maintained herself by keeping a little dame's school and doing needle work, it was still on Redcliffe Hill and in close neighborhood to St. Mary's. The church itself--"the pride of Bristowe and the western land"--is described as "one of the finest parish churches in England,"[3] a rich specimen of late Gothic or "decorated" style; its building or restoration dating from the middle of the fifteenth century. Chatterton's uncle by marriage, Richard Phillips, had become sexton in 1748, and the boy had the run of the aisles and transepts. The stone effigies of knights, priests, magistrates, and other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color from the red and blue patterns thrown on the pavement by the stained glass of the windows; and he may well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he knew from "the knightly brasses of the tombs" and "cold _hic jacets_ of the dead." It is curious how early his education was self-determined to its peculiar ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary child, given to fits of moodiness, he was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's Hospital, where he was put to school, was built on the site of a demolished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars wore blue coats, with metal plates on their breasts stamped with the image of a dolphin, the armorial crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short in imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy grew into a youth, there were numbered among his near acquaintances, along with the vintners, sugar-bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other tradesmen of the Bristol _bourgeoisie_, two church organists, a miniature painter, and an engraver of coats-of-arms--figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling of municipal life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is reproduced in the Rowley poems. "Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking of his manuscripts, and sometimes reading them there. There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take a peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on a sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt down by lightning: that was the place where they formerly acted plays.'" "Among his early studies," we are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings of medieval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry seems especially to have had a fascination for him. He supplied himself with charcoal, black-lead, ochre, and other colors; and with these it was his delight to delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, castles, tombs of mailed warriors, heraldic emblazonments, and other like belongings of the old world."[5] Is there not a breath of the cloister in all this, reminding one of the child martyr in Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale," the "litel clergeon, seven yeer of age"? "This litel child his litel book lerninge, As he sat in the scole at his prymer, He 'Alma redemptoris' herde singe, As children lerned hir antiphoner." A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his glimpses of the sky not through green boughs, but through the treetops of the Episcopal gardens discolored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; dreaming in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, when "The choristers, sitting with faces aslant, Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant." Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol, including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About Canynge Chatterton arranged a number of _dramatis personae_, some of whose names he discovered in old records and documents, such as Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley, parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect manuscripts and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pass under the general name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were played interludes--"Aella," "Goddwyn," and "The Parliament of Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating. Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc. The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into this literary _cénacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of his age. There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore. But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _à propos_ of Scott, the expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the soil, that brought passion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings," he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans. The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more intense conception. In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda, church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish documents. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room. How early he conceived the idea of making this treasure-trove responsible for the Rowley myth, which was beginning to take shape in his mind, is uncertain. According to the testimony of a schoolfellow, by name Thistlethwaite, Chatterton told him in the summer of 1764 that he had a number of old manuscripts, found in a chest in Redcliffe Church, and that he had lent one of them to Thomas Philips, an usher in Colston's Hospital. Thistlethwaite says that Philips showed him this manuscript, a piece of vellum pared close around the edge, on which was traced in pale and yellow writing, as if faded with age, a poem which he thinks identical with "Elinoure and Juga," afterward published by Chatterton in the _Town and Country Magazine_ for May, 1769. One is inclined to distrust this evidence. "The Castle of Otranto" was first published in December, 1764, and the "Reliques," only in the year following. The latter was certainly known to Chatterton; many of the Rowley poems, "The Bristowe Tragedie," _e.g._, and the ministrel songs in "Aella," show ballad influence[6]; while it seems not unlikely that Chatterton was moved to take a hint from the disguise--slight as it was--assumed by Walpole in the preface to his romance.[7] But perhaps this was not needed to suggest to Chatterton that the surest way to win attention to his poems would be to ascribe them to some fictitious bard of the Middle Ages. It was the day of literary forgery; the Ossian controversy was raging, and the tide of popular favor set strongly toward the antique. A series of avowed imitations of old English poetry, however clever, would have had small success. But the discovery of a hitherto unknown fifteen-century poet was an announcement sure to interest the learned and perhaps a large part of the reading public. Besides, instances are not rare where a writer has done his best work under a mask. The poems composed by Chatterton in the disguise of Rowley--a dramatically imagined _persona_ behind which he lost his own identity--are full of a curious attractiveness; while his acknowledged pieces are naught. It is not worth while to bear down very heavily on the moral aspects of this kind of deception. The question is one of literary methods rather than of ethics. If the writer succeeds by the skill of his imitations, and the ingenuity of the evidence that he brings to support them, in actually imposing upon the public for a time, the success justifies the attempt. The artist's purpose is to create a certain impression, and the choice of means must be left to himself. In the summer of 1764 Chatterton was barely twelve, and wonderful as his precocity was, it is doubtful whether he had got so far in the evolution of the Rowley legend as Thistlethwaite's story would imply. But it is certain that three years later, in the spring of 1767, Chatterton gave Mr. Henry Burgum, a worthy pewterer of Bristol, a parchment emblazoned with the "de Bergham," coat-of-arms, which he pretended to have found in St. Mary's Church, furnishing him also with two copy-books, in which were transcribed the "de Bergham," pedigree, together with three poems in pseudo-antique spelling. One of these, "The Tournament," described a joust in which figured one Sir Johan de Berghamme, a presumable ancestor of the gratified pewterer. Another of them, "The Romaunte of the Cnyghte," purported to be the work of this hero of the tilt-yard, "who spent his whole life in tilting," but notwithstanding found time to write several books and translate "some part of the Iliad under the title 'Romance of Troy.'" All this stuff was greedily swallowed by Burgum, and the marvelous boy next proceeded to befool Mr. William Barrett, a surgeon and antiquary who was engaged in writing a history of Bristol. To him he supplied copies of supposed documents in the muniment room of Redcliffe Church: "Of the Auntiaunte Forme of Monies," and the like: deeds, bills, letters, inscriptions, proclamations, accounts of churches and other buildings, collected by Rowley for his patron, Canynge: many of which this singularly uncritical historian incorporated in his "History of Bristol," published some twenty years later. He also imparted to Barrett two Rowleian poems, "The Parliament of Sprites," and "The Battle of Hastings" (in two quite different versions). In September, 1768, a new bridge was opened at Bristol over the Avon; and Chatterton, who had now been apprenticed to an attorney, took advantage of the occasion to send anonymously to the printer of _Farley's Bristol Journal_ a description of the mayor's first passing over the old bridge in the reign of Henry II. This was composed in obsolete language and alleged to have been copied from a contemporary manuscript. It was the first published of Chatterton's fabrications. In the years 1768-69 he produced and gave to Mr. George Catcott the long tragical interude "Aella," "The Bristowe Tragedie," and other shorter pieces, all of which he declared to be transcripts from manuscripts in Canynge's chest, and the work of Thomas Rowley, a secular priest of Bristol, who flourished about 1460. Catcott was a local book-collector and the partner of Mr. Burgum. He was subsequently nicknamed "Rowley's midwife." In December, 1768, Chatterton opened a correspondence with James Dodsley, the London publisher, saying that several ancient poems had fallen into his hands, copies of which he offered to supply him, if he would send a guinea to cover expenses. He inclosed a specimen of "Aella." "The motive that actuates me to do this," he wrote, "is to convince the world that the monks (of whom some have so despicable an opinion) were not such blockheads as generally thought, and that good poetry might be wrote in the dark days of superstition, as well as in these more enlightened ages." Dodsley took no notice of the letters, and the owner of the Rowley manuscripts next turned to Horace Walpole, whose tastes as a virtuoso, a lover of Gothic, and a romancer might be counted on to enlist his curiosity in Chatterton's find. The document which he prepared for Walpole was a prose paper entitled "The Ryse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, wroten by T. Rowleie, 1469, for Mastre Canynge," and containing _inter alia_, the following extraordinary "anecdote of painting" about Afflem, an Anglo-Saxon glass-stainer of Edmond's reign who was taken prisoner by the Danes. "Inkarde, a soldyer of the Danes, was to slea hym; onne the Nete before the Feeste of Deathe hee founde Afflem to bee hys Broder Affrighte chanynede uppe hys soule. Gastnesse dwelled yn his Breaste. Oscarre, the greate Dane, gave hest hee shulde bee forslagene with the commeynge Sunne: no tears colde availe; the morne cladde yn roabes of ghastness was come, whan the Danique Kynge behested Oscarre to arraie hys Knyghtes eftsoones for Warre. Afflem was put yn theyre flyeynge Battailes, sawe his Countrie ensconced wyth Foemen, hadde hys Wyfe ande Chyldrenne brogten Capteeves to hys Shyppe, ande was deieynge wythe Soorowe, whanne the loude blautaunte Wynde hurled the battayle agaynste an Heck. Forfraughte wythe embolleynge waves, he sawe hys Broder, Wyfe and Chyldrenne synke to Deathe: himself was throwen onne a Banke ynne the Isle of Wyghte, to lyve hys lyfe forgard to all Emmoise: thus moche for Afflem."[8] This paper was accompanied with notes explaining queer words and giving short biographical sketches of Canynge, Rowley, and other imaginary characters, such as John, second abbot of St. Austin's Minster, who was the first English painter in oils and also the greatest poet of his age. "Take a specimen of his poetry, 'On King Richard I.': "'Harte of Lyone! Shake thie Sworde, Bare this mortheynge steinede honde,' etc." The whole was inclosed in a short note to Walpole, which ran thus: "Sir, Being versed a little in antiquitys, I have met with several curious manuscripts, among which the following may be of Service to you, in any future Edition of your truly entertaining Anecdotes of Painting.[9] In correcting the mistakes (if any) in the Notes, you will greatly oblige Your most humble Servant, Thomas Chatterton." Walpole replied civilly, thanking his correspondent for what he had sent and for his offer of communicating his manuscripts, but disclaiming any ability to correct Chatterton's notes. "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language, and, without your learned notes, should not have been able to comprehend Rowley's text." He asks where Rowley's poems are to be found, offers to print them, and pronounces the Abbot John's verses "wonderful for their harmony and spirit." This encouragement called out a second letter from Chatterton, with another and longer extract from the "Historie of Peyncteynge yn Englande," including translations into the Rowley dialect of passages from a pair of mythical Saxon poets: Ecca, Bishop of Hereford, and Elmar, Bishop of Selseie, "fetyve yn Workes of ghastlienesse," as _ecce signum_: "Nowe maie alle Helle open to golpe thee downe," etc. But by this time Walpole had begun to suspect imposture. He had been lately bitten in the Ossian business and had grown wary in consequence. Moreover, Chatterton had been incautious enough to show his hand in his second letter (March 30). "He informed me," said Walpole, in his history of the affair, "that he was the son of a poor widow . . . that he was clerk or apprentice to an attorney, but had a taste and turn for more elegant studies; and hinted a wish that I would assist him with my interest in emerging out of so dull a profession, by procuring him someplace." Meanwhile, distrusting his own scholarship, Walpole had shown the manuscripts to his friends Gray and Mason, who promptly pronounced them modern fabrications and recommended him to return them without further notice. But Walpole, good-naturedly considering that it was no "grave crime in a young bard to have forged false notes of hand that were to pass current only in the parish of Parnassus," wrote his ingenious correspondent a letter of well-meant advice, counseling him to stick to his profession, and saying that he "had communicated his transcripts to much better judges, and that they were by no means satisfied with the authenticity of his supposed manuscripts." Chatterton then wrote for his manuscripts, and after some delay--Walpole having been absent in Parish for several months--they were returned to him. In 1769 Chatterton had begun contributing miscellaneous articles, in prose and verse, to the _Town and Country Magazine_, a London periodical. Among these appeared the eclogue of "Elinoure and Juga,"[10] the only one of the Rowley poems printed during its author's lifetime. He had now turned his pen to the service of politics, espousing the side of Wilkes and liberty. In April, 1770, he left Bristol for London, and cast himself upon the hazardous fortunes of a literary career. Most tragical is the story of the poor, unfriended lad's struggle against fate for the next few months. He scribbled incessantly for the papers, receiving little or no pay. Starvation confronted him; he was too proud to ask help, and on August 24 he took poison and died, at the age of seventeen years and nine months. With Chatterton's acknowledged writings we have nothing here to do; they include satires in the manner of Churchill, political letters in the manner of Junius, squibs, lampoons, verse epistles, elegies, "African eclogues," a comic burletta, "The Revenge"--played at Marylebone Gardens shortly after his death--with essays and sketches in the style that the _Spectator_ and _Rambler_ had made familiar: "The Adventures of a Star," "The Memoirs of a Sad Dog," and the like. They exhibit a precocious cleverness, but have no value and no interest today. One gets from Chatterton's letters and miscellanies an unpleasant impression of his character. There is not only the hectic quality of too early ripeness which one detects in Keats' correspondence; and the defiant swagger, the affectation of wickedness and knowingness that one encounters in the youthful Byron, and that is apt to attend the stormy burst of irregular genius upon the world; but there are things that imply a more radical unscrupulousness. But it would be harsh to urge any such impressions against one who was no more than a boy when he perished, and whose brief career had struggled through cold obstruction to its bitter end. The best traits in Chatterton's character appear to have been his proud spirit of independence and his warm family affections. The death of an obscure penny-a-liner, like young Chatterton, made little noise at first. But gradually it became rumored about in London literary coteries that manuscripts of an interesting kind existed at Bristol, purporting to be transcripts from old English poems; and that the finder, or fabricator, of the same was the unhappy lad who had taken arsenic the other day, to anticipate a slower death from hunger. It was in April, 1771, that Walpole first heard of the fate of his would-be _protégé_. "Dining," he says, "at the Royal Academy, Dr. Goldsmith drew the attention of the company with an account of a marvelous treasure of ancient poems lately discovered at Bristol, and expressed enthusiastic belief in them; for which he was laughed at by Dr. Johnson, who was present. I soon found this was the _trouvaille_ of my friend Chatterton, and I told Dr. Goldsmith that this novelty was known to me, who might, if I had pleased, have had the honor of ushering the great discovery to the learned world. You may imagine, sir, we did not all agree in the measure of our faith; but though his credulity diverted me, my mirth was soon dashed; for, on asking about Chatterton, he told me he had been in London and had destroyed himself." With the exception of "Elinour and Juga," already mentioned, the Rowley poems were still unprinted. The manuscripts, in Chatterton's handwriting, were mostly in the possession of Barrett and Catcott. They purported to be copies of Rowley's originals; but of these alleged originals, the only specimens brought forward by Chatterton were a few scraps of parchment containing, in one instance, the first thirty-four lines of the poem entitled "The Storie of William Canynge"; in another a prose account of one "Symonne de Byrtonne," and, in still others, the whole of the short-verse pieces, "Songe to Aella" and "The Accounte of W. Canynge's Feast." These scraps of vellum are described as about six inches square, smeared with glue or brown varnish, or stained with ochre, to give them an appearance of age. Thomas Warton had seen one of them, and pronounced it a clumsy forgery; the script not of the fifteenth century, but unmistakably modern. Southey describes another as written, for the most part, in an attorney's regular engrossing hand. Mr. Skeat "cannot find the slightest indication that Chatterton had ever seen a MS. of early date; on the contrary, he never uses the common contractions, and he was singularly addicted to the use of capitals, which in old MSS. are rather scarce." Boswell tells how he and Johnson went down to Bristol in April, 1776, "where I was entertained with seeing him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Rowley's poetry, as I had seen him inquire upon the spot into the authenticity of Ossian's poetry. Johnson said of Chatterton, 'This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things.'" In 1777, seven years after Chatterton's death, his Rowley poems were first collected and published by Thomas Tyrwhitt, the Chaucerian editor, who gave, in an appendix, his reasons for believing that Chatterton was their real author, and Rowley a myth.[11] These reasons are convincing to any modern scholar. Tyrwhitt's opinion was shared at the time by all competent authorities--Gray, Thomas Warton, and Malone, the editor of the _variorum_ Shakspere, among others. Nevertheless, a controversy sprang up over Rowley, only less lively than the dispute about Ossian, which had been going on since 1760. Rowley's most prominent champions were the Rev. Dr. Symmes, who wrote in the _London Review_; the Rev. Dr. Sherwin, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_; Dr. Jacob Bryant,[12] and Jeremiah Milles, D.D., Dean of Exeter, who published a sumptuous quarto edition of the poems in 1782.[13] These asserters of Rowley belonged to the class of amateur scholars whom Edgar Poe used to speak of as "cultivated old clergymen." They had the usual classical training of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, but no precise knowledge of old English literature. They had the benevolent curiosity of Mr. Pickwick, and the gullibility--the large, easy swallow--which seems to go with the clerico-antiquarian habit of mind. Nothing is so extinct as an extinct controversy; and, unlike the Ossian puzzle, which was a harder nut to crack, this Rowley controversy was really settled from the start. It is not essential to our purpose to give any extended history of it. The evidence relied upon by the supporters of Rowley was mainly of the external kind: personal testimony, and especially the antecedent unlikeliness that a boy of Chatterton's age and imperfect education could have reared such an elaborate structure of deceit; together with the inferiority of his acknowledged writings to the poems that he ascribed to Rowley. But Tyrwhitt was a scholar of unusual thoroughness and acuteness; and, having a special acquaintance with early English, he was able to bring to the decision of the question evidence of an internal nature which became more convincing in proportion as the knowledge necessary to understand his argument increased; _i.e._, as the number of readers increased, who knew something about old English poetry. Indeed, it was nothing but the general ignorance of the spelling, flexions, vocabulary, and scansion of Middle English verse, that made the controversy possible. Tyrwhitt pointed out that the Rowleian dialect was not English of the fifteenth century, nor of any century, but a grotesque jumble of archaic words of very different periods and dialects. The orthography and grammatical forms were such as occurred in no old English poet known to the student of literature. The fact that Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form _itts_, instead of _his_; or the other fact that he used the termination _en_ in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, "resists the internal evidence of the style of Rowley's poems, we make him welcome to the rest of the argument; to his belief that the Saxons imported heraldry and gave armorial bearings (which were not known till the time of the Crusades); that Mr. Robert [_sic_] Canynge, in the reign of Edward IV., encouraged drawing and had private theatricals." In this article Scott points out a curious blunder of Chatterton's which has become historic, though it is only one of a thousand. In the description of the cook in the General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," Chaucer had written: "But gret harm was it, as it thoughte me, That on his schyne a mormal hadde he, For blankmanger he made with the beste." _Mormal_, in this passage, means a cancerous sore, and _blankmanger_ is a certain dish or confection--the modern _blancmange_. But a confused recollection of the whole was in Chatterton's mind, when among the fragments of paper and parchment which he covered with imitations of ancient script, and which are now in the British Museum,--"The Yellow Roll," "The Purple Roll," etc.,--he inserted the following title in "The Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory," purporting to be old medical prescriptions; "The cure of mormalles and the waterie leprosie; the rolle of the blacke mainger"; turning Chaucer's innocent _blankmanger_ into some kind of imaginary _black mange_. Skeat believes that Chatterton had read very little of Chaucer, probably only a small portion of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." "If he had really taken pains," he thinks, "To _read_ and _study_ Chaucer of Lydgate or any old author earlier than the age of Spenser, the Rowley poems would have been very different. They would then have borne some resemblance to the language of the fifteenth century, whereas they are rather less like the language of that period than of any other. The spelling of the words is frequently too late, or too bizarre, whilst many of the words themselves are too archaic or too uncommon."[14] But this internal evidence, which was so satisfactory to Scott, was so little convincing to Chatterton's contemporaries that Tyrwhitt felt called upon to publish in 1782 a "Vindication" of his appendix; and Thomas Warton put forth in the same year an "Enquiry," in which he reached practically the same conclusions with Tyrwhitt. And yet Warton had devoted the twenty-sixth section of the second volume of his "History of English Poetry" (1778,) to a review of the Rowley poems, on the ground that "as they are held to be real by many respectable critics, it was his duty to give them a place in this series": a curious testimony to the uncertainty of the public mind on the question, and a half admission that the poems might possibly turn out to be genuine.[15] Tyrwhitt proved clearly enough that Chatterton wrote the Rowley poems, but it was reserved for Mr. Skeat to show just _how_ he wrote them. The _modus operandi_ was about as follows: Chatterton first made, for his private use, a manuscript glossary, by copying out the words in the glossary to Speght's edition of Chaucer, and those marked as old in Bailey's and Kersey's English Dictionaries. Next he wrote his poem in modern English, and finally rewrote it, substituting the archaic words for their modern equivalents, and altering the spelling throughout into an exaggerated imitation of the antique spelling in Speght's Chaucer. The mistakes that the he made are instructive, as showing how closely he followed his authorities, and how little independent knowledge he had of genuine old English. Thus, to give a few typical examples of the many in Mr. Skeat's notes: in Kersey's dictionary occurs the word _gare_, defined as "cause." This is the verb _gar_, familiar to all readers of Burns,[16] and meaning to cause, to make; but Chatterton, taking it for the _noun_, cause, employs it with grotesque incorrectness in such connections as these: "Perchance in Virtue's gare rhyme might be then": "If in this battle luck deserts our gare." Again the Middle English _howten_ (Modern English, _hoot_) is defined by Speght as "hallow," _i.e._, halloo. But Kersey and Bailey misprint this "hollow"; and Chatterton, entering it so in his manuscript list of old words, evidently takes it to be the _adjective_ "hollow" and uses it thus in the line: "Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," _i.e._, Hollow are words to tell his doings. Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the "Wynde hurled the Battayle"--Rowleian for a small boat--"agaynste an Heck." _Heck_ in this and other passages was a puzzle. From the context it obviously meant "rock," but where did Chatterton get it? Mr. Skeat explains this. _Heck_ is a provincial word signifying "rack," i.e., "hay-rack"; but Kersey misprinted it "rock," and Chatterton followed him. A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually committing was his understanding the "Listed, bounded," _i.e., edged_ (as in the "list" or selvage of cloth) for "bounded" in the sense of _jumped,_ and so coining from it the verb "to liss"=to jump: "The headed javelin lisseth here and there." Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the nineteenth century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are employed which never had any existence, such as _hopelen_=hopelessness, and _anere_=another. Skeat says, that "an analysis of the glossary in Milles's edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used, occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about _seven_ per cent, of all the old words employed." It is probable that, by constant use of his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton's memory and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words, which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian. The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton's career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual precocity--what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been the extent of their literary influence? The dust of controversy has long since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? My own belief is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary curiosities--the work of an infant phenomenon--and that they have little importance in themselves, or as models and inspirations to later poets. I cannot help thinking that, upon this subject, many critics have lost their heads. Malone, _e.g._, pronounced Chatterton the greatest genius that England had produced since Shakspere. Professor Masson permits himself to say: "The antique poems of Chatterton are perhaps as worthy of being read consecutively as many portions of the poetry of Byron, Shelley, or Keats. There are passages in them, at least, quite equal to any to be found in these poets."[18] Mr. Gosse seems to me much nearer the truth: "Our estimate of the complete originality of the Rowley poems must be tempered by a recollection of the existence of 'The Castle of Otranto' and 'The Schoolmistress,' of the popularity of Percy's 'Reliques' and the 'Odes' of Gray, and of the revival of a taste for Gothic literature and art which dates from Chatterton's infancy. Hence the claim which has been made for Chatterton as the father of the romantic school, and as having influenced the actual style of Coleridge and Keats, though supported with great ability, appears to be overcharged. So also the positive praise given to the Rowley poems, as artistic productions full of rich color and romantic melody, may be deprecated without any refusal to recognize these qualities in measure. There are frequent flashes of brilliancy in Chatterton, and one or two very perfectly sustained pieces; but the main part of his work, if rigorously isolated from the melodramatic romance of his career, is surely found to be rather poor reading, the work of a child of exalted genius, no doubt, yet manifestly the work of a child all through."[19] Let us get a little closer to the Rowley poems, as they stand in Mr. Skeat's edition, stripped of their sham-antique spelling and with their language modernized wherever possible; and we shall find, I think, that tried by an absolute standard, they are markedly inferior not only to true mediaeval work like Chaucer's poems and the English and Scottish ballads, but also to the best modern work conceived in the same spirit: to "Christabel" and "The Eve of St. Agnes," and "Jock o'Hazeldean" and "Sister Helen," and "The Haystack in the Flood." The longest of the Rowley poems is "Aella," "a tragycal enterlude or discoorseynge tragedie" in 147 stanzas, and generally regarded as Chatterton's masterpiece.[20] The scene of this tragedy is Bristol and the neighboring Watchet Mead; the period, during the Danish invasions. The hero is the warden of Bristol Castle.[21] While he is absent on a victorious campaign against the Danes, his bride, Bertha, is decoyed from home by his treacherous lieutenant, Celmond, who is about to ravish her in the forest, when he is surprised and killed by a band of marauders. Meanwhile Aella has returned home, and finding that his wife has fled, stabs himself mortally. Bertha arrives in time to hear his dying speech and make the necessary explanations, and then dies herself on the body of her lord. It will be seen that the plot is sufficiently melodramatic; the sentiments and dialogue are entirely modern, when translated out of Rowleian into English. The verse is a modified form of the Spenserian, a ten-line stanza which Mr. Skeat says is an invention of Chatterton and a striking instance of his originality.[22] It answers very well in descriptive passages and soliloquies; not so well in the "discoorseynge" parts. As this is Chatterton's favorite stanza, in which "The Battle of Hastings," "Goddwyn," "English Metamorphosis" and others of the Rowley series are written, an example of it may be cited here, from "Aella." _Scene_, Bristol. Celmond, _alone_. The world is dark with night; the winds are still, Faintly the moon her pallid light makes gleam; The risen sprites the silent churchyard fill, With elfin fairies joining in the dream; The forest shineth with the silver leme; Now may my love be sated in its treat; Upon the brink of some swift running stream, At the sweet banquet I will sweetly eat. This is the house; quickly, ye hinds, appear. _Enter_ a servant. _Cel._ Go tell to Bertha straight, a stranger waiteth here. The Rowley poems include, among other things, a number of dramatic or quasi-dramatic pieces, "Goddwyn," "The Tournament," "The Parliament of Sprites"; the narrative poem of "The Battle of Hastings," and a collection of "eclogues." These are all in long-stanza forms, mostly in the ten-lined stanza. "English Metamorphosis" is an imitation of a passage in "The Faërie Queene," (book ii. canto x. stanzas 5-19). "The Parliament of Sprites" is an interlude played by Carmelite friars at William Canynge's house on the occasion of the dedication of St. Mary Redcliffe's. One after another the _antichi spiriti dolenti_ rise up and salute the new edifice: Nimrod and the Assyrians, Anglo-Saxon ealdormen and Norman knights templars, and citizens of ancient Bristol. Among others, "Elle's sprite speaks": "Were I once more cast in a mortal frame, To hear the chantry-song sound in mine ear, To hear the masses to our holy dame, To view the cross-aisles and the arches fair! Through the half-hidden silver-twinkling glare Of yon bright moon in foggy mantles dressed, I must content this building to aspere,[23] Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest; Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light. Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!" Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses. The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,--sudden epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,--which goes far to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I mean such touches as these: "Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay." "Brown as the filbert dropping from the shell." "My gorme emblanchèd with the comfreie plant." "Where thou may'st here the sweetè night-lark chant, Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide." "Upon his bloody carnage-house he lay, Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray." "The red y-painted oars from the black tide, Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise." "As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright, In little circles dance upon the green; All living creatures fly far from their sight, Nor by the race of destiny be seen; For what he be that elfin fairies strike, Their souls will wander to King Offa's dyke." The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination--which attracted the notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]--is perhaps seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it a weird turn of his own: "Hark! the raven flaps his wing In the briared dell below; Hark! the death owl loud doth sing To the nightmares, as they go. My love is dead. Gone to his death-bed All under the willow tree. "See the white moon shines on high,[25] Whiter is my true-love's shroud, Whiter than the morning sky, Whiter than the evening cloud. My love is dead," etc. It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatterton's life and writings upon his contemporaries and successors in the field of romantic poetry. The dramatic features of his personal career drew, naturally, quite as much if not more attention than his literary legacy to posterity. It was about nine years after his death that a clerical gentleman, Sir Herbert Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he gave to the world in a book entitled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26] Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works which he and Joseph Cottle--both native Bristowans--published in three volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the trade." It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796," he compares the flower to "Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy, An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own, Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste." And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," associating him in imagination with the abortive community on the Susquehannah: "O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive! Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale, And love with us the tinkling team to drive O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale; And we at sober eve would round thee throng, Hanging enraptured on thy stately song, And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy All deftly masked as hoar antiquity. . . Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream; And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide, Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee, Sweet harper of time-shrouded ministrelsy." It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems had very much to do with giving shape to Coleridge's own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Darke Ladye" would still have been; and yet it is possible that they might not have been just what they are. In "The Ancient Mariner" there is the ballad strain of the "Reliques," but _plus_ something of Chatterton's. In such lines as these: "The bride hath paced into the hall Red as a rose is she: Nodding their heads before her, goes The merry minstrelsy;" or as these: "The wedding guest here beat his breast For he heard the loud bassoon:" one catches a far-away reverberation from certain stanzas of "The Bristowe Tragedie:" this, _e.g._, "Before him went the council-men In scarlet robes and gold, And tassels spangling in the sun, Much glorious to behold;" and this: "In different parts a godly psalm Most sweetly they did chant: Behind their backs six minstrels came, Who tuned the strung bataunt."[27] Among all the young poets of the generation that succeeded Chatterton, there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and passionate boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton Mathew," he asks him to help him find a place "Where we may soft humanity put on, And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28] Keats said that he always associated the season of autumn with the memory of Chatterton. He asserted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest writer in the English language and used "no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews of his "Endymion," she wrote: "Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton." Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner--hard to define, though not to feel--he inherited from Chatterton. In his unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian accent in the passage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the old volume of saints' legends whence it is taken, with its "--pious poesies Written in smallest crow-quill size Beneath the text." And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling across another young life, as we read how "Bertha was a maiden fair Dwelling in th' old Minster-square; From her fireside she could see, Sidelong, its rich antiquity, Far as the Bishop's garden-wall"; and of the footfalls that pass the echoing minster-gate, and of the clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats' artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus: "Thy nested home-loves, noble Chatterton; The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed space Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown And love-dream of thine unrecorded face." The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as "Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Théophile Gautier gave, in the _Moniteur_,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two years before. "The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale, long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in that assembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood 'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not passed through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31] [1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence." [2] January 1, 1753. [3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv. [4] Willcox's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842, Vol. I. p. xxi. [5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv. [6] _Cf._ ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx) "The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set, Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet" With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (_ante_, p. 295). To be sure the ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques." [7] See _ante_, p. 237. [8] Walter Scott quotes this passage in his review of Southey and Cottle's edition of Chatterton in the Edinburgh _Review_ for April, 1804, and comments as follows: "While Chatterton wrote plain narrative, he imitated with considerable success the dry, concise style of an antique annalist; but when anything required a more dignified or sentimental style, he mounted the fatal and easily recognized car of the son of Fingal." [9] Publication begun 1761: 2d edition 1768. Chatterton's letter was dated March 25 [1769]. [10] See _ante_, p. 346. [11] "Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others in the fifteenth century. The greatest part now first published from the most authentic copies, with engraved specimens of one of the MSS. To which are added a preface, an introductory account of the several pieces, and a glossary. London: Printed for T. Payne & Son at the Mews Gate. MDCCLXXVII." [12] "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley," 2 vols. 1781. [13] Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol in the fifteenth century by Thomas Rowley, Priest, etc. With a commentary in which the antiquity of them is considered and defended. [14] "Essay on the Rowley Poems:" Skeat's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Vol. II. p. xxvii. [15] For a bibliography of the Rowley controversy, consult the article on Chatterton in the "Dictionary of National Biography." [16] "Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet." --_Tam o'Shanter_ [17] _Ante_, p. 350. [18] "Chatterton. A Story of the Year 1770," by David Masson London, 1874. [19] "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 334. [20] A recent critic, the Hon. Roden Noel ("Essays on Poetry and Poets," London, 1886), thinks that "'Aella' is a drama worthy of the Elizabethans" (p. 44). "As to the Rowley series," as a whole, he does "not hesitate to say that they contain some of the finest poetry in our language" (p. 39). The Choric "Ode to Freedom" in "Goddwyn" appears to Mr. Noel to be the original of a much admired passage in "Childe Harold," in which war is personified, "and at any rate is finer"! [21] See in Wm. Howitt's "Homes of the Poets," Vol. I. pp. 264-307, the description of a drawing of this building in 1138, done by Chatterton and inserted in Barrett's "History." [22] For some remarks on Chatterton's metrical originality, see "Ward's English Poets," Vol. III, pp. 400-403. [23] Look at. [24] Blake was an early adherent of the "Gothic artists who built the Cathedrals in the so-called Dark Ages . . . of whom the world was not worthy." Mr. Rossetti has pointed out his obligations to Ossian and possibly to "The Castle of Otranto." See Blake's poems "Fair Eleanor" and "Gwin, King of Norway." [25] Chatterton's sister testifies that he had the romantic habit of sitting up all night and writing by moonlight. Cambridge Ed. p. lxi. [26] Other standard lives of Chatterton are those by Gregory, 1789, (reprinted and prefixed to the Southey and Cottle edition): Dix, 1837; and Wilson, 1869. [27] Rowleian: there is no such instrument known unto men. The romantic love of _color_ is observable in this poem, and is strong everywhere in Chatterton. [28] See also the sonnet: "O Chatterton, how very sad thy fate"--Given in Lord Houghton's memoir. "Life and Letters of John Keats": By R. Monckton Milnes, p. 20 (American Edition, New York, 1848). [29] Chatterton, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley. "The absolutely miraculous Chatterton," Rossetti elsewhere styles him. [30] "Historie du Romantisme," pp. 153-54. [31] "Chatterton," a drama by Jones and Herman, was played at the Princess' Theater, London, May 22, 1884. CHAPTER XI. The German Tributary Up to the last decade of the eighteenth century the romantic movement in Great Britain had been self-developed and independent of foreign influence, except for such stimulus as it had found, once and again, in the writings of continental scholars like Sainte Palaye and Mallet. But now the English literary current began to receive a tributary stream from abroad. A change had taken place in the attitude of the German mind which corresponds quite closely to that whose successive steps we have been following. In Germany, French classicism had got an even firmer hold than in England. It is well-known that Frederick the Great (1740-86) regarded his mother-tongue as a barbarous dialect, hardly fit for literary use. In his own writings, prose and verse, he invariably employed French; and he boasted to Gottsched that from his youth up he had not read a German book.[1] But already before the middle of the century, and just about the time of the publication of Thomason's "Seasons," the so-called Swiss school, under the leadership of the Züricher, Johann Jacob Bodmer, had begun a national movement and an attack upon Gallic influences. Bodmer fought under Milton's banner, and in the preface to his prose translation of "Paradise Lost" (1732), he praised Shakspere as the English Sophocles. In his "Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren" ("Treatise on the Marvelous," 1740) he asserted the claims of freedom, nature, and the inspired imagination against the rules of French critics, very much as the Wartons and Bishop Hurd did a few years later in England. _Deutscheit, Volkspoesie_, the German past, the old Teutonic hero-age, with the _Kaiserzeit_ and the Middle Ages in general, soon came into fashion. "As early as 1748 Bodmer had published specimens from the Minnesingers, in 1757 he had brought out a part of the Nibelungenlied, in 1758 and 1759 a more complete collection of the Minnesingers, and till 1781, till just before his death, he continued to produce editions of the Middle High-German poems. Another Swiss writer, Christian Heinrich Myller, a pupil of Bodmer's . . . published in 1784 and 1785 the whole of the Nibelungenlied and the most important of the chivalrous epics. Lessing, in his preface to Gleim's 'War-songs,' called attention to the Middle High German poets, of whom he continued to be throughout his life an ardent admirer. Justus Möser took great interest in the Minnesingers. About the time when 'Götz' appeared, this enthusiasm for early German poetry was at its strongest, and Bürger, Voss, Miller, and Höltz wrote Minnesongs, in which they imitated the old German lyric poets. In 1773 Gleim published 'Poems after the Minnesingers,' and in 1779 'Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide.' Some enthusiasts had already hailed the Nibelungenlied as the German Iliad, and Bürger, who vied hard with the rest, but without much success, in turning Homer into German, insisted on dressing up the Greek heroes a little in the Nibelungen style. He and a few other poets loved to give their ballads a chivalrous character. Fritz Stolberg wrote the beautiful song of a German boy, beginning, 'Mein Arm wird stark und gross mein Muth, gib, Vater, mir ein Schwert'; and the song of the old Swabian knight--'Sohn, da hast du meinen Speer; meinem Arm wird er zu schwer.' Lessing's 'Nathan,' too, appealed to this enthusiasm for the times of chivalry, and must have strengthened the feeling. An historian like the Swiss, Johannes Müller, began to show the Middle Ages in a fairer light, and even to ascribe great merits to the Papacy. But in doing so, Johannes Müller was only following in Herder's steps. Herder . . . had written against the self-conceit of his age, its pride in its enlightenment and achievements. He found in the Middle Ages the realization of his aesthetic ideas, namely, strong emotion, stirring life and action, everything guided by feeling and instinct, not by morbid thought: religious ardor and chivalrous honor, boldness in love and strong patriotic feeling."[2] When the founders of a truly national literature in Germany cut loose from French moorings, they had an English pilot aboard; and in the translations from German romances, dramas, and ballads that were made by Scott, Coleridge, Taylor, Lewis, and others, English literature was merely taking back with usury what it had lent its younger sister. Mention has already been made of Bürger's and Herder's renderings from Percy's "Reliques,"[3] an edition of which was published at Göttingen in 1767; as well as of the strong excitement aroused in Germany by MacPherson's "Ossian."[4] This last found--besides the Viennese Denis--another translator in Fritz Stolberg, who carried his medievalism so far as to join the Roman Catholic Church in 1800. Klopstock's "Kriegslied," written as early as 1749, was in the meter of "Chevy Chase," which Klopstock knew through Addison's _Spectator_ papers. Through Mallet, the Eddaic literature made an impression in Germany as in England; and Gerstenberg's "Gedicht eines Skalden" (1766), one of the first-fruits of the German translation of the "Historire de Dannemarc," preceded by two years the publication--though not the composition--of Gray's poems from the Norse. But the spirit which wrought most mightily upon the new German literature was Shakspere's. During the period of French culture there had been practically no knowledge of Shakspere in Germany. In 1741 Christian von Borck, Prussian ambassador to London, had translated "Julius Caesar." This was followed, a few years later, by a version of "Romeo and Juliet." In 1762-66 Wieland translated, in whole or in part, twenty-two Shakspere's plays. His translation was in prose and has been long superseded by the Tieck-Schlegel translation (1797-1801-1810). Goethe first made acquaintance with Shakspere, when a student at Leipsic, through the detached passages given in "Dodd's Beauties of Shakspere."[5] He afterward got hold of Wieland's translation, and when he went to Strassburg he fell under the influence of Herder, who inspired him with his own enthusiasm for "Ossian," and the _Volkslieder_, and led him to study Shakspere in the original. Young Germany fastened upon and appropriated the great English dramatist with passionate conviction. He became an object of worship, an article of faith. The Shakspere _cultus_ dominated the whole _Sturm- und Drangperoide_. The stage domesticated him: the poets imitated him: the critics exalted him into the type and representative (_Urbild_) of Germanic art, as opposed to and distinguished from the art of the Latin races, founded upon a false reproduction of the antique.[6] It was a recognition of the essential kinships between the two separated branches of the great Teutonic stock. The enthusiastic young patriots of the Göttinger _Hain_,--who hated everything French and called each other by the names of ancient bards,--accustomed themselves to the use of Shaksperian phrases in conversation; and on one occasion celebrated the dramatist's birthday so uproariously that they were pounced upon by the police and spent the night in the lockup. In Goethe's circle at Strassburg, which numbered, among others, Lenz, Klinger, and H. L. Wagner, this Shakspere mania was _de rigueur_. Lenz, particularly, who translated "Love's Labour's Lost," excelled in whimsical imitations of "such conceits as clownage keeps in pay."[7] Upon his return to Frankfort, Goethe gave a feast in Shakspere's honor at his father's house (October 14, 1771), in which healths were drunk to the "Will of all Wills," and the youthful host delivered an extravagant eulogy. "The first page of Shakspere's that I read," runs a sentence of this oration, "made me his own for life, and when I was through with the first play, I stood like a man born blind, to whom sight has been given by an instant's miracle. I had a most living perception of the fact that my being had been expanded a whole infinitude. Everything was new and strange; my eyes ached with the unwonted light."[8] Lessing, in his onslaught upon the French theater in his "Hamburgische Dramaturgie" (1767-69), maintained that there was a much closer agreement between Sophocles and Shakspere in the essentials of dramatic art than between Sophocles and Racine or Voltaire in their mechanical copies of the antique. In their own plays, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller all took Shakspere as their model. But while beginning with imitation, they came in time to work freely in the spirit of Shakspere rather than in his manner. Thus the first draught of Goethe's "Götz von Berlichingen" conforms in all externals to the pattern of a Shaksperian "history." The unity of action went overboard along with those of time and place; the scene was shifted for a monologue of three lines or a dialogue of six; tragic and comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions--knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the piece and give it a more independent form. Scherer[9] says that the pronunciamento of the new national movement in German letters was the "small, badly printed anonymous book" entitled "Von Deutscher Art und Kunst, einige fliegende Blätter" ("Some Loose Leaves about German Style and Art"), which appeared in 1773 and contained essays by Justus Möser, who "upheld the liberty of the ancient Germans as a vanished ideal"; by Johann Gottfried Herder, who "celebrated the merits of popular song, advocated a collection of the German _Volkslieder_, extolled the greatness of Shakspere, and prophesied the advent of a German Shakspere"; and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who praised the Strassburg Minster and Gothic architecture[10] in general, and "asserted that art, to be true, must be characteristic. The reform, or revolution, which this little volume announced was connected with hostility to France, and with a friendly attitude toward England. . . This great movement was, in fact, a revulsion from the spirit of Voltaire to that of Rousseau, from the artificiality of society to the simplicity of nature, from doubt and rationalism to feeling and faith, from _a priori_ notions[11] to history, from hard and fast aesthetic rules to the freedom of genius. Goethe's 'Götz' was the first revolutionary symptom which really attracted much attention, but the 'Fly-sheets on German Style and Art' preceded the publication of 'Götz,' as a kind of programme or manifesto." Even Wieland, the mocking and French-minded, the man of consummate talent but shallow genius, the representative of the _Aufklärung_ (_Éclaircissement_, Illumination) was carried away by this new stream of tendency, and saddled his hoppogriff for a ride _ins alte romantische Land_. He availed himself of the new "Library of Romance" which Count Tressan began publishing in France in 1775, studied Hans Sachs and Hartmann von Aue, experiments with Old German meters, and enriched his vocabulary from Old German sources. He poetized popular fairy tales, chivalry stories, and motives from the Arthurian epos, such as "Gandalin" and "Geron der Adeliche" ("Gyron le Courteois"). But his best and best-known work in this temper was "Oberon" (1780) a rich composite of materials from Chaucer, "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and the French romance of "Huon of Bordeaux."[12] From this outline--necessarily very imperfect and largely at second hand--of the course of the German romantic movement in the eighteenth century, it will nevertheless appear that it ran parallel to the English most of the way. In both countries the reaction was against the _Aufklärung_, _i.e._, against the rationalistic, prosaic, skeptical, common-sense spirit of the age, represented in England by deistical writers like Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Bolingbroke, and Tindal in the department of religious and moral philosophy; and by writers like Addison, Swift, Prior, and Pope in polite letters; and represented most brilliantly in the literatures of Europe by Voltaire. In opposition to this spirit, an effort was now made to hark back to the ages of faith; to recover the point of view which created mythology, fairy lore, and popular superstitions; to _believe_, at all hazards, not only in God and the immortal soul of man, but in the old-time corollaries of these beliefs, in ghosts, elves, demons, and witches. In both countries, too, the revolution, as it concerned form, was a break with French classicism and with that part of the native literature which had followed academic traditions. Here the insurrection was far more violent in Germany than in England,[13] partly because Gallic influence had tyrannized there more completely and almost to the supplanting of the vernacular by the foreign idiom, for literary uses; and partly because Germany had nothing to compare with the shining and solid achievements of the Queen Anne classics in England. It was easy for the new school of German poets and critics to brush aside _perruques_ like Opitz, Gottsched, and Gellert--authors of the fourth and fifth class. But Swift and Congreve, and Pope and Fielding, were not thus to be disposed of. We have noted the cautious, respectful manner in which such innovators as Warton and Percy ventured to question Pope's supremacy and to recommend older English poets to the attention of a polite age; and we have seen that Horace Walpole's Gothic enthusiasms were not inconsistent with literary prejudices more conservation than radical, upon the whole. In England, again, the movement began with imitations of Spenser and Milton, and, gradually only, arrived at the resuscitation of Chaucer and medieval poetry and the translation of Bardic and Scaldic remains. But in Germany there was no Elizabethan literature to mediate between the modern mind and the Middle Age, and so the Germans resorted to England and Shakspere for this. In Germany, as in England, though for different reasons, the romantic revival did not culminate until the nineteenth century, until the appearance of the _Romantische Schule_ in the stricter sense--of Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Wackenroder, Fouqué, Von Arnim, Brentano, and Uhland. In England this was owing less to arrested development than to the absence of genius. There the forerunners of Scott, Coleridge, and Keats were writers of a distinctly inferior order: Akenside, Shenstone, Dyer, the Wartons, Percy, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, "Monk" Lewis, the boy Chatterton. If a few rise above this level, like Thomason, Collins, and Gray, the slenderness of their performance, and the somewhat casual nature of their participation in the movement, diminish their relative importance. Gray's purely romantic work belongs to the last years of his life. Collins' derangement and early death stopped the unfolding of many buds of promise in this rarely endowed lyrist. Thomson, perhaps, came too early to reach any more advanced stage of evolution than Spenserism. In Germany, on the contrary, the pioneers were men of the highest intellectual stature, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But there the movement was checked for a time by counter-currents, or lost in broader tides of literary life. English romanticism was but one among many contemporary tendencies: sentimentalism, naturalism, realism. German romanticism was simply an incident of the _sturm- und Drangperiode_, which was itself but a temporary phase of the swift and many-sided unfolding of the German mind in the latter half of the last century; one element in the great intellectual ferment which threw off, among other products, the Kantian philosophy, the "Laocoön," "Faust," and "Wilhelm Meister"; Winckelmann's "Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums" and Schiller's "Wallenstein" and "Wilhelm Tell." Men like Goethe and Schiller were too broad in their culture, too versatile in their talents, too multifarious in their mental activities and sympathies to be classified with a school. The temper which engendered "Götz" and "Die Räuber" was only a moment in the history of their _Entwickelung_; they passed on presently into other regions of thought and art. In Goethe especially there ensued, after the time of his _Italienische Reise_, a reversion to the classic; not the exploded pseudo-classic of the eighteenth-century brand, but the true Hellenic spirit which expressed itself in such work as "Iphigenie auf Tauris," "Hermann und Dorothea," and the "Schöne Helena" and "Classische Walpurgis-Nacht" episodes in the second part of "Faust." "In his youth," says Scherer, "a love for the historical past of Germany had seized on the minds of many. Imaginative writers filled the old Teutonic forests with Bards and Druids and cherished an enthusiastic admiration for Gothic cathedrals and for the knights of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century. . . In Goethe's mature years, on the contrary, the interest in classical antiquity dwarfed all other aesthetic interests, and Germany and Europe were flooded by the classical fashion for which Winckelmann had given the first strong impulse. The churches became ancient temples, the mechanical arts strove after classical forms, and ladies affected the dress and manners of Greek women. The leaders of German poetry, Goethe and Schiller, both attained the summit of their art in the imitation of classical models."[14] Still the ground recovered from the Middle Age was never again entirely lost; and in spite of this classical prepossession, Goethe and Schiller, even in the last years of the century, vied with one another in the composition of romantic ballads, like the former's "Der Erlkonig," "Der Fischer," "Der Todtentanz," and "Der Zauberlehrling," and the latter's "Ritter Toggenburg," "Der Kampf mit dem Drachen," and "Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer." On comparing the works of a romantic temper produced in England and in Germany during the last century, one soon becomes aware that, though the original impulse was communicated from England, the continental movement had greater momentum. The _Gründlichkeit_, the depth and thoroughness of the German mind, impels it to base itself in the fine arts, as in politics and religion, on foundation principles; to construct for its practice a theoria, an _aesthetik_. In the later history of German romanticism, the medieval revival in letters and art was carried out with a philosophic consistency into other domains of thought and made accessory to reactionary statecraft and theology, to Junkerism and Catholicism. Meanwhile, though the literary movement in Germany in the eighteenth century did not quite come to a head, it was more critical, learned, and conscious of its own purposes and methods than the kindred movement in England. The English mind, in the act of creation, works practically and instinctively. It seldom seeks to bring questions of taste or art under the domain of scientific laws. During the classical period it had accepted its standards of taste from France, and when it broke away from these, it did so upon impulse and gave either no reasons, or very superficial ones, for its new departure. The elegant dissertations of Hurd and Percy, and the Wartons, seem very dilettantish when set beside the imposing systems of aesthetics propounded by Kant, Fichte, and Schelling; or beside thorough-going _Abhandlungen_ like the "Laocoön," the "Hamburgische Dramaturgie," Schiller's treatise "Ueber naïve and sentimentalische Dichtung," or the analysis of Hamlet's character in "Wilhelm Meister." There was no criticism of this kind in England before Coleridge; no Shakspere criticism, in particular, to compare with the papers on that subject by Lessing, Herder, Gerstenberg, Lenz, Goethe, and many other Germans. The only eighteenth-century Englishman who would have been capable of such was Gray. He had the requisite taste and scholarship, but even he wanted the philosophic breadth and depth for a fundamental and _eingehend_ treatment of underlying principles. Yet even in this critical department, German literary historians credit England with the initiative. Hettner[15] mentions three English critics, in particular, as predecessors of Herder in awakening interest in popular poetry. These were Edward Young, the author of "Night Thoughts," whose "Conjectures on Original Composition" was published in 1759: Robert Wood, whose "Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer" (1768) was translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian; and Robert Lowth, Bishop of Oxford, who was Professor of Poetry at Oxford delivered there in 1753 his "Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum," translated into English and German in 1793. The significance of Young's brilliant little essay, which was in form a letter addressed to the author of "Sir Charles Grandison," lay in its assertion of the superiority of genius to learning and of the right of genius to be free from rules and authorities. It was a sort of literary declaration of independence; and it asked, in substance, the question asked in Emerson's "Nature": "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Pope had said, in his "Essay on Criticism,"[16] "follow Nature," and in order to follow Nature, learn the rules and study the ancients, particularly Homer. "Nature and Homer were the same." Contrariwise, Young says: "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more. . . Learning . . . is a great lover of rules and boaster of famed examples . . . and sets rigid bounds to that liberty to which genius often owes its supreme glory. . . Born _originals_, how comes it to pass that we die _copies_?. . . Let not great examples or authorities browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of thyself. . . While the true genius is crossing all public roads into fresh untrodden ground; he [the imitative writer], up to the knees in antiquity, is treading the sacred footsteps of great examples with the blind veneration of a bigot saluting the sacred toe." Young asserts that Shakspere is equal in greatness to the ancients: regrets that Pope did not employ blank verse in his translation of Homer, and calls Addison's "Cato" "a piece of statuary." Robert Wood, who visited and described the ruins of Balbec and Palmrya, took his Iliad to the Troad and read it on the spot. He sailed in the track of Menelaus and the wandering Ulysses; and his acquaintance with Eastern scenery and life helped to substitute a fresher apprehension of Homer for the somewhat conventional conception that had prevailed through the classical period. What most forcibly struck Herder and Goethe in Wood's essay was the emphasis laid upon the simple, unlettered, and even barbaric state of society in the heroic age: and upon the primitive and popular character (_Ursprünglichkeit, Volksthümlichkeit_) of the Homeric poems.[17] This view of Homer, as essentially a minstrel or ballad-maker, has been carried so far in Professor Newman's translations as to provoke remonstrance from Matthew Arnold, who insists upon Homer's "nobility" and "grand style."[18] But with whatever exaggeration it may have latterly been held, it was wholesomely corrective and stimulating when propounded in 1768. Though the final arrival of German romanticism, in its fullness, was postponed too late to modify the English movement, before the latter had spent its first strength, yet the prelude was heard in England and found an echo there. In 1792 Walter Scott was a young lawyer at Edinburgh and had just attained his majority. "Romance who loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and folded wing, To _him_ a painted paroquet Had been--a most familiar bird-- Taught _him_ his alphabet to say, To lisp his very earliest word."[19] He had lain from infancy "in the lap of legends old," and was already learned in the antiquities of the Border. For years he had been making his collection of _memorabilia_; claymores, suits of mail, Jedburgh axes, border horns, etc. He had begun his annual raids into Liddesdale, in search of ballads and folk lore, and was filling notebooks with passages from the Edda, records of old Scotch law-cases, copies of early English poems, notes on the "Morte Darthur," on the second sight, on fairies and witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating to the history of the Stuarts. In the autumn or early winter of that year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the study of German, and Scott joined it. In his own account of the matter he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by Henry Mackenzie, the "Addison of the North," and author of that most sentimental fictions, "The Man of Feeling." "The literary persons of Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character. . . Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati." Scott's German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer Tytler, whose version of Schiller's "Robbers" was one of the earliest English translations from the German theater.[20] In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart's by reading a translation of Bürger's ghastly ballad "Lenore." The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript copy. Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that he borrowed a volume of Burger's poems from his young kinswoman by marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Brühl of Martkirchen, formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont. Scott set to work in 1795 to make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private circulation in the spring of 1796. In the autumn of the same year he published his version under the title "William and Helen," together with "The Chase," a translation of Bürger's "Der Wilde Jäger." The two poems made a thin quarto volume. It was printed at Edinburgh, was anonymous, and was Walter Scott's first published book. Meanwhile Taylor had given his rendering to the public in the March number of the _Monthly Magazine_, introducing it with a notice of Burger's poems; and the very same year witnessed the appearance of three other translations, one by J. T. Stanley (with copperplate engravings), one by Henry James Pye, the poet laureate, and one by the Hon. William Robert Spencer,--author of "Beth Gelert." "Too Late I Stayed," etc.,--with designs by Lady Diana Beauclerc. (A copy of this last, says Allibone, in folio, on vellum, sold at Christie's in 1804 for L25 4s.) A sixth translation, by the Rev. James Beresford, who had lived some time in Berlin, came out about 1800; and Schlegel and Brandl unite in pronouncing this the most faithful, if not the best, English version of the ballad.[21] The poem of which England had taken such manifold possession, under the varied titles "Lenore," "Leonore," "Leonora," "Lenora," "Ellenore," "Helen," etc., was indeed a noteworthy one. In the original, it remains Bürger's masterpiece, and in its various English dresses it gained perhaps as many graces as it lost. It was first printed at Göttingen in Boie's "Musen Almanach" in 1773. It was an uncanny tale of a soldier of Frederick the Great, who had perished in the Seven Years' War, and who came at midnight on a spectral steed to claim his ladylove and carry her off a thousand miles to the bridal bed. She mounts behind him and they ride through the phantasms of the night till, at cock-crow, they come to a churchyard. The charger vanishes in smoke, the lover's armor drops from him, green with the damps of the grave, revealing a skeleton within, and the maiden finds that her nuptial chamber is the charnel vault, and her bridegroom is Death. "This poem," says Scherer, "leaves on us, to some degree, the impression of an unsolved mystery; all the details are clear, but at the end we have to ask ourselves what has really happened; was it a dream of the girl, a dream in which she died, or did the ghost really appear and carry her away?"[22] The story is managed, indeed, with much of that subtle art which Coleridge used in "The Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel"; so that the boundary between the earthly and the unearthly becomes indefinite, and the doubt continually occurs whether we are listening to a veritable ghost-story, or to some finer form of allegory. "Lenore" drew for its materials upon ballad motives common to many literatures. It will be sufficient to mention "Sweet William's Ghost," as an English example of the class. Scott's friends assured him that his translation was superior to Taylor's, and Taylor himself wrote to him: "The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you, or his exit so well as with Mr. Spencer." But Lewis was right in preferring Taylor's version, which has a wildness and quaintness not found in Scott's more literal and more polished rendering, and is wonderfully successful in catching the _Grobheit_, the rude, rough manner of popular poetry. A few stanzas from each will illustrate the difference: [From Scott's "William and Helen."] "Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear:-- Dost fear to ride with me? Hurrah! Hurrah! the dead can ride"-- "O William, let them be!" "See there! see there! What yonder swings And creaks 'mid whistling rain?" "Gibbet and steel, the accursed wheel; A murd'rer in his chain. "Halloa! Thou felon, follow here: To bridal bed we ride; And thou shalt prance a fetter dance Before me and my bride." And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash! The wasted form descends,[23] And fleet as wind through hazel bush The wild career attends.[23] Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode, Splash, splash! along the sea: The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, The flashing pebbles flee. [From Taylor's "Lenora."] Look up, look up, an airy crewe In roundel dances reele. The moone is bryghte and blue the night, May'st dimly see them wheel.[24] "Come to, come to, ye ghostlie crewe, Come to and follow me. And daunce for us the wedding daunce When we in bed shall be." And brush, brush, brush, the ghostlie crew Come wheeling o'er their heads, All rustling like the withered leaves That wyde the whirlwind spreads. Halloo! halloo! Away they goe Unheeding wet or drye, And horse and rider snort and blowe, And sparkling pebbles flye. And all that in the moonshine lay Behynde them fled afar; And backward scudded overhead The skye and every star. Tramp, tramp across the land they speede, Splash, splash across the sea: "Hurrah! the dead can ride apace, Dost fear to ride with me?" It was this stanza which fascinated Scott, as repeated from memory by Mr. Cranstoun; and he retained it without much change in his version. There is no mention of the sea in Bürger, whose hero is killed in the battle of Prague and travels only by land. But Taylor nationalized and individualized the theme by making his William a knight of Richard the Lion Heart's, who had fallen in Holy Land. Scott followed him and made his a crusader in the army of Frederic Barbarossa. Bürger's poem was written in an eight-lined stanza, but Taylor and Scott both chose the common English ballad verse, with its folkloreish associations, as the best vehicle for reproducing the grewsome substance of the story; and Taylor gave an archaic cast to his diction, still further to heighten the effect. Lewis considered his version a masterpiece of translation, and, indeed, "far superior, both in spirit and in harmony, to the German." Taylor showed almost equal skill in his rendering of Bürger's next most popular ballad, "Des Pfarrer's Tochter von Taubenhain," first printed in the _Monthly Magazine_ for April, 1796, under the somewhat odd title of "The Lass of Fair Wone." Taylor of Norwich did more than any man of his generation, by his translations and critical papers in the _Monthly Magazine_ and _Monthly Review_, to spread a knowledge of the new German literature in England. When a lad of sixteen he had been sent to study at Detmold, Westphalia, and had spent more than a year (1781-82) in Germany, calling upon Goethe at Weimar, with a letter of introduction, on his way home to England. "When his acquaintance with this literature began," wrote Lucy Aikin, "there was probably no English translation of any German author but through the medium of the French, and he is very likely to have been the first Englishman of letters to read Goethe, Wieland, Lessing, and Bürger in the originals."[25] Some years before the publication of his "Lenora" he had printed for private distribution translations of Lessing's "Nathan der Weise" (1791) and Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" (1793). In 1829-30 he gathered up his numerous contributions to periodicals and put them together in a three-volume "Historic Survey of German Poetry," which was rather roughly, though not disrespectfully, handled by Carlyle in the _Edinburgh Review_. Taylor's tastes were one-sided, not to say eccentric; he had not kept up with the later movement of German thought; his critical opinions were out of date, and his book was sadly wanting in unity and a proper perspective. Carlyle was especially scandalized by the slight space accorded to Goethe.[26] But Taylor's really brilliant talent in translation, and his important service as an introducer and interpreter of German poetry to his own countrymen, deserve always to be gratefully remembered. "You have made me hunger and thirst after German poetry," wrote Southey to him, February 24, 1799.[27] The year 1796, then, marks the confluence of the English and German romantic movements. It seems a little strange that so healthy a genius as Walter Scott should have made his _dèbut_ in an exhibition of the horrible. Lockhart reports him, on the authority of Sir Alexander Wood, as reading his "William and Helen" over to that gentleman "in a very slow and solemn tone," and then looking at the fire in silence and presently exclaiming. "I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two crossbones." Whereupon Sir Alexander accompanied him to the house of John Bell, surgeon, where the desired articles were obtained and mounted upon the poet's bookcase. During the next few years, Scott continued to make translations of German ballads, romances, and chivalry dramas. These remained for the present in manuscript; and some of them, indeed, such as his versions of Babo's "Otto von Wittelsbach" (1796-97) and Meier's "Wolfred von Dromberg" (1797) were never permitted to see the light. His second publication (February, 1799) was a free translation of Goethe's tragedy, "Götz von Berlichingen mit der Eisernen Hand." The original was a most influential work in Germany. It had been already twenty-six years before the public and had produced countless imitations, with some of which Scott had been busy before he encountered this, the fountain head of the whole flood of _Ritterschauspiele_.[28] Götz was an historical character, a robber knight of Franconia in the fifteenth century, who had championed the rights of the free knights to carry on private warfare and had been put under the ban of the empire for engaging in feuds. "It would be difficult," wrote Carlyle, "to name two books which have exercised a deeper influence on the subsequent literature of Europe"--than "The Sorrows of Werther" and "Gotz." "The fortune of 'Berlichingen with the Iron Hand,' though less sudden"--than Werther's--"was by no means less exalted. In his own country 'Götz,' though he now stands solitary and childless, became the parent of an innumerable progeny of chivalry plays, feudal delineations, and poetico-antiquarian performances; which, though long ago deceased, made noise enough in their day and generation; and with ourselves his influence has been perhaps still more remarkable. Sir Walter Scott's first literary enterprise was a translation of 'Götz von Berlichingen'; and if genius could be communicated, like instruction, we might call this work of Goethe's the prime cause of 'Marmion' and 'The Lady of the Lake,' with all that has since followed from the same creative hand. . . How far 'Götz von Berlichingen' actually affected Scott's literary destination, and whether without it the rhymed romances, and then the prose romances of the author of Waverly, would not have followed as they did, must remain a very obscure question; obscure and not important. Of the fact, however, there is no doubt, that these two tendencies, which may be named Götzism and Wertherism, of the former of which Scott was representative with us, have made and are still in some quarters making the tour of all Europe. In Germany, too, there was this affectionate, half-regretful looking-back into the past: Germany had its buff-belted, watch-tower period in literature, and had even got done with it before Scott began."[29] Elsewhere Carlyle protests against the common English notion that German literature dwells "with peculiar complacency among wizards and ruined towers, with mailed knights, secret tribunals, monks, specters, and banditti. . . If any man will insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello' and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance. We are little read in this bowl-and-dagger department; but we do understand it to have been at one time rather diligently cultivated; though at present it seems to be mostly relinquished. . . What should we think of a German critic that selected his specimens of British literature from 'The Castle Specter,' Mr. Lewis' 'Monk,' or the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' and 'Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus'?. . . 'Faust,' for instance, passes with many of us for a mere tale of sorcery and art magic. It would scarcely be more unwise to consider 'Hamlet' as depending for its main interest on the ghost that walks in it."[31] Now for the works here named, as for the whole class of melodramas and melodramatic romances which swarmed in Germany during the last quarter of the century and made their way into English theaters and circulating libraries, in the shape of translations, adaptations, imitations, two plays were remotely responsible: Goethe's "Götz" (1773), with its robber knights, secret tribunal, imperialist troopers, gypsies, and insurgent peasants; and Schiller's "Die Räuber" (1781), with its still more violent situations and more formidable _dramatis personae_. True, this spawn of the _Sturm- und Drangzeit_, with its dealings in banditti, monks, inquisitors, confessionals, torture and poison, dungeon and rack, the haunted tower, the yelling ghost, and the solitary cell, had been anticipated in England by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto" and "Mysterious Mother"; but this slender native stream was now quite overwhelmed in the turbid flood of sensational matter from the Black Forest and the Rhine. Mrs. Radcliffe herself had drunk from foreign sources. In 1794 she made the tour of the Rhine and published a narrative of her journey in the year following. The knightly river had not yet become hackneyed; Brentano had not invented nor Heine sung the seductive charms of the Lürlei; nor Byron mused upon "the castled crag of Drachenfels." The French armies were not far off, and there were alarums and excursions all along the border. But the fair traveler paused upon many a spot already sacred to legend and song: the Mouse Tower and Rolandseck and the Seven Mountains. She noted the peasants, in their picturesque costumes, carrying baskets of soil to the steep vineyard terraces: the ruined keeps of robber barons on the heights, and the dark sweep of the romantic valleys, bringing in their tributary streams from north and south. Lockhart says that Scott's translations of "Götz" should have been published ten years sooner to have had its full effect. For the English public had already become sated with the melodramas and romances of Kotzebue and the other German _Kraftmänner_; and the clever parody of "The Robbers," under the title of "The Rovers," which Canning and Ellis had published in the _Anti-Jacobin_, had covered the entire species with ridicule. The vogue of this class of fiction, the chivalry romance, the feudal drama, the robber play and robber novel, the monkish tale and the ghost story (_Ritterstück, Ritteroman, Räuberstuck, Räuberroman, Klostergeschichte, Gespensterlied_) both in Germany and England, satisfied, however crudely, the longing of the time for freedom, adventure, strong action, and emotion. As Lowell said of the transcendental movement in New England, it was a breaking of windows to get at the fresh air. Laughable as many of them seem today, with their improbable plots and exaggerated characters, they met a need which had not been met either by the rationalizing wits of the Augustan age or by the romanticizing poets who followed them with their elegiac refinement, and their unimpassioned strain of reflection and description. They appeared, for the moment, to be the new avatar of the tragic muse whereof Akenside and Collins and Warton had prophesied, the answer to their demand for something wild and primitive, for the return into poetry of the _Naturton_, and the long-absent power of exciting the tragic emotions, pity and terror. This spirit infected not merely the department of the chivalry play and the Gothic romance, but prose fiction in general. It is responsible for morbid and fantastic creations like Beckford's "Vathek," Godwin's "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams," Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein," Shelley's "Zastrozzi" and "St. Irvine the Rosicrucian," and the American Charles Brockden Brown's "Ormond" and "Wieland," forerunners of Hawthorne and Poe; tales of sleep-walkers and ventriloquists, of persons who are in pursuit of the _elixir vitae_, or who have committed the unpardonable sin, or who manufacture monsters in their laboratories, or who walk about in the Halls of Eblis, carrying their burning hearts in their hands. Lockhart, however, denies that "Götz von Berlichingen" had anything in common with the absurdities which Canning made fun of in the _Anti-Jacobin_. He says that it was a "broad, bold, free, and most picturesque delineation of real characters, manners, and events." He thinks that in the robber barons of the Rhine, with "their forays upon each other's domains, the besieged castles, the plundered herds, the captive knights, the brow-beaten bishop and the baffled liege-lord," Scott found a likeness to the old life of the Scotch border, with its moss-troopers, cattle raids, and private warfare; and that, as Percy's "Reliques" prompted the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," so "Götz" prompted the "Lay of the Last Minstrel" and "Marmion." He quotes the passage from "Götz" where Selbiss is borne in, wounded, by two troopers who ascend a watch-tower and describe to their leader the further progress of the battle; and he asks "who does not recognize in Goethe's drama the true original of the death scene in 'Marmion' and the storm in 'Ivanhoe'?" A singular figure now comes upon our stage, Matthew Gregory Lewis, commonly nicknamed "Monk" Lewis, from the title of his famous romance. It is a part of the irony of things that so robust a muse as Walter Scott's should have been nursed in infancy by a little creature like Lewis. His "Monk" had been published in 1795, when the author was only twenty. In 1798 Scott's friend William Erskine meet Lewis in London. The latter was collecting materials for his "Tales of Wonder," and when Erskine showed him Scott's "William and Helen" and "The Wild Huntsman," and told him that he had other things of the kind in manuscript, Lewis begged that Scott would contribute to his collection. Erskine accordingly put him in communication with Scott, who felt highly flattered by the Monk's request, and wrote to him that his ballads were quite at his service. Lewis replied, thanking him for the offer. "A ghost or a witch," he wrote, "is a _sine qua non_ ingredient in all the dishes of which I mean to compose my hobgoblin repast." Later in the same year Lewis came to Edinburgh and was introduced to Scott, who found him an odd contrast to the grewsome horrors of his books, being a cheerful, foppish, round-faced little man, a follower of fashion and an assiduous tuft-hunter. "Mat had queerish eyes," writes his _protégé_: "they projected like those of some insects, and were flattish on the orbit. His person was extremely small and boyish--he was indeed the least man I ever saw, to be strictly well and neatly made. . . This boyishness went through life with him. He was a child and a spoiled child, but a child of high imagination; and so he wasted himself on ghost stories and German romances. He had the finest ear for rhythm I ever met with--finer than Byron's." Byron, by the way, had always a kindly feeling for Lewis, though he laughed at him in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers": "O wonder-working Lewis, Monk or Bard, Who fain would'st make Parnassus a churchyard; Lo! wreaths of yew, not laurel, bind thy brow; Thy muse a sprite, Apollo's sexton thou; Whether on ancient tombs thou tak'st thy stand, By gibbering specters hailed, thy kindred band, Or tracest chaste descriptions on thy page, To please the females of our modest age-- All hail, M. P.,[32] from whose infernal brain Thin-sheeted phantoms glide, a grisly train; At whose command grim women thron in crowds, And kings of fire, of water and of clouds, With 'small gray men,' wild yagers and what not, To crown with honor thee and Walter Scott!" In 1816, while on his way to Italy, Lewis sojourned for a space with Byron and Shelley in their Swiss retreat and set the whole company composing goblin stories. The most remarkable outcome of this queer symposium was Mrs. Shelley's abnormal romance, "Frankenstein." The signatures of Byron and Shelley are affixed, as witnesses, to a codicil to Lewis' will, which he drew at this time and dated at Maison Diodati, Geneva; a somewhat rhetorical document in which he provided for the protection of the slaves on his Jamaica plantations. It was two years after this, and on his return voyage from a visit to these West Indian estates, that Lewis died of yellow fever and was buried at sea. Byron made this note of it in his diary: "I'd give the lands of Deloraine Dark Musgrave were alive again," that is, "I would give many a sugar cane Monk Lewis were alive again." Scott's modesty led him to depreciate his own verses as compared with Lewis', some of which he recited to Ballantyne, in 1799, speaking of their author, says Lockhart, "with rapture." But however fine an ear for rhythm Lewis may have had, his verse is for the most part execrable; and his jaunty, jiggling anapaests and pragmatic manner are ludicrously out of keeping with the horrors of his tale, increasing the air of bathos which distinguishes his poetry: "A toad still alive in the liquor she threw, And loud shrieked the toad as in pieces it flew: And ever, the cauldron as over she bent, She muttered strange words of mysterious intent:" or this from the same ballad:[33] "Wild laughing, the Fiend caught the hand from the floor, Releasing the babe, kissed the wound, drank the gore; A little jet ring from her finger then drew, Thrice shrieked a loud shriek and was borne from their view." Lewis would appear to have inherited his romantic turn from his mother, a sentimental little dame whose youthful looks caused her often to be taken for Mat's sister, and whose reading was chiefly confined to novels. The poor lady was something of a blue-stocking and aspired, herself, to literary honors. Lewis' devotion to her is very charming, and the elder-brotherly tone of his letters to her highly amusing. But he had a dislike of "female authorship": and the rumor having reached his ear that his mother had written a novel and a tragedy and was preparing to print them, he wrote to her in alarm, begging her to stay her hand. "I hold that a woman has no business to be a public character, and that, in proportion as she acquires notoriety, she loses delicacy. I always consider a female author as a sort of half-man." He was also, quite properly, shocked at some gossip which attributed "The Monk," to his mother instead of to his mother's son. We read in the "Life and Correspondence of Matthew Gregory Lewis" (2 vols., London, 1839), that one of Mrs. Lewis' favorite books was "Glanvil on Witches." Glanvil was the seventeenth-century writer whose "Vanity of Dogmatizing,"[34] and "Sadduceismus Triumphatus" rebuked the doubter and furnished arguments for Cotton Mather's "Wonders of the Invisible World" (1693), an apology for his share in the Salem witchcraft trials; and whose description of a ghostly drum, that was heard to beat every night in a Wiltshire country house, gave Addison the hint for his comedy of "The Drummer." Young Lewis gloated with a pleasing horror over Glanvil's pages and the wonderful copperplates which embellished them; particularly the one which represents the devil beating his airy tympanum over Mr. Mompesson's house. In the ancient mansion of Stanstead Hall, belonging to a kinsman of his father, where the boy spent a part of his childhood, there was a haunted chamber known as the cedar room. "In maturer years," says his biographer, "Lewis has frequently been heard to declare that at night, when he was conducted past that gloomy chamber, on the way to his dormitory, he would cast a glance of terror over his shoulder, expecting to see the huge and strangely carved folding doors fly open and disclose some of those fearful shapes that afterward resolved themselves into the ghastly machinery of his works." Lewis' first and most celebrated publication was "Ambrosio, or the Monk" (1795), a three-volume romance of the Gothic type, and a lineal descendant of Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. He began it at Oxford in 1792, describing it in a letter to his mother as "a romance in the style of 'The Castle of Otranto.'" But in the summer of the same year he went to Germany and took up his residence at Weimar, where he was introduced to Goethe and made eager acquaintance with the bizarre productions of the _Sturm- und Drangperiode_. For years Lewis was one of the most active intermediaries between the German purveyors of the terrible and the English literary market. He fed the stage with melodramas and operas, and stuffed the closet reader with ballads and prose romances.[35] Meanwhile, being at The Hague in the summer of 1794, he resumed and finished his "Monk," in ten weeks. "I was induced to go on with it," he wrote to his mother, "by reading the 'Mysteries of Udolpho,' which is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting books that has ever been published. . . When you read it, tell me whether you think there is any resemblance between the character given of Montoni . . . and my own. I confess that it struck me." This innocent vanity of fancying a likeness between Anne Radcliffe's dark-browed villain and his own cherubic personality recalls Scott's story about the picture of Lewis, by Saunders, which was handed round at Dalkeith House. "The artist had ingeniously flung a dark folding-mantle around the form, under which was half-hid a dagger, a dark lantern, or some cut-throat appurtenance; with all this, the features were preserved and ennobled. It passed from hand to hand into that of Henry, Duke of Buccleuch, who, hearing the general voice affirm that it was very like, said aloud, 'Like Mat Lewis! Why, that picture's like a man.'" "The Monk" used, and abused, the now familiar apparatus of Gothic romance. It had Spanish grandees, heroines of dazzling beauty, bravoes and forest banditti, foolish duennas and gabbling domestics, monks, nuns, inquisitors, magic mirrors, enchanted wands, midnight incantations, sorcerers, ghosts, demons; haunted chambers, wainscoated in dark oak; moonlit castles with ruined towers and ivied battlements, whose galleries rang with the shrieks and blasphemies of guilty spirits, and from whose portals issued, when the castle clock tolled one, the specter of a bleeding nun, with dagger and lamp in hand. There were poisonings, stabbings, and ministrations of sleeping potions; beauties who masqueraded as pages, and pages who masqueraded as wandering harpers; secret springs that gave admittance to winding stairs leading down into the charnel vaults of convents, where erring sisters were immured by cruel prioresses and fed on bread and water among the loathsome relics of the dead. With all this, "The Monk" is a not wholly contemptible work. There is a certain narrative power about it which puts it much above the level of "The Castle of Otranto." And though it partakes of the stilted dialogue and false conception of character that abound in Mrs. Radcliffe's romances, it has neither the excess of scenery nor of sentiment which distinguishes that very prolix narrator. There is nothing strictly mediaeval about it. The knight in armor cuts no figure and the historical period is not precisely indicated. But the ecclesiastical features lend it a semblance of mediaevalism; and one is reminded, though but faintly, by the imprisonment of the offending sister in the sepulcher of the convent, of the scene in "Marmion" where Constance is immured in the vaults of Lindisfarne--a frank anachronism, of course, on Scott's part, since Lindisfarne had been in ruins centuries before the battle of Flodden. The motto from Horace on the title page of "The Monk" sums up its contents, and indeed the contents of most of its author's writings, prose and verse-- "Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, Nocturnos lemures portentaque." The hero Ambrosio is the abbot of St. Francis' Capuchin monastery in Madrid; a man of rigid austerity, whose spiritual pride makes him an easy prey to the temptations of a female demon, who leads him by degrees through a series of crimes, including incest and parricide, until he finally sells his soul to the devil to escape from the dungeons of the Inquisition and the _auto da fe_, subscribing the agreement, in approved fashion, upon a parchment scroll with an iron pen dipped in blood from his own veins. The fiend, who enters with thunder and lightning, over whose shoulders "waved two enormous sable wings," and whose hair "was supplied by living snakes," then snatches up his victim and soars with him to a peak of the Sierra Morena, where in a Salvator Rosa landscape of torrents, cliffs, caverns, and pine forests, by the light of an opera moon, and to the sound of the night wind sighing hoarsely and "the shrill cry of mountain eagles," he drops him over a precipice and makes an end of him. A passage from the episode of Agnes de Medina, the incarcerated nun, will illustrate Lewis' wonder-working arts: "A faint glimmering of light which strained through the bars permitted me to distinguish the surrounding horrors. I was oppressed by a noisome, suffocating smell; and perceiving that the grated door was unfastened, I thought that I might possibly effect my escape. As I raised myself with this design, my hand rested upon something soft. I grasped it and advanced it toward the light. Almighty God! what was my disgust! my consternation! In spite of its putridity and the worms which preyed upon it, I perceived a corrupted human head, and recognized the features of a nun who had died some months before. . . A sepulchral lamp was suspended from the roof by an iron chain and shed a gloomy light through the dungeon. Emblems of death were seen on every side; skills, shoulder-blades, thigh-bones and other relics of mortality were scattered upon the dewy ground. . . As I shrunk from the cutting wind which howled through my subterraneous dwelling, the change seemed so striking, so abrupt, that I doubted its reality. . . Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapors of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom; sometimes the quick, cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair. Often have I, at waking, found my fingers ringed with the long worms which bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant." "The Monk" won for its author an immediate and wide celebrity, assisted no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the _Guardian_ (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. Lewis' melodrama "The Castle Specter" was first performed December 14, 1797, at Drury Lane, ran sixty nights and "continued popular as an acting play," says the biographer, "up to a very recent period."[36] This is strong testimony to the contemporary appetite for nightmare, for the play is a trumpery affair. Sheridan, who had a poor opinion of it, advised the dramatist to keep the specter out of the last scene. "It had been said," explains Lewis in his preface, "that if Mr. Sheridan had not advised me to content myself with a single specter, I meant to have exhibited a whole regiment of ghosts." The prologue, spoken by Mr. Wroughton, invokes "the fair enchantress, Romance": "The moonstruck child of genius and of woe," who "--Loathes the sun or blazing taper's light: The moonbeamed landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft with glimmering lamp Near graves new opened, or midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruined aisles and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours." The scene of the drama is Conway Castle in Wales, where abides Earl Osmond, a feudal tyrant of the "Otranto" type, who is planning an incestuous marriage with his own niece, concerning which he thus soliloquizes: "What though she prefer a basilisk's kiss to mine? Because my short-lived joy may cause her eternal sorrow, shall I reject those pleasures sought so long, desired so earnestly? That will I not, by Heaven! Mine she is, and mine she shall be, though Reginald's bleeding ghost flit before me and thunder in my ear 'Hold! Hold!'--Peace, stormy heart, she comes." Reginald's ghost does not flit, because Reginald is still in the flesh, though not in very much flesh. He is Osmond's brother and Angela's father, and the wicked Earl thought that he had murdered him. It turns out, however, that, though left for dead, he had recovered of his hurts and has been kept unbeknown in solitary confinement, in a dungeon vault under the castle, for the somewhat long period of sixteen years. He is discovered in Act V., "emaciated, in coarse garments, his hair hanging wildly about his face, and a chain bound round his body." Reginald's ghost does not flit, but Evelina's does. Evelina is Reginald's murdered wife, and her specter in "white and flowing garments, spotted with blood," appears to Angela in the oratory communicating with the cedar room, which is furnished with an antique bedstead and the portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette after the "Otranto" pattern. A few poems were scattered through the pages of "The Monk," including a ballad from the Danish, and another from the Spanish. But the most famous of these was "Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," original with Lewis, though evidently suggested by "Lenore." It tells how a lover who had gone to Palestine presented himself at the bridal feast of his faithless fair one, just as the clock struck one and the lights burned blue. At the request of the company, the strange knight raises his visor and discloses a skeleton head: "All present then uttered a terrified shout; All turned with disgust from the scene; The worms they crept in and the worms they crept out, And sported his eyes and his temples about While the spectre addressed Imogene." He winds his arms about her and sinks with his prey through the yawning ground; and "At midnight four times in each year does her sprite, When mortals in slumber are bound. Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, Appear in the hall with a skeleton knight And shriek as he whirls her around. "While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave, Dancing round them pale spectres are seen. Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave They how: 'To the health of Alonzo the Brave And his consort, the Fair Imogene!'" Lewis' own contributions to his "Tales of Terror" and "Tales of Wonder," were of his same raw-head and bloody-bones variety. His imagination rioted in physical horrors. There are demons who gnash with iron fangs and brandish gore-fed scorpions; maidens are carried off by the Winter King, the Water King, the Cloud King, and the Sprite of the Glen; they are poisoned or otherwise done to death, and their wraiths revisit their guilty lovers in their shrouds at midnight's dark hour and imprint clammy kisses upon them with livid lips; gray friars and black canons abound; requiem and death knell sound through the gloom of the cloisters; echo roars through high Gothic arches; the anchorite mutters in his mossy cell; tapers burn dim, torches cast a red glare on vaulted roofs; the night wind blows through dark aisles; the owl hoots in the turret, and dying groans are heard in the lonely house upon the heath, where the black and tattered arras molders on the wall. The "Tales of Wonder" included translations by Lewis from Goethe's "Fisher" and "Erl-King," and from German versions of Runic ballads in Herder's "Stimmen der Völker." Scott's "Wild Huntsman," from Bürger, was here reprinted, and he contributed, in addition, "Frederick and Alice," paraphrased from a romance-fragment in Goethe's opera "Claudina von Villa Bella"; and three striking ballads of his own, "The Fire King," a story of the Crusades, and "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," Scottish tales of "gramarye." There were two or three old English ballads in the collection, such as "Clerk Colvin" and "Tam Lin"; a contribution from George Colman, Jr., the dramatist, and one from Scott's eccentric friend Leyden; and the volume concluded with Taylor's "Lenora."[37] It is comical to read that the Monk gave Scott lectures in the art of versification and corrected the Scotticisms and false rhymes in his translations from Bürger; and that Scott respectfully deferred to his advice. For nothing can be in finer contrast with Lewis' penny dreadful, than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._: "All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb, Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan; A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom And each charm of beauty was faded and gone." And this is how Scott writes them: "He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand, He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . . For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood, And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood." It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these _facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder." Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a _rifacimento_ of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's "Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after (1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic Survey," Taylor said that "Götz von Berlichingen" was "translated into English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's "Götz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the Norwich reviewer.[38] The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are still discernible in English poetry and prose. Southey was clearly in error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798: "Coleridge's ballad, 'The Ancient Mariner' is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw."[39] The "Mariner" is not in the least German, and when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the language. He had read "Die Rauber," to be sure, some years before in Tytler's translation. He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had never heard before. "A winter midnight, the wind high and 'The Robbers' for the first time. The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt." He recorded, in the sonnet "To Schiller" (written December, 1794, or January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by --"The famished father's cry From the dark dungeon of the tower time-rent," and wish that he might behold the bard himself, wandering at eve-- "Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood." Coleridge was destined to make the standard translation of "Wallenstein"; and there are motives borrowed from "The Robbers" and "The Ghost-Seer" in his own very rubbishy dramas, "Zapolya"--of which Scott made some use in "Peveril of the Peak"--and "Osorio" (1797). The latter was rewritten as "Remorse," put on at Drury Lane January 23, 1813, and ran twenty nights. It had been rejected by Sheridan, who expressed a very proper contempt for it as an acting play. The Rev. W. L. Bowles and Byron, who had read it in manuscript and strangely overvalued it, both made interest with the manager to have it tried on the stage. "Remorse" also took some hints from Lewis' "Monk." But Coleridge came in time to hold in low esteem, if not precisely "The Robbers" itself, yet that school of German melodrama of which it was the grand exemplar. In the twenty-third chapter of the "Biographia Literaria" (1817) he reviewed with severity the Rev. Charles Robert Maturin's tragedy "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand,"[40] and incidentally gave the genesis of that whole theatric species "which it has been the fashion, of late years, at once to abuse and to enjoy under the name of the German Drama. Of this latter Schiller's 'Robbers' was the earliest specimen, the first-fruits of his youth. . . Only as _such_ did the maturer judgment of the author tolerate the play." Coleridge avows that "The Robbers" and its countless imitations were due to the popularity in Germany of the translations of Young's "Night Thoughts," Hervey's "Meditations," and Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." "Add the ruined castles, the dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts, and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author[41] (themselves the literary brood of the 'Castle of Otranto,' the translations of which, with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England), and, as the compound of these ingredients duly mixed, you will recognize the so-called _German_ Drama," which "is English in its origin, English in its materials, and English by readoption; and till we can prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether dramatists or romantic writers or writers of romantic dramas, were ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated Germans than were occupied by their originals . . . in their mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own shoulders." Germany, rather than Italy or Spain, became under these influences for a time the favored country of romance. English tale-writers chose its forests and dismantled castles as the scenes of their stories of brigandage and assassination. One of the best of a bad class of fictions, _e.g._, was Harriet Lee's "The German's Tale: Kruitzner," in the series of "Canterbury Tales" written in conjunction with her sister Sophia (1797-1805). Byron read it when he was fourteen, was profoundly impressed by it, and made it the basis of "Werner," the only drama of his which had any stage success. "Kruitzner" is conceived with some power, but monotonously and ponderously written. The historic period is the close of the Thirty Years' War. It does not depend mainly for its effect upon the time-honored "Gothic" machinery, though it makes a moderate use of the sliding panel and secret passage once again. We are come to the gate of the new century, to the date of the "Lyrical Ballads" (1798) and within sight of the Waverly novels. Looking back over the years elapsed since Thomson put forth his "Winter," in 1726, we ask ourselves what the romantic movement in England had done for literature; if indeed that deserves to be called a "movement" which had no leader, no programme, no organ, no theory of art, and very little coherence. True, as we have learned from the critical writings of the time, the movement, such as it was, was not all unconscious of its own aims and directions. The phrase "School of Warton" implies a certain solidarity, and there was much interchange of views and some personal contact between men who were in literary sympathy; some skirmishing, too, between opposing camps. Gray, Walpole, and Mason constitute a group, encouraging each other's studies in their correspondence and occasional meetings. Shenstone was interested in Percy's ballad collections, and Gray in Warton's "History of English Poetry." Akenside read Dyer's "Fleece," and Gray read Beattie's "Minstrel" in MS. The Wartons were friends of Collins; Collins a friend and neighbor of Thomson; and Thomson a frequent visitor at Hagley and the Leasowes. Chatterton sought to put Rowley under Walpole's protection, and had his verses examined by Mason and Gray. Still, upon the whole, the English romanticists had little community; they worked individually and were scattered and isolated as to their residence, occupations, and social affiliation. It does not appear that Gray ever met Collins, or the Wartons, or Shenstone or Akenside; nor that MacPherson, Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Chatterton ever saw each other or any of those first mentioned. There was none of that united purpose and that eager partisanship which distinguished the Parisian _cénacle Romantische Schule_ whose members have been so brilliantly sketched by Heine. But call it a movement, or simply a drift, a trend; what had it done for literature? In the way of stimulus and preparation, a good deal. It had relaxed the classical bandages, widened the range of sympathy, roused a curiosity as to novel and diverse forms of art, and brought the literary mind into a receptive, expectant attitude favorable to original creative activity. There never was a generation more romantic in temper than that which stepped upon the stage at the close of the eighteenth century: a generation fed upon "Ossian" and Rousseau and "The Sorrows of Werther" and Percy's "Reliques" and Mrs. Radcliffe's romances. Again, in the department of literary and antiquarian scholarship much had been accomplished. Books like Tyrwhitt's "Chaucer" and Warton's "History of English Poetry" had a real importance, while the collection and preservation of old English poetry, before it was too late, by scholars like Percy, Ritson, Ellis, and others was a pious labor. But if we inquire what positive additions had been made to the modern literature of England, the reply is disappointing. No one will maintain that the Rowley poems, "Caractacus," "The Monk," "The Grave of King Arthur," "The Friar of Orders Gray," "The Castle of Otranto," and "The Mysteries of Udolpho" are things of permanent value: or even that "The Bard," "The Castle of Indolence," and the "Poems of Ossian" take rank with the work done in the same spirit by Coleridge, Scott, Keats, Rossetti, and William Morris. The two leading British poets of the _fin du siècle_, Cowper and Burns, were not among the romanticists. It was left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the eighteenth only prophesied. [1] Scherer's "History of German Literature," Conybeare's Translation, Vol. II, p. 26. [2] Scherer, Vol. II. pp. 123-24. [3] See _ante_, pp. 300-301. [4] See _ante_, pp. 337-38. [5] "The Beauties of Shakspere. Regularly selected from each Play. With a general index. Digesting them under proper heads." By the Rev. Wm. Dodd, 1752. [6] "Es war nicht blos die Tiefe der Poesie, welche sie zu Shakespeare zog, es war ebenso sehr das sichere Gefühl, das hier germanische Art und Kunst sei."--_Hettner's Geschichte der deutschen Literatur_, 3.3.1. s. 51. "Ist zu sagen, dass die Abwendung von den Franzosen zu den stammverwandten Engländern . . . in ihrem geschichtlichen Ursprung und Wachsthum wesentlich die Auflehnung des erstarkten germanischen Volksnaturells gegen die erdrückende Uebermacht der romanischen Formenwelt war," etc.--_Ibid._ s. 47. See also, ss. 389-95, for a review of the interpretation of the great Shaksperian roles by German actors like Schröder and Fleck. [7] "Wir hören einen Nachklang jener fröhlichen Unterhaltungen, in denen die Freunde sich ganz und gar in Shakepear'schen Wendungen und Wortwitzen ergingen, in seiner Uebersetzung von Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's Lost'"--_Hettner_, s. 244. [8] See the whole oration (in Hettner, s. 120,) which gives a most vivid expression of the impact of Shakspere upon the newly aroused mind of Germany. [9] "German Literature," Vol. II. pp. 82-83 [10] "Unter allen Menschen des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts war Geothe wieder der Erste, weicher die lang verachtete Herrlichkeit der gothischen Baukunst empfand und erfasste."--_Hettner_, 3.3.1., s. 120. [11] _Construirtes Ideal_. [12] Scherer, II. 129-31. "Oberon" was englished by William Sotheby in 1798. [13] "Vor den classischen Dichtarten fängt mich bald an zu ekeln," wrote Bürger in 1775. "Charakteristiken": von Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) s. 205. "O, das verwünschte Wort: Klassisch!" exclaims Herder. "Dieses Wort war es, das alle wahre Bildung nach den Alten als noch lebenden Mustern verdrangte. . . Dies Wort hat manches Genie unter einen Schutt von Worten vergraben. . . Es hat dem Vaterland blühende Fruchtbäume entzogen!"--_Hettner_ 3.3.1. s. 50. [14] "German Literature," Vol. II. p. 230. [15] "Literaturegeschichte," 3.3.1. s. 30-31. [16] See _ante_, p. 48. [17] "Our polite neighbors the French seem to be most offended at certain pictures of primitive simplicity, so unlike those refined modes of modern life in which they have taken the lead; and to this we may partly impute the rough treatment which our poet received from them"--_Essay on Homer_ (Dublin Edition, 1776), p. 127. [18] See Francis W. Newman's "Iliad" (1856) and Arnold's "Lectures on Translating Homer" (1861). [19] "Romance," Edgar Poe. [20] "Lockhart's Life of Scott," Vol. I. p. 163. [21] For full titles and descriptions of these translations, as well as for the influence of Bürger's poems in England, see Alois Brandl: "Lenore in England," in "Charakteristiken," by Erich Schmidt (Berlin, 1886) ss. 244-48. Taylor said in 1830 that no German poem had been so often translated: "eight different versions are lying on my table and I have read others." He claimed his to be the earliest, as written in 1790, though not printed till 1796. "Lenore" won at once the honors of parody--surest proof of popularity. Brandl mentions two--"Miss Kitty," Edinburgh, 1797, and "The Hussar of Magdeburg, or the Midnight Phaeton," Edinburgh, 1800, and quotes Mathias' satirical description of the piece ("Pursuits of Literature," 1794-97) as "diablerie tudesque" and a "'Blue Beard' story for the nursery." The bibliographies mention a new translation in 1846 by Julia M. Cameron, with illustrations by Maclise; and I find a notice in Allibone of "The Ballad of Lenore: a Variorum Monograph," 4to, containing thirty metrical versions in English, announced as about to be published at Philadelphia in 1866 by Charles Lukens. _Quaere_ whether this be the same as Henry Clay Lukens ("Erratic Enrico"), who published "Lean 'Nora" (Philadelphia, 1870; New York, 1878), a title suggestive of a humorous intention, but a book which I have not seen. [22] "History of German Literature," Vol. II. p. 123. [23] These are book phrases, not true ballad diction. [24] _Cf_. The "Ancient Mariner": "The feast is set, the guests are met, May'st hear the merry din." [25] "Memoir of Wm. Taylor of Norwich," by J. W. Robberds (1843), Vol. II. p. 573. [26] For Taylor's opinion of Carlyle's papers on Goethe in the _Foreign Review_, see "Historic Survey," Vol. III. pp. 378-79. [27] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 255. [28] Among the most notable of these was "Maler" (Friedrich) Müller's "Golo und Genoveva" (written 1781; published 1811); Count Törring's "Agnes Bernauerin" (1780); and Jacob Meyer's "Sturm von Borberg" (1778), and "Fust von Stromberg" (1782). Several of these were very successful on the stage. [29] "Essay on Walter Scott." [30] Kotzebue's "The Stranger" ("Menschenhass und Reue") still keeps the English stage. Sheridan's "Pizarro"--a version of Katzebue's "Spaniards in Peru"-was long a favorite; and "Monk" Lewis made another translation of the same in 1799, entitled "Rolla," which, however, was never acted. [31] "State of German Literature." [32] Lewis sat in Parliament for Hindon, Wilts, succeeding Beckford of "Vathek" and Fonthill Abbey fame. [33] "The Grim White Woman," in "Tales of Wonder." [34] Matthew Arnold's lovely "Scholar Gypsy" was suggested by a passage in this. [35] The following is a list of his principal translations: "The Minister" (1797), from Schiller's "Kabale and Liebe"; played at Covent Garden in 1803, as "The Harper's Daughter." "Rolla" (1799), from Kotzebue's "Spaniards in Peru." "Adelmorn, or the Outlaw" (1800), played at Drury Lane, 1801. "Tales of Terror" (1801) and "Tales of Wonder" (1801). (There seems to be some doubt as to the existence of the alleged Kelso editions of these in 1799 and 1800, respectively. See article on Lewis in the "Dict. Nat. Biog.") "The Bravo of Venice" (1804), a prose romance, dramatized and played at Covent Garden, as "Rugantino," in 1805. "Feudal Tyrants" (1807), a four-volume romance. "Romantic Tales" (1808), 4 vols. From German and French. [36] The printed play had reached its eleventh edition in 1803. [37] The "Tales of Terror," and "Tales of Wonder" are reprinted in a single volume of "Morley's Universal Library," 1887. [38] See "Memoir of Wm. Taylor," Vol. II. Pp. 533-38. [39] "Memoir of Taylor," Vol. I. p. 223. [40] This was one of the latest successes of the kind. It was played at Drury Lane in 1816 for twenty-two nights, bringing the author 1000 pounds, and the printed play reached the seventh edition within the year. Among Maturin's other works were "The Fatal Revenge" (1807), "Manuel" (Drury Lane, 1817) "Fredolfo" (Covent Garden, 1817), and his once famous romance, "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820), see _ante_, p. 249. [41] Mrs. Radcliffe. BIBLIOGRAPHY [This bibliography is intended to give practical aid to any reader who may wish to follow up the history of the subject for himself. It by no means includes all the books and authors referred to in the text; still less, all that have been read or consulted in the preparation of the work.] Addison, Joseph. Works. New York, 1856. 6 vols. Akenside, Mark. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1837. Amherst, Alicia. "History of Gardening in England." London, 1896. Arnold, Matthew. "The Study of Celtic Literature," and "Lectures on Translating Homer." London, 1893. Austen, Jane. "Northanger Abbey," London, 1857. Bagehot, Walter. "Literary Studies." London, 1879. 2 vols. Beattie, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. Beckford, William. "History of the Caliph Vathek." New York, 1869. Bell, John. "Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry." London, 1790-97. 18 vols. Blair, Robert. Poetical works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1854. Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Fitzgerald's ed. London, 1874. 3 vols. Boswell, James. "Life of Samuel Johnson." Abridged ed. New York, 1878. Boyesen, H.H. "Essays on German Literature." New York, 1892. Brandl, Alois. "Lenore in England," in "Characteristiken," by Erich Schmidt. Berlin, 1886. Brunetière, Ferdinand. "Études Critiques." Troisième Série. Tome III. Paris, 1890. Bryant, Jacob. "Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley." London, 1781. 2 vols. Brydges, Samuel Egerton. Poems. 4th ed. London, 1807. Bürger, Gottfriend August. "Sämmtliche Werke." Gottingen, 1844. 4 vols. Byron, Geo. Gordon Noel. Works. London, 1832-33. 15 vols. Cambridge, Richard Owen. Works. London, 1803. Cameron, Ewen. "The Fingal of Ossian, rendered into Heroic Verse," Warrington, 1776. Campbell, J. F. "Leabhar na Feinne." London, 1872. Campbell, J. F. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands." Edinburgh, 1862. 4 vols. Canning, George, Ellis, and Frere. "The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin." London, 1890. (Carisbrooke Library, Vol. VI.) Carlyle, Thomas. Works. London, 1869-72. 31 vols. Chateaubriand, F. A. R. de. "The Beauties of Christianity." Translation of F. Shoberl. Philadelphia, 1815. Chatterton, Thomas. Poetical Works. Skeat's ed. London, 1871. 2 vols. Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Tyrwhitt's ed. London, 1777. Chatterton, Thomas. "The Rowley Poems." Mille's ed. London, 1782. Chatterton, Thomas. "A Story of the Year 1770." By David Masson. London, 1874. Chatterton, Thomas. 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"A History of the Gothic Revival." London, 1872. Edwards, Thomas. Sonnets in "Canons of Criticism." London, 1765. Ellis, George. "Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances." London, 1811. 2d ed. 3 vols. Ellis, George. "Specimens of the Early English Poets." London, 1803. 3d ed. 3 vols. Evans, Evan. "Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards." London, 1764. Fergusson, James. "History of Architecture." London, 1865-76. 4 vols. Gates, Lewis E. "Introduction to Selections from Newman." New York, 1895. Gautier, Théophile. "Historie due Romantisme." Paris, 1884. Gildon, Charles. "The Complete Art of Poetry." London, 1718. 2 vols. Gilpin, William. "The Highlands of Scotland." London, 1808. 3d ed. 2 vols. Gilpin, William. "The Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland." London, 1808. 3d ed. 2 vols. Gilpin, William. "Remarks on Forest Scenery." London, 1808. 3d ed. 2 vols. Goethe, J. W. von. "Sorrows of Werter." (Trans.) London, 1784. 2 vols. Goethe, J. W. von. "Götz von Berlichingen" (trans.) in Walter Scott's Poetical Works. Vol. IX. Boston, 1871. Goldsmith, Oliver. Miscellaneous Works. Globe ed. London, 1869. Goldsmith, Oliver. Poetical Works. Dobson-Mitford ed. London, 1869. Gosse, Edmund. "From Shakspere to Pope." London, 1885. Gosse, Edmund. "History of Eighteenth Century Literature," London, 1889 Graves, Richard. "Recollections of Shenstone." London, 1788. Gray, Thomas. Works. Gosse's ed. New York, 1885. 4 vols. Grundtvig, Svend. "Danmark's Gamle Folkeviser." Kjöbenhavn, 1853-90. 5 vols. Harvey, George. "Ossian's Fingal Rendered into English Verse." London, 1814. Hedge, F. H. "Classic and Romantic." _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. LVII. Heine, Heinrich. "The Romanic School." (Trans.) New York, 1882. Herder, J. G. von. "Stimmen der Völker," in Vol. II. Werke. Stuttgart, 1894. ("Deutsche National Litteratur"). Hettner, Hermann J. T. "Litteraturgeschichte." Theil III. Braunschweig, 1872. Hickes, George. "Thesaurus Linguarum Vett. 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"The Stranger," in "Sargent's Modern Standard Drama." New York, 1847. 2 vols. Laing, Malcolm. "Dissertation on Ossian's Poems." Appendix to "History of Scotland." London, 1804. 2d ed. 4 vols. Langbaine, Gerard. "An Account of the English Dramatic Poets." Oxford, 1691. Lee, Harriet. "Canterbury Tales." New York, 1857. 2 vols. Leland, Thomas. "Longsword, Earl of Salisbury." London, 1762. 2 vols. Lennox, Charlotte. "Shakspere Illustrated." London, 1753-54. 3 vols. Lessing, G. E. "Sämmtliche Schriften." Berlin, 1838-44. 13 vols. Lewis, M. G. Poems. London, 1812. Lewis, M. G. "Tales of Terror and Wonder." Morley's Universal Library. London, 1887. Lewis, M. G. "The Monk." London, 1796. 3 vols. Lockhart, J. G. "Life of Scott." Boston and Philadelphia, 1837-38. 7 vols. Lowell, J. R. "My Study Windows." Boston, 1871. Lowth, Robert. "De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum." Oxford, 1775. 3d ed. Lyttelton, George. Works. London, 1776. 3d ed. 3 vols. McClintock, W. D. "The Romantic and Classic in English Literature." _Chautauquan_, Vol. XIV. MacPherson, James. "Poems of Ossian." Clerk's ed. Edinburgh, 1870. 2 vols. Mallet, P. H. "Northern Antiquities." (Percey's trans.) London, 1770. 2 vols. Mason, William. Works. London, 1811. 4 vols. Masson, David. "Chatterton." London, 1874. Maturin, Chas. R. "Bertram," in "Sargent's Standard Drama." New York, 1847. Mendez, Moses. "A Collection of the Most Esteemed Pieces of Poetry." London, 1767. Mickle, Wm. J. Poetical Works, in "Chalmer's Poets," Vol. XVII. London, 1810. Miller, Hugh. "First Impressions of England." Boston, 1851. Milton, John. "Poems upon Several Occasions." Warton's ed. London, 1785. Musset, L. C. A. de. "Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet," in Vol. IX., "Oeuvres Complètes." Paris, 1881. Neol, Roden. "Essays on Poetry and Poets." London, 1886. Ossian in the Original Gaelic. Clerk's ed. (See MacPherson.) Ossian in the Original Gaelic. Highland Society's ed. London, 1807. 3 vols. Ossian. Article in _Macmillan's Magazines_, Vol. XXIV. Pater, Walter. "Romanticism." _Macmillan's Magazine_. Vol. XXXV. Pearch, George. "A Collection of Poems by Several Hands." London, 1783. New ed. 4 vols. Peck, Francis. "New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Milton." London, 1740. Pellissier, Georges. "The Literary Movement in France." (Brinton's trans.) New York, 1897. Percy, Thomas. "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1858. 3 vols. Percy, Thos. S. "English Literature in the Eighteenth Century." New York, 1883. Phelps, W. L. "English Romantic Movement." Boston, 1893. Philips, Edward. "Theatrum Poetarum." London, 1675. 2 vols. Phillips, John. Poems in "Johnson's Poets." Phillimore, Robert. "Memoirs and Correspondence of Geo. Lord Lyttelton." London, 1845. 2 vols. Pope, Alexander. Works. Courthope-Elwin ed. London, 1871-86. 10 vols. Prior, Matthew. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1858. Radcliffe, Anne. 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"Literary Life and Select Works." London, 1811. 2 vols. Sullivan, Wm. R. Article on Celtic Literature in "Encyclopedia Britannica." Taylor, William. "Historical Survey of German Poetry." London, 1830. 3 vols. Thompson, William. "Poems on Several Occasions." Oxford, 1757. Thomson, James. Poetical Works. Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1853. Vigny, Alfred de. "Stello," Vol. IV. Oeuvres. Paris, 1836. 3d ed. Walpole, Horace. "The Castle of Otranto." Philadelphia, 1840. Walpole, Horace. Works. London, 1798. 5 vols. Ward, T. H. "The English Poets." London, 1880-81. 4 vols. Warton, Joseph. "Essay on Pope." London, 1806. 5th ed. 2 vols. Warton. Joseph. Poems, in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVIII. 1810 Warton, Thomas, Sr. "Poems on Several Occasions." London, 1748. Warton, Thomas, Jr. "History of English Poetry." Ed. Hazlitt. London, 1871. 4 vols. Warton, Thomas. "Observations on the Faëry Queene." London, 1870. 2 vols. New ed. Weber, H. W. "English Metrical Romances." Edinburgh, 1810. 3 vols. West, Gilbert. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XIII. 1810. Wilkie, William. Poetical Works in "Chalmers' Poets," Vol. XVI., 1810. Winstanley, William. "Lives of the English Poets." London, 1687. Wodrow, John. "Carthon, etc. Attempted in English Verse." Edinburgh, 1769. Wodrow, John. "Fingal Translated into English Heroic Rhyme." Edinburgh, 1771. 2 vols. Wood, Robert. "Essay on Homer." Dublin, 1776. Wordsworth, William. Poetical Words. Centenary ed. London, 1870. 6 vols. Young, Edward. "The Complaint; or, Night Thoughts." Gilfillan's ed. Edinburgh, 1853. Young, Edward. Works in Prose. London, 1765. INDEX. Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren, 374 Abuse of Traveling, The, 84, 89 Account of the English Dramatic Poets, An, 69 Account of the Greatest English Poets, An, 80 Account of Wm. Canynge's Feast, 344, 355 Adams, Jean, 95 Addison, Joseph, 35, 37, 40-42, 45, 46, 49-52, 55-57, 80, 120, 126, 139, 141, 148, 152, 178, 179, 181, 210, 218, 219, 223, 226-28, 283-85, 377, 382, 388, 408 Adelmorn, 409 Adonais, 98, 370 Adventurer, The, 207 Adventures of a Star, 353 Aella, 344, 346, 349, 363-65, 367 Aeneid, The, 56, 328 Aesop's Fables, 84 Agamemnon, 75 Agnes Bernauerin, 399 Aiken, Lucy, 391, 397 Akenside, Mark, 52, 75, 84, 85, 91, 102, 106, 124, 136, 139-42, 145, 157, 159, 168, 215, 228, 235, 403, 422, 423 Albion's Triumph, 85 Alfieri, Vittorio, 3 Alley, The, 80 Allibone's Dictionary of Authors, 392, 393 Alonzo the Brave, 415 Alps, The, 182 Ambrosio, see the Monk. Amherst, Alicia, 119, 123 Amis et Amile, 64 Ancient Armor, 189 Ancient Lays, 326 Ancient Mariner, The, 18, 262, 269, 299, 369, 394, 419 Ancient Songs, 293 Anecdotes of Painting, 230, 351 Annus Mirabilis, 137 Another Original Canto, 84 Anti-Jacobin, The, 402, 403 Antiquities of Scotland, 187 Apology for Smectymnuus, 146 Apuleius, Lucius, 16, 220 Arcadia, The Countess of Pembroke's, 239 Archimage, 84 Architectura Gothica, 181 Ardinghello, 400 Argenis, 241, 242 Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 42 Ariosto, Lodovico, 25, 100, 219, 222, 225, 226 Aristotle, 19, 38, 51, 55, 274, 276 Arme Heinrich, Der, 64 Armstrong, Jno., 106, 124 Arnold's Chronicle, 274 Arnold, Matthew, 71, 173, 315, 389, 408 Ars Poetica, 47 Art of Preserving Health, 124 Art Poétique, L', 47 Aspects of Poetry, 315 Atalanta in Calydon, 35 Athalie, 217 Atlantic Monthly, The, 11 Aucassin et Nicolete, 64, 189, 221 Austen, Jane, 263 Aytoun, Wm. E., 269 Babes in the Wood, see Children in the Wood. Babo, Joseph M., 398 Bacon, Francis, 8, 120 Bagehot, Walter, 17 Bailey's Dictionary, 360 Ballads that Illustrate Shakspere, 284 Ballantyne's Novelist's Library, 249 Balzac, Honoré de, 249 Banks of Yarrow, The, 274 Bannatyne, Geo., 284 Banville, Théodore F. de, 373 Baour-Lormian, P. M. F. L., 337 Barbauld, Anna L., 391 Barclay, Jno., 241 Bard, The, 173, 193, 194, 196, 424 Barrett, Wm., 348, 354, 364, 367 Bartholin, Thos., 191, 196 Battle of Hastings, The, 345, 346, 348, 364, 365 Battle of Otterburn, The, 278 Bayly, T. H., 254 Beattie, Jas., 85, 97, 166, l86, 242, 245-47, 251, 302-05, 422 Beaumont and Fletcher, 284 Beauties of Shakspere, The, 377 Beckford, Wm., 403, 405 Bedingfield, Thos., 85, 97, 215 Bell, Edward, 340, 342 Bell of Arragon, The, 172 Belle Dame sans Merci, La, 299 Bell's Fugitive Poetry, 159, 161 Bentham, Jas, 180 Beowulf, 25, 318 Beresford, Jas., 391 Berkeley, Geo., 31 Bernart de Ventadour, 64 Bertram, 420 Both Gélert, 391 Biographia Literaria, 59, 420 Black-eyed Susan, 57, 273 Blacklock, Thos., 85, 333 Blair, Hugh, 309, 313, 320. 335 Blair, Robert, 163, 164, 251 Blake, Wm., 28, 164, 365, 366, 372 Blenheim, 104 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 28, 29, 49 Bodmer, J. J., 374, 375 Boiardo, M. M., 25, 100 Boileau-Despreaux, N., 35, 38, 47, 49, 65, 212, 214, 226, 227 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 41, 135, 382 Bonny Earl of Murray, The, 300 Bonny George Campbell, 275 Borck, C. von, 377 Bossuet, J. B., 38 Boswell, Jas., 94, 105, 139, 150, 174, 288, 312, 320, 355 Botanic Garden, The, 99 Bouhours, Dominique, 49, 227 Bowles, W. L., 420 Boy and the Mantle, The, 300 Boyesen, H. H., 23 Braes of Yarrow, The, 61, 297 Brandl, Alois, 391-93 Bravo of Venice, The, 409 Brentano, Clemens, 384, 402 Bristowe Tragedy, The, 346, 349, 366, 370 Brockes, B. H., 106 Brown, "Capability," 124, 130 Brown, Chas. B., 403 Brown Robyn's Confession, 278 Browne, Sir Thos., 40, 66 Browne, Wm., 79 Browning, Robert, 43 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 2, 5, 11, 14 Bryant, Jacob, 356 Brydges, Saml. Egerton, 336 Buchanan, Robt., 272 Bürger, G. A., 279, 289, 301, 375, 376, 382, 389-97, 416, 417 Burney, Francis, 252 Burning Babe, The, 41 Burns, Robt., 57, 95. 112, 187, 334, 360, 424 Burton, J. H., 178 Burton, Robt., 162 Byron, Geo. Gordon, Lord, 5, 16, 24, 36, 49, 78, 98, 107, 135, 181, 222, 229, 238, 250, 255, 262, 328-30, 333, 353, 362, 370, 402, 405, 406, 420, 421 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 25 Caleb Williams, 403 Calverley. C. S., 270 Cambridge, R. O., 84, 89, 92, 98, 151, 228, 229 Cameron, Ewen, 335 Cameron, Julia M., 393 Campbell, Thos., 142, 143 Campbell, J. F., 314, 322, 323, 325, 327 Canning, Geo., 402, 403 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 27, 63, 358, 359 Canterbury Tales (Lee), 421 Caractacus, 190, 194, 195, 306, 424 Carádoc, 195 Carew, Thos., 66 Carey, Henry, 57 Caric-thura, 334 Carle of Carlisle, The, 293 Carlyle, Thos., 317, 330, 334, 397-400 Carmen Seculare, 35 Carter, Jno., 189 Carthon, 311, 333, 335 Castle of Indolence, the, 75, 85, 92-94, 97, 104, 114, 165, 219, 424 Castle of Otranto, The, 188, 211, 215, 223, 129, 231, 236-43, 247, 249, 253, 255, 340, 346, 362, 367, 401, 409, 411, 414, 415, 421, 424 Castle Spectre, The, 401, 413-15 Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, The, 250, 258, 261 Cath-Loda, 334 Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors, 230 Cato, 51, 218, 388 Celtic Literature (Sullivan), 315, 325 Celtic Literature, on the Study of (Arnold), 315 Cerdick, 329 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, 244 Cesarotti, M., 321, 337 Champion of Virtue, The, 241-43 Chanson de Roland, The, 27, 64 Chappell, Wm., 270 Charakteristiken, 382, 391 Chase, The (Scott), 391 Chase, The (Somerville), 124 Chateaubriand, F. A. de., 255, 332, 333 Chatterton (Jones and Herman), 373 Chatterton (Masson), 362 Chatterton (Vigny), 372, 373 Chatterton, Thos., 152, 188, 211, 235, 245, 294, 317, 328, 339-73, 384, 422, 423 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 27, 28, 30, 63, 66, 69, 108, 154, 188, 199, 212, 213, 244, 266, 272, 279, 280, 294, 301, 304, 322, 342, 358-60, 363, 371, 382, 383, 433 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 40, 50, 137 Chevy Chase, 274, 283-86, 300, 346, 377 Child, F. J., 267, 284 Child Maurice, 292 Child of Elle, The, 289, 290, 301 Child Waters, 281, 295, 298, 301 Childe Harold, 98, 250, 333, 334, 364 Children in the Wood, The, 273, 283, 285, 288, 302 Choice of Hercules, The, 85 Chrestien de Troyes, 27 Christabel, 363, 369, 394 Christian Ballads, 165 Christ's Kirk o' the Green, 66 Churchill, Chas., 353 Cibber, Colley, 74, 176 Cid, The, 298 City of Dreadful Night, The, 162 Clarissa Harlowe, 352, 421 Classic and Romantic, 11 Classiques et Romantiques, 2 Classische Walpurgisnacht, 385 Claudina von Villa Bella, 417 Clerk, Archibald, 313, 320, 321, 323, 324 Clerk Colvin, 279, 417 Clerkes Tale, The, 280, 281 Coleridge, S. T., 59, 66, 73, 108, 110, 161, 188, 262, 265, 269, 299, 328, 363, 366, 368, 369, 372, 376, 387, 388, 394, 419-21, 424 Colin's Mistakes, 84 Collins, Wm., 25, 75, 104, 110, 112, 114, 118, 129, 136, 142, 151, 155, 156, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168-72, 175, 184, 186, 193, 197, 215, 251, 279, 281, 384, 403, 422, 423 Collection of Old Ballads, A., 284 Colman, Geo., Jr., 176, 254, 417 Colvin, Sidney, 16-18 Companion to the Oxford Guide Book, 202 Complaint of Ninathoma, The, 328 Complete Art of Poetry, The, 69, 72 Comus, 16, 144, 149, 150, 215 Conan, 195 Concubine, The, 85, 95 Conjectures on Original Composition, 387 Conquest of Granada, The, 44 Contemplation, 297 Cooper's Hill, 39 Coriolanus, 72, 74 Corneille, Pierre, 38, 65, 67 Corsair, The, 334 Cottle, Joseph, 350, 358, 368 Count of Narbonne, The, 240 Country Walk, The, 142 Cowley, Abraham, 37, 38, 53, 66, 79, 120, 228 Cowper, Wm., 53, 57, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115, 424 Coxe, A. C., 165 Crabbe, Geo., 103 Crashaw, Richard, 41 Croft. Herbert, 367, 368 Croma, 336 Cromwell, 19, 35 Croxall, Saml., 84 Crusade, The, 199 Cumberland, Richard, 74, 177 Cumnor Hall, 94 Cyder, 104, 124 Dacier, Anne L., 49 Dalrymple, Sir David, 291, 306, 336 Danmarks Gamie Folkeviser, 266 Dante Alighieri, 22, 28, 29, 64, 235 Darke Ladye, The, 369 Darthula, 314, 335 Darwin, Erasmus, 99 Davenant, Wm., 67, 74, 137, 226 David Balfour, 258 Davies, John, 137 De Anglorum Gentis Origine, 192 De Causis Contemnendae Mortis, 191 De Imitatione Christi, 64 Dean of Lismore's Book, The, 314 Death of Calmar and Orla, The, 328 Death of Cuthullen, The, 335 Death of Hoel, The, 195 Death of Mr. Pope, 85 Defence of Poesy, 72, 274 Defence of the Epilogue to the Conquest of Granada, 71 De Foe, Daniel, 40 Demonology and Witchcraft, 42, 189 Demosthenes, 3 Deirdrè, 314 Denham, Sir Jno., 39 Denis, Michael, 337, 377 Dennis, Jno., 49, 62, 69, 72, 74, 285 Descent of Odin, The, 191, 192, 220 Deschanel, Émile, 2 Description of the Leasowes, 133, 139 Descriptive Poem, A, 185 Deserted Farm-house, The, 177 Deserted Village, The, 91, 207 Deutscher Art und Kunst, Einige Fliegende Blätter, von, 380, 381 Dictionary of French Antiquities, 221 Dictionary of National Biography, 359 Dies Irae, 64 Dirge in Cymbeline, The, 75, 163 Dissertatio de Bardis, 195 Dissertation on Fable and Romance, 242, 245-47 Dissertation on the Authenticity of Ossian, 320 Divine Comedy, The, 27 Divine Emblems, 164 Dobson, Austin, 272 Dobson, Susannah,221 Dodd, Wm., 377 Doddington, Geo. Bubb, 111 Dodsley, Jas., 349 Dodsley, Robert, 84, 85, 132, 133, 135, 139, 209 Dodsley's Miscellany, 137, 159, 165 Don Juan, 5, 49 Donne, Jno., 28, 37, 66 Dorset, Chas. Sackville, Earl of, 283 Douglas, 170, 276, 308 Dream, A, 85 Dream of Gerontius, The, 41 Drummer, The, 408 Dryden, Jno., 27, 41, 44, 49, 50-53, 62, 63, 66-68, 70, 71, 74, 79, 80, 104, 137, 148, 149, 177, 192, 209, 210, 212, 213, 216, 265, 283 Dugdale, Wm., 198 Dunciad, The, 34, 56 Dürer, Albrecht, 162 D'Urfey, Thos., 74 Dyer, Jno., 75, 102, 103, 106, 119, 124, 142-45, 168, 215, 422 Early English Metrical Romances, 301 Eastlake, Sir Chas., 54, 55, 199, 231-33 Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 145 Edda, The, 64, 190, 196, 220, 313, 390 Edinburgh Review, The, 350, 397 Education, 85, 89, 90, 126 Education of Achilles, The, 85, 97 Edward, 274, 300 Edwards, Thos., 53, 89, 161 Effusions of Sensibility, 250 Eighteenth Century Literature (Gosse), 84, 104, 106, 163, l69, 362 Elegant Extracts, 211 Elegies (Shenstone's), 137, 138 Elegy on the Death of Prince Frederick, 85 Elegy to Thyrza, 135 Elegy Written in a Churchyard in South Wales, 176 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 103, 137, 157, 163, 167, 173-77, 204 Elinoure and Juga, 346, 352, 354 Ellis, Geo., 188, 301, 402, 423 Elstob, Elizabeth, 192 Emerson, R, W., 66, 388 Emilia Galotti, 380 Endymion, 370 English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The, 267 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 405 English Garden, The, 123-27, 151 English Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Perry), 7, 163, 307, 211, 337 English Metamorphosis, 364, 365 English Romantic Movement, The (Phelps), 84, 85, l97, 283, 297, 329 English Women of Letters, 249, 262 Enid, 281 Enquiry into the Authenticity of the Rowley Poems, 359 Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, 208 Enthusiast, The, 151-53, 160 Epigoniad, the, 89 Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, 56, 157, 163, 218, 220 Epistle to Augustus, 66, 69, 72, 115 Epistle to Mathew, 370 Epistle to Sacheverel, 80 Epistle to the Earl of Burlington, 120, 129 Epitaphium Damonis, 146 Epithalamium, 84 Erl-King, The, 386, 416 Erskine, Wm., 203, 404 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 68, 70 Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning, 69 Essay on Criticism, 47, 50, 388 Essay on Gothic Architecture, 180 Essay on Gray (Lowell), 209 Essay on Homer, 387, 389 Essay on Man, 34, 41, 113, 175 Essay on Poetry, 47 Essay on Pope (Lowell), 60, 169, 173 Essay on Pope (Warton), 97, 118, 149, 160, 163, 185, 193, 206, 212-20, 224 Essay on Satire, 47, 80 Essay on Scott, 400 Essay on Shakspere, 69, 72 Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, 245, 293, 302 Essay on the Rowley Poems, 359 Essay on Truth, 303 Essays on German Literature, 23 Essays on Men and Manners, 127 Essays on Poetry and Poets, 363 Ethelgar, 328 Etherege, Geo., 38 Evans, Evan, 195 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 98, 257, 363 Eve of St. John, The, 417 Eve of St. Mark, The, 177, 371 Evelina, 243, 252 Evelyn, Jno., 7 Evergreen, The, 284, 286 Excellente Ballade of Charitie, An, 366 Excursion, The (Mallet), 134 Excursion, The (Wordsworth), 304 Fables, (Aesop), 84 Fables (Dryden), 63 Faërie Queene, The, 16, 37, 66, 77-101, 154, 215, 225, 365 Fair Annie, 281, 295 Fair Circassian, The, 84 Fair Eleanor, 367 Fair Janet, 268 Fair Margaret and Sweet William, 268, 279, 283, 286, 300 Farewell Hymn to the Country, A, 85 Fatal Revenge, The, 249, 420 Fatal Sisters, The, 191 Faust, 27, 141, 384, 385, 401 Fergusson, Jas., 233 Feudal Tyrants, 409 Fichte, J. G., 387 Fielding, Henry, 26, 40, 76, 383 Filicaja, Vincenzio, 49 Fingal, 309, 311, 313, 317, 322, 324, 335, 336, 338 Fire King, The, 417 First Impressions of England, 109, 133 Fischer, Der, 386 Fisher, The, 416 Five English Poets, 372 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry, 190 Flaming Heart, The, 41 Fleece, The, 124, 144, 145, 422 Fleshly School of Poets, The, 272 Fletcher, Giles, 78 Fletcher, Jno., 25, 51, 79, 117, 162, 210 Fletcher, Phineas, 78 Ford, Jno., 241 Foreign Review, The, 398 Forsaken Bride, The, 280 Fouqué, F. de la M., 4, 26, 384 Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 306, 307, 309, 311, 323, 326, 328, 336 Frankenstein, 401, 403, 406 Frederick and Alice, 416 Frederick, Prince of Wales, 84, 137 Fredolfo, 420 Freneau, Philip, 177 Friar of Orders Grey, The, 298, 301, 424 Froissart, Jean, 27, 64, 236 From Shakspere to Pope, 39, 60 Frühling, Der, 106 Fuller, Thos., 28 Furnivall, F. J.,292 Fust von Stromberg, 399 Gammer Gurton's Needle, 293 Gandalin, 381 Gang nach dem Eisenhammer, Der, 386 "Garlands," The, 284 Garrick, David, 162, 209, 287 Gaston de Blondville, 250, 259-62 Gates, L. E., 41, 44 Gautier, Théophile, 372, 423 Gay Goshawk, The, 279 Gay, Jno., 35, 57, 273 Gebir, 18, 245 Gedicht eines Skalden, 190, 377 Génie du Christianisme, Le, 332 Gentle Shepherd, The, 79 Georgics, The, 111 German's Tale, The, 421 Geron der Adeliche, 381 Gerstenberg, H. W. von, 190, 377, 387 Geschichte der Deutschen Literatur (Hettner) 300, 378, 387 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 384 Ghost-Seer, The, 419 Gierusalemme Liberata, 214, 225 Gilderoy, 283 Gildon, Chas., 49, 62, 69, 72 Giles Jollop, 418 Gil Maurice, 276 Gilpin, Wm., 185 Glanvil, Joseph, 390, 408 Gleim, J. W. L., 375 Glenfinlas, 417 Goddwyn, 344, 363-65 Godred Crovan, 329 Godwin, Wm., 403 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 3, 4, 11, 31, 141, 252, 255, 275, 330, 334, 377-81, 384-87, 389, 397-99, 404, 409, 416, 417 "Göttinger Hain," The, 378 Gotz von Berlichingen, 334, 375, 380, 381, 385, 398-404, 418 Golden Ass, The, 16 Golden Treasury, The, 57, 277 Golo und Genoveva, 399 Goldsmith, Oliver, 76, 91, 112, 113, 162, 177, 186, 207-11, 287, 354 Gondibert, 137 Gorthmund, 329 Gosse, Edmund, 39, 53, 60, 84, 103, 106, 163, 169, 192, 272, 362 Gottfried of Strassburg, 3, 64 Gottsched, J. C., 374, 383 Gower, Jno., 266, 272 Grainger, James, 124, 287 Granville, Geo., 47 Grave, The, 104, 163, 164, 175 Grave of King Arthur, The, 199-201, 424 Graves, Richard, 130-33, 137 Gray, Thos., 25, 32, 52, 53, 75, 89, 103, 117-19, 123, 136, 137, 139, 145, 151, 155, 157-60, 163, 164, 166-69, 172-85, 190-206, 199, 201, 204, 206, 209, 211, 215, 2l6, 2l8, 220, 221, 229, 235, 238, 251, 276, 286, 302, 306-08, 336, 352, 356, 362, 377, 384, 387, 422, 423 Green, Matthew, 136 Grene Knight, The, 293 Grim White Woman, The, 407 Grongar Hill, 104, 119, 142, 143, 145 Grose, Francis, 187 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy, The, 71 Grundtvig, Svend, 266 Guardian, The, 120, 126, 413 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 189 Gulliver's Travels, 26 Gummere, F. B., 276 Gwin, King of Norway, 367 Hagley, 108, 109, 122, 127, 131, 133, 136, 183, 303, 422 Hales, J. W., 289, 290 Hallam, Henry, 189 Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 379, 387 Hamilton, Wm., 61, 279 Hamlet, 387, 401 Hammond, Jas., 137 Hardyknut, 286 Harper's Daughters, The, 409 Hartmann von Aue, 64, 381 Harvey, Geo., 336 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 403 Haystack in the Flood, The, 299, 363 Hayward, A., 234 Hazlitt, Wm., 161, 254 Hazlitt, W. C., 205 Hearne, Thos., 201 Hedge, F. H., 11, 14, 16 Heilas, The, 329 Heilige Vehm, Der, 418 Heine, Heinrich, 2, 24, 330, 409, 423 Heir of Lynne, The, 290 Helen of Kirkconnell, 274 Heliodorus, 244 Hellenics, 3 Henriade, The, 50, 214, 216, 217 Henry and Emma, 295, 296 Herbert, Geo., 28, 66, 228 Herd, David, 299 Herder, J. G. von, 274, 300, 301, 337, 376, 378, 380, 384, 387, 389, 416 Hermann und Dorothea, 4, 385 Hermit of Warkworth, The, 186, 289, 294, 298 Hermit, The (Beattie), 186, 305 Hermit, The (Goldsmith), 113, 186 Hermit, The (Parnell), 186 Herrick, Robert, 66 Hervarer Saga, The, 192 Hervey, Jas., 421 Hettner, H. J. T., 378, 379, 38l, 383, 387 Hicks, Geo., 192, 193 Hill, Aaron, 217 Hind and the Panther, The, 41 Histoire de Dannemarc, 190, 221, 377 Histoire des Troubadours, 221, 222 Histoire du Romantisme, 372 Historical Anecdotes of Heraldry, and Chivalry, 221 Historic Doubts, 230 Historic Survey of German Poetry, 397, 398, 418 Historic of Peyncteynge in England, 351 History of Architecture, 233 History of Bristol, 348, 364 History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt, 245 History of England (Hume), 100 History of English Literature (Taine), 316 History of English Poetry (Warton), 36, 205, 206, 211, 245, 260, 359, 422, 423 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 32, 41 History of Gardening, 119, 123 History of German Literature (Scherer), 374, 380, 382, 385, 394 History of Opinion on the Writings of Shakspere, 74 History of Santon Barsisa, 413 History of the Gothic Revival, 54, 55, 231 Hobbes, Thos., 226 Hölty, L. H. C., 375 Hole, R., 336 Home, Jno., 132, 170, 276, 308, 309 Homer, 3, 25, 35, 37, 50, 55, 100, 110, 215, 222-24, 271, 284, 285, 310, 313, 318, 330, 335, 376, 387-89 Homes of the Poets, 133, 364 Horace, 38, 47, 55, 72, 156, 223, 285, 411 Houghton, J. Monckton Milnes, Lord, 370 Hours in a Library, 235 Hours of Idleness, 329 House of Aspen, The, 418 House of Superstition, The, 85 "How Sleep the Brave," 168 Howitt, Wm., 133, 134, 364 Hugo, Victor Marie, 3, 19, 35, 36, 77, 115, 209 Hume, Robert, 100, 303, 308 Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 274, 278.295 Huon of Bordeaux, 382 Hurd, Richard, 221-26, 245, 246, 375, 387 Hussar of Magdeburg, The, 393 Hymn (Thomson), 106 Hymn to Adversity, 167, 173 Hymn to Divine Love, 85 Hymn to May, 85 Hymn to the Supreme Being, 85 Hypenon, 35 Idler, The, 207 Idyls of the King, The, 146 Il Bellicoso, 153 Il Pacifico, 153, 154 Il Penseroso, 104, 115, 142, 147, 149, 150, 154, 162, 170, 175, 334 Iliad, The, 16, 36, 56, 58, 214, 269, 313, 338, 388, 389 Imaginary Conversations, 18, 43 Immortality, 85 Indian Burying Ground, The, 177 Indian Emperor, The, 44 Ingelow, Jean, 270 Inscription for a Grotto, 136 Institution of the Order of the Garter, 159, 193, 194 Introduction to the Lusiad, 85 Iphigenie auf Tauris, 3, 385, 397 Ireland, Wm. H., 77, 294 Irene, 51 Isis, 176 Italian, The, 250, 252, 263 Italienische Reise, 385 Ivanhoe, 4, 23, 188, 237, 262, 404 Jamieson, Robert, 292 Jane Shore, 286 January and May, 63 Jemmy Dawson, 273 Jephson, Robert, 240 Jew's Daughter, The, 300 Jock o' Hazeldean, 269, 277, 363 Johnnie Armstrong, 274, 278, 283 Johnnie Cock, 279, 280 Johnson, Saml., 37, 40, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59, 66, 68, 70, 71, 89, 90, 94, 97, 99, 104, 105, 113, 131, 132, 136-39, 144, 145, 150, 151, 172-75, 177, 179, 186, 196-98, 207, 224, 243, 274, 285, 287-89, 295, 302, 303, 312, 313, 320, 328, 354, 355 Joinville, Jean Sire de, 27, 64 Jones, Inigo, 121, 230 Jonson, Ben, 25, 50, 71, 79, 97, 210, 285 Jordan, The, 85 Journal in the Lakes, 183, 184 Journey through Holland, 257 Joyce, R. D., 314 Julius Caesar, 377 Junius, Letters of, 353 Kabale mid Liebe, 409 Kalewala, The, 313 Kampf mit dem Drachen, Der, 386 Kant, Immanuel, 31, 387 Katharine Janfarie, 277 Kavanagh, Julia, 249, 262 Keate, Geo., 182 Keats. Jno., 18, 35, 94, 107, 169, 177, 257, 263, 265, 353, 362, 363, 370-72, 434 Keepsake, The, 418 Kemp Owen, 279 Kenilworth, 94, 260 Kenrick, 329 Kent, Wm., 129, 135, 152 Kersey's Dictionary, 360, 361 King Arthur's Death, 278 King Estmere, 279, 300 King John and the Abbot, 301 Kinmont Willie, 278 Kittridge, G. L., 191, 192 Kleist, E. C. von, 106 Klinger, F. M., 379 Klopstock, P. G., 338, 377 Knight, Chas., 74 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 284 Knox, V., 211, 212, 228 Knythinga Saga, The, 196 Kotzebue, A. F. F. von, 400, 409, 421 Kriegslied, 377 Kruitzner, 421, 423 La Bruyère, Jean de, 138 La Calprenède, G. de C. Chevalier de, 6 Lachin Y Gair, 329 Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament, 283 Lady of the Lake, The, 96, 299, 399 La Fontaine, Jean de, 38 Laing, Malcolm, 318, 320, 329 L'Allegro, 104, 129, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 154, 158, 170 Lamartine, A. M. L. de, 176 Lamb, Chas., 28, 161, 199 Land of Liberty, 85 Land of the Muses, The, 85 Landor, W. S., 3, 18, 34, 42, 136, 245, 293 Lang, Andrew, 272 Langbaine, Gerard, 49, 62, 69, 71 Langley, Batty, 54, 121, 233 Lansdowne, Geo. Granville, Earl of, 47, 74 Laocoön, 384, 387 Lass of Fair Wone, The, 397 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 165, 191, 336, 404 Lays of Ancient Rome, 269, 298 Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 269 Leabhar na Feinne, 314, 323 Lear, 217 Leasowes, The, 127, 130-37, 139, 152, 183, 213, 422 Le Bossu, René, 49 Lectures on Translating Homer, 389 Legend of Sir Guy, 278 Legenda Aurea, 3 Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 421 Le Lac, 176 Leiand, Thos., 244, 247 Leland's Collectanea, 260 Lenora, 391-97, 415, 417 Lenox, Charlotte, 70 Lenz, J. M. R., 379, 387 Leonidas, 337 Lessing, G. E., 56, 300, 375, 376, 379, 380, 384, 387, 397 Letourneur, Pierre, 337 Letter from Italy, 57, 218 Letter to Master Canynge, 344 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 221-26, 245 Letters to Shenstone, Lady Luxborough's, 135, 229 Lettres de Dupuis et Cotonet, 18-22 Lewis, M. G., 249, 252, 262, 376, 394, 396, 400, 401, 404-18, 420 Leyden, Jno., 417 Library of Romance, 381 Life of Lyttelton (Phillimore), 74, 108 Lines on Observing a Blossom, 368 Lines Written at Tintern Abbey, 140 Literary Movement in France, The, 35, 44, 61 Literatura Runica, 191 Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, 283 Lives of the English Poets (Winstanley), 69 Lives of the Novelists (Scott), 262 Lives of the Poets (Johnson), 51, 68, 90, 97, 105, 114, 131, 139, 150, 172, 196, 286 Lloyd, Robert, 85, 91, 98, 151, 176 Lockhart, J. G., 298, 391, 398, 402, 403, 406 Longfellow, H. W., 198, 199, 269 Longinus, 38 Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, 244, 247, 248 Lord Lovel, 268 Lord Randall, 275 Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 268 Lotus Eaters, The, 18, 92 Love and Madness, 368 Love's Labour's Lost, 379 Lowell, J. R., 27, 59, 114, 139, 144, 169, 173, 206, 209, 403 Lowth, Robert, 85, 387 Lürlei, Die, 402 Lukens, Chas., 393 Lusiad, The, 85, 94 Lycidas, 37, 115, 145, 149, 150, l54, 192 Lydgate, Jno., 206, 266, 344, 359 Lyrical Ballads, 58, 109, 112, 160, 183, 218, 288, 299, 316, 422 Lytel Geste of Robyn Hode, The, 274 Lyttelton, Geo. Lord, 90, 91, 95, 108, 111, 121, 127, 131, 132, 135-37, 303 Mabinogion, The, 189 Macaulay, T. B., 69, 238, 269, 272, 298 Macbeth, 223 McClintock, W. D., 102 Mackenzie, Henry, 252, 390 Mackenzie. Jno., 321 McLauchlan, Thos., 314 Macmillan's Magazine, 326 McNeil, Archibald, 326 MacPherson, Jas., 24, 195, 294, 302, 306-38, 377, 423 Madden, Sir Frederick, 292 Malherbe, François de, 38 Mallet, David, 75, 105, 106, 124, 235, 283, 286 Mallet, P. H., 190, 191, 196, 221, 374, 377 Malone, Edmond, 32, 356, 362 Malory, Sir Thos., 27 Manfred, 334 Man of Feeling, The, 352, 390 Mansus, 146 Manuel, 420 Map, Walter, 27 Marbie Faun, The, 23 Mariner's Wife, The, 95 Marlowe, Christopher, 66 Marmion, 203, 234, 258, 336, 399, 404, 411 Marriage of Frederick, 84 Marriage of Gawaine, The, 278 Mary Hamilton, 280 Mason, Wm., 85, 91, 123-27, 129, 151, 153-55, 160, 165, 167, 176, 180, 183, 190, 194-96, 211, 213, 215, 221, 251, 276, 306, 307, 337, 352, 422, 423 Masson, David, 148, 362 Mather, Cotton, 408 Mathias, Thos. J., 393 Maturin, Chas. Robert, 249, 420 Meditations (Harvey), 421 Melmoth the Wanderer, 249, 420 Mémoires sur l'ancienne Chevalerie, 221, 222 Memoirs of a Sad Dog, 353 Mendez, Moses, 85, 91, 159 Menschenhass und Reue, 400 Merchant of Venice, The, 372 Meyrick, Sir Saml. R., 189 Michael, 4 Mickle, Wm. J., 85, 94-96 Middle Ages, The (Hallam) 189 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 76, 235, 382 Miller and the King's Daughter, The, 283 Miller, Johann M., 375, 400 Miller, Hugh, 108, 109, 130, 133, 136 Milles, Jeremiah, 356, 361 Milnes, R. Monckton, 370 Milton, Jno., 16, 34, 37, 40, 52, 53, 55, 56, 63, 66, 69,78, 79, 94, 104, 110, 111, 115, 129, 140, 142, 144, 146-62, 170, 173, 193, 199, 212, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 222, 225, 244, 265, 283, 297, 318, 371, 374, 391 Miltonic Imitations in Dodsley, List of, 159-61 Minister, The, 409 Minnesingers, The, 375 Minot, Lawrence, 293 Minstrel, The, 85, 97, 345, 302-05, 422. Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern, 270 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 262, 267, 377, 299, 404. Mirror, The, 85 Miscellany Poems (Dryden), 192, 283 Miss Kitty, 393 Modern Painters, 26, 34 Möser, Justus, 375, 380 Molière, J. B. P., 38 Monasticon, Anglicanum, 198 Monk, The, 249, 262, 263, 401, 404, 407-13, 420, 424 Monody on the Death of Chatterton, 368 Monody Written near Stratford-upon-Avon, 201 Monologue, A, 176 Montagu, Elizabeth R., 303, 337 Monthly Magazine, The, 391, 392 Monthly Review, The, 397 Moral Essays, 220 More, Hannah, 151 Morning, 85 Morris, Wm., 191, 203, 424 Morte Artus, 64, 390 Motherwell, Wm., 270, 299 Mud King, The, 418 Mütler, Friedrich, 399 Müller, Johannes, 376 Mulgrave, Jno. Sheffield, Earl of, 47, 63 Murdoch, Patrick, 105 Musaeus, 85, 153-55 Musen Almanach, 393 Musset, Alfred de, 18-22 Myller, C. H., 375 Mysterious Mother, The, 237, 238, 241, 251, 253, 401, 409 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 250, 252-55, 262, 263, 401, 424 Nares' and Halliwell's Glossary, 189 Nathan der Weise, 376, 397 Nativity, The, 85 Nature, 388 Nature of Poetry, The, 162 New Canto of Spenser's Fairy Queen, A, 84, 85 Newman, F. W., 389 Newman, J. H., 41 New Memoirs of Milton, 149 New Principles of Gardening, 121 Nibelungen Lied, The, 25, 64, 313, 375, 376 Nichols' Anecdotes, 192 Night Piece on Death, 61, 177 Night Thoughts, 104, 163, l75, 387, 421 Noble Moringer, The, 418 Nocturnal Reverie, 57, 61 Noel, Roden. 363 Nonnë Prestës Tale, The, 28 Northanger Abbey, 263, 264 Northern Antiquities, 190 Northumberland Betrayed by Douglas, 278 Nosce Teipsum, 137 Not-brown Maid, The, 274, 295, 296, 300, 302 Notes and Illustrations to Ossian, 318 Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems, 326 Nôtre Dame de Paris, 3 Nouvelle Héloise, La, 31 Novalis, 384 Oberon, 382 Observations on English Meter, 206 Observations on Modern Gardening (Whately), 123 Observations on The Faëry Queene, 99-101, 204, 213, 223 Observations on The Scenery of Great Britain, 185 Observations upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley, 356 Odes, (Akenside's), 142 Odes, (Collins'), 142, 155, 156 Odes, (Gray's), 362 Odes, (J. Warton's), 142, 155, 156 Odes, For the New Year, 199. On a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 167, 173, 216. On His Majesty's Birthday, 199. On the Approach of Summer, 158. On the Death of Thomson, 163, 165, 194. On the First of April, 158. On the Installation of the Duke of Grafton, 159. On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 147, 149, 150, 156. On the Passions, 166, 169, 175. On the Spring, 167, 173. On the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, 25, 114, 170-72. Sent to Mr. Upton, 201. To a Grecian Urn, 18. To a Nightingale (Keats) 18. To an Aeolus Harp, 165. To Curio, 85. To Evening (Collins), 156, 165, 168. To Evening (Warton), 165. To Fear, 156. To Freedom, 363. To Liberty, 194. To Oblivion, 176. To Obscurity, 176. To Peace, 305. To Pyrrha, 156. To Simplicity, 156. To Solitude, 165. To the Hon. Charles Townsend, 84. To the Marquis of Tavistock, 84. To the Nightingale (Warton), 165. To the Queen, 84. Written at Vale Royal Abbey, 204 Odyssey, The, 16, 269 Oedipus Rex, 3, 19, 241 Of Heroic Virtue, 192, 197 Of Poetry, 192 Old English Ballads, 276 Old English Baron, The, 241-43, 249 Oldmixon, Jno., 62 Old Plays (Dodsley) 209 Olive, The, 84 On King Arthur's Round Table, 201 On Modern Gardening (Walpole), 123, 130 On Myself, 79 On Our Lady's Church, 344 On the Prevailing Taste for the Old English Poets, 211 On the River Duddon, 162 On Witches (Glanvil), 408 Opie, Amelia, 252 Orcades, 191 Origin of Romantic Fiction, The, 205 Original Canto of Spenser, An, 84 Ormond, 403 Osorio, 420 Ossian (MacPherson's), 25, 117, 178, 195, 235, 245, 256, 302, 306-38, 355, 356, 377, 378, 423, 424 Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Clerk), 313 Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Gillie's Collection), 326 Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (Highland Society's Text), 321, 324, 326 Ossian, Poems of, in the Original Gaelic (In Stewart's Collection), 326 Othello, 372 Otto von Wittelsbach, 398 Otway, Thos., 74, 210 Ovid, 25 Oxford Sausage, The, 199 Pain and Patience, 84 Palamon and Arcite, 28, 215 Palgrave. F. T., 57, 277 Pamela, 252 Paradise Lost, 50, 52, 55-57, 104, 110, 129, 145, 147, 148, 151, 217, 375 Paradise Regained, 147, 148 Parliament of Sprites, The, 344, 365 Parnell, Thos., 58, 61, 177, 186, 210 Parzival, 64 Pastoral Ballad, A., 138 Pastoral in the Manner of Spenser, A., 85 Pastoral Ode, A., 133 Pastorals (Philips'), 80 Pastorals (Pope's), 57, 112, 193, 215, 216 Pater, Walter, 7, 8, 16 Paul and Virginia, 22, 112 Pearch's Collection, 159, i82, 185 Peck, F., 149 Pellissier, George, 35, 44, 61, 65 Pepys, Saml., 283, 291 Percy Folio MS., The, 288, 290-93 Percy, Thos., 186, 196, 212, 235, 246, 272, 284, 306, 319, 326, 383, 387, 422. See also Reliques. Perigrine Pickle, 139 Perle, The, 189 Perry, T. S., 7, 163, 176, 211, 212, 251, 337 Persiles and Sigismonda, 244 Peter Bell, 299 Petrarca, Francesco, 29 Peveril of the Peak, 420 Pfarrers Tochter, Des, 396 Phelps, W. L., 84, 85, 191, 197, 283, 297, 329 Philander, 85 Philantheus, 85 Philips, Ambrose, 80, 102, 284 Philips, Edward, 67, 80 Philips, Jno., 104, 124 Phillimore's Life of Lyttelton, 74, 108 Phoenix, The, 241 Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, 293 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 5 Pindar, 35, 54, 89 Pitt, Christopher, 85 Pitt, Wm., 90, 132, 133 Pizarro, 400 Plato, 42, 47 Pleasures of Hope, The, 142, 143 Pleasures of Imagination, The, 124, 139-42, 157 Pleasures of Melancholy, The, 142, 156-58, 160, 161, 194 Pleasures of Memory, The, 142 Poe, Edgar A., 202, 356, 390, 403 Poem in Praise of Blank Verse, 217 Poems after the Minnesingers, 375 Poems after Walther von der Vogelweide, 375 Pope, Alexander, 33, 36, 39, 41, 47, 50-54, 56-59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 72, 75, 77-79, 92, 93, 99, 102, 105, 108, 111-13, 115, 120, 121, 126, 129, 136, 149, 150, 154, 157, 159, 162, 163, 193, 210, 212-20, 228, 235, 265, 382, 383, 388 Popular Ballads and Songs (Jamieson), 292 Popular Tales of the West Highlands, 322, 323, 325 Porter, Jane, 252, 371 Portuguese Letters, The, 22 Praelectiones de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, 387 Preface to Johnson's Shakspere, 70 Preface to Pope's Shakspere, 72 Prelude, The, 304 Price, Richard, 205 Prior, Matthew, 35, 57, 63, 84, 159, 291, 295, 296, 382 Prioresse Tale, The, 279, 342 Progress of Envy, The, 85, 91 Progress of Poesy, The, 173 Progress of Romance, The, 243-45 Prologue at the Opening of Drury Lane, 59, 70 Proud Maisie, 277 Psalm XLII., 84 Psyche,85 Pugin, A. N. W., 234 Pure, Ornate and Grotesque Art, 17 Pursuits of Literature, 393 Pye, H. J., 392 Quarles, Francis, 164 Racine, J. B., 38, 44, 65, 379 Radcliffe, Anne, 232, 237, 249-64, 402, 408, 409, 411, 421, 423 Rambler, The, 97, 287, 288, 353 Ramsay, Allan, 61, 79, 284, 286, 297, 300 Rape of the Lock, The, 36, 220 Rapin, René, 49 Rasselas, 186 Räuber, Die. See Robbers. Reeve, Clara, 241-45, 247, 249-64, 423 Regnier, Mathurin, 38 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 139, 188, 190, 206, 209, 211, 223, 265, 274, 278, 287-302, 317, 346, 362, 369, 376, 423 Remorse, 420 Report of the Committee of the Highland Society on Ossian, 319 Resolution and Independence, 339 Retirement, 305 Revenge, The, 353 Revival of Ballad Poetry in the Eighteenth Century, 290 Revolt of Islam, The, 5 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 202, 303 Richardson, Saml., 31, 32, 40, 76, 252, 421 Riddles Wisely Expounded, 270 Ridley, G., 85 Rime of Sir Thopas, The, 28 Rising in the North, The, 278 Ritson, Joseph, 188, 205, 246, 287, 290, 293, 294, 301, 423 Ritter Toggenburg, 386 Robbers, The, 385, 391, 402, 417, 418, 420 Robin Hood and the Monk, 273, 278, 283 Robin Hood and the Old Man, 292 Robin Hood and the Potter, 273 Robin Hood Ballads, The, 281-83, 301 Robin Hood (Ritson's), 292 Robinson Crusoe, 5, 26 Rogers, Saml., 142, 181 Rokeby, 277 Rolla, 400, 409 Rolls of St. Bartholomew's Priory, The, 358 Roman de la Rose, The, 37, 64 Romance, 390 Romance of the Forest, The, 250, 253, 255, 256 Romancero, The, 64 Romantic and Classical in English Literature, The, 102 Romantic Tales, 409 Romanticism (Pater), 7 Romantische Schule, Die, 2, 423 Romaunt of the Rose, The, 27 Romaunte of the Cnyghte, The, 348 Romeo and Juliet, 377 Ronsard, Pierre de, 22 Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of, 47 Ross, Thos., 321, 333 Rossetti, D. G., 4, 270, 272, 367, 372, 424 Roundabout Papers, 252 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 31, 112, 252, 330, 381, 423 Rovers, The, 402 Rowe, Nicholas, 210, 219, 286 Rowley Poems, The, 211, 339-67, 424 Rudiments of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, 192 Rugantino, 409 Ruins of Netley Abbey, The, 182 Ruins of Rome, The, 144, 145 Ruskin, Jno., 26, 34, 102, 255 Rymer, Thos., 49, 62, 70 Reyse of Peyncteynge yn Englande, The, 349 Sachs, Hans, 381 Sadduceismus Triumphatus, 408 Sagen der Vorzeit, 418 Sängers Fluch, Der, 275 Saint Alban's Abbey, 262 Sainte-Beuve, C. A, 56 Sainte Palaye, J. B. de la C., 221, 222, 374 St. Irvine the Rosicrucian, 403 Saint Lambert, C. F., 106 St. Leon, 403 St. Pierre, J. H. B. de, 112 Saintsbury, Geo., 111, 131 Saisons, Les, 106 Sally in our Alley, 57 Salvator Rosa, 255 Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder, 418 Samson Agonistes, 148, 184 "Saturday Papers," Addison's, 148 Schelling, F. W. J. von, 387 Scherer, Wilhelm, 300, 374, 376, 380, 382, 394 Schiller, J. C. F. von, 11, 76, 379, 384-87, 391, 401, 409, 419, 420 Schlegel, A. W. von, 14, 73, 301, 377, 384, 392 Schmidt, Erich, 382, 392 Schöne Helena, Die, 385 Scholar Gypsy, The, 408 Schoolmistress, The, 84, 91, 92, 97, 104, 130, 136, 138, 362 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 119 Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 16, 24, 26, 27, 42, 94, 96, 139, 187-89, 191, 200, 203, 223, 232, 234, 238, 248, 249, 258, 260, 262, 267, 269, 277, 298-301, 333, 334, 344, 350, 358, 359, 376, 389-96, 398-400, 402, 404-06, 410, 411, 416-18, 420, 424 Scottish Songs (Ritson's), 293 Scribleriad, The, 228, 229 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 6 Sean Dàna, 326 Seasons, The (Mendez), 85 Seasons, The (Thomson), 52, 75, 79, 103, 105-20, 124, 170, 152, 305, 374 Selden, John, 283 Selections from Gray (Phelps), 191 Selections from Newman (Gates), 41, 44 Seven Champions of Christendom, The, 37 Shadwell, Thos., 74 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 41, 62, 226, 382 Shairp, J. C., 315 Shakspere Alterations, List of, 74 Shakspere Editions, List of, 74 Shakspere Illustrated, 70 Shakspere, Wm., 18, 25, 40, 50, 51, 63, 68-78, 89, 111, 117, 140, 170, 171, 198, 208-10, 213, 216-19, 225, 237, 298, 362, 375, 377-80, 383, 391 Shelley, Mary, 403, 406 Shelley, P. B., 5, 43, 107, 241, 362, 370, 372, 403, 406 Shenstone, Wm., 75, 84, 91, 97, 98, 102, 103, 110, 127, 130-39, 151, 152, 159, 162, 168, 184, 186, 215, 229, 273, 287, 422, 423 Shepherd's Calendar, The, 154 Sheridan, R. B., 76, 162, 400, 413, 420 Sheridan, Thos., 74 Sheringham, Robert, 192 Sicilian Romance, The, 250, 253 Sidney, Sir Philip, 25, 71, 72, 239, 274 Siegwart, 400 Sigurd the Volsung, 191 Sim, Jno., 94 Sinclair, Archibald, 325 Sinclair. Sir Jno., 321 Sir Cauline, 289, 200, 298 Sir Charles Grandison, 388 Sir Hugh, 279 Sir Lancelot du Lake, 278 Sir Patrick Spens, 300 Sister Helen, 363 Sisters, The, 270 Six Bards of Ossian Versified, The, 336 Skeat, W. W., 340, 355, 358-61, 364 Skene, W. F., 314, 323 Sketches of Eminent Statesmen, 234 Smart, Christopher, 85 Smith, Adam, 105 Smollett, Tobias, 76, 139 Solitary Reaper, The, 115 Somerville, Wm., 106, 124, 135 Song of Harold the Valiant, 196 Song of Ragner Lodbrog, 197 Song to Aella, 355 Songs of Selma, The, 331 Sonnet to Chatterton, 370 Sonnet to Mr. Gray, 201 Sonnet to Schiller, 419 Sonnet to the River Lodon, 161 Sophocles, 3, 19, 241, 379 Sophonisba, 75 Sorrows of Werther, The, 31, 330-32, 399, 423 Sotheby, Wm., 382 Southey, Robert, 206, 299, 350, 355, 358, 368, 398, 419 Southwell, Robert, 41 Spaniards in Peru, The, 400, 409 Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, 189 Specimens of Early English Poets, 301 Specimens of the Welsh Bards, 195 Spectator, The, 35, 37, 42, 49, 51, 55, 62, 120, 126, 139, 141, 148, 178, 227, 284, 353, 377 Speght's Chaucer, 360 Spence, Joseph, 132 Spencer, W. R., 392, 394 Spenser, Edmund, 16, 25, 33, 37, 63, 68, 69, 77-101, 129, 151, 154, 157, 159, 163, 170, 198, 199, 212, 213, 216, 219, 222, 224-26, 235, 244, 265, 279, 304, 359, 371 Spleen, The, 104, 136 Splendid Shilling, The, 104 Squire of Dames, The, 85, 91 Stanley, J. T., 392 State of German Literature, The, 401 Stedman, E. C., 162 Steevens, Geo., 32 Stello, 372 Stephen, Leslie, 32-34, 40, 102, 234, 237, 327 Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 32, 252 Stevenson, R, L., 258 Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 53, 161 Stimmen der Völker, 300, 337, 416 Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, Count, 376, 377 Storie of William Canynge, The, 355 Stranger, The, 400 Stratton Water, 299 Strawberry Hill, 173, 179, 229, 230, 232, 234, 236, 340 Sturm von Borberg, 399 Suckling, Sir Jno., 57 Sugar Cane, The, 124 Sullivan, Wm. R., 314, 325 Sweet William's Ghost, 279, 280, 295, 300, 394 Swift, Jonathan, 40, 42, 162, 382 Swinburne, A. C., 35, 168 Syr Gawaine, 293 Syr Martyn, 95, 96 System of Runic Mythology, 191 Taine, H. A., 302, 316 Tale of a Tub, 42 Tales of Terror, 409, 417 Tales of Wonder, 404, 409, 416-18 Talisman, The, 188 Tam Lin, 268, 279, 295, 417 Tam o'Shanter, 187, 360 Tannhäuser, 268 Tasso, Torquato, 25, 49, 50, 170, 319, 222-26 Tate, Nahum, 74 Tatler, The, 62 Taylor, Jeremy, 40 Taylor, Wm., 376, 391-98, 417-18 Tea Table Miscellany, The, 284, 297 Temora, 309, 313, 314, 316, 321, 323, 338 Tempest, The, 70, 76, 171, 215 Temple, Sir Wm., 69, 120, 192, 197 Tennyson, Alfred, 18, 27, 35, 92, 93, 146, 200, 270, 28l Thackeray, W. M., 56, 80, 252, 254 Thaddeus of Warsaw, 243, 252 Thales, 85 Theagenes and Chariclea, 244 Theatrum Poetarum, 67, 81 Theocritus, 36 Thesaurus (Hicks'), 192, 193 Thomas à Kempis, 64 Thomas Rymer, 268 Thompson, Wm., 84 Thomson, Jas., 52, 74, 75, 79, 84, 85, 92-95, 97, 98, 102-19, 124, 133-36, 142, 151, 157, 159, 168, 184, 198, 215, 235, 251, 302, 303, 305, 374, 384, 422 Thomson, Jas. (2d), 162 Thoreau, H. D., 107 Tieck, Ludwig, 22, 377, 384 To Country Gentlemen of England, 85 Todtentanz, Der, 386 To Helen, 202 To Melancholy, 251 Tom Jones, 186, 263 Tom Thumb, 285 "Too Late I Stayed," 392 Torfaeus Thormodus, 191 To the Nightingale (Lady Winchelsea), 61 To the Nightingale (Mrs. Radcliffe), 251 To the Nightingale. See Odes. To the River Otter, 161 Tournament, The, 348, 365 Town and Country Magazine, The, 346, 352 Tragedies of the Last Age Considered, The, 70 Tressan, L. E. de L., Comte de, 381 Triumph of Isis, The, 199 Triumph of Melancholy, The, 305 Triumphs of Owen, The, 195 Tristan und Isolde, 3, 64 Trivia, 35 Troilus and Cresseide, 28 True Principles of Gothic Architecture, 234 Turk and Gawin, The, 293 Twa Corbies, The, 275 Two Sisters, The, 270, 279 Tyrwhitt, Thos., 63, 188, 211, 213, 246, 30l, 355-57, 359, 423 Tytler, Sir A. F., 391, 419 Ueber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, 11, 387 Ueber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, 338 Uhland, Ludwig, 384 Ulysses, 18, 35 Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, 127, 132 Universal Prayer, The, 41 Unnatural Flights in Poetry, 47 Upton, John, 85 Uz, J. P., 106 Vanity of Dogmatizing, The, 408 Vathek, 403, 405 Vergil, 25, 37, 49, 50, 55, 110, 223, 285, 335 Verses to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 202 Verses Written in 1748, 133 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 209 Vigny, Alfred Victor, Comte de, 372, 373 Villehardouin, Geoffrey de, 27, 64 Villon, Francois, 64, 216 Vindication (Tyrwhitt's), 359 Virtuoso, The, 84, 91, 141, 228 Vision, The (Burns), 334 Vision, The (Croxall), 84 Vision of Patience, The, 84 Vision of Solomon, The, 84 Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 214, 216, 237, 379, 381, 382 Von Arnim, Achim (L. J.), 384 Voragine, Jacobus de, 3 Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, 14 Voss, J. H., 375 Wackenroder, W. H., 384 Wagner, H. L., 379 Waking of Angantyr, The, 192 Wallenstein, 385, 419 Waller, Edmund, 38, 39, 52, 53, 80, 216 Walpole, Horace, 32, 89, 120, 122, 129, 130, 135, 145, 159, 166, 173, 178, 179, 181, 229-43, 249-55, 258, 286, 306, 336, 337, 349-52, 354, 383, 401, 408, 417, 422 Walsh, Wm., 50, 53 Walther von der Vogelweide, 64 "Waly, Waly," 374, 300 Wanton Wife of Bath, The, 301 Warburton, Wm., 237 Wardlaw, Lady, 286 Ward's English Poets, 53, 111, 131, 169, 364 Warton, Joseph, 32, 75, 118, 142, 149, 151-53, 155, 156, l60, 163, 168, 171, 185, 193, 197-99, 206, 207, 212-20, 223, 226, 262, 302, 355, 375, 383, 387, 422, 423 Warton, Thos., Jr., 32, 36, 53, 75, 84, 85, 99-101, 150, 151, 156-58, 161, 163, 168, 171, 194, 197-207, 211, 213, 221, 224, 226, 245, 251, 260, 291, 293, 294, 302, 356, 359, 375, 387, 403, 422, 423 Warton, Thos., Sr., 85, 197 Waverley Novels, The, 188, 258, 262, 400, 422 Way, G. L., 301 Weber's Metrical Romances, 188 Weber, Veit, 400, 418 Webster, Jno., 66 Werner, 421 Wesley, Jno., 31 West, Gilbert, 84, 85, 89-91, 98, 126, 133, 151, 160, 193, 194 Whately, Thos., 122 Whistle, The, 334 White Doe of Rylstone, The, 184 Whitefield, Geo., 31 Whitehead, Wm., 84, 197 Whittington and his Cat, 273 Wieland, 403 Wieland, C. M., 106, 377, 378, 381, 397 Wife of Usher's Well, The, 269, 279 Wilde Jäger, Der, 391 Wild Huntsman, The, 404, 416 Wilkie, Wm., 85 Wilhelm Meister, 384, 387 Wilhelm Tell, 385 William and Helen, 391, 398, 404 Willie Drowned in Yarrow, 170 Willie's Lady, 279 Wilson's Life of Chatterton, 368 Winchelsea, Anne Finch, Countess of, 57, 61 Winckelmann, J. J., 384, 385 Windsor Forest, 57, 58, 2l5, 220 Winstanley, William, 62, 69 Winter, 103-106, 142, 422 Wither, Geo., 57 Wodrow, Jno., 334, 335 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 64 Wolfred von Dromberg, 398 Wonders of the Invisible World, 408 Wood, Anthony, 291 Wood, Robert, 387-89 Worde, Wynkyn de, 274 Wordsworth, Wm., 4, 5, 43, 58, 103, 107, 109, 112, 115, 135, 143-45, 160, 162, 183, 184, 218, 220, 288-90, 298, 299, 304, 316, 326, 328, 339, 344 Worm, Ole, 191, 193 Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 269 Wren, Sir Christopher, 121, 230 Written at an Inn at Henley, 138 Written at Stonhenge, 201 Written in Dugdale's Monasticon, 198 Yarrow Revisited, 344 Yarrow Unvisited, 298 Young, Edward, 56, 149, 163, 213, 387, 388, 421 Young Hunting, 279 Young Lochinvar, 277 Young Waters, 300 Zapolya, 420 Zastrozzi, 403 Zauberlehrling, Der, 386 Zauberring, Der, 4