ESSAYS 
 IN CRITICISM 
 
 THIRD SERIES 
 BY 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 EDWARD J. O'BRIEN 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 THE BALL PUBLISHING CO. 
 
 1910 
 

 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Copyright 1910, by 
 
 THE BALL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 CIA:^?1074 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction 5 
 
 On the Modern Element in Literature 35 
 
 Dante and Beatrice 87 
 
 Obermann Ill 
 
 Sainte-Beuve 137 
 
 Eenan 153 
 
 Johnson's Lives 183 
 
 A ^'Friend of God'' 223 
 
 An Eton Boy 249 
 
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 Matthew Arnold published the first series 
 of his Essays in Criticism in 1865. He died 
 in 1888. A few months later, a second se- 
 ries of Essays in Criticism was published. 
 Between the issue of these two series a genera- 
 tion elapsed. Now, in 1910, a third and last 
 series of Essays in Criticism, appears, after an 
 equal lapse of time. 
 
 Of the high critical value of these essays, 
 Time has been the best and kindest judge. 
 To us, as we read them to-day, such essays as 
 those On the Modern Element in Literature 
 and on Oherr/iann have an abiding and pro- 
 phetic truth which raises them at once to the 
 plane of classic criticism. To become classic, 
 criticism must hold a flawless mirror up to na- 
 ture, and interpret adequately what that mir- 
 ror reflects. Judged by this standard, the 
 third series of Essays in Criticism suffers no 
 diminution by comparison with its predeces- 
 sors. In fact, we may surely claim that the 
 essay which opens the volume ranks higher 
 5 
 
6 INTEODUCTION 
 
 than any which have preceded it, since its 
 sympathy and its voice are alike universal in 
 their truth. Matthew Arnold's modesty for 
 a long time prevented its publication, but, at 
 last, after twelve years, he reprinted it in 
 Macmillan's Magazine with an interesting 
 prefatory note. 
 
 The essay On the Modern Element of Lit- 
 erature , he says, ''was delivered as an in- 
 augural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford. 
 It was never printed, but there appeared at 
 the time several comments on it from critics 
 who had either heard it, or heard reports 
 about it. It was meant to be followed and 
 completed by a course of lectures developing 
 the subject entirely, and some of these were 
 given. But the course was broken off because I 
 found my knowledge insufficient for treating 
 in a solid way many portions of the subject 
 chosen. The inaugural lecture, however, 
 treating a portion of the subject where my 
 knowledge was perhaps less insufficient, and 
 where besides my hearers were better able to 
 help themselves out from their own knowledge, 
 is here printed. No one feels the imperfection 
 of this sketchy and generalizing mode of treat- 
 ment, less to my taste now than it was eleven 
 years ago, but the style too, which is that of 
 the doctor rather than the explorer, is a style 
 
INTEODUCTION 7 
 
 whieh I have long since learnt to abandon. 
 Nevertheless, having written much of late 
 about Hellenism and Hebraism, and Hellen- 
 ism being to many people almost an empty 
 name compared with Hebraism, I print this 
 lecture with the hope that it may serve, in the 
 absence of other and fuller illustrations, to 
 give some notion of the Hellenic spirit and its 
 works, and of their significance in the history 
 of the evolution of the human spirit in gen- 
 eral/' 
 
 These words are a pleasing reflection of 
 Arnold's personality, but two generations 
 have proven his instinct to have been false. 
 The essay has passed successfully through a 
 long probation, and Time at last claims toll. 
 
 The three essays on Obermann, Benan, and 
 Sainte-Beuve are, each, significant mile-stones 
 of interpretation, and two generations have 
 preserved their freshness likewise unimpaired. 
 Each carries its message to us to-day, and each 
 reflects most clearly the spirit of its subject. 
 Of the other essays included in the volume, 
 we may say that they fully sustain the repu- 
 tation of Matthew Arnold as one of the few 
 world-critics whose work will stand the endur- 
 ing test of Time. 
 
 The publication of a third series of Ar- 
 nold's Essays in Criticism offers a most fitting 
 
8 INTEODUCTION 
 
 opportunity to pause and test the value and 
 validity of contemporary criticism, to lay it 
 unobtrusively by the side of Arnold's critical 
 contribution, and, looking at it in the spirit 
 of the age, to hazard a forecast of the future. 
 
 Of this opportunity I have endeavoured to 
 take advantage, and if the point of view 
 which I voice should, at first, seem novel, be- 
 lieve that in truth it is as old as Plato and 
 that it can point to high exemplars in the past 
 and present of its theory and practice. Let 
 us keep Arnold present in our minds as an 
 element of our thought, but regard him as 
 a voice crying in the wilderness, uttering 
 many wise words, which are true when sepa- 
 rated from his personality, but now and then 
 unsafe when guided by his pleading heart and 
 tongue. For much of what we say, he has 
 been the precursor, and we owe him an in- 
 calculable debt for starting the critical im- 
 pulse, but he falls short of our ideal in some 
 respects, and occasionally, though seldom, he 
 is antagonistic to it. 
 
 Briefly, the ideal is this : that criticism shall 
 consist in the identification, as far as possible, 
 of the critic with the man whom he criticises, 
 and in the interpretation of the latter 's soul 
 by the critic in terms of imaginative, that is 
 to say, poetic truth. Since the human race 
 
INTRODUCTION ' 9 
 
 is progressing steadily, and since the line of 
 progress lies along the road of sympathy, I 
 think that we may do more than hope : we may 
 predict what the nature of criticism in the fu- 
 ture will be. 
 
 First of all, therefore, we may say that the 
 new criticism will be sympathetic, for this 
 will be essential, if it is to interpret. ''How 
 can a writer adequately interpret the activity 
 of his age when he is not in sympathy with 
 it ? " exclaims Arnold in his essay On the Mod- 
 ern Element in Literature. Yet lack of sym- 
 pathy is our vice, the one great weakness 
 which we have to combat. Lately, the London 
 Times has been bewailing the lack of sym- 
 pathy to be found in modern drama, and 
 a few sentences from its complaint may have 
 their fitness here. ''Most modern writers 
 seem to be reporting upon life as if it were 
 a piece of machinery; and their report is to 
 the effect that it was badly designed from the 
 first, and has long been utterly out of repair. 
 . . . Our modern writers . . . rub 
 the gilt off the gingerbread from a sense of 
 duty, and then tell us that the gingerbread 
 is not worth eating. They exhort us to see 
 things as they are and then represent them 
 as not worth seeing. They tear the veil away 
 only to show that there is nothing behind it. 
 
10 INTEODUCTION 
 
 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
 die.' That is the true moral to be drawn 
 from much of our serious art; and it is little 
 wonder that many draw it and prefer musical 
 comedy. ' ' 
 
 The criticism of to-day only too frequently 
 applies the same point of view to literature, 
 forgetting that books are not corpses, nor 
 criticism a dissecting-room. If the litera- 
 ture of our day is to be mainly criticism, as 
 for a time it must be, apart from the devel- 
 opment of the short-story, let it be, in Ar- 
 nold's phrase, ''a criticism of life," and not, 
 according to the naturalist's point of view, a 
 criticism of death. The criticism of the fu- 
 ture will revolt from this latter ideal, which 
 would define the critic's office as an analysis 
 of death, and will substitute for this defini- 
 tion the true one — that criticism is rather a 
 synthesis of life. "When called upon to 
 choose between poetry and pathology, it will 
 not find it difficult to make a final decision. 
 
 The new criticism will take little account 
 of bodies: it will rather care mainly for souls. 
 Arnold has taught us by example, if not in 
 theory, that personality is almost of para- 
 mount importance as the interpreter of a 
 man's thought and message. Therefore the 
 new criticism will seek personality first of all. 
 
INTEODUCTION 11 
 
 Environment will be held as a topic of little 
 importance for investigation, but the spirit- 
 ual essence of the man will be held of much, 
 I may say, chief, value. This being true, 
 the criticism of the future will follow Ar- 
 nold's example, and view with disfavour and 
 suspicion any over-serious attempt to base 
 literary criticism upon the laws of history, 
 heredity, or physiological psychology. It will 
 not overlook the value of such laws, but the 
 study of them will be kept wholly subsidiary 
 to the critical appreciation of spiritual beauty. 
 The future critic will pay little attention 
 to the so-called ^'higher criticism.' ' Rather 
 will he concern himself with the exercise of 
 the inner criticism — the criticism of life, 
 which is based on the complete identification 
 of critic and subject. In the true sense of 
 the word, such criticism will be impression- 
 istic, but the impression recorded will be 
 based on a sound foundation of critical eth- 
 ics. This ethical standard will save it from 
 being spasmodic or crude, quite as much as 
 its impressionistic method will rescue it from 
 the danger of pedantry and an excessively 
 academic standard. This assumption of im- 
 pressionism does not imply that the criticism 
 of the future will be, to employ Mr. Brown- 
 ell 's piquant phrase, an ' ' irresponsible exercise 
 
12 INTEODUCTION 
 
 of the nervous system. ' ' It will be nervous, I 
 grant you, if by nervous you mean sensitive 
 in feeling and expression, but it will be lucid 
 in its reasoning, following, somewhat cau- 
 tiously however, Arnold as a guide. It will 
 assume that an attitude of detachment on the 
 critic 's part implies a totally erroneous theory 
 of criticism, and it will keep in mind the fact 
 that Arnold himself is at his best, when he 
 forgets his own identity, and enters wholly 
 into the spirit of his subject. In criticism, 
 as in life, since loth are quests, you must lose 
 yourself to find yourself. 
 
 Complete identification implies possession 
 of all the theological virtues. The criticism 
 of the future will value highly faith and hope, 
 for it will be founded upon them, but it will 
 be particularly careful not to forget charity. 
 Good taste will remind the critic of this duty, 
 and also warn him not to strive after effect 
 for effect's sake. The new criticism will not 
 ignore, to be sure, the frequent value and sal- 
 utary influence of paradox. Far from it. 
 But it will never sacrifice soul to form, nor 
 surrender, under any circumstances, sense to 
 sound. 
 
 Taking care not to overestimate the im- 
 portance of technique in his own work, the 
 future critic will make a consideration of 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 it in his subject subordinate to his efforts at 
 reaching the heart and soul of the man he 
 is studying. He will remember that the man 
 who criticises form only, and, finding the 
 form bad, wholly condemns the work, is es- 
 sentially disproportionate and uncritical in 
 his mental outlook. Curiously enough, Ar- 
 nold has been severely accused of this very 
 fault by no less a critic than Richard Holt 
 Hutton. ''Read," says he, ''his five lectures 
 on translating Homer, and observe how ex- 
 clusively the critic's mind is occupied with 
 the form as distinguished from the substance 
 of the Homeric poetry. Even when he con- 
 cerns himself with the greatest modern poets 
 . . . it is always the style and superficial 
 doctrine of their poetry, not the individual 
 character and unique genius which occupy 
 him." "Superficial doctrine" is delicious. 
 The critic of the future will take warning, 
 and not sin through over-confidence. 
 
 The new criticism will be simple, searching, 
 and salutary. Avoiding metaphysical en- 
 tanglements, it will rely on intuition only 
 so far as that intuition finds its justifica- 
 tion in already established truth. It will 
 therefore be based on tradition and sanc- 
 tion. Its motto will be faith and its 
 watchword romance. It will not he proud 
 
14 INTEODUCTION 
 
 and analyse truth: rather will it he hwm- 
 hle and seek truth. The fact is that con- 
 temporary criticism has fallen into a partial 
 pathetic fallacy. Identifying itself to a 
 greater or less degree with science, it scorns 
 romance and faith, forgetting that faith and 
 romance are the progenitors of science, that 
 Columbus and Bacon, and others such as they, 
 who followed the great quest of life as the 
 critic should follow the great quest of souls, 
 were wholly animated by these two aspects 
 of truth which are really one, and that it is 
 because they saw a wonderful and seemingly 
 impossible vision, and because seeing it they 
 believed, that their achievement has made 
 modern science possible. 
 
 We are apt to forget the existence of truth 
 in our midst, and seeking wildly after it far 
 afield, to fail entirely in our quest. This is 
 to be one message of criticism in the future. 
 We are indeed already beginning to hear it 
 voiced, and already there are many signs of 
 the second spring. Nowhere has the truth 
 been more clearly and searchingly pointed 
 out than by a young American poet of high 
 gifts and high accomplishment, Mr. William 
 Stanley Braithwaite. Sandy ^ Star, printed 
 last year in the Atlantic Monthly, conveys a 
 great message to our generation. 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 "No more from out the sunset. 
 No more across the foam. 
 No more across the windy hills 
 Will Sandy Star come home. 
 
 "He went away to search it 
 
 With a curse upon his tongue: 
 And in his hands the staff of life. 
 Made music as it swung. 
 
 "I wonder if he found it 
 
 And knows the mystery now — 
 Our Sandy Star who went away. 
 With the secret on his brow." 
 
 The new criticism will therefore be intro- 
 spective in its search for truth. It will live 
 neither in the past, nor in the future, but 
 in the present. Living in the present, it will 
 not criticise, in the commonly accepted sense 
 of the word: rather will it appreciate. In 
 other words, it will seek for beauty and not 
 for imperfection. Since the ideal critic must 
 be tolerant, he will not be excessively fas- 
 tidious. No man can unite both qualities. 
 Arnold endeavoured to do so, and failed. To 
 be sure, the future critic will cultivate dis- 
 cretion, but he will not carry this discretion 
 to the point of timidity. 
 
 The new criticism, seeking beauty only, 
 will be positive, and not negative. As a 
 
16 INTEODUCTION 
 
 corollary to this, it will perceive the true 
 meaning of freedom. The future criticism 
 will not confound lubricity (I use the word in 
 a somewhat pleasant sense) with lucidity, nor 
 well-oiled machinery with a clear-flowing cur- 
 rent, nor again, on the other hand, will it 
 mistake anarchy for freedom. It will recog- 
 nise that to be free it is simply necessary to 
 unmanacle the limbs, and that to eliminate 
 the surroundings of life and life 's atmosphere, 
 as Nietzsche and certain of his critical disci- 
 ples have done, is simply to substitute new 
 bonds for old. 
 
 Realising this somewhat elementary truth, 
 the criticism of the future will study before 
 it teaches; and will take little for granted. 
 Since its fundamental object is constructive, 
 it will feel the necessity of ascertaining be- 
 yond the shadow of a doubt that its founda- 
 tion is secure, and will recognise that we are 
 yet children in our apprehension of spiritual 
 truth. In a new and truer sense of the word, 
 it will be inductive on the grand scale, and 
 each new critical revelation of its masters 
 will serve as an additional contribution to the 
 body of our spiritual insight. 
 
 The criticism of the future will, above all 
 else, teach, and the spirit of its teachers will 
 be one of humility and not of pride. Pride 
 
INTEODUCTION 17 
 
 is the vice of critics, and it usually takes 
 the form of excessive urbanity. The new 
 criticism, therefore, in its anxiety to avoid the 
 reproach of provinciality will not fall into 
 the greater fault of excessive urbanity or 
 civility. The moments when Matthew Arnold 
 is most provincial are the very moments when 
 he endeavours consciously to be urbane. 
 Such urbanity savours much of the calcium- 
 light when practised by lesser craftsmen than 
 Arnold. For such as these, there are more 
 effective means of illumination. 
 
 One of these, — perhaps the most effective, 
 — ^is a sense of humour. The new criticism 
 will bear in mind Arnold's utterance in his 
 lecture On the Modern Element in Literature: 
 — ''There is a comic side from which to re- 
 gard humanity as well as a tragic one." It 
 will be genial and fresh in its outlook, and 
 will value highly a sense of humour, knowing 
 that without such a gift, no man, much less a 
 critic, can be quite catholic. 
 
 This sense of humour will carry with it, 
 and perhaps dictate, an instinct for propor- 
 tion, not unmingled with proper dignity. At 
 present, there are two kinds of critics who 
 consider their opportunity for critical ex- 
 pression in two respectively different ways. 
 One class looks upon the exercise of the crit- 
 
18 INTEODUCTION 
 
 ical faculty as a barren heath for him to wan- 
 der on whithersoever he wills: the other as a 
 road leading to a definite goal whither he 
 proposes to conduct his readers. The crit- 
 icism of the future will recognise that the 
 former has no excuse for being, and that the 
 latter outlook only can make for idealistic 
 criticism. 
 
 The manner of the new criticism will be 
 confident, but not self-willed, either in this 
 or in other respects. A sense of proportion 
 should cause the future critic to feel neither 
 superior nor inferior to his subject. Rather 
 should he approach it as nearly on an equal 
 plane as possible, for otherwise he will fail 
 in that identification which he seeks. Henry 
 James in Views and Reviews mentions as Ar- 
 nold's chief merit the fact that he stands on 
 high ground. That he stands on high ground 
 is true, and admirable when he voices general 
 principles, but now and then, though fortu- 
 nately not often, the ground of his criticism 
 is so high that it dwarfs his subject, and he 
 declaims to the atmosphere alone. Lucidity 
 under these conditions is hardly desirable. 
 
 The fact is that Arnold is a reformer be- 
 fore he is a critic, and that this narrows his 
 outlook. No reformer has ever had or can 
 ever have the wide impartial critical mind, 
 
INTEODUCTION 19 
 
 which *'sees life steadily and sees it whole. '^ 
 He is eaten up by the zeal of his task, and 
 he lives detached days. A man may, none 
 the less, be greater as a reformer than as a 
 critic, if he is whole-hearted and not too sane. 
 Matthew Arnold just fell short of universal 
 critical greatness, and the cause of his limita- 
 tion was the very lucidity which he valued so 
 highly and sought so earnestly. The new 
 criticism will therefore not be too eager to 
 reform, nor, remembering Arnold's example, 
 will it be obtrusively didactic. 
 
 Keeping ever before him the ideal of identi- 
 fication, the future critic will not sneer but 
 sympathise. His sympathy will be founded 
 upon faith in men, and he will study men be- 
 cause of this faith that is in him. He will not 
 study, therefore, objectively. He will study 
 subjectively, knowing that the kingdom of 
 God is within. He will therefore treat as sec- 
 ondary the consideration of literary polish 
 on the part of his subject, though he will by 
 no means ignore it as an element of beauty. 
 The critic's first and chief office, however, will 
 he to go directly with keen penetration to 
 the core and soul of the thought and the 
 man. 
 
 This is his mission in life, — to seek, find, 
 interpret, and apply. His criticism will there- 
 
20 INTEODUCTION 
 
 fore be warm and imaginative, rather than 
 cold and reminiscent of the laboratory. 
 
 Curiously enough, Arnold's most direct in- 
 fluence here in America has been on men who 
 have lacked creative imagination. If one 
 were asked who, he thought, would be most 
 likely to be influenced by Matthew Arnold's 
 criticism and literary style, he would be apt 
 to mention such men as Professor Woodberry 
 and Professor Santayana. Certainly the 
 names of President Eliot and Professor Wen- 
 dell would never occur to him, for Arnold is 
 essentially imaginative. These men, to be 
 sure, are often fanciful, but the criticism of 
 the future will demand imagination. Its 
 practitioners, having a clear eye and a sure 
 touch, will be responsible to themselves and 
 to their audience, and will be eminently sane 
 and normal. The criticism of the future will 
 not illustrate and comment: it will express. 
 Discarding realism, it will substitute idealism, 
 perceiving clearly that the realist does not 
 realise, 'but merely analyses, and that it is left 
 to the idealist alone to realise and express. 
 
 Arnold has defined criticism as "a disin- 
 terested endeavour to learn and propagate the 
 best that is known and thought in the world. ' ' 
 Under the rule of the new criticism, the true 
 higher criticism, this definition will practi- 
 
INTEODUCTION 21 
 
 cally stand. One little change in wording 
 there will be. For disinterested, we are learn- 
 ing to substitute the word interested, knowing 
 that greater than all the rest is the gift pecul- 
 iar to St. Paul, the gift of vital spiritual sym- 
 pathy; in other words, the gift of identifica- 
 tion. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me. This does not 
 mean that we must be completely satisfied with 
 the subject of our criticism. On the con- 
 trary, the great virtue in the criticism of 
 given works is, in Arnold's words, "to be 
 perpetually dissatisfied with these works, 
 while they perpetually fall short of a high 
 and perfect ideal." This is the very spirit 
 of the rule. Let us identify ourselves so 
 completely with the artist that we feel with 
 him and in his spirit, his own sense of limita- 
 tion, that we communicate our sympathetic 
 and cooperative stimulus to him, not only en- 
 couraging him, but also seeing more clearly 
 ourselves because of the noble effort. Abil- 
 ity, therefore, on the part of the critic to 
 identify himself with his author, — to assume 
 the author's point of view while preserving 
 his own identity, — ^this shall be the chief dis- 
 tinction of the future critic. By this stand- 
 ard he shall judge others, and by it he shall 
 himself be judged. 
 
22 INTEODUCTION 
 
 The criticism of the future will therefore 
 be in no wise academic. It will be conserva- 
 tive, to be sure, but conservative in the true 
 sense of the word. Eealising the limitations 
 of national affinities, it will, in general, re- 
 serve for its greatest men the field of inter- 
 national criticism, knowing that they alone 
 can interpret other races with adequacy and 
 sympathy. It will exclude from this limita- 
 tion the criticism of work which is universal, 
 but even here it will reserve such criticism in 
 its higher manifestations for the leaders of its 
 thought. 
 
 Lastly, and most important of all, the high- 
 est criticism of the future will be left to the 
 poets. It will require high seership and a 
 special dower, and men shall listen to it as 
 to an intellectual law, finding therein the 
 perfect freedom which their heart desires. 
 Its eminent sanity will stand as a living and 
 permanent proof of the fact that the po- 
 etic temperament is not necessarily erratic, 
 and that one may be possessed by the im- 
 aginative temper without being carried away 
 from sense in a swirl of sound. Matthew 
 Arnold substantially asserts the same fact in 
 his lecture On the Modem Element in Litera- 
 ture, to which I must have recourse once 
 more. '*I shall not, I hope, be thought,'' 
 
INTEODUCTION 23 
 
 says he, 'Ho magnify too much my office if 
 I add, that it is to the poetical literature of 
 an age that we must, in general, look for the 
 most perfect, the most adequate interpreta- 
 tion of that age, — ^for the performance of a 
 work which demands the most energetic and 
 harmonious activity of all the powers of the 
 human mind. ' ' 
 
 Here is a declaration in no uncertain terms 
 of the mission of poetical criticism. I should 
 like to go a step further, and predict that the 
 new criticism will, on the whole, be Gothic, 
 recognising, however, that, as applied to crit- 
 icism, the terms '^ classic" and ''' Gothic" do 
 not necessarily exclude one another. Here 
 I must differ for a moment with a deservedly 
 admired critic, Mr. Ferris Greenslet. In his 
 delicately woven study of James Eussell 
 Lowell, which contains much that is stimulat- 
 ing and more that is true, he v/rites as fol- 
 lows, with Lowell ever before him as a text. 
 *'A man may prefer the Gothic to the classic 
 and still be a good and stimulating critic. 
 But he will hardly take a place upon the su- 
 preme bench of the critical court unless there 
 be imperishably, potently, in his memory the 
 bright forms of classic art as constant touch- 
 stones and exemplars. 
 
 *'The truth is that in Lowell's criticism 
 
24 INTEODUCTION 
 
 there is sometimes a little of the uote of the 
 amateur. He writes habitually more as a 
 reader, a bookman, than as a professional 
 critic. This is one reason why the best of his 
 essays are so freshly delightful. Yet it is 
 also the reason why the body of his criticism 
 is stimulating and suggestive rather than con- 
 vincing, and why some few of his studies do 
 not so much edify as initiate. ' ' 
 
 Now this attitude is essentially uncritical. 
 There is a lurking implication, nowhere pre- 
 cisely expressed, that a ** Gothic" critic must 
 by his nature be somewhat amateurish, and 
 that the critic, to be adequate and convinc- 
 ing, must turn to classical models for the in- 
 terpretation of his vision. 
 
 This is precisely what we should expect to 
 hear from Boileau were he living to-day, and 
 betokens something very like a relapse into 
 an era of Augustanism. If this point of view 
 had been defended by one critic only, I 
 should not have held its utterance to be omi- 
 nous. But when, out of the six American crit- 
 ics whom we value most highly for their acu- 
 men, five declare for this standard, there is 
 cause for anxiety. Mr. Brownell, Mr. More, 
 Mr. Greenslet, Professor Perry, and Mr. 
 Huneker, each representing a quite different 
 and distinct outlook upon life and letters, all 
 
INTEODUCTION 25 
 
 declare for Augustanism, and Professor 
 Woodberry is left alone to defend the lists of 
 romance against all comers. How valiantly 
 he does battle for the right, let his New De- 
 fence of Poetry attest. The title of the vol- 
 ume in which it appears is itself significant, 
 and might serve as a motto for the servants 
 of the lamp, the genii of the new criticism. 
 After all, the purpose of criticism is to read 
 and interpret sympathetically the heart of 
 ma7i to himself. 
 
 This is the ideal, and it yet falls far short 
 of accomplishment. But it is not as far off 
 as it seems. The keenest critics which this 
 age has produced, — Matthew Arnold and 
 Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson and Wal- 
 ter Pater, William Ernest Henley and Ar- 
 thur Symons, Theodore Watts-Dunton and 
 James Russell Lowell, Edmund Clarence 
 Stedman and George Edward Woodberry, to 
 name no others, — have been the poets, and 
 their criticism has been from the poet's point 
 of view. 
 
 To quote from Mr. Brownell: *'What crit- 
 icism lacks, and what will always be a limita- 
 tion to its interest and its power, is the ele- 
 ment of beauty which it of necessity largely 
 foregoes in its concentration upon truth. It 
 is less potent and persuasive than poetry, than 
 
26 INTEODUCTION 
 
 romance, not because in dealing with litera- 
 ture rather than directly with life it occu- 
 pies a lower or less vital field, but because its 
 province lies outside the realm of all those 
 puissant aids to cogency and impressiveness 
 that appeal to the sense of beauty and accord- 
 ingly influence so powerfully not only the in- 
 tellect but the emotions as well/' 
 
 Mr. Brownell may dislike being quoted on 
 this subject, for in a vital sense these 
 words are an admission of limitation. That 
 this limitation is not personal, but largely 
 self-inflicted, not only in his case but in 
 that of many other deservedly eminent crit- 
 ics, is a point which he might dispute, but 
 which I feel to be inevitably true. Why 
 should not criticism deal with life, and con- 
 sider literature only as a mirror in which 
 its permanent and fixed reflection may be 
 studied ? Matthew Arnold keeps insisting, as 
 the new criticism will insist, that the object 
 of criticism is to persuade. If the most po- 
 tent instrument of persuasion is the poetic 
 and romantic impulse, as Mr. Brownell admits 
 it to be, then by all means let us employ it in 
 preference to any other. 
 
 After all, the poet's outlook upon life can 
 be the only true one, for the poet alone is 
 consummately dowered with sympathetic in- 
 
INTRODUCTION 27 
 
 sight, and his gift, if not misapplied, is the 
 very gift which the critic should possess above 
 all others. 
 
 When I speak of the poets as the critics 
 of the future, I, of course, only refer to those 
 who, in Arnold's words, *'see life steadily, 
 and see it whole." Such critics will not see 
 truth by chance flashes of an uncontrolled in- 
 sight, (though this sort of insight is better 
 than none at all), but will rather take life 
 quietly and simply, seeing beauty rather than 
 seeking it. The ''poet" of the pornographic 
 mind and tongue will have no share in this 
 work, and the future critic will bear in mind 
 those noble words of Matthew Arnold, taken 
 from the lecture On the Modern Element in 
 Literature which is destined to be so much 
 quoted and discussed. "The human race," 
 says he, "has the strongest, the most invin- 
 cible tendency to live, to develop itself. It 
 retains, it clings to what fosters its life, what 
 favours its development, to the literature 
 which exhibits it in its vigour; it rejects, it 
 abandons what does not foster its develop- 
 ment, the literature which exhibits it arrested 
 and decayed." 
 
 Such words as these should serve as a warn- 
 ing to certain journalistic poets who almost 
 form a pathological school, and whose work. 
 
28 INTRODUCTION 
 
 heady with wine, is a sure portent of disinte- 
 gration. The criticism of the future will not 
 identify itself with such as these. It will be 
 an academy, not a forum or arena. 
 
 Had we no other poets, we might despair of 
 the literary issue. But to-day it is America 
 and not England whose genuine poetry shows 
 promise and an unclouded vision. Now here 
 is a new field for its poetic energy, a field 
 which can reach and teach many more than 
 the books of song. 
 
 Is not the application worthy of a trial? 
 Some, consciously or unconsciously, are ex- 
 pressing themselves in this new mode, and 
 proving that the barrier between creation and 
 criticism is purely an imaginary one, which 
 consequently never did nor could stand. 
 Others, doubtless, lie hidden in ambush. Con- 
 ditions in America are surely ripe for such a 
 movement. In that lecture O71 the Modern 
 Element in Literature, which I here permit 
 myself to quote for the last time, Matthew 
 Arnold delivered his mind of these mighty 
 words. 
 
 ''One of the noblest channels of Athenian 
 life, that of political activity, had begun to 
 narrow and to dry up. That was the true 
 catastrophe of the ancient world : it was then 
 that the oracles of the ancient world should 
 
INTRODUCTION 29 
 
 have become silent, and that its gods should 
 have forsaken their temples; for from that 
 date the intellectual and spiritual life of 
 Greece was left without an adequate material 
 basis of political and practical life; and both 
 began inevitably to decay. The opportunity 
 of the ancient world was then lost, never to 
 return; for neither the Macedonian nor the 
 Roman world, which possessed an adequate 
 material basis, possessed, like the Athens of 
 earlier times, an adequate intellect and soul to 
 inform and inspire them; and there was left 
 of the ancient world, when Christianity ar- 
 rived, of Greece only a head without a body, 
 and of Rome only a body without a soul. ' ' 
 
 These words, though Arnold knew it not, 
 were written for us. In the United States, the 
 channel of political activity is more active than 
 it has ever been before, and the opportunity 
 to interpret life is correspondingly great. 
 
 To-day we are living in an age of faith, and 
 we believe in the plenary inspiration of plen- 
 ary endeavour. Because we have this faith, 
 we are peculiarly qualified to undertake the 
 task. Beginning modestly, we shall grow in 
 sympathy, and growing in sympathy, shall 
 develop the critical temper. Developing thus, 
 our effort shall spell progress: not the physical 
 progress of science and knowledge, but the 
 
30 INTEODUCTION 
 
 spiritual progress of insight and wisdom. 
 Here there will be no room for the pessimist : 
 the battle will be to the strong. 
 
 Since the present creative impulse has all 
 but ceased, it would surely seem as if the time 
 for testing had begun. May we not turn to 
 that with the readier vigour, and let this new 
 and higher criticism carry us over the shoals ? 
 Its result should be a stimulated energy, which 
 would flow into creative work, and save us 
 from relapsing into an era of formalism and 
 Augustanism. Let us preserve while there is 
 yet time what creative energy is left to us, for 
 a critical purpose, and employ this purpose as 
 a stimulant which shall ultimately make our 
 work result in a renewed and greater creative 
 effort. Doing so, we shall conform to the 
 spirit of our age, but, conforming outwardly 
 and following the current till we ultimately 
 reach a favourable situation, we shall turn and 
 master it. 
 
 This is our ideal. How near or how far 
 away the realisation of it is, time alone can 
 tell, but that it lies beyond us and straight 
 ahead is very clear. 
 
 Matthew Arnold was one of the last and 
 greatest of the critics under the old law, and 
 as such he was a prophet of the new. The 
 spirit of a later age spake in and through him, 
 
INTEODUCTION 31 
 
 when he penned those noble sentences full of 
 prophetic truth which close his essay on The 
 Function of Criticism at the Present Time. 
 
 "I conclude with what I said at the begin- 
 ning: to have the sense of creative activity is 
 the great happiness and the great proof of 
 being alive, and it is not denied to criticism 
 to have it ; but then criticism must be sincere, 
 simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its 
 knowledge. Then it may have, in no contempt- 
 ible measure, a joyful sense of creative ac- 
 tivity ; a sense which a man of insight and con- 
 science will prefer to what he might derive 
 from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inade- 
 quate creation. And at some epochs no other 
 creation is possible. 
 
 * * Still in full measure, the sense of creative 
 activity belongs only to genuine creation; in 
 literature we must never forget that. But 
 what true man of letters ever can forget it? 
 It is no such common matter for a gifted na- 
 ture to come into possession of a current of 
 true and living ideas, and to produce amidst 
 the inspiration of them, that we are likely to 
 understate it. The epochs of ^schylus and 
 Shakespeare make us feel their preeminence. 
 In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true 
 life of literature: there is the promised land, 
 towards which criticism can onlv beckon. 
 
32 INTRODUCTION 
 
 That promised land it will not be ours to enter, 
 and we shall die in the wilderness : but to have 
 desired to enter it, to have saluted it from 
 afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction 
 among contemporaries ; it will certainly be the 
 best title to esteem with posterity. ' ' 
 
 Edward J. 'Brien. 
 March 23, 1910. 
 
ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT 
 IN LITERATURE 
 
ON THE MODEEN ELEMENT 
 IN LITEEATURE 
 
 IT is related in one of those legends 
 wliicli illustrate the history of Bud- 
 dhism, that a certain disciple once 
 presented himself before his master, 
 Buddha, with the desire to be permitted 
 to undertake a mission of peculiar 
 difficulty. The compassionate* teacher 
 represented to him the obstacles to be 
 surmounted and the risks to be run. 
 Pourna — so the disciple was called — 
 insisted, and replied, with equal humil- 
 ity and adroitness, to the successive 
 objections of his adviser. Satisfied at 
 last by his answers of the fitness of his 
 disciple, Buddha accorded to him the 
 desired permission; and dismissed him 
 to his task with these remarkable words, 
 nearly identical with those in which he 
 35 
 
36 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 himself is said to have been admonished 
 by a divinity at the ontset of his own 
 career: — ^^Go then, Pourna/' are his 
 words; ^^ having been delivered, deliver; 
 having been consoled, console; being ar- 
 rived thyself at the farther bank, en- 
 able others to arrive there also." 
 
 It was a moral deliverance, eminently, 
 of which the great Oriental reformer 
 spoke; it was a deliverance from the 
 pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfish- 
 ness, which impair the moral activity of 
 man — a deliverance which is demanded 
 of all individuals and in all ages. But 
 there is another deliverance for the 
 human race, hardly less important, in- 
 deed, than the first — for in the enjoy- 
 ment of both united consists man^s true 
 freedom — but demanded far less uni- 
 versally, and even more rarely and 
 imperfectly obtained; a deliverance 
 neglected, apparently hardly conceived, 
 in some ages, while it has been pursued 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 37 
 
 with earnestness in others, which de- 
 rive from that very pursuit their pecul- 
 iar character. This deliverance is an 
 intellectual deliverance. 
 
 An intellectual deliverance is the 
 peculiar demand of those ages which 
 are called modern; and those nations 
 are said to be imbued with the modern 
 spirit most eminently in which the de- 
 mand for such a deliverance has been 
 made with most zeal, and satisfied with 
 most completeness. Such a deliverance 
 is emphatically, whether we will or no, 
 the demand of the age in which we our- 
 selves live. All intellectual pursuits 
 our age judges according to their power 
 of helping to satisfy this demand ; of all 
 studies it asks, above all, the question, 
 how far they can contribute to this de- 
 liverance. 
 
 I propose, on this my first occasion of 
 speaking here,^ to attempt such a gen- 
 
 1 Published in 1869. 
 
38 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 eral survey of ancient classical litera- 
 ture and history as may afford us 
 the conviction — in presence of the 
 doubts so often expressed of the profit- 
 ableness, in the present day, of our 
 study of this literature — that, even ad- 
 mitting to their fullest extent the 
 legitimate demands of our age, the 
 literature of ancient Greece is, even for 
 modern times, a mighty agent of intel- 
 lectual deliverance; even for modern 
 times, therefore, an object of indestruc- 
 tible interest. 
 
 But first let us ask ourselves why the 
 demand for an intellectual deliverance 
 arises in such an age as the present, 
 and in what the deliverance itself con- 
 sists? The demand arises, because our 
 present age has around it a copious and 
 complex present, and behind it a copious 
 and complex past; it arises, because the 
 present age exhibits to the individual 
 man who contemplates it the spectacle 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 39 
 
 of a vast multitude of facts awaiting 
 and inviting his comprehension. The 
 deliverance consists in man's compre- 
 hension of this present and past. It 
 begins when our mind begins to enter 
 into possession of the general ideas 
 which are the law of this vast multi- 
 tude of facts. It is perfect when we 
 have acquired that harmonious acquies- 
 cence of mind which we feel in con- 
 templating a grand spectacle that is 
 intelligible to us ; when we have lost that 
 impatient irritation of mind which we 
 feel in presence of an immense, moving, 
 confused spectacle which, while it per- 
 petually excites our curiosity, perpetu- 
 ally baffles our comprehension. 
 
 This, then, is what distinguishes cer- 
 tain epochs in the history of the human 
 race, and our own amongst the number ; 
 — on the one hand, the presence of a 
 significant spectacle to contemplate; on 
 the other hand, the desire to find the 
 
40 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 true point of view from which to con- 
 template this spectacle. He who has 
 found that point of view, he who ad- 
 equately comprehends this spectacle, has 
 risen to the comprehension of his age: 
 he who conununicates that point of view 
 to his age, he who interprets to it that 
 spectacle, is one of his age's intellectual 
 deliverers. 
 
 The spectacle, the facts, presented for 
 the comprehension of the present age, 
 are indeed immense. The facts consist 
 of the events, the institutions, the 
 sciences, the arts, the literatures, in 
 which human life has manifested itself 
 up to the present time: the spectacle is 
 the collective life of humanity. And 
 everywhere there is connexion, every- 
 where there is illustration: no single 
 event, no single literature, is adequately 
 comprehended except in its relation to 
 other events, to other literatures. The 
 literature of ancient Greece, the litera- 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 41 
 
 ture of the Christian Middle Age, so 
 long as they are regarded as two 
 isolated literatures, two isolated growths 
 of the human spirit, are not adequately 
 comprehended; and it is adequate com- 
 prehension which is the demand of the 
 present age. ^^We must compare, '^ — 
 the illustrious Chancellor of Cambridge ^ 
 said the other day to his hearers at 
 Manchester, — ^^we must compare the 
 works of other ages with those of our 
 own age and country; that, while we 
 feel proud of the immense development 
 of knowledge and power of production 
 which we possess, we may learn humil- 
 ity in contemplating the refinement of 
 feeling and intensity of thought mani- 
 fested in the works of the older schools/' 
 To know how others stand, that we 
 may know how we ourselves stand; 
 and to know how we ourselves stand, 
 that we may correct our mistakes 
 
 2 The late Prince Consort. — M. A. 
 
42 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 and achieve our deliverance — that is our 
 problem. 
 
 But all facts, all the elements of the 
 spectacle before us, have not an equal 
 value — do not merit a like attention: 
 and it is well that they do not, for no 
 man would be adequate to the task of 
 thoroughly mastering them all. Some 
 have more significance for us, others 
 have less ; some merit our utmost atten- 
 tion in all their details, others it is 
 sufficient to comprehend in their general 
 character, and then they may be dis- 
 missed. 
 
 What facts, then, let us ask ourselves, 
 what elements of the spectacle before 
 us, will naturally be most interesting to 
 a highly developed age like our own, to 
 an age making the demand which we 
 have described for an intellectual de- 
 liverance by means of the complete 
 intelligence of its own situation? Evi- 
 dently, the other ages similarly de- 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 43 
 
 veloped, and making the same demand. 
 And what past literature will naturally 
 be most interesting to such an age as 
 our own? Evidently, the literatures 
 which have most successfully solved for 
 their ages the problem which occupies 
 ours: the literatures which in their day 
 and for their own nation have ade- 
 quately comprehended, have adequately 
 represented, the spectacle before them. 
 A significant, a highly-developed, a cul- 
 minating epoch, on the one hand, — a 
 comprehensive, a commensurate, an 
 adequate literature, on the other, — these 
 will naturally be the objects of deepest 
 interest to our modern age. Such an 
 epoch and such a literature are, in fact, 
 modern, in the same sense in which our 
 own age and literature are modern; 
 they are founded upon a rich past and 
 upon an instructive fulness of experi- 
 ence. 
 
 It may, however, happen that a great 
 
44 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 epoch is without a perfectly adequate 
 literature; it may happen that a great 
 age, a great nation, has attained a re- 
 markable fulness of political and social 
 development, without intellectually tak- 
 ing the complete measure of itself, 
 without adequately representing that 
 development in its literature. In this 
 case, the epoch , the nation itself, will 
 still be an object of the greatest interest 
 to us ; but the literature will be an object 
 of less interest to us: the facts, the 
 material spectacle, are there; but the 
 contemporary view of the facts, 
 the intellectual interpretation, are in- 
 ferior and inadequate. 
 
 It may happen, on the other hand, 
 that great authors, that a powerful 
 literature, are found in an age and 
 nation less great and powerful than 
 themselves ; it may happen that a litera- 
 ture, that a man of genius, may arise 
 adequate to the representation of a 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 45 
 
 greater, a more highly developed age 
 than that in which they appear; it may 
 happen that a literature completely 
 interprets its epoch, and yet has some- 
 thing over; that it has a force, a rich- 
 ness, a geniality, a power of view which 
 the materials at its disposition are in- 
 sufficient adequately to employ. In such 
 a case, the literature will be more in- 
 teresting to us than the epoch. The 
 interpreting power, the illuminating and 
 revealing intellect, are there; but the 
 spectacle on which they throw their 
 light is not fully worthy of them. 
 
 And I shall not, I hope, be thought to 
 magnify too much my office if I add, 
 that it is to the poetical literature of 
 an age that we must, in general, look 
 for the most perfect, the most adequate 
 interpretation of that age, — for the 
 performance of a work which demands 
 the most energetic and harmonious 
 activity of all the powers of the human 
 
46 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 mind. Because that activity of the 
 whole mind, that genius, as Johnson 
 nobly describes it, ^^ without which judg- 
 ment is cold and knowledge is inert; 
 that energy which collects, combines, 
 amplifies, and animates," is in poetry at 
 its highest stretch and in its most 
 energetic exertion. 
 
 What we seek, therefore, what will 
 most enlighten us, most contribute to 
 our intellectual deliverance, is the union 
 of two things; it is the coexistence, the 
 simultaneous appearance, of a great 
 epoch and a great literature. 
 
 Now the culminating age in the life 
 of ancient Greece I call, beyond ques- 
 tion, a great epoch ; the life of Athens in 
 the fifth century before our era I call 
 one of the highly developed, one of the 
 marking, one of the modern periods in 
 the life of the whole human race. It 
 has been said that the ^^ Athens of 
 Pericles was a vigorous man, at the 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 47 
 
 summit of his bodily strength and 
 mental energy/' There was the utmost 
 energy of life there, public and private ; 
 the most entire freedom, the most un- 
 prejudiced and intelligent observation 
 of human affairs. Let us rapidly ex- 
 amine some of the characteristics which 
 distinguish modern epochs; let us see 
 how far the culminating century of 
 ancient Greece exhibits them; let us 
 compare it, in respect of them, with a 
 much later, a celebrated century; let us 
 compare it with the age of Elizabeth in 
 our own country. 
 
 To begin with what is exterior. One 
 of the most characteristic outward 
 features of a modern age, of an age of 
 advanced civilization, is the banishment 
 of the ensigns of war and bloodshed 
 from the intercourse of civil life. 
 Crime still exists, and wars are still 
 carried on ; but within the limits of civil 
 life a circle has been formed within 
 
48 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 which man can move securely, and de- 
 velop the arts of peace uninterruptedly. 
 The private man does not go forth to 
 his daily occupation prepared to assail 
 the life of his neighbour or to have to 
 defend his own. With the disappear- 
 ance of the constant means of offence 
 the occasions of offence diminish; 
 society at last acquires repose, confi- 
 dence, and free activity. An important 
 inward characteristic, again, is the 
 growth of a tolerant spirit; that spirit 
 which is the offspring of an enlarged 
 knowledge; a spirit patient of the di- 
 versities of habits and opinions. Other 
 characteristics are the multiplication of 
 the conveniences of life, the formation 
 of taste, the capacity for refined pur- 
 suits. And this leads us to the supreme 
 characteristic of all: the intellectual 
 maturity of man himself; the tendency 
 to observe facts with a critical spirit; 
 to search for their law, not to wander 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 49 
 
 among them at random; to judge by 
 the rule of reason, not by the impulse 
 of prejudice or caprice. 
 
 Well, now, with respect to the pres- 
 ence of all these characteristics in the 
 age of Pericles, we possess the explicit 
 testimony of an immortal work, — of the 
 history of Thucydides. *^The Athen- 
 ians first,'' he says, — speaking of the 
 gradual development of Grecian society 
 up to the period when the Peloponnesian 
 war commenced — *Hhe Athenians first 
 left oif the habit of wearing arms:" 
 that is, this mark of superior civiliza- 
 tion had, in the age of Pericles, become 
 general in Greece, had long been visible 
 at Athens. In the time of Elizabeth, 
 on the other hand, the wearing of arms 
 was universal in England and through- 
 out Europe. Again, the conveniences, 
 the ornaments, the luxuries of life, had 
 become common at Athens at the time 
 of which we are speaking. But there 
 
50 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 had been an advance even beyond this; 
 there had been an advance to that per- 
 fection, that propriety of taste which 
 proscribes the excess of ornament, the 
 extravagance of luxury. The Athenians 
 had given up, Thucydides says, had 
 given up, although not very long before, 
 an extravagance of dress and an excess 
 of personal ornament which, in the first 
 flush of newly-discovered luxury, had 
 been adopted by some of the richer 
 classes. The height of civilization in 
 this respect seems to have been at- 
 tained; there was general elegance and 
 refinement of life, and there was sim- 
 plicity. What was the case in this 
 respect in the Elizabethan age? The 
 scholar Casaubon, who settled in Eng- 
 land in the reign of James I., bears 
 evidence to the want here, even at that 
 time, of conveniences of life which 
 were already to be met with on the 
 continent of Europe. On the other 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 51 
 
 hand, the taste for fantastic, for ex- 
 cessive personal adornment, to which 
 the portraits of the time bear testimony, 
 is admirably set forth in the work of a 
 great novelist, who was also a very 
 truthful antiquarian — in the **Kenil- 
 worth" of Sir Walter Scott. We all 
 remember the description, in the thir- 
 teenth and fourteenth chapters of the 
 second volume of **Kenilworth," of the 
 barbarous magnificence, the ** fierce 
 vanities," of the dress of the period. 
 
 Pericles praises the Athenians that 
 they had discovered sources of recrea- 
 tion for the spirit to counterbalance 
 the labours of the body : compare these, 
 compare the pleasures which charmed 
 the whole body of the Athenian people 
 through the yearly round of their fes- 
 tivals with the popular shows and 
 pastimes in ^^Kenilworth." *^We have 
 freedom," says Pericles, *^for individ- 
 ual diversities of opinion and character; 
 
52 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 we do not take offense at the tastes 
 and habits of our neighbour if they 
 differ from our own.'' Yes, in Greece, 
 in the Athens of Pericles, there is tol- 
 eration; but in England, in the Eng- 
 land of the sixteenth century? — the 
 Puritans are then in full growth. So 
 that with regard to these characteristics 
 of civilization of a modern spirit which 
 we have hitherto enumerated, the supe- 
 riority, it will be admitted, rests with 
 the age of Pericles. 
 
 Let us pass to what we said was the 
 supreme characteristic of a highly de- 
 veloped, a modern age — the manifesta- 
 tion of a critical spirit, the endeavour 
 after a rational arrangement and appre- 
 ciation of facts. Let us consider one 
 or two of the passages in the masterly 
 introduction which Thucydides, the con- 
 temporary of Pericles, has prefixed to 
 his history. What was his motive in 
 choosing the Peloponnesian War for his 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 53 
 
 subject? Because it was, in his opinion, 
 the most important, the most instructive 
 event which had, up to that time, hap- 
 pened in the history of mankind. What 
 is his effort in the first twenty-three 
 chapters of his history? To place in 
 their correct point of view all the facts 
 which had brought Grecian society to 
 the point at which that dominant event 
 found it; to strip these facts of their 
 exaggeration, to examine them critic- 
 ally. The enterprises undertaken in 
 the early times of Greece were on a 
 much smaller scale than had been com- 
 monly supposed. The Greek chiefs 
 were induced to combine in the ex- 
 pedition against Troy, not by their 
 respect for an oath taken by them all 
 when suitors to Helen, but by their 
 respect for the preponderating influ- 
 ence of Agamemnon; the siege of Troy 
 had been protracted not so much by the 
 valour of the besieged as by the in- 
 
54 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 adequate mode of warfare necessitated 
 by the want of funds of the besiegers. 
 No doubt Thueydides' criticism of the 
 Trojan war is not perfect; but observe 
 how in these and many other points he 
 labours to correct popular errors, to 
 assign their true character to facts, 
 complaining, as he does so, of men's 
 habit of uncritical reception of current 
 stories. *^So little a matter of care to 
 most men,'' he says, ^4s the search 
 after truth, and so inclined are they to 
 take up any story which is ready to 
 their hand." ^*He himself," he con- 
 tinues, **has endeavoured to give a true 
 picture, and believes that in the main 
 he has done so. For some readers his 
 history may want the charm of the un- 
 critical, half-fabulous narratives of 
 earlier writers; but for such as desire 
 to gain a clear knowledge of the past, 
 and thereby of the future also, which 
 will surely, after the course of human 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 55 
 
 things, represent again hereafter, if not 
 the very image, yet the near resem- 
 blance of the past — if such shall judge 
 my work to be profitable, I shall be well 
 content." 
 
 What language shall we properly call 
 this? It is modern language; it is the 
 language of a thoughtful philosophic 
 man of our own days ; it is the language 
 of Burke or Niebuhr assigning the true 
 aim of history. And yet Thucydides is 
 no mere literary man; no isolated 
 thinker, speaking far over the heads of 
 his hearers to a future age — ^no : he was 
 a man of action, a man of the world, 
 a man of his time. He represents, at 
 its best indeed, but he represents, the 
 general intelligence of his age and 
 nation; of a nation the meanest citizens 
 of which could follow with comprehen- 
 sion the profoundly thoughtful speeches 
 of Pericles. 
 
 Let us now turn for a contrast to a 
 
56 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 historian of the Elizabethan age, also 
 a man of great mark and ability, also 
 a man of action, also a man of the 
 world. Sir Walter Ealeigh. Sir Walter 
 Ealeigh writes the *^ History of the 
 World,'' as Thucydides has written the 
 *^ History of the Peloponnesian War"; 
 let US hear his language; let us mark 
 his point of view; let us see what prob- 
 lems occur to him for solution. '* See- 
 ing," he says, *Hhat we digress in all 
 the ways of our lives — ^yea, seeing the 
 life of man is nothing else but digres- 
 sion — I may be the better excused in 
 writing their lives and actions." What 
 are the preliminary facts which he 
 discusses, as Thucydides discusses the 
 Trojan War and the early naval power 
 of Crete, and which are to lead up to 
 his main inquiry? Open the table of 
 contents of his first volume. You will 
 find: — *'0f the firmament, and of the 
 waters above the firmament, and 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 57 
 
 whetlier there be any crystalline Heaven, 
 or any primum mobile." You will 
 then find:— *^ Of Fate, and that the 
 stars have great influence, and that 
 their operations may diversely be pre- 
 vented or furthered." Then you come 
 to two entire chapters on the place of 
 Paradise, and on the two chief trees in 
 the garden of Paradise. And in what 
 style, with what power of criticism, does 
 Raleigh treat the subjects so selected? 
 I turn to the 7th section of the third 
 chapter of his first book, which treats 
 **0f their opinion which make Para- 
 dise as high as the moon, and of others 
 which make it higher than the middle 
 region of the air." Thus he begins 
 the discussion of this opinion: — 
 ** Whereas Beda saith, and as the 
 schoolmen affirm Paradise to be a place 
 altogether removed from the knowledge 
 of men (^ locus a cognitione hominum 
 remotissimus'), and Barcephas con- 
 
58 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ceived that Paradise was far in the 
 east, but mounted above the ocean and 
 all the earth, and near the orb of the 
 moon (which opinion, though the school- 
 men charge Beda withal, yet Pererius 
 lays it off from Beda, and his master 
 Eabanus) ; and whereas Eupertus in 
 his geography of Paradise doth not 
 much differ from the rest, but finds it 
 seated next or nearest Heaven — ". So 
 he states the error, and now for his own 
 criticism of it. ** First, such a place 
 cannot be commodious to live in, for 
 being so near the moon it had been too 
 near the sun and other heavenly bodies. 
 Secondly, it must have been too joint 
 a neighbour to the element of fire. 
 Thirdly, the air in that region is so 
 violently moved and carried about with 
 such swiftness as nothing in that 
 place can consist or have abiding. 
 Fourthly, — " but what has been quoted 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 59 
 
 is surely enough, and there is no use in 
 continuing. 
 
 Which is the ancient here, and which 
 is the modern? Which uses the lan- 
 guage of an intelligent man of our own 
 days'? which a language wholly ob- 
 solete and unfamiliar to us 1 Which has 
 the rational appreciation and control of 
 his facts? which wanders among them 
 helplessly and without a clue? Is it 
 our own countryman, or is it the Greek? 
 And the language of Ealeigh affords a 
 fair sample of the critical power, of 
 the point of view, possessed by the 
 majority of intelligent men of his day; 
 as the language of Thucydides affords 
 us a fair sample of the critical power 
 of the majority of intelligent men in 
 the age of Pericles. 
 
 Well, then, in the age of Pericles we 
 have, in spite of its antiquity, a highly- 
 developed, a modern, a deeply interest- 
 
60 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ing epoch. Next comes the question: 
 Is this epoch adequately interpreted 
 by its highest literature? Now, the 
 peculiar characteristic of the highest 
 literature — the poetry — of the fifth cen- 
 tury in Greece before the Christian 
 era, is its adequacy; the peculiar charac- 
 teristic of the poetry of Sophocles is 
 its consummate, its unrivalled adequacy; 
 that it represents the highly developed 
 human nature of that age — human 
 nature developed in a number of direc- 
 tions, politically, socially, religiously, 
 morally developed — in its completest 
 and most harmonious development in 
 all these directions; while there is shed 
 over this poetry the charm of that noble 
 serenity which always accompanies true 
 insight. If in the body of Athenians of 
 that time there was, as we have said, 
 the utmost energy of mature manhood, 
 public and private; the most entire 
 freedom, the most unprejudiced and in- 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 61 
 
 telligent observation of human affairs 
 — in Sophocles there is the same en- 
 ergy, the same maturity, the same free- 
 dom, the same intelligent observation; 
 but all these idealized and glorified by 
 the grace and light shed over them from 
 the noblest poetical feeling. And there- 
 fore I have ventured to say of Soph- 
 ocles, that he ''saw life steadily, and 
 saw it whole/' Well may we un- 
 derstand how Pericles — ^how the great 
 statesman whose aim was, it has been 
 said, ''to realize in Athens the idea 
 which he had conceived of human great- 
 ness," and who partly succeeded in his 
 aim — should have been drawn to the 
 great poet whose works are the noblest 
 reflection of his success. ^' 
 
 I assert, therefore, though the de- 
 tailed proof of the assertion must be 
 reserved for other opportunities, that, 
 if the fifth century in Greece before our 
 era is a significant and modern epoch, 
 
62 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 the poetry of that epoch — the poetry of 
 Pindar, ^schylus, and Sophocles — is 
 an adequate representation and inter- 
 pretation of it. 
 
 The poetry of Aristophanes is an 
 adequate representation of it also. 
 True, this poetry regards humanity 
 from the comic side ; but there is a comic 
 side from which to regard humanity 
 as well as a tragic one; and the distinc- 
 tion of Aristophanes is to have regarded 
 it from the true point of view on the 
 comic side. He too, like Sophocles, re- 
 gards the human nature of his time in 
 its fullest development; the boldest 
 creations of a riotous imagination are 
 in Aristophanes, as has been justly said, 
 based always upon the foundation of a 
 serious thought: politics, education, 
 social life, literature — all the great 
 modes in which the human life of his 
 day manifested itself — are the subjects 
 of his thoughts, and of his penetrating 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 63 
 
 comment. There is shed, therefore, 
 over his poetry the charm, the vital 
 freshness, which is felt when man and 
 his relations are from any side ade- 
 quately, and therefore genially, re- 
 garded. Here is the true difference 
 between Aristophanes and Menander. 
 There has been preserved an epitome 
 of a comparison by Plutarch between 
 Aristophanes and Menander, in which 
 the grossness of the former, the ex- 
 quisite truth to life and felicity of ob- 
 servation of the latter, are strongly 
 insisted upon ; and the preference of the 
 refined, the learned, the intelligent men 
 of a later period for Menander loudly 
 proclaimed. ^^What should take a man 
 of refinement to the theatre," asks 
 Plutarch, ^^ except to see one of Menan- 
 der 's plays? When do you see the 
 theatre filled with cultivated persons, 
 except when Menander is acted? and 
 he is the favourite refreshment," he 
 
64 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 continues, ^^to the overstrained mind 
 of the laborious philosopher/' And 
 every one knows the famous line of 
 tribute to this poet by an enthusiastic 
 admirer in antiquity: — *^0 Life and 
 Menander, which of you painted the 
 other?" We remember, too, how a 
 great English stateman is said to have 
 declared that there was no lost work 
 of antiquity which he so ardently de- 
 sired to recover as a play of Menander. 
 Yet Menander has perished, and Aris- 
 tophanes has survived. And to what 
 is this to be attributed? To the in- 
 stinct of self-preservation in humanity. 
 The human race has the strongest, the 
 most invincible tendency to live, to de- 
 velop itself. It retains, it clings to 
 what fosters its life, what favours its 
 development, to the literature which 
 exhibits it in its vigour; it rejects, it 
 abandons what does not foster its de- 
 velopment, the literature which exhibits 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 65 
 
 it arrested and decayed. Now, be- 
 tween the times of Sophocles and Me- 
 nander a great check had befallen the 
 development of Greece;— the failure of 
 the Athenian expedition to Syracuse, 
 and the consequent termination of the 
 Peloponnesian War in a result un- 
 favourable to Athens. The free expan- 
 sion of her growth was checked; one of 
 the noblest channels of Athenian life, 
 that of political activity, had begun to 
 narrow and to dry up. That was the 
 true catastrophe of the ancient world; 
 it was then that the oracles of the 
 ancient world should have become silent, 
 and that its gods should have forsaken 
 their temples; for from that date the 
 intellectual and spiritual life of Greece 
 was left without an adequate material 
 basis of political and practical life; and 
 both began inevitably to decay. The 
 opportunity of the ancient world was 
 then lost, never to return; for neither 
 
66 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 the Macedonian nor the Eoman world, 
 which possessed an adequate material 
 basis, possessed, like the Athens of 
 earlier times, an adequate intellect and 
 soul to inform and inspire them; and 
 there was left of the ancient world, 
 when Christianity arrived, of Greece 
 only a head without a body, and of 
 Eome only a body without a soul. 
 
 It is Athens after this check, after 
 this diminution of vitality, — it is man 
 with part of his life shorn away, refined 
 and intelligent indeed, but sceptical, friv- 
 olous, and dissolute, — which the poetry 
 of Menander represented. The culti- 
 vated, the accomplished might applaud 
 the dexterity, the perfection of the 
 representation — might prefer it to the 
 free genial delineation of a more liv- 
 ing time with which they were no longer 
 in sympathy. But the instinct of hu- 
 manity taught it, that in the one poetry 
 there was the seed of life, in the other 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 67 
 
 poetry the seed of death; and it has 
 rescued Aristophanes, while it has left 
 Menander to his fate. 
 
 In the flowering period of the life of 
 Greece, therefore, we have a culminating 
 age, one of the flowering periods of the 
 life of the human race : in the poetry of 
 that age we have a literature commensu- 
 rate with its epoch. It is most perfectly 
 commensurate in the poetry of Pindar, 
 ^schylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes ; 
 these, therefore, will be the supremely 
 interesting objects in this literature; 
 but the stages in literature which led 
 up to this point of perfection, the stages 
 in literature which led downward from 
 it, will be deeply interesting also. A 
 distinguished person,^ who has lately 
 been occupying himself with Homer, 
 has remarked that an undue preference 
 is given, in the studies of Oxford, to 
 these poets over Homer. The justifica- 
 
 3 Mr. Gladstone.— M. A. 
 
68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 tion of such a preference, even if we put 
 aside all philological considerations, 
 lies, perhaps, in what I have said. 
 Homer himself is eternally interesting; 
 he is a greater poetical power than even 
 Sophocles or ^schylus; but his age is 
 less interesting than himself, ^schy- 
 lus and Sophocles represent an age as. 
 interesting as themselves; the names, 
 indeed, in their dramas are the names 
 of the old heroic world, from which they 
 were far separated ; but these names are 
 taken, because the use of them permits 
 to the poet that free and ideal treat- 
 ment of his characters which the high- 
 est tragedy demands; and into these 
 figures of the old world is poured all 
 the fulness of life and of thought which 
 the new world had accumulated. This 
 new world in its maturity of reason re- 
 sembles our own; and the advantage 
 over Homer in their greater significance 
 for us, which ^schylus and Sophocles 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 69 
 
 gain by belonging to this new worlds 
 more than compensates for their poet- 
 ical inferiority to him. 
 
 Let us now pass to the Roman world. 
 There is no necessity to accumulate 
 proofs that the culminating period of 
 Roman history is to be classed among 
 the leading, the significant, the modern 
 periods of the world. There is univer- 
 sally current, I think, a pretty correct 
 appreciation of the high development 
 of the Rome of Cicero and Augustus; 
 no one doubts that material civilization 
 and the refinements of life were largely 
 diffused in it; no one doubts that cul- 
 tivation of mind and intelligence were 
 widely diffused in it. Therefore, I 
 will not occupy time by showing that 
 Cicero corresponded with his friends in 
 the style of the most accomplished, the 
 most easy letter-writers of modern 
 times; that Caesar did not write history 
 like Sir Walter Raleigh. The great 
 
70 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 period of Eome is, perhaps, on the 
 whole, the greatest, the fullest, the most 
 significant period on record; it is cer- 
 tainly a greater, a fuller period than the 
 age of Pericles. It is an infinitely 
 larger school for the men reared in it; 
 the relations of life are immeasurably 
 multiplied, the events which happen are 
 on an immeasurably grander scale. The 
 facts, the spectacle of this Eoman world, 
 then, are immense: let us see how far 
 the literature, the interpretation of the 
 facts, has been adequate. 
 
 Let us begin with a great poet, a great 
 philosopher, Lucretius. In the case of 
 Thucydides I called attention to the fact 
 that his habit of mind, his mode of 
 dealing with questions, were modern; 
 that they were those of an enlightened, 
 reflecting man among ourselves. Let 
 me call attention to the exhibition in 
 Lucretius of a modern feeling not less 
 remarkable than the modern thought 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 71 
 
 in Thucydides. The predominance of 
 thought, of reflection, in modern epochs 
 is not without its penalties; in the un- 
 sound, in the over-tasked, in the over- 
 sensitive, it has produced the most 
 painful, the most lamentable results; it 
 has produced a state of feeling unknown 
 to less enlightened but perhaps healthier 
 epochs — the feeling of depression, the 
 feeling of ennui. Depression and en- 
 nui; these are the characteristics 
 stamped on how many of the repre- 
 sentative works of modern times! they 
 are also the characteristics stamped 
 on the poem of Lucretius. One of the 
 most powerful, the most solemn pas- 
 sages of the work of Lucretius, one of 
 the most powerful, the most solemn 
 passages in the literature of the whole 
 world, is the well-known conclusion of 
 the third book. With masterly touches 
 he exhibits the lassitude, the incurable 
 tedium which pursue men in their amuse- 
 
72 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ments; with indignant irony he up- 
 braids them for the cowardice with 
 which they cling to a life which for most 
 is miserable; to a life which contains, 
 for the most fortunate, nothing but the 
 old dull round of the same unsatisfying 
 objects for ever presented. ^^A man 
 rushes abroad, '^ he says, ''because he is 
 sick of being at home; and suddenly 
 comes home again because he finds him- 
 self no whit easier abroad. He posts as 
 fast as his horses can take him to his 
 country-seat; when he has got there he 
 hesitates what to do ; or he throws him- 
 self down moodily to sleep, and seeks 
 forgetfulness in that; or he makes the 
 best of his way back to town again with 
 the same speed as he fled from it. Thus 
 every one flies from himself.'^ What a 
 picture of ennuil of the disease of the 
 most modern societies, the most ad- 
 vanced civilizations! "0 man," lie ex- 
 claims again, "the lights of the world. 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 73 
 
 Scipio, Homer, Epicurus, are dead; wilt 
 thou hesitate and fret at dying, whose 
 life is well-nigh dead whilst thou art yet 
 alive ; who consumest in sleep the greater 
 part of thy span, and when awake dron- 
 est and ceasest not to dream; and ear- 
 nest about a mind troubled with base- 
 less fear, and canst not find what it is 
 that aileth thee when thou staggerest 
 like a drunken wretch in the press of thy 
 cares, and welterest hither and thither 
 in the unsteady wandering of thy 
 spirit!" And again: ^'I have noth- 
 ing more than you have already seen," 
 he makes Nature say to man, '^to in- 
 vent for your amusement; eadem sunt 
 omnia semper — all things continue the 
 same for ever." 
 
 Yes, Lucretius is modern; but is he 
 adequate? And how can a man ade- 
 quately interpret the activity of his age 
 when he is not in sympathy with it? 
 Think of the varied, the abundant, the 
 
74 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 wide spectacle of the Eoman life of his 
 day; think of its fulness of occupation, 
 its energy of effort. From these Lu- 
 cretius withdraws himself, and bids his 
 disciples to withdraw themselves; he 
 bids them to leave the business of the 
 world, and to apply themselves ^^na- 
 turam cognoscere rerum — to learn the 
 nature of things ; ' ' but there is no peace, 
 no cheerfulness for him either in the 
 world from which he comes, or in the 
 solitude to which he goes. With stern 
 effort, with gloomy despair, he seems 
 to rivet his eyes on the elementary real- 
 ity, the naked framework of the world, 
 because the world in its fulness and 
 movement is too exciting a spectacle for 
 his discomposed brain. He seems to 
 feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying 
 and alluring; and to deliver himself 
 from it he has to keep perpetually re- 
 peating his formula of disenchantment 
 and annihilation. In reading him, you 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 75 
 
 understand the tradition which repre- 
 sents him as having been driven mad 
 by a poison administered as a love- 
 charm by his mistress, and as having 
 composed his great work in the in- 
 tervals of his madness. Lucretius is, 
 therefore, overstrained, gloom-weighted, 
 morbid ; and he who is morbid is no ade- 
 quate interpreter of his age. 
 
 I pass to Virgil ; to the poetical name 
 which of all poetical names has perhaps 
 had the most prodigious fortune; the 
 name which for Dante, for the Middle 
 Age, represented the perfection of clas- 
 sical antiquity. The perfection of clas- 
 sical antiquity Virgil does not represent; 
 but far be it from me to add my voice to 
 those which have decried his genius; 
 nothing that I shall say is, or can ever 
 be, inconsistent with a profound, an al- 
 most affectionate veneration for him. 
 But with respect to him, as with respect 
 to Lucretius, I shall freely ask the ques- 
 
76 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tion, 75 he adequate? Does he represent 
 the epoch in which he lived, the mighty 
 Eoman world of his time, as the great 
 poets of the great epoch of Greek life 
 represented theirs, in all its fulness, in 
 all its significance^ 
 
 From the very form itself of his great 
 poem, the ^neid, one wonld be led to 
 augur that this was impossible. The 
 epic form, as a form for representing 
 contemporary or nearly contemporary 
 events, has attained, in the poems of 
 Homer, an unmatched, an immortal suc- 
 cess; the epic form as employed by 
 learned poets for the reproduction of the 
 events of a past age has attained a very 
 considerable success. But for this pur- 
 pose, for the poetic treatment of the 
 events of a past age, the epic form is a 
 less vital form than the dramatic form. 
 The great poets of the modern period 
 of Greece are accordingly, as we have 
 seen, the dramatic poets. The chief of 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 77 
 
 these — ^scliylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
 Aristophanes — have survived: the dis- 
 tinguished epic poets of the same period 
 — Panyasis, Choerilus, Antimachus — 
 though praised by the Alexandrian crit- 
 ics, have perished in a common destruc- 
 tion with the undistinguished. And 
 what is the reason of this? It is, that 
 the dramatic form exhibits, above all, 
 the actions of man as strictly determined 
 hy his thoughts and feelings; it exhibits, 
 therefore, what may be always acces- 
 sible, always intelligible, always inter- 
 esting. But the epic form takes a wider 
 range ; it represents not only the thought 
 and passion of man, that which is uni- 
 versal and eternal, but also the forms of 
 outward life, the fashion of manners, 
 the aspects of nature, that which is local 
 or transient. To exhibit adequately 
 what is local and transient, only a wit- 
 ness, a contemporary, can suffice. In 
 the reconstruction f by learning and an- 
 
78 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tiquarian ingenuity, of the local and 
 transient features of a past age, in their 
 representation by one who is not a wit- 
 ness or contemporary, it is impossible 
 to feel the liveliest kind of interest. 
 What, for instance, is the most interest- 
 ing portion of the ^neid, — the portion 
 where Virgil seems to be moving most 
 freely, and therefore to be most ani- 
 mated, most forcible? Precisely that 
 portion which has most a dramatic char- 
 acter; the episode of Dido; that por- 
 tion where locality and manners are 
 nothing — where persons and characters 
 are everything. We might presume 
 beforehand, therefore, that if Virgil, at 
 a time when contemporary epic poetry 
 was no longer possible, had been in- 
 spired to represent human life in its 
 fullest significance, he would not have 
 selected the epic form. Accordingly, 
 what is, in fact, the character of the 
 poem, the frame of mind of the poet? 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 79 
 
 Has the poem the depth, the complete- 
 ness of the poems of ^schylus or Soph- 
 ocles, of those adequate and consum- 
 mate representations of human life? 
 Has the poet the serious cheerfulness of 
 Sophocles, of a man who has mastered 
 the problem of human life, who knows 
 its gravity, and is therefore serious, but 
 who knows that he comprehends it, and 
 is therefore cheerful? Over the whole 
 of the great poem of Virgil, over the 
 whole ^neid, there rests an ineffable 
 melancholy : not a rigid, a moody gloom, 
 like the melancholy of Lucretius; no, a 
 sweet, a touching sadness, but still a 
 sadness; a melancholy which is at once 
 a source of charm in the poem, and a 
 testimony to its incompleteness. Vir- 
 gil, as Niebuhr has well said, expressed 
 no affected self-disparagement, but the 
 haunting, the irresistible self-dissatis- 
 faction of his heart, when he desired 
 on his death-bed that his poem might 
 
80 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 be destroyed. A man of the most deli- 
 cate genius, the most rich learning, but 
 of weak health, of the most sensitive 
 nature, in a great and overwhelming 
 world; conscious, at heart, of his in- 
 adequacy for the thorough spiritual 
 mastery of that world and its interpre- 
 tation in a work of art ; conscious of this 
 inadequacy — the one inadequacy, the 
 one weak place in the mighty Eoman 
 nature! This suffering, this graceful- 
 minded, this finely-gifted man is the 
 most beautiful, the most attractive fig- 
 ure in literary history ; but he is not the 
 adequate interpreter of the great period 
 of Rome. 
 
 We come to Horace : and if Lucretius, 
 if Virgil want cheerfulness, Horace 
 wants seriousness. I go back to what 
 I said of Menander: as with Menander 
 so is it with Horace: the men of taste, 
 the men of cultivation, the men of the 
 world are enchanted with him; he has 
 
THE MODERN ELEMENT 81 
 
 not a prejudice, not an illusion, not a 
 blunder. True ! yet the best men in the 
 best ages have never been thoroughly 
 satisfied with Horace. If human life 
 were complete without faith, without 
 enthusiasm, without energy, Horace, 
 like Menander, would be the perfect in- 
 terpreter of human life: but it is not; 
 to the best, to the most living sense of 
 humanity, it is not; and because it is 
 not, Horace is inadequate. Pedants are 
 tiresome, men of reflection and enthu- 
 siasm are unhappy and morbid; there- 
 fore Horace is a sceptical man of the 
 world. Men of action are without ideas, 
 men of the world are frivolous and scep- 
 tical; therefore Lucretius is plunged in 
 gloom and in stern sorrow. So hard, 
 nay, so impossible for most men is it to 
 develop themselves in their entireness; 
 to rejoice in the variety, the movement 
 of human life with the children of the 
 world; to be serious over the depth, the 
 
82 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 significance of human life with the wise ! 
 Horace warms himself before the tran- 
 sient fire of human animation and hu- 
 man pleasure while he can, and is only 
 serious when he reflects that the fire 
 must soon go out: — 
 
 ''Damna tamen celeres reparant coelestia 
 lunae : 
 Nos, ubi decidimus — " 
 
 **For nature there is renovation, but for 
 man there is none ! ' ' — it is exquisite, but 
 it is not interpretative and fortifying. 
 In the Koman world, then, we have 
 found a highly modern, a deeply signifi- 
 cant, an interesting period — a period 
 more significant and more interesting, 
 because fuller, than the great period of 
 Greece; but we have not a commen- 
 surate literature. In Grreece we have 
 seen a highly modern, a most significant 
 and interesting period, although on a 
 scale of less magnitude and importance 
 than the great period of Eome ; but then. 
 
THE MODEEN ELEMENT 83 
 
 co-existing with the great epoch of 
 Greece there is what is wanting to that 
 of Eome, a commensurate, an interest- 
 ing literature. 
 
 The intellectual history of our race 
 cannot be clearly understood without 
 applying to other ages, nations, and lit- 
 eratures the same method of inquiry 
 which we have been here imperfectly 
 applying to what is called classical 
 antiquity. But enough has at least been 
 said, perhaps, to establish the absolute, 
 the enduring interest of Greek litera- 
 ture, and, above all, of Greek poetry. 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 
 
DANTE AND BEATRICE 
 
 THOSE critics who allegorize the 
 Divine Comedy, who exaggerate, 
 or, rather, who mistake the supersensual 
 element in Dante's work, who reduce 
 to nothing the sensible and human ele- 
 ment, are hardly worth refuting. 
 They know nothing of the necessary 
 laws under which poetic genius works, 
 of the inevitable conditions under which 
 the creations of poetry are produced. 
 But, in their turn, those other critics 
 err hardly less widely, who exaggerate, 
 or, rather, who mistake the human and 
 real element in Dante's poem; who see, 
 in such a passion as that of Dante for 
 Beatrice, an affection belonging to the 
 sphere of actual domestic life, fitted to 
 sustain the wear and tear of our ordi- 
 87 
 
88 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 nary daily existence. Into the error of 
 those second critics an accomplished 
 recent translator of Dante, Mr. Theo- 
 dore Martin, seems to me to have fallen. 
 He has ever present to his mind, when 
 he speaks of the Beatrice whom Dante 
 adored, Wordsworth's picture of — 
 
 The perfect woman, nobly planned 
 To warm, to comfort, and command; 
 And yet a spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light. 
 
 He is ever quoting these lines in con- 
 nexion with Dante's Beatrice; ever as- 
 similating to this picture Beatrice as 
 Dante conceived her; ever attributing 
 to Dante's passion a character identical 
 with that of the affection which Words- 
 worth, in the poem from which these 
 lines are taken, meant to portray. 
 The affection here portrayed by Words- 
 worth is, I grant, a substantial human 
 affection, inhabiting the domain of real 
 life, at the same time that it is poetical 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 89 
 
 and beautiful. But in order to give this 
 flesh-and-blood character to Dante's pas- 
 sion for Beatrice, what a task has Mr. 
 Martin to perform! how much he is 
 obliged to imagine! how much to shut 
 his ejes to, or to disbelieve! Not per- 
 ceiving that the vital impulse of Dante's 
 soul is towards reverie and spiritual 
 vision ; that the task Dante sets himself 
 is not the task of reconciling poetry and 
 reality, of giving to each its due part, 
 of supplementing the one by the other; 
 but the task of sacrificing the world to 
 the spirit, of making the spirit all in all, 
 of effacing the world in presence of 
 the spirit — Mr. Martin seeks to find a 
 Dante admirable and complete in the 
 life of the world as well as in the life 
 of the spirit; and when he cannot find 
 him, he invents him. Dante saw the 
 world, and used in his poetry what he 
 had seen; for he was a born artist. 
 But he was essentially aloof from the 
 
90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 world, and not complete in the life of 
 the world; for he was a born spiritual- 
 ist and solitary. Keeping in our minds 
 this, his double character, we may seize 
 the exact truth as to his relations with 
 Beatrice, and steer a right course be- 
 tween the error of those who deliteralize 
 them too much, on the one hand, and 
 that of those who literalize them too 
 much, on the other. 
 
 The Divine Comedy, I have already 
 said, is no allegory, and Beatrice no 
 mere personification of theology. Mr. 
 Martin is quite right in saying that 
 Beatrice is the Beatrice whom men 
 turned round to gaze at in the streets of 
 Florence; that she is no '* allegorical 
 phantom," no ^^ fiction purely ideal.'' 
 He is quite right in saying that Dante 
 ** worships no phantoms,'' that his pas- 
 sion for Beatrice was a real passion, and 
 that his love-poetry does not deal ^'in 
 the attributes of celestial charms." He 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 91 
 
 was an artist — one of the greatest of 
 artists; and art abhors what is vague, 
 hollow, and impalpable. 
 
 Enough to make this fully manifest 
 we have in the Vita Nuova. Dante 
 there records how, a boy of ten, he first 
 saw Beatrice, a girl of nine, dressed in 
 crimson; how, a second time, he saw 
 her, nine years later, passing along the 
 street, dressed in white, between two 
 ladies older than herself, and how she 
 saluted him. He records how after- 
 wards she once denied him her saluta- 
 tion; he records the profound impres- 
 sion which, at her father's death, the 
 grief and beauty of Beatrice made on 
 all those who visited her; he records 
 his meeting with her at a party after 
 her marriage, his emotion, and how 
 some ladies present, observing his 
 emotion, ^'made a mock of him to that 
 most gentle being;'' he records her 
 death, and how, a year afterwards, some 
 
92 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 gentlemen found him, on the anniversary 
 of her death, ' ' sketching an angel on his 
 tablets." He tells us how, a little later, 
 he had a vision of the dead Beatrice 
 ^^ arrayed in the same crimson robe in 
 which she had originally appeared to my 
 eyes, and she seemed as youthful as on 
 the day I saw her first." He mentions 
 how, one day, the sight of some pilgrims 
 passing along a particular street in 
 Florence brought to his mind the 
 thought that perhaps these pilgrims, 
 coming from a far country, had never 
 even heard the name of her who filled 
 his thoughts so entirely. And even in 
 the Divine Comedy^ composed many 
 years afterwards, and treating of the 
 glorified Beatrice only, one distinct 
 trait of the earthly Beatrice is still pre- 
 served — her smile ; the santo riso of the 
 Purgatory, the dolce riso of the Para- 
 dise. 
 Yes, undoubtedly there was a real 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 93 
 
 Beatrice, whom Dante had seen living 
 and moving before him, and for whom 
 he had felt a passion. This basis of 
 fact and reality he took from the life of 
 the outward world : this basis was indis- 
 pensable to him, for he was an artist. 
 
 But this basis was enough for him 
 as an artist: to have seen Beatrice two 
 or three times, to have spoken to her 
 two or three times, to have felt her 
 beauty, her charm; to have had the 
 emotion of her marriage, her death — 
 this was enough. Art requires a basis 
 of fact, but it also desires to treat this 
 basis of fact with the utmost freedom; 
 and this desire for the freest handling 
 of its object is even thwarted when its 
 object is too near, and too real. To 
 have had his relations with Beatrice 
 more positive, intimate, and prolonged, 
 to have had an affection for her into 
 which there entered more of the life of 
 this world, would have even somewhat 
 
94 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 impeded, one may say, Dante's free use 
 of these relations for the purpose of 
 art. And the artist nature in him was 
 in little danger of being thus impeded; 
 for he was a born solitary. 
 
 Thus the conditions of art do not 
 make it necessary that Dante's relations 
 with Beatrice should have been more 
 close and real than the Vita Nuova 
 represents them; and the conditions of 
 Dante's own nature do not make it 
 probable. Not the less do such admirers 
 of the poet as Mr. Martin — misconceiv- 
 ing the essential characteristic of chival- 
 rous passion in general, and of Dante's 
 divinization of Beatrice in particular, 
 misled by imagining this ** worship for 
 woman, ' ' as they call it, to be something 
 which it was not, something involving 
 modern relations in social life between 
 the two sexes — insist upon making out 
 of Dante's adoration of Beatrice a sub- 
 stantial modern love-story, and of ar- 
 
DANTE AND BEATRICE 95 
 
 ranging Dante ^s real life so as to turn 
 it into the proper sort of real life for 
 a ' ' worshipper of woman ' ' to lead. The 
 few real incidents of Dante ^s passion, 
 enumerated in the Vita Nuova, sufficient 
 to give to his great poem the basis which 
 it required, are far too scanty to give 
 to such a love-story as this the basis 
 which it requires; therefore they must 
 be developed and amplified. Beatrice 
 was a living woman, and Dante had seen 
 her; but she must become 
 
 The creature not too bright and good 
 For human nature's daily food, 
 
 of Wordsworth's poem: she must be- 
 come '^pure flesh and blood— beautiful, 
 yet substantial," and ^^ moulded of that 
 noble humanity wherewith Heaven 
 blesses, not unfrequently, our common 
 earth." Dante had saluted Beatrice, 
 had spoken to her; but this is not 
 enough: he has surely omitted to '^re- 
 
96 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 cord particulars:'' it is ** scarcely cred- 
 ible that he should not have found an 
 opportunity of directly declaring his at- 
 tachment;" for ^4n position, education, 
 and appearance he was a man worth 
 any woman, ' ' and his face ' ' at that time 
 of his life must have been eminently en- 
 gaging/' Therefore ^4t seems strange 
 that his love should not have found its 
 issue in marriage;" for *^he loved Bea- 
 trice as a man loves, and with the pas- 
 sion that naturally perseveres to the 
 possession of its mistress." 
 
 However, his love did not find its is- 
 sue in marriage. Beatrice married 
 Messer Simone dei Bardi, to whom, says 
 Mr. Martin, ^^her hand had been, per- 
 haps lightly or to please her parents, 
 pledged, in ignorance of the deep and 
 noble passion which she had inspired in 
 the young poet's heart." But she cer- 
 tainly could not **have been insensible to 
 his profound tenderness and passion"; 
 
DANTE AND BEATRICE 97 
 
 although whether * ^ she knew of it before 
 her marriage, ' ' and whether * * she, either 
 then or afterwards, gave it her counte- 
 nance and approval, and returned it in 
 any way, and in what degree" — ques- 
 tions which, Mr. Martin says, ^^ naturally 
 suggest themselves'' — are, he confesses, 
 questions for solving which **the mate- 
 rials are most scanty and unsatisfac- 
 tory.'' ^* Unquestionably," he adds, ^^it 
 startles and grieves us to find Beatrice 
 taking part with her friends ^^in laugh- 
 ing at Dante when he was overcome at 
 first meeting her after her marriage." 
 ^^But there may," he thinks, **have been 
 causes for this — causes for which, in 
 justice to her, allowance must be made, 
 even as we see that Dante made it." 
 Then, again, as to Messer Simone dei 
 Bardi's feelings about this attachment 
 of Dante to his wife. ^^It is true," says 
 Mr. Martin, ^^that we have no direct in- 
 formation on this point;" but ''the love 
 
98 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 of Dante was of an order too pure and 
 noble to occasion distrust, even if the 
 purity of Beatrice had not placed her 
 above suspicion;'' but Dante *^did what 
 only a great and manly nature could 
 have done — he triumphed over his pain ; 
 he uttered no complaint; his regrets 
 were buried within his own heart." 
 '^At the same time," Mr. Martin thinks, 
 *4t is contrary to human nature that a 
 love unfed by any tokens of favour 
 should retain all its original force; and 
 without wrong either to Beatrice or 
 Dante, we may conclude that an under- 
 standing was come to between them, 
 which in some measure soothed his 
 heart, if it did not satisfy it." And 
 ''sooner or later, before Beatrice died, 
 we cannot doubt that there came a day 
 when words passed between them which 
 helped to reconcile Dante to the doom 
 that severed her from his side during 
 her all too brief sojourn on earth, when 
 
DANTE AND BEATKICE 99 
 
 the pent-up heart of the poet swept down 
 the barriers within which it had so long 
 struggled, and he 
 
 Caught up the whole of love, and utter 'd it, 
 Then bade adieu for ever, 
 
 if not to her, yet to all those words 
 which it was no longer meet should be 
 spoken to another's wife." 
 
 But Dante married, as well as Bea- 
 trice; and so Dante's married life has 
 to be arranged also. '^It is," says Mr. 
 Martin, *^only those who have observed 
 little of human nature, or of their own 
 hearts, who will think that Dante 's mar- 
 riage with Gemma Donati argues against 
 the depth of sincerity of his first love. 
 Why should he not have sought the so- 
 lace and the support of a generous 
 woman's nature, who, knowing all the 
 truth, was yet content with such affec- 
 tion as he was able to bring to a second 
 love? Nor was that necessarily small. 
 Ardent and affectionate as his nature 
 
100 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 was, the sympathies of such a woman 
 must have elicited from him a satisfac- 
 tory response; while, at the same time, 
 without prejudice to the wife's claim on 
 his regard, he might entertain his heav- 
 enward dream of the departed Bea- 
 trice.'' The tradition is, however, that 
 Dante did not live happily with his wife ; 
 and some have thought that he means 
 to cast a disparaging reflection on his 
 marriage in a passage of the Purgatory. 
 I need not say that this sort of thing 
 would never do for Mr. Martin's hero — 
 that hero who can do nothing ' * inconsis- 
 tent with the purest respect to her who 
 had been the wedded wife of another, on 
 the one hand, or with his regard for the 
 mother of his children, on the other." 
 Accordingly, *^are we to assume," Mr. 
 Martin cries, ^ ' that the woman who gave 
 herself to him in the full knowledge that 
 she was not the bride of his imagination, 
 was not regarded by him with the esteem 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 101 
 
 which her devotion was calculated to in- 
 spire. '^ It is quite impossible. '^ Dante 
 was a true-hearted gentleman, and could 
 never have spoken slightingly of her on 
 whose breast he had found comfort amid 
 many a sorrow, and who had borne to 
 him a numerous progeny — the last a 
 Beatrice. '^ Donna Gemma was a ^ ^gen- 
 erous and devoted woman, ' ' and she and 
 Dante ^^ thoroughly understood each 
 other. ' ' 
 
 All this has, as applied to real per- 
 sonages, the grave defect of being en- 
 tirely of Mr. Martin's own imagining. 
 But it has a still graver defect, I think, 
 as applied to Dante, in being so singu- 
 larly inappropriate to its object. The 
 grand, impracticable Solitary, with keen 
 senses and ardent passions — for nature 
 had made him an artist, and art must be, 
 as Milton says, *^ sensuous and impas- 
 sioned'' — but with an irresistible bent to 
 the inward life, the life of imagination, 
 
102 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 vision, and ecstasy; with an inherent 
 impatience of the outward life, the life 
 of distraction, jostling, mutual conces- 
 sion ; this man ^ ^ of a humour which made 
 him hard to get on with, ' ' says Petrarch ; 
 *^ melancholy and pensive, '' says Boc- 
 caccio; ^^by nature abstracted and taci- 
 turn, seldom speaking unless he was 
 questioned, and often so absorbed in his 
 own reflections that he did not hear the 
 questions which were put to him;" who 
 could not live with the Florentines, who 
 could not live with Gemma Donati, who 
 could not live with Can Grande della 
 Scala; this lover of Beatrice, but of 
 Beatrice a vision of his youth, hardly at 
 all in contact with him in actual life, 
 vanished from him soon, with whom his 
 imagination could deal freely, whom he 
 could divinize into a fit subject for the 
 spiritual longing which filled him — this 
 Dante is transformed, in Mr. Martin's 
 hands, into the hero of a sentimental, but 
 
DANTE AND BEATRICE 103 
 
 strictly virtuous, novel! To make out 
 Dante to have been eminent for a wise, 
 complete conduct of his outward life, 
 seems to me as unimportant as it is im- 
 possible. I can quite believe the tradi- 
 tion which represents him as not having 
 lived happily with his wife, and at- 
 tributes her not having joined him in 
 his exile to this cause. I can even be- 
 lieve, without difficulty, an assertion of 
 Boccaccio which excites Mr. Martin's in- 
 dignation, that Dante's conduct, even in 
 mature life, was at times exceedingly 
 irregular. We know how the followers 
 of the spiritual life tend to be antino- 
 mian in what belongs to the outward life : 
 they do not attach much importance to 
 such irregularity themselves ; it is their 
 fault, as complete men, that they do not ; 
 it is the fault of the spiritual life, as a 
 complete life, that it allows this tend- 
 ency: by dint of despising the outward 
 life, it loses the control of this life, and 
 
104 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 of itself when in contact with it. My 
 present business, however, is not to 
 praise or blame Dante's practical con- 
 duct of his life, but to make clear his 
 peculiar mental and spiritual constitu- 
 tion. This, I say, disposed him to ab- 
 sorb himself in the inner life, wholly to 
 humble and efface before this the out- 
 ward life. We may see this in the pas- 
 sage of the Purgatory where he makes 
 Beatrice reprove him for his backslid- 
 ings after she, his visible symbol of 
 spiritual perfection, had vanished from 
 his eyes. 
 
 **For a while" — she says of him to 
 the ^' pious substances,'' the angels, — 
 ^^for a while with my countenance I up- 
 held him; showing to him my youthful 
 eyes, with me I led him, turning towards 
 the right way. 
 
 **Soon as I came on the threshold of 
 my second age, and changed my life, this 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 105 
 
 man took himself from me and gave him- 
 self to others. 
 
 ^^When that I had mounted from flesh 
 to spirit, and beauty and spirit were in- 
 creased unto me, I was to him less dear 
 and less acceptable. 
 
 **IIe turned his steps to go in a way 
 not true, pursuing after false images of 
 good, which fulfil nothing of the prom- 
 ises which they give. 
 
 ^ ^ Neither availed it me that I obtained 
 inspirations to be granted me, whereby, 
 both in dream and otherwise, I called 
 him back ; so little heed paid he to them. 
 
 *^So deep he fell, that, for his salva- 
 tion all means came short, except to 
 show him the people of perdition. 
 
 *'The high decree of God would be 
 broken, could Lethe be passed, and that 
 so fair aliment tasted, without some scot 
 paid of repentance, which pours forth 
 tears.'' 
 
106 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 Here, indeed, and in a somewhat 
 similar passage of the next canto, Mr. 
 Martin thinks that the *^ obvious allu- 
 sion'' is to certain moral shortcomings, 
 occasional slips, of which (though he 
 treats Boccaccio's imputation as mon- 
 strous and incredible) ^' Dante, with his 
 strong and ardent passions, having, 
 like meaner men, to fight the perennial 
 conflict between flesh and spirit," had 
 sometimes, he supposes, been guilty. 
 An Italian commentator gives at least 
 as true an interpretation of these pas- 
 sages when he says that ^4n them Dante 
 makes Beatrice, as the representative 
 of theology, lament that he should 
 have left the study of divinity — in 
 which, by the grace of Heaven, he might 
 have attained admirable proficiency — 
 to immerse himself in civil affairs with 
 the parties of Florence." But the real 
 truth is, that all the life of the world, its 
 
DANTE AND BEATEICE 107 
 
 pleasures, its business, its parties, its 
 politics, all is alike hollow and miserable 
 to Dante in comparison with the inward 
 life, the ecstasy of the divine vision; 
 every way which does not lead straight 
 towards this is for him a via non vera; 
 every good thing but this is for him a 
 false image of good, fulfilling none of 
 the promises which it gives; for the 
 excellency of the knowledge of this he 
 counts all things but loss. Beatrice 
 leads him to this; herself symbolizes 
 for him the ineffable beauty and purity 
 for which he longs. Even to Dante at 
 twenty-one, when he yet sees the living 
 Beatrice with his eyes, she already 
 symbolizes this for him, she is already 
 not the ^^ creature not too bright and 
 good'^ of Wordsworth, but a spirit far 
 more than a woman ; to Dante at twenty- 
 five composing the Vita Nuova she is 
 still more a spirit; to Dante at fifty, 
 
108 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 when his character has taken its bent, 
 when his genius is come to its perfec- 
 tion, when he is composing his immortal 
 poem, she is a spirit altogether. 
 
OBEEMANN 
 
OBERMANN 
 
 THE most recent edition of Oher- 
 mann ^ lies before me, the date on 
 its title-page being 1863. It is, I be- 
 lieve, the fourth edition which has been 
 published; the book made its first ap- 
 pearance in 1804 ; three editions, and not 
 large editions, have sufficed for the de- 
 mand of sixty years. Yet the book has 
 lived, though with but this obscure life, 
 and is not likely to die. Madame 
 George Sand and Monsieur Sainte- 
 Beuve have spoken in prose much and 
 excellently of the book and its author. 
 It may be in the recollection of some 
 who read this that I have spoken of 
 Ohermann in verse, if not well, at least 
 
 1 OBERMANN.— Par De Senancour. Nouvelle edi- 
 tion, revue et corrigee avec une Pr6faee, par George 
 Sand. Charpentier, Paris, 1863. 
 Ill 
 
112 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 abundantly. It is to be wished, how- 
 ever, that Obermann should also speak 
 to English readers for himself; and my 
 present design is to take those two or 
 three points where he is most significant 
 and interesting, and to present some of 
 his deliverances on those points in his 
 own words. 
 
 It may be convenient, however, that 
 first I should repeat here the short 
 sketch which I have already given else- 
 where of the uneventful life of the 
 personage whom we call Obermann. 
 His real name is Senancour. In the 
 book which occupies us, — a volume of 
 letters of which the writer, calling him- 
 self Obermann, and writing chiefly from 
 Switzerland, delivers his thoughts about 
 God, nature, and the human soul, — it is 
 Senancour himself who speaks under 
 Obermann 's name. Etienne Pivert de 
 Senancour, a Frenchman, although hav- 
 ing in his nature much that we are ac- 
 
OBERMANN 113 
 
 customed to consider as by no means 
 French, was born in 1770, was trained 
 for the priesthood, and passed some 
 time in the seminary of St. Sulpice, 
 broke away from his training and coun- 
 try to live some years in Switzerland, 
 where he married, came back to France 
 in middle life, and followed thencefor- 
 ward the career of a man of letters, but 
 with hardly any fame or success. His 
 marriage was not a happy one. He 
 died an old man in 1846, desiring that 
 on his grave might be placed these 
 words only: '^Eternite, deviens mon 
 
 Of the letters of Obermann, the writ- 
 er's profound inwardness, his austere 
 and sad sincerity, and his delicate feel- 
 ing for nature, are, as I have elsewhere 
 remarked, the distinguishing charac- 
 teristics. His constant inwardness, his 
 unremitting occupation with that ques- 
 tion which haunted St. Bernard — Bern- 
 
114 ESSAYS IN CBITICISM 
 
 arde, ad quid venisU?—di\^imgm%\x 
 him from Goethe and Wordsworth, 
 whose study of this question is relieved 
 hy the thousand distractions of a poetic 
 interest in nature and in man. His 
 severe sincerity distinguishes him from 
 Eousseau, Chateaubriand, or Byron, 
 who in their dealing with this question 
 are so often attitudinising and thinking 
 of the effect of what they say on the 
 public. His exquisite feeling for nature, 
 though always dominated by his inward 
 self -converse and by his melancholy, yet 
 distinguishes him from the men simply 
 absorbed in philosophical or religious 
 concerns, and places him in the rank of 
 men of poetry and imagination. Let 
 me try to show these three main charac- 
 teristics of Senancour from his own 
 words. 
 
 A Frenchman, coming immediately 
 after the eighteenth century and the 
 French Eevolution, too clear-headed and 
 
OBEEMANN 115 
 
 austere for any such sentimental Cath- 
 olic reaction as that with which Chateau- 
 briand cheated himself, and yet, from 
 the very profoundness and meditative- 
 ness of his nature, religious, Senancour 
 felt to the uttermost the bare and bleak 
 spiritual atmosphere into which he was 
 born. Neither to a German nor to an 
 Englishman, perhaps, would such a 
 sense of absolute religious denudation 
 have then been possible, or such a plain- 
 ness and even crudity, therefore, in 
 their way of speaking of it. Only to a 
 Frenchman were these possible; but 
 amid wars, bustle, and the glory of the 
 grande nation few Frenchmen had med- 
 itativeness and seriousness enough for 
 them. Senancour was of a character to 
 feel his spiritual position, to feel it 
 without dream or illusion, and to feel, 
 also, that in the absence of any real in- 
 ward basis life was weariness and 
 vanity, and the ordinary considerations 
 
116 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 so confidently urged to induce a man to 
 master himself and to be busy in it, 
 quite hollow. 
 
 ^* People keep talking," says he, ''of 
 doing with energy that which ought to 
 be done; but, amidst all this parade of 
 firmness, tell me, then, what it is that 
 ought to he done. For my part I do not 
 know; and I venture to suspect that a 
 good many others are in the same state 
 of ignorance." 
 
 He was born with a passion for order 
 and harmony, and a belief in them; his 
 being so utterly divested of all conven- 
 tional beliefs, makes this single elemen- 
 tary belief of his the more weighty and 
 impressive. 
 
 *'May we not say that the tendency 
 to order forms an essential part of our 
 propensities, our instinct, just like the 
 tendency to self-preservation, or to the 
 reproduction of the species I Is it noth- 
 
OBERMANN 117 
 
 ing, to live with the calm and the secu- 
 rity of the just! '^ 
 
 And therefore, he concludes, ^* inas- 
 much as man had this feeling of order 
 planted in him, inasmuch as it was in 
 his nature, the right course would have 
 been to try and make every individual 
 man sensible of it and obedient to it/' 
 But what has been done! Since the 
 beginning of the world, instead of hav- 
 ing recourse to this innate feeling, the 
 guides of mankind have uniformly 
 sought to control human conduct by 
 means of supernatural hopes, super- 
 natural terrors, thus misleading man's 
 intelligence, and debasing his soul. 
 ^^Depuis trente siecles, les result at s 
 sont dignes de la sag esse des moyens/^ 
 What are called the virtues, ^^are laws 
 of nature as necessary to man as the 
 laws of his bodily senses." Instead of 
 teaching men to feel this, instead of de- 
 
118 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 veloping in them that sentiment of order 
 and that consciousness of the divine 
 which are the native possession of our 
 race, Paganism and Christianity alike 
 have tampered with man's mind and 
 heart, and wrought confusion in them. 
 
 '* Conquerors, slaves, poets, pagan 
 priests, and nurses, succeeded in dis- 
 figuring the traditions of primitive wis- 
 dom by dint of mixing races, destroying 
 memorials, explaining allegories and 
 making nonsense of them, abandoning 
 the profound and true meaning in order 
 to discover in them absurd ideas which 
 might inspire wonder and awe, and 
 personifying abstract beings in order to 
 have plenty of objects of worship. The 
 principle of life — that which was in- 
 telligence, light, the eternal — became 
 nothing more than the husband of Juno ; 
 harmony, fruit fulness, the bond of all 
 living things, became nothing more than 
 the mistress of Adonis; imperishable 
 
OBERMANN 119 
 
 wisdom came to be distinguished only 
 through her owl; the great ideas of 
 immortality and retribution consisted in 
 the fear of turning a wheel, and the hope 
 of strolling in a green wood. The in- 
 divisible divinity was parcelled into a 
 hierarchical multitude torn by miserable 
 passions; the fruit of the genius of 
 primitive mankind, the emblems of the 
 laws of the universe, had degenerated 
 into superstitious usages which the chil- 
 dren in great cities turned into ridicule." 
 
 Paul at Athens might have set forth, 
 in words not unlike these, the degrada- 
 tion of the Unknown God; now for the 
 religion of which Paul was a minister : — 
 
 '^A moral belief was wanted, because 
 pure morality was gone out of men's 
 knowledge; dogmas were wanted, which 
 should be profound and perhaps un- 
 fathomable, but not by any means dog- 
 mas which should be absurd, because 
 intelligence was spreading more and 
 
120 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 more. All religions being sunk into 
 degradation, there was needed a religion 
 of majesty, and answering to man's 
 effort to elevate his sonl by the idea of 
 a God of all things. There were needed 
 religious rites which should be impos- 
 ing, not too common, objects of desire, 
 mysterious yet simple; rites which 
 seemed to belong to a higher world, and 
 which yet a man's reason should accept 
 as naturally as his heart. There was 
 needed, in short, what only a great 
 genius could institute, and what I can 
 only catch glimpses of. 
 
 **But you have fabricated, patched, 
 experimented, altered; renewed I know 
 not what incoherent multitude of trivial 
 ceremonies and dogmas, more fitted to 
 scandalize the weak than to edify them. 
 This dubious mixture you have joined 
 to a morality sometimes false, often ex- 
 ceedingly noble, and almost always aus- 
 tere; the one single point in which you 
 
OBERMANN 121 
 
 have shown sagacity. You pass some 
 hundreds of years in arranging all this 
 by inspiration; and your slowly built 
 work, industriously repaired, but with a 
 radical fault in plan, is so made as to 
 last hardly longer than the time during 
 which you have been accomplishing it.'' 
 
 There is a passage to be meditated by 
 the new (Ecumenical Council ! Not that 
 Senancour has a trace of the Voltair- 
 ian bitterness against Christianity, or 
 against Catholicism which to him repre- 
 sented Christianity: 
 
 *^So far am I from having any prej- 
 udice against Christianity, that I de- 
 plore, I may say, what the majority of 
 its zealous adherents never themselves 
 think of deploring. I could willingly 
 join them in lamenting the loss of Chris- 
 tianity; but there is this difference be- 
 tween us, that they regret it in the form 
 into which it settled, nay, in the form, 
 even, which it wore a century ago; 
 
122 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 whereas, I cannot consider such a Chris- 
 tianity as that was to be much worthy 
 of regret/' 
 
 He owns that religion has done much ; 
 but, '*si la religion a fait des grandes 
 choses, c^est avec des moyens im- 
 menses/' Disposing of such means, it 
 ought to have done much more. Re- 
 mark, he says, that for the educated 
 class religion is one of the weakest of 
 the motive-powers they live by; and 
 then ask yourself whether it is not ab- 
 surd that there should be only a tenth 
 part of our race educated. That re- 
 ligion should be of use as some re- 
 straint to the ignorant and brutal mass 
 of mankind, shows, he thinks, not so 
 much the beneficence of religion as the 
 state of utter confusion and misery into 
 which mankind has, in spite of religion, 
 drifted ; — 
 
 **I admit that the laws of civil society 
 prove to be not restraint enough for this 
 
OBEEMANN 123 
 
 multitude to which we give no training, 
 about which we never trouble our heads, 
 which we bring into the world and then 
 leave to the chance of ignorant passions 
 and of habits of low debauchery. This 
 only proves that there is mere wretched- 
 ness and confusion under the apparent 
 calm of vast states; that the science 
 of politics, in the true sense of the term, 
 is a stranger to our world, where di- 
 plomacy and financial administration 
 produce prosperity to be sung in poems, 
 and win victories to figure in gazettes. ' ' 
 This concern for the state and pros- 
 pects of what are called the masses is 
 perpetually recurring with Senancour; 
 it came to him from his singular lucidity 
 and plain-dealing, for it was no com- 
 monplace with his time and contempo- 
 raries, as it is with ours. ^^ There are 
 men," he says, and he was one of them, 
 ^'who cannot be happy except among 
 men who are contented; who feel in 
 
124 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 their own persons all the enjoyment 
 and suffering they witness, and who can- 
 not be satisfied with themselves except 
 they contribute to the order of the world 
 and to man's welfare." ** Arrange 
 one's life how one will," he says in an- 
 other place, ^^who can answer for its 
 being any happier, so long as it is and 
 must be sans accord avec les choses, et 
 passee au milieu des peuples souffransf^' 
 This feeling returns again and again : — 
 ^^ Inequality is in the nature of things ; 
 but you have increased it out of all meas- 
 ure, when you ought, on the contrary, to 
 have studied to reduce it. The prodi- 
 gies of your industry must surely be a 
 baneful work of superfluity, if you have 
 neither time nor faculties for doing so 
 many things which are indispensable. 
 The mass of mankind is brutal, foolish, 
 given over to its passions; all your ills 
 come from this cause. Either do not 
 bring men into existence, or, if you do, 
 
OBEEMANN 125 
 
 give them an existence which is human." 
 But as deep as his sense that the time 
 was out of joint, was the feeling of this 
 Hamlet that he had no power to set it 
 right. Vos douleurs ont fletri mon dme, 
 he says : — 
 
 **Your miseries have worn out my 
 soul; they are intolerable, because they 
 are objectless. Our pleasures are il- 
 lusory, fugitive ; a day suffices for know- 
 ing them and abandoning them. I en- 
 quired of myself for happiness, but with 
 my eyes open ; I saw that it was not made 
 for the man who was isolated: I pro- 
 posed it to those who stood round me; 
 they had not leisure to concern them- 
 selves with it. I asked the multitude in 
 its wear and tear of misery, and the 
 great of earth under their load of ennui ; 
 they answered me: We are wretched 
 to-day, but we shall enjoy ourselves to- 
 morrow. For my part, I know that the 
 day which is coming will only tread in 
 
126 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 the footsteps of the day which is gone 
 before." 
 
 But a root of failure, powerlessness, 
 and ennui, there certainly was in the 
 constitution of Senancour's own nature; 
 so that, unfavourable as may have been 
 his time, we should err in attributing to 
 any outward circumstances the whole 
 of the discouragement by which he is 
 pervaded. He himself knew this well, 
 and he never seeks to hide it from us. 
 *^I1 y a dans moi un derangement," 
 says he; '^c'est le desordre des ennuis,' ' 
 
 ^^I was born to be not happy. You 
 know those dark days, bordering on the 
 frosts of winter, when mists hang heav- 
 ily about the very dawn, and day begins 
 only by threatening lines of a lurid 
 light upon the masses of cloud. That 
 glooming veil, those stormy squalls, 
 those uncertain gleams, that whistling of 
 the wind through trees which bend and 
 shiver, those prolonged throes like fun- 
 
OBERMANN 127 
 
 eral groans — you see in them the morn- 
 ing of life; at noon, cooler storms and 
 more steadily persistent; at evening, 
 thicker darkness still, and the day of 
 man is brought to an end/' 
 
 No representation of Senancour can, 
 however, be complete without some of 
 the gleams which relieved this discour- 
 agement. Besides the inwardness, be- 
 sides the sincerity, besides the renounce- 
 ment, there was the poetic emotion and 
 the deep feeling for nature. 
 
 *'And I, too, I have my moments of 
 forgetfulness, of strength, of grandeur; 
 I have desires and yearnings that know 
 no limit. But I behold the monuments 
 of effaced generations; I see the flint 
 wrought by the hand of man, and which 
 will subsist a hundred centuries after 
 him. I renounce the care for that which 
 passes away, and the thought of a pres- 
 ent which is already gone. I stand still, 
 and marvel; I listen to what subsists 
 
128 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 yet, I would fain hear what will go on 
 subsisting; in the movement of the 
 forest, in the murmnr of the pines, I 
 seek to catch some of the accents of the 
 eternal tongue." 
 
 Nature, and the emotion caused by 
 nature, inspire so many beautiful pas- 
 sages in Obermann's letters that one is 
 embarrassed to make a choice among 
 them. The following, with which we 
 will end our extracts, is a morning and 
 night-piece from the north end of the 
 Lake of Neufchatel, where the Eiver 
 Thiele enters the lake from Bienne, be- 
 tween Saint Blaise and Morat: — 
 
 ^^My window had remained open all 
 night, as is my habit. Towards four 
 o'clock in the morning I was wakened 
 by the dawn, and by the scent of the 
 hay which they had been cutting in the 
 cool early hours by the light of the 
 moon. I expected an ordinary view; 
 but I had a moment of perfect astonish- 
 
OBERMANN 129 
 
 •ment. The midsummer rains had kept 
 tip the waters which the melting snow in 
 the Jura had previously swollen. The 
 space between the lake and the Thiele 
 was almost entirely flooded; the highest 
 spots formed islands of pasture amidst 
 the expanse of waters ruffled with the 
 fresh breeze of morning. The waves of 
 the lake could be made out in the dis- 
 tance, driven by the wind against the 
 half-flooded bank. Some goats and 
 cows, with their herdsman, who made a 
 rustic music with a horn, were passing 
 at the moment over a tongue of land left 
 dry between the flooded plain and the 
 Thiele. Stones set in the parts where 
 it was worst going supported this nat- 
 ural causeway or filled up gaps in it; 
 the pasture to which the docile animals 
 were proceeding was not in sight, and 
 to see their slow and irresolute advance, 
 one would have said they were about to 
 get out into the lake and be lost there. 
 
130 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 The heights of Anet and the thick woods 
 of Julemont rose out of the waters like 
 a desert island without an inhabitant. 
 The hilly chain of Vuilly edged the lake 
 on the horizon. To the south, this 
 chain stretched away behind the slopes 
 of Montmirail; and farther on than all 
 these objects, sixty leagues of eternal 
 snows stamped the whole country with 
 the inimitable majesty of those bold 
 lines of nature which give to places sub- 
 limity. ' ' 
 
 He dines at the toll-house by the river- 
 bank, and after passing the afternoon 
 there, goes out again late in the even- 
 ing:— 
 
 ^^The moon had not yet risen; my 
 path lay beside the green waters of the 
 Thiele. I had taken the key of my lodg- 
 ing that I might come in when I liked 
 without being tied to a particular hour. 
 But feeling inclined to muse, and finding 
 the night so warm that there was no 
 
OBERMANN 131 
 
 hardship in being all night out of doors, 
 I took the road to Saint Blaise. I left 
 it at a little village called Marin, which 
 has the lake to the south of it. I de- 
 scended a steep bank, and got upon the 
 shore of the lake where its ripple came 
 up and expired. The air was calm; 
 not a sail was to be seen on the lake. 
 Every one was at rest ; some in the f or- 
 getfulness of their toils, others in the 
 forgetfulness of their sorrows. The 
 moon rose; I remained there hours. 
 Towards morning, the moon shed over 
 earth and waters the ineffable melan- 
 choly of her last gleams. Nature seems 
 unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a 
 long reverie, one hears the washing of 
 the waves upon a solitary strand, in the 
 calm of a night still enkindled and 
 luminous with the setting moon. 
 
 ^^Sensibility which no words can ex- 
 press, charm and torment of our vain 
 years! vast consciousness of a nature 
 
132 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 everywhere greater than we are, and 
 everywhere impenetrable! all-embracing 
 passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self- 
 abandonment, — everything that a mortal 
 heart can contain of life-weariness and 
 yearning, I felt it all, I experienced it 
 all, in this memorable night. I have 
 made an ominous step towards the age 
 of decline; I have swallowed up ten 
 years of life at once. Happy the 
 simple, whose heart is always young!'' 
 There, in one of the hours which were 
 at once the inspiration and the enerva- 
 tion of Senancour 's life, we leave him. 
 It is possible that an age, breaking with 
 the past, and inclined to tell it the most 
 naked truths, may take more pleasure 
 than its predecessors in Obermann's 
 bleak frankness, and may even give him 
 a kind of celebrity. Nevertheless it 
 may be predicted with certainty that his 
 very celebrity, if he gets it, will have, 
 like his life, something maimed, in- 
 
OBERMANN 133 
 
 complete, and unsuccessful about it; 
 and that his intimate friends will still 
 be but a few, as they have hitherto been. 
 These few will never fail him. 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 
 
 THIS is neither the time nor the 
 place to attempt any complete ac- 
 count of the remarkable man whose pen, 
 busy to the end, and to the end charming 
 and instructing us, has within the last 
 few weeks dropped from his hand for 
 ever. A few words are all that the 
 occasion allows, and it is hard not to 
 make them words of mere regret and 
 eulogy. Most of what is at this moment 
 written about him is in this strain, and 
 very naturally; the world has some 
 arrears to make up to him, and now, if 
 ever, it feels this. Late, and as it were 
 by accident, he came to his due estima- 
 tion in France ; here in England it is only 
 within the last ten years that he can 
 be said to have been publicly known at 
 137 
 
138 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 all. We who write these lines knew him 
 long and owed him much; something of 
 that debt we will endeavour to pay, not, 
 as we ourselves might be most inclined, 
 by following the impulse of the hour 
 and simply praising him, but, as he him- 
 self would have preferred, by recalling 
 what in sum he chiefly was, and what is 
 the essential scope of his effort and 
 working. 
 
 Shortly before Sainte-Beuve's death 
 appeared a new edition of his Portraits 
 Contemporains, one of his earlier works, 
 of which the contents date from 1832 
 and 1833, before his method and manner 
 of criticism were finally formed. But 
 the new edition is enriched with notes 
 and retouches added as the volumes 
 were going through the press, and which 
 bring our communications with him 
 down to these very latest months of his 
 life. Among them is a comment on a 
 letter of Madame George Sand, in which 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 139 
 
 she had spoken of the admiration ex- 
 cited by one of his articles. *'I leave 
 this as it stands/' says he, ^^ because 
 the sense and the connection of the 
 passage require it ; but, personne ne salt 
 mieux que moi a quoi s'en tenir sur le 
 merite dbsolu de ces articles qui sont tout 
 au plus, et meme lorsqu'ils reussissent le 
 mieux, des choses sensees dans un genre 
 mediocre, Ce quails ont eu d^ alert e et 
 d'd-propos a leur moment suffit a peine 
 a expliquer ces exagerations de Vamitie, 
 Reservons V admiration pour les ceuvres 
 de poesie et d'art, pour les compositions 
 elevees; la plus grande gloire du critique 
 est dans Vapprohation et dans Vestime 
 des hons esprits." 
 
 This comment, which extends to his 
 whole work as a critic, has all the good 
 breeding and delicacy by which Sainte- 
 Beuve's writing was distinguished, and 
 it expresses, too, what was to a great 
 extent, no doubt, his sincere conviction. 
 
140 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 Like so many wlio have tried their hand 
 at oeuvres de poesie et d'art, his prefer- 
 ence, his dream, his ideal, was there; 
 the rest was comparatively journeyman- 
 work, to be done well and estimably 
 rather than ill and discreditably, and 
 with precious rewards of its own, be- 
 sides, in exercising the faculties and in 
 keeping off ennui; but still work of an 
 inferior order. Yet when one looks at 
 the names on the title-page of the Por- 
 traits Contempo rains: Chateaubriand, 
 Beranger, Lamennais, Lamartine, Vic- 
 tor Hugo, George Sand, — names repre- 
 senting, in our judgment, very different 
 degrees of eminence, but none of which 
 we have the least inclination to dis- 
 parage, — is it certain that the works of 
 poetry and art to which these names 
 are attached eclipse the work done 
 by Sainte-Beuve! Could Sainte-Beuve 
 have had what was no doubt his will, 
 and in the line of the Consolations and 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 141 
 
 Volupte have produced works with the 
 power and vogue of Lamartine's works, 
 or Chateaubriand's, or Hugo's, would 
 he have been more interesting to us to- 
 day,— would he have stood permanently 
 higher? We venture to doubt it. 
 Works of poetry and art like Moliere's 
 and Milton's eclipse no doubt all pro- 
 ductions of the order of the Causeries 
 du Lundi, and the highest language of 
 admiration may very properly be re- 
 served for such works alone. Inferior 
 works in the same kind have their mo- 
 ment of vogue when their admirers 
 apply to them this language ; there is a 
 moment when a drama of Hugo's finds 
 a public to speak of it as if it were 
 Moliere's, and a poem of Lamartine's 
 finds a public to speak of it as if it were 
 Milton's. At no moment will a public 
 be found to speak of work like Sainte- 
 Beuve's Causeries in such fashion; and 
 if this alone were regarded, one might 
 
142 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 allow oneself to leave to Ms work the 
 humbler rank which he assigns to it. 
 But the esteem inspired by his work 
 remains and grows, while the vogue of 
 all works of poetry and art but the best, 
 and the high-pitched admiration which 
 goes with vogue, diminish and disap- 
 pear; and this redresses the balance. 
 Five-and-twenty years ago it would 
 have seemed absurd, in France, to place 
 Sainte-Beuve, as a French author, on 
 a level with Lamartine. Lamartine had 
 at that time still his vogue, and though 
 assuredly no Moliere or Milton, had for 
 the time of his vogue the halo which 
 surrounds properly none but great poets 
 like these. To this Sainte-Beuve can- 
 not pretend, but what does Lamartine 
 retain of it now? It would still be ab- 
 surd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level 
 with Moliere or Milton ; is it any longer 
 absurd to place him on a level with 
 Lamartine, or even above him? In 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 143 
 
 other words, excellent work in a lower 
 kind counts in the long run above work 
 which is short of excellence in a higher ; 
 first-rate criticism has a permanent 
 value greater than that of any but first- 
 rate works of poetry and art. 
 
 And Sainte-Beuve's criticism may be 
 called first-rate. His curiosity was un- 
 bounded, and he was born a naturalist, 
 carrying into letters, so often the mere 
 domain of rhetoric and futile amuse- 
 ment, the ideas and methods of scien- 
 tific natural inquiry. And this he did 
 while keeping in perfection the ease of 
 movement and charm of touch which 
 belongs to letters properly so called, 
 and which give them their unique power 
 of universal penetration and of propa- 
 gandism. Man, as he is, and as his 
 history and the productions of his spirit 
 show him, was the object of his study 
 and interest; he strove to find the real 
 data with which, in dealing with man 
 
144 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 and his affairs, we have to do. Beyond 
 this study he did not go, — to find the 
 real data. But he was determined they 
 should be the real data, and not fictitious 
 and conventional data, if he could help 
 it. This is what, in our judgment, dis- 
 tinguishes him, and makes his work of 
 singular use and instructiveness. Most 
 of us think that we already possess the 
 data required, and have only to proceed 
 to deal with human affairs in the light 
 of them. This is, as is well known, a 
 thoroughly English persuasion. It is 
 what makes us such keen politicians; it 
 is an honour to an Englishman, we say, 
 to take part in political strife. Solomon 
 says, on the other hand, ^^It is an 
 honour to a man to cease from strife, 
 hut every fool will be meddling"; 
 and Sainte-Beuve held with Solomon. 
 Many of us, again, have principles and 
 connections which are all in all to us, 
 and we arrange data to suit them; — a 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 145 
 
 book, a character, a period of history, 
 we see from a point of view given by 
 our principles and connections, and to 
 the requirements of this point of 
 view we make the book, the character, 
 the period, adjust themselves. Sainte- 
 Beuve never did so, and criticised with 
 unfailing acuteness those who did. 
 ^^Tocqueville arrivait avec son moule 
 tout pret; la realite n'y repond pas, et 
 les choses ne se pretent pas a y entrer/^ 
 M. de Tocqueville commands much 
 more sympathy in England than his 
 critic, and the very mention of him will 
 awaken impressions unfavourable to 
 Sainte-Beuve ; for the French Liberals 
 honour Tocqueville and at heart dislike 
 Sainte-Beuve; and people in England 
 always take their cue from the French 
 Liberals. For that very reason have we 
 boldly selected for quotation this criti- 
 cism on him, because the course criti- 
 cised in Tocqueville is precisely the 
 
146 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 course with which an Englishman would 
 sympathise, and which he would be apt 
 to take himself; while Sainte-Beuve, in 
 criticising him, shows just the tendency 
 which is his characteristic, and by which 
 he is of use to us. Tocqueville, as is 
 well known, finds in the ancient regime 
 all the germs of the centralisation which 
 the French Eevolution developed and 
 established. This centralisation is his 
 bugbear, as it is the bugbear of English 
 Liberalism; and directly he finds it, the 
 system where it appears is judged. 
 Disliking, therefore, the French Eevolu- 
 tion for its centralisation, and then 
 finding centralisation in the ancient 
 regime also, he at once sees in this dis- 
 covery, ^^mille motifs nouveaux de hair 
 Vancien regime/' How entirely does 
 every Englishman abound here, as the 
 French say, in Tocqueville 's sense; how 
 faithfully have all Englishmen repeated 
 and re-echoed Tocqueville 's book on the 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 147 
 
 ancient regime ever since it was pub- 
 lished; how incapable are they of sup- 
 plying, or of imagining the need of 
 supplying, any corrective to it! But 
 hear Sainte-Beuve : — 
 
 ''Dans son effroi de la centralisation, 
 I'auteur en vient a meconnaitre de grands 
 bienfaits d'equite dus a Eichelieu et a Louis 
 XIV. Homme du peuple ou bourgeois, sous 
 Louis XIII. , ne valait-il pas mieux avoir af- 
 faire a un intendant, a I'homme du roi, qu'a 
 un gouverneur de province, a quelque due 
 d'Epernon? Ne maudissons pas ceux a qui 
 nous devons les commencements de I'egalite 
 devant la loi, la premiere ebauche de I'ordre 
 moderne qui nous a affranchis, nous et nos 
 peres, et le tiers-etat tout entier, de cette quan- 
 tite de petits tyrans qui couvraient le sol, 
 grands seigneurs ou hobereaux. ' ' 
 
 The point of view of Sainte-Beuve is 
 as little that of a glowing Kevolutionist 
 as it is that of a chagrined Liberal; it 
 is that of a man who seeks the truth 
 about the ancient regime and its institu- 
 tions, and who instinctively seeks to 
 
148 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 correct anything strained and arranged 
 in the representation of them. ^^Voy- 
 ons les choses de V histoire telles qu' 
 elles se sont passees," 
 
 At the risk of offending the prejudices 
 of English readers we have thus gone 
 for an example of Sainte-Beuve's essen- 
 tial method to a sphere where his ap- 
 plication of it makes a keen impression, 
 and created for him, in his lifetime, 
 warm enemies and detractors. In that 
 sphere it is not easily permitted to a 
 man to be a naturalist, but a naturalist 
 Sainte-Beuve could not help being al- 
 ways. Accidentally, at the end of his 
 life, he gave delight to the Liberal 
 opinion of his own country and ours by 
 his famous speech in the Senate on be- 
 half of free thought. He did but follow 
 his instinct, however, of opposing, in 
 whatever medium he was, the current of 
 that medium when it seemed excessive 
 and tyrannous. The extraordinary so- 
 
SAINTE-BEUVE 149 
 
 cial power of French Catholicism makes 
 itself specially felt in an assembly like 
 the Senate. An elderly Frenchman of 
 the upper class is apt to be, not unfre- 
 quently, a man of pleasure, reformed or 
 exhausted, and the deference of such a 
 personage to repression and Cardinals 
 is generally excessive. This was enough 
 to rouse Sainte-Beuve's opposition; but 
 he would have had the same tendency 
 to oppose the heady current of a medium 
 where mere Liberalism reigned, where it 
 was Professor Fawcett, and not the 
 Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the 
 bit in his teeth. 
 
 That Sainte-Beuve stopped short at 
 curiosity, at the desire to know things 
 as they really are, and did not press on 
 with faith and ardour to the various 
 and immense applications of this knowl- 
 edge which suggest themselves, and of 
 which the accomplishment is reserved 
 for the future, was due in part to his 
 
150 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 character, but more to his date, his 
 period, his circumstances. Let it be 
 enough for a man to have served well 
 one need of his age; and among politi- 
 cians and rhetoricians to have been a 
 naturalist, at a time when for any good 
 and lasting work in government and 
 literature our old conventional draught 
 of the nature of things wanted in a thou- 
 sand directions re-verifying and correct- 
 ing. 
 
RENAN 
 
RENAN 1 
 
 BURKE says, speaking of himself: *'He 
 has never professed himself a friend 
 or an enemy to republics or to monarchies in 
 the abstract. He thought that the circum- 
 stances and habits of every country, which it 
 is always perilous and productive of the great- 
 est calamities to force, are to decide upon the 
 form of its government. There is nothing in 
 his nature, his temper, or his faculties, which 
 should make him an enemy to any republic, 
 modern or ancient. Far from it. He has 
 studied the form and spirit of republics very 
 early in life ; he has studied them with great 
 attention; and with a mind undisturbed by 
 affection or prejudice. But the result in his 
 mind from that investigation has been and is, 
 that neither England nor France, without 
 infinite detriment to them, as well in the event 
 as in the experiment, could be brought into a 
 republican form, but that everything republi- 
 
 1 La JR6forme intellectuelle et morale de la France. 
 Par Ernest Renan. Paris: 1871. 
 
 153 
 
154 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 can which can be introduced with safety into 
 either of them must be built upon a mon- 
 archy." 
 
 The name of Burke is not mentioned 
 in M. Eenan's book, but it is difficult 
 to believe that Burke's publications of 
 eighty years ago on the French Eevo- 
 lution, from which we have quoted the 
 foregoing passage, were not in M. 
 Eenan's hands when he wrote his recent 
 work. If it was so, it detracts nothing 
 from M. Eenan's originality; a man of 
 his powers cannot but be original in 
 the treatment of his subject, and to have 
 read and agreed with Burke will not 
 make him less so. But the similarity 
 of the point of view strikes the reader 
 in almost every page; and certainly it 
 will be no bad effect of M. Eenan's book 
 if it sends us back to those masterpieces 
 of thinking and eloquence, the Reflec- 
 tions ofi the Revolution in France, the 
 Letter to a Member of the National As- 
 
EENAN 155 
 
 sembly, and the Appeal from the New 
 to the Old Whigs. They are far too lit- 
 tle read. They need to be received with 
 discrimination and judgment, and to 
 common liberalism they can never be ac- 
 ceptable ; yet so rich is their instructive- 
 ness that a serious politician could 
 hardly make a better resolve than to 
 read them through once every year. 
 
 **You have industriously destroyed all the 
 opinions and prejudices, and as far as in you 
 lay, all the instincts which support govern- 
 ment." "You might, if you pleased, have 
 profited by our example. You had the ele- 
 ments of a constitution very nearly as good 
 as could be wished. You possessed in some 
 parts the walls, and in all the foundations, 
 of a noble and venerable castle. You might 
 have repaired those walls, you might have 
 built on those old foundations. You had all 
 these advantages in your ancient States; but 
 you chose to act as if you had never been 
 moulded into civil society, and had everything 
 to begin anew.'' ''Rousseau was your canon 
 of holy writ." 
 
156 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 These sentences are Burke's, and 
 never surely could he have desired a 
 better testimony to his wisdom than for 
 a man like M. Renan to say eighty years 
 afterwards, with the France of the pres- 
 ent moment before his eyes: 
 
 ^*If no more had been done at the Revolu- 
 tion than to call together the States-General, 
 to regularise them, to make them annual, all 
 would have been right. But the false policy 
 of Rousseau won the day. It was resolved 
 to make a constitution a priori. People failed 
 to remark that England, the most constitu- 
 tional of countries, has never had a written 
 constitution, drawn out in black and white/* 
 (P. 7.) 
 
 That the rights of its history do more 
 for a society than the rights of man, that 
 the mere will of the majority is an in- 
 sufficient basis for government, that 
 France was made by the Capets, that she 
 ought never to have broken with them 
 entirely, that she would even now do 
 well to restore them, the younger branch 
 
EENAN 157 
 
 of them, if the elder is impracticable, 
 that with the monarchy she ought to 
 form again aristocratic institutions, a 
 second chamber, and, to some extent, a 
 hereditary nobility — this is the main 
 thesis of the new part of M. Eenan's 
 volume. If this is not done, France, he 
 thinks, cannot hope to vie with Prussia, 
 which owes its victory to its aristocratic 
 organisation and to the virtues of en- 
 durance and discipline which this organ- 
 isation fosters. France's only hope of 
 revenge must then be in the Interna- 
 tional. The superficial jacobinism, the 
 vulgar republicanism, the materialism 
 (for by all these names and more does 
 M. Eenan call it), which the French 
 Eevolution introduced, and which has 
 brought France to her present ruin, has 
 fatal attractions for the crowd every- 
 where ; it has eaten far into the heart and 
 life of England; it has overrun all the 
 Continent except Prussia and Eussia. 
 
158 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 Prussia too is very probably doomed 
 to enter into this ^^way of all flesh/' to 
 be forced into ^Hhe whirl of the witches' 
 sabbath of democracy ; ' ' and then Prus- 
 sia 's day, too, is over, and France is 
 revenged. At the same time M. Eenan 
 suggests certain reforms in French edu- 
 cation. These reforms may at any rate, 
 he thinks, go forward, whatever else the 
 future may have in store for us : whether 
 a Capet at Rheims or the International 
 at Potsdam. 
 
 All this makes the new part of M. 
 Kenan's volume. He has reprinted 
 here besides, his two letters to Dr. 
 Strauss and several other publications 
 occasioned by the late war; while the 
 volume ends with an essay on Constitu- 
 tional Monarchy in France, and another 
 on the respective share of the family and 
 the State in the work of education, which 
 appeared before the war began. These 
 two essays may rank with the best things 
 
EENAN 159 
 
 M. Renan has written, and to read them 
 again heightens our admiration of them. 
 The new part of the book abounds with 
 ingenious and striking thoughts, elo- 
 quently expressed ; yet this part will not 
 entirely satisfy the friends of M. Renan, 
 nor does it quite answer, to say the 
 truth, to the impression left on us by the 
 summary of its contents which we read 
 in the Times before the book appeared. 
 It has not the usual consummate round- 
 ness of M. Renan 's composition, the 
 appearance of having been long and 
 thoroughly prepared in the mind, and of 
 now coming forth in perfect ripeness; 
 there are, or we seem to see, marks here 
 and there of haste, excitement, and cha- 
 grin. This was perhaps inevitable. 
 
 Our business is not with politics, for- 
 eign or domestic; yet on one or two of 
 the political points where M. Renan 
 does not quite satisfy us, we must touch. 
 We will not ask whether France in gen- 
 
160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 eral has not let the idea of dynastic at- 
 tachment, as M. Renan calls it, and the 
 remembrance of its historic self before 
 1789, so completely die out that it is 
 vain to seek now to restore them, al- 
 though, when Burke wrote, this might 
 still have been possible. But we will 
 observe that this restoration has, in any 
 case, an enemy more serious and more 
 respectable than that vulgar jacobinism, 
 with no higher aim than to content the 
 envy and the materialistic cravings of 
 the masses, which M. Renan assails with 
 such scorn; it has against it the repub- 
 licanism of men, for instance, like M. 
 Quinet. This republicanism is a rea- 
 soned and serious faith, and it grows 
 not out of a stupid insensibility to the 
 historic life and institutions of a nation, 
 nor out of a failure to perceive that in 
 the world's progress, as M. Renan elo- 
 quently and profoundly urges, all can- 
 not shine, all cannot be prosperous, some 
 
EENAN 161 
 
 sacrificed lives there must be; but it 
 grows out of the conviction that in what 
 we call our civilisation this sacrifice is 
 excessive. Our civilisation in the old 
 and famous countries of Europe has 
 truly been, as M. Kenan says, in its or- 
 igin an aristocratic work, the work of a 
 few: its maintenance is the work of a 
 few; *^ country, honour, duty, are things 
 created and upheld by a small number 
 of men amidst a multitude which, left 
 to itself, lets them fall." Yes, because 
 this multitude are in vice and misery 
 outside them; and surely that they are 
 so is in itself some condemnation of the 
 ^^aristocratic work." We do not say 
 that the historic life and continuity of a 
 nation are therefore to be violently 
 broken, or its traditional institutions 
 abandoned; but we say that a case has 
 been made out against our mere actual 
 civilization, and a new work given it to 
 do, which were not so visible when Burke 
 
162 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 wrote, which would certainly have fixed 
 the regards of Burke now, and which M. 
 Renan too much leaves out of sight. 
 
 A mere looker-on may smile to read 
 at p. 153, written before Alsace and Lor- 
 raine were ceded and when there was 
 still hope of saving them, that France 
 could not survive their loss, that she is 
 like a building so compact that to pull 
 out one or two large stones makes it 
 tumble down, or like a living being with 
 an organisation so highly centralised 
 that to have an important limb cut off is 
 death; and then to read at p. 58 and 
 other passages, written since peace was 
 made, that the immense resources of 
 France are hardly at all altered or im- 
 paired, that she is a peine entamee. 
 But of this kind of inconsistency a man 
 of heart and imagination may well be 
 guilty when his country is in question; 
 Burke, assuredly, might have been guilty 
 of it. 
 
EENAN 163 
 
 Our one serious point of difference 
 with M. Renan, and where we confess 
 he somewhat disappoints us, is in his 
 discussion of the faults of France. 
 The capital fault, the cherished defect 
 of France, is — what does the reader 
 think? — ^want of faith in science, le man- 
 que de foi a la science. In the same 
 strain speaks Mdme. Sand in the charm- 
 ing Letters she has lately published: 
 Nous voulons penser et agir a la fois, 
 she says; and therefore we are beaten. 
 Nay, our amiability itself puts us at a 
 disadvantage, she adds, in this bad 
 actual world: Nous ne sommes pas 
 capables de nous preparer a la guerre 
 pendant vingt ans; nous sommes si in- 
 capahles de hair! It is the head, la tete, 
 which is so greatly in fault; the heart, 
 the sentiments are right; le Frangais, 
 says M. Renan, est hon, etourdi; yes, 
 etourdi he may be, harum-scarum; but 
 
164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 he is bon, Burke, whom we have so 
 much quoted, says of Charles II.: 
 
 ''The person given to us by Monk was a 
 man without any sense of his duty as a prince, 
 without any regard to the dignity of his 
 crown, without any love to his people; disso- 
 lute, false, venal, and destitute of any positive 
 good quality whatsoever, except a pleasant 
 temper and the manners of a gentleman.'* 
 
 So far he, too, was hon: but his good- 
 ness had gaps which, though certainly 
 he was also without the scientific temper, 
 would make us hesitate to say that his 
 chief fault was want of faith in science. 
 Of France we may say the same. It 
 seems to us much more true of England 
 than of France that the national defect 
 is want of faith in science. In France 
 the great defect lies, surely, in a much 
 simpler thing — want of faith in conduct. 
 M. Eenan's chief concern at the failure 
 of the Reformation in France is for what 
 tKe head lost ; for the better schools, the 
 
EENAN 165 
 
 reading, the instruction, which the Eef- 
 ormation would have brought with it. 
 But M. Michelet put his finger on the 
 real cause for concern, when he said 
 that the Eeformation failed in France 
 because a moral reformation France 
 would not have. That sense of personal 
 responsibility which is the foundation of 
 all true religion, which possessed Luther, 
 which possessed also the great saints of 
 Catholicism, but which Luther alone 
 managed to convey to the popular mind, 
 earning thereby — little as we owe him 
 for the theological doctrines he imagined 
 to be his great boon to us — a most true 
 title to our regard; that was what the 
 Huguenots had, what the mass of the 
 French nation had not and did not care 
 to have, and what they suffer to this 
 day for not having. One of the gifts 
 and graces which M. Eenan finds in 
 France is her enmity to pedantry and 
 over-strictness in these matters: and in 
 
166 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 his letter to Dr. Strauss he says that, 
 although he himself has been sufficiently 
 near holy orders to think himself bound 
 to a regular life, he should be sorry not 
 to see around him a brilliant and dis- 
 sipated society. No one feels more than 
 we do the harm which the exaggeration 
 of Hebraism has done in England; but 
 this is Hellenism with a vengeance! 
 Considering what the natural propen- 
 sions of men are, such language appears 
 to us out of place anywhere, and in 
 France simply fatal. Moral conscience, 
 self-control, seriousness, steadfastness, 
 are not the whole of human life cer- 
 tainly, but they are by far the greatest 
 part of it; without them — and this is 
 the very burden of the Hebrew prophets 
 and a fact of experience as old as the 
 world — ^nations cannot stand. France 
 does not enough see their importance; 
 and the worst of it is that no man can 
 make another see their importance un- 
 
EENAN 167 
 
 less lie sees it naturally. For these 
 things, just as for the more brilliant 
 things of art and science, there is a bent, 
 a turn. ^^He showed his ways unto 
 Moses, his works unto the children of 
 Israel,*' — to them, and to the heavy 
 Germanic nations whom they have 
 moulded; not, apparently, to the chil- 
 dren of Gomer and to Vercingetorix. 
 But this opens a troubled prospect for 
 the children of Gomer. 
 
 But perhaps we English, too, shall be 
 as the children of Gomer ; for M. Eenan 
 has a theory that according to ^^that 
 great law by which the primitive race 
 of an invaded country always ends by 
 getting the upper hand, England is be- 
 coming every day more Celtic and less 
 Germanic;" in the public opinion and 
 policy of England for the last thirty 
 years he sees the esprit celtique, plus 
 doux, plus sympathetique, plus humain. 
 We imagine our Irish neighbours by no 
 
168 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 means share his opinion. A more truly 
 Germanic, or, at least, Anglo-Saxon, per- 
 formance than the abolition of the Irish 
 Church through the power of the Dis- 
 senters' antipathy to church-establish- 
 ments, then telling ourselves in our 
 newspapers we had done it out of a pure 
 love of reason and justice, and then call- 
 ing solemnly upon the quick-witted 
 Irish, who knew that the Dissenters 
 would have let the Irish Church stand 
 for ever sooner than give a shilling of its 
 funds to the Catholics entitled to them, 
 to believe our claptrap and be prop- 
 erly grateful to us at last, was never 
 witnessed. What we call our Philistin- 
 ism, to which M. Eenan might perhaps 
 apply his favourite epithets of dur et 
 rogue, may well bring us into trouble; 
 but hardly, we think, our doux esprit 
 celtique. 
 
 It seems, indeed, as if, in all that re- 
 lates to character and conduct strictly 
 
EENAN 169 
 
 so called, M. Eenan, whom at other times 
 we follow with so much sympathy, saw 
 things with other eyes than ours. In 
 a parallel between the English Eevolu- 
 tion of 1688 and the French Eevolution 
 of 1830, he asks himself why the first 
 succeeded and the second failed; and 
 he answers that it cannot have been 
 owing to the difference between William 
 of Orange and Louis-Philippe, because 
 the second had no faults as a ruler which 
 the first did not show in fully as great 
 a degree. When we read this, we are 
 fairly lost in amazement. Surely the 
 most important point in a ruler is char- 
 acter; and William III., whatever were 
 his faults, had a character great and 
 commanding; while Louis-Philippe had, 
 or gave the world the impression of hav- 
 ing, a character somewhat (to speak 
 quite frankly) ignoble. 
 
 We would fain stop here in our enu- 
 meration of matters of difference; for 
 
170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 to differ with M. Renan is far less nat- 
 ural to us than to agree with him. But 
 it is impossible not to notice one or two 
 assumptions respecting the French Rev- 
 olution and the intellectual value of 
 France to the world, because to these 
 assumptions M. Renan, like almost all 
 Frenchmen, seems to challenge the as- 
 sent of mankind, at least of all mankind 
 except France's rogue et jaloux enemy, 
 Prussia. Greece and Judea, he says, 
 have had to pay with the loss of their 
 national existence the honor of having 
 given lessons to all mankind; in like 
 manner — 
 
 ** France at this moment expiates her Revo- 
 lution; she will perhaps one day reap its 
 fruits in the grateful memory of emancipated 
 nations. ' ' 
 
 Just in the same strain writes Mdme. 
 Sand, in the Letters we have already 
 quoted : 
 
 **Even though Germany should appear to 
 conquer us, we shall remain the peuple initi- 
 
EENAN 171 
 
 ateur, which receives a lesson and does not 
 take one." 
 
 In prosperity the French are incorri- 
 gible, so that a time like the present 
 offers the only opportunity for dis- 
 abusing them of notions of this kind, so 
 obstructive to improvement; and M. 
 Eenan, one would have hoped, was the 
 very man to do it. Greece has given 
 us art and science, Judea has given us 
 the Bible; these are positive achieve- 
 ments. Whoever gives us a just and 
 rational constitution of human society 
 will also confer a great boon on us and 
 effect a great work; but what has the 
 French Eevolution accomplished to- 
 wards this? Nothing. It was an in- 
 surrection against the old routine, it 
 furiously destroyed the medieval form 
 of society; this it did, and this was well 
 if anything had come of it; but into 
 what that is new and fruitful has France 
 proceeded to initiate us? A colourless, 
 
172 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 humdrum, and ill-poised life is a baneful 
 thing, and men would fain change it; 
 but our benefactor and initiator is the 
 poet who brings us a new one, not the 
 drunkard who gets rid of it by break- 
 ing the windows and bringing the house 
 about his ears. 
 
 There seems to us a like exaggeration 
 in the French estimate of their country's 
 intellectual rank in the world. France 
 is the plat de sel, the dish containing the 
 salt without which all the other dishes 
 of the world would be savourless ; she is 
 (we will use M. Eenan's own words, for 
 a translation might easily do injustice 
 to them) — 
 
 ''la grande maitresse de rinvestigation sa- 
 vante, ringenieuse, vive et prompte initiatrice 
 du monde a toute fine et delicate pensee;" 
 
 she alone has — 
 
 ''line societe exquise, charmante et serieuse a 
 la fois, fine, tolerante, aimable, sachant tout 
 sans avoir rien appris, devinant d^ instinct le 
 dernier resultat de toute philosophie." 
 
RENAN 173 
 
 We wonder if it ever occurs to these 
 masters du gout et chi tact that in an 
 Englishman, an Italian, a German, this 
 language provokes a smile. No one 
 feels more than we do, and few English- 
 men feel enough, the good of that ami- 
 ability, even if it does not go very deep, 
 of that sympathetic side in the French 
 nature, which makes German and Prot- 
 estant Alsace cling to defeated France, 
 while, mainly for the want of it, pros- 
 perous England cannot attach Ireland. 
 No one feels more than we do, few 
 Englishmen feel enough, the good of 
 that desire for lucidity, even apparent, 
 in thought and expression, which has 
 made the French language. But, after 
 all, a nation's intellectual place depends 
 upon its having reached the very highest 
 rank in the very highest lines of spirit- 
 ual endeavour; this is what in the end 
 makes its ideal; this is what fixes its 
 scale of intellectual judgment, and what 
 
174 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 it counts by in the world. More than 
 twenty years ago we said, lovers of 
 France as we are, and abundant and 
 brilliant as is her work of a lower or- 
 der than the very highest: 
 
 *' France, famed in all great arts, in none 
 supreme" — 
 
 and this still seems to ns to be the true 
 criticism on her. M. Eenan opposes 
 living names, for or against which we 
 will say nothing, to the best living 
 names of Germany ; but what is one gen- 
 eration? and what, directly we leave our 
 own generation, are any names but the 
 greatest? And where, throughout all 
 her generations, has France a name like 
 Goethe ? where, still more, has she names 
 like Sophocles and Plato, Dante and 
 Raphael, Shakespeare and Newton? 
 That is the real question for her, when 
 she is esteeming herself the salt of the 
 earth. Probably the incapacity for seri- 
 
RENAN 175 
 
 ousness in the highest sense, for what the 
 Greeks called to aTrovBalov^ and Virgil calls 
 virtus verusque labor, is here too what 
 keeps France back from perfection. 
 For the Greeks and Romans, and a 
 truly Latin race like the Italians, have 
 this seriousness intellectually, as the 
 Hebrews and the Germanic races have 
 it morally; and it may be remarked 
 in passing that this distinction makes 
 the conditions of the future for Latin 
 Italy quite different from those for 
 Celtic France. Only seriousness is con- 
 structive ; Latin Gaul was a Roman con- 
 struction. Old France was, as M. Renan 
 himself says, a Germanic construction; 
 France has been since 1789 getting rid 
 of all the plan, cramps, and stays of 
 her original builders, and their edifice 
 is in ruins ; but is the Celt, by himself, 
 constructive enough to rebuild! 
 
 We sincerely believe that France 
 would do well, instead of proclaiming 
 
176 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 herself the salt of the earth, to ponder 
 these things ; and sometimes it is hard to 
 refrain from saying so. M. Kenan has 
 tempted us; yet we see with regret our 
 space nearly gone. Why could we not 
 have kept to our own generation 1 and 
 then we might have given ourselves the 
 pleasure of saying how high is M. Ee- 
 nan's place in it. Certainly, we find 
 something of a bathos in his challenge 
 to Germany to produce a living poet to 
 surpass M. Hugo; but in sober serious- 
 ness we might challenge Germany, or 
 any other country, to produce a living 
 critic to surpass M. Renan. We have 
 just been reading an American essayist, 
 Mr. Higginson, who says that the United 
 States are to evolve a type of literary 
 talent superior to anything yet seen in 
 the mother country; and this perhaps, 
 when it is ready, will be something to 
 surprise us. But taking things as they 
 now are, where shall we find a living 
 
EENAN 177 
 
 writer who so habitually as M. Renan, 
 moves among questions of the deepest 
 interest, presents them so attractively, 
 discusses them with so much feeling, in- 
 sight, and felicity? Even as to the all- 
 importance of conduct J which in his irri- 
 tation against the ^^ chaste Vandals" 
 who have been overrunning France we 
 have seen him a little disposed just now 
 to underrate, he is far too wise a man 
 not to be perfectly sound at bottom. 
 Le monde, we find him saying in 1869, 
 ne tient debout que par un peu de vertu. 
 The faults and dangers both of vulgar 
 democracy and of vulgar liberalism 
 there is no one who has seen more 
 clearly or described so well. The vulgar 
 democrat's ^^ happiness of the greatest 
 number" he analyses into what it prac- 
 tically is — a principle reduisant tout a 
 contenter les volontes materialistes des 
 joules, of that ^* popular mass, growing 
 every day larger, which is destitute of 
 
178 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 any sort of religious ideal and can rec- 
 ognise no social principle beyond and 
 above the desire of satisfying these ma- 
 terialistic cravings." The esprit dem- 
 ocratique of this sort of democracy, avec 
 sa violence, son ton ahsolu, sa simplicite 
 decevante d^idees, ses soupgons meticu- 
 leux, son ingratitude, is admirably 
 touched; but touched not less admirably 
 is another very different social type, the 
 cherished ideal of vulgar liberalism, the 
 American type — 
 
 *^fonde essentiellement sur la liberie et la 
 propriete sans privileges de classes, sans in- 
 stitutions anciennes, sans histoire, sans so- 
 ciete anstocratique, sans cour, sans pouvoir 
 brilla/)it, sans universites serieuses ni fortes 
 institutions scientifiques, Ces sociStes man- 
 quent de distinction, de noblesse; elles ne 
 font guere d'oeuvres originales en fait d'art 
 et de science" — 
 
 but they can come to be very strong 
 and to produce very good things, and 
 that is enough for our Philistines. 
 
EENAN 179 
 
 What can be better, and in the end more 
 fruitful, than criticism of this force; 
 but what constituency can accept a man 
 guilty of making it 1 Let M. Eenan con- 
 tinue to make it, and let him not fear 
 but that in making it, in bringing 
 thought into the world to oust claptrap, 
 he fulfils a higher duty than by sketch- 
 ing paper constitutions, or by prose- 
 cuting electoral campaigns in the Seine- 
 et-Marne. '^The fashion of this world 
 passetH, away,^' wrote Goethe from 
 Eome in 1787, '*and I would fain occupy 
 myself only with the eternal." 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 
 
 DA miJii, Domine, scire quod scien- 
 dum est — ^^ Grant that the knowl- 
 edge I get may be the knowledge which 
 is worth having!'' — the spirit of that 
 prayer ought to rule our education. 
 How little it does rule it, every discern- 
 ing man will acknowledge. Life is 
 short, and our faculties of attention and 
 of recollection are limited; in education 
 we proceed as if our life were endless, 
 and our powers of attention and recol- 
 lection inexhaustible. We have not time 
 or strength to deal with half of the mat- 
 ters which are thrown upon our minds, 
 and they prove a useless load to us. 
 When some one talked to Themistocles 
 of an art of memory, he answered: 
 ' * Teach me rather to forget ! ' ' The sar- 
 183 
 
184 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 casm well criticises the fatal want of 
 proportion between what we put into 
 our minds and their real needs and 
 powers. 
 
 From the time when first I was led to 
 think about education, this want of pro- 
 portion is what has most struck me. 
 It is the great obstacle to progress, yet 
 it is by no means remarked and con- 
 tended against as it should be. It 
 hardly begins to present itself until we 
 pass beyond the strict elements of edu- 
 cation — beyond the acquisition, I mean, 
 of reading, of writing, and of calculating 
 so far as the operations of common life 
 require. But the moment we pass be- 
 yond these, it begins to appear. Lan- 
 guages, grammar, literature, history, 
 geography, mathematics, the knowledge 
 of nature — what of these is to be taught, 
 how much, and how 1 There is no clear, 
 well-grounded consent. The same with 
 religion. Eeligion is surely to be taught. 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 185 
 
 but what of it is to be taught, and how 1 
 A clear, well-grounded consent is again 
 wanting. And taught in such fashion 
 as things are now, how often must a 
 candid and sensible man, if he could be 
 offered an art of memory to secure all 
 that he has learned of them, as to a 
 very great deal of it be inclined to say 
 with Themistocles : '* Teach me rather 
 to forget!'' 
 
 In England the common notion seems 
 to be that education is advanced in two 
 ways principally: by for ever adding 
 fresh matters of instruction, and by pre- 
 venting uniformity. I should be in- 
 clined to prescribe just the opposite 
 course; to prescribe a severe limitation 
 of the number of matters taught, a 
 severe uniformity in the line of study 
 followed. Wide ranging, and the mul- 
 tiplication of matters to be investigated, 
 belong to private study, to the develop- 
 ment of special aptitudes in the individ- 
 
186 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ual learner, and to the demands which 
 they raise in him. But separate from 
 all this should be kept the broad plain 
 lines of study for almost universal use. 
 I say almost universal, because they 
 must of necessity vary a little with the 
 varying conditions of men. Whatever 
 the pupil finds set out for him upon these 
 lines, he should learn ; therefore it ought 
 not to be too much in quantity. The 
 essential thing is that it should be well 
 chosen. If once we can get it well 
 chosen, the more uniformly it can be kept 
 to, the better. The teacher will be more 
 at home ; and besides, when we have got 
 what is good and suitable, there is small 
 hope of gain, and great certainty of risk, 
 in departing from it. 
 
 No such lines are laid out, and per- 
 haps no one could be trusted to lay them 
 out authoritatively. But to amuse one- 
 self with laying them out in fancy is a 
 good exercise for one's thoughts. One 
 
JOHNSON ^S LIVES 187 
 
 may lay them out for this or that de- 
 scription of pupil, in this or that branch 
 of study. The wider the interest of the 
 branch of study taken, and the more 
 extensive the class of pupils concerned, 
 the better for our purpose. Suppose 
 we take the department of letters. It 
 is interesting to lay out in one's mind 
 the ideal line of study to be followed by 
 all who have to learn Latin and Greek. 
 But it is still more interesting to lay 
 out the ideal line of study to be followed 
 by all who are concerned with that body 
 of literature which exists in English, be- 
 cause this class is so much more nu- 
 merous amongst us. The thing would 
 be, one imagines, to begin with a very 
 brief introductory sketch of our subject ; 
 then to fix a certain series of works to 
 serve as what the French, taking an ex- 
 pression from the builder's business, 
 call points de repere — points which 
 stand as so many natural centres, and 
 
188 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 by returning to which we can always 
 find our way again, if we are embar- 
 rassed ; finally, to mark out a number of 
 illustrative and representative works, 
 connecting themselves with each of these 
 points de repere. In the introductory 
 sketch we are amongst generalities, in 
 the group of illustrative works we are 
 amongst details ; generalities and details 
 have, both of them, their perils for the 
 learner. It is evident that, for purposes 
 of education, the most important parts 
 by far in our scheme are what we call 
 the points de repere. To get these 
 rightly chosen and thoroughly known is 
 the great matter. For my part, in 
 thinking of this or that line of study 
 which human minds follow, I feel al- 
 ways prompted to seek, first and fore- 
 most, the leading points de repere in it. 
 In editing for the use of the young 
 the group of chapters which are now 
 commonly distinguished as those of the 
 
JOHNSON ^S LIVES 189 
 
 Babylonian Isaiah, I drew attention to 
 their remarkable fitness for serving as a 
 point of this kind to the student of uni- 
 versal history. But a work which by 
 many is regarded as simply and solely 
 a document of religion, there is difficulty, 
 perhaps, in employing for historical and 
 literary purposes. With works of a 
 secular character one is on safer ground. 
 And for years past, whenever I have 
 had occasion to use Johnson's Lives of 
 the Poets, the thought has struck me how 
 admirable a point de repere, or fixed 
 centre of the sort described above, these 
 lives might be made to furnish for the 
 student of English literature. If we 
 could but take, I have said to myself, the 
 most important of the lives in Johnson's 
 volumes, and leave out all the rest, what 
 a text-book we should have! The vol- 
 umes at present are a work to stand in 
 a library, '^a work which no gentleman's 
 library should be without." But we 
 
190 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 want to get from them a text-book, to be 
 in the hands of every one who desires 
 even so much as a general acquaintance 
 with English literature; — and so much 
 acquaintance as this who does not de- 
 sire? The work as Johnson published 
 it is not fitted to serve as such a text- 
 book; it is too extensive, and contains 
 the lives of many poets quite insignifi- 
 cant. Johnson supplied lives of all 
 whom the booksellers proposed to in- 
 clude in their collection of British 
 Poets ; he did not choose the poets him- 
 self, although he added two or three to 
 those chosen by the booksellers. What- 
 ever Johnson did in the department of 
 literary biography and criticism pos- 
 sesses interest and deserves our atten- 
 tion. But in his Lives of the Poets 
 there are six of pre-eminent interest; 
 the lives of six men who, while the rest 
 in the collection are of inferior rank, 
 stand out as names of the first class in 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 191 
 
 English literature — Milton, Dryden, 
 Swift, Addison, Pope, Gray. These six 
 writers differ among themselves, of 
 course, in power and importance, and 
 every one can see, that, if we were fol- 
 lowing certain modes of literary classi- 
 fication, Milton would have to be placed 
 on a solitary eminence far above any 
 of them. But if, without seeking a close 
 view of individual differences, we form 
 a large and liberal first class among 
 English writers, all these six personages 
 — Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, 
 Gray — must, I think, be placed in it. 
 Their lives cover a space of more than 
 a century and a half, from 1608, the 
 year of Milton's birth, down to 1771, 
 the date of the death of Gray. Through 
 this space of more than a century and 
 a half the six lives conduct us. We fol- 
 low the course of what Warburton well 
 calls ^^the most agreeable subject in 
 the world, which is literary history," 
 
192 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 and follow it in the lives of men of 
 letters of the first class. And the 
 writer of their lives is himself, too, a 
 man of letters of the first class. Ma- 
 lone calls Johnson ^^the brightest orna- 
 ment of the eighteenth century. '^ He 
 is justly to be called, at any rate, a man 
 of letters of the first class, and the 
 greatest power in English letters dur- 
 ing the eighteenth century. And in 
 these characteristic lives, not finished 
 until 1781, and *^ which I wrote,'' as he 
 himself tells us, ^'in my usual way, dil- 
 atorily and hastily, unwilling to work 
 and working with vigour and haste, ' ' we 
 have Johnson mellowed by years, John- 
 son in his ripeness and plenitude, treat- 
 ing the subject which he loved best and 
 knew best. Much of it he could treat 
 with the knowledge and sure tact of a 
 contemporary; even from Milton and 
 Dryden he was scarcely further sepa- 
 rated than our generation is from Burns 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 193 
 
 and Scott. Having all these recom- 
 mendations, his Lives of the Poets do 
 indeed truly stand for what Boswell 
 calls them, ^Hhe work which of all Dr. 
 Johnson's writings will perhaps be read 
 most generally and with most pleasure." 
 And in the lives of the six chief per- 
 sonages of the work, the lives of Mil- 
 ton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and 
 Gray, we have its very kernel and 
 quintessence ; we have the work relieved 
 of whatever is less significant, retain- 
 ing nothing which is not highly signifi- 
 cant, brought within easy and conven- 
 ient compass, and admirably fitted to 
 serve as a point de repere, a fixed and 
 thoroughly known centre of departure 
 and return, to the student of English 
 literature. 
 
 I know of no such first-rate piece of 
 literature, for supplying in this way the 
 wants of the literary student, existing 
 at all in any other language; or exist- 
 
194 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ing in our own language, for any period 
 except the period wMch Johnson's six 
 lives cover. A student cannot read them 
 without gaining from them, consciously 
 or unconsciously, an insight into the 
 history of English literature and life. 
 He would find great benefit, let me add, 
 from reading in connection with each 
 biography something of the author with 
 whom it deals ; the first two books, say, 
 of Paradise Lost, in connection with the 
 life of Milton ; Absalom and AcJiitophel, 
 and the Dedication to the ^neis, in con- 
 nection with the life of Dryden; in con- 
 nection with Swift's life, the Battle of 
 the Boohs; with Addison's, the Cover- 
 ley Papers; with Pope's, the imitations 
 of the Satires and Epistles of Horace. 
 The Elegy in a Country Churchyard 
 everybody knows, and will have it pres- 
 ent to his mind when he reads the life 
 of Gray. But of the other works which 
 I have mentioned how little can this be 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 195 
 
 said; to how many of us are Pope and 
 Addison and Dryden and Swift, and 
 even Milton himself, mere names, about 
 whose date and history and supposed 
 characteristics of style we may have 
 learnt by rote something from a hand- 
 book, but of the real men and of the 
 power of their works we know nothing! 
 From Johnson's biographies the stu- 
 dent will get a sense of what the real 
 men were, and with this sense fresh in 
 his mind he will find the occasion propi- 
 tious for acquiring also, in the way 
 pointed out, a sense of the power of 
 their works. 
 
 This will seem to most people a very 
 unambitious discipline. But the fault 
 of most of the disciplines proposed in 
 education is that they are by far too 
 ambitious. Our improvers of educa- 
 tion are almost always for proceeding 
 by way of augmentation and complica- 
 tion; reduction and simplification, I 
 
196 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 say, is what is rather required. We give 
 the learner too much to do, and we are 
 over-zealous to tell him what he ought 
 to think. Johnson himself has admir- 
 ably marked the real line of our educa- 
 tion through letters. He says in his life 
 of Pope: — ^^ Judgment is forced upon 
 us by experience. He that reads many 
 books must compare one opinion or one 
 style with another; and when he com- 
 pares, must necessarily distinguish, re- 
 ject, and prefer.'' The end and aim of 
 education through letters is to get this 
 experience. Our being told by another 
 what its results will properly be found 
 to be, is not, even if we are told aright, 
 at all the same thing as getting the ex- 
 perience for ourselves. The discipline, 
 therefore, which puts us in the way of 
 getting it, cannot be called an inconsid- 
 erable or inefficacious one. We should 
 take care not to imperil its acquisition 
 by refusing to trust to it in its simplic- 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 197 
 
 ity, by being eager to add, set right, and 
 annotate. It is much to secure the read- 
 ing, by young English people, of the lives 
 of the six chief poets of our nation be- 
 tween the years 1650 and 1750, related by 
 our foremost man of letters of the eight- 
 eenth century. It is much to secure 
 their reading, under the stimulus of 
 Johnson's interesting recital and for- 
 cible judgments, famous specimens of 
 the authors whose lives are before them. 
 Do not let us insist on also reviewing 
 in detail and supplementing Johnson's 
 work for them, on telling them what 
 they ought really and definitively to 
 think about the six authors and about 
 the exact place of each in English litera- 
 ture. Perhaps our pupils are not ripe 
 for it; perhaps, too, we have not John- 
 son's interest and Johnson's force; we 
 are not the power in letters for our 
 century which he was for his. "We may 
 be pedantic, obscure, dull, everything 
 
198 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 that bores, rather than everything that 
 attracts; and so Johnson and his lives 
 will repel, and will not be received, 
 because we insist on being received 
 along with them. Again, as we bar a 
 learner's approach to Homer and Virgil 
 by our chevaux de frise of elaborate 
 grammar, so we are apt to stop his way 
 to a piece of English literature by im- 
 bedding it in a mass of notes and addi- 
 tional matter. Mr. Croker's edition of 
 Boswell's Life of Johnson is a good ex- 
 ample of the labour and ingenuity which 
 may be spent upon a masterpiece, with 
 the result, after all, really of rather 
 encumbering than illustrating it. All 
 knowledge may be in itself good, but 
 this kind of editing seems to proceed 
 upon the notion that we have only one 
 book to read in the course of our life, or 
 else that we have eternity to read in. 
 What can it matter to our generation 
 whether it was Molly Aston or Miss 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 199 
 
 Boothby whose preference for Lord 
 Lyttelton made Johnson jealous, and 
 produced in his Life of Lyttelton a cer- 
 tain tone of disparagement? With the 
 young reader, at all events, our great 
 endeavour should be to bring him face 
 to face with masterpieces, and to hold 
 him there, not distracting or rebutting 
 him with needless excursions or trifling 
 details. 
 
 I should like, therefore, to reprint 
 Johnson's six chief lives, simply as they 
 are given in the edition of four volumes 
 octavo, — the edition which passes for 
 being the first to have a correct and 
 complete text, — and to leave the lives, 
 in that natural form, to have their 
 effect upon the reader. I should like to 
 think that a number of young people 
 might thus be brought to know an im- 
 portant period of our literary and intel- 
 lectual history, by means of the lives of 
 six of its leading and representative 
 
200 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 authors, told by a great man. I should 
 like to think that they would go on, 
 under the stimulus of the lives, to ac- 
 quaint themselves with some leading 
 and representative work of each author. 
 In the six lives they would at least have 
 secured, I think, a most valuable point 
 de repere in the history of our English 
 life and literature, a point from which 
 afterwards to find their way; whether 
 they might desire to ascend upwards 
 to our anterior literature, or to come 
 downwards to the literature of yester- 
 day and of the present. 
 
 The six lives cover a period of liter- 
 ary and intellectual movement in which 
 we are all profoundly interested. It is 
 the passage of our nation to prose and 
 reason ; the passage to a type of thought 
 and expression, modern, European, and 
 which on the whole is ours at the pres- 
 ent day, from a type antiquated, pe- 
 culiar, and which is ours no longer. 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 201 
 
 The period begins with a prose 
 like this of Milton: '' They who to 
 states and governors of the common- 
 wealth direct their speech, high court 
 of parliament! or wanting snch access 
 in a private condition, write that which 
 they foresee may advance the public 
 good; I suppose them, if at the begin- 
 ning of no mean endeavour, not a little 
 altered and moved inwardly in their 
 minds/' It ends with a prose like this 
 of Smollett: ^^My spirit began to ac- 
 commodate itself to my beggarly fate, 
 and I became so mean as to go down 
 towards Wapping, with an intention to 
 inquire for an old schoolfellow, who, I 
 understood, had got the command of 
 a small coasting vessel then in the river, 
 and implore his assistance. ' ' These are 
 extreme instances; but they give us no 
 unfaithful notion of the change in our 
 prose between the reigns of Charles I. 
 and of Greorge III. Johnson has re- 
 
202 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 corded his own impression of the ex- 
 tent of the change and of its salutariness. 
 Boswell gave him a book to read, writ- 
 ten in 1702 by the Enghsh chaplain of 
 a regiment stationed in Scotland. *^It 
 is sad stuff, sir," said Johnson, after 
 reading it; ^^ miserably written, as books 
 in general then were. There is now an 
 elegance of style nniversally diffused. 
 No man now writes so ill as Martin's 
 Account of the Hebrides is written. A 
 man could not write so ill if he should 
 try. Set a merchant's clerk now to 
 write, and he'll do better." 
 
 It seems as if a simple and natural 
 prose were a thing which we might ex- 
 pect to come easy to communities of 
 men, and to come early to them; but we 
 know from experience that it is not so. 
 Poetry and the poetic form of expres- 
 sion naturally precede prose. We see 
 this in ancient Greece. We see prose 
 forming itself there gradually and with 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 203 
 
 labour; we see it passing througli more 
 than one stage before it attains to tbor- 
 ougb propriety and lucidity, long after 
 forms of consummate adequacy have al- 
 ready been reached and used in poetry. 
 It is a people's growth in practical life, 
 and its native turn for developing this 
 life and for making progress in it, which 
 awakens the desire for a good prose — 
 a prose plain, direct, intelligible, serv- 
 iceable. A dead language, the Latin, 
 for a long time furnished the nations of 
 Europe with an instrument of the kind, 
 superior to any which they had yet dis- 
 covered in their own. But nations such 
 as England and France, called to a 
 great historic life, and with powerful 
 interests and gifts either social or prac- 
 tical, were sure to feel the need of hav- 
 ing a sound prose of their own, and to 
 bring such a prose forth. They brought 
 it forth in the seventeenth century; 
 France first, afterwards England. 
 
204 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 The Eestoration marks tlie real mo- 
 ment of birth of our modern English 
 prose. Men of lucid and direct mental 
 habit there were, such as Chillingworth, 
 in whom before the Eestoration the de- 
 sire and the commencements of a mod- 
 ern prose show themselves. There were 
 men like Barrow, weighty and powerful, 
 whose mental habit the old prose suited, 
 who continued its forms and locutions 
 after the Eestoration. But the hour 
 was come for the new prose, and it grew 
 and prevailed. In Jolmson's time its 
 victory had long been assured, and the 
 old style seemed barbarous. The prose 
 writers of the eighteenth century have 
 indeed their mannerisms and phrases 
 which are no longer ours. Johnson says 
 of Milton 's blame of the universities for 
 allowing young men designed for Or- 
 ders in the Church to act in plays, ' * This 
 is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, 
 when he mentions his exile from college, 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 205 
 
 relates, with great luxuriance, the com- 
 pensation which the pleasures of the 
 theatre afford him. Plays were there- 
 fore only criminal when they were acted 
 by academics.'' We should now-a-days 
 not say peevish here, nor luxuriance, nor 
 academics. Yet the style is ours by its 
 organism, if not by its phrasing. It is 
 by its organism — an organism opposed 
 to length and involvement, and enabling 
 us to be clear, plain, and short — that , 
 English style after the Eestoration j 
 breaks with the style of the times pre- j 
 ceding it, finds the true law of prose, 
 and becomes modern; becomes, in spite 
 of superficial diif erences, the style of our 
 own day. 
 
 Burnet has pointed out how we are 
 under obligations in this matter to 
 Charles II., whom Johnson described as 
 **the last king of England who was a 
 man of parts." A king of England by 
 no means fulfils his whole duty by being 
 
206 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 a man of parts, or by loving and en- 
 couraging art, science, and literature. 
 Yet the artist and the student of the 
 natural sciences will always feel a kind- 
 ness towards the two Charleses for their 
 interest in art and science; and modern 
 letters, too, have their debt to Charles 
 II., although it may be quite true that 
 that prince, as Burnet says, ^*had little 
 or no literature. ' ' ^ ^ The King had little 
 or no literature, but true and good sense, 
 and had got a right notion of style ; for 
 he was in France at the time when they 
 were much set on reforming their lan- 
 guage. It soon appeared that he had a 
 true taste. So this helped to raise the 
 value of these men (Tillotson and 
 others), when the king approved of the 
 style their discourses generally ran in, 
 which was clear, plain, and short." 
 
 It is the victory of this prose style, 
 ** clear, plain, and short," over what 
 Burnet calls ^'the old style, long and 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 207 
 
 heavy," whicli is the distinguislimg 
 achievement, in the history of English 
 letters, of the century following the Ees- 
 toration. From the first it proceeded 
 rapidly and was never checked. Burnet 
 says of the Chancellor Finch, Earl of 
 Nottingham — **He was long much ad- 
 mired for his eloquence, but it was la- 
 boured and affected, and he saw it much 
 despised before he died.'' A like revo- 
 lution of taste brought about a general 
 condemnation of our old prose style, 
 imperfectly disengaged from the style of 
 poetry. By Johnson's time the new 
 style, the style of prose, was alto- 
 gether paramount in its own proper do- 
 main, and in its pride of victorious 
 strength had invaded also the domain of 
 poetry. 
 
 That invasion is now visited by us 
 with a condemnation not less strong and 
 general than the condemnation which 
 the eighteenth century passed upon the 
 
208 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 unwieldy prose of its predecessors. But 
 let us be careful to do justice while we 
 condemn. A thing good in its own 
 place may be bad out of it. Prose re- 
 quires a different style from poetry. 
 Poetry, no doubt, is more excellent in 
 \ itself than prose. In poetry man finds 
 Sthe highest and most beautiful expres- 
 sion of that which is in him. We had 
 ! far better poetry than the poetry of the 
 eighteenth century before that century 
 arrived, we have had better since it de- 
 parted. Like the Greeks, and unlike the 
 French, we can point to an age of poetry 
 anterior to our age of prose, eclipsing 
 our age of prose in glory, and fixing the 
 future character and conditions of our 
 literature. We do well to place our 
 pride in the Elizabethan age and Shakes- 
 peare, as the Greeks placed theirs in 
 Homer. We did well to return in the 
 present century to the poetry of that 
 older age for illumination and inspira- 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 209 
 
 tion, and to put aside, in a great meas- 
 ure, the poetry and prose intervening 
 between Milton and Wordsworth. Mil- 
 ton, in whom our great poetic age ex- 
 pired, was the last of the immortals. 
 Of the five poets whose lives follow his 
 in our proposed volume, three, Dryden, 
 Addison, and Swift, are eminent prose- 
 writers as well as poets ; two of the three, 
 Swift and Addison, far more distin- 
 guished as prose-writers than as poets. 
 The glory of English literature is in 
 poetry, and in poetry the strength of '5) 
 the eighteenth century does not lie. 
 
 Nevertheless, the eighteenth century 
 accomplished for us an immense liter- 
 ary progress, and even its shortcomings 
 in poetry were an instrument to that 
 progress, and served it. The example 
 of Germany may show us what a nation 
 loses from having no prose style. The 
 practical genius of our people could not 
 but urge irresistibly to the production 
 
210 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 of a real prose style, because for the pur- 
 poses of modern life the old English 
 prose, the prose of Milton and Taylor, 
 is cumbersome, unavailable, impossible. 
 A style of regularity, uniformity, pre- 
 cision, balance, was wanted. These are 
 the qualities of a serviceable prose 
 style. Poetry has a different logic, as 
 Coleridge said, from prose; poetical 
 style follows another law of evolution 
 than the style of prose. But there is 
 no doubt that a style of regularity, uni- 
 formity, precision, balance, will acquire 
 a yet stronger hold upon the mind of a 
 \ nation, if it is adopted in poetry as well 
 1 as in prose, and so comes to govern 
 1 both. This is what happened in France. 
 1 To the practical, modern, and social 
 genius of the French, a true prose was 
 indispensable. They produced one of 
 conspicuous excellence, one marked in 
 the highest degree by the qualities of 
 regularity, uniformity, precision, bal- 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 211 
 
 ance. With little opposition from any 
 deep-seated and imperious poetic in- 
 stincts, they made their poetry conform 
 to the law which was moulding their 
 prose. French poetry became marked 
 with the qualities of regularity, uni- 
 formity, precision, balance. This may 
 have been bad for French poetry, but 
 it was good for French prose. It 
 heightened the perfection with which 
 those qualities, the true qualities of 
 prose, were impressed upon it. When 
 England, at the Eestoration, desired a 
 modern prose, and began to create it, 
 our writers turned naturally to French 
 literature, which had just accomplished 
 the very process which engaged them. 
 The King's acuteness and taste, as we 
 have seen, helped. Indeed, to the ad- 
 mission of French influence of all kinds, 
 Charles the Second's character and that 
 of his court were but too favourable. 
 But the influence of the French writers 
 
212 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 was at that moment on the whole fortu- 
 nate, and seconded what was a vital and 
 necessary effort in our literature. Our 
 literature required a prose which con- 
 formed to the true law of prose ; and that 
 it might acquire this the more surely, it 
 compelled poetry, as in France, to con- 
 . form itself to the law of prose likewise. 
 The classic verse of French poetry was 
 the Alexandrine, a measure favourable 
 to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, 
 precision, balance. Gradually a measure 
 favourable to those very same qualities 
 — the ten-syllable couplet — established 
 itself as the classic verse of England, 
 until in the eighteenth century it had 
 become the ruling form of our poetry. 
 Poetry, or rather the use of verse, 
 entered in a remarkable degree, dur- 
 ing that century, into the whole of 
 the daily life of the civilised classes; 
 and the poetry of the century was a 
 perpetual school of the qualities requi- 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 213 
 
 site for a good prose, the qualities of/ 
 regularity, uniforraity, precision, bal- 
 ance. This may have been of no great 
 service to English poetry, although tOj 
 say that it has been of no service at all,' 
 to say that the eighteenth century has in 
 no respect changed the conditions of 
 English poetical style, or that it has 
 changed them for the worse, would be 
 untrue. But it was undeniably of sig- 
 nal service to that which was the great 
 want and work of the hour, English 
 prose. 
 
 Do not let us, therefore, hastily de- 
 spise Johnson and his century for their 
 defective poetry and criticism of poetry. 
 True, Johnson is capable of saying: 
 ^ ^ Surely no man could have fancied that 
 he read Lycidas with pleasure had he 
 not known the author!" True, he is 
 capable of maintaining ^^that the de- 
 scription of the temple in Congreve's 
 Mourning Bride was the finest poetical 
 
214 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 passage he had ever read — he recol- 
 lected none in Shakespeare equal to it. ' ' 
 But we are to conceive of Johnson and 
 of this century as having a special task 
 committed to them, the establishment 
 of English prose ; and as capable of be- 
 ing warped and narrowed in their judg- 
 ments of poetry by this exclusive task. 
 fSuch is the common course and law of 
 progress; one thing is done at a time, 
 and other things are sacrificed to it. 
 We must be thankful for the thing done, 
 if it is valuable, and we must put up 
 with the temporary sacrifice of other 
 things to this one. The other things 
 will have their turn sooner or later. 
 Above all, a nation with profound poet- 
 ical instincts, like the English nation, 
 may be trusted to work itself right again 
 in poetry after periods of mistaken poet- 
 ical practice. Even in the midst of an 
 age of such practice, and with his style 
 frequently showing the bad influence of 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 215 
 
 it, Gray was saved, we may say, and 
 remains a poet whose work has high 
 and pure worth, simply by knowing the 
 Greeks thoroughly, more thoroughly than 
 any English poet had known them since 
 Milton. Milton was a survivor from the 
 great age of poetry; Dryden, Addison, 
 Pope, and Swift were mighty workers 
 for the age of prose. Gray, a poet in 
 the midst of the age of prose, a poet, 
 moreover, of by no means the highest 
 force and of scanty productiveness, 
 nevertheless claims a place among the 
 six chief personages of Johnson's lives, 
 because it was impossible for an English 
 poet, even in that age, who knew the 
 great Greek masters intimately, not to 
 respond to their good influence, and to be 
 rescued from the false poetical practice 
 of his contemporaries. Of such avail to 
 a nation are deep poetical instincts even 
 in an age of prose. How much more 
 may they be trusted to assert themselves 
 
216 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 after the age of prose has ended, and to 
 remedy any poetical mischief done by it ! 
 And meanwhile the work of the hour, 
 the necessary and appointed work, has 
 been done, and we have got our prose. 
 
 Let US always bear in mind, there- 
 fore, that the century so well repre- 
 sented by Dryden, Addison, Pope, and 
 Swift, and of which the literary history 
 is so powerfully written by Johnson in 
 his lives, is a century of prose — a cen- 
 tury of which the great work in liter- 
 ature was the formation of English 
 prose. Johnson was himself a labourer 
 in this great and needful work, and was 
 ruled by its influences. His blame of 
 genuine poets like Milton and Gray, his 
 over-praise of artificial poets like Pope, 
 are to be taken as the utterances of a 
 man who worked for an age of prose, 
 who was ruled by its influences, and 
 could not but be ruled by them. Of 
 poetry he speaks as a man whose sense 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 217 
 
 for that with which he is dealing is in 
 some degree imperfect. 
 
 Yet even on poetry Johnson's utter- 
 ances are valuable, because they are the 
 utterances of a great and original man. 
 That indeed he was ; and to be conducted 
 by such a man through an important 
 century cannot but do us good, even 
 though our guide may in some places 
 be less competent than in others. John- 
 son was the man of an age of prose. 
 Furthermore, he was a strong force of 
 conservation and concentration, in an 
 epoch which by its natural tendencies 
 seemed moving towards expansion and 
 freedom. But he was a great man, and 
 great men are always instructive. The 
 more we study him, the higher will be 
 our esteem for the power of his mind, 
 the width of his interests, the largeness 
 of his knowledge, the freshness, fear- 
 lessness, and strength of his judgments. 
 The higher, too, will be our esteem for 
 
218 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 his character. His well-known lines on 
 Levett's death, beautiful and touching 
 lines, are still more beautiful and touch- 
 ing because they recall a whole history 
 of Johnson's goodness, tenderness, and 
 charity. Human dignity, on the other 
 hand, he maintained, we all know how 
 well, through the whole long and ar- 
 duous struggle of his life, from his 
 servitor days at Oxford, down to the 
 Jam moriturus of his closing hour. 
 His faults and strangenesses are on the 
 surface, and catch every eye. But on 
 the whole we have in him a good and 
 admirable type, worthy to be kept in our 
 view for ever, of ^^the ancient and in- 
 bred integrity, piety, good-nature and 
 good-humour of the English people." 
 
 A volume giving us Johnson's Lives 
 of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, 
 Pope, Gray, would give us, therefore, the 
 compendious story of a whole impor- 
 tant age in English Literature, told by 
 
JOHNSON'S LIVES 219 
 
 a great man, and in a performance wMch 
 is itself a piece of English literature of 
 the first class. If such a volume could 
 but be prefaced by Lord Macaulay's 
 Life of Johnson, it would be perfect. 
 
A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD' 
 
A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 
 
 THERE has lately been published^ a 
 pretty little volume entitled The 
 Following of Christ, by John Tauler; 
 done into English hy J. R, Morell. It is 
 not certain that the work is by Tauler; 
 the weight of authority and of probabil- 
 ity is, it seems to me, against his being 
 its author. The book has many repeti- 
 tions, and a manner formal and some- 
 times tiresome of conducting its argu- 
 ment. Mr. Moreirs translation is writ- 
 ten in an English occasionally slovenly 
 and even inaccurate. Still, this little 
 volume — which is cheap, let me say, as 
 well as pretty — should certainly not be 
 suffered to pass unnoticed. If it does 
 not proceed from Tauler himself, it pro- 
 
 1 By Burns & Gates, London and New York. 
 
 223 
 
224 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ceeds from one of that remarkable group 
 of Grerman mystics — ^^ Friends of God/' 
 as they called themselves — amongst 
 whom the great Dominican preacher of 
 Strasburg lived and worked. And the 
 contents of the little book, notwith- 
 standing its forms and repetitions, are 
 full of value. Therefore we may well 
 say in this case with the Imitation, — 
 which itself, also, issued from the deep 
 religious movement felt in the Germanic 
 lands along the Rhine in the fourteenth 
 century: — ^^Ask not who wrote it, but 
 attend to what it says.'' Mr. MorelPs 
 translation, finally, in spite of its oc- 
 casional inaccuracy and slovenliness, is 
 on the whole a sound and good one, with 
 the signal merit of faithfully reproduc- 
 ing the plain and earnest tone character- 
 istic of the original. 
 
 Every one is familiar with the Imita- 
 tion, attributed to Thomas a Kempis. 
 Tauler however, and his immediate 
 
A '^FEIEND OF GOD" 225 
 
 group, are to most of us names and noth- 
 ing more. Tauler's History and Life 
 and Twenty-Five of his Sermons, trans- 
 lated by Miss Winkworth, were pub- 
 lished in 1857, with a preface by Charles 
 Kingsley. The book is out of print and 
 can hardly be obtained. Some of the 
 sermons are interesting, but in general 
 the book, even if obtained, will disap- 
 point, I think, those who have been at- 
 tracted to it by Tauler's reputation, and 
 to reprint it as it stands would be unad- 
 visable. Much more interesting is the 
 Theologia Germanica, also translated by 
 Miss Winkworth, a work not by Tauler 
 himself, but by one of his group who 
 shared his spirit. On this short book 
 Luther set the very highest value, and 
 justly. But this book likewise is out of 
 print, and scarcely obtainable. 
 
 Its merit is of like kind with that of 
 the book translated by Mr. Morell to 
 which I now wish to call attention. 
 
226 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 Each of the two is an answer of the sin- 
 cere and deeply religious German 
 nature to the need felt, by itself and by 
 others, in a time such as was the middle 
 of the fourteenth century, a time ^^of 
 famine '' (to use the words of the proph- 
 et Amos) ^*of hearing of the words 
 of the Eternal." We read in the Fol- 
 lowing of Christ: *'It is often said, He 
 who suffereth a man to die of bodily 
 hunger when he might have helped the 
 sufferer, would be guilty of the death 
 of that man. Much more is a man guilty 
 towards souls when he letteth them die 
 of hunger. For just as the soul is much 
 nobler than the body, so much more are 
 you guilty if you allow the soul to suf- 
 fer hunger.'' To this hunger and suf- 
 fering of the soul the Following of 
 Christ is a response, but a response with 
 a special character of its own. The 
 Imitation is also a response to the same 
 hunger, but a response of a different 
 
A ^'FRIEND OF GOD^' 227 
 
 character. ^^No way to life and peace 
 but the way of the cross!" that, in sum, 
 is the response of the Imitation. Tauler 
 and his group would have sincerely pro- 
 fessed that they likewise adopted it ; and 
 yet the real and characteristic response 
 of the ^^ Friends of God" and of such 
 works as the Following of Christ and 
 the Theologia Germanica is far rather 
 this, which I quote from the first-named 
 work: ^'Sin killeth nature, but nature 
 is abhorrent of death; therefore sin is 
 against nature, therefore sinners can 
 never have a joy." That is the negative 
 side of the response, and its positive 
 side is this : ^ ^ They who have left sins 
 and come to grace have more delight 
 and joy in one day than all sinners have 
 ever gained." 
 
 It is the natural truth of religion and 
 of Christianity which occupies these 
 *^ Friends of God." The truly natural 
 thing is virtue. Christian virtue; and 
 
228 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 that it is so is proved by the peace and 
 happiness ensuing from it. ^^It is much 
 more according to nature to work virtue 
 than vice; for virtue places nature 
 firmly and supports it, while vice dis- 
 places it. A thoroughly natural man is 
 a pure man. That which maketh na- 
 ture impure is a faulty accident of na- 
 ture and is not the essence of nature. 
 But in order to be ^^a thoroughly nat- 
 ural man/' one who '^enters into him- 
 self, listens to the eternal words, and 
 has the life full of ecstasy and joy,'' a 
 man must ^^set aside all things and fol- 
 low Christ. Christ is the everlasting 
 aim of all men." 
 
 I have mentioned Luther as a lover 
 of the Theologia Germanica. Luther 
 too, some hundred and fifty years after 
 our mystics, had to provide for ^ ^ a fam- 
 ine of the words of the Eternal.'' 
 Vinet has said with perfect truth that 
 ^Hhe reformers did not separate morals 
 
A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 229 
 
 from dogma; Calvin, the most dogmatic 
 of them all, is the one who most effica- 
 ciously and most constantly preached 
 morals." Undoubtedly the reformers 
 preached morals ; undoubtedly, too, Cal- 
 vin and Luther produced an immeasur- 
 ably greater effect than Tauler and his 
 group. But how was the effect obtained? 
 After laying down the Following of 
 Christ, I took up Luther's famous 
 Commentary on Galatians. The Com- 
 mentary deserves its reputation; it has 
 clearness, force, unction. But on what 
 thought does Luther rest with all his 
 weight, as Tauler rests with all his 
 weight on the thought : * ' Sin is against 
 nature; they who have left sins have 
 more delight and joy in one day than all 
 sinners have ever gained"? Luther 
 rests with his whole weight on the ar- 
 ticle of justification, that Gospel doc- 
 trine, which, he says, is suavissima et 
 consolationis plenissima, '^All heretics 
 
230 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 have continually failed in this one point, 
 that thej do not rightly understand or 
 know the article of justification; do not 
 see that by none other sacrifice or of- 
 fering could God's fierce anger be ap- 
 peased, but by the precious blood of the 
 son of God." 
 
 The article of justification has been 
 made arid and obnoxious by formalists ; 
 let us take it from the mouth of this man 
 of genius, its earnestly convinced and 
 unrivalled expositor. Christ has been 
 made a curse for us! — that is the point; 
 Christ has assumed, in our stead, the 
 guilt and curse of sin from which we 
 could not otherwise be delivered, but are 
 delivered by believing in his having so 
 done. ^^When the merciful Father saw 
 us to be so crushed under the curse of 
 the law, and so bound by it, that we 
 could never through our own strength 
 get free from it, he sent his only begot- 
 ten Son into the world and laid on him 
 
A ^'FRIEND OF GOD" 231 
 
 the sins of all men, saying: ^Be thou 
 that Peter the denier, that Paul the 
 persecutor, that David the adulterer, 
 that sinner who ate the apple in Para- 
 dise, that thief on the cross ; in a word, 
 be thou the person who has done the 
 sins of all men ; consider then how thou 
 mayest pay and make satisfaction for 
 them. ' Then comes in the law and says : 
 *I find him a sinner, and a sinner who 
 has taken unto himself the sins of all 
 men, and I see no sin besides except in 
 him, therefore let him die on the cross !' 
 and so the law falls upon him and slays 
 him. By this transaction the whole 
 world has been purged and purified of all 
 sins, and at the same time, therefore, 
 been set free from death and from all 
 evil." By giving our hearty belief to 
 this transaction we are admitted to its 
 benefits. 
 
 Here we have the Cahala vera, says 
 Luther, the true mystery of Christian- 
 
232 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 ity — here, in the transaction just re- 
 corded. I will not now discuss the 
 misunderstanding of St. Paul which 
 Luther's message of comfort involves. 
 I will not discuss its faults as a reli- 
 gious conception. I will admit that it 
 has been indeed a message of comfort 
 to thousands, and has produced much 
 good and much happiness. I will simply 
 point out that it is mythology, and that 
 this is daily becoming more and more 
 evident; as sheer mythology, at bottom, 
 as Saturn's devouring his children or 
 Pallas springing from the head of Zeus. 
 The transaction between the magnified 
 and non-natural man, whom Luther calls 
 **the merciful Father," and his Son, 
 never really took place; or what comes 
 to the same thing, its having taken place 
 can no more be verified, and has no more 
 real probability in its favour, than 
 Saturn's devouring his children or Pal- 
 las springing from the head of Zeus. 
 
A ^'FRIEND OF GOD'' 233 
 
 This character of mythology is a dis- 
 advantage to Luther's message of com- 
 fort now. But it was an advantage to 
 it when the message was delivered. It 
 gave to it an immense superiority in ef- 
 fectiveness over such a message of com- 
 fort as Tauler's. The one leavened a 
 group, and individuals ; the other created 
 the Protestant Churches. 
 
 To the mass of those who seek religion, 
 an element of mythology in it, far from 
 being an objection, has hitherto been a 
 recommendation and attraction; and 
 they hold to this element as long as ever 
 they can. Only, to moral and serious 
 people, such as were the Germanic races 
 who made the Reformation, it must be 
 a moral mythology, and moreover a 
 mythology receivable and approvable 
 by them in the intellectual stage at which 
 they are then arrived. The serious 
 Germanic races, visited by that soul-hun- 
 ger which Tauler describes, could easily 
 
234 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 be brought to recognise that rauch of 
 the mythology presented to them by 
 medieval religion, with its machinery of 
 Virgin and saints, Pope and priests, 
 was nnscriptural and immoral ; and that 
 good works in the current conception 
 of them as ^^ fasts, pilgrimages, rosaries, 
 vows'' — to adopt Luther's list — were 
 unfruitful. A powerful spirit who went 
 to the Bible and produced from it a new 
 and grave mythology with a new and 
 grave conception of righteousness, was 
 the man for that moment. Luther's 
 doctrine of justification, Calvin's doc- 
 trine of election, were far more effective 
 to win crowds and found churches than 
 Tauler's Following of Christ just be- 
 cause the doctrines of Calvin and Lu- 
 ther are mythology, while the doctrine 
 of Tauler is not. Luther's doctrine 
 and Calvin's were a mythology appeal- 
 ing directly and solely to the Bible for 
 support, and they professed, also, to 
 
A ^^FEIEND OF GOD'^ 235 
 
 deepen men's conception of righteous- 
 ness; they were therefore acceptable to 
 thousands of serious people in the intel- 
 lectual and moral stage of that time. 
 They were, however, a mythology. But 
 as such they enlisted in their favour 
 those forces of imagination, wonder, 
 and awe, which men love to feel aroused 
 within them; and they enlisted these in 
 an immeasurably greater degree than 
 Tauler's doctrine of the Following of 
 Christ, which is not a mythology at all. 
 Hence their immeasurably greater scale 
 of effect and number of adherents. 
 
 And so it has been ever since, up to 
 this day. Let us confine our view to our 
 own country. Hitherto an element of 
 mythology, the stronger and the more 
 turbid the better, has been a help rather 
 than a hindrance to what are called re- 
 ligious causes. To the Calvinists, to 
 the Methodists, to the Eevivalists, to 
 the Salvation Army, have been the strik- 
 
236 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 ing effects and the heavy numbers; to 
 the Latitude Men, to Leighton, to Ers- 
 kine of Linlathen, as to Tauler and his 
 friends in the fourteenth century, action 
 on a group merely, or on individuals. 
 Men such as Butler, or Wilson of Sodor 
 and Man, who have had far wider in- 
 fluence in our religious world than the 
 mystics, and who yet at the same time 
 were true ^^ Friends of God'' at heart, 
 have owed their wide influence not to 
 this character but chiefly to something 
 else. The true grandeur of Butler is 
 in his sacred horror at the thought **of 
 committing the dreadful mistake of 
 leaving the course marked out for us 
 by nature, whatever that nature may 
 be;" his reputation is from his embar- 
 rassed and unsatisfying apologetic. 
 The true glory of Wilson is his living 
 and abiding sense that **sin is against 
 nature, therefore sinners can never have 
 
A ^'FEIEND OF GOD" 237 
 
 ^ joy;'- his reputation is as the most 
 exemplary of Anglican Churchmen. 
 
 The immense, the epoch-making 
 change of our own day, is that a stage 
 in our intellectual development is now 
 declaring itself when mythology, 
 whether moral or immoral, as a basis 
 for religion is no longer receivable, is no 
 longer an aid to religion but an obstacle. 
 Our own nation is not specially lucid, 
 it is strongly religious. We have wit- 
 nessed in the Salvation Army the spec- 
 tacle of one of the crudest and most tur- 
 bid developments of religion with the 
 element of mythology in full sway; and 
 yet it is certain that, even amongst our- 
 selves, over all which is most vigorous 
 and progressive in our population, myth- 
 ology in religion has lost or is fast los- 
 ing its power, and that it has no future. 
 The gross mob has ever been apt to show 
 brutality and hostility towards religion. 
 
238 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 and demonstrations of this spirit we 
 have often enough still. But mingled 
 with the mere ignoble and vicious enmity 
 against any discipline to raise, restrain, 
 and transform, there is also in the com- 
 mon people now a sense of impatience 
 and anger at what they think futile tri- 
 fling with them on the part of those who 
 offer to them, in their sore need, the old 
 mythological religion — a thing felt to be 
 impossible of reception and going if not 
 quite gone, incapable of either solving 
 the present or founding the future. 
 
 This change is creating a situation 
 much more favourable to the mystics. 
 Whole libraries of theology have lost 
 their interest when it is perceived that 
 they make mythology the basis of re- 
 ligion, and that to take seriously this 
 mythology is impossible. But for those 
 groups and individuals, little regarded 
 in their day, whom their heart prompted 
 to rest religion on natural truth rather 
 
A ^^ FRIEND OF GOD'' 239 
 
 than on mythology, the hour of hearing 
 and of well-inclined attention has at last 
 come. For a long while it was heavily 
 against them that they merely preached 
 the following of Christ, instead of the 
 article of justification, the article of 
 election ; now at last it is in their favour. 
 Let me be candid. I love the mystics, 
 but what I find best in them is their 
 golden single sentences, not the whole 
 conduct of their argument and result 
 of their work. I should mislead the 
 reader if I led him to suppose that he 
 will find any great body of discourse in 
 the work attributed to Tauler, The 
 FoUoiving of Christ, which Mr. Morell 
 has translated, of like value with the de- 
 tached sentences from it which I have 
 quoted above. But the little book is 
 well worth reading if only for the sake 
 of such sentences. The general argu- 
 ment, too, if not complete and satisfy- 
 ing, has an interest of its own from the 
 
240 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 natural, or, as we nowadays say, the 
 positive point of view taken by the au- 
 thor, without regard to mythology, or 
 conventions, or shams, in Carlyle's 
 phrase, of any kind. 
 
 For instance, the book developes the 
 idea of following Christ, and teaches 
 how for him who would follow Christ, 
 poverty, both inward and outward, is 
 necessary. Christ's is emphatically a 
 ^'poor life." Yet to follow him and his 
 life is really to follow nature, to be 
 happy. And to enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven is really nothing else than this 
 following him, this following nature, 
 this being happy. When Jesus said: 
 ' ' How hardly shall they that have riches 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven, '' this 
 was, in our mystic's view, but another 
 way of saying: '^How hardly shall 
 they that have riches follow me and my 
 life, live naturally, be happy." The life 
 poor in external goods, as Christ's was, 
 
A *^FEIEND OF GOD'' 241 
 
 is therefore, concludes our mystic, the 
 happy, natural life, the life to be pre- 
 ferred. 
 
 But the official and current religion 
 interprets Christ's words, as we all 
 know, in quite another fashion, and 
 makes him in fact say: ^*If you trust 
 in riches, if you make a bad use of 
 riches, you cannot enter after death in- 
 to the paradise above the sky." Now 
 I do not at present inquire whether the 
 doctrine of our mystic is right or wrong, 
 adequate or inadequate. But it is well 
 to remark how much nearer, at any rate, 
 he comes to the mind of Christ, how 
 much more sincerely and faithfully he 
 interprets it, than our official religion 
 does. For undoubtedly what Jesus 
 meant by the kingdom of God or of 
 heaven was the reign of saints, the ideal 
 future society on earth. ^^How hardly 
 shall they that have riches be fit for the 
 society of the future," was what he in 
 
242 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 fact said. One who is unfit for this ideal 
 society does not follow Christ ; he is also 
 in conflict with nature, cannot be happy. 
 This is the doctrine of Jesus, and our 
 mystic has rightly seized it. Jesus 
 threw out the doctrine and left it to bear 
 fruit. It has worked in many and many 
 an individual mind since, and will work 
 more and more. The worldly them- 
 selves have to deal with it. They can 
 free themselves from all concern about 
 the paradise above the sky, but from 
 concern about the society of the future 
 they cannot. It will arrive, its begin- 
 nings are even now. No one yet, how- 
 ever, has disengaged the doctrine from 
 difficulty, has so set it forth as to make 
 it useable and serviceable ; certainly our 
 mystic has not. But to have rightly 
 seized it is something. 
 
 Christ's sentence on riches is but a 
 corollary from what we call his secret: 
 ^^He that loveth his life shall lose it, he 
 
A *^FEIEND OF GOD" 243 
 
 that will lose his life shall save it." 
 Now the infinite progress possible in 
 Christianity lies in the gradually suc- 
 cessful application, to doctrines like this 
 secret of Jesus and the corollary from 
 it, of what we call his epieikeia, his tem- 
 per of sweet reasonableness, consum- 
 mate balance, unerring felicity. Al- 
 though the application has here not yet 
 been successfully made, and the mystics 
 have not made it, yet the secret and its 
 corollary are unceasingly felt to have in 
 them something deeply important, and 
 to be full of future; at the same time 
 that mythology, like Luther's article of 
 justification or Calvin's article of elec- 
 tion, is felt to be passing quite away and 
 to have no future at all. The mystics, 
 then, have the merit of keeping always 
 before their minds, and endeavouring 
 earnestly to make operative on their 
 lives, just that in Christianity which is 
 not perishable but abiding. 
 
244 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 But I ought before I end to let our 
 mystic, whether he be indeed Tauler as 
 Mr. Morell thinks, or another, to speak 
 for himself at more length than I have 
 let him speak hitherto. I have men- 
 tioned his insistence on external pov- 
 erty; let us hear him on internal pov- 
 erty, poverty of spirit, ^'a going out of 
 yourself and out of everything earthly. ' ' 
 A man ^*must perceive and listen to the 
 eternal word, and this hearing bringeth 
 him to everlasting life. ' ' 
 
 ** Through the outer world that men hear, 
 they attain to the inner world, which God 
 speaketh in the essence of the soul. They 
 who have not come to this should hear preach- 
 ing, and learn and follow what they hear or 
 read ; thus they come to the real truth, and to 
 life, which is God. Even if a man is so ad- 
 vanced that he hear the word in himself, 
 he is yet not at all times prepared for it, 
 for bodily nature cannot bear it, and a man 
 must sometimes turn to his senses and be ac- 
 tive; but he ought to direct this work of the 
 senses to the best end. If preaching is use- 
 
A *^ FRIEND OF GOD" 245 
 
 f ul to him, he can hear it ; if an outward vir- 
 tue is useful to him, he can work it; and he 
 ought to exercise himself in what he recog- 
 nises as the best. But this by no means hin- 
 dereth him from hearing the everlasting word, 
 but it furthers him to what is best. And he 
 should drop and drive out with violence all 
 that hindereth him in this. Then he doeth as 
 Jesus did in the Temple, when he drove out 
 buyers and sellers and said : ' ' My house is a 
 house of prayer, but ye have made it a den 
 of thieves." A pure heart is a temple of 
 God; the tradesm.en whom Jesus drove out 
 are the worldly furniture and goods that rust 
 in the heart and are hurtful to it. If now 
 the heart keepeth the useless thoughts and 
 tarrieth over them, it is no longer a house of 
 prayer but a den of thieves, for the evil 
 thoughts drive out God from his dwelling and 
 murder him. But the man who resisteth all 
 thoughts that keep him apart from God, re- 
 ceiveth from God living, divine power. This 
 inpouring is God 's inspeaking, and that is the 
 life full of ecstasy and joy." 
 
 The reader will recognise the strain 
 of homage which from age to age suc- 
 cessive generations of mystics have ever 
 
246 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 loved to uplift to ^Hhe eternal word.'' 
 I will not say that it is entirely satisfy- 
 ing, but at least it is always refreshing, 
 consoling, and ennobling. 
 
 Whoever turns to the little volume 
 which Mr. Morell has translated will 
 find plenty in this strain to give him 
 refreshment. But he will find more 
 than this, he will find sentences such as 
 those of which I spoke in beginning, 
 and to which in ending I would return; 
 isolated sentences fitted to abide in the 
 memory, to be a possession for the mind 
 and soul, to form the character. *^Sin 
 killeth nature, but nature is abhorrent 
 of death; therefore sin is against na- 
 ture, therefore sinners can never have 
 a joy.'' *^They who have left sins and 
 come to grace have more delight and 
 joy in one day than all sinners have 
 ever gained.'' 
 
AN ETON BOY 
 
AN ETON BOY 
 
 4 6TT is becoming a mania with him/^ 
 X people will say; ''lie has schools 
 on the brain!" Yes, I have certainly 
 made secondary schools my theme very 
 often, and for the public ear the attrac- 
 tions of this theme are not inexhaust- 
 ible. Perhaps it is time that I quitted 
 it, but I should like the leave-taking to 
 be a kind one. I have said a great deal 
 of harm of English secondary instruc- 
 tion. It deserves all the blame that I 
 have cast upon it, and I could wish 
 everybody to grow more and more im- 
 patient of its present condition amongst 
 us. Necessarily, as I wished to make 
 people dissatisfied with the thing, I 
 have insisted upon its faults ; I have in- 
 sisted upon the faults of the civilisation 
 249 
 
250 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 which goes along with it, and which is 
 in a considerable measure the product 
 of it. But our actual secondary 
 schools, like our actual civilization, have 
 the merit of existing. They are not, 
 like all projects for recasting them, an 
 ideal; they have the merit of existing. 
 They are the modus vivendi, as the 
 phrase now is, the schools and the 
 civilization are the modus vivendi 
 found by our nation for its wants, and 
 brought into fact, and shape, and actual 
 working. The good which our nation 
 has in it, it has put into them, as well 
 as the bad. They live by the good in 
 them rather than by the bad. At any 
 rate, it is to the good which dwells in 
 them,, and in the nation which made 
 them, that we have to appeal in all our 
 projects for raising them, and for bring- 
 ing them nearer to the ideal which lovers 
 of perfection frame for them. 
 
 Suppose we take that figure we know 
 
AN ETON BOY 251 
 
 so well, the earnest and nonconforming 
 Liberal of our middle classes, as his 
 schools and his civilisation have made 
 him. He is for disestablishment; he is 
 for temperance; he has an eye to his 
 wife's sister; he is a member of his 
 local caucus ; he is learning to go up to 
 Birmingham every year to the feast of 
 Mr. Chamberlain. His inadequacy is 
 but too visible. Take him, even, 
 raised, cleared, refined, ennobled, as we 
 see him in Dr. Alexander Raleigh, the 
 late well-known Nonconformist minister 
 of Stamford Hill, whose memoir has re- 
 cently been published. Take Dr. Ea- 
 leigh, as he himself would have 
 desired to be taken, dilating on a theme 
 infinitely precious to him — the world to 
 come, **My hope of that world seems 
 to be my religion. If I were to lose it, 
 this whole life would be overcast in a 
 moment with a gloom which nothing 
 could disperse. Yet a little while, and 
 
252 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 we shall be sorrowless and sinless, like 
 the angels, like God, and, looking back 
 on the struggles and sorrows of earth, 
 astonished that things so slight and 
 transient could have so much discom- 
 posed us.'' This transference of our 
 ideal from earth to the sky — this re- 
 course, for the fulfilment of our hopes 
 and for the realisation of the kingdom 
 of God, to a supernatural, future, an- 
 gelic, fantastic world — is, indeed, to 
 our popular religion the most familiar 
 and favourite conception possible. Yet 
 it is contrary to the very central thought 
 and aim of Jesus; it is a conception 
 which, whether in the form of the new 
 Jerusalem of popular Judaism, or in 
 the form of the glorified and unending 
 tea-meeting of popular Protestantism, 
 Jesus passed his life in striving to 
 transform, and in collision with which 
 he met his death. And so long as our 
 main stock and force of serious people 
 
AN ETON BOY 253 
 
 have their minds imprisoned in this 
 conception, so long will ' * things so slight 
 and transient'' as their politics, their 
 culture, their civilisation, be in the state 
 in which we see them now: they will 
 be narrowed and perverted. Neverthe- 
 less, what a store of virtue there is in 
 our main body of serious people even 
 now, with their minds imprisoned in 
 this Judaic conception; what qualities 
 of character and energy are in such 
 leaders of them as Dr. Ealeigh! Nay, 
 what a store of virtue there is even m 
 their civilisation itself, narrowed and 
 stunted though it be! Imperfect as it 
 is, it has founded itself, it has made its 
 way, it exists; the good which is in it, 
 it has succeeded in bringing forth and 
 establishing against a thousand hin- 
 drances, a thousand difficulties. We see 
 its faults, we contrast it with our ideal; 
 but our ideal has not yet done as much. 
 And for making itself fact, this civilisa- 
 
254 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tion has found in its Judaic conceptions 
 tlie requisite guidance and stimulus, 
 and probably only in conceptions of this 
 kind could it have done so. 
 
 Take, again, that other type which we 
 have accustomed ourselves to call, for 
 shortness, the Barbarian. Take it first 
 in its adult and rigid stage, devoid of 
 openness of mind, devoid of flexibility, 
 with little culture and with no ideas, 
 considerably materialised, staunch for 
 ^^our traditional, existing social ar- 
 rangements,'' fiercely ready with the 
 reproach of *^ revolution'' and ** athe- 
 ism" against all its disturbers. Evi- 
 dently this is the very type of personage 
 for which Jesus declared entrance to 
 the kingdom of God to be well-nigh 
 impossible. Take this type in its far 
 more amiable stage, with the beauty 
 and freshness of youth investing it; 
 take it unspoiled, gay, brave, spirited, 
 generous; take it as the Eton boy. 
 
AN ETON BOY 255 
 
 '*As Master of the Beagles/' so testifies 
 the admiring record of such a boy in 
 the Eton College Chronicle, ''he showed 
 himself to possess all the qualities of a 
 keen sportsman, with an instinctive 
 knowledge of the craft." The aged 
 Barbarian will, upon this, admiringly 
 mumble to us his story how the battle 
 of Waterloo was won in the playing- 
 fields of Eton. Alas! disasters have 
 been prepared in those playing-fields as 
 well as victories; disasters due to in- 
 adequate mental training — to want of 
 application, knowledge, intelligence, lu- 
 cidity. The Eton playing-fields have 
 their great charms, notwithstanding; 
 but with what felicity of unconscious 
 satire does that stroke of *^the Master 
 of the Beagles" hit off our whole sys- 
 tem of provision of public secondary 
 schools; a provision for the fortunate 
 and privileged few, but for the many, 
 for the nation, ridiculously impossible! 
 
256 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 And yet, as we said of the Philistine and 
 his civilisation, so we may say of the 
 Barbarian and his civilisation also: 
 What merits they have, what a store of 
 virtue! First of all, they have the 
 grand merit of existing, of having — un- 
 like our ideal society of the future — 
 advanced out of the state of prospectus 
 into the state of fact. They have in 
 great part created the modus vivendi by 
 which our life is actually carried for- 
 ward, and by which England is what it 
 is. In the second place, they have in- 
 trinsic merits of nature and character; 
 and by these, indeed, have mainly done 
 their work in the world. Even the 
 adult and rigid Barbarian has often in- 
 valuable qualities. It is hard for him, 
 no doubt, to enter into the kingdom of 
 God — ^hard for him to believe in the 
 sentiment of the ideal life transforming 
 the life which now is, to believe in it 
 and come to serve it — hard, but not im- 
 
AN ETON BOY 257 
 
 possible. And in the young the qual- 
 ities take a brighter colour, and the rich 
 and magical time of youth adds graces 
 of its own to them; and then, in happy 
 natures, they are irresistible. In a na- 
 ture of this kind I propose now to show 
 them. 
 
 The letters and diary of an Eton boy, 
 a young lieutenant in the army who died 
 of dysentery in South Africa, came the 
 other day into my hands. They have 
 not been published, but they were 
 printed as a record of him for his family 
 and his friends. He had been with his 
 regiment little more than a year; the 
 letters and diary extend over a space of 
 less than two months. I fell in, by 
 chance, with the slight volume which is 
 his memorial, and his name made me 
 look through the pages; for the name 
 awakened reminiscences of distant Ox- 
 ford days, when I had known it in 
 another generation. The passing atten- 
 
258 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tion which his name at first drew was 
 presently fixed and charmed by what I 
 read. I have received permission to 
 give to the public some notice of the 
 slight and unpretending record which 
 thus captivated my interest. 
 
 Arthur Clynton Baskerville Mynors 
 was born in 1856, of a Herefordshire 
 family. His bringing-up was that of an 
 English boy in an English country house. 
 In January, 1870, he went to Eton, and 
 left at Election, 1875. **His life here,'' 
 says the short record of him in the Eton 
 College Chronicle, **was always joyous, 
 a fearless keen boyhood, spent sans peur 
 et sans reproche. Many will remember 
 him as fleet of foot and of lasting pow- 
 ers, winning the mile and the steeple- 
 chase in 1874, and the walking race in 
 1875. As Master of the Beagles in 1875 
 he showed himself to possess all the 
 qualities of a keen sportsman, with an 
 instinctive knowledge of the craft." 
 
AN ETON BOY 259 
 
 After leaving Eton he joined the Ox- 
 ford militia, and at the beginning of 
 1878 obtained a commission in the 60th 
 Rifles. He had been just a year with 
 his battalion when it was sent to South 
 Africa. He sailed on the 19th of Feb- 
 ruary, and on the 25th of April he died 
 of dysentery at Fort Pearson, Natal. 
 For these two months we have his let- 
 ters and diary, written to his father and 
 mother at home. I wish to let him tell 
 his own story as far as possible, and we 
 will begin with his first letter. 
 
 *' * Dublin Castle,' February 20th. 
 **My Dear Papa, 
 
 *'We were all safe on board last night, and 
 steamed down the Thames, and anchored for 
 the night. The boat is a beautiful one, it 
 goes very smooth as yet; we have passed 
 Dover and Folkestone, and are now off Dunge- 
 ness. To-night we reach Dartmouth at 
 twelve, and wait till twelve next day. There 
 is an oudacioiis crowd on board with all the 
 men, and nothing to do. The cabins we sleep 
 in are the most extraordinary, two of us, bed 
 
260 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 and all, in a place about as big as the dining- 
 room table at home, and when it's rough, as 
 far as I can see, we must tumble out ; still, it 
 is rather fun. The skipper is a first-rate fel- 
 low, lets us do what we like on board. He 
 expects we shall get to Natal about the 18th 
 or 19th of next month; we are sailing about 
 eleven knots an hour, I wish we were going 
 faster. It is very windy and cold on deck; 
 the band played, which enlivened us a little. 
 We have mess as usual, only at six o 'clock. I 
 have fitted all my things on your belt, and 
 they do capitally. Please give my love to 
 mamma and everybody that is staying at 
 Durrant's, especially Aunt Ellen, and thank 
 them all for everything they have given me. 
 We stop at Madeira, when I will write to you 
 again; so good-bye till then. 
 
 "Ever your most affectionate son, 
 
 ' ' Arthur. ' ' 
 
 The next letter is written four days 
 later. 
 
 " 'Dublin Castle,' February 24th. 
 "My Dear Mamma, 
 
 "Many thanks for your letters, which I 
 found waiting at Dartmouth, where we ar- 
 rived after rather a rough voyage. There 
 
AN ETON BOY 261 
 
 were no end of people there assembled to see 
 us off, and when we started we were lustily 
 cheered by crowds on the shore; the band 
 played 'Should old acquaintance/ &c., and 
 we soon lost sight of England. Friday night 
 everybody was ill, as the sea was rough. Sat- 
 urday, in the Bay of Biscay, it was awful; 
 the waves were mountains high — a grand 
 sight — so much so, that the upper decks were 
 washed over by the sea all day. I was aw- 
 fully ill; in fact, so was everybody. On Sat- 
 urday morning at 4 a. m. I was on watch ; 
 luckily for me it was much calmer. I found 
 two of the horses had died in the night, and 
 that several hammocks and other things had 
 been washed overboard. I was awfully glad 
 when we got out of the Bay. I'll never go to 
 sea again if I can help it. Sunday was bright 
 and sunny; everybody came up on deck after 
 the bad weather, and we had quite a jolly day, 
 steaming with a strong wind behind at about 
 twelve and a half miles, or knots I should say, 
 an hour. I was on duty that day. We con- 
 signed the poor horses to the deep. This 
 morning was lovely, and we had a regular 
 tropical shower, the weather, by-the-bye, get- 
 ting much warmer. It's most absurd, since 
 we started none of us have shaved; we are 
 (not myself) all growing beards. It is aw- 
 
262 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 fully slow, nothing to do but read. The men 
 also have nothing to do. I wish we were at 
 Natal, I do so detest the sea. It keeps very 
 rough all the time, and the ship rolls horri- 
 bly. The men have an awfully bad time of 
 it ; packed so close, they have scarcely room to 
 breathe. All the officers and passengers have 
 dinner, &c., together, down-stairs, in a stuffy 
 place, not so bad to look at, but when it is 
 full of sickly females, and no one in the best 
 of humours, it's perfectly unbearable. Still 
 we live in hopes of getting to Natal soon, 
 where I hope we shall have some better fun. 
 We get to Madeira to-morrow night at ten 
 o'clock, and wait for about three hours for 
 stores and the mails. I sent you a picture of 
 the vessel. I hope you got it safe. I hope 
 you were none the worse for waiting in the 
 cold and seeing me off at Tilbury. I have 
 no more to say, but, with best love to papa 
 and all, 
 
 "I am ever, dear Mamma, 
 
 ''Your affectionate son, 
 
 *' Arthur.'' 
 
 Madeira is reached and left ; they have 
 a week ** awfully hot," during which **I 
 have been learning signalling, which will 
 
AN ETON BOY 263 
 
 probably come in useful in the bush.'^ 
 The line has now been crossed, they are 
 approaching Cape Town. 
 
 *'It has been getting much cooler the last 
 few days, and to-day quite a breeze and rather 
 rough ; the ship is getting lighter, and conse- 
 quently rolls more. We had some pistol 
 practising yesterday, and a nigger entertain- 
 ment last night, which was great fun. I 
 spend the day mostly in reading, but it is 
 awfully slow, nothing to do. . . . So far, 
 we have had a capital passage, but the trade 
 winds are dead against us now. I wonder 
 how you are all getting on; you will soon 
 begin fishing at Aberedw. Have the hounds 
 had any sport, and how are grandpapa and 
 grandmamma? Please let granny have my 
 letter, and tell her I would write, only one 
 letter answers the purpose as there is so little 
 to say; but I want lots of letters, to hear what 
 is going on at home and at Bosbury. We are 
 all ready to land at Natal; all our weapons 
 are as sharp as needles. I wish we were 
 there. You will hear plenty of news (even if 
 I don't write often, as there may be no way 
 of conveying the letters), as there are three 
 correspondents going up to the front. The 
 
264 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 Graphic correspondent has taken one or two 
 drawings of our men on board ship, so you 
 may see them; I advise you to take it in. I 
 have written very badly, but must make ex- 
 cuse that the sea is rough to-day. Remind 
 Charles about planting the gorse in the cock- 
 shoots, where the trees are bitten off by the 
 rabbits. I don't fancy the mosquitoes in 
 Natal. I believe there are swarms of them 
 there, so I am going to buy a mosquito net 
 at Cape Town. My next letter will probably 
 be from Durban, in a week's time or so." 
 
 *^For something to do," he copies out, 
 to send with this letter, the verses writ- 
 ten by a passenger on the burial of a 
 private soldier who died on board. 
 Then comes Cape Town, ^ ' a horrid place, 
 very hot and dirty," but with the Table 
 Mountain to make amends; ^^the rocks 
 were rather like the Craigy rocks, only 
 much larger and bolder." Then Cape 
 Town is left, and they are in the last 
 stage of their voyage. 
 
 ''On Sunday morning I went to church at 
 the cathedral, rather a fine building for Cape 
 
AN ETON BOY 265 
 
 Town. Had to go on board at one o'clock, 
 and we sailed at two o 'clock. We passed the 
 Cape of Good Hope about six o'clock in the 
 afternoon. The coast all along looked rugged 
 and bare, very mountainous in the back- 
 ground, and rocks jutting boldly out. 
 Bounding the point, the sea became very 
 rough, and has been ever since. At dinner 
 nothing can stand up, knives, forks, tumblers, 
 bottles, everything sent flying about. There 
 are no end of porpoises and dolphins all along 
 the coast; they come swimming and jumping 
 by the side of the vessel. Rounded Cape 
 D'Agulhas about three in the morning; only 
 saw the lighthouse. Monday was still rough, 
 and we kept in sight of shore all day. We 
 practised revolver-shooting most of the after- 
 noon. To-day it rained all the morning 
 . . . the country opposite us looks much 
 flatter, and is quite green on the slopes of the 
 hills. We amuse ourselves by looking 
 through our field-glasses at the shore — we are 
 now about three miles from it; enormous 
 great sand-hills along the beach, and woody 
 at the back. We have seen a few houses and 
 some cattle, otherwise the country looks unin- 
 habited. We passed Algoa Bay this morning. 
 . . . I shall be very glad when we have 
 landed, as this is the slowest work I ever went 
 
266 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 through in my life ; we sail along pretty fast, 
 do about two hundred and seventy to three 
 hundred miles in twenty-four hours. Another 
 of the horses is very ill from the rough 
 weather; I expect he will die before he gets 
 on shore. The men and officers are none the 
 worse for the journey, but I expect we shall 
 get very foot-sore at first. We are in awfully 
 bad training, as we can't get any exercise. 
 How is poor old Martha? Give her my love. 
 I suppose you are just beginning summer; 
 here the winter is beginning. I believe in the 
 winter-time there is no rain at all." 
 
 On Friday, the 21st of March, they 
 are at Durban, and in tents; ^^the coun- 
 try looks beautiful; like Wales, only all 
 the hills are bush." On Saturday they 
 start to relieve Colonel Pearson, sur- 
 rounded by the Zulus at Fort Ekowe. 
 On Saturday, the 22nd, ^^went by train 
 twelve miles, encamped, had dinner in 
 dark ; slept four hours, up at two o 'clock 
 in the dark." Then a diary gives a, 
 record of the march, 
 
AN ETON BOY 267 
 
 ^^ Sunday morning. — Started at 4 a. m., to 
 march in utter darkness; unpitched camp, 
 packed up and off; marched six miles on aw- 
 ful bad road to Verulam ; the hilliest and pret- 
 tiest country I ever saw; forded two rivers; 
 stopped eight hours at Verulam; bathed, 
 washed my clothes, and started at three o 'clock 
 p. M., our baggage drawn by oxen, sixteen to 
 twenty oxen in each waggon. "Went to church 
 at Yerulam. Niggers awful-looking beasts, 
 tall, strong, and active ; wear no clothes at all, 
 except very few round the waist. The bat- 
 talion bathed in the Umhloti River. No more 
 news about the war. Weather very hot from 
 9 A. M. till 3 p. M. The march to Victoria was 
 fearful, dreadfully hot; the sun right on our 
 heads; and carrying our ammunition and 
 arms, almost heart-breaking. We got there 
 just in time to see to pitch our tents and tum- 
 ble into bed for a few hours, and on 
 
 ^^ Monday nfiorning. — Up at 2 :20 in the 
 dark, see nothing and find nothing; started, 
 crossed and bathed in the Tongaati, up to our 
 waists crossing, so wet and wretched. One 
 halt for mid-day in Compensation Flat in the 
 sun, no shade to be found and no rest ; waited 
 till 2 :30 and marched nine miles, the longest 
 and weariest I ever marched; the men were 
 
268 ESSAYS IN CKITICISM 
 
 almost dead with heat. Had only coffee and 
 tea twice a day, and nothing else, unless we 
 passed a public-house or shed, which were few 
 and far between; and then what we bought 
 was awfully dear. Still we scrape along ; and 
 at last at seven o 'clock we got to our camping- 
 place; put tents up in the dark; had some 
 salt tinned beef and muddy water, and went 
 to bed. Up next morning at 2:30 to a min- 
 ute; lowered and packed our tents and off at 
 4 A. M. ; crossed and bathed in the Umhali, 
 which, we being pretty dirty from heat, re- 
 freshed us much ; and then encamped at eight 
 o'clock at the Umvoti River, up to our knees. 
 Very, very hot; we washed some of our 
 clothes, and this time a native who owned a 
 mill was very kind and gave us some beer. 
 We boiled our tinned meat and made soup; 
 started much refreshed, and in much better 
 spirits. The country very hilly and hot; In- 
 dian corn up to one's head in the fields. 
 Some plantations of sugar-cane also in the 
 country, which, when picked, was sweet and 
 juicy. The Zulus or niggers here are scarcely 
 human beings; naked and their skins like 
 leather; awful beasts to look at and very 
 hideous. This afternoon we passed Stanger 
 Camp, and halted a mile and a half from the 
 camp. The men just beginning to get into 
 
AN ETON BOY 269 
 
 condition again; since tliey left the ship they 
 had been in very bad training for marching, 
 owing to no exercise on board ship. Next 
 morning we got up at 2:45, and down tents, 
 and crossed a river (shoes and stockings off), 
 and marched by New Gelderland about seven 
 or eight miles by seven o'clock, and encamped 
 by the Monoti River, where alligators and hip- 
 popotami are numerous; we bathed notwith- 
 standing. It was hotter than ever ; the coun- 
 try beautiful and hilly; no fences; mostly 
 grass about as high as your thigh. We heard 
 yesterday that the column going to relieve 
 Pearson had crossed the Tugela, and was 
 waiting for us before starting. . . . We 
 shall cross the Tugela to-morrow. 
 
 Thursday, 27th. — A spy was caught yester- 
 day at Fort Pearson in the camp. No one 
 knows where the Zulu armies are; one day 
 they are seen at one place, another at another ; 
 one meal lasts them for three days, and the 
 bush they can creep through like snakes. Be- 
 ing nothing but Zulus (natives) about the 
 country here, they come and watch us; in 
 fact, they know everything that goes on. 
 They are awfully wily; they are never to be 
 caught in an open country, and never will be 
 unless at Undini ; the only time they will at- 
 tack their enemy is before daybreak, and at 
 
270 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 night when we encamp, and then they won't 
 attack a very big force. 
 
 * ' My dear papa and mamma, I send you my 
 diary. ' ' 
 
 Finding that they have still to wait a 
 day at Fort Pearson, he writes a letter 
 to accompany his diary, and gives an 
 account of the military situation. 
 
 *'We shall cross the river to-morrow or next 
 day, and then we relieve Pearson. They can 
 signal from here to them. Pearson says he is 
 pretty well off, but has nine officers and one 
 hundred and fifty men ill with dysentery. 
 When Pearson is relieved, we by ourselves 
 stay here; the other regiments return and 
 make a depot between Fort Pearson and 
 Ekowe, where Pearson is encamped, and carry 
 stores and provisions there; then we shall 
 march to Undini, the king 's kraal. At first it 
 is a pretty clear road to Pearson, but after- 
 wards there is a large bush which we have to 
 get through to get at him. "We shall be at 
 Ekowe for about three weeks. We are about 
 four miles from the sea, and the river is about 
 a quarter of a mile across. Everything looks 
 like business. Colonel Hopton, when we 
 
AN ETON BOY 271 
 
 march up, remains in command here, and at 
 Fort Tenedos, the other side of the river. I 
 saw him this morning; he asked after every- 
 body at home. It is very jolly getting here, 
 and having a day's rest, and some bread and 
 fresh meat. All in very good spirits. Every- 
 thing I have, and the rest of us, is washing 
 and drying. My camp equipage is first rate— 
 everything I want. The Zulus are very fine 
 men, use assegaies and rifles of some sort. 
 They treat the wounded fearfully ; spear them 
 through and through— at least, their women 
 do. I enclose my diary of the month as I 
 have no time to copy it." 
 
 On Friday, the 28th of March, the 
 Tugela is crossed, and the diary recom- 
 mences. 
 
 **We crossed the Tugela, being towed across. 
 The men bivouacked and spent an awful night 
 in pouring rain. Colonel Hopton gave me a 
 bed in his tent. Most of the officers stood up 
 in the rain all night. Next day, 
 
 Saturdaij, March 29th.— We started for 
 Ekowe and marched about twelve miles. The 
 column was five to six miles long, and we went 
 awfully slow. There we laagered with shel- 
 ter-trench outside. It would have taken 
 
272 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 100,000 Zulus to take it. I and Keith (Tur- 
 nour) on outpost duty all night (blue funk), 
 and both tired and wet. Luckily no enemy 
 came. Eeturned to camp tired, after the col- 
 umn had marched off. 
 
 Sunday, March 30th. — Started at ten. 
 Much delay caused by waggons crossing a 
 brook. Warm march. Burnt a lot of kraals 
 on the way. Enemy flying in small detach- 
 ments. Arrived at Amatakula River, one mile 
 from river on Natal side. Great bother about 
 laager being put up, and much confusion. 
 Early to bed. Bright moonlight till twelve. 
 
 Monday, March 31st. — Under arms at four, 
 expecting attack early. Enemy moving. 
 Very hot; no wind; no shade. A buck ran 
 into camp this morning and was assegaied, 
 after much sport amongst the natives. Ru- 
 mour of Cetewayo having offered peace; not 
 believed, one word of it. Got into camp about 
 5 :30, where we bivouacked. 
 
 Tuesday, April 1st. — Under arms at four. 
 Marched about eight o'clock with great care, 
 Zulus having been seen by scouts hovering 
 about. This morning the order of advance 
 was — 
 
AN ETON BOY 273 
 
 ''The sailors with a Gat ling and rocket. 
 
 ' ' Ourselves. 
 
 ' ' Our train. 
 "Rear guard, 99th. 
 "Marines and 91st. 
 "Two Regiments of Natives, 
 protecting our waggons on the flanks. We 
 were drawn up ready to receive the enemy 
 twice, but they retreated. We reached our 
 camping-place about four o 'clock ; laagered as 
 usual, and made entrenchments round it, only 
 making them nearly double the height. About 
 one hour after we got in, it began to thunder, 
 and the rain came down in torrents, wetting 
 us through. Our feet had been wet for the 
 last two days ; in fact, we are never dry. No 
 clothes to change, or anything, as now we have 
 only got with us what we have got on, a mack- 
 intosh sheet, and a great-coat. We slept as 
 well as we could. Had the sentries doubled, 
 the enemy being expected to attack us next 
 morning. 
 
 Wednesday, April 2nd. — Under arms at 
 four ; and just as day was beginning to break, 
 our pickets reported the enemy advancing. 
 Everything was got into readiness; the 
 trenches manned; the pickets recalled. We 
 saw the enemy coming out of a dingle in files. 
 
274 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 and, opening out, they surrounded us in most 
 splendid skirmishing order. The bravest fel- 
 lows I ever saw. Our face was attacked first, 
 as they had not had time to get round to the 
 other side. At about 6:20 the first shot was 
 fired, and soon all our men were blazing away ; 
 shots whizzing over our heads, the Gatling at 
 the corner pounding it into them. They ad- 
 vanced at the double, creeping in shelter of 
 the grass. We were so strong they could do 
 nothing. Still they advanced within twenty 
 yards, where afterwards some were picked up 
 dead. Our men were awfully frightened and 
 nervous at first, could not even speak, and 
 shivered from funk; so we, the officers, had 
 enough to do to keep the men cool. We re- 
 pulsed them in about twenty minutes ; whilst 
 on our flanks and rear, where the other regi- 
 ments were, the battle was still going on. 
 Two of our companies were then taken round 
 to relieve the other side, one of which was 
 mine, so we marched under their fire to the 
 rear face, and acted as a support. It was soon 
 all over. We repulsed them on all sides. The 
 native cavalry and native contingent were 
 then let loose to pursue them ; which they did, 
 assegaieing most of the wounded on their way 
 and not doing much damage to the enemy. 
 There ought to have been a great many more 
 
AN ETON BOY 275 
 
 killed^ but all the men were nervous and ex- 
 cited, and had not been under fire before. We 
 counted and buried four hundred and seventy- 
 six, but a great many were found the same 
 day by our scouts, wounded and hiding in 
 bushes some miles off. We finished at about 
 7 :10, and the rest of the day we were burying 
 them, and our own five poor fellows, and one 
 officer, Johnson, of the 99th. I think we had 
 thirty wounded. In our regiment one man 
 was killed ; he was in my company — shot right 
 through the head ; and Colonel Northey badly 
 wounded, the shot entering at the shoulder 
 and lodging itself in his back. It was got 
 out. He is very weak; I only hope he may 
 recover. Three other men in the regiment 
 were wounded. It was a fearful sight — so 
 many of these brave chaps lying about, dead 
 and covered with blood and gore. They must 
 have had a great many more wounded, whom 
 they took away with them. I myself did not 
 quite like the first few shots as they whizzed 
 about over our heads, but found I had such a 
 lot to do to keep the men in order and telling 
 them when to shoot, that I did not mind it 
 a bit." 
 
 This was the affair, or ^ ^battle,'' of 
 Ginghilovo; and surely never was such 
 
276 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 an affair described with a more pre- 
 possessing simplicity, modesty, and hu- 
 manity. The next day, the 3rd of April, 
 Ekowe was reached and Pearson re- 
 lieved. On the 5th of April young 
 Mynors with his battalion marched back 
 to the scene of their recent action, Gin- 
 ghilovo, where a fort was to be estab- 
 lished for a base of operations. And 
 now, with the common mention of bad 
 weather and trying climate, comes the 
 ominous mention of sickness also. 
 
 Saturday, April 5th. — We left Ekowe quite 
 empty, having burnt the king's brother's 
 kraal the day before. We halted for two 
 hours, as our line of waggons with Pearson's 
 was so long. It was awfully hot. The coun- 
 try is perfectly lovely; such grass and woods, 
 hills, most beautiful flowers and trees ; if only 
 inhabited, it would be one of the most charm- 
 ing countries in the world. The climate is 
 bad. So hot in the day-time and cold at night. 
 Dew like rain. I saw, on our route to-day, 
 after halting in the sun for a couple of hours, 
 six or seven fellows fall out from sunstroke. 
 
AN ETON BOY 277 
 
 Sunday, April 6th.— Poor Colonel Northey 
 died. We had a scare, or rather false alarm, 
 at about 3 :30 in the morning. Colonel Pem- 
 berton has got dysentery. We began half -ra- 
 tions to-day. Men not in good health." 
 
 That night the second instalment of 
 diary is sent off by the courier from 
 Ginghilovoj with a letter of a few lines, 
 written by moonlight. *'I hope this will 
 find you all well at home. Here there is 
 nothing but hard work, and very little 
 to eat from morning till night. I am 
 afraid it will be a long affair.^' The 
 same Sunday night the diary is re- 
 sumed. 
 
 '^GiNGHiLOVo. — We came back here in the 
 morning, after leaving Pearson to our right, 
 who was going straight back to the Tu- 
 gela to recruit his troops. We encamped 
 about three-quarters of a mile from where we 
 had had our battle. Passing the ground the 
 stench was fearful, owing to natives who had 
 dragged themselves off and died. 
 
 Monday, April 7th. — Colonel Pemberton 
 still remains on the sick Ust; and several of 
 
278 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 the officers have been suffering more or less 
 from diarrhoea, caused by bad water. In my 
 last letter I said we were on half -rations ; but 
 it only lasted for about two days, as we have 
 got some more sent us. In the afternoon we 
 moved up a small hill into a first-rate position, 
 but water bad and a mile off, and even that 
 not likely to last long. We have also on the 
 next hill another laager for the natives and 
 bullocks. It is, of course, a necessity to keep 
 them out of the camp, because they make the 
 place smell so. In the day-time it is awfully 
 hot, the sun having such power ; and at night 
 cool, and very heavy dews wet you through 
 if you did not wear a mackintosh. The men 
 begin to improve in spirits, but it will be 
 awfully slow here for a fortnight on the salt- 
 est of pork and hard biscuit, pork unfit to 
 eat. 
 
 Wednesday, April 9th. — I was on duty from 
 3 to 4 A. M. Another scorching-hot day. A 
 great deal of long grass has been burnt about 
 the country, of course by the Zulus. Captain 
 Tufnell — who was assuming command of the 
 regiment, as we had no other officers — also 
 very ill. We sit in the shade under the wag- 
 gons out of the sun. Of course we cannot go 
 much more than a couple of hundred yards 
 
AN ETON BOY 279 
 
 from the camp, except in small parties, so we 
 find it rather dull. I got your letter from 
 Mereworth, and was very glad to get it; al- 
 ways like having as much news as possible, 
 as we seldom see a paper. ... I walked 
 round our new fort this afternoon. It is very 
 strong, so to say, and would keep any Zulu 
 army in the world off. 
 
 Thursday, April 10th. — My company was on 
 outpost duty, so I was out all day long, and 
 did not do much but keep a look-out. Most 
 of the troops suffering from dysentery and 
 want of sustenance. We expect a convoy 
 soon, as we have only six days' more pro- 
 visions. Awfully hot again to-day. The 
 country all round our fort is more or less plain 
 to the N., S., and E., where the King feeds 
 his cattle. To the W. it is very mountainous, 
 very like Scotland, only hills, I should say, 
 higher. We see the Zulu fires at night in the 
 distance. I wish we could get from here, but 
 I believe we have to wait until all the forces 
 are ready to advance. I don't know whether 
 I told you about the native contingent. They 
 are all black like niggers, and awful-looking 
 beasts; have scarcely any clothes on at all. 
 They are armed with rifles, but are very bad 
 shots; the only good they are is after a vie- 
 
280 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tory to pursue the enemy, as they are very 
 active ; also they do not make bad scouts ; they 
 are very sharp-sighted, and can hear very 
 quickly. We must in the end give the Zulus 
 a thrashing, but the hard thing is to find 
 them. We can never attack them, because we 
 don 't know where they are, and they will take 
 good care only to attack us when we are in 
 the bush or crossing rivers, and perhaps at 
 night. When they advance at close quarters, 
 they come like cavalry ; but of course any Eng- 
 lish army can stop them if properly handled. 
 **Now, my dear papa and mamma, I must 
 finish off. I hope this will catch the mail on 
 Tuesday. I hope all the farms, &c., are doing 
 well. With very best love to all, Martha, Jub- 
 ber, and Pussy, 
 
 ''I am, ever your affectionate son, 
 
 '^ Arthur.*' 
 
 On the night of Saturday, the 12th of 
 April, poor boy, after being on duty all 
 the previous day, Good Friday, *4n the 
 other laager where the niggers live," 
 he was himself seized by sickness. On 
 the 13th he writes home : — 
 
 *'I was taken awfully seedy in the night 
 
AN ETON BOY 281 
 
 with diarrhoea, and to-day, Easter Sunday, I 
 was obliged to go on the sick list, as my com- 
 plaint had turned more to dysentery. The 
 bad water and lowering food and bad climate 
 are enough to kill anybody; still we struggle 
 on, the same for everybody. Our native run- 
 ners who take the post w^ere yesterday chased 
 on their way to the Tugela, and had to return 
 here. A convoy with provisions has arrived 
 here all safe ; so far so good, as long as it lasts. 
 We expect to be here a month or six weeks 
 doing nothing, unless we have to alter the po- 
 sition of our fort owing to the scarcity of 
 water. The nights get colder, and the sun is 
 hotter than any English sun in the day-time. 
 . . . When we left England we were 700 
 strong, and now we figure about 628, caused 
 mostly by men gone to hospital. Some two or 
 three of our cattle die every night, also a horse 
 or two ; consequently, being only just covered 
 with earth for burial, there are numerous un- 
 healthy smells. I tried to get leave with Hut- 
 ton to go shooting some buck which had been 
 seen, but was refused as not being safe. We 
 got our first English papers on Thursday, and 
 very glad we were to get them. By-the-bye, 
 have you been fishing, and what sport? 
 Please tell me everything. How are grand- 
 mamma and grandpapa ? I have not heard of 
 
282 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 or from them. I hope you send them my 
 scribbles; I daresay they are very hard to 
 make out, but having only a blanket and 
 sheet (waterproof) with us, there is very little 
 paper to be got. What I write with now is 
 a pen I bought, which you dip in water and 
 it writes as you see. How is Jubber, and how 
 is Edmund Carew? The Zulus around us 
 amuse themselves by burning grass, I suppose 
 with the idea to starve our cattle. Lord 
 Chelmsford has gone back to Durban. All 
 the troops have arrived safe, the 17th only 
 losing three horses on their journey. The 
 niggers brought us in some sweet potatoes yes- 
 terday which are horrible things, still they 
 are of the vegetable description. . . . The 
 Colonel is still suffering from dysentery, also 
 Tufnell; so Cramer, the second captain, is in 
 command of us. I should very much like to 
 have the Hereford Times forwarded to me, as 
 it would give me all the county news. We 
 had service this morning for the first time 
 since we left the 'Dublin Castle'; every other 
 Sunday we have been marching. We killed 
 an enormous snake the other day, about five 
 or six feet long. Two rhinoceroses have been 
 seen near here feeding; I wish I could get a 
 shot at them, but can't get leave to get out. 
 Has Colonel Price had much sport with the 
 
AN ETON BOY 283 
 
 hounds, and how are all the horses, colts, 
 mares, &c. ? How does the Cwm get on; I 
 wish I was there ; also the ravens, everything ? 
 Colonel Northey is a great loss; he was mar- 
 ried, too, and his wife a very nice person. 
 Tell grandpapa I find the little book he gave 
 me very useful; also your Bible, which I al- 
 ways carry with me. To-day is Easter Sun- 
 day, and a convoy has just been sighted ; they 
 say we shall get the mail. I know I am writ- 
 ing great bosh, but have nothing else to do. 
 If you happen to see Mr. Walsh, please thank 
 him for my revolver ; I find it very useful, and 
 it shoots first rate, also remember me to Aunt 
 Ellen, and tell her she does not know how 
 much I am indebted to her. . . . Several 
 fellows have followed my idea of writing a 
 diary and posting it; it seems very lazy and 
 undutiful of me, but it is perhaps better than 
 nothing. I do wish you could be here for a 
 day or two to see the country, and the trees 
 and shrubs that grow wild, just like a flower 
 garden. I should say the grass here is better 
 for feeding than any in England, one could 
 easily mow three or four crops of hay in the 
 year. The only thing, or one of the few 
 things, the Zulus cultivate is Indian corn, what 
 they call mealies; also a few fields of sugar- 
 cane here and there. We are not many miles 
 
284 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 from the sea, as we can hear it when the wind 
 is the right way, from six to ten miles I dare- 
 say. 
 
 Monday. — Convoy arrived all safe last 
 night. By the mail poor Keith Turnour heard 
 he had lost his father. I was awfully sorry, 
 as I could not do any work, being still on the 
 sick list. My dysentery still sticks to me with 
 bad pain in my inside, but I feel otherwise 
 well in myself. I slept under a cart last night 
 — quite a luxury, as it keeps the dew off. To- 
 day we are burning the grass round our 
 laager, so that the Zulus cannot set fire to it 
 and attack us at the same time. The men 
 have had fresh meat the last two days, as sev- 
 eral bullocks have come up from Tugela. 
 They are killed at eight in the morning, and 
 eaten at one. We got some jam up last night, 
 so we are doing pretty well now. The only 
 thing I wish is that the Zulus would attack us 
 again. It is getting quite slow doing noth- 
 ing. Captain Tufnell is off the sick list to- 
 day, and takes command of the regiment. 
 How are Uncle Tom and Aunt Conty getting 
 on ? Having no end of fun, I '11 be bound. 
 Our laager is about twenty miles from Fort 
 Pearson on the Tugela, and sixteen miles from 
 the now abandoned Ekowe, which we can see 
 with our telescopes. We are all becoming 
 
AN ETON BOY 285 
 
 very learned cooks, as we cook all our meat, 
 salt meat, &c., make soup and different things 
 of them. The worst of it is we have very few 
 materials to cook in, mostly provided by the 
 waggon conductors. We made some mealie 
 cakes of Indian com, which were first rate at 
 the time, but awfully indigestible afterwards ; 
 I'm afraid the fault of the cooking; I wish 
 I had taken lessons from Miles before I left. 
 
 Tuesday, April 15th.— The convoy of empty 
 waggons left at six to go to Tugela. Spent a 
 very bad night, suffering from diarrhoea, and 
 felt much weaker to-day ; still I hope I shall 
 get over it soon. Some of the fellows got 
 leave to shoot, and they shot five golden 
 plovers, or grey kind of plovers, which are 
 very acceptable to our larder. I felt awfully 
 dull, nothing to do but sit under a cart out of 
 the sun and try to sleep. The scouts went out 
 some six or seven miles to-day and burnt sev- 
 eral kraals. Four Zulu women and a boy were 
 brought in yesterday, the most hideous crea- 
 tures I ever saw, more like wild animals. I 
 am going to post my letter to-night, so as to 
 be certain to catch the mail. I hope you are 
 all well, and love to everybody. 
 
 '*Ever your most affectionate son, 
 
 ' ' Arthur. ' ' 
 p^ S __I was very glad to get a letter from 
 
286 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 you and papa last night, of March 11th. I 
 am exceedingly sorry to hear of grand- 
 mamma's attack. It must indeed have been 
 very serious. I only hope she may recover 
 for some time, and be well when I get home 
 again. I had rather a better night last night, 
 but am still very weak. Sorry to hear 'Mas- 
 querade' is a roarer. Have not had grand- 
 papa's and Elinor's letters yet: must have 
 missed the mail." 
 
 He never got home, and he wrote no 
 more; the cold nights, and heavy dews, 
 and suns ^* hotter than any English 
 sun, ' ' had done their work. On the 24th 
 of April he was sent to the hospital at 
 Fort Pearson, where Colonel Hopton, a 
 Herefordshire neighbour, was in com- 
 mand ; the poor boy died on the day fol- 
 lowing, and in a letter to his father 
 Colonel Hopton relates the end. 
 
 *' Yesterday morning I got a note from an 
 officer of the 60th, Gunning, who appears to 
 have been told by Arthur that he knew me, 
 informing me that he, Arthur, was very ill 
 with dysentery, and that the doctor had sent 
 
AN ETON BOY 287 
 
 him to Fort Pearson in hopes that the change 
 of air would do him good, and asking me to 
 meet the convoy on arrival here and get Ar- 
 thur at once into the hospital. I met the 
 empty convoy of waggons last evening, as they 
 approached our camp, and got the one with 
 Arthur in it over the river (Tugela) as soon 
 as I could, and sent it up to hospital. This 
 morning early I went to see him, having first 
 asked the doctor in charge about him. He at 
 once told me he feared the worst. When I 
 saw him I did not think he would recover. 
 His servant was with him, who was very 
 attentive to him. We gave him what med- 
 ical comforts could be got, such as beef-tea 
 and champagne. I stayed with him all the 
 morning, until 2 p. M., and at his request I 
 read and prayed by his stretcher side; he 
 was then quite sensible and followed all I 
 said, and repeated some of the prayers after 
 me. All this time he was very weak, and 
 hardly able to raise himself up, although 
 his servant told me that yesterday he was 
 able to stand and walk. The disease for 
 some days seems to have taken hold of him. 
 He passed nothing but pure blood, and when 
 I first saw him was reduced almost to a skele- 
 ton. About 2 p. M., having changed his shirt 
 and made him as comfortable as I could, I left 
 
288 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 him, telling him I would come back soon. 
 Some time afterwards I got a message from 
 him asking me to go back, which I did, about 
 5 :30 p. M. I found a Captain Cardew, one of 
 the staff officers, with him. He had just read 
 the fourteenth chapter of St. John to him, 
 which he listened to, and asked Cardew to 
 read slowly, so that he might follow. A doc- 
 tor was also with him. They told me that the 
 end was approaching. We all stayed with 
 him till about 7 p. m.^ when he gave a little 
 sigh and passed away ; he was not sensible for 
 the last hour, but appeared not to suffer any 
 pain. When I was with him in the morning, 
 I said; * Arthur, I shall write by the post to- 
 night, to tell your mother how ill you are.' 
 He said: *Yes, please, Colonel, write to 
 mamma.' It was at this time that he asked 
 me to read to him and repeated after me the 
 Lord's Prayer." 
 
 A little more is added bj a friend and 
 
 brother officer, Lieutenant Hntton, a 
 
 corporal from whose company had 
 
 helped the dying boy's servant in his 
 
 attendance on his master. 
 
 **The corporal at the boy's request had on 
 several occasions read to him both from the 
 
AN ETON BOY 289 
 
 Bible and Prayer Book, and as the corporal ex- 
 pressed himself to me, he seemed always more 
 peaceful and happy afterwards. His servant 
 Starman was most struck by the heroic and 
 resigned way in which his master bore the 
 pain of his disease shortly before his death. 
 Knowing the end was approaching, and seeing 
 his master inclined to move, Starman got up 
 and was about to smooth his pillow for him, 
 when the boy, with a smile that as he said he 
 will never forget, turned and whispered: 
 * Hush, don 't touch me, I am going to heaven ; ' 
 and so fell asleep. ' ' 
 
 On the 26th of April, the day after 
 his death, Arthur Mynors was buried 
 under a mimosa-tree, on a grassy slope 
 looking down to the sea over the lovely 
 valley of the Tugela. On the 2nd of 
 May some men of his regiment, the 60th, 
 put a small rough wooden cross over 
 his grave, with this inscription: — 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 LIEUT. MYNORS, 
 
 3/60, 
 
 WHO DIED APRIL 25, 1879, 
 
 AGED 22 YEARS, 
 
290 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 It was a happy nature that, by the 
 banks of the Tugela, passed thus early 
 away — a happy and beautiful nature. 
 His simple letters and diary, which we 
 have been following, show him to us 
 better than any admiring description. 
 They show a nature fresh, wholesome, 
 gay; an English boy with the tastes of 
 his age and bringing up, with a keen 
 love of sport, with a genuine love for 
 the country, a genuine eye for it — 
 Greek in his simplicity and truth of feel- 
 ing, Greek in his simplicity and truth 
 of touch. We see him full of natural 
 affection, and not ashamed of manifest- 
 ing it; bred in habits of religion, and 
 not ashamed of retaining them; without 
 a speck of affectation, without a shadow 
 of pretension, unsullied, brave, true, 
 kind, respectful, grateful, uncensorious, 
 uncomplaining ; in the time to act, cheer- 
 fully active ; in the time to suffer, cheer- 
 fully enduring. So to his friends he 
 
AN ETON BOY 291 
 
 seemed, and so their testimony shows 
 him — testimony which by its affection- 
 ate warmth proves the character which 
 could inspire it to have been no ordi- 
 Qary one. ^ ' I am sure you and anybody 
 who knew him/' writes a brother of- 
 ficer, '^will be grieved beyond measure 
 to hear of the death of our dear Bunny 
 Mynors, of dysentery. I can't tell you 
 what a loss he is to us, as he was such 
 a favourite with us all. He had en- 
 deared himself in his short stay of a 
 year with men and officers alike, more 
 than is given to the lot of most of us." 
 **He had all the qualities," says an- 
 other, **of a good soldier and a leader 
 of men, combined with a perfect temper, 
 thorough unselfishness, and a genial 
 cheery manner." ^^The life and soul 
 of the mess," writes the adjutant of his 
 battalion, himself an Etonian, **keen at 
 all sports and games, and a universal 
 favourite wherever we have been quar- 
 
292 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 tered — it seems hard to lose him. But 
 when I add that in all professional mat- 
 ters he was most earnest, and so keen to 
 be well up in his work, strict and yet 
 with a perfect manner, a favourite with 
 his men, and, as all admit, the most 
 promising boy Eton had sent to our 
 ranks for many a day — when I add this, 
 I feel that not only we who knew him, 
 but all the battalion, must grieve, and 
 will do so for the loss of one who prom- 
 ised to be such a credit to his regiment. 
 . . . The old school may well grieve 
 for so fine a character as his who has 
 just been taken from us. I know no 
 finer fellows, or those who do their work 
 so well, as those like Mynors, who never 
 said an unkind word of any one, and con- 
 sequently no one ever said any word ex- 
 cept of praise or love for them." 
 ^^Such as they," to the same effect says 
 his tutor, Mr. Warre, who has gained 
 and kept the loving regard and trust 
 
AN ETON BOY 293 
 
 of so many generations of his Eton pu- 
 pils, as he gained and kept those of 
 young Mynors; '^such as they have from 
 others the love that they deserve.'' 
 
 Natures so beautiful are not common ; 
 and those who have seen and possessed 
 the bright presence of such a boy, while 
 they mourn their irreparable loss, can- 
 not but think most of his rareness, his 
 uniqueness. For me, a stranger, and 
 speaking not to his friends but to the 
 wide public, I confess that when I have 
 paid my tribute of sympathy to a beauti- 
 ful character and to a profound sorrow, 
 it is rather to what he has in common 
 with others that my thoughts are drawn, 
 than to what is unique in him. The or- 
 der of things in which he was brought up, 
 the school system in which he was edu- 
 cated, produce, not indeed many natures 
 so sweet as his, but in all good natures 
 many of his virtues. That school sys- 
 tem is a close and narrow one; that or- 
 
294 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 
 
 der of things is changing, and will 
 surely pass away. Vain are endeavours 
 to keep it fixed for ever, impotent are 
 regrets for it; it will pass away. The 
 received ideas which furnished the mind 
 of Arthur Mynors, as they in general 
 furnish the minds of English boys of 
 his class, and which determine his and 
 their intellectual vision, will change. 
 But under the old order of things, and 
 with its received ideas, there were bred 
 great and precious virtues; it is good 
 for us to rest our eyes upon them, to 
 feel their value, to resolve amid all 
 chances and changes to save and nourish 
 them, as saved and nourished they can 
 be. Our slowness of development in 
 England has its excellent uses in ena- 
 bling indispensable virtues to take root, 
 and to make themselves felt by us to be 
 indispensable. Our French neighbours 
 have moved faster than we; they have 
 more lucidity, in several important re- 
 
AN ETON BOY 295 
 
 spects, than we have; they have fewer 
 illusions. But a modern French school- 
 boy, Voltairian and emancipated, read- 
 ing La Fille Elisa and Nana, making it 
 his pastime to play tricks on his chap- 
 lain, to mock and flout him and his teach- 
 ing — the production of a race of lucid 
 school-boys of this kind is a dangerous 
 privilege. When I lay down the memoir 
 of Dr. Ealeigh I feel that, crude and 
 faulty as is the type of religion offered 
 by Puritanism, narrow and false as is 
 its conception of human life, material- 
 istic and impossible as is its world to 
 come, yet the seriousness, soberness, and 
 devout energy of Puritanism are a 
 prize, once won, never to be lost; they 
 are a possession to our race for ever. 
 And in taking leave of the letters and 
 diary of Arthur Mynors, I feel that this 
 natural and charming boy, too, has vir- 
 tues, he and others like him, which are 
 part of the very tradition and life of 
 
296 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM 
 
 England ; which have gone to make * * the 
 ancient and inbred integrity, piety, good- 
 nature, and good-humour of the Eng- 
 lish people,"^ and which can no more 
 perish than that ideal. 
 
 1 Burke. 
 
 THE END 
 
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