Class / c, J> JO o J 
 Book C3Z&6 
 
 Copyright}! . 
 
 (QOS 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE HOLY GRAIL 
 
By tke Same Author 
 
 FOUR PRINCES ; Or, The Growth 
 of a Kingdom. The story of the 
 Christian Church. Decorated cloth, 
 $1.25, net 
 
 JAPAN TO-DAY. A record of contem- 
 porary impressions. Profusely illustra- 
 ted. Decorated cloth, $1.50, net 
 
 YOUNG JAPAN. The story of the 
 rise of a world-power. Fully illustrated. 
 $1.50, net 
 
from the painting by george frederick watts 
 
 sir Galahad's quest of the grail 
 
 " My strength is as the strength of ten, 
 Because my heart is pure." 
 
 —Tennyson, " Sir Galahad. 
 
?* 
 
 Copyright, 1905 
 By J. B. LippiNCOTT Company 
 
 LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
 Two Copies Received 
 
 DEC 11 1905 
 
 Copyright Entry 
 AJZtx.//. /90f\ 
 CLASS CX. XXc, No. 
 
 / 33/3? 
 
 COPY B. 
 
 Published December, 
 
 [905 
 
 Printed by 
 J. B. Lippineott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A. 
 
8 
 
 DEDICATED TO 
 
 THE CHARLESTONIANS 
 
 IN TOKEN OF 
 LASTING FRIENDSHIP 
 
PREFACE 
 
 I intend the Holy Grail to be the bind- 
 ing theme that unites this sheaf of essays 
 and addresses. The first bears that espe- 
 cial title, but the quest of the Grail is no 
 less the real motive of the five other chap- 
 ters in this book. For example, no men 
 since the days of Galahad and Percivale 
 have more utterly lost themselves in the 
 knightly quest than those two Southern 
 poets whose early death deprived the 
 world of mystical rich music, but brought 
 them their vision at last. The Crusaders 
 were knights of the Grail. " Liberty and 
 law" shows the present need of lance and 
 spear, while the final chapter hints of a 
 Golden Age to come. I pray that my 
 
10 Preface 
 
 little book may somehow hearten some 
 of those who wander, and point them 
 straightwise towards The Gleam. This is 
 its single aim. 
 
 James A. B. Scherer. 
 Newberry College, S. C. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Holy Grail 15 
 
 Henry Timrod 55 
 
 Sidney Lanier 73 
 
 The Crusaders 115 
 
 Liberty and Law 153 
 
 The Century in Literature 181 
 
THE HOLY GRAIL 
 
THE HOLY GRAIL* 
 
 A TRIBUTE AND AN APPEAL 
 
 Some one asked a child on a door-step, 
 "Is your father at home?" The house 
 was that of a village physician. 
 
 " No ; he is away," answered the child. 
 
 " Can you tell me where I can find 
 him?" 
 
 " No ; but he is somewhere, where 
 somebody is either sick or hurt; he is 
 helping somewhere." 
 
 And the caller went away with a beau- 
 tiful sermon in his heart. " Helping 
 somewhere!" 
 
 There is beauty in a life of service. 
 
 It solves one of the great problems that 
 weigh upon the minds of men in these 
 
 * Delivered before the Medical College of 
 South Carolina. 
 
 15 
 
16 The Holy Grail 
 
 days — the problem of inequality. Here 
 are the rich, there are the poor ; here are 
 the weak, there are the strong. The high 
 and the lowly, the crushed and these who 
 crush them, the maimed and wan against 
 the ruddy and the glad ; what a vast rid- 
 dle lies in this universal fact of human in- 
 equality ! The saddest feature of it is that 
 the weak themselves so keenly realize 
 their weakness. They have not even that 
 poor bliss which ignorance is said to bring. 
 They are consciously unequal. On the 
 other hand, never before has this fact of 
 inequality been so fully realized by the 
 brothers of the weak. " Never before 
 have men felt the sorrows and hardships 
 of their fellow men so widely, so keenly, 
 so constantly, as to-day." 
 
 The solution is in service. In a per- 
 fectly equal world service would be mani- 
 festly impossible. It implies inequalities. 
 And were service impossible, the noblest 
 
The Holy Grail 17 
 
 fruitfulness of the human soul, the high- 
 est attainment of human character, would 
 perforce be unachieved. To each is given 
 his individual talent, which is to be spent 
 in service for the common weal. Brain 
 and brawn, music and money, letters, me- 
 chanics, sciences and arts — there are di- 
 versities of gifts, but the same spirit, the 
 spirit of service, should animate all, and 
 so achieve at once the common weal and 
 the highest individual development. " He 
 that would be chief among you, let him be 
 as one that doth serve." Herein is hap- 
 piness, herein is health and hope. If vice 
 be the shadow of idleness, service is ir- 
 radiant of virtue. " Ich dien" is indeed 
 a princely motto; and true princes in the 
 realm of service are the men who go forth 
 night and day, in storm and sunshine, 
 through evil and through good report, 
 into mansions and hovels, wherever some 
 one is sick or hurt, helping somewhere; 
 
18 The Holy Grail 
 
 serving, always serving. Carlyle writes of 
 the hero as prophet, the hero as poet, the 
 hero as priest, as man of letters, as king. 
 He did not need to write a chapter on 
 the hero as a healer, since such a chapter 
 is written in every human heart where 
 burns the faintest spark of gratitude for 
 such as serve. Then, 
 
 Health to the art whose glory is to give 
 The crowning boon that makes it life to live ! 
 
 I said that service is irradiant, but the 
 statement must be qualified. Service does 
 not always bless either the servant or the 
 served. Serve we must; yet there are 
 those who serve faithfully, but cheer- 
 lessly. There are physicians, for ex- 
 ample, who bring skill and constancy 
 and good medicines and deep learning 
 into the sick-room, but they do not 
 bring warmth, nor are their own hearts 
 warm. On the other hand, there is the 
 immoral character of William McClure, 
 
The Holy Grail 19 
 
 whose home is not only beside the bon- 
 nie brier bush, but also beneath Southern 
 palmettos. The one man may be per- 
 fect; but even so, he is painfully perfect 
 — precise, cool, chilling, mechanical. He 
 is "the doctor"— Dr. Fell. We may 
 stand in awe of him, but we do not love 
 him; we rather have that shuddering 
 fear of him which love casts out. See 
 him, this fell physician, with his saw-like 
 face and his saw-like voice and his sur- 
 geon's saw, unsheathed, forever taking 
 conspicuously the place of his knightly 
 sword. How he loves to brandish his 
 saw, unmindful of shrinking nerves! 
 Harsh, skilful, saw-like Dr. Fell! 
 
 I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, 
 The reason why I cannot tell ; 
 
 But this I know, I know full well : 
 I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. 
 
 The other man (may his tribe increase) 
 is " our friend, Dr. McClure." How 
 
20 The Holy Grail 
 
 proud we are to call him that! Warm- 
 hearted, cheery, wholesome Dr. McClure! 
 The one man may help the body, but the 
 other helps the body and the soul, because 
 he has a soul himself. It is the difference 
 between the music of a street organ and 
 the music of a woman's voice. Service is 
 always music. But it may be mechanical, 
 or it may be mellow with light. 
 
 I despair of making my meaning clear 
 without recourse to a legend.* 
 
 This legend is the simplest form of the 
 story known as Percivale, or the Holy 
 Grail. Simple as it is, this story has had 
 a deeper influence upon literature than 
 any other legend in the world. Familiar 
 to the people of Western Britain before 
 their conversion to Christianity, it was 
 
 * Besides Tennyson and Malory, I am indebted 
 in this study of the Grail chiefly to the excel- 
 lent essays by George McLean Harper and Ferris 
 Greenslet — S. 
 
The Holy Grail 21 
 
 seized upon by the religious romancers of 
 the twelfth century and transformed into 
 a Christian legend. Since that time it has 
 formed the theme for the greatest of epic 
 poems, whether in French, Welsh, Eng- 
 lish, German, Icelandic, or Flemish. Its 
 influence was profound, showing itself 
 especially in spiritualizing the Arthurian 
 narratives, which had previously been of 
 a worldly, and even sensual, character. 
 During the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 
 teenth centuries it was the mission of the 
 legend of the Holy Grail to fill the strong, 
 deep current of Arthurian romance with 
 purity and light. " Then the Renaissance, 
 which was springing to so many fields 
 of thought, fell like a polar night on these 
 shining floods of fair mediaeval story. The 
 legend of the Holy Grail, which had 
 leaped down in tiny rivulets from the high 
 antiquity of so many races, and had 
 cleansed and beautified the literatures of 
 
22 The Holy Grail 
 
 so many tongues — this purifying stream 
 lay frozen throughout the sixteenth, 
 seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. 
 Suddenly, in our own time, it has been 
 irradiated and warmed to life again and 
 to the old genial motion." 
 
 But what is the legend? Lately one 
 has retold it in the beauty of its simplest 
 form: 
 
 They say that a banished queen, widow 
 of a king slain in combat, dwelt in the 
 wild-wood with her little son. His child- 
 hood was spent in companionship with 
 the birds of the forest. He loved them 
 and understood their language. One day 
 he met several knights in a green glade 
 and was fascinated by the splendor of 
 their arms and by what they told him of 
 their wandering life. Following their ex- 
 ample, he, too, set forth to conquer the 
 world. He soon reached a bewitched 
 castle, upon which some dreadful woe 
 
The Holy Grail 23 
 
 had fallen. A wounded man, called the 
 Fisher King, lay there speechless, but 
 supplicating relief with great sorrowful 
 eyes. At regular intervals there is borne 
 before this sufferer a sacred vessel, bathed 
 in a holy light, at sight of which the king 
 and his attendants look expectantly to- 
 wards the simple Percivale. But he has 
 been taught pridefully never to ask ques- 
 tions, and so he leaves the castle to its 
 fate. If he had only had sufficient in- 
 terest in this mystery to speak of it, the 
 Fisher King would have been healed. 
 Percivale now goes forth to many more 
 adventures, but is ever haunted by pity 
 for the king and regret of his own for- 
 bearance. At length he learns from a 
 hermit that the sacred vessel was the Holy 
 Grail, and devotes himself henceforth to 
 searching for the castle in hopes of re- 
 pairing his fault. After many years he 
 finds it again, but now the spell is not so 
 
24 The Holy Grail 
 
 easily unbound. He must first weld to- 
 gether the parts of a broken sword. 
 When this is finally done, and when he 
 asks the searching duplex question, 
 "What ails thee, O King? And what 
 mean these wondrous things?" — then the 
 Fisher King recovers, hailing Percivale as 
 his deliverer and the chief defender of the 
 Grail. 
 
 But what is the significance of this leg- 
 end of the Holy Grail? Briefly, this 
 seems to me to be its meaning: To men 
 who, getting and spending, are laying 
 waste their powers; in days when the 
 world is too much with us, every way, 
 this fertile bit of folk-lore comes to us 
 as a reminder of spiritual needs and privi- 
 leges. It comes as a warning lest, in 
 our daily dealings with the material 
 world, we forget the wonders of the ideal 
 land. To the caretakers of the body it 
 comes as a warning lest, in dealing with 
 
The Holy Grail 25 
 
 the materia medica, they lose sight of the 
 truth that " in the cloud of the human 
 soul there is a fire stronger than the light- 
 ning and a grace more precious than the 
 ram." Serve we must. That which en- 
 nobles service is a belief in the ideal and 
 the spiritual. 
 
 My message, then, is an appeal for the 
 ideal against the material and gross. My 
 voice is a voice crying against the threat- 
 ening triumph of materialism over the 
 spiritual. Service may be hard and cold, 
 or it may be full of all sweetness and light, 
 both for ourselves and for others. The 
 light that transforms it, making it a bless- 
 ing to oneself and a strong uplifting force 
 to other men, is the light which Tennyson, 
 the aged, called The Gleam. 
 
 This great man's theory of service was 
 altogether a wholesome and practical the- 
 ory. He had no patience with the silly 
 folk who will only dream and drone. He 
 
26 The Holy Grail 
 
 taught that no man, for the simple sake of 
 seeing visions, many wander from the 
 allotted field before his work be done; 
 that even the king is but the hind to 
 whom a space of land is given to plough. 
 He did not let himself fall into that pretty 
 net of a lazy and sentimental philosophy 
 whose motto is : Be, not Do. He taught 
 that none can nobly be who will not faith- 
 fully do. But he saw, too, that service 
 may be dark and hard, missing its highest 
 end, both for the servant and the served. 
 Therefore, as this gray magician, who so 
 long had enchanted the world with his 
 music, was about to turn again home, he 
 shouted the secret of his noble life of 
 service to all young mariners ready to 
 launch out into the deep. 
 
 O young Mariner, 
 You from the haven 
 Under the sea-cliff, 
 You that are watching 
 The gray Magician 
 
The Holy Grail 27 
 
 With eyes of wonder, 
 
 I am Merlin, 
 
 And I am dying, 
 
 I am Merlin 
 
 Who follow The Gleam . . . 
 
 Not of the sunlight, 
 
 Not of the moonlight, 
 
 Not of the starlight ! 
 
 O young Mariner, 
 
 Down to the haven 
 
 Call your companions, 
 
 Launch your vessel, 
 
 And crowd your canvas, 
 
 And, ere it vanishes 
 
 Over the margin, 
 
 After it, follow it, 
 
 Follow The Gleam. 
 
 That is my message — follow The 
 Gleam ! Now, " ere it vanishes over the 
 margin, after it, follow it, follow The 
 Gleam !" 
 
 Let me show you the remarkable adap- 
 tation of the Percivale legend to inculcate 
 this message. I have cited the story of 
 the Grail in its simplest form, precisely as 
 
28 The Holy Grail 
 
 it stands written in ancient romances, 
 without the slightest addition or altera- 
 tion. Yet when we come to apply it to 
 this present occasion, and to our own 
 needs, it is hard to believe that it has not 
 been purposely adjusted, so perfectly does 
 it fit them. 
 
 Here is the lad, Percivale. His child- 
 hood has been spent in all simplicity and 
 purity. One day he heeds the voices of 
 the knights of healing, and resolves to go 
 out into the world in their noble com- 
 pany. It is not far to the doomed castle, 
 whereon some dreadful woe seems to have 
 fallen. You will not be long in your pro- 
 fessions before there comes an oppressive 
 sense of the misery that fills the world. 
 Here he lies, the Fisher King. Only a 
 poor fisherman, perhaps — toilsome, suf- 
 fering, helpless, conscious of his weakness 
 and his wounds; yet still a king! Here 
 he lies, patient, and supplicating relief, 
 
The Holy Grail 29 
 
 with great dumb imploring eyes. Will 
 you make the mistake of the other Per- 
 civale? Shall this dumb and wounded 
 Fisher King see in our eyes no interest 
 in the sacred and the spiritual? If you 
 ask for the body's sake, " What ails 
 thee?" will you not also show interest in 
 the " wondrous things" of the soul? As 
 the visions of the higher life pass ever and 
 anon before his apprehension now quick- 
 ened by suffering, shall he discern from 
 sympathetic touch and glance that these 
 things are gloriously true, or shall a hard, 
 mechanical materialism chill these holy 
 visions of his into a haunting nightmare? 
 Be sure that unless an interest and a faith 
 in the spiritual and the unseen illume your 
 service to the Fisher King, you will go 
 forth and leave him still wounded, 
 whereas you might have healed and freed 
 him. Then, years afterwards, you may 
 seek remorsefully to repair your fault and 
 
30 The Holy Grail 
 
 crime against the Fisher King. But now, 
 alas! the spell is not so easily unbound; 
 one must first weld together the parts 
 of a broken sword. Ah, keen, unbroken 
 sword of knightly and believing youth ! 
 Wield it, and it grows the stronger and 
 the brighter. Leave it unused, and it 
 weakens, rusts, breaks. 
 
 There is no sadder proof of this than 
 in the experience of the great scientist, 
 Charles Darwin. One of his letters con- 
 tains a remarkable confession, strange and 
 pathetic. " In one respect," he says, " my 
 mind has changed during the last twenty 
 or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, 
 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such 
 as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, 
 gave me great pleasure, and even as a 
 schoolboy I took intense delight in 
 Shakespeare. I have also said that for- 
 merly pictures gave me considerable, and 
 
The Holy Grail 31 
 
 music very great delight. But now for 
 many years I cannot endure to read a line 
 of poetry. I have tried lately to read 
 Shakespeare and found it so intolerably 
 dull that it nauseated me. I have also 
 almost lost my taste for pictures or music. 
 Music generally sets me thinking too en- 
 ergetically on what I have been at work 
 on, instead of giving me pleasure. I re- 
 tain some taste for fine scenery, but it does 
 not cause me the exquisite delight which 
 it once did. My mind seems to have be- 
 come a kind of machine for grinding gen- 
 eral laws out of large collections of facts, 
 but why this should have caused the 
 atrophy of that part of the brain alone on 
 which the higher tastes depend I cannot 
 conceive. If I had to live my life again 
 I would have made a rule to read some 
 poetry and listen to some music at least 
 once every week; for, perhaps, the part 
 of my brain now atrophied would thus 
 
32 The Holy Grail 
 
 have been kept active through use. The 
 loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, 
 and may possibly be injurious to the in- 
 tellect, and more probably to the moral 
 character, by enfeebling the emotional 
 part of our nature." 
 
 I will venture to say that the profes- 
 sion into which you go will expose you 
 to the same danger that eventually so sad- 
 dened this, great and honest scientist. In 
 dealing with mere facts there is always 
 a tendency to forget truth. Phenomena 
 conceal realities. You will be busied in- 
 cessantly with drugs and bones and nerves 
 and tissues. Thinking so much about the 
 body, you may be tempted to forget the 
 soul. It will be easy to develop the purely 
 intellectual faculties at the expense of 
 those powers on which the very highest 
 tastes and pleasures depend. Moreover, 
 you and I are born into an age of mate- 
 rialism; an age when it is hard to main- 
 
The Holy Grail 33 
 
 tain the vision of the spiritual. The mal- 
 aria of materialism forms a mist, a fog, 
 wherein the spirit moves, heavy and be- 
 wildered. " Things that are near loom 
 larger in the mist. Things that are far 
 are lost to view." " Men are confused, 
 hesitating, questioning, despondent, in re- 
 gard to all that lies beyond the reach of 
 the senses." Materialism is the only re- 
 ligion that some will hear of; teaching 
 that the first cause is some blind pulp, — 
 the final cause, dust and ashes. The gen- 
 esis of man, they tell us, is through the 
 earthworm, who also shall devour him. 
 It is, I say, a materialistic age, and the 
 mist of doubt will tend to blind you to the 
 sight of things that are far, but real; 
 especially since your sight will perforce 
 be so closely and constantly directed to- 
 wards the things that are near by. 
 
 But that is not all. The most of you 
 will belong to one of those four profes- 
 3 
 
34 The Holy Grail 
 
 sions that get the closest views of human 
 nature. The lawyer, the editor, the min- 
 ister and the physician see things that 
 other men barely suspect. The physician, 
 I believe, sees, most of all, the weaknesses 
 of humanity, with its innumerable faults 
 and foibles. You will feel the sting of in- 
 gratitude ; you may feel the sting of pov- 
 erty. You may even feel the double sting 
 of an undeserved poverty, begotten of the 
 ingratitude of those for whom you labor. 
 All of these things, the scientific character 
 of your profession, the intimate knowl- 
 edge that it gives of the dark and seamy 
 side of life, and the character of the age in 
 which we live, will tend strongly, as it 
 seems to me, to make you strangers to 
 " the wonders of the ideal land" whereof 
 Timrod sings. 
 
 Learn a lesson from Timrod. If ever 
 a high and beautiful spirit was tempted to 
 lose faith in the ideal and the spiritual, 
 
The Holy Grail 35 
 
 that temptation came to Henry Timrod. 
 The maturer years of his life form a sick- 
 ening record of one long wrestling with 
 cruelty, famine, and disease. Concerning 
 his sweet minstrelsy, which was infinitely 
 dear to him, hunger made him once write 
 to his friend, Paul Hayne, that he would 
 " consign every line of it to eternal ob- 
 livion for one hundred dollars in hand." 
 It was an awful fight between Beauty and 
 the Beast, but the beauty of his spirit 
 survived. Willing to destroy all his poetry 
 for a little bread and bacon, the poetry of 
 life yet remained priceless and triumphant 
 with him. Wet with his tears and blood 
 he has left us a song that glows with the 
 dazzling fire of an inextinguishable hope 
 and faith. In the midst of his wrestling 
 with the horrible realities of his sad life, 
 as he realized the danger which beset him 
 of losing all that makes life worth while, 
 he cried out in a very agony of earnest- 
 ness: 
 
36 The Holy Grail 
 
 Dear God ! if that I may not keep through life 
 
 My trust, my truth, 
 And that I must, in yonder endless strife, 
 
 Lose faith with youth; 
 
 If the same toil which indurates the hand 
 
 Must steel the heart, 
 Till in the wonders of the ideal land 
 
 It have no part; 
 
 Oh, take me hence! I would no longer stay 
 
 Beneath the sky; 
 Give me to chant one pure and deathless lay, 
 
 And let me die ! * 
 
 In speaking of Timrod, my thought 
 naturally recurs to his great master, Ten- 
 nyson, and I recall his striking testimony 
 to the reality of the things unseen, when 
 in conversation he once said : " There 
 are moments when the flesh is nothing to 
 me, when I feel and know the flesh to be 
 the vision, God and the spiritual the only 
 real and true. Depend upon it, the spir- 
 
 * " Youth and Manhood." 
 
The Holy Grail 37 
 
 itual is the real; it belongs to one more 
 than the hand and the foot. You may tell 
 me that my hand and foot are only imag- 
 inary symbols of my existence. I could 
 believe you, but you never, never can con- 
 vince me that the I is not an eternal re- 
 ality, and that the spiritual is not the true 
 and real part of me." His son adds that 
 he spoke these words with such passionate 
 earnestness that a solemn stillness fell on 
 them all as he left the room. 
 
 It is little wonder that this great man, 
 with his prophet's vision of the spiritual 
 as the truly real, should be the foremost 
 of all the poets, in many tongues and cen- 
 turies, who have dealt with the glorious 
 story of the Grail. This theme appealed 
 to him, as he himself has told us, because 
 it gave such rich opportunity to express 
 his " strong feeling as to the reality of the 
 Unseen." First, it is Percivale's sister, a 
 nun, who sees the vision. 
 
38 The Holy Grail 
 
 . . . " O my brother Percivale," she said, 
 " Sweet brother, I have seen the Holy Grail : 
 For, waked at dead of night, I heard a sound 
 As of a silver horn from o'er the hills 
 Blown, and I thought, ' It is not Arthur's use 
 To hunt by moonlight;' and the slender sound, 
 As from a distance beyond distance grew, 
 Coming upon me — O never harp nor horn, 
 Nor aught we blow with breath, or touch with 
 
 hand, 
 Was like that music as it came; and then 
 Stream'd thro' my cell a cold and silver beam, 
 And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail, 
 Rose-red with beatings in it, as if alive, 
 Till all the white walls of my cell were dyed 
 With rosy colors leaping on the wall ; 
 And then the music faded, and the Grail 
 Past, and the beam decay'd, and from the walls 
 The rosy quiverings died into the night." 
 
 Next the wonderful vision comes veiled 
 to all the knights of Arthur, as they sit 
 feasting in their great hall at the Table 
 Round. 
 
 A cracking and a riving of the roofs, 
 And all at once, as there we sat, we heard 
 
The Holy Grail 39 
 
 And rending, and a blast, and overhead 
 
 Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 
 
 And in the blast there smote along the hall 
 
 A beam of light seven times more clear than day : 
 
 And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 
 
 All over cover'd with a luminous cloud, 
 
 And none might see who bare it, and it past. 
 
 Then it is the pure Galahad who de- 
 scribes to Percivale his success in the 
 noble quest. 
 
 ... I, Galahad, saw the Grail, . . . 
 . . . and never yet 
 
 Hath what thy sister taught me first to see, 
 This Holy Thing, fail'd from my side, nor come 
 Cover'd, but moving with me night and day, 
 Fainter by day, but always in the night 
 Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh 
 Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top 
 Blood-red, and in the sleeping mere below 
 Blood-red. And in the strength of this I rode, 
 Shattering all evil customs everywhere. 
 
 Then Percivale himself, drawn by the 
 power of Galahad, attains the unveiled 
 vision. He sees Galahad clad " in silver- 
 
40 The Holy Grail 
 
 shining armor starry-clear," embarked at 
 night upon the stormy sea. As the thun- 
 ders roar, the heavens open with blaze of 
 lightning, and reveal to the watcher on 
 the shore Sir Galahad asail. 
 
 And o'er his head the Holy Vessel hung 
 Redder than any rose, a joy to me, 
 For now I knew the veil had been withdrawn. 
 Then in a moment when they blazed again 
 Opening, I saw the least of little stars 
 Down on the waste, and straight beyond the star 
 I saw the spiritual city and all her spires 
 And gateways in a glory like one pearl — 
 No larger, tho' the goal of all the saints — 
 Strike from the sea ; and from the star there shot 
 A rose-red sparkle to the city, and there 
 Dwelt, and I knew it was the Holy Grail. 
 
 The vision, too, was granted to the hon- 
 est, simple-minded Bors, who scarce had 
 prayed or asked it for himself, so hum- 
 ble was he; yet, nevertheless, one night 
 before his sight " the sweet Grail glided 
 and past, and close upon it pealed a shrap, 
 quick thunder." 
 
The Holy Grail 41 
 
 Then at last the veiled vision of the sin- 
 tormented Lancelot! Cursed with an 
 overpowering unholy love, he rode madly 
 on the quest, hoping that could he but 
 touch or see the Holy Grail his sin and 
 spirit might be plucked asunder. At 
 length, cast ashore from a mad and peril- 
 ous voyage, he found an enchanted castle, 
 lion-guarded. Up between the lions he 
 pressed in the moonlit night — up a thou- 
 sand steps, panting, towards where, in the 
 topmost tower to the eastward, a sweet 
 voice sang clear and high as a lark. 
 
 ... As in a dream I seem'd to climb 
 For ever ; at the last I reach' d a door ; 
 A light was in the crannies, and I heard, 
 " Glory and joy and honor to our Lord, 
 And to the Holy Vessel of the Grail." 
 Then in my madness I essay'd the door; 
 It gave; and thro' a stormy glare, a heat 
 As from a seventimes-heated furnace, I, 
 Blasted and burnt, and blinded as I was, 
 With such a fierceness that I swoon'd away — 
 O, yet methought I saw the Holy Grail, 
 
42 The Holy Grail 
 
 All pall'd in crimson samite, and around 
 Great angels, awful shapes, and wings and eyes. 
 And but for all my madness and my sin, 
 And then my swooning, I had sworn I saw 
 That which I saw ; but what I saw was veil'd 
 And cover'd ; and this Quest was not for me. 
 
 Alas, for the blinding power of a wil- 
 ful sin! And yet he saw it, although 
 veiled. Not alone the retired and holy 
 nun had this glorious vision; not alone 
 the maiden Sir Galahad and the wander- 
 ing Percivale, but also the simple-minded 
 Bors and the wrestling Lancelot. Be 
 sure that the Quest is for all who are will- 
 ing to seek it. 
 
 O young Mariner, 
 Down to the haven 
 Call your companions, 
 Launch your vessel, 
 And crowd your canvas, 
 And, ere it vanishes 
 Over the margin, 
 After it, follow it, 
 Follow The Gleam. 
 
The Holy Grail 43 
 
 There is no way by which this faith in 
 the good, the true and the beautiful may 
 better be kept living and warm than by the 
 way of literature. Of course I do not 
 speak of the literature that belongs espe- 
 cially to professions. Chaucer's " doctour 
 of phisik" was thoroughly grounded in 
 that. 
 
 Wei knew he the olde Esculapius, 
 And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus ; 
 Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen; 
 Serapion, Razis, and Avycen; 
 Averrois, Damascien, and Constantyn; 
 Bernard, and Gatesden, and Gilbertyn, 
 
 so that " in al this world ne was ther noon 
 him lyk, to spek of phisik and of sur- 
 gerye." And yet, despite this expert 
 technical knowledge, he had fallen deep 
 into this very error, against which the 
 great voices all sound warning. We 
 know this, because 
 
44 The Holy Grail 
 
 He kepte that he wan in pestilence. 
 For gold in phisik is a cordial; 
 Therefore he loved gold in special. 
 
 Nay, I do not mean the technical lit- 
 erature of your professions. I speak 
 rather of what is sometimes called, with 
 a sneer, " mere belles lettres" If, in the 
 wonders of the ideal land, you are to have 
 a part, you dare not slight the pleasant 
 paths of the great English classics. Re- 
 member Darwin's regret that he had not 
 read some poetry at least once every week, 
 and so supplied a tonic to prevent, in the 
 pursuit of a purely scientific profession, 
 the atrophy of those faculties upon which 
 the higher tastes depend. As a very dis- 
 cerning philosopher has put it, to acquire 
 a love for the best poetry, and a just un- 
 derstanding of it, is the chief end of the 
 study of literature. " For it is by means 
 of poetry that the imagination is quick- 
 ened, nurtured, and invigorated, and it is 
 
The Holy Grail 45 
 
 only through the exercise of the imagina- 
 tion that a man can live a life that is in a 
 true sense worth living. For it is the im- 
 agination which lifts him from the petty, 
 transient, and physical interests that en- 
 gross the greater part of his time and 
 thoughts in self-regarding pursuits, to the 
 large, permanent, and spiritual interests 
 that ennoble his nature, and transform 
 him from a solitary individual into a 
 member of the brotherhood of the human 
 
 race. 
 
 » * 
 
 Do not say that you have no time for 
 letters ; the mind to read finds the time to 
 read. And so the danger is not that you 
 will not find the time, but that you may, 
 like Darwin, lose the mind for it. Some 
 of our great English-speaking physicians, 
 from Sir Thomas Browne to Oliver Wen- 
 dell Holmes and Weir Mitchell, have 
 
 * Charles Eliot Norton. 
 
46 The Holy Grail 
 
 proved that there is no necessary disparity 
 between medicine and letters. 
 
 As a second influence in maintaining a 
 clear vision of The Gleam, of the spiritual 
 realities of life, I would name chivalry. 
 By chivalry I mean nothing else than a 
 steadfast belief in the purity and nobility 
 of womanhood. I am selfish in this ad- 
 vice. What I mean is this : There is no 
 danger that woman will ever lose the 
 vision of the things unseen; her percep- 
 tion is keener than ours, her spiritual hori- 
 zon wider; now, by a steadfast belief in 
 her and her ideals, we can have our own 
 kept true through her sweet aid. It is not 
 without a profound significance that the 
 maiden nun belted Sir Galahad as he set 
 forth on his quest for the Holy Grail. 
 Shearing away clean from her forehead all 
 her wealth of hair, out of this she plaited 
 broad and long a strong sword-belt. 
 
The Holy Grail 47 
 
 . . . and wove with silver thread 
 
 And crimson in the belt a strange device, 
 
 A crimson grail within a silver beam; 
 
 And saw the bright boy-knight, and bound it on 
 
 him, 
 Saying, " My knight, my love, my knight of 
 
 heaven, 
 O thou, my love, whose love is one with mine, 
 I, maiden, round thee, maiden, bind my belt. 
 Go forth, for thou shalt see what I have seen, 
 And break thro' all, till one will crown thee 
 
 king 
 Far in the spiritual city ;" and as she spake 
 She sent the deathless passion in her eyes 
 Thro' him, and made him hers, and laid her mind 
 On him, and he believed in her belief. 
 
 Chivalry, literature, and religious faith 
 — these three are the prismatic elements 
 of the deathless gleam of the Holy Grail. 
 He who holds to these finds his quest; 
 and the greatest of these is faith. Chau- 
 cer says of his " doctour" that " his studie 
 was but litel on the Bible." After that 
 illuminating bit of information we cannot 
 
48 The Holy Grail 
 
 wonder that he " loved gold in special" 
 and " kepte that he wan in pestilence." 
 For in the end it is religious faith that 
 lies at the root of all true charity and no- 
 bility of life. I have spoken of chivalry; 
 I remind you that the source of chivalry 
 was the Crusades, and the Crusades were 
 nothing but religious wars. I have spoken 
 of literature; I remind you of that Book 
 which is the permeating force of all our 
 truest literature, the Book that Walter 
 Scott, on his death-bed, called the only 
 book. I have spoken of Tennyson; I 
 recall an extract from Queen Victoria's 
 private journal, under date of August 7, 
 1883, where she is describing a visit which 
 the great poet had just paid her. " He 
 talked of the many friends he had lost and 
 what it would be if he did not feel and 
 know that there was another world, where 
 there would be no partings; and then he 
 spoke with horror of the unbelievers and 
 philosophers who would make you believe 
 
The Holy Grail 49 
 
 that there was no other world, no immor- 
 tality, who tried to explain all away in a 
 miserable manner." I spoke of Timrod; 
 his poems glow with religious faith. So 
 with Sir Thomas Browne and Holmes and 
 all the great men mentioned in this talk 
 about the Holy Grail. What is the Holy 
 Grail itself? A religious cup bathed in 
 spiritual light. The spiritual and the ideal 
 cannot exist apart from the religious. 
 
 This truth is beautifully told by one 
 of the minnesingers, who dealt with the 
 legend of the Holy Grail. He paints the 
 lad, Percivale, at his mother's side, before 
 he had set forth to journey towards the 
 doomed castle in the company of knights. 
 He had lived in the wild-wood, innocent 
 and joyous, loving the birds and all things 
 God hath made. One day, in pain for 
 the wounded birds, he hears his mother 
 speak the great Name of the Creator of 
 all, and, looking up into her face, he asks 
 
50 The Holy Grail 
 
 the mighty question, " O mother, what is 
 God?" Her answer is one of deep beauty 
 and tenderness : 
 
 My son, in solemn truth I say, 
 
 He is far brighter than the day, 
 
 Though once His countenance did change 
 
 Into the face of man. 
 
 O son of mine, give wisely heed, 
 
 And call on Him in time of need, 
 
 Whose faithfulness has never failed 
 
 Since first the world began. 
 
 Forget not this lesson of the mother as 
 you go out into the high and holy knight- 
 hood of service; let not faith falter. Be 
 sure that there is a God. We discern His 
 likeness brightening the page of history, 
 with the illumination of a single divine 
 purpose, governing and directing all; 
 that " divinity which shapes our ends, 
 rough-hew them how we will." There is 
 a God. We see Him in the blue vault of 
 the sky, we feel Him in the touch of a 
 mother's hand, in the kiss of a child's pure 
 
The Holy Grail 51 
 
 lips. We hear Him in the still, small voice 
 that whispers to the heart, Thou shalt, or 
 Thou shalt not. 
 
 Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with 
 
 spirit can meet — 
 Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
 
 hands and feet. 
 
 In Him will I believe. In the good, the 
 beautiful and the true will I believe. In 
 the wonders of the ideal land I will seek 
 to hold my part. Follow The Gleam! 
 Now, ere it vanishes over the margin; 
 now, in our strong youth, let us after it, 
 follow it — the vision of a sacred vessel 
 bathed with light, the vision of the Holy 
 Grail, which, if you hold it ever in sight, 
 will bless and lift your lives and, through 
 you, unbind and heal the wounded Fisher 
 King. 
 
 And now, fair Sirs, your voices : who will gird 
 His belt for travel in the perilous ways? 
 This thing must be fulfilled: in vain our land 
 
52 The Holy Grail 
 
 Of noble name, high deed, and famous men, 
 
 Vain the proud homage of our thrall the sea, 
 
 If we be shorn of God ; — ah, loathsome shame ! 
 
 To hurl in battle for the pride of arms ; 
 
 To ride in native tourney, foreign war; 
 
 To count the stars ; to ponder pictured runes, 
 
 And grasp great knowledge, as the demons do, — 
 
 If we be shorn of God; — we must assay 
 
 The myth and meaning of this marvellous bowl 
 
 It shall be sought and found * 
 
 * Robert Stephen Hawker. 
 
HENRY TIMROD 
 
HENRY TIMROD 
 
 A CAROLINA POET 
 
 Matthew Arnold's pregnant criti- 
 cism of America, that it needs ruins, 
 hardly applies to old Charleston, which 
 was a city when New York was a town. 
 The place wears that quiet dignity which 
 comes only with the heaping years. It 
 has the calm culture whereof Arnold was 
 so fond, but whose price is ruins. Its 
 gray hairs are its glory-crown. 
 
 From the ocean it is Wilhelm Muller's 
 sunken city, seeming to rise from the sea. 
 Ancient spires gleam white in the South- 
 ern sun, under a turquoise sky. Nearing, 
 you see no vulgar showiness of piled-up 
 brownstone, but the simple elegance of 
 snowy, slender columns fronting the open 
 doors of ancient homes. It is not Amer- 
 
 55 
 
56 The Holy Grail 
 
 ica, it is Europe; not the new world, but 
 the old. 
 
 The churches can trace back their his- 
 tories to a time when letter-heads were 
 dated 16 — instead of 19 — . One of them 
 is a Huguenot church, founded by refu- 
 gees, and still worshipping with its un- 
 changed historic liturgy. The St. Cecilia 
 Society, oldest social organization in 
 America, was founded in 1761, and the 
 Charleston Library dates from 1748. 
 There is a Hibernian Society, organized 
 in 1 701; one of Scotchmen, founded 
 1729; and a " German Friendly Society," 
 organized in 1766. 
 
 The early roll of this German Friendly 
 Society bears the name of Henry Timrod 
 (grandfather of his great namesake), 
 who became a member in 1772. William, 
 his only son, was born of a Scotch 
 mother, thus uniting those two diverse ele- 
 ments which Professor Morley likes to 
 
Henry Timrod 57 
 
 trace in English literature, — Teutonic and 
 
 Keltic. At the age of eleven William's 
 
 love of books literally bound him to a 
 
 bookbinder, whom he startled one day in 
 
 Nullification times with an outburst of 
 
 patriotic poetry. While writing good 
 
 verse, the bookbinder, William Timrod, 
 
 never became more than a man of letters, 
 
 bequeathing the bud of his poetic genius 
 
 to a gentle son, in whom it blossomed into 
 
 fairest and fullest flower, his immortelle. 
 
 Henry Timrod was born in the city of 
 
 Charleston, South Carolina, in the year 
 
 1829. A studious schoolboy, he had as 
 
 desk-mate and always warmest friend, 
 
 Paul Hamilton Hayne, who prepared for 
 
 the second edition of Timrod's poems 
 
 (in 1873) a memoir to which the present 
 
 writer is indebted.* " Harry" was a sen- 
 
 * The edition has long been out of print, and 
 rare. A third appeared in 1899, brought out by 
 
58 The Holy Grail 
 
 sitive, passionate lad, shy save with inti- 
 mate friends. Poetic tastes appeared early, 
 the natural fruitage of his temperament. 
 His warm delight in nature, inherited 
 doubtless from his beautiful English 
 mother, gave him that power which marks 
 the poet from his fellows: the power to 
 interpret rather than merely describe. 
 He wrote verses when but a child, and 
 later, while a student at the University 
 of Georgia, pretty love-fancies appeared 
 from his pen in the Charleston News. 
 But ill health and poverty brought him 
 away from school an undergraduate. For 
 a while he studied law, then set about pre- 
 paring to be a teacher. Yet ever while 
 fighting the wolf, his whole heart yearned 
 towards poetry. Hayne draws a graphic 
 picture of him reciting Wordsworth's 
 
 Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., for the Timrod 
 Memorial Association. 
 
Henry Timrod 59 
 
 " Intimations," his favorite poem : " Short 
 of stature, but broad-chested, and com- 
 pactly formed, with his superb head well 
 set upon shoulders erect, and thrown back 
 in haughty grace — his gray eyes flashing, 
 and his swarthy face one glow of intense 
 emotion — it was impossible to listen to 
 him without catching some spark of his 
 fiery enthusiasm." 
 
 Another literary friend of Timrod's 
 was Gilmore Simms. The young poet, 
 during his ten years of school-teaching in 
 the " up-country," was frequently one of 
 the cultured coterie whom Simms, " like 
 a literary Nestor, gathered about him in 
 his hospitable home." Timrod wrote at 
 this time for the Southern Literary Mes- 
 senger, under the name of " Aglaiis," and 
 for a short-lived journal edited by Hayne, 
 known as Russell's Magazine. This mag- 
 azine contains essays which show his the- 
 
60 The Holy Grail 
 
 ories of art.* In defending the sonnet as 
 a form of expression, he ridicules those 
 who, regarding poetry as the " outgush- 
 ing of a present emotion, cannot conceive 
 how the poet, carried on by the ' divine 
 afflatus,' should always contrive to rein 
 in his Pegasus at a certain goal." Then 
 he adds, with rare discrimination and 
 common-sense : " A distinction must be 
 made between the moment when the great 
 thought first breaks upon the mind, 
 
 1 Leaving in the brain 
 A rocking and a ringing/ 
 
 and the hour of patient, elaborate execu- 
 tion. It is in the conception only that the 
 poet is vates: in the labor of putting that 
 conception into words, he is simply the 
 artist." 
 
 * See his " Theory of Poetry," published in 
 The Atlantic Monthly (September, 1905) as this 
 book goes to press. 
 
Henry Timrod 61 
 
 His own work gives fine illustration to 
 this union between passion and patience, 
 for he was both seer and artist. As a 
 characteristic specimen of his style, we 
 may take these verses addressed to a 
 cotton boll : 
 
 While I recline 
 
 At ease beneath 
 
 This immemorial pine, 
 
 Small sphere! 
 
 (By dusky fingers brought this morning here 
 
 And shown with boastful smiles), 
 
 I turn thy cloven sheath, 
 
 Through which the soft white fibres peer, 
 
 That, with their gossamer bands, 
 
 Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands, 
 
 And slowly, thread by thread, 
 
 Draw forth the folded strands, 
 
 Than which the trembling line, 
 
 By whose frail help yon startled spider fled 
 
 Down the tall spear-grass from his swinging bed 
 
 Is scarce more fine ; 
 
 And as the tangled skein 
 
 Unravels in my hands, 
 
 Betwixt me and the noonday light, 
 
62 The Holy Grail 
 
 A veil seems lifted, and for miles and miles 
 
 The landscape broadens on my sight, 
 
 As, in the little boll, there lurked a spell 
 
 Like that which, in the ocean shell, 
 
 With mystic sound, 
 
 Breaks down the narrow walls that hem us round, 
 
 And turns some city lane 
 
 Into the restless main, 
 
 With all his capes and isles ! 
 
 An elaborate metrical exposition of 
 Timrod's theories of art is found in his 
 " Vision of Poesy," the longest one of the 
 first collection of his poems, published by 
 Ticknor & Fields in i860. These pro- 
 ductions won deserved praise, the critic of 
 the New York Tribune finding in them 
 " a genuine poetic instinct," with a 
 " lively, delicate fancy, and a graceful 
 beauty of expression." 
 
 Timrod, more than any other man, is 
 the poet of the South — of " the generous 
 and lonely South." His voice is her 
 breath, her spirit gave him life, and in her 
 
Henry Timrod 63 
 
 defeat he fell. For when the flash of the 
 Charleston cannon set the South on fire, 
 Timrod was destined, like Sidney Lanier, 
 to be one of the eventual victims of that 
 fearful holocaust. From the first he 
 threw himself with all his fervid feeling 
 into the heated struggle. War verses, 
 sonorous with drum-beat and trumpet, 
 rolled from his pen, — yet beneath the blare 
 and thunder breathes always some sweet 
 earnest prayer for peace. His was a gen- 
 tle spirit. In '62 he went to the front as 
 correspondent for the Charleston Mer- 
 cury, but was actually made sick with the 
 sight of strife, and so " staggered home- 
 ward, half blinded, bewildered, with a 
 dull red mist before his eyes, and a shud- 
 dering horror at heart." Then, in the 
 thick of the whelming storm, he found for 
 one swift elusive hour the sweet shelter 
 of a comfortable home. Married in Co- 
 lumbia to his " Katie," heroine of one of 
 
64 The Holy Grail 
 
 the sweetest of his songs, he also found in 
 that city what seemed an escape from the 
 hungry wolf that had always followed at 
 his heels. Becoming editor and part 
 owner of a well-to-do Columbia paper, 
 and blessed soon with a beautiful child 
 whom he idolized, his gentle spirit was 
 thrilled with quiet happiness. How pure 
 and beautiful must have been the crowned 
 love of a man who could sing thus of 
 wooing : — 
 
 As thou talkest at the fireside, 
 
 With the little children by— 
 As thou prayest in the darkness, 
 
 When thy God is nigh — 
 
 With a speech as chaste and gentle, 
 
 And such meaning as become 
 Ear of child, or ear of angel, 
 
 Speak, or be thou dumb. 
 
 Woo her thus, and she shall give thee 
 Of her heart the sinless whole, 
 
Henry Timrod 65 
 
 All the girl within her bosom, 
 And her woman's soul.* 
 
 Alas ! his babe was not yet two months 
 old when the war-torch burnt his home, 
 destroying utterly all his little property; 
 leaving him beggared, only to be presently 
 bereaved by the death of his beautiful boy. 
 The poet's life henceforth became a tragic 
 wrestling with famine and disease, made 
 infinitely pathetic by the unmurmuring 
 sweetness with which he bore up to the 
 struggle. " Little Jack Horner," he 
 writes to Hayne, making sad sport of his 
 misery — " Little Jack Horner, who sang 
 for his supper, and got his plumcake, was 
 a far more lucky minstrel than I am." 
 Concerning this minstrelsy of his, which 
 was unspeakably dear to him, hunger 
 made him add : " I would consign every 
 line of it to eternal oblivion for one hun- 
 
 * " The Lily Confidante." 
 5 
 
66 The Holy Grail 
 
 dred dollars in hand!" Copying legal 
 papers for " a month's supply of bread 
 and bacon," he says : " On two occasions 
 I wrote from ten o'clock one morning 
 until sunrise of the next day." Yet this 
 man, while suffering so cruelly from the 
 effects of the war, could nevertheless in- 
 terpret the message of that terrible spring 
 of '65 in these brave and beautiful words : 
 " She hangs once more in our blasted 
 gardens the fragrant lamps of the jessa- 
 mine ; in the streets, she kindles the maple 
 like a beacon announcing peace ; and from 
 amidst the charred and blackened ruins of 
 once happy homes, she pours through the 
 mouth of her favorite musician, the 
 mocking-bird, a song of hope and joy. 
 What is the lesson which she designs by 
 these means to convey? It may be 
 summed in a single sentence — forgetful- 
 ness of the past, effort in the present, 
 and trust for the future!" When most 
 
Henry Timrod 67 
 
 men would have been grinding their 
 hearts to wormwood, he can, say to his 
 dear friend Hayne, " I am really learning, 
 Paul, to trust in God." 
 
 In the autumn of 1867, from a last de- 
 lightful visit to this brother soul of his, 
 the young poet returned to Columbia to 
 die. Hemorrhages befell him in the 
 streets. Forced at length to his bed, they 
 told him that his time had come. His 
 surprised answer was, " And is this to be 
 the end of all? So soon! so soon! and I 
 have achieved so little. Do you not think 
 I could will to live?" — adding, with a 
 smile, " I might make an effort, like Mrs. 
 Dombey, you know." His prayers were 
 unceasing. Frequently he would fold his 
 arms and repeat the lines, 
 
 Jesus, lover of my soul. 
 
 Tortured with thirst, which he was 
 physically unable to quench, he mur- 
 
68 The Holy Grail 
 
 mured : " I shall soon drink of the river 
 of eternal life." Of death he said, while 
 dying, " It appears like two tides — two 
 tides advancing and retreating, these 
 powers of life and death! Now the 
 power of death recedes; but wait, it will 
 advance again triumphant." To one who 
 whispered, " You will soon be at rest 
 now," he answered: "Yes; but love is 
 sweeter than rest." 
 
 " In a dim and musky chamber," while 
 the dawn was broadening on the lawn 
 without, they whispered, " He is gone." 
 Shortly before breathing his last, he said 
 to his sister, " Do you remember that lit- 
 tle poem of mine?" The verses whereof 
 he spoke, written long ago, proved now 
 to be his swan-song : * 
 
 Somewhere on this earthly planet 
 In the dust of flowers to be, 
 
 * " A Common Thought." 
 
Henry Timrod 69 
 
 In the dewdrop, in the sunshine, 
 Sleeps a solemn day for me. 
 
 In a dim and musky chamber, 
 I am breathing life away; 
 
 Some one draws a curtain softly, 
 And I watch the broadening day. 
 
 As it purples in the zenith, 
 As it brightens on the lawn, 
 
 There's a hush of death about me, 
 And a whisper, " He is gone !" 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 
 
SIDNEY LANIER 
 
 MINSTREL AND MAN 
 
 Ten years ago I undertook to collect 
 the various definitions set forth by mod- 
 ern masters as to what the Ars Poetica 
 really is. I soon paused, overwhelmed. 
 There was Poe, with his pagan contention 
 that it is merely " the rhythmical creation 
 of beauty." At the other extreme, there 
 was the transcendental Browning, who 
 calls it " a presentment of the correspond- 
 ence of the universe to the Deity, of the 
 natural to the spiritual, and of the actual 
 to the ideal." Between these two defini- 
 tions lies that vast ancient battlefield 
 where nominalist and realist, rationalist 
 and mystic, Aristotelian and Platonist, 
 wage their never-ceasing war. 
 
 73 
 
74 The Holy Grail 
 
 I shall go just far enough into this de- 
 batable ground to say that I believe the 
 simple essential elements of all great 
 poetry to be three: beauty and wisdom 
 and passion. Beauty is the child of the 
 emotions ; wisdom, like Minerva, is of the 
 mind; and passion — as I use the word — 
 possesses the entire being. 
 
 Poe proved that he believed in his own 
 definition of poetry by practising what he 
 preached. Whatever else may be thought 
 of that weird genius, it must certainly be 
 conceded that his verse was musical, that 
 he was in truth a creator of rhythmical 
 beauty. 
 
 Listen : 
 
 For the moon never beams without bringing me 
 dreams 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee ; 
 And the stars never rise but I feel the bright 
 eyes 
 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 
 
Sidney Lanier 75 
 
 And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 
 Of my darling — my darling — my life and my 
 bride, 
 In the sepulchre there by the sea, 
 In her tomb by the sounding sea. 
 
 That is an example of the capacity of 
 our English speech towards the produc- 
 tion of actual music; a fine example of 
 the " rhythmical creation of beauty." So 
 much must be conceded to the poetry of 
 Poe; that he is unsurpassed in the con- 
 sistency of his work witn his own par- 
 ticular theory. And I will venture to 
 say that no other American poet so nearly 
 approaches him in the power of produc- 
 ing pure musical effects as the noble 
 singer to whom we are listening now. Let 
 him sing for you some stanzas of his own 
 " Song of the Chattahoochee," and tell me 
 whether I am not right : 
 
 Out of the hills of Habersham, 
 Down the valleys of Hall, 
 
76 The Holy Grail 
 
 I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
 Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
 Split at the rock and together again, 
 Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
 And flee from folly on every side 
 With a lover's pain to attain the plain 
 Far from the hills of Habersham, 
 Far from the valleys of Hall. 
 
 High o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
 The hickory told me manifold 
 Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
 Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
 The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
 Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, 
 Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold 
 
 Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 These glades in the valleys of Hall. 
 
 But oh, not the hills of Habersham, 
 
 And oh, not the valleys of Hall 
 Avail : I am fain for to water the plain. 
 Downward the voices of Duty call — 
 Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 
 
Sidney Lanier 77 
 
 The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
 And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
 And the lordly main from beyond the plain 
 
 Calls o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Calls through the valleys of Hall. 
 
 Sidney Lanier has, indeed, been cen- 
 sured for the large amount of attention he 
 gave to the subject of the scientific con- 
 struction of melodious verse. Mr. Sted- 
 man, who is perhaps our ablest living lit- 
 erary critic here in America, says that he 
 had a theory which " led him to essay in 
 language feats that only the gamut can 
 render possible." I suppose that certain 
 of his verses would seem to lend color to 
 this criticism, which I have no intention of 
 endeavoring to refute. Lanier is very well 
 able to take care of his own theories, 
 as is shown by his masterly essays on 
 " Music and Poetry" and " The Science 
 of English Verse." No view of him can 
 be intelligently complete which does not 
 
78 The Holy Grail 
 
 take cognizance of the fact that music and 
 poetry were so bound together in his na- 
 ture as to form the wedded whole of his 
 inner spirit in an unbroken and indivisi- 
 ble unison ; music, in the phrase of Rich- 
 ard Wagner, being the mate of her liege 
 lord, poetry. So we find his most inti- 
 mate biographers declaring of Lanier that 
 from his youth he was equally dominated 
 by these two splendid geniuses, music 
 and poetry, which were really one to him ; 
 although we hear him actually exalting 
 the wife above her husband in that naive 
 letter to his friend Paul llayne : 
 
 " Are you, by the way, a musician ? 
 Strange that I have never before asked 
 this question — when so much of my own 
 life consists of music. I don't know that 
 I've ever told you that whatever turn I 
 have for art is purely musical; poetry 
 being, with me, a mere tangent into which 
 I shoot sometimes." 
 
Sidney Lanier 79 
 
 I cannot forbear to quote here the elo- 
 quent language of Asger Hamerik, for six 
 years his director in the Peabody Sym- 
 phony Orchestra of Baltimore: 
 
 " To him as a child in his cradle music 
 was given; the heavenly gift to feel and 
 to express himself in tones. His human 
 nature was like an enchanted instrument, 
 a magic flute, or the lyre of Apollo, need- 
 ing but a breath or a touch to send its 
 beauty out into the world. It was indeed 
 irresistible that he should turn with those 
 poetical feelings which transcend lan- 
 guage to the penetrating gentleness of the 
 flute, or the infinite passion of the violin ; 
 for there was an agreement, a spiritual 
 correspondence, between his nature and 
 theirs, so that they mutually absorbed 
 and expressed each other. In his hands 
 the flute no longer remained a mere ma- 
 terial instrument, but was transformed 
 into a voice that set heavenly harmonies 
 
80 The Holy Grail 
 
 into vibration. Its tones developed colors, 
 warmth, and a low sweetness of unspeak- 
 able poetry ; they were not only true and 
 pure, but poetic, allegoric as it were, sug- 
 gestive of the depths and heights of being 
 and of the delights which the earthly ear 
 never hears and the earthly eye never sees. 
 No doubt his firm faith in these lofty 
 idealities gave him the power to present 
 them to our imagination, and thus by the 
 aid of the higher language of music to 
 inspire others with that sense of beauty in 
 which he constantly dwelt. . . . 
 
 " I will never forget the impression he 
 made on me when he played the flute- 
 concerto of Emil Hartmann at a Peabody 
 symphony concert in 1878; his tall, hand- 
 some, manly presence, his flute breathing 
 noble sorrows, noble joys, the orchestra 
 softly responding. The audience was 
 spellbound. Such distinction, such refine- 
 ment! He stood, the master, the genius." 
 
Sidney Lanier 81 
 
 How could it be otherwise than that 
 this passionate lover of music, who in his 
 boyhood, after improvising on the violin, 
 " would be rapt into an ecstasy which left 
 his whole frame trembling with the ex- 
 haustion of too tense delight;" who as 
 a man both won his bread and found his 
 pleasure with his flute — how could it be 
 otherwise than that his noble poetry 
 should inevitably rock and swing to the 
 measure of melodious beauty ? I dare re- 
 peat that for pure artistic beauty of form 
 no American poet can surpass Lanier ex- 
 cept it be the brilliant but erratic Poe. 
 
 " Brilliant but erratic" — alas ! how true 
 
 the terms ! Beauty is an essential of true 
 
 poetry, but it is not the only essential. 
 
 John Burroughs has been the last to say 
 
 what others have discerned of Poe, that 
 
 in his work " one's sense of artistic forms 
 
 and verbal melody are alone appealed to." 
 
 And Lanier himself, who was a trenchant 
 6 
 
82 The Holy Grail 
 
 critic, cuts to the heart of the matter 
 when he says : " The trouble with Poe 
 was he did not know enough. He needed 
 to know a good many more things in 
 order to be a great poet." 
 
 Which brings me to say, as I promised, 
 that the second essential element of great 
 poetry is wisdom. 
 
 I know that the word is used in two 
 kinds ; and in both kinds do I use it now, 
 as denoting not only mental acquisition, 
 but also that higher power, largely moral, 
 which is the veritable wisdom of the clear- 
 eyed prophet. The great poet must have, 
 in the first place, a large store of sound 
 and scientific knowledge. " For all 
 knowledge is food, as faith is wine, to a 
 genius like Lanier." The age of poetry 
 is never past ; there is nothing in culture 
 or science hostile to it. No one can 
 read Shakespeare without overwhelming 
 amazement for his sheer learning. That 
 
Sidney Lanier 83 
 
 lies really at the base of the Baconian 
 craze, as Brandes has thoroughly shown. 
 Unimaginative men who found it incredi- 
 ble that a mere poacher and playwright — 
 as they felicitously call him — should be a 
 veritable encyclopaedia of scientific infor- 
 mation, have had perforce to find an alias 
 for Shakespeare, and the only contempo- 
 rary who suited their necessities was Fran- 
 cis Bacon. Hence that lumbersome lo- 
 gomachy of Ignatius Donnelly and his 
 compeers. But this same amazing fulness 
 of learning characterizes in less degree, I 
 claim, all of the major poets. How we 
 marvel that John Keats, a mere apothe- 
 cary's clerk, as the Baconians would say, 
 should be saturated to his finger-tips 
 with the spirit of classic mythology, and 
 drenched from head to heel in the inner- 
 most secrets of nature. As for Milton, he 
 was the most learned man of his time. 
 Browning must be read with an encyclo- 
 
84 The Holy Grail 
 
 psedia for more reasons than to solve his 
 obscurities. And surely readers of Ten- 
 nyson do not need to be reminded of such 
 touches as meet us, for example, in a 
 phrase like that descriptive of the yew 
 tree answering a random stroke 
 
 . . . with fruitful cloud and living smoke ; 
 
 or of such illustrative touches as when the 
 poet asks : 
 
 Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, 
 
 Delaying as the tender ash delays 
 
 To clothe herself when all the woods are green? 
 
 So also of Lanier it has been truly said 
 that he was a close scientific observer, 
 and " a tremendous student, not of music 
 alone, but of language, of philosophy, and 
 of science. He loved science. He was an 
 inventor. . . . But that only made his 
 range of poetic thought wider as his out- 
 look became larger. The world is open- 
 ing to the poet with every question the 
 
Sidney Lanier 85 
 
 crucible asks of the elements, with every 
 spectrum the prism steals from a star. 
 The old he has and all the new." 
 
 I do not care to dwell longer on this 
 phase of our subject. Perhaps a dainty 
 little sonnet of which I am very fond may 
 serve to denote somehow that taste and 
 gift for knowledge which characterizes 
 all of Lanier's verse. It will the better 
 appeal to Southern ears because it is in- 
 dited to " The Mocking Bird:" 
 
 Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray 
 
 That o'er the general leafage boldly grew, 
 
 He summ'd the woods in song ; or typic drew 
 
 The watch of hungry hawks, the lone dismay 
 
 Of languid doves when long their lovers stray, 
 
 And all birds' passion-plays that sprinkle dew 
 
 At morn in brake or bosky avenue. 
 
 Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could 
 
 say. 
 Then down he shot, bounced airily along 
 The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song 
 Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. 
 Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain: 
 
86 The Holy Grail 
 
 How may the death of that dull insect be 
 The life of yon trim Shakspere on the tree? 
 
 I wonder whether that last bold stroke 
 of Lanier's inspired another Southern 
 poet, Henry Jerome Stockard, to carry 
 out the Shakespeare thought in an exqui- 
 site quatrain " To a Mocking Bird :" 
 
 The name thou wearest does thee grievous 
 wrong ; 
 
 No mimic thou; that voice is thine alone. 
 The poets sing but strains of Shakespeare's song ; 
 
 The birds, but notes of thine imperial own. 
 
 And now let me hasten to say that Sid- 
 ney Lanier had a far larger wisdom than 
 the wisdom of mere knowledge. He was 
 a clear-eyed seer of the truth. It was in 
 his nature to touch the soul of things, and 
 then touch hearts. Carlyle was right; a 
 poet's truest mission, like that of the mu- 
 sician, is to lead us to the edge of the In- 
 finite, and let us for moments gaze into 
 that. Herein is wisdom : to penetrate into 
 
Sidney Lanier 87 
 
 the inmost heart of a thing, to detect the 
 innermost mystery of it, and then reveal 
 it to the world in " thoughts that breathe 
 and words that burn." That is to be a 
 poet-prophet; and a poet-prophet was 
 Lanier. 
 
 I seldom cross Charleston Bay when 
 the green is on the marshes but I think of 
 Sidney Lanier and his noble sunset hymn 
 to " The Marshes of Glynn" down in 
 Georgia : 
 
 . . . how ample, the marsh and the sea and the 
 sky! 
 
 A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist- 
 high, broad in the blade, 
 
 Green, and all of a height, and unflecked with a 
 light or a shade, 
 
 Stretch leisurely off, in a pleasant plain, 
 
 To the terminal blue of the main. 
 
 Oh, what is abroad in the marsh and the terminal 
 sea? 
 Somehow my soul seems suddenly free 
 
88 The Holy Grail 
 
 From the weighing of fate and the sad discussion 
 
 of sin, 
 By the length and the breadth and the sweep of 
 
 the marshes of Glynn. 
 
 # * * 
 
 As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery 
 
 sod, 
 Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness 
 
 of God: 
 I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh - 
 
 hen flies 
 In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt 
 
 the marsh and the skies : 
 By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in 
 
 the sod 
 I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of 
 
 God: 
 Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness 
 
 within 
 The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of 
 
 Glynn. 
 
 * * * 
 
 And now from the Vast of the Lord will the 
 
 waters of sleep 
 Roll in on the souls of men, 
 But who will reveal to our waking ken 
 
Sidney Lanier 89 
 
 The forms that swim and the shapes that creep 
 
 Under the waters of sleep? 
 And I would I could know what swimmeth below 
 
 when the tide comes in 
 On the length and the breadth of the marvellous 
 
 marshes of Glynn. 
 
 A deep sort of wisdom is this, which 
 can win truth from the treacherous 
 marsh, and make of the humble marsh- 
 hen a messenger of God. Small wonder 
 that a brother poet salutes the spirit of 
 Lanier with the rapturous cry : 
 
 The marsh burst into bloom for thee — 
 And still abloom shall ever be ! 
 Its sluggish tide shall henceforth bear alway 
 A charm it did not hold until thy day* 
 
 Beauty he had and wisdom he had, and 
 finally he had passion — that splendid thrill 
 of quivering life that breathes through 
 words until they glow like coals that once 
 were dead. A man can be a poet without 
 
 * Waitman Barbe. 
 
90 The Holy Grail 
 
 passion — there was Pope; and his verses 
 may pass into proverbs, but they will 
 hardly take hold on hearts. Some one 
 quizzed me the other day because I had 
 likened Lanier to Keats. Very well. But 
 what I mean to say again is that amid 
 our glorious company of English poets 
 I see two splendid quivering creatures, 
 who, in complete attune, stand together 
 tingling and aglow with life, life, life. 
 They are slender, tense, delicate, if you 
 will ; but it is the tenseness and the slen- 
 derness and the delicacy of the quivering 
 thoroughbred. They are such figures as 
 I imagine Apollo to have been. And per- 
 haps it may not show any very great rug- 
 gedness of taste, but I make the personal 
 confession that while I go to Tennyson 
 for noble music and to Browning for the 
 stuff of which character is builded, and to 
 Shakespeare for occasional glimpses of 
 the Infinite ; yet when I am tired, and the 
 
Sidney Lanier 91 
 
 tide of life runs low, there stand upon my 
 shelves two slender volumes, Lanier and 
 Keats, which seem to me like slender 
 streams of refreshment from the inner- 
 most passionate heart of life. Even when 
 the blood is most sluggish it cannot refuse 
 the stir of that awful " Revenge of Ha- 
 mish." If there is a more vibrant, domi- 
 nant poem of passion in all American lit- 
 erature I would like to know where to 
 find it. You know the story. The poem 
 is too long for me to quote in full. Mac- 
 lean had gone a-hunting for deer, all am- 
 bitious to slay in the sight of his wife and 
 his child. His henchman, Hamish, had 
 been roused breakfastless from bed to set 
 the quarry towards the stand where the 
 grim master, with his wife and child, 
 was waiting. But the fleet deer escaped 
 the hungry henchman. And Maclean, all 
 red with wrath, had his men strip Hamish 
 to the waist and ply him with thongs — 
 
92 The Holy Grail 
 
 and " reckon no stroke if the blood follow 
 not at the bite of the thong!" 
 
 So Hamish made bare, and took him his strokes ; 
 at the last he smiled. 
 
 We can imagine the bitterness of that 
 smile. For, left now alone with the wife 
 and child, while the men go back to the 
 hunt, suddenly " he snatches the child 
 from the mother, and clambers the crag 
 towards the sea." The mother screams 
 shrill and pursues him. Maclean and his 
 clansmen hear, and strive and strain to 
 outrun him. 
 
 But, mother, 'tis vain; but, father, 'tis vain; 
 Stern Hamish stands bold on the brink, and 
 dangles the child o'er the deep. 
 
 Now a faintness falls on the men that run, and 
 they all stand still. 
 And the wife prays Hamish as if he were God, 
 on her knees, 
 
Sidney Lanier 93 
 
 Crying : " Hamish ! O Hamish ! but please, 
 but please 
 For to spare him !" and Hamish still dangles the 
 child, with a wavering will. 
 
 On a sudden he turns ; with a sea-hawk scream, 
 and a gibe, and a song, 
 Cries : " So ; I will spare ye the child if, in 
 
 sight of ye all, 
 Ten blows on Maclean's bare back shall fall, 
 And ye reckon no stroke if the blood follow not 
 at the bite of the thong !" 
 
 Then Maclean he set hardly his tooth to his lip 
 that his tooth was red, 
 Breathed short for a space, said: "Nay, but 
 
 it never shall be! 
 Let me hurl off the damnable hound in the 
 sea!" 
 But the wife : " Can Hamish go fish us the child 
 from the sea, if dead? 
 
 Say yea ! Let them lash me, Hamish?"—" Nay !" 
 — " Husband, the lashing will heal ; 
 
 But, oh, who will heal me the bonny sweet 
 bairn in his grave? 
 
 Could ye cure me my heart with the death of 
 a knave? 
 
94 The Holy Grail 
 
 Quick! Love! I will bare thee — so — kneel!" 
 
 Then Maclean 'gan slowly to kneel 
 With never a word, till presently downward he 
 
 jerked to the earth. 
 Then the henchman — he that smote Hamish — 
 
 would tremble and lag; 
 " Strike, hard !" quoth Hamish, full stern, from 
 
 the crag; 
 Then he struck him, and " One !" sang Hamish, 
 
 and danced with the child in his mirth. 
 
 And no man spake beside Hamish; he counted 
 each stroke with a song, 
 When the last stroke fell, then he moved him 
 
 a pace down the height, 
 And he held forth the child in the heartaching 
 sight 
 Of the mother, and looked all pitiful grave, as 
 repenting a wrong. 
 
 And there as the motherly arms stretched out 
 with the thanksgiving prayer — 
 And there as the mother crept up with a fear- 
 ful swift pace, 
 Till her finger nigh felt of the bairnie's face — 
 In a flash, fierce Hamish turned round and lifted 
 the child in the air. 
 
Sidney Lanier 95 
 
 And sprang with the child in his arms from the 
 horrible height in the sea, 
 Shrill screeching, " Revenge !" in the wind- 
 rush ; and pallid Maclean, 
 Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain, 
 Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked 
 hold of dead roots of a tree — 
 
 And gazed hungrily o'er, and the blood from his 
 back drip-dripped in the brine, 
 And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as 
 
 he flew, 
 And the mother stared white on the waste of 
 blue, 
 And the wind drove a cloud to seaward, and the 
 sun began to shine. 
 
 That is passion in its crudest and most 
 biting tincture. It serves as a crude im- 
 pressive instance of the tingling and 
 throbbing vitality that transforms all of 
 Lanier's poetry, no matter what his 
 theme. What his distinctive passion was 
 will, I think, now presently appear. For 
 I intend now to speak of Lanier the man. 
 
96 The Holy Grail 
 
 His life was gentle ; and the elements 
 
 So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 
 
 And say to all the world, this was a man! 
 
 It is to the everlasting glory of the 
 South that this man was a Southerner. 
 To me he seems typical of the highest and 
 finest that can come out of " the generous 
 and lonely South" that we love so well. 
 He was born in Macon on the 3d of Feb- 
 ruary, 1842, of a good old Huguenot 
 stock. From childhood he showed pas- 
 sionate attachment to music; but he had 
 a deeper passion than music. Before he 
 was eighteen years old he recorded in his 
 college note-book the index to this con- 
 trolling passion of his life : 
 
 " The point which I wish to settle is 
 merely, by what method shall I ascertain 
 what I am fit for, as preliminary to ascer- 
 taining God's will with reference to me. 
 ... I am more than all perplexed by this 
 fact, that the prime inclination, that is, 
 
Sidney Lanier 97 
 
 natural bent (which I have checked, 
 though) of my nature is to music; and 
 for that I have the greatest talent . . . 
 But I cannot bring myself to believe that 
 I was intended for a musician, because it 
 seems so small a business in comparison 
 with other things which, it seems to me, 
 I might do. Question here, What is the 
 province of music in the economy of the 
 world?" 
 
 From such insistent questionings he 
 was suddenly summoned by the shrill 
 bugle of war. For he was no less a sol- 
 dier than a dreamer; in him the qualities 
 of tenderness and strength were most 
 harmoniously blended. As a child he had 
 won distinction for the soldierly fashion 
 in which he drilled a body of schoolboys 
 in the tactics of the militia, so that the 
 juvenile battalion was actually accorded a 
 place in the State parades of their elders. 
 Therefore his ear was quick to catch the 
 7 
 
98 The Holy Grail 
 
 very first notes of the bugle, and he en- 
 listed in April, 1861, in the First Regi- 
 ment of Georgia Volunteers. During the 
 course of his four years' faithful service 
 he three times refused promotion, because 
 he would have been separated from his 
 younger brother, whom he dearly loved. 
 Towards the close of the war he was cap- 
 tured while in charge of a vessel attempt- 
 ing to run the blockade; and the five 
 months of confinement in the prison at 
 Point Lookout sealed him for the grave. 
 True, for fifteen long years thereafter he 
 battled bravely against his terrible dis- 
 ease; but from this fatal period of his im- 
 prisonment the issue was never once in 
 doubt. Thus, having sacrificed his health 
 and strength upon his country's altar, 
 when the terrible war at length was over, 
 he took up his own sad desperate warfare, 
 which he waged with the unfaltering 
 courage of a Saladin until at last, in 1881, 
 
Sidney Lanier 99 
 
 he was compelled to show the final flag of 
 truce, yielding up " the white flower of a 
 blameless life" into the hands of that grim 
 warrior who always conquers in the end. 
 From the time of his settlement in Balti- 
 more in 1874 his was " a story of as brave 
 and sad a struggle as the history of genius 
 records. On the one hand was the oppor- 
 tunity for study, and the full conscious- 
 ness of power, and a will never subdued ; 
 and on the other a body wasting with 
 consumption, that must be forced to task 
 beyond its strength not merely to express 
 the thoughts of beauty which strove for 
 utterance, but from the necessity of pro- 
 viding bread for his babes." Yet he could 
 even dare to jest about it — about the 
 awful doom which he foresaw steadily 
 from the first, but which he never allowed 
 to unnerve him. He could dare to write 
 pleasantries concerning " a certain Miss 
 
100 The Holy Grail 
 
 Death," " her coquetries," and her " fan 
 of a raven's wing." 
 
 His life in Baltimore, despite this piti- 
 ful struggle, was very sweet to Lanier. 
 Here his musical soul could revel for the 
 first time amid the opulent creations of 
 the masters. " His attitude in listening. 
 was usually a bent, reverent posture, with 
 folded arms and closed eyes — a study of 
 profound meditation and absorption." 
 Yet music was with him still, as it had 
 been in his youth, but a means to a higher 
 end. Listen to this sonnet to Beethoven : 
 
 Sovereign Master ! stern and splendid power, 
 
 That calmly dost both time and death defy; 
 Lofty and lone as mountain peaks that tower, 
 
 Leading our thoughts up to the eternal sky; 
 Keeper of some divine, mysterious key, 
 
 Raising us far above all human care, 
 Unlocking awful gates of harmony 
 
 To let Heaven's light in on the world's de- 
 spair ; 
 
Sidney Lanier 101 
 
 Smiter of solemn chords that still command 
 Echoes in souls that suffer and aspire ! 
 
 In the great moment while we hold thy hand, 
 Baptized with pain and rapture, tears and fire, 
 
 God lifts our saddened foreheads from the dust — 
 The everlasting God in whom we trust. 
 
 It was during this Baltimore period 
 that his noblest friendships ripened — save 
 only that his devoted wife was always his 
 closest friend. Those who would under- 
 stand his passion for friendship and gain 
 also an insight into the noble character- 
 istics of such of his friends as Bayard 
 Taylor and Paul H. Hayne will be fairly 
 charmed by the carefully edited collection 
 of " The Letters of Sidney Lanier." And 
 yet, while friendship was with him a pas- 
 sion, it was only an outer aspect of some- 
 thing deeper and more beauteous still. 
 
 With Sidney Lanier, as we have seen, 
 beauty itself was a passion; but beauty 
 was not his elemental and controlling pas- 
 sion. It derived its chief charm from the 
 
102 The Holy Grail 
 
 fact that it was to him a synonym for 
 something more beautiful than beauty. 
 Wisdom was with him a passion, but not 
 as an end in itself, rather only as a means 
 toward the quest of his Holy Grail. The 
 consuming passion of his life, from the 
 heyday of youth's " high emprise" to 
 that frosty autumn morning when his un- 
 faltering will rendered " its supreme sub- 
 mission to the adored will of God" — was 
 his passion for holiness, burning within 
 him in a flame of the whitest lambent heat 
 and enwrapping him with a saintly au- 
 reole of 
 
 And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 
 And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
 . . . high thought, and amiable words 
 
 It may be said of him, as Liszt said of 
 Chopin, that " his character in none of its 
 numerous folds concealed a single move- 
 ment, a single pulse, which was not dic- 
 tated by the nicest sense of honor, the 
 
Sidney Lanier 103 
 
 most delicate appreciation of affection." 
 He seems to me to have been a far holier 
 man than Chopin, to whom he has at 
 times been likened. Over and over again 
 he was fond of uttering as the key-note 
 of his creed of life, whether aesthetic or 
 ethical, " Beauty is holiness, and holiness 
 is beauty;" somewhat as Keats had said: 
 
 " Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know ! 
 
 But with Lanier holiness was an in- 
 tensely practical thing, the key to his ca- 
 reer and to his character, the one domi- 
 nant passion of his life. It is perhaps the 
 key even to his apparent defects, which, 
 when they are examined closely, prove to 
 be virtues. If, for example, Lanier's po- 
 etry had a " limited range," as I have 
 heard good people declare, it is because 
 he had learned to say : 
 
 I dare do all that may become a man ; 
 Who dares do more is none. 
 
104 The Holy Grail 
 
 Listen to these words from his closing 
 chapter on " The English Novel" — words 
 to which our living novelists might well 
 give heed: 
 
 " Wherever there is contest as between 
 artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral 
 side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor 
 hew us out the most ravishing combina- 
 tion of tender curves and spheric softness 
 that ever stood for woman ; yet if the lip 
 have a certain fulness that hints of the 
 flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the 
 minutest particular the physical beauty 
 suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor — 
 unless he be portraying a moral ugliness 
 for a moral purpose — may as well give 
 over his marble for paving-stones. Time, 
 whose judgments are inexorably moral, 
 will not accept his work. For indeed we 
 may say that he who has not yet per- 
 ceived how artistic beauty and moral 
 beauty are convergent lines which run 
 
Sidney Lanier 105 
 
 back into a common ideal origin and who, 
 therefore, is not afire with moral beauty, 
 just as with artistic beauty — that he, in 
 short, who has not come to that stage of 
 quiet and eternal frenzy in which the 
 beauty of holiness and the holiness of 
 beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, 
 shine as one light, within him — he is not 
 yet the great artist." 
 
 He did not believe, with Flaubert, in 
 " art for art's sake." He believed, with 
 Ruskin, that " the arts can never be right 
 themselves unless their motive is right." 
 So, while the crude native strength of 
 Whitman, for example, " refreshed him 
 like harsh salt spray," yet Whitman's 
 lawlessness so repelled him that he called 
 him " poetry's butcher." 
 
 — "As near as I can make it out, Whit- 
 man's argument seems to be that, because 
 a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is 
 
106 The Holy Grail 
 
 admirable, and because the Mississippi is 
 long, therefore every American is God." 
 
 With Sidney Lanier, let us repeat 
 again, as he so often loved to do, beauty 
 was holiness and holiness was beauty. It 
 is his chief distinction among English 
 poets that, while you cannot call him 
 specifically a religious poet, he, more 
 passionately than any of his illustrious 
 peers, loves to dwell exclusively upon the 
 things that are pure and lovely and of 
 good report. His beauty is the beauty of 
 holiness and his wisdom has for its end 
 the finding of the Infinite wisdom. He is 
 a true knight of the Grail. 
 
 I have said that he cannot be called 
 specifically a religious poet. He wrote 
 only two poems that are distinctively of 
 this character, and both of them are no- 
 table also for other qualities in an almost 
 equal measure. The longer of the two, 
 called " The Crystal," is the most remark- 
 
Sidney Lanier 107 
 
 able piece of condensed epigrammatic 
 criticism that English literature affords. 
 The other of these two poems is very 
 brief, but it is wondrously beautiful, even 
 as it is wondrously sad. He calls it " A 
 Ballad of Trees and the Master." 
 
 Into the woods my Master went, 
 
 Clean forspent, forspent. 
 
 Into the woods my Master came, 
 
 Forspent with love and shame. 
 
 But the olives, they were not blind to Him, 
 
 The little gray leaves were kind to Him; 
 
 The thorn-tree had a mind to Him 
 
 When into the woods He came. 
 
 Out of the woods my Master went, 
 
 And He was well content. 
 
 Out of the woods my Master came, 
 
 Content with death and shame. 
 
 When Death and Shame would woo Him last, 
 
 From under the trees they drew Him last; 
 
 'Twas on a tree they slew Him — last 
 
 When out of the woods He came. 
 
108 The Holy Grail 
 
 The enthusiastic editor whose rare 
 good fortune it was to " discover" this 
 poem, has truthfully said: 
 
 " These two short verses are exquisite 
 beyond description. They are deep and 
 rich as the love of God ; they are tender 
 as the hushed harps of the angels that 
 watched over Gethsemane, but forbore to 
 help. The lines vary from five syllables to 
 ten, with an irregularity which is masterly 
 perfection. I should not have believed 
 it possible to put into a poem, which can- 
 not be surpassed for tenderness and so- 
 lemnity, those extraordinary three-syllable 
 rhymes, ' blind to Him/ ' kind to Him,' 
 ' mind to Him' and ' woo Him last,' 
 ' drew Him last,' ' slew Him last ;' for 
 such rhymes were usually supposed to be- 
 long to burlesque, but here they jar no 
 sensitive nerve. They seem to draw out 
 and prolong the sweet pain of the thought 
 like the 'hold' which tells the singer to 
 
Sidney Lanier 109 
 
 linger on a tender note. The reader will 
 not wonder that I repeated them over 
 hundreds of times. Never since but once 
 have I been so touched by a short poem, 
 and that was another red-letter day when 
 I first read Tennyson's ' Crossing the 
 Bar.' " 
 
 I find myself embarrassed by the abun- 
 dant richness of my material. I should 
 especially like to show you, from the 
 noble poem called " Clover," how bravely 
 this gentle suffering poet submitted to 
 the great browsing " Course-of-Things," 
 actually with pseans of humble thanksgiv- 
 ing for the privilege of self-sacrifice! I 
 should also like to enjoy with you his 
 brave parable of the "Corn;" or his 
 splendid " Sunrise" hymn of the live-oaks 
 and the marshes, whereof the critic al- 
 ready quoted has declared that " no other 
 American poet has reached the height of 
 this one work, that no poem of its length 
 
110 The Holy Grail 
 
 by Bryant or Poe or Longfellow or 
 Lowell can compare with it for creative 
 poetic fervor or absolute mastery of the 
 secrets of poetic structure." * But I am 
 admonished that this address must have 
 an end, and, therefore, I choose, since 
 choose I must, one final simple song, for 
 the reason that it voices so perfectly the 
 aim of Sidney Lanier's existence. He 
 calls it, significantly, " Life and Song:" 
 
 If life were caught by a clarionet, 
 And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed, 
 
 Should thrill its joy and trill its fret, 
 And utter its heart in every deed, 
 
 Then would this breathing clarionet 
 Type what the poet fain would be; 
 
 For none o' the singers ever yet 
 Has wholly lived his minstrelsy, 
 
 Or clearly sung his true, true thought, 
 Or utterly bodied forth his life, 
 
 * William Hayes Ward. 
 
Sidney Lanier 111 
 
 Or out of life and song has wrought 
 The perfect one of man and wife; 
 
 Or lived and sung, that Life and Song 
 Might each express the other's all, 
 
 Careless if life or art were long 
 Since both were one, to stand or fall ; 
 
 So that the wonder struck the crowd, 
 Who shouted it about the land : 
 
 His song was only living aloud, 
 His work, a singing with his hand! 
 
 I do not know that the wonder of Sid- 
 ney Lanier's musical life has as yet 
 " struck the crowd," or will ever do so, 
 for crowds are hardly susceptible to any 
 such music as that. But it seems to me 
 that this modest knight of God, a-sighing 
 for what seemed to him to be the unat- 
 tainable, had in reality already attained 
 and is in reality already made perfect, in 
 that we who have caught even a few faint 
 sweet echoes from his passionate, throb- 
 bing flute are more than ready to say for 
 
112 The Holy Grail 
 
 him with absolute certitude that tribute 
 for which he hungered and which would 
 be any poet's most glorious epitaph : 
 
 He wholly lived his minstrelsy; 
 His song was only living aloud, 
 His work, a singing with his hand. 
 
THE CRUSADERS 
 
THE CRUSADERS 
 
 A STUDY OF THE TRANSFORMED CROSS 
 
 With the twelfth century, while the 
 dawn from the Dark Ages was as yet un- 
 broken, appeared that romantic and spir- 
 ited movement of history known as the 
 Crusades. Europe had been sleeping; 
 not the sleep of sweet rest and pleasant 
 dreams, but the distressed horrid slum- 
 ber of nightmare. During the ninth and 
 tenth centuries there had been no less 
 than fifty incursions of the Northmen 
 throughout France, which they swept as 
 with a besom of destruction; while 
 countless whirlwinds of the Huns devas- 
 tated the whole of Europe, until the fields 
 were actually left untilled, becoming, as 
 in primeval times, the dwelling-place of 
 
 115 
 
116 The Holy Grail 
 
 numberless wild beasts, which herded in 
 human homesteads, unafraid, and, in 
 turn, less dreaded than these human 
 beasts of Huns. They were wandering 
 shepherd tribes, natives of the north of 
 Asia, and inhabiting the vast plains be- 
 tween Russia and China. " They had no 
 houses. They lived in tents, in which 
 they also stabled their horses. From 
 being constantly on horseback their legs 
 were crooked. They were short men, 
 broad-shouldered, with strong muscular 
 arms; had coarse, thick lips, straight, 
 black, wiry hair, little, round, sloe-like 
 eyes, yellow complexions, and sausage 
 noses. They were filthy in their habits. 
 Their horrible ugliness, their disgusting 
 smell, their ferocity, the speed with which 
 they moved, their insensibility to the gen- 
 tler feelings, made the Goths, with whom 
 they first came in contact, believe they 
 were half demons. They ate, drank, and 
 
The Crusaders 117 
 
 slept on horseback. Their no less hideous 
 wives and children followed diem in wag- 
 ons. They ate roots and raw meat. They 
 seemed insensible to hunger, thirst, and 
 cold." To complete the repulsiveness of 
 this interesting picture from the pages of 
 Baring-Gould, we need only to add that 
 the weapons with which these frightful 
 folk fought were the sword, the spear, the 
 battle-axe, and, chiefly, the terrible Tar- 
 tar bows. They seemed created and 
 equipped of the arch-fiend himself. 
 
 With the coming of barbarians into 
 the land, there was a revival of barbarism 
 among the people. " One feels almost, 
 in reading the foul and frightful annals, 
 as if the ancient Pagan temper, driven 
 into the air or trodden into the soil before 
 the armies of the empire, had settled back 
 densely and heavily upon Europe, and 
 was infecting and poisoning the very 
 
118 The Holy Grail 
 
 springs of spiritual life." * This was true, 
 not only of the people, but also of their 
 princes, and even of the popes. It is no 
 figure of speech to say that the " vicars 
 of Christ" became the devotees of Satan. 
 Not only were satanic rites actually prac- 
 tised at the Vatican, but the spirit of evil 
 reigned there, the pontifical palace at one 
 time becoming little else than " a vast 
 school of prostitution." These are not 
 the slander of Protestantism. Why, in- 
 deed, should not we feel as deeply as the 
 Roman Catholics the shame of those 
 awful days, seeing that the Church of 
 Rome is in a sense the mother of us all? 
 The French Catholic, Mabillon, out of 
 many that might be cited, confesses that 
 most of the popes of the tenth century 
 " lived rather like monsters, or like wild 
 beasts, than like bishops." Let us hear 
 
 * Storrs, " Bernard of Clairvaux." 
 
The Crusaders 119 
 
 also from Cardinal Newman on this sub- 
 ject. In his " Essays, Critical and His- 
 torical" he declares that " no exaggera- 
 tion is possible of the demoralized state 
 into which the Christian world, and espe- 
 cially the Church of Rome, had fallen in 
 the years that followed the extinction of 
 the Carlovingian line (a.d. 887). . . . 
 At the close of the ninth century Hope 
 Stephen VI. dragged the body of an ob- 
 noxious predecessor from the grave, and, 
 after subjecting it to a mock trial, cut off 
 its head and threw it into the Tiber. He 
 himself was subsequently deposed, and 
 strangled in prison. In the years that fol- 
 lowed, the power of electing to the pope- 
 dom actually fell into the hands of 
 intriguing and licentious Theodora and 
 her equally unprincipled daughters. . . . 
 Boniface VII. (a.d. 974), in the space of 
 a few weeks after his elevation, plundered 
 the treasury and basilica of St. Peter 
 
120 The Holy Grail 
 
 of all he could conveniently carry off 
 and fled to Constantinople. . . . Benedict 
 IX. (a.d. 1033) was consecrated pope, 
 according to some authorities, at the age 
 of ten or twelve years, and became no- 
 torious for adulteries and murders. At 
 length he resolved on marrying his first 
 cousin ; and when her father would not 
 consent except on the condition of his re- 
 signing the popedom, he sold it for a 
 large sum, and consecrated the purchaser 
 as his successor. Such are a few of the 
 most prominent features of the ecclesias- 
 tical history of those dreadful times, 
 when in the words of St. Bruno, ' the 
 world lay in wickedness, holiness had dis- 
 appeared, justice had perished, and truth 
 had been buried.' " It was a Pagan revi- 
 val of indefinitely greater strength and 
 evil than that of Julian the Apostate ; for 
 then paganism had been without the 
 Church, but now the Church itself was 
 
The Crusaders 121 
 
 paganized. Tiberius and Caligula, those 
 monsters of heathendom, were now out- 
 done by the " holy fathers" of Christen- 
 dom, who vied with one another in the 
 practice of the vilest vices, the rule of the 
 Christian Church being actually called, 
 and truthfully called, a " pornocracy." 
 
 The distress of the people was most 
 profound. As though the natural terrors 
 were not sufficiently acute, they fell into 
 abnormal fear of the supernatural. It 
 was believed that the end of the world 
 was nigh. Fearful portents were seen in 
 sky and sea. Every night men laid weary 
 heads upon their pillows, in dread expec- 
 tation of the midnight trump of doom. 
 Each morning the sun blanched their 
 faces with the promise of a burning 
 world. Nerveless, they forsook accus- 
 tomed tasks, awaiting in idle cowardice 
 the final hour. Famine fell upon the land. 
 Greece, Italy, France, and England were 
 
122 The Holy Grail 
 
 involved in it. The people actually fell 
 into the horrors of cannibalism. " Men 
 ate earth, weeds, roots, the bark of trees, 
 vermin, dead bodies." Mothers devoured 
 their children, and children their mothers, 
 in the frenzy of hunger. Men were mur- 
 dered to be eaten, and human flesh was 
 almost openly sold in the markets. Storrs 
 says : " The multitude of the dead was 
 so great that they could not be buried, 
 and wolves flocked to feast on their bod- 
 ies. Great numbers were tumbled promis- 
 cuously into vast trenches. A state of 
 fierce cannibal savagery appeared likely 
 to mark the end of a fallen and ruined 
 race, for which the Lord had died in vain. 
 It was not wonderful that men following 
 their dead relations to the grave some- 
 times cast themselves into it, to end at 
 once their intolerable life." The Roman 
 Catholic historian, Michelet, has dramat- 
 ically pointed out that " the very statues 
 
The Crusaders 123 
 
 of the period are sad and pinched, as if 
 the dreadful apprehension of the age had 
 sunk into the softened stone." It was the 
 age of the power of darkness. The whole 
 world lay in wickedness, and the Church 
 of Christ was asleep. 
 
 Then, in that darkest, stillest hour 
 which is just before the dawn, a silver 
 bugle rang clear and shrill, like the call 
 of the chanticleer. It was God's breath 
 that filled it; and it thrilled with the 
 music of Christ's name. From sea to sea, 
 from land to land it sounded. Men 
 rubbed their eyes; leaped to their feet in 
 the darkness ; buckled on their scabbards ; 
 flashed blades high in the unresponsive 
 air ; shouted to the chill gray dawn, " It 
 is the will of God !" and rushed, six hun- 
 dred thousand strong, towards the holy 
 city of Jerusalem, " to break the heathen 
 and uphold the Christ." Seven times the 
 silver bugle sounded. Seven times it 
 
124 The Holy Grail 
 
 roused new sleepers to the hurry of im- 
 petuous warfare; seven times the sons 
 of reawakening- Europe flung themselves 
 across the seas against the sullen Sara- 
 cens, who stood like a dark wall between 
 them and the holy home of their Lord the 
 Christ — only to be cast back on the sod- 
 den shores, clotted with the blood of de- 
 feat, or else pale corpses. Even children, 
 a score of thousand children, mere tender 
 babes, piped with their treble voices, " It 
 is the will of God !" and sought to redeem, 
 with swords in their dimpled hands, the 
 home of the Babe of Bethlehem; but 
 they, too — O pitiful ! — were lost, a myr- 
 iad babes in the wood, their only shroud 
 the leaves, their only priest the robin. 
 What a catastrophe ! men will say, have 
 said. The Crusades — what a failure, 
 what a vast mistake of history! But in 
 the end history does not makes mistakes. 
 
The Crusaders 125 
 
 When we cannot understand her, it is 
 only because we are not wise enough. 
 For history is the handmaid of the Al- 
 mighty, and " facts are the finger of 
 God." The Crusades? Men of science 
 tell us that to every sleeper, in every 
 night, comes a moment fraught with the 
 baleful threat of death. The tide of the 
 blood is ebbing. The hammer of the pulse 
 is almost silent. The great engine of the 
 heart throbs its least and faintest. Then, 
 they tell us, unless at that fearful time 
 there come some stir of warning to the 
 sleeper, some whispering call from the 
 deeps of the darkness to startle the engine 
 to its work again, and the pulse to its 
 duty, and the blood to its flow — then the 
 heart sleeps forever, and when friends 
 come in the morning they find a dead man 
 there. So we may say that the call to 
 the Crusades saved the life of Europe. 
 Their origin has been a mystery. His- 
 
126 The Holy Grail 
 
 torians have stood amazed at this vast 
 sudden movement of millions towards the 
 same frail sentimental goal. But the call 
 to the Crusades was the call of God. The 
 sleepers stirred. Their pulses set a-beat- 
 ing to the quick throb of war drums. 
 The sluggish blood sprang once more like 
 a brook. The Crusaders were defeated, 
 but Europe was saved, because she was 
 awake. The darkness was overpast. 
 New life came, as always, out of the East 
 into the West. From that moment the 
 page of history brightens. The period of 
 those strange holy wars, apparently so 
 unsuccessful, is precisely the period of 
 the dawn from the darkest age that has 
 ever eclipsed the world since Christ was 
 slain, into the requickened life of day. 
 And so, in the wiser way, those wars were 
 gloriously successful. God's thoughts are 
 not as man's thoughts. " He moves in 
 a mysterious way, His wonders to per- 
 
The Crusaders 127 
 
 form." The call to the Crusades was a 
 thoughtful loving device of the great 
 watchful Father to save His sleeping chil- 
 dren from the sleep of death, as He 
 waked them with the music of Christ's 
 name. 
 
 Moreover, the Crusades did a service 
 not for Europe only, but for the whole 
 world ; not for that age alone, but for all 
 time. Think what a flower grew up from 
 the blood of those fallen knights ! It is the 
 flower of chivalry. Shame on that cheap 
 humor that would pawn our holiest tra- 
 ditions for a laugh! Pity it is that all 
 of us " Yankees" could not go and dwell 
 for a season in King Arthur's court, 
 there to learn at least a higher worship 
 than the worship of the dollar. No sin- 
 gle gift has come to us from Christianity, 
 that great source of all best gifts, which 
 is of sweeter influence in the mutual rela- 
 tionships of men than the spirit of chiv- 
 
128 The Holy Grail 
 
 airy. The knights, once sworn to a noble 
 cause, were always malcontent with ig- 
 nobility. Unsuccessful in attaining the 
 material object of their welfare, they did 
 but learn a firmer grasp on the snowy 
 shields of the ideal. Failing to gain pos- 
 session of the Holy Land, they yet were 
 led, through pursuing a noble and roman- 
 tic purpose, to know of a holier land, of 
 that fair kingdom of God which is within. 
 The inspiring history of that holy city, Je- 
 rusalem, which they sought in vain to 
 take and keep, told them of a greatness 
 which is greater than that of taking a city. 
 Schooled in the noble discipline of fight- 
 ing, unafraid, whole hordes of over- 
 whelming heathen, they were wed forever 
 to the battle of the weak against the 
 strong, and so returned from fighting the 
 strong men of the East to fight for the 
 weak of the West. The knight's banner, 
 once uplifted, never falls: for it is the 
 
The Crusaders 129 
 
 essence of knighthood to battle for ideals, 
 and ideals are unaffected by material fail- 
 ures. You cannot hurt a spirit. See, 
 then, what rich bequest comes to the 
 world from these fanatical Crusades. 
 They taught the world the battle of the 
 weak against the strong; the battle for 
 the spiritual against the material and 
 gross; the battle of ideals against dol- 
 lars; the battle for women against vil- 
 lains, of romanticism against realism, of 
 poetry against the prosaic, of right 
 against wrong. But for the Crusades, 
 men perhaps would not know the manly 
 gesture of baring the head to women — 
 that remarkable tribute of physical 
 strength to spiritual strength. But for 
 the Crusades there might be now no clear- 
 eyed lad to defend a child against a bully. 
 But for the Crusades, our minstrelsy 
 would be unspeakably impoverished ; for 
 the story of the foolish doings of those 
 
130 The Holy Grail 
 
 romantic knights has been the theme of 
 all our wisest music since their time. 
 
 Tennyson's glowing pages draw all 
 their light from chivalry. The great 
 Victorian poet has, indeed, uttered the 
 very creed of knighthood for us, when, 
 speaking as King Arthur to his knights, 
 he cries : 
 
 I made them lay their hands in mine and swear 
 
 To reverence the King, as if he were 
 
 Their conscience, and their conscience as their 
 
 King, 
 To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 
 To ride abroad redressing human wrongs, 
 To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it, 
 To honour his own word as if his God's, 
 To lead sweet lives in purest chastity, 
 To love one maiden only, cleave to her, 
 And worship her by years of noble deeds, 
 Until they won her ; for indeed I knew 
 Of no more subtle master under heaven 
 Than is the maiden passion for a maid, 
 Not only to keep down the base in man, 
 But teach high thought, and amiable words 
 
The Crusaders 131 
 
 And love of truth, and all that makes a man. 
 And courtliness, and the desire of fame, 
 
 What ear so dull as to be deaf to that 
 noble music ? What heart so numb as not 
 to thrill with the charm of knightliness ? 
 Chivalry : it may be called the fairest 
 flower of history, sprung from the root 
 of that tree which Roman soldiers planted 
 one day, high on Calvary. For as the 
 source of knighthood is the Crusades, so 
 the source of the Crusades is the cross. 
 
 That is what the word means. A cru- 
 sade is a war for the cross. The sign of 
 enlistment was not a cap and a row of 
 buttons, it was a red cross on the right 
 shoulder. Becoming a soldier-knight was 
 in those days called " the taking of the 
 cross." Peter the Hermit, on a pilgrim- 
 age to Jerusalem, had witnessed for him- 
 self the pollution of the holy places by 
 blasphemous Mahometans, and secured 
 permission from the Patriarch of the East 
 
132 The Holy Grail 
 
 and the Pope of the West to announce 
 these pollutions to all Christendom, with 
 an appeal for redress and deliverance. 
 Pope Urban II. gave him the enthusiastic 
 support of his influence and his eloquence. 
 At Clermont, in the year 1095, the great 
 orator addressed a vast concourse com- 
 posed largely of proud knights, whose 
 chief business had hitherto been plunder 
 and feud. " Yea," he exclaimed, " the 
 knighthood of Christ hath even plundered 
 Christ's fold, exchanging the deeds of a 
 knight for the works of night. As ye 
 love your souls, now go forth boldly, and, 
 quitting this mutual slaughter, take up 
 arms for the household of faith. Christ 
 himself will be your leader, as, more val- 
 iantly than did the Israelites of old, you 
 fight for your Jerusalem. It will be a 
 goodly thing to die in that city, where 
 Christ died for you. Let not love of any 
 earthly possession detain you. It were 
 
The Crusaders 133 
 
 better to die in warfare than behold the 
 evils that befall the holy places. Start 
 upon the way to the holy sepulchre; 
 wrench the land from the accursed race, 
 and subdue it to yourselves. Thus shall 
 you spoil your foes of their wealth and re- 
 turn home victorious, or else, purpled 
 with your own blood, receive an everlast- 
 ing reward." As the voice of the speaker 
 died away, there went up one cry from 
 the assembled host : " It is the will of 
 God! It is the will of God," Then 
 raising his eyes to heaven and stretching 
 out his hand for silence, Urban renewed 
 his speech with words of praise: ' This 
 day hath been fulfilled in your midst the 
 saying of our Lord, ' Where two or 
 three are gathered together in my name, 
 there am I in the midst of them.' Had 
 not the Lord been in your midst, you 
 would not thus have all uttered the same 
 cry. Wherefore I tell you it is God who 
 
134 The Holy Grail 
 
 hath inspired you with His voice. So let 
 the Lord's motto be your battle-cry, and 
 when you go forth to meet the enemy this 
 shall be your watchword : ' It is the will 
 of God ! It is the will of God !' " The 
 multitudes flung themselves prostrate be- 
 fore the sign of the uplifted cross. Proud 
 knights bent the knee, and even grovelled 
 in the dust, before the sign of Calvary, 
 pledging with kisses and with vows their 
 devotion unto death. On the right shoul- 
 der the insignia were affixed; garments 
 were destroyed that each might bear 
 proudly on his shoulder the sign and seal 
 of his undying devotion, even the red, the 
 bloody cross. The Crusades were wars 
 for the cross. The thought uppermost in 
 the hearts of all re-awakened Europe at 
 that time was this, and this alone: The 
 Taking of the Cross. 
 
 What transformation is denoted by that 
 phrase! The cross had been, but a few 
 
The Crusaders 135 
 
 centuries before, the symbol of unuttera- 
 ble shame. Crucifixion was the lowest of 
 deaths ; men spoke of " the ignominious 
 death of the cross," a death of peculiar 
 shame, reserved for the lowest degraded 
 criminals. Yet now, in those ages of the 
 Crusades, it had become a badge of honor, 
 worn proudly by the lordliest knights. It 
 is a wonderful transformation — as though 
 in our day men were to begin to paint the 
 gallows upon their coats of arms. Think 
 of what it means ! A Jewish peasant, bear- 
 ing the common name of Jesus, had spent 
 three years of his life in such a way as to 
 make even his own family say that he was 
 " beside himself." Deserted at the last 
 even by his own chosen twelve, one of 
 them delivered him into the hands of 
 Roman soldiers, who mocked him, 
 scourged him, slapped him, and spat in his 
 face, the victim of their cruel Saturnalian 
 feast. His boasted crown turned out to 
 
136 The Holy Grail 
 
 be but a crown of thorns, plaited by the 
 coarse thick fingers of some Roman 
 guardsman. For his sceptre, they put a 
 reed into his hand. Then they knelt, with 
 mocking laughter, and hailed him as a 
 king. Silent, pale, helpless, he could not 
 save himself. So the Roman soldiers 
 crucified him, and speared him, and at 
 the foot of the cross raffled away his gar- 
 ments. So died he : in perfect loneliness, 
 utter defeat, and profoundest shameful- 
 ness. Yet, because of a rumor that spread 
 abroad shortly after his death, people 
 began to believe in him again, and a sect 
 sprang up. This sect gained a following 
 at length in Rome ; because, as the citizen 
 Tacitus bitterly confesses, everything 
 worthless and vile drifted to the capital. 
 Nero burnt these fanatics. Trajan out- 
 lawed them. The gentle Aurelius did not 
 scruple to murder them. Decius slew 
 them wholesale. Diocletian and Galerius 
 
The Crusaders 137 
 
 sought them out man by man, woman by 
 woman, child by child, determined that 
 not one of the vermin should remain to 
 corrupt the Roman State. Then, after 
 two hundred and fifty years of this fierce 
 and bloody work, the State rested in 
 weary satisfaction and celebrated its vic- 
 tory. 
 
 But the next emperor is a Christian. 
 He takes the eagles from his standards, 
 and replaces them with crosses. The 
 badge of shame becomes a sign of glory. 
 He bids his Roman soldiers fight in the 
 name of the crucified Jew. Roman sol- 
 diers bow the knee to Him whom Roman 
 soldiers scourged. Again do they put a 
 crown upon His head and a sceptre in His 
 hand, but not in scorn. Jesus is their 
 King, above Caesar. Galilee has con- 
 quered Rome. The empire becomes Chris- 
 tian by imperial decree. Christians, no 
 longer wandering about in deserts or 
 
138 The Holy Grail 
 
 dwelling in the caves of the earth, drive 
 in gilded chariots of state, becoming the 
 most honored officers of the empire. They 
 have exchanged their goat-skins for bro- 
 cade, the purple of mourning for the pur- 
 ple of rule. The poor are rich, the de- 
 based are exalted, the vanquished are the 
 victors. " Constantine the Defender" 
 succeeds " Galerius the Butcher." The 
 Crusaders did but follow Constantine 
 when they took the cross; and millions 
 since have followed the Crusaders in 
 choosing as their highest, proudest symbol 
 that which was, till Jesus died, the badge 
 of shame. To-day it is the centre of our 
 noblest paintings. Women wear it pen- 
 dant on their breasts. Plain men choose 
 it as their single ornament. Our books 
 are stamped with it. It gleams, gilded, 
 from the summit of our noblest architec- 
 ture. And always there dwells in this 
 simple transverse figure a dignity and 
 
The Crusaders 139 
 
 glory belonging to no other symbol 
 known to man. 
 
 Why is it so? Why this remarkable 
 transformation of an ancient gallows into 
 a modern emblem of glory? Marvellous 
 as it may seem, this is the simple reason : 
 because that outlawed Jew did die 
 thereon. Because this cross was the scaf- 
 fold of the Man of Nazareth ; because it 
 upbore in death His suffering body, there- 
 fore it has become a symbol loved and 
 adored and glorious. He it was that up- 
 lifted it. Because of Him who bore the 
 cross did Roman emperors weave it with 
 gold upon their purple standards. And it 
 was supreme devotion to Jesus Christ, a 
 thousand years after He had died, and in 
 the darkest of all ages since the black year 
 of His death — it was supreme devotion to 
 Him that led those millions of Crusaders 
 to the taking of the cross. Let us seize 
 this thought ir all its full significance: 
 
140 The Holy Grail 
 
 the supreme attractiveness of that grand 
 figure whose death could glorify a gal- 
 lows ! " I, if I be lifted up," said He, 
 " will draw all men unto me." Superbly 
 is that prophecy proved true. Hearts of 
 iron have leaped irresistibly and forever 
 unto Him, the Great Magnet. Thousands 
 of earth's knightliest souls have taken the 
 cross and followed Him. 
 
 Beginning with His own earliest disci- 
 ples — what a splendid vision had the be- 
 loved John of the supreme kingliness of 
 Jesus ! " Behold a white horse ! And He 
 that is seated thereon is called Faithful 
 and True, and in righteousness He doth 
 judge and make war. His eyes are as a 
 flaming fire, and on His head are many 
 crowns — many crowns! And He hath a 
 Name written, which no man knoweth, 
 but He Himself. And He is clothed in 
 a vesture dipped in blood ; and His Name 
 is called the Word of God. And the arm- 
 
The Crusaders 141 
 
 ies which are in heaven follow Him, upon 
 white horses, clothed in fine linen, white 
 and clean. And He hath on His vesture 
 and on His thigh a Name written, King 
 of kings and Lord of lords." Simple 
 contact for three short years with this su- 
 perb crucified King uplifted humble John 
 the fisherman into John the rapt seer, the 
 poet, and the saint. Think also of that 
 other Galilean fisherman; hard-handed, 
 harsh, soiled with his unseemly trade, 
 whose brittle character was transformed 
 into the Rock of the Church through the 
 impartation of the knightliness of Jesus: 
 " Who," as Cephas cries with divine en- 
 thusiasm— " Who did no sin, neither was 
 guile found in His mouth; Who, when 
 He was reviled, reviled not again ; when 
 He suffered, He threatened not; but com- 
 mitted Himself to Him that judgeth 
 righteously." So, by the firm yet gentle 
 and supremely faithful knightliness of his 
 
142 The Holy Grail 
 
 Leader was this impetuous, uncouth and 
 faithless fisherman transformed into one 
 who was faithful to his Master even unto 
 death, humbly requesting, when they led 
 him, too, to be crucified, that they affix 
 him to the cross head downwards, since 
 he was not worthy even to die in the same 
 manner as had his knightly Lord. 
 
 Ah, those white-clad heavenly armies 
 of John's vision — those ascended follow- 
 ers of Jesus, who follow in their Master's 
 train: see them as they march, that glo- 
 rious cavalry, clothed in glistening linen, 
 white and clean! Hear their shouts of 
 supreme devotion to Him for whose sake 
 they were led on earth to take the cross, 
 whereas now in heaven they wear the 
 crown. Leading that host of white-clad 
 armies is the fine old chieftain of Tarsus, 
 who fought a good fight, who kept the 
 faith, and who went half regretfully 
 (since to live was Christ) to the gain of 
 
The Crusaders 143 
 
 the crown of righteousness, his meed for 
 the taking of the cross. Once he had de- 
 spised that cross. But a single eye-to- 
 eye vision of the kingly Christ trans- 
 formed him from enemy to friend. Hear 
 his devotion utter itself in angelic elo- 
 quence as he cries : " For I am persuaded 
 that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor 
 principalities, nor powers, nor things pres- 
 ent, nor things to come, nor height, nor 
 depth, nor any other creature, shall be able 
 to separate us from the love of God, which 
 is in Christ Jesus our Lord." " Unto this 
 King eternal, immortal, invisible, the 
 Only Wise God, be honor and glory for 
 ever and ever !" 
 
 Out of those thousands voices of as- 
 cended knights a few dim echoes come to 
 us. Hear Augustine's ascription of devo- 
 tion to his Leader, as he cries : " O Truth 
 who art Eternity! And Love who art 
 Truth! And Eternity who art Love! 
 
1U The Holy Grail 
 
 Thou art my All, to Thee do I sigh night 
 and day. When I first knew Thee, Thou 
 liftedst me up, that I might see there was 
 somewhat for me to see, and that I was 
 not yet such as to see. And Thou stream- 
 ing forth Thy beams of light upon me 
 most strongly, didst beat back the weak- 
 ness of my sight, and I trembled with 
 love and awe: and I perceived myself to 
 be far off from Thee in the region of un- 
 likeness." And yet — " For Thyself Thou 
 madest us; and our hearts are restless 
 until they rest in Thee." There comes to 
 us also the impassioned voice of the monk 
 Bernard, who preached the Second Cru- 
 sade : " If thou writest, nothing therein 
 hath savor to me unless I read Jesus in it. 
 If thou discoursest, nothing there is agree- 
 able to me unless in it also ' Jesus' re- 
 sounds. He is as honey in the mouth, a 
 melody in the ear, a song of jubilee in the 
 heart. He is our medicine as well. Is 
 
The Crusaders 145 
 
 any among you saddened? Let Jesus 
 enter into his heart, and thence leap to his 
 lips, and lo! at the rising illumination of 
 His name, every cloud flies away, serenity 
 returns." Often are the words of this 
 mediaeval monk on our lips as we sing, 
 
 Jesus, the very thought of thee, 
 With sweetness fills my breast, 
 
 But sweeter far Thy face to see, 
 And in Thy presence rest. 
 
 Next we hear the peaceful prayer of 
 the German mystic, Thomas a Kempis: 
 " Grant to me above all things that can 
 be desired, to rest in Thee, and in Thee 
 to have my heart at peace. Thou art the 
 true peace of the heart, Thou its only rest ; 
 out of Thee all things are hard and rest- 
 less. In this very peace, that is, in Thee, 
 Thou One Chiefest Eternal Good, I will 
 sleep and rest." 
 
 The turbulent Luther, whose words 
 were "half-battles," turns for peace and 
 
146 The Holy Grail 
 
 soothing to the gentle Cross-Bearer, whis- 
 pering ever so gently to his heart, " Keep 
 still, and He will mould thee into the 
 right shape." A hundred years later, 
 we hear the consecrated voice of Francis 
 de Sales pledging his will to Christ's in 
 everything; "without reserve, without a 
 ' but,' an ' if,' or a limit." Then Fenelon 
 offers himself in total sacrifice with the 
 words : " Smite, or heal ; depress me, or 
 raise me up; I adore all Thy purposes 
 without knowing them; I am silent; I 
 offer myself in sacrifice; I yield myself 
 to Thee; I would have no other desire 
 than to do Thy will." In our own time, 
 there has lately entered into the company 
 of that white-clad throng one who prayed : 
 " O Lord, who art as the shadow of a 
 great rock in a weary land, who beholdest 
 Thy weak creatures weary of labor, 
 weary of pleasure, weary of hope de- 
 ferred, weary of self ; in Thine abundant 
 
The Crusaders 147 
 
 compassion, and unutterable tenderness, 
 bring us, I pray thee, unto Thy rest." 
 And then the clear-eyed Christian poet of 
 the South, Sidney Lanier ; hear him, after 
 he has set all of earth's greatest names 
 beside the name of Jesus, how he cries 
 with transcendent admiration : 
 
 But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of time, 
 
 But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue, 
 
 But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love, 
 
 O perfect life in perfect labor writ, 
 
 O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,— 
 
 What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse, 
 
 What least defect or shadow of defect, 
 
 What rumor, tattled by an enemy, 
 
 Of inference loose, what lack of grace 
 
 Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's — 
 
 Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee, 
 
 Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ? 
 
 What a goodly company have followed 
 Jesus in the taking of the cross ! How 
 many thousands of stainless knights have 
 claimed Him as their leader ! Truly, after 
 
148 The Holy Grail 
 
 this brief backward glance into the devo- 
 tional history of the purest hearts that 
 ever have throbbed on this old earth, we 
 may sing with new understanding the 
 words of that grand ancient hymn, the 
 hymn of the valiant Crusaders them- 
 selves. As they marched on their ven- 
 turous quest against His foes, the fair 
 meadow-lands of France smiled to them 
 of the gentle love of Christ, and the 
 mighty German forests whispered of His 
 majesty. In the dazzling Eastern sun 
 that shone by day they saw His light, and 
 in the silent wonders of the heavens by 
 night they read His glory. To this ter- 
 rible army with banners all created things 
 did but speak of Him their Creator, Who 
 was to them the Bright and Morning 
 Star, the One Among Ten Thousand, 
 and the Altogether Lovely. Thus it is 
 that the music of this great " Crusaders' 
 Hymn" rolls through the ages down to 
 
The Crusaders 149 
 
 us, throbbing with the martial tread of 
 the armies of the Lord of Hosts, pulsing 
 with the heart's devotion of a myriad of 
 Christian knights — 
 
 Beautiful Saviour ! King of Creation, 
 True Son of God and Son of Man! 
 
 Truly I'd love Thee, truly I'd serve Thee, 
 Knight of my soul, my Joy, my Crown ! 
 
 Fair are the meadows, fairer the woodlands, 
 Robed in the flowers of blooming spring; 
 
 Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer, 
 
 He makes our sorrowing spirits sing. 
 
 Fair is the sunshine, fairer the moonlight, 
 And all the sparkling stars on high ; 
 
 Jesus shines brighter, Jesus shines purer, 
 Than all the angels in the sky. 
 
 Beautiful Saviour ! King of Creation ! 
 
 True Son of God and Son of Man ! 
 Glory and honor, praise, adoration, 
 
 Now and forevermore be Thine. 
 
LIBERTY AND LAW 
 
LIBERTY AND LAW* 
 
 THE FOUNDATIONS OF PATRIOTISM 
 
 It may be set forth almost as an axiom 
 that every virtue has its counterfeit, 
 which is invariably vicious. Bravery 
 is the essential virtue of manhood, but its 
 counterfeit is the bravado of the bully, 
 which may degenerate into vicious bru- 
 tality. At the other extreme, the gen- 
 tleness of a gentleman is certainly a vir- 
 tue, but effeminacy is the accompaniment 
 of cowardice. Neatness has its counter- 
 feit in foppery, economy in miserliness, 
 culture in pedantry, devoutness in cant, 
 
 * Delivered before the Southern Educational 
 Association at Jacksonville, Florida, under the 
 title, " The School as a Check upon Lawlessness." 
 
 153 
 
154 The Holy Grail 
 
 purity in prudery, humility in servility, 
 love in lust, and pure patriotism in impure 
 politics. 
 
 It is so with the great twin truths 
 whereon society is founded : I mean lib- 
 erty and law. The counterfeit of law is 
 tyranny, while that of liberty is license, 
 which is only another name for lawless- 
 ness. Liberty and law are twin sisters, 
 bound together by a closer unity than the 
 famous Siamese twins, so that to hurt the 
 one is to maim the other. But tyranny 
 and license are enormous antipodal evils 
 united only in their antagonism to the 
 State. 
 
 Men have always shown a tendency to 
 drive these two great principles of law 
 and liberty into their counterfeit vicious 
 extremes, and to this fatal fact may be 
 traced all of the woes of government. It 
 is true of Church as well as of State. The 
 religion that we profess is ultimately 
 
Liberty and Law 155 
 
 founded on the conception of the Divine 
 Fatherhood. Now, fatherhood implies 
 both liberty and law. Because the father 
 loves his child, he wishes the child to be 
 free; for liberty is of the essence of love.* 
 But the wise father knows that liberty can 
 be attained only through law. To give 
 the child license would be to subvert his 
 best interests; he would never have lib- 
 erty at all, because his lower nature 
 would inevitably control his higher na- 
 ture and the worst sort of slavery result. 
 Therefore law is as much the outcome of 
 love as liberty is. The earlier Jews had 
 a beautiful comprehension of this fact. 
 David praises God for His " free spirit," 
 but never ignores His " perfect law." He 
 unites the two under a conception of fath- 
 erhood both majestic and tender, which 
 reaches its wonderful acme in the twenty- 
 
 * Both words arise from the Teutonic Lub. 
 
156 The Holy Grail 
 
 third Psalm, wherein we hear of rod and 
 staff, but also of still waters and green 
 pastures. Had the sheep license, he would 
 go astray; God's law keeps him in lib- 
 erty. The later Jews, however, forgot the 
 liberal heart of God, and laid all em- 
 phasis on His law. This made them at 
 length conceive of Him as a tyrant, and 
 Pharisaism was the outcome of this tyran- 
 nous conception. Then the Gospel came. 
 I do not hesitate to say that its great ob- 
 ject, considered from one point of view, 
 was just to restore the unity of law and 
 liberty in men's ideas about God. But the 
 reaction in behalf of liberty tended to 
 swing out into lawlessness, so that we hear 
 Peter, the great apostle of authority, 
 warning the early Christians against 
 using their liberty for a cloak of malic- 
 iousness,* while Paul, the apostle of lib- 
 
 * i Peter ii. 16. 
 
Liberty and Law 157 
 
 erty, calls love the fulfilling of the law.* 
 The woes of the Church from that day 
 to this have come from a sort of alterna- 
 ting emphasis upon law or upon liberty, in- 
 stead of an equal unifying emphasis on 
 both, so that she has suffered now from 
 ecclesiastical tyranny, and again from 
 antinomian license. 
 
 History abounds in similar illustra- 
 tions. How has it been with America? 
 Our tendency from the very beginning 
 has led us to emphasize liberty at the ex- 
 pense of law. The country was discov- 
 ered and settled under the influence of a 
 vast revolt against tyranny. The intel- 
 lectual revolt dates from the year 1453, 
 when the gates of the Golden Horn at 
 last moved on their ancient hinges, flood- 
 ing all Europe from the classical springs 
 
 * Romans xiii. 10. 
 
158 The Holy Grail 
 
 of the East. It was the impetus of the 
 Renaissance that impelled the little Span- 
 ish caravel across the stormy seas; the 
 discovery of America was a direct result 
 of the downfall of Constantinople. Larger 
 revolts were sure to follow: the Refor- 
 mation is the religious side of the Renais- 
 sance. It was under the influence of the 
 tremendous protest against tyranny begun 
 by Martin Luther in 15 17 that this coun- 
 try was settled by those colonists that 
 have meant most to her history — the Puri- 
 tans and the Huguenots and the Salz- 
 burgers, whose very names have Protes- 
 tant associations. Moreover, these and 
 other colonists, led hither by love of lib- 
 erty, found themselves in a vast untram- 
 melled continent to breathe whose air was 
 to become, as it were, drunk with a sense 
 of freedom. The Revolutionary War was 
 an inevitable consequence of such condi- 
 tions. Its success led to the foundation 
 
Liberty and Law 159 
 
 of a republic upon principles that seek a 
 maximum of liberty by means of an irre- 
 ducible minimum of law. Whenever this 
 minimum is still further diminished 
 through blindness to the equable princi- 
 ples of government, the fundamental bal- 
 ance is at once destroyed and liberty de- 
 scends into license. We sadly need at this 
 hour a strong readjustment of the scales. 
 Who will deny this? 
 
 Take, for example, the law as applied 
 to the protection of human life, which is 
 supposed to be its primary function. The 
 individualist frenzy of libertinism has 
 been carried to such a degree in this 
 " land of the free" that human life is act- 
 ually ten times cheaper to-day in the 
 United States than in the pagan empire 
 of Japan.* In a valuable address deliv- 
 
 * For the statistics, see article by Dr. Julius 
 D. Dreher in The State, Columbia, for October 
 18, 1004. 
 
160 The Holy Grail 
 
 ered at the St. Louis Fair, Judge William 
 H. Thomas, of Alabama, indicated the 
 unenviable pre-eminence of the United 
 States in the number of annual homicidal 
 crimes. In the German Empire there are 
 about five homicides committed annually 
 for every million of the population; in 
 England and Wales, ten or eleven; in 
 France, fourteen or fifteen; in Belgium, 
 sixteen, and in the United States about 
 130. We have been accustomed to charge 
 our crimes upon the foreigner ; but these 
 figures do not justify that view; and 
 Judge Thomas further points out the 
 striking fact that among the five sub- 
 divisions of our country " the two geo- 
 graphic divisions having the most foreign- 
 born show the lowest rate of homicides." 
 A dozen years ago we were all reading 
 a startling book bearing the suggestive 
 title, " In Darkest London." This city is 
 noted for a combination of conditions that 
 
Liberty and Law 161 
 
 tend to breed crime, — such as racial mix- 
 ture, depressing climate, density of popu- 
 lation, and comparative illiteracy. Its 
 crowded slums would seem to furnish a 
 veritable hotbed for vice and lawlessness. 
 I have therefore been interested in a com- 
 parison between the homicidal record of 
 " darkest London" for 1903 and that of 
 my own adopted State, which I choose for 
 illustration because I wish to be impartial. 
 London has an area of 688 square miles, 
 with a population of 6,500,000; that is to 
 say, 9,500 people inhabit every square 
 mile in London. South Carolina has an 
 area of 30,570 square miles and a popu- 
 lation somewhat exceeding 1,340,000; 
 that is to say, about forty-four people to 
 the mile. In climate the State is richly 
 favored, there is no greater average of 
 white illiteracy than in London, and the 
 aggravations of our race problem are off- 
 set by racial admixtures among the 
 
162 The Holy Grail 
 
 crowded slums of the world's metropo- 
 lis. Every advantage is with the State 
 as against the city. And yet London, 
 with its six and a half million souls, 
 had only twenty-four murders during the 
 year in question, while in South Carolina, 
 with a population of one and a half mil- 
 lion, two hundred and twenty-two people 
 were tried in the courts for homicide. Not 
 only so, but in London there was no " un- 
 discovered crime," as all the murderers 
 were arrested, except in four cases, where 
 they committed suicide. In South Caro- 
 lina, however, we are told that " many 
 homicides are committed for which no 
 one is tried. Hence the actual number of 
 homicides was considerably more than two 
 hundred and twenty-two/' * The fig- 
 ures are a little better now, but a striking 
 
 *Dr. J. D. Dreher, The State, October 18, 
 1004. 
 
Liberty and Law 163 
 
 feature of the situation lies in the fact that 
 even where criminals are arrested and 
 tried the law is very seldom enforced. 
 
 In the general matter of lawlessness, my 
 own State is no worse than others of the 
 Union. As I shall show, the lawlessness 
 takes on different forms of expression, 
 according as conditions vary. Judge 
 Thomas, in the paper from which I have 
 already quoted, shows conclusively that 
 the variations in the enforcement of law 
 do not seem to be due to climate, race, 
 density of population, illiteracy, form of 
 government, or length of governmental 
 experience. The terrible facts cannot be 
 explained by any of these theories, each 
 of which has had able advocates I think 
 that our deplorable national notoriety in 
 the taking of human life is simply the 
 result of a historical deluge of liberty, 
 rising at last to the floodtide of license, 
 
164. The Holy Grail 
 
 which is proving too strong for the pro- 
 tective barriers of law. 
 
 Perhaps the most alarming phase of 
 the whole situation consists in the enor- 
 mous increase of homicidal crime in this 
 country within the past twenty-five years. 
 If the same ratio between the number of 
 homicides and the total population of the 
 country now prevailed as was the case in 
 1 88 1, there would have been less than two 
 thousand homicides in 1903; but as a 
 matter of fact there were nearly nine thou- 
 sand. That is to say, twenty-five years 
 ago twenty-five people were killed annu- 
 ally out of every million of our popula- 
 tion, but in 1903 we slaughtered one hun- 
 dred and twelve per million, so that the 
 danger of murder is four and one-half 
 times greater in this country to-day than 
 it was in 1881.* 
 
 * For statistics see McClure's Magazine, De- 
 cember, 1904. 
 
Liberty and Law 165 
 
 But these figures, startling though they 
 are, do not even yet begin to indicate the 
 number of human lives that are sacrificed 
 in this country every year as a direct re- 
 sult of lawlessness. What of the Iro- 
 quois Theatre horror and the General Slo- 
 cum disaster? We claim to be a Chris- 
 tian people, but those human bodies were 
 really burnt in sacrificial offering to our 
 American Moloch of greed. It has been 
 proved beyond question that there were 
 laws sufficient to prevent those disasters; 
 but that the law-keepers were susceptible 
 to bribery, and that the " captains of in- 
 dustry" who owned the theatre and the 
 steamboat preferred license to licenses. 
 The railroads of the country kill more 
 than seven thousand human beings every 
 year, a record without parallel in any 
 other country on earth; who shall say 
 how many of these mutilated corpses are 
 victims to the spirit of lawlessness? Mr. 
 
166 The Holy Grail 
 
 S. S. McClure describes our wholesale 
 criminals, if I may so term them, under 
 three heads : First, saloon-keepers, gam- 
 blers, and others who engage in businesses 
 that degrade; second, contractors, capi- 
 talists, bankers, and others who can make 
 money by getting franchises and other 
 property of the community cheaper by 
 bribery than by paying the community; 
 third, politicians who are willing to seek 
 and accept office with the aid and endorse- 
 ment of the classes already mentioned. 
 He rightly says that these men " consti- 
 tute a class of criminals very different 
 from ordinary criminals who break laws ; 
 these men destroy law. They are enemies 
 of the human race. They are destroyers 
 of a people. They are murderers of a 
 civilization." 
 
 The spirit of lawlessness covers the 
 whole country. Its most tangible expres- 
 sion is in the taking of human life, 
 
Liberty and Law 167 
 
 whether by wholesale or retail. In the 
 great cities, where the prevailing motives 
 are commercial, we have holocausts. In 
 the South, where the prevailing motives 
 are social, we have lynchings. In certain 
 communities, such as Chicago, San Fran- 
 cisco, and Pittsburg, we murder both by 
 wholesale and by retail. Everywhere we 
 have license, and unless we can check it 
 the country is doomed. 
 
 There will not be any rapid transforma- 
 tion in this matter, depend upon it. That 
 is impossible. We shall have no marked 
 change until a new generation comes upon 
 the scene, trained to nobler ideals. We 
 must begin with the child. There are 
 three institutions that are theoretically 
 concerned with child training: the fam- 
 ily, the Church, and the school. I say 
 " theoretically," because a glance at any 
 of our comic papers will indicate the 
 anomalous conditions of family life in this 
 
168 The Holy Grail 
 
 country. Some one has caustically ob- 
 served that " a problem in America has to 
 begin by being a jest, and we laugh at 
 our troubles long before we think of 
 doing anything about them." Conse- 
 quently, we have satires by our prominent 
 humorists on " the bringing up of pa- 
 rents/' but the parents have not yet 
 learned to take the matter seriously. At 
 least the father has not. In the theoretical 
 home the mother stands for the principle 
 of liberty or love, while the father stands 
 for law; but in the practical American 
 home the father usually stands for nothing 
 at all. He is far too busy to give any 
 attention to the duties of fatherhood. He 
 is out in the market making money for his 
 child, forgetting that the coin of charac- 
 ter transcends every other kind of wealth. 
 American children are deprived of the 
 needful discipline of fatherhood, and the 
 disobedient child inevitably grows into a 
 
Liberty and Law 169 
 
 lawless citizen, for " men are but children 
 of a larger growth." I say it with a sense 
 of bitter shame, but I think we need 
 hardly look to our present generation of 
 homes, with their altarless hearths and 
 their headless tables, for the instillation of 
 lawfulness into our children. 
 
 Nor yet, on the whole, to the Church. 
 The Church in this country for the most 
 part takes little account of the children. 
 In Europe the Protestants have their pa- 
 rochial or religious schools with daily in- 
 struction in the fundamental truths of re- 
 ligion, besides rigid catechetical systems. 
 Over here we seem to think that one hour 
 of one day in each week is time enough 
 for the Church to devote to the children ; 
 and what a strange sort of devotion it is ! 
 You have heard that caustic conundrum, 
 " When is a school not a school? When 
 it's a Sunday-school." Better methods 
 are coming to prevail within very recent 
 
170 The Holy Grail 
 
 years, but I still submit that the average 
 Sunday-school affords utterly inadequate 
 opportunity for the moral training of chil- 
 dren. 
 
 There remains, then, the school as a 
 possible check upon lawlessness. Is it 
 possible? I believe so. I believe that it 
 is actually within our reach, teachers of 
 the men of to-morrow, to lay upon their 
 hearts now while they are plastic chil- 
 dren, such a regard for the dignity and 
 sacredness of law as will forever keep our 
 liberties secure. My plan is so simple 
 that I fear you will smile at it, but re- 
 member that our complex life breeds an 
 undeserved and unworthy contempt of 
 simple things. I wish that it might be 
 made a part of the duty of every public- 
 school teacher throughout the land just to 
 teach the children the Ten Command- 
 ments. They do not know them; where 
 have they had a chance to learn them? 
 
Liberty and Law 171 
 
 Do you think it would mean nothing to 
 them in after-life, when tempted to do 
 evil, to have these ineradicable law-words 
 of childhood rise with an imperative 
 " Thou shalt not" ? Then your theory of 
 psychology is a very different one from 
 mine. Among the supreme restraints of 
 a grown man's life are the inlaid impera- 
 tives of childhood. 
 
 I think that the simplicity of my plan 
 has one thing at least to commend it : no- 
 body could object to it, whether Catholic 
 or Protestant or Jew. Besides, the proper 
 teaching of the Decalogue carries with it 
 weightier matter than one might think. 
 I would have the commandment " Thou 
 shalt not steal" so taught as to include not 
 only the petty thief, but also the million- 
 aire. " By what process of reasoning can 
 we make a moral distinction between the 
 larceny of the despised green-goods or 
 gold-brick swindler and the equally real 
 
172 The Holy Grail 
 
 rich and quasi-respectable promoters of 
 larceny accomplished, for example, by the 
 the American Shipbuilding Company, that 
 bubble of fraud, concerning which the 
 public press has had so much to say re- 
 cently?" * And yet, the "confidence 
 man" is hurried off to prison as a past- 
 master in swindling, while the " captain 
 of industry" is held up before our ambi- 
 tious youth as a past-master of " success." 
 It is as Emerson said, we need to correct 
 our theory of success; and the best cor- 
 rective I can think of is a plain teaching 
 of the Ten Commandments. 
 
 I would have the ancient word, " Thou 
 shalt not kill," taught to our children in 
 the South to mean exactly what it says. 
 Dr. Julius D. Dreher goes to the core of 
 the matter when he writes : 
 
 " The reports of lynching for the first 
 
 * See George W. Alger on " Unpunished Com- 
 mercial Crime," Atlantic Monthly, August, 1904. 
 
Liberty and Law 178 
 
 few years always assigned as the cause 
 the ' usual crime.' But it is no longer 
 the usual crime that calls forth the ven- 
 geance of the mob. If men may be 
 lynched for rape, may they not also be 
 lynched for murder? Very little reason 
 satisfied the mob; in fact, it does not 
 reason; it draws no fine distinctions. 
 Vengeance is its motto. When the mob 
 wanted to lynch a murderer it did so. 
 And then the list of lynchable crimes 
 grew longer and longer. After a while 
 misdemeanors were added to the list and 
 negroes have been lynched for trifling 
 offences, for which our laws do not even 
 provide a penalty. 
 
 " Men who trample on the laws of 
 course have no respect for courts; and 
 so the mob enters even the temples of jus- 
 tice to execute its lawless will. It takes 
 prisoners from officers and jails when the 
 hanging of such prisoners by the orderly 
 
174 The Holy Grail 
 
 processes of the law is as certain as any- 
 thing human can be. The mob usually 
 confines itself to killing and occasionally 
 burning negroes; but now and then a 
 white man is the victim. In South Caro- 
 lina three white men have been lynched by 
 white men and one by negroes, which is, 
 so far as I know, the only case in which 
 negroes have lynched a white man. But 
 negroes have lynched a number of ne- 
 groes. 
 
 " It is high time to inquire whither are 
 we drifting. It seems to me that we have 
 now drifted so far that all thoughtful per- 
 sons ought to see plainly that the only po- 
 sition for law-abiding and law-respecting 
 people to take is this : That lynching for 
 any crime whatever is itself a crime 
 against our civilization. We cannot put 
 down crime by committing other crimes. 
 Lawlessness breeds lawlessness; hatred 
 begets hatred; revenge incites revenge. 
 
Liberty and Law 175 
 
 If we sow the wind we may expect to reap 
 the whirlwind. If we sow lawlessness, 
 hatred, revenge, cruelty, and brutality, we 
 should not expect to enjoy the fair fruits 
 of civilization. We should rather expect 
 to raise the hydra-headed monster of an- 
 archy and barbarism." 
 
 There are others of these old command- 
 ments that need new emphasis and plain 
 interpretation. We need a new remem- 
 brance of the Sabbath day ; a re-enforce- 
 ment of filial piety; a purer social life; 
 a cleanlier tongue and a heart that covets 
 only the best gifts. Above all, we need 
 to remember the supreme law, " Thou 
 shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 strength." 
 
 I am not alone in my insistence upon 
 this simple plan. The chancellor of New 
 York University said at the opening of 
 his session in 1903 : " I wish we could re- 
 quire from every freshman a Sunday- 
 
176 The Holy Grail 
 
 school diploma that would certify that he 
 knew by heart the Ten Commandments, 
 the sermon on the Mount, a church cate- 
 chism of some kind, and a score of the 
 Scripture Psalms and best classic hymns. 
 This university will join any association of 
 universites and colleges that will demand 
 them as an entrance requirement." The 
 truth is, we are exalting the intellect at the 
 expense not only of the hand, but still 
 more of the heart, in our educational sys- 
 tems. We are in danger of deifying the 
 mind, and of dethroning the morals by 
 sheer neglect here in America. The facts 
 that I have cited call aloud for new meth- 
 ods in our schools, which seem to be the 
 sole training places of the rising genera- 
 tion. We must emphasize the law — that 
 comprehensive moral law which is alone 
 sufficient as a guide of human conduct. 
 There is no danger that we exaggerate the 
 importance of law; our entire environ- 
 
Liberty and Law 177 
 
 ment, as I have tried to show, provides 
 against that. I wish that we could have 
 a simple text-book on " moral law" pre- 
 pared for use in every school; teaching 
 the sacredness of law as such, and based 
 upon some such simple code as the Dec- 
 alogue, with practical application to our 
 modern needs. Meanwhile, we should 
 face the facts. Nothing is ever to be 
 gained by denying the truth, and the first 
 step towards the quest for a remedy is the 
 clear recognition of a disease. 
 
 12 
 
THE CENTURY IN 
 LITERATURE 
 
THE CENTURY IN 
 LITERATURE 
 
 A REVIEW AND A FORECAST 
 
 A century is, of course, a purely arbi- 
 trary division of time. If " a rose by any 
 other name would smell as sweet," then a 
 cycle of time would have equal signifi- 
 cance if it included eighty years instead of 
 a hundred, or began and ended at any 
 points you please. The length of our cy- 
 cles happens to be determined by our use 
 of the decimal system, and the point of 
 their beginning is fixed by the birth of 
 Jesus. It is not always logical to cut 
 human history into so many equal lengths, 
 using a century instead of a yardstick, for 
 often a great movement has nothing 
 whatever to do with arbitrary divisions of 
 
 time. 
 
 181 
 
182 The Holy Grail 
 
 Nevertheless it is usually proper to 
 speak of the specific " character" of a 
 century. While unreal distinctions ought 
 not to be made, yet it is undoubtedly true 
 in these later centuries, at least, that 
 each of them has a certain individuality 
 of its own. Perhaps this is due in a meas- 
 ure to the quiet, unrealized influence of 
 these arbitrary divisions of time. Is it not 
 true that the whole of thoughtful man- 
 kind, this very day seems to be agitated 
 by an impression that we must somehow 
 give distinctive character to this new- 
 born Twentieth Century? There is no 
 telling to what extent the history of Chris- 
 tian civilization has come to be affected, 
 during the course of the Christian ages, 
 by the silent influence of the century idea. 
 
 The progress of civilization is inevita- 
 bly reflected by the history of literature; 
 for literature, no less than art, always re- 
 sponds to the dominant ideals of a time 
 
The Century in Literature 183 
 
 and a people. As the great world spins 
 " forever down the ringing grooves of 
 change" the crystal lens of literature is 
 continually focussing its varied moods 
 and movements into a small, but accurate, 
 photograph, which finally develops as the 
 permanent record of the race. Herder 
 was the first to formulate this truth, self- 
 evident to us now, and since his time the 
 historians of literature have been setting 
 themselves to the task of producing a his- 
 tory of civilization based upon the na- 
 tional literatures. It is enough for the 
 present purpose to call attention to the 
 fact that an analysis of the English litera- 
 ture of the nineteenth century will in ef- 
 fect show forth the spiritual elements of 
 the age itself as related to the English- 
 speaking peoples. That is to say, the cen- 
 tury in English literature will show the 
 century in Anglo-Saxon life. So close is 
 
184 The Holy Grail 
 
 the relationship between literature and 
 life. 
 
 The clear-cut character of the nine- 
 teenth century in English literature is 
 nothing short of remarkable. It differs 
 as completely from the hundred years that 
 went before as George Eliot differs from 
 Lady Mary Montagu. Indeed, it were 
 perhaps not over-fanciful to take these 
 two women as literary types of their re- 
 spective centuries, around whose living 
 forms dead facts may be quickened into 
 vivid truth. Being women, it is not im- 
 possible that, with womanhood's quick 
 sympathies and intuitions, they did some- 
 how discern the very inmost spirit of the 
 times in which they lived, — the Zeitgeist, 
 as the Germans say ; being great women, 
 it is not without the bounds of reason that 
 they should somehow seize and actually 
 embody in themselves that spirit, thus be- 
 come incarnate. The claim has already 
 
The Century in Literature 185 
 
 been advanced for Lady Mary Montagu. 
 She has been called " the eighteenth cen- 
 tury masquerading as a woman." " Like 
 her age, she was absorbed in the shows of 
 things." " She possesses its cleverness, 
 its clear head, its brittle wit. She exhibits 
 also its lack of strong natural feeling, its 
 indifference to the primal truths of exist- 
 ence, its tendency to sacrifice the Ten 
 Commandments to an epigram. She was 
 as much a product of her time as her acid 
 friend and enemy, Pope; as the rocking- 
 horse metre of the contemporary poetry; 
 as the patched and powdered ladies of the 
 court ; as the Whig and Tory parties ; as 
 the polite infidelities of the fashionable." 
 " Of the weakness and strength of that 
 age of light without sweetness Lady Mary 
 is representative" to a very marked de- 
 gree. We get an index to the frivolous 
 spirit of her times in the very name of the 
 famous " Kit-Kat Club," which numbered 
 
186 The Holy Grail 
 
 her as perhaps the chief of its reigning 
 belles. Mr. Christopher Catt was an 
 obliging caterer of fashionable London, 
 famous for his excellent mutton pies. A 
 circle of literary brilliancy, comprising the 
 Dukes of Marlborough and Devonshire, 
 Lord Halifax, Sir Robert Walpole, Con- 
 greve, Granville and Addison, revolved 
 around the savory tables of Mr. Christo- 
 pher Catt, whose abbreviated name they 
 lovingly appropriated, and so it was that 
 the most famous literary circle of the 
 eighteenth century in England became 
 known as the Kit-Kat Club, whose deli- 
 cate toasting glasses were each inscribec 
 with a separate dainty couplet in honor ot 
 some reigning belle. 
 
 Now it is strikingly significant of the 
 marked transition from the eighteenth tc 
 the nineteenth century spirit that the Kit- 
 Kat Club was superseded by the Blue 
 Stocking Club, whose name is quite as 
 
The Century in Literature 187 
 
 suggestive of seriousness as the earlier 
 narne of frivolity. Our common word 
 " bluestocking" comes to us through this 
 club, whose members, especially in the 
 person of a certain Mr. Benjamin Stilling- 
 fleet, perpetuated the memory of the Bare- 
 bone parliament by affecting to despise the 
 dapper airs of the dandy world about 
 them, particularly in the matter of hose. 
 The decadent dandies derided this studied 
 plainness of dress and the new cult was 
 dubbed with its tenacious name from the 
 character of Mr. Stillingfleet's stockings. 
 A younger Mrs. Montagu, married to a 
 cousin of the gay Lady Mary's husband, 
 promptly occupied the stage when the old 
 Lady Mary disappeared, and became 
 straightway known as " the Queen of the 
 Blues." Around her sober tables gathered 
 such disciples of the new regime as Lyt- 
 telton, Burke, Samuel Johnson, and 
 Joshua Reynolds. Her younger associ- 
 
188 The Holy Grail 
 
 ates included such serious feminine spirits 
 as Hannah More and Frances Burney. 
 Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, disdaining to 
 waste her precious time on frivolous let- 
 ters of travel, assailed even the sprightly 
 Voltaire with a heavy " Essay on Shakes- 
 peare." She and her associates, the verita- 
 ble Methodists of literature, accepted the 
 derisive name of their light foes, and so 
 rightly did they attune their spirits to the 
 changed key of the incoming age that the 
 nineteenth century may well be called, in 
 token of their keen if somewhat pedantic 
 discernment, the Bluestocking Century. 
 Robert Burns it was who, a poet-prophet, 
 living in the eighteenth century, but be- 
 longing to the nineteenth — Robert Burns 
 foresaw the approaching change in its 
 deepest and noblest aspects, giving expres- 
 sion to the Sartor Resartus idea in those 
 manly, ringing lines that may well stand 
 
The Century in Literature 189 
 
 for all that is best in our bluestocking 
 
 age: 
 
 What tho' on hamely fare we dine, 
 
 Wear hoddin gray, and a' that? 
 
 Give fools their silks and knaves their wine, 
 
 A man's a man for a' that; 
 
 For a' that, an a' that, 
 
 Their tinsel show, and a' that ; 
 
 The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 
 
 Is king o' men for a' that. 
 
 A hundred years ago to-day the horizon 
 of English literature was bright with 
 promise. The mild glories of the Lake 
 School, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 and Southey, were already apparent. 
 Three boys were then living — Byron, 
 Shelley, and Keats — whose influence was 
 to give to nineteenth century poetry its 
 most distinctive formal characteristics. 
 Across the sea a precocious lad was 
 shortly to write a remarkable poem which 
 should stand as a type of a young and 
 precocious development in English litera- 
 
190 The Holy Grail 
 
 ture that must hereafter compel the sub- 
 divisions " British" and "American." 
 Walter Scott was just rising into fame, 
 and the American youth was living who 
 should describe the romance of our own 
 pioneer life with Scott as his living model. 
 Hallam was preparing to devote himself 
 to history, Milman and Grote and Pres- 
 cott were lively lads, Macaulay and 
 George Bancroft were infants. Lamb and 
 Landor and De Quincey were polishing 
 their styles to perfection in secret, while 
 Washington Irving was about to become 
 the first American writer of wide distinc- 
 tion. Carlyle was a child in Dumfries- 
 shire ; his spirtual kinsman, Emerson, was 
 born in 1803 in Boston; and Hawthorne 
 in the year succeeding. 
 
 But the year 1809 was to be the red- 
 letter year of the century. Over in Eng- 
 land, all within that darling twelvemonth 
 of the natal gods, were to be born the 
 
The Century in Literature 191 
 
 greatest scientist, the greatest statesman, 
 the greatest poet, the greatest poetess, and 
 the greatest poetical translator that the 
 lavish century bestowed on Anglo-Saxon 
 peoples — Darwin, Gladstone, Tennyson, 
 Elizabeth Barrett* (Browning), and the 
 marvellous Edward Fitzgerald. America 
 was scarcely less favored; for that same 
 bright year bequeathed to us our most bril- 
 liant poet, Poe; our most popular man- 
 of-letters, Holmes; and a statesman to 
 whom impartial history will yet assign a 
 station greater than Gladstone's, and even 
 a place in American literature as the mas- 
 ter of strenuous Shakespearean prose. 
 Longfellow and Whittier were born two 
 years before. Thus early in the century 
 had been mustered, for the most part, 
 those creative and critical forces that were 
 destined to glorify the Victorian era with 
 a splendor only less bright than the spa- 
 
 * Some chronologies give 1806. 
 
192 The Holy Grail 
 
 cious golden days of Good Queen Bess. A 
 dozen years later and the roll of the real 
 immortals was complete, if we except a 
 few brilliant names that belong rather to 
 the new century than to the old. Brown- 
 ing in poetry, Thackeray and Dickens and 
 George Eliot in fiction, Ruskin and Ar- 
 nold and Lowell in essay — add these to 
 the catalogue already cited, and you have 
 the two-score largest names in nineteenth 
 century English literature, and the cen- 
 tury but a score of years old. 
 
 The century in English literature has 
 been marked by three distinguishing ele- 
 mental features — a wide possession of 
 facts, an earnest hunger for truth, and a 
 profound resulting sadness. Let us 
 briefly inquire as to what this means. 
 
 The century opened in a whirlwind of 
 revolution. It was the time of a new Re- 
 naissance; a time only to be compared 
 with the wonderful revival of thought that 
 
The Century in Literature 193 
 
 followed the downfall of Constantinople 
 in 1453. Rousseau's " Contrat Social," 
 and the " Doctrine of the Rights of Man," 
 formulated by Rousseau's disciples, were 
 the Turks that took France. And the 
 downfall of the French Empire liberated 
 quite as many forces throughout Europe 
 as had escaped through the gates of the 
 Golden Horn. That vast complex move- 
 ment, known as the French Revolution, 
 proved to be one of the greatest stimu- 
 lants that ever quickened the mind of man, 
 — by no means altogether wholesome, let 
 us say, yet none the less mighty for that. 
 Second only to the impetus of the French 
 Revolution was the influence of a single 
 German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. 
 His " Critique of Pure Reason" has 
 shaped the spirit of the age to an extent 
 that cannot be estimated. The mind of 
 the world suddenly seized hold of the 
 magical key of law, — a key to unlock all 
 13 
 
194 The Holy Grail 
 
 riddles. Chaotic nature was quickly re- 
 duced to order, and natural laws patiently 
 traced to their sources yielded veritable 
 Golcondas of facts. Marvellous inven- 
 tions and discoveries sprang into exist- 
 ence from nowhere. The mind of the 
 world has had a solemn, wide sweep of 
 sheer facts. It is as though a seeker in 
 the dark for rare gems had been suddenly 
 set down amid glittering acres of dia- 
 monds, — such is the contrast between the 
 opulence of nineteenth century enlighten- 
 ment and the poverty of the ages just pre- 
 ceding. Naturally, humanity was dazzled 
 and blinded. Old facts seemed unreal or 
 incomparably mean when seen by the side 
 of the new. Moreover, it was felt that 
 the old foundations of facts were faulty 
 and that truth must be searched for anew. 
 In other words, science revolutionized 
 philosophy, overturning inadequate theo- 
 ries with its deluge of irresistible facts, 
 
The Century in Literature 195 
 
 and men were swept from their precious 
 footholds by a rising flood of materialism. 
 Some of them asked the flippant, bitter 
 question, " What is truth?" and were con- 
 tent to float with the tide, careless of aim 
 or of anchorage. But be it said to the 
 everlasting glory of this turbulent age 
 that the great majority of its thoughtful 
 scholars have quested eagerly to set their 
 feet upon the rock of truth beneath the 
 sea of facts, not content to lose faith in 
 the spiritual because they had found such 
 wide knowledge of the material. Quite 
 unlike the century preceding, it has never 
 for a moment been satisfied with " the 
 shows of things." With all of its mani- 
 fold tools and talents it probed search- 
 ingly down through the understood rind 
 of the world towards the deep hidden 
 heart where the truth is. Note how the 
 literary stream of the century shunted off 
 from its strenuous current those bubbles 
 
196 The Holy Grail 
 
 and small surface movements that mur- 
 mured of "art for art's sake." The 
 English literary art of the age has been 
 profoundly concerned with a motive, a 
 deep soul-hunger for truth. The mind 
 has reached out in a wide possession of 
 facts, but the will has driven it onward 
 into a dim and shadowy sphere, where 
 one believes, although he cannot see, that 
 those things dwell which are eternal. 
 This characteristic double chord of patent 
 fact and latent truth is sounded with ma- 
 jestic resonance in those rare verses that 
 are too little known : 
 
 The centre fire heaves underneath the earth, 
 And the earth changes like a human face; 
 The molten ore bursts up among the rocks, 
 Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright 
 In hidden mines, spots barren river beds, 
 Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask — 
 God joys therein. The wroth sea's waves are 
 
 edged 
 With foam, white as the bitter lip of hate, 
 
The Century in Literature 197 
 
 When, in the solitary waste, strange groups 
 Of young volcanoes come up, Cyclops-like, 
 Staring together with their eyes on flame — 
 God tastes a pleasure in their uncouth pride. 
 Then all is still; earth is a wintry clod; 
 But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes 
 Over its breast to waken it, rare verdure 
 Buds tenderly upon rough banks, between 
 The withered tree-roots and the cracks of frost, 
 Like a smile striving with a wrinkled face; 
 The grass grows bright, the boughs are swollen 
 
 with blooms 
 Like chrysalids impatient for the air; 
 The shining dorrs are busy, beetles run 
 Along the furrows, ants make their ado; 
 Above, birds fly in merry flocks, the lark 
 Soars up and up, shivering for very joy; 
 Afar the ocean sleeps ; white fishing gulls 
 Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe 
 Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek 
 Their loves in wood and plain, and God renews 
 His ancient rapture. 
 
 I have quoted this eloquent passage not 
 only because of its aptness to denote the 
 clinging faith in the vague unseen which 
 
198 The Holy Grail 
 
 abides amid the multiplicity of clearly per- 
 ceived material facts, but also because of 
 its pervasive sadness. The poem illus- 
 trates all three of the dominant elements 
 of the century in English literature. The 
 element of melancholy is often the least 
 obtrusive, but the most thoroughly perva- 
 sive of the three. The scope of our knowl- 
 edge has been so vast that it has teased 
 and oppressed the mind. The grip of our 
 faith has been maintained chiefly by sheer 
 force of heart power. In a word, it has 
 been an age of transition, and the soul is 
 always sad when it is not at rest. The 
 renovated home that it will eventually 
 enter will doubtless be a far more stately 
 mansion than the " outgrown shell" it left 
 behind, and sadness is no doubt a good 
 soul-medicine, but the fact remains that 
 a time of passage is a time of travail. 
 Gone is all that brilliant persiflage, that 
 heartless gayety, of the century preceding. 
 
The Century in Literature 199 
 
 Even our gayety is sad and forced. There 
 were those who sought to drive them- 
 selves, fact-bewildered, into an arid desert 
 of universal scepticism, but their mirth 
 was hollow mockery, their laughter only 
 an abnormal sobbing. Byron, rightly 
 read, is one of the saddest of poets. It is 
 as when the French Baudelaire exclaims : 
 " One should always be drunk ! That is 
 all, the whole question. In order not to 
 feel the horrible burden of time, which is 
 breaking your shoulders and bearing you 
 to earth, you must be drunk without cease, 
 on wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose. 
 But get drunk !" Such terrible confessions 
 merely betray the awful pain of the hun- 
 gry heart, the intensity of a desire which 
 has turned at last in the lassitude of dull 
 despair from its quest. 
 
 Those others, great-souled, who yet 
 have persevered, are also immeasurably 
 sad. The best that the best of them can 
 
200 The Holy Grail 
 
 do, with all their strength of grasp and 
 dogged hopefulness, is just to " cleave 
 ever to the sunnier side of doubt" — to 
 " follow The Hleam," which shifts and slips 
 on far-off spiritual landscapes, in lieu of 
 open sunshine near at hand. It has been 
 an age of profound sadness, because the 
 alert mind has opened the whole wide uni- 
 verse to our bewildered ken, and the 
 hungry soul has driven persistently 
 through these multifold dumb shows of 
 things in a passionate thirst for the truth, 
 which should lie beyond, only to find itself 
 as yet in a place of large shadows, be- 
 wildered, afraid and yet hopeful — groping 
 towards a far-off " kindly light." That is 
 what the English literature of the nine- 
 teenth century really means, whether it be 
 the philosophy of Spencer or the criticism 
 of Arnold, the essay of Carlyle or the 
 poetry of Stephen Phillips, the history of 
 Buckle of the fiction of Mrs. Humphrey 
 
The Century in Literature 201 
 
 Ward. " Never," says Paul Desjardins, 
 " have men been more universally sad 
 than in the present time." And one of the 
 most eloquent of living American men of 
 letters adds : " Never was literary art 
 more perfect, more accomplished, more 
 versatile and successful than in the pres- 
 ent age. Never have its laws been more 
 widely understood and its fascinations 
 more potently exercised. Never has 
 it evoked more magical and charming 
 forms to float above an abyss of disen- 
 chantment and nothingness. A gray 
 shadow of melancholy spreads over the 
 questioning, uncertain, disillusioned 
 age." * 
 
 Attainment and the unattainable — 
 these dominant notes of nineteenth cen- 
 tury life produce in literature an all-per- 
 
 * Henry van Dyke, in " The Gospel for an Age 
 of Doubt." 
 
202 The Holy Grail 
 
 vasive minor chord, and almost any repre- 
 sentative author may be studied for the 
 proof thereof. But it is a woman who 
 becomes the veritable sibyl of her age, its 
 greatest representative writer in the strict 
 significance of that term, because with her 
 delicate feminine intuitions she gathered 
 all its subtle influences within herself and 
 then by virtue of a wonderful virile mind 
 set them forth in an eloquent unity. Her 
 knowledge ? It ranged with the sweep of 
 science to the farthest stars, or delved 
 with infinite patience into the musty tomes 
 of the past, wide, deep, and untiring. At 
 the Sunday gatherings in her London 
 home one might meet in a single after- 
 noon such ruling spirits of the century as 
 Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, Tennyson, 
 Browning, Turgenieff, and Richard Wag- 
 ner, with others. Such was the magnetic 
 power of her sympathetic temperament, so 
 great was her capacity for responsiveness, 
 
The Century in Literature 208 
 
 that this homely woman compelled the 
 tribute of giants, and from their store of 
 learning she took the best they had to 
 give. Her books are laden with instruc- 
 tiveness in every line. Her facts were 
 always scientifically correct. One of the 
 most critical of living historical scholars 
 has called her portraiture of mediaeval 
 Florence " a picture executed with an ac- 
 curacy and completeness worthy of an 
 exact scholar/' and this is characteristic, 
 not only of " Romola," but of every book 
 she wrote. And yet, withal, she was 
 profoundly dissatisfied with mere facts. 
 There was an absorbing quest for the 
 truth in every line she penned. Her 
 novels, while not didactic and conse- 
 quently inartistic, were inevitably per- 
 vaded by a moral. Never has pen been 
 moved to a more serious measure, or with 
 more earnest purpose, than the pen of this 
 woman novelist, who probed through 
 
204 The Holy Grail 
 
 facts for the truth. She probed, but she 
 did not find it. She believed it was there 
 to the end, but it always somehow eluded 
 her. One who knew her says that she 
 worked with a " brave despair." Does 
 not this precisely characterize the solemn 
 note that sounds even through her sing- 
 ing? And this same friend has told us 
 how at Cambridge he walked with her in 
 a garden, " on an evening of rainy May ; 
 and she, stirred somewhat beyond her 
 wont, and taking as her text the three 
 words which have been used so often as 
 the inspiring trumpet calls of men, the 
 words God, immortality, duty — pro- 
 nounced, with terrible earnestness, how 
 inconceivable was the first ; how unbeliev- 
 able the second, and yet how peremptory 
 and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, 
 have sterner accents affirmed the sover- 
 eignty of impersonal and unrecompensing 
 law. I listened, and night fell ; her grave, 
 
The Century in Literature 205 
 
 majestic countenance turned towards me 
 like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as 
 though she withdrew from my grasp, one 
 by one, the two scrolls of promise, and 
 left me the third scroll only, awful with 
 inevitable fates." * 
 
 It is as her best interpreter has said: 
 " We must conceive her as an expression 
 of the spirit of the age out of which she 
 grew." He who would gain a clear and 
 unified idea of what the nineteenth cen- 
 tury means in the development of English 
 literature, can on the whole find it best 
 embodied and exemplified in the wise, ear- 
 nest, sombre writings of " George Eliot." 
 And what a contrast to Lady Mary Mon- 
 tagu! 
 
 Pain is symptomatic of life. The eigh- 
 teenth century, with all its gayety, was 
 insensate ; the sad nineteenth century was 
 
 * F. W. H. Myers, Essays. 
 
206 The Holy Grail 
 
 at least alive. No one can gainsay that. 
 And it was growing — growing towards a 
 larger and a fuller life. It was sad be- 
 cause it was a transitional age, but the 
 transition was in the direction of the light. 
 We who greet the twentieth century have 
 our faces towards the sunshine, not the 
 darkness. Our immediate forerunners 
 made real progress in their struggles to- 
 wards the light, and we are the heirs of 
 their travail. The age that is coming, let 
 us predict, will be no less wide in its 
 knowledge, no less eager for wisdom, 
 than the century just gone by, but it will 
 be far less sad. Yet the incoming gladness 
 will not be a mere childish joy, which has 
 never known pain — such was the gayety 
 of a hundred years ago ; it will be rather a 
 deep and abiding peace, that has been won 
 at the cost of tears; it will be the full 
 gladness of manhood. There is a peace 
 of the idler, we might almost say of the 
 
The Century in Literature 207 
 
 coward, and there is the " peace with 
 
 honor" of the man who has battled and 
 won. " Blessed is he that overcomem." 
 The glory of the nineteenth century is the 
 heroic glory of an Abraham, " who 
 against hope believed in hope," laying its 
 embodied treasure on the altar at the be- 
 hest of truth, and going out into far coun- 
 tries of bewilderment for the sake of a fu- 
 ture race, that all the families of the earth 
 might eventually be called blessed, " the 
 heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files 
 of time." Nay, it is rather the splendid 
 tragic glory of a Moses, leading the peo- 
 ple out from the bondage of the idle flesh- 
 pots, through the wilderness, to the verge 
 of the Promised Land, whereinto the 
 great lawgiver might not enter because 
 a Joshua has been summoned as sup- 
 planter. And the spokesman of this 
 Joshua has already uttered the heartening 
 cry of the herald. Just as Robert Burns 
 
208 The Holy Grail 
 
 stood at the close of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury heralding the nineteenth, so Robert 
 Browning lived in the nineteenth century, 
 but was not truly of it, because this poet 
 was also a prophet, living in advance of 
 his age, believing that " the best is yet to 
 be, the last of life, for which the first was 
 made" — bidding us bravely " trust God; 
 see all, nor be afraid!" Tennyson was" 
 the chief poetical exponent of the present, 
 but Browning was the prophet of the fu- 
 ture. Tennyson had wide knowledge. 
 He observed, and observed narrowly — 
 " observed indeed with something akin to 
 the trained scientific eye." Profoundly 
 earnest was he also in his quest for truth, 
 as all his lovers know. But unutterably 
 sad ! One can see that he held to his creed 
 of optimism only through sheer force of 
 will power; even his optimism is sombre. 
 His was " the field of that vague, word- 
 less autumnal sadness that seems to have 
 
Century in Literature 209 
 
 its source in a secret sympathy with some 
 hidden sorrow lying deep in the heart of 
 nature." Therefore he has been recog- 
 nized as the greatest poet of his century, 
 not only because of his supreme mastery 
 of form, and other far greater qualities, 
 but also because he was so utterly its 
 mouthpiece. His words speed straight 
 to the mark, they find immediate re- 
 sponsiveness, they are seized upon and 
 assimilated without effort. Browning's 
 great message, however, overreaches us 
 and eludes us, but we feel that the fault 
 is not with him, it is with us — that he is 
 speaking a truth so large and free that we 
 have not yet grown quite great enough to 
 grasp it. As one has most admirably 
 said : " Tennyson clove the mark at which 
 he aimed, but Browning's arrow, like that 
 of the archer of ancient story, sped in an 
 arc of light, beyond the ken of the gazers, 
 
210 Century in Literature 
 
 to be lost in the overarching heaven." * 
 Nay, not lost, but harbored for a heaven- 
 lier race. With Browning there is all the 
 wonderful wide scope of his contempora- 
 ries, and all of their deep, earnest quest, 
 but of sadness never a whit. Because he 
 had somehow found! He drank from 
 the true " chalice of the grapes of God," 
 he saw the Grail unveiled. Therefore he 
 stands, true herald of the dawn, with his 
 mystical, matchless song — 
 
 The year's at the spring, 
 And day's at the morn; 
 Morning's at seven ; 
 The hill-side's dew-pearled; 
 The lark's on the wing; 
 The snail's on the thorn ; 
 God's in his heaven — 
 All's right with the world! 
 
 * Dixon, " A Tennyson Primer." 
 
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 BEING THE STORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH CENTRED 
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 EPRESENTATIVE characters are selected to stand for 
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