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 SELECTED 
 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 FROM 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 WILL DAVID HOWE 
 
 Professor of English in Indiana Uni-vtrsity 
 
 and 
 K 
 
 NORMAN FOERSTER 
 
 Associate Professor of English in the Uni-versity 
 of North Carolina 
 
 BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
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 ■3 !" 
 
 1^4 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9I4, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 R. L. S. 236 
 
 SEP 21 1914 
 
 Kht %iber«Rie $retl« 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
 ©CI,A380460 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 I. Lowell's Life and Personality ... v 
 n. Lowell as a Literary Critic . . . ix 
 
 SELECTED ESSAYS 
 
 Chaucer (excerpt) i 
 
 ^ Milton (excerpt) 20 
 
 Dryden 44 
 
 Pope (excerpt) 154 
 
 Wordsworth (excerpt) 201 
 
 Carlyle 228 
 
 Emerson the Lecturer 276 
 
 Thoreau 290 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I. LOWELL S LIFE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 *'One is sometimes asked by young men to recom- 
 mend to them a course of reading. My advice would 
 always be to confine yourself to the supreme books in 
 whatever literature ; still better, to choose one great 
 author and grow thoroughly familiar with him. For 
 as all roads lead to Rome, so they all likewise lead 
 hence; and you will find that in order to understand 
 perfectly and weigh exactly any really vital piece of 
 literature, you will be gradually and pleasantly per- 
 suaded to studies and explorations of which you little 
 dreamed when you began and will find yourselves schol- 
 ars before you are aware." 
 
 Thus spoke Lowell, the reader, professor, and man 
 of letters. This was his advice in his day and serves 
 as well in our time, when there are so many books 
 and so few good readers. How well he followed his 
 own teaching may be seen by watching him grow 
 from early childhood to advanced maturity. His life 
 was one long search for the " supreme books," one 
 quest for a deeper familiarity with the " really vital 
 pieces of literature." 
 
 James Russell Lowell was born in Cambridge within 
 the shadow of Harvard University at a time when 
 America was breaking the soil for a new intellectual 
 and spiritual life. In his veins flowed the blood of one 
 
vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 of the best New England families, mingled with the 
 romantic Celtic strain of his mother, a descendant from 
 the Spence family which liked to trace its ancestry 
 back to the old hero, Sir Patrick Spens. From the 
 lips of his mother, Lowell listened with delight to the 
 reciting and singing of the old ballads. In his father's 
 library he was surrounded by books which had been 
 gathered through many years by a family that read the 
 best that New England could afford. 
 
 He completed the course at Harvard. He won lit- 
 tle distinction as a scholar in the classroom, but was 
 developed exceptionally by his " browsing " among the 
 volumes of the library. If we glance at the list of 
 books which he drew from the library in his college 
 days, we observe the same eagerness which character- 
 ized the enthusiastic reader of later years. There was 
 in him something of the curiosity which in the period 
 of the European Renaissance inspired men to discover 
 the books of the classic past just as our pioneer fore- 
 fathers gave their lives to the discovery of new lands 
 and new riches. Lowell was always led by this same 
 romantic curiosity in his wandering in " the realms of 
 gold." 
 
 Having come to the end of his college course, 
 young Lowell tried to find himself in the professions 
 of law and medicine and in business, but the old love 
 of books ever drew him on. Happily for him he re- 
 solved to make a new start by writing verse. At this 
 time Maria White came into his life, an unusual 
 young woman of strong radical mind who encouraged 
 him in his idealism. Under her sympathetic inspira- 
 tion he wrote his first poetry which showed a serious- 
 
INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 ness of purpose and a sincere devotion to the best 
 ideals of his country. So began the career of Lowell 
 the poet. 
 
 In 1855 he was appointed to the professorship of 
 Belles-Lettres at Harvard, to the same chair which 
 had been occupied with distinction by Ticknor and 
 Longfellow. While serving the University he was 
 first selected to be Minister to Spain and later ad- 
 vanced to the Court of St. James. All these positions 
 he filled with marked success. During this span of 
 thirty ^years (1855 ^^ 1885) it was possible for him to 
 devote himself to his reading and to inspire young 
 students with an enthusiasm for great books and to 
 mingle with men of letters who read widely and sym- 
 pathetically. He was able to develop and cherish a 
 taste and appreciation of the great literatures to a de- 
 gree which is rare among men. 
 
 In every way in which Lowell expressed himself 
 he was the same likable man of fine sense and of 
 genuine virility. In his excellent biography of Lowell, 
 Mr. Greenslet writes : " Lowell had a way of utter- 
 ing a good thing in talk, then jotting it down in his 
 notebook, then writing it to a correspondent, and 
 then using it, a little filed and polished, in whatever 
 he happened to be composing at the time. One has 
 in consequence a marked sense of parallelism in 
 thought and phrase in the three modes of his prose ex- 
 pression." His lectures to his students at Harvard, 
 his letters to his many friends, his political and literary 
 essays, all reflected delightfully the same human in- 
 terest which made him a likable man. Leslie Stephen 
 once wrote of his " unmixed kindliness arjd thorough 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 wholesomeness of nature." The better we know him 
 the more we like him. His common sense, whimsical 
 humor, genuine interest in affairs of the day, his un- 
 daunted faith in men, — these saved him from mere 
 bookishness. He was too human, too much a social 
 being to be a recluse. That he knew the world at its 
 best and cherished the highest ideals for his country, 
 our people learned when they trusted to him the most 
 delicate diplomatic questions in Madrid and in London. 
 
 The volumes bearing the titles Among my Books^ My 
 Study Windows^ Literary Essays^ contain his more for- 
 mal criticism on the reading which ran through his 
 life. These titles are characteristic of their author. 
 Lowell read good books, talked about good books, 
 wrote to his friends about good books, inspired his 
 students to read good books, and has left us the best 
 things said in America about ,the good books of the 
 world literatures. He read widely, preferring the au- 
 thors of modern literature rather than those of classic 
 times. He liked to read authors through with the pur- 
 pose of discovering the unity in their work. Thus 
 he found that Carlyle fell short of being a very great 
 author because he did not reveal this unity; Dante 
 was one of the greatest writers because his work was 
 a perfect reflection of the man himself. So he was al- 
 ways reading books from the human point of view. 
 
 It was fortunate for America in the middle of the nine- 
 teenth century that our leading university was repre- 
 sented by a teacher who was so thoroughly American 
 in all his political and literary ideals, who set for him- 
 self the task of interesting the young nation in the great 
 authors of literature, and not by one who exalted the 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 ephemeral literature of his own country chiefly because 
 it was American. Nor was he interested in mere tech- 
 nique or in any timely or bizarre expression. He was 
 content to point to the great lights whose shining had 
 not grown dim with the centuries. Dante, Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Lessing, 
 Rousseau, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, 
 and Emerson, — these were the writers who had made 
 literature, and literature stood to him as the " great ex- 
 ponent of a^l that was permanent in the human spirit." 
 No one could go far astray who inspired his readers 
 to know more of these masters. 
 
 In the passing years as we come to look upon Frank- 
 lin, Emerson, Whittier, Lincoln, Whitman, Mark 
 Twain, and others as representing in this way or in that 
 way the spirit of America, we shall not soon forget the 
 lasting service rendered to our higher life by the ideal- 
 ism of our most distinguished American man of letters. 
 
 II. LOWELL AS A LITERARY CRITIC 
 
 In a letter to Miss Barrett, Robert Browning re- 
 ferred, with just amusement, to "the very air of a 
 Columbus " that Lowell betrayed in his earliest criti- 
 cal writing. This naivete, though it diminished as Low- 
 ell's faculties ripened, was always characteristic of his 
 criticism, and is, indeed, one of its main charms. To 
 his countrymen, who were in Lowell's day flushed with 
 the surprise and excitement of their share of the Ro- 
 mantic Movement, Lowell was a Columbus, because 
 the literatures of the Old World, which he more than 
 any other brought within their ken, were to them vir- 
 
X INTRODUCTION 
 
 tually a New World of delight and inspiration. He was 
 the foremost critic and humanist of our New England 
 Renaissance; he wrote for those who had little, if any, 
 acquaintance with either critical traditions or the poets 
 and dramatists who to him were the brightest of the 
 fixed stars. With a boundless enthusiasm for the finest 
 things in literature, and with hardly a rival in the field of 
 interpretative criticism, he made an extraordinary im- 
 pression upon his own and the succeeding generation. 
 Historically, his criticism is of the first importance. 
 
 But to his readers in the twentieth century, Lowell's 
 criticism depends, for its interest and value, on its ab- 
 solute excellences; we shall find it preferable to study, 
 not so much its historic significance as its merits and 
 demerits as literary criticism. 
 
 What strikes us from beginning to end in the read- 
 ing of Lowell's writing on literature is the fact that it 
 is primarily the criticism, not of a literary critic, but 
 of an insatiable and excellent reader. He read inces- 
 santly; his library at Elmwood was a place consecrated 
 to communion with the highest minds of literature. 
 He knew the classics, and read fluently French, Ger- 
 man, Spanish, and Italian. Dante, Cervantes, Calde- 
 ron, Chaucer, and Shakespeare he studied untiringly. 
 He could read for incredible stretches of hours, and he 
 carried the literary point of view with him wherever 
 he went. He responded immediately and abundantly 
 to excellence wherever he found it ; with an unerring 
 instinct he could find the delectable spots in the uneven 
 fields of Dryden and the correct gardens of Pope, and 
 like Lamb, he could relish a book that the uncharit- 
 able world pronounced stupid. Though he wrote. 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 " Books are good dry forage ; we can keep alive on 
 them ; but, after all, men are the only fresh pasture" ; 
 and though in practice he was never the mere book- 
 worm, he unquestionably suffered from what De Quin- 
 cey called "the gluttony of books." In "A Moose- 
 head Journal," he remarked, "how tyrannical the habit 
 of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape think- 
 ing." There is an instructive relation between his 
 manner of writing a critical essay and the result. He 
 annotated ^s he read, for lecture-room purposes ; it was 
 his habit, he tells us more than once, to review all that 
 a man wrote just before criticizing his work, and while 
 re-reading, he doubtless annotated more amply; then 
 he gathered and elaborated his material, and presto ! an 
 essay was ready for the public. The processes of re- 
 flection, of arrangement of material, and of develop- 
 ment of ideas had but scant attraction for him ; in one 
 of his commonplace books is this characteristic entry : 
 *''Tis only while we are forming our opinions that we 
 are very anxious to propagate them." As a consequence, 
 his essays are sometimes perfunctory, and, but for his 
 irrepressible cleverness and his intermittent response 
 to the demands of the subject, some of them would 
 have been dull. He was first of all a reader, an enjoyer 
 of books : he was almost — to use an epithet that he 
 bestowed upon Cotton Mather — " book-sufFocated." 
 His mind, though alert, was not by nature reflective. 
 He had no insistent desire to search for standards of 
 criticism or life; his writing, rich in many ways, is 
 poor in ideas; he is not interested in points of view, 
 in hilltop surveys, but rather in the engaging or imagin- 
 atively startling detail. 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Lowell's criticism, then, is quite unphilosophic ; is, 
 indeed, little more than so much random comment. 
 But what comment! how diverting, and pungent, and 
 healthy, and true, and human, and (on occasion) sol- 
 emnizing! If he wanted the poise, the symmetry, and 
 the unity of purpose characteristic of Arnold (of whom 
 he wrote, " clear and cold as a critique of Matt Ar- 
 nold's "), if he was too rarely " clear and cold " him- 
 self, he made up for his defects in a fashion by writing 
 with a warmth, a never-failing gusto, and sometimes 
 a veneration, that are communicated to the reader by 
 the contagion of a large nature. His view of the art 
 of criticism — '' the higher wisdom of criticism lies in 
 the capacity to admire" — is the one-sided romantic 
 view which the better critics of our own day have wisely 
 abjured; but whatever we may think of the view, 
 Lowell was surely a noble exemplar of it, partly be- 
 cause his admiration was almost uniformly deserved 
 by its object, and partly because he could admire greatly 
 as well as profusely. 
 
 It is significant that Lowell's best critical essays, 
 such as the " Chaucer," or " Shakespeare Once More," 
 or the extended study of " Dante," deal with the 
 greatest writers. They put him on his mettle, evoked 
 in its fulness that power of wise admiration and sym- 
 pathy which needed to be roused if he was to do his 
 best writing. The " Dante " essay, which to some of 
 its readers seems disappointing as the result of twenty 
 years' intimate study, is, whatever its shortcomings, 
 written in an atmosphere of calm spiritual elevation 
 which many more original and speculative critics never 
 breathe, and which Lowell himself rarely breathed 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 unless in the company of serene spirits. Here is a typi- 
 cal passage: — 
 
 " Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and strength- 
 ening of that native instinct of the soul which leads 
 it to strive backward toward its divine source, may 
 sublimate the senses till each becomes a window for 
 the light of truth and the splendor of God to shine 
 through. In him as in Calderon the perpetual presence 
 of imagination not only glorifies the philosophy of life 
 and the science of theology, but idealizes both in symbols 
 of material beauty. Though Dante's conception of 
 the highest end of man was that he should climb 
 through every phase of human experience to that tran- 
 scendental and supersensual region where the true, the 
 good, and the beautiful blend in the white light of God, 
 yet the prism of his imagination forever resolved the 
 ray into color again, and he loved to show it also 
 where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it became 
 beautiful once more to the eye of sense." 
 
 The invariable tokens of genius which Lowell found 
 in Dante and Shakespeare as well as in Homer and 
 iEschylus were, first, " fatally-chosen words," sec- 
 ondly, " the simplicity of consummate art," thirdly, 
 an " harmonious whole," and fourthly, a " happy 
 mixture and proportion " of the qualities of artistic 
 work (imagination, the most important, supported by 
 its "less showy and more substantial allies"). Al- 
 though he nowhere brings together these various 
 essentials of great art, and although the first two 
 seemed to mean more to him than the second two, one 
 is doubtless justified in saying that these are almost 
 constantly the bases for his critical opinions. When, 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 for example, in the essay on Carlyle, he speaks of 
 Goethe as " the last of the great poets," the charac- 
 teristics of genius mentioned above are implied in the 
 epithet he italicizes. 
 
 These traits of the highest type of art are obvi- 
 ously found more frequently in the classical literatures 
 of Greece and Rome than in modern literatures, so 
 that one might expect Lowell's sympathies to lie with 
 the former rather than the latter. But Lowell had not 
 the classical spirit — he preferred painting to sculp- 
 ture, the mediaeval cathedral to the Greek temple, and 
 in general Gothic art to classic art. His favorite poets 
 were not Homer, Sophocles, and Virgil, but, no doubt, 
 Dante, Shakespeare, and Calderon. It is true that in 
 his address on " The Study of Modern Languages " 
 the undertone is one of instinctive allegiance — partly 
 conventional and partly personal — to the ancient 
 literatures ; but in this address he seems to be combat- 
 ing, as he did rather often, a " secret partiality." His 
 list of the illustrious writers in " the literature of the 
 last three centuries" — Dante, Machiavelli, Mon- 
 taigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Pascal, Cal- 
 deron, Lessing, and Goethe — contains more names 
 that were dear to him than would any list of ten clas- 
 sical writers. In the Battle of the Books he would 
 probably have fought lustily for the cause of the an- 
 cients, yet one suspects that his heart would have 
 been with the moderns. 
 
 But this is not to say that Lowell's sympathies 
 were with romanticism. Petrarch he usually credits 
 with being the inventor of " romance and sentiment — 
 in other words, the pretense of feeling what we do not 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 feel," and as Petrarch's followers he includes Rous- 
 seau, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Byron, — in fact, 
 almost all who come after Rousseau in point of time. 
 It is true that Lowell himself, in his youth, passed 
 through a period of romantic melancholy, and to the end, 
 one cannot help feeling, nursed in secret a wild spark 
 of romance which he would neither fan into flame nor 
 forcibly quench. It may be fanciful to suppose that 
 this is why he was attracted to Dryden and wrote so 
 well about him — Dryden, whose poetical enthusiasm 
 was chilled, as Lowell pointed out, by the skeptical 
 atmosphere of his age. At all events, Lowell was but 
 ill at ease in the currents of thought that prevailed in 
 the nineteenth century. Despite his Tory nature, he 
 welcomed the spirit and doctrine of democracy bravely ; 
 but evolutionary science (" I hate it," he wrote in a 
 letter, " as a savage does writing ") and the introspec- 
 tion of romanticism (the " melancholy liver-complaint " 
 of" our self-exploiting nineteenth century ") perplexed 
 him sorely, and caused him to seek, with the more 
 earnestness, the hearty good-fellowship of Chaucer and 
 the serene presence of Shakespeare. 
 
 What Lowell lost in his criticism through allowing 
 it to be random comment, he well-nigh made up 
 through his astonishing power of expression. What- 
 ever entered his mind, this he expressed or could ex- 
 press. His literary essays and his classroom talk are 
 qf a piece, so that what Professor Barrett Wendell, 
 one of his pupils in the famous Dante course, says of 
 his talk applies well enough to his essays : " Now and 
 again, some word or some passage would suggest to 
 him a line of thought — sometimes very earnest, some- 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 times paradoxically comical — that it would never 
 have suggested to any one else. And he w^ould lean 
 back in his chair, and talk away across country till he 
 felt like stopping ; or he would thrust his hands into 
 the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and pace 
 the end of the room with his heavy laced boots, and 
 look at nothing in particular, and discourse of things 
 in general." Those hours in the course on Dante 
 many men still living carry about with them as an im- 
 perishable possession. What made them memorable is 
 mainly Lowell's character, Lowell the man, from 
 whom it would be hard to separate the fertility and 
 readiness and aptness of his power of expression. His 
 pages, like his talk, are sprinkled with engaging turns 
 of phrase, quotable epigrams, figures of extraordinary 
 " patness," and all these are borne on a swift current 
 of speech that deepens and darkens here and sparkles 
 over pebbles there, but that never recognizes impedi- 
 ment. 
 
 To watch for the clever phrases and passages while 
 one is carried forward rapidly by the irresistible tide 
 of his style, is perhaps not the most elevating pursuit 
 conceivable, but it has an excuse in the excellent 
 quality of Lowell's cleverness. There are two kinds 
 of cleverness : the first, cheap cleverness, bears the 
 relation to the second, genuine cleverness, which 
 melodrama bears to tragedy. Just as melodrama ofi^ers 
 thrills for their own sake, while the thrills of tragedy 
 are inevitable, so cheap cleverness delights in produc- 
 ing clever effects, while genuine cleverness produces 
 them because it cannot help it. Lowell's cleverness is 
 of the latter kind ; his happy expressions give one the 
 
INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 feeling that they came unsought, that they arranged 
 themselves spontaneously. Here are a few from the 
 first volume of his collected prose works : — 
 
 "... one of those naked pigs that seem rushing 
 out of market-doors in winter, frozen in a ghastly at- 
 titude of gallop." 
 
 [Of the dramatist Webster ;] " His nature had 
 something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a plot, 
 to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be sprinkled 
 with fresh blood at every turn. ... He has not the 
 condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed mean- 
 ing into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could 
 carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti. . . ." 
 
 [Of Emerson :] "His eye for a fine, telling phrase 
 that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman 
 for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word 
 from the mud of Cotton Mather himself." His dic- 
 tion "is like homespun cloth-of-gold." Of a dis- 
 jointed lecture : " It was as if, after vainly trying to get 
 his paragraphs into sequence and order, he had at last 
 tried the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It was 
 chaos come again, but it was a chaos full of shooting- 
 stars. . . ." 
 
 Such things as those — and one could find still bet- 
 ter examples in the other volumes — would repay the 
 reading of many a pedestrian page, if there were any 
 such in Lowell. But there are not. First of all, his 
 writing is entertaining — one can read him in the 
 most languid hour ; secondly, it is inspiring. If the en- 
 tertainment is ere long forgotten, the inspiration, hav- 
 ing recruited our spiritual faculties, abides indefinitely. 
 
 Since Lowell's death, and the death of many of 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 those who came under the spell of his charming and 
 vigorous personality, his reputation as a literary critic 
 has suffered a slight decline. The decline was inevi- 
 table, since in his later years he was somewhat over- 
 rated, and since until a few years ago no one had 
 undertaken to expose his unquestionably grave defects 
 as a literary critic. Now that his defects — his lack of 
 plan and of purpose, in particular — are clearly under- 
 stood, we may dwell upon his excellences, and be 
 grateful for them, without danger of exaggeration. As 
 rambling essays on literature rather than deliberate 
 critical estimates, they are among the few of their 
 kind in the whole range of English literature that have 
 survived, and they may confidently be expected to 
 outlive the more orderly, more solid, but less impres- 
 sive works of critics whom only critics care to read. 
 Generous, brilliant, and wise, his conversations on 
 literature will ever be our resort when our own un- 
 aided light seems dim and unprofitable. 
 
LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 CHAUCER 
 
 1870 
 
 ** And ay the more he was in despair 
 The more he coveted and thought her fair; 
 His blinde lust was all his coveting. 
 On morrow when the bird began to sing 
 Unto the siege he cometh full privily 
 And by himself he walketh soberly 
 The image of her recording alway new: 
 Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue. 
 Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer. 
 Thus fair she was, and this was her manere. 
 All this conceit his heart hath new ytake. 
 And as the sea, with tempest all toshake. 
 That after, when the storm is all ago. 
 Yet will the water quap a day or two. 
 Right so, though that her forme were absent 
 The pleasance of her forme was present." 
 
 THIS passage leads me to say a few 
 words of Chaucer as a descriptive 
 poet; for I think it a great mistake 
 to attribute to him any properly dramatic 
 power, as some have done. Even Herr 
 
2 CHAUCER 
 
 Hertzberg, in his remarkably intelligent essay-j 
 is led a little astray on this point by his enthu- 
 siasm. Chaucer is a great narrative poet ; and, 
 in this species of poetry, though the author's 
 personality should never be obtruded, it yet 
 unconsciously pervades the whole, and commu- 
 nicates an individual quality, — a kind of flavor 
 of its own. This very quality, and it is one of 
 the highest in its way and place, would be fatal 
 to all dramatic force. The narrative poet is oc- 
 cupied with his characters as picture, with their 
 grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he 
 feels for and with them instead of being they 
 for the moment, as the dramatist must always 
 be. The story-teller must possess the situation 
 perfectly in all its details, while the imagination 
 of the dramatist must be possessed and mastered 
 by it. The latter puts before us the very pas- 
 sion or emotion itself in its utmost intensity ; 
 the former gives them, not in their primary 
 form, but in that derivative one which they 
 have acquired by passing through his own mind 
 and being modified by his reflection. The deep- 
 est pathos of the drama, like the quiet " no 
 more but so ? " with which Shakespeare tells us 
 that Ophelia's heart is bursting, is sudden as a 
 stab, while in narrative it is more or less suf- 
 fused with pity, — a feeling capable of prolonged 
 sustention. This presence of the author's own 
 sympathy is noticeable in all Chaucer's pathetic 
 
CHAUCER 3 
 
 passages, as, for instance, in the lamentation of 
 Constance over her child in the " Man of Law's 
 Tale." When he comes to the sorrow of his 
 story, he seems to croon over his thoughts, to 
 soothe them and dwell upon them with a kind 
 of pleased compassion, as a child treats a wounded 
 bird which he fears to grasp too tightly, and yet 
 cannot make up his heart wholly to let go. It 
 is true also of his humor that it pervades his 
 comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the 
 attention by a sudden flash. Sometimes he 
 brings it in parenthetically, and insinuates a 
 sarcasm so slyly as almost to slip by without our 
 notice, as where he satirizes provincialism by the 
 cock who 
 
 ** By nature knew ech ascensioun 
 Of equinoxial in thilke toun. ' * 
 
 Sometimes he turns round upon himself and 
 smiles at a trip he has made into fine writing : — 
 
 ** Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue. 
 For th' orisont had reft the sun his light 
 (This is as much to sayen as «it was night *)." 
 
 Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through 
 his very tears, as in the 
 
 ** * Why wouldest thou be dead,' these women cry, 
 * Thou haddest gold enough — and Emily? ' " — 
 
 that follows so close upon the profoundly ten- 
 der despair of Arcite's farewell : — 
 
4 CHAUCER 
 
 ** What is this world ? What asken men to have ? 
 Now with his love now in the colde grave 
 Alone vvithouten any company !" 
 
 The power of diffusion without being diffuse 
 would seem to be the highest merit of narration, 
 giving it that easy flow which is so delightful. 
 Chaucer's descriptive style is remarkable for its 
 lowness of tone, — for that combination of en- 
 ergy with simplicity which is among the rarest 
 gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying 
 that he has style at all, for that consists mainly 
 in the absence of undue emphasis and exaggera- 
 tion, in the clear uniform pitch which penetrates 
 our interest and retains it, where mere loudness 
 would only disturb and irritate. 
 
 Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on 
 occasion ; but it is with a quiet intensity of his 
 own, that comes in as it were by accident. 
 
 *' Upon a thicke palfrey, paper-white. 
 
 With saddle red embroidered with delight. 
 Sits Dido: 
 
 And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 
 That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 
 Upon a courser startling as the fire, 
 ^neas sits." 
 
 Pandarus, looking at Troilus, — 
 
 *'Took up a light and found his countenance 
 As for to look upon an old romance." 
 
CHAUCER S 
 
 With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and 
 not the description of it that is the main object. 
 His picturesque bits are incidental to the story, 
 glimpsed in passing ; they never stop the way. 
 His key is so low that his high lights are never 
 obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh Hunt, and 
 Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice gra- 
 dation with which the master toned everything 
 down, become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds 
 one of him in the variety and natural action of 
 his figures, is like him also in the subdued bril- 
 liancy of his coloring. When Chaucer condenses, 
 it is because his conception is vivid. He does 
 not need to personify Revenge, for personifica- 
 tion is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and 
 professional poets ; but he embodies the very 
 passion itself in a verse that makes us glance 
 over our shoulder as if we heard a stealthy tread 
 behind us : — 
 
 *♦ The smilcr with the knife hid under the cloak." ' 
 
 And yet how unlike is the operation of the im- 
 aginative faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When 
 the latter describes, his epithets imply always 
 an impression on the moral sense (so to speak) 
 of the person who hears or sees. The sun " flat- 
 ters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye " ; 
 the bending "weeds lacquey the dull stream"; 
 
 * Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Col- 
 lins's Ode. 
 
6 CHAUCER 
 
 the shadow of the falcon " coucheth the fowl 
 below " ; the smoke is " helpless " ; when Tar- 
 quin enters the chamber of Lucrece " the thresh- 
 old grates the door to have him heard." His 
 outward sense is merely a window through which 
 the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind 
 passes over at once from the simple sensation 
 to the complex meaning of it, — feels with the 
 object instead of merely feeling it. His imagina- 
 tion is forever dramatizing. Chaucer gives only 
 the direct impression made on the eye or ear. 
 He was the first great poet who really loved 
 outward nature as the source of conscious plea- 
 surable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the 
 return of spring ; but with him it was a piece 
 of empty ritualism, Chaucer took a true delight 
 in the new green of the leaves and the return 
 of singing birds, — a delight as simple as that 
 of Robin Hood: — 
 
 *• In summer when the shaws be sheen. 
 And leaves be large and long. 
 It is full merry in fair forest 
 
 To hear the small birds' song." 
 
 He has never so much as heard of the " burthen 
 and the mystery of all this unintelligible world." 
 His flowers and trees and birds have never both- 
 ered themselves with Spinoza. He himself sings 
 more like a bird than any other poet, because 
 it never occurred to him, as to Goethe, that he 
 ought to do so. He pours himself out in sin- 
 
CHAUCER 7 
 
 cere joy and thankfulness. When we compare 
 Spenser's imitations of him with the original 
 passages, we feel that the delight of the later 
 poet was more in the expression than in the 
 thing itself. Nature with him is only good to 
 be transfigured by art. We walk among Chau- 
 cer's sights and sounds ; we listen to Spenser's 
 musical reproduction of them. In the same way, 
 the pleasure which Chaucer takes in telling his 
 stories has in itself the effect of consummate 
 skill, and makes us follow all the windings of 
 his fancy with sympathetic interest. His best 
 tales run on like one of our inland rivers, some- 
 times hastening a little and turning upon them- 
 selves in eddies that dimple without retarding 
 the current ; sometimes loitering smoothly, 
 while here and there a quiet thought, a tender 
 feeling, a pleasant image, a golden-hearted verse, 
 opens quietly as a water-lily, to float on the sur- 
 face without breaking it into ripple. The vulgar 
 intellectual palate hankers after the titillation of 
 foaming phrase, and thinks nothing good for 
 much that does not go off with a pop like a 
 champagne cork. The mellow suavity of more 
 precious vintages seems insipid : but the taste, 
 in proportion as it refines, learns to appreciate 
 the indefinable flavor, too subtile for analysis. 
 A manner has prevailed of late in which every 
 other word seems to be underscored as in a 
 school-girl's letter. The poet seems intent on 
 
8 CHAUCER 
 
 showing his sinew, as if the power of the slim 
 Apollo lay in the girth of his biceps. Force for 
 the mere sake of force ends like Milo, caught 
 and held mockingly fast by the recoil of the log- 
 he undertook to rive. In the race of fame, there 
 are a score capable of brilliant spurts for one 
 who comes in winner after a steady pull with 
 wind and muscle to spare. Chaucer never shows 
 any signs of effort, and it is a main proof of his 
 excellence that he can be so inadequately sam- 
 pled by detached passages, — by single lines 
 taken away from the connection in which they 
 contribute to the general effect. He has that 
 continuity of thought, that evenly prolonged 
 power, and that delightful equanimity, which 
 characterize the higher orders of mind. There 
 is something in him of the disinterestedness that 
 made the Greeks masters in art. His phrase is 
 never importunate. His simplicity is that of 
 elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern 
 with which he says his best things is peculiar to 
 him among English poets, though Goldsmith, 
 Addison, and Thackeray have approached it in 
 prose. He prattles inadvertently away, and all 
 the while, like the princess in the story, lets fall 
 a pearl at every other word. It is such a piece 
 of good luck to be natural ! It is the good gift 
 which the fairy godmother brings to her prime 
 favorites in the cradle. If not genius, it alone 
 is what makes genius amiable in the arts. If a 
 
CHAUCER 9 
 
 man have it not, he will never find it, for when 
 it is sought it is gone. 
 
 When Chaucer describes anything, it is com- 
 monly by one of those simple and obvious epi- 
 thets or qualities that are so easy to miss. Is it 
 a woman? He tells us she is fresh; that she 
 has glad eyes ; that " every day her beauty 
 newed " ; that 
 
 •♦ Methought all fellowship as naked 
 Withouten her that I saw once. 
 As a corone without the stones." 
 
 Sometimes he describes amply by the merest 
 hint, as where the Friar, before setting himself 
 softly down, drives away the cat. We know 
 without need of more words that he has chosen 
 the snuggest corner. I n some of his early poems 
 he sometimes, it is true, falls into the catalogue 
 style of his contemporaries; but after he had 
 found his genius he never particularizes too 
 much, — a process as deadly to all effect as an 
 explanation to a pun. The first stanza of the 
 " Clerk's Tale " gives us a landscape whose 
 stately choice of objects shows a skill in com- 
 position worthy of Claude, the last artist who 
 painted nature epically : — 
 
 ** There is at the west ende of Itaile, 
 Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, 
 A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 
 Where many a tower and town thou may'st behold 
 That founded were in time of fathers old. 
 
iG CHAUCER 
 
 And many another delitable sight; 
 And Saluces this noble country hight.'* 
 
 The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape en- 
 tangles the eye among the obtrusive weeds and 
 grass-blades of the foreground which, in look- 
 ing at a real bit of scenery, we overlook ; but 
 what a sweep of vision is here ! and what happy 
 generalization in the sixth verse as the poet turns 
 away to the business of his story ! The whole 
 is full of open air. 
 
 But it is in his characters, especially, that his 
 manner is large and free ; for he is painting 
 history, though with the fidehty of portrait. He 
 brings out strongly the essential traits, char- 
 acteristic of the genius rather than of the indi- 
 vidual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a 
 countenance that 
 
 ** There wist no wight that he was e'er in debt," — 
 
 the Sergeant at Law, " who seemed busier than 
 he was," the Doctor of Medicine, whose " study 
 was but little on the Bible," — in all these cases 
 it is the type and not the personage that fixes 
 his attention. William Blake says truly, though 
 he expresses his meaning somewhat clumsily, 
 " the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the 
 characters which compose all ages and nations. 
 Some of the names and titles are altered by time, 
 but the characters remain forever unaltered, and 
 consequently they are the physiognomies and 
 
CHAUCER M 
 
 lineaments of universal human life,beyond which 
 Nature never steps. Names alter, things never 
 alter. As Newton numbered the stars, and as 
 Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer num- 
 bered the classes of men." In his outside acces- 
 sories, it is true, he sometimes seems as minute 
 as if he were illuminating a missal. Nothing 
 escapes his sure eye for the picturesque, — the 
 cut of the beard, the soil of armor on the buff 
 jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of 
 the eye. But in this he has an artistic purpose. 
 It is here that he individualizes, and, while every 
 touch harmonizes with and seems to complete 
 the moral features of the character, makes us 
 feel that we are among living men, and not 
 the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds 
 particular to particular, scattering rather than 
 deepening the impression of reality, and making 
 us feel as if every man were a species by him- 
 self; but Chaucer, never forgetting the essential 
 sameness of human nature, makes it possible, 
 and even probable, that his motley characters 
 should meet on a common footing, while he 
 gives to each the expression that belongs to him, 
 the result of special circumstance or training. 
 Indeed, the absence of any suggestion of caste 
 cannot fail to strike any reader familiar with the 
 literature on which he is supposed to have formed 
 himself. No characters are at once so broadly 
 human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong- 
 
12 CHAUCER 
 
 ing, some of them, to extinct types, they con- 
 tinue contemporary and famihar forever. So 
 wide is the difference between knowing a great 
 many men and that knowledge of human nature 
 which comes of sympathetic insight and not of 
 observation alone. 
 
 It is this power of sympathy which makes 
 Chaucer's satire so kindly, — more so, one is 
 tempted to say, than the panegyric of Pope. 
 Intellectual satire gets its force from personal 
 or moral antipathy, and measures offences by 
 some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth 
 waters over a galling word, and it loves to say 
 I'hoUy pointing out its victim to public scorn. 
 Indignatio facit versus^ it boasts, though they 
 might as often be fathered on envy or hatred. 
 But imaginative satire, warmed through and 
 through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles 
 half sadly and murmurs IVe. Chaucer either 
 makes one knave betray another, through a 
 natural jealousy of competition, or else expose 
 himself with a naivete of good-humored cyni- 
 cism which amuses rather than disgusts. In the 
 former case the butt has a kind of claim on 
 our sympathy; in the latter, it seems nothing 
 strange, as I have already said, if the sunny at- 
 mosphere which floods that road to Canterbury 
 should tempt anybody to throw off one disguise 
 after another without suspicion. With perfect 
 tact, too, the Host is made the choragus in this 
 
CHAUCER 13 
 
 diverse company, and the coarse jollity of his 
 temperament explains, if it do not excuse, much 
 that would otherwise seem out of keeping. Surely 
 nobody need have any scruples with him. 
 
 Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the 
 most purely original of poets, as much so in 
 respect of the world that is about us as Dante 
 in respect of that which is within us. There had 
 been nothing like him before, there has been 
 nothing since. He is original, not in the sense 
 that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought 
 and said before, and what nobody can ever think 
 and say again, but because he is always natural, 
 because, if not always absolutely new, he is al- 
 ways delightfully fresh, because he sets before 
 us the world as it honestly appeared to Geoffrey 
 Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper 
 to certain people that it ought to appear. He 
 found that the poetry which had preceded him 
 had been first the expression of individual feel- 
 ing, then of class feeling as the vehicle of legend 
 and history, and at last had well-nigh lost itself 
 in chasing the mirage of allegory. Literature 
 seemed to have passed through the natural 
 stages which at regular intervals bring it to de- 
 cline. Even the lyrics of the jongleurs were all 
 run in one mould, and the Pastourelles of North- 
 ern France had become as artificial as the Pasto- 
 rals of Pope. The Romances of chivalry had 
 been made over into prose, and the " Melusine " 
 
14 CHAUCER 
 
 of his contemporary Jehan d' Arras is the for- 
 lorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus 
 far in their decrepitude, the monks endeavored 
 to give them a religious and moral turn by alle- 
 gorizing them. Their process reminds one of 
 something Ulloa tells us of the fashion in which 
 the Spaniards converted the Mexicans : " Here 
 we found an old man in a cavern so extremely 
 aged as it was wonderful, which could neither 
 see nor go because he was so lame and crooked. 
 The Father, Friar Raimund, said it were good 
 (seeing he was so aged) to make him a Chris- 
 tian ; whereupon we baptized him." The monks 
 found the Romances in the same stage of senil- 
 ity, and gave them a saving sprinkle with the 
 holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only 
 trying to turn the enemy's own weapons against 
 himself, for it was the free-thinking " Romance 
 of the Rose " that more than anything else had 
 made allegory fashionable. Plutarch tells us 
 that an allegory is to say one thing where an- 
 other is meant, and this might have been need- 
 ful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, 
 as afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. 
 But, except as a means of evading the fagot, the 
 method has few recommendations. It reverses 
 the true office of poetry by making the real un- 
 real. It is imagination endeavoring to recom- 
 mend itself to the understanding by means of 
 cuts. If an author be in such deadly earnest, 
 
CHAUCER I? 
 
 or if his imagination be of such creative vigor 
 as to project real figures when it meant to cast 
 only a shadow upon vapor ; if the true spirit 
 come, at once obsequious and terrible, when the 
 conjurer has drawn his circle and gone through 
 with his incantations merely to produce a proper 
 frame of mind in his audience, as was the case 
 with Dante, there is no longer any question of 
 allegory as the word and thing are commonly 
 understood. But with all secondary poets, as 
 with Spenser for example, the allegory does not 
 become of one substance with the poetry, but 
 is a kind of carven frame for it, whose figures 
 lose their meaning, as they cease to be contem- 
 porary. It was not a style that could have much 
 attraction for a nature so sensitive to the actual, 
 so observant of it, so interested by it, as that 
 of Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand 
 at all the forms in vogue, and to have arrived 
 in his old age at the truth, essential to all really 
 great poetry, that his own instincts were his 
 safest guides, that there is nothing deeper in 
 life than life itself, and that to conjure an alle- 
 gorical significance into it was to lose sight of 
 its real meaning. He of all men could not say 
 one thing and mean another, unless by way of 
 humorous contrast. 
 
 In thus turning frankly and gayly to the ac- 
 tual world, and drinking inspiration from sources 
 open to all; in turning away from a colorless 
 
i6 CHAUCER 
 
 abstraction to the solid earth and to emotions 
 common to every pulse; in discovering that to 
 make the best of Nature, and not to grope 
 vaguely after something better than Nature, was 
 the true office of Art; in insisting on a definite 
 purpose, on veracity, cheerfulness, and simplic- 
 ity, Chaucer shows himself the true father and 
 founder of what is characteristically English lit- 
 erature. He has a hatred of cant as hearty as 
 Dr. Johnson's, though he has a slier way of 
 showing it; he has the placid common sense of 
 Franklin, the sweet, grave humor of Addison, 
 the exquisite taste of Gray ; but the whole tex- 
 ture of his mind, though its substance seem 
 plain and grave, shows itself at every turn iri- 
 descent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above 
 all, he has an eye for character that seems to 
 have caught at once not only its mental and 
 physical features, but even its expression in 
 variety of costume, — an eye, indeed, second 
 only, if it should be called second in some 
 respects, to that of Shakespeare. 
 
 I know of nothing that may be compared 
 with the Prologue to the " Canterbury Tales," 
 and with that to the story of the " Chanon's 
 Yeoman " before Chaucer. Characters and por- 
 traits from real life had never been drawn 
 with such discrimination, or with such variety, 
 never with such bold precision of outline, and 
 with such a lively sense of the picturesque. 
 
CHAUCER 17 
 
 His Parson is still unmatched, though Dryden 
 and Goldsmith have both tried their hands in 
 emulation of him. And the humor also in its 
 suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy 
 unobtrusiveness, is something wholly new in 
 literature. For anything that deserves to be 
 called like it in English we must wait for 
 Henry Fielding. 
 
 Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated 
 To-day as if it were as good as Yesterday, the 
 first who held up a mirror to contemporary 
 life in its infinite variety of high and low, of 
 humor and pathos. But he reflected life in its 
 large sense as the life of men, from the knight 
 to the ploughman, — the life of every day as it 
 is made up of that curious compound of human 
 nature with manners. The very form of the 
 "Canterbury Tales" was imaginative. The gar- 
 den of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, 
 and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough 
 thread for their stories, but exclude all save 
 equals and friends, exclude consequently human 
 nature in its wider meaning. But by choosing 
 a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where 
 all men are equal, with souls to be saved, and 
 with another world in view that abolishes all 
 distinctions. By this choice, and by making 
 the Host of the Tabard always the central 
 figure, he has happily united the two most famil- 
 iar emblems of life, — the short journey and 
 
i8 CHAUCER 
 
 the inn. We find more and more as we study 
 him that he rises quietly from the conventional 
 to the universal, and may fairly take his place 
 with Homer in virtue of the breadth of his hu- 
 manity. 
 
 In spite of some external stains, which those 
 who have studied the influence of manners will 
 easily account for without imputing them to any 
 moral depravity, we feel that we can join the 
 pure-minded Spenser in calling him "most sa- 
 cred, happy spirit." If character may be divined 
 from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, 
 hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, 
 for this world than the next, but thoroughly 
 humane, and friendly with God and men. I 
 know not how to sum up what we feel about 
 him better than by saying (what would have 
 pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) 
 that we love him more even than we admire. 
 We are sure that here was a true brother-man 
 so kindly that, in his House of Fame, after 
 naming the great poets, he throws in a pleasant 
 word for the oat^n-pipes 
 
 '* Of the little herd-grooms 
 That keepen beasts among the brooms." 
 
 No better inscription can be written on the first 
 page of his works than that which he places over 
 the gate in his Assembly of Fowls, and which 
 contrasts so sweetly with the stern lines of Dante 
 from which they were imitated : — 
 
CHAUCER 19 
 
 ** Through me men go into the blissful place 
 Of the heart's heal and deadly woundes' cure; 
 Through me men go unto the well of Grace, 
 Where green and lusty May doth ever endure; 
 This is the way to all good aventure; 
 Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast. 
 All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast ! " 
 
MILTON' 
 
 1872 
 
 MILTON was a harmonist rather than a 
 melodist. There are, no doubt, some 
 exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina 
 Fair") among his earlier poems, as could hardly 
 fail to be the case in an age which produced or 
 trained the authors of our best English glees, 
 as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the 
 songs of our dramatists, but he also showed 
 from the first that larger style which was to be 
 his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in 
 the " Nativity Ode," in the " Solemn Music," 
 and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as re- 
 gards metrical construction, than anything that 
 
 ' The Life of John MiIto?i : narrated in Connection with 
 the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time. 
 By David Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and 
 English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Vols, i., 
 ii, 1638-1643. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 
 1 87 1., 8vo, pp. xii, 608. 
 
 The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Intro- 
 duction, Notes, and an Essay on Milton's English, by David 
 Masson, M.A., LL.D., Professor of Rhetoric and English 
 Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. Svo. 
 Macmillan & Co. 1874. 
 
MILTON 2 1 
 
 had thrilled the English ear before, giving no 
 uncertain augury of him who was to show what 
 sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the 
 keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various 
 language, that have never since felt the strain 
 of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger 
 movements of metre that Milton was great and 
 original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's 
 fondness for dilation as respects thoughts and 
 images. In Milton it extends to the language 
 also, and often to the single words of which a 
 period is composed. He loved phrases of tower- 
 ing port, in which every member dilated stands 
 like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and 
 passages that stamp him great, the verses do 
 not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but 
 march rather with resounding tread and clang 
 of martial music. It is true that he is cunning 
 in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell 
 in his orchestra without being obvious, but it 
 is in the more scientific region of open-voweled 
 assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet 
 withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), 
 that he is an artist and a master. He even some- 
 times introduces rhyme with misleading intervals 
 between and unobviously in his blank verse : — 
 
 *' There rest, if any rest can harbour there ; 
 And, reassembling our afflicted powers. 
 Consult how we may henceforth most offend 
 Our enemy, our own loss how repair, 
 . How overcome this dire calamity. 
 
22 MILTON 
 
 What reinforcement we may gain from hope. 
 If not, what resolution from des/i^/r." ' 
 
 There is one almost perfect quatrain, — 
 
 ** Before thy fellows, ambitious to win 
 From me some plume, that thy success may show 
 Destruction to the rest. This pause between 
 (Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know "; — 
 
 and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an 
 
 assonance, — 
 
 ** If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge 
 Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft 
 In worst extremes and on the perilous edge 
 Of battle when it raged, in all assaults." 
 
 There can be little doubt that the rhymes in 
 the first passage cited were intentional, and per- 
 haps they were so in the others; but Milton's 
 ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming 
 couplets, and others in which the assonance 
 almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blank 
 verse : — 
 
 •' From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these). 
 From India and the Golden Chersonese"; 
 
 "That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired 
 What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired"; 
 
 *♦ And will alike be punished, whether thou 
 Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow ' ' ; 
 
 * I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the near- 
 ness of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson 
 leaves out the comma after If not, the pause of which is need- 
 ful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep not a little 
 farther apart from what, (" teach each " !) 
 
MILTON 23 
 
 *♦ Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy. 
 Save what is in destroying, other joy "; 
 
 " Shall all be Paradise, far happier place 
 Than this of Eden, and far happier days "; 
 
 ♦* This my long sufferance and my day of grace 
 They who neglect and scorn shall never taste"; 
 
 *' So far remote with diminution seen. 
 First in his East the glorious lamp was seen." ' 
 
 These examples (and others might be adduced) 
 serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy 
 about the larger interests of his measures to be 
 always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist 
 rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable, 
 beyond any other English poet, of putting great 
 masses through the most complicated evolutions 
 without clash or confusion, but he was not curi- 
 ous that every foot should be at the same angle. 
 In reading " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling 
 of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky, 
 brimmed with sunshine or hung with constella- 
 tions ; the abysses of space are about you ; you 
 hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean ; 
 thunders mutter round the horizon ; and if the 
 scene change, iti-s with an elemental movement 
 like the shifting of mighty winds. His imagina- 
 tion seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in 
 the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves 
 better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions, 
 
 ' •* First in his East," is not soothing to the ear. 
 
24 MILTON 
 
 wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing 
 in the blue streams of air, controlling with his 
 eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and 
 rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser 
 expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps 
 I should rather say the indefinite, where more 
 is meant than meets the ear, than any other of 
 our poets. He loved epithets (like old 2.ndfar) 
 that suggest great reaches, whether of space or 
 time. This bias shows itself already in his 
 earlier poems, as where he hears 
 
 ** The_/^r off cwrkw sound 
 Over some widewatered shore," 
 
 or where he fancies the shores and sounding 
 seas washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches 
 its climax in the " Paradise Lost." He pro- 
 duces his effects by dilating our imaginations 
 with an impalpable hint rather than by concen- 
 trating them upon too precise particulars. Thus 
 in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no 
 definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward 
 the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He gen- 
 eralizes always instead of specifying, — the true 
 secret of the ideal treatment in which he is with- 
 out peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he 
 is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with 
 
 •' Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne 
 II rauco suon della tartarea tromba; 
 Treman le spaziose atre caverne. 
 El' aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba," 
 
MILTON 25 
 
 but soon spoils all by condescending to definite 
 comparisons with thunder and intestinal convul- 
 sions of the earth ; in other words, he is unwary 
 enough to give us a standard of measurement, 
 and the moment you furnish Imagination with 
 a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statis- 
 tical poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with 
 this passage in his memory, is too wise to ham- 
 per himself with any statement for which he 
 can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a 
 mist of looming indefiniteness ; — 
 
 *' He called so loud that all the hollow deep 
 Of hell resounded; " 
 
 thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from 
 his usual method of prolonged evolution. No 
 caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn, 
 because they have limits. He could practise this 
 self-denial when his artistic sense found it need- 
 ful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater 
 intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness. 
 His more elaborate passages have the multitu- 
 dinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a 
 sullen force again from its own reverberations, 
 but he knew that the attention is recalled and 
 arrested by those claps that stop short without 
 echo and leave us listening. There are no such 
 vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading 
 the " Paradise Lost" one has a feeling of spa- 
 ciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's 
 respect for himself and for his own mind and 
 
26 MILTON 
 
 its movements rises well-nigh to veneration. He 
 prepares the way for his thought and spreads on 
 the ground before the sacred feet of his verse 
 tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology 
 and romance. There is no such unfailing dignity 
 as his. Observe at what a reverent distance he 
 begins when he is about to speak of himself, as 
 at the beginning of the Third Book and the 
 Seventh. His sustained strength is especially 
 felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start 
 full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve; there 
 is never any fluttering of the canvas. In this he 
 off^ers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who 
 has to go through with a great deal o{ yo-heave- 
 ohing before he gets under way. And though, 
 in the didactic parts of " Paradise Lost," the 
 wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell 
 that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon 
 some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its 
 tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. And 
 the poem never becomes incoherent ; we feel all 
 through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven, 
 a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct 
 we trust implicitly. 
 
 Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's Eng- 
 lish are, it seems to me, for the most part un- 
 satisfactory. He occupies some ten pages, for 
 example, with a history of the genitival form its, 
 which adds nothing to our previous knowledge 
 on the subject and which has no relation to 
 
MILTON 27 
 
 Milton except for its bearing on the author- 
 ship of some verses attributed to him against 
 the most overwhehning internal evidence to the 
 contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether too reso- 
 lute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough 
 " recollectiveness of Latin constructions " in 
 Milton, and scents them sometimes in what 
 would seem to the uninstructed reader very 
 idiomatic English. More than once, at least, 
 he has fancied them by misunderstanding the 
 passage in which they seem to occur. Thus, 
 in "Paradise Lost," xi. 520, 511, — 
 
 '* Therefore so abject is their punishment. 
 
 Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own," — 
 
 has no analogy with eorum deformantium^ for the 
 context shows that it is the ■punishment which 
 disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds 
 constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words 
 needing annotation that are common to all 
 poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his 
 notes seem not seldom to have been written by 
 a foreigner. On this passage in " Comus," — 
 
 ** I do not think my sister so to seek 
 Or so unprincipled in virtue's book 
 And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever 
 As that the single want of light and noise 
 (Not being in danger, as I trust she is not) 
 Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts," 
 
 Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict con- 
 
28 MILTON 
 
 struction, not being would cling to want as its 
 substantive ; but the phrase passes for the Latin 
 ablative absolute." Soon i\\Q \^ or ds forestalling 
 nighty " i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to 
 anticipate the market by purchasing goods be- 
 fore they are brought to the stall." In the verse 
 
 " Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good," 
 
 he explains that " while here has the sense o( so 
 long as.'' But Mr. Masson's notes on the lan- 
 guage are his weakest. He is careful to tell us, 
 for example, " that there are instances of the use 
 of shine as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson, 
 and other poets." It is but another way of spell- 
 ing sheen^ and if Mr. Masson never heard a 
 shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I give you 
 a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular. 
 His notes in general are very good (though too 
 long). Those on the astronomy of Milton are 
 particularly valuable. I think he is sometimes 
 a little too scornful of parallel passages,' for if 
 there is one thing more striking than another 
 in this poet, it is that his great and original im- 
 agination was almost wholly nourished by books, 
 perhaps I should rather say set in motion by 
 
 ' A passage from Dante (^Inferno, xi. 96-105), with its 
 reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of 
 •' Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study 
 of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also Lave beer 
 of great service in the astronomical notes. 
 
MILTON 29 
 
 them. It is wonderful how, from the most 
 withered and juiceless hint gathered in his read- 
 ing, his grand images rise like an exhalation ; 
 how from the most battered old lamp caught in 
 that huge drag-net with which he swept the 
 waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius 
 to build his palaces. Whatever he touches swells 
 and towers. That wonderful passage in " Co- 
 mus " of the airy tongues, perhaps the most 
 imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was 
 conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's ab- 
 stract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us 
 to understand the poet. When I find that Sir 
 Thomas Browne had said before Milton, that 
 Adam "was the wisest of all men since,'' I am 
 glad tofind this link between the most profound 
 and the most stately imagination of that age. 
 Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of 
 the historical development of our poetry, of 
 its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every 
 one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous 
 proper names, which have not only an acquired 
 imagmative value by association, and so serve 
 to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have 
 likewise a merely musical significance. This he 
 probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom 
 are frequent in him. There is certainly some- 
 thing of what afterwards came to be called Mil- 
 tonic in more than one passage of " Tambur- 
 iaine," a play in which gigantic force seems 
 
30 MILTON 
 
 struggling from the block, as in Michael Angelo's 
 Dawn. 
 
 Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification 
 of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when 
 he ventures on particulars, one cannot always 
 agree with him. He seems to understand that 
 our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when 
 he comes to what he calls variations, he talks of 
 the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or 
 the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the 
 Anapsest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the 
 same." This is always misleading. The shift 
 of the accent in what Mr. Masson calls " dis- 
 syllabic variations " is common to all pentameter 
 verse, and, in the other case, most of the words 
 cited as trisyllables either were not so in Milton's 
 day,' or were so or not at choice of the poet, ac- 
 cording to their place in the verse. There is not 
 an elision of Milton's without precedent in the 
 dramatists from whom he learned to write blank 
 verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of 
 them, except Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he 
 employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than 
 they to give a faint undulation or retardation to 
 his verse, only because his epic form demanded 
 
 ' Almost every combination of two vowels might in those 
 days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of ehsion 
 was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study 
 of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely 
 conforms. 
 
MILTON 31 
 
 it more for variety's sake. How Milton would 
 have read them, is another question. He cer- 
 tainly often marked them by an apostrophe 
 in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed 
 according to quantity, so far as that is possible 
 in English, and as Cowper somewhat extrava- 
 gantly says, " gives almost as many proofs of it 
 in his * Paradise Lost ' as there are lines in the 
 poem." ' But when Mr. Masson tells us that 
 
 " Self-fed and self-consumed; if this fail," 
 
 and 
 
 ** Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare," 
 are " only nine syllables," and that in 
 
 ** Created hugest that swim the ocean- stream," 
 
 " either the third foot must be read as an ana- 
 f<£st or the word hugest must be pronounced 
 as one syllable, hug sty' I think Milton would 
 have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of 
 course Milton read it 
 
 ** Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," — ■ 
 
 just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Mas- 
 son's facsimile) 
 
 "Thus sang the uncouth swain to th* oaks and rills," — 
 
 a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur 
 precisely as in the Italian poets.^ " Gest that 
 
 ' Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791. 
 
 * So Dante: — 
 
 " Ma sapienza e amore e virtute." 
 
 So Donne: — 
 
 " Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives." 
 
32 MILTON 
 
 swim " would be rather a knotty anapast^ an 
 insupportable foot indeed ! And why is even 
 hug st worse than Shakespeare's 
 
 ♦* Toung^ st follower of thy drum " ? 
 
 In the same way he says of 
 
 «* For we have also our evening and our morn," 
 
 that " the metre of this line is irregular," and 
 of the rapidly fine 
 
 " Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,' 
 
 that it is " a line of unusual metre." Why more 
 unusual than 
 
 ** As being the contrary to his high will " ? 
 
 What would Mr. Masson say to these three 
 verses from Dekkar ? — 
 
 ** And knowing so much, I muse thou art so poor "; 
 
 *' I fan away the ^\is,tjiytng in mine eyes "; 
 
 ** Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them." 
 
 All such participles (where no consonant di- 
 vided the vowels) were normally of one sylla- 
 ble, permissibly of two.' If Mr. Masson had 
 studied the poets who preceded Milton as he 
 
 ' Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand 
 with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been 
 trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's 
 Shakespearian Grammar in the interval between writing his 
 notes and his Introduction. Walker's Shakespeare' s Versifica- 
 tion would have been a great help to him in default of original 
 knowledge. 
 
MILTON 33 
 
 has studied hiniy he would never have said that 
 the verse — 
 
 ** Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills " — 
 
 was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of 
 over-measure." He retains Milton's spelling 
 of hunderd without perceiving the metrical rea- 
 son for It, that d^ /, />, b, etc., followed by / or r, 
 might be either of two or of three syllables. In 
 Marlowe we find it both ways in two consecu- 
 tive verses : — 
 
 *' A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse. 
 Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms." ' 
 
 Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses 
 ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and 
 even argues In his Introduction that some of 
 them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He 
 cites some lines of Spenser as confirming his 
 theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes 
 the conditions of the case by throwing the ac- 
 cent (appreciably even now, but more emphatic- 
 ally in Spenser's day) on the last syllable. 
 ** A spirit and judgment equal or superior," 
 
 he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consist- 
 ing of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely 
 Milton's ear would never have tolerated a dis- 
 
 ' Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from 
 the word sister by its preceding a vowel: — 
 
 " Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near ! " 
 
 This would have been impossible before a consonant. 
 
34 MILTON 
 
 syllabic " spirit " in such a position. The word 
 was then more commonly of one syllable, though 
 it might be two, and was accordingly spelt spreet 
 (still surviving in sprite)^ sprit ^ and even spirt ^ as 
 Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's 
 facsimiles.' Shakespeare, in the verse 
 
 ** Hath put a spirit of youth in everything," 
 
 uses the word admirably well in a position where 
 it cannot have a metrical value of more than one 
 syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to 
 the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old 
 metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality 
 which modern verse has lost in proportion as 
 our language has stiffened into uniformity under 
 the benumbing fingers of pedants. 
 
 This discussion of the value of syllables is not 
 so trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense 
 has been written about imperfect measures in 
 Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic ef- 
 fect produced by filling up the gaps of missing 
 syllables with pauses or prolongations of the 
 voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and pas- 
 sionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages 
 of continuously level speech it is barbarously 
 absurd. I do not believe that any of our old 
 dramatists has knowingly left us a single im- 
 perfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way 
 
 ' So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old 
 French. 
 
MILTON 35 
 
 and in how mutilated a form their plays have 
 mostly reached us, we should attribute such 
 faults (as a geologist would call them) to any- 
 thing rather than to the deliberate design of the 
 poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best 
 metrists among them, have given us a standard 
 by which to measure what licenses they took in 
 versification, — the one in his translations, the 
 other in his poems. The unmanageable verses 
 in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in 
 works printed after his blindness had lessened 
 the chances of supervision and increased those 
 of error. There are only two, indeed, which 
 seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand. 
 These are, 
 
 ** Burnt after them to the bottomless pit," 
 
 and y^ y- ^ 
 
 ** With them from bliss to the bottomless deep." 
 
 This certainly looks like a case where a word 
 had dropped out or had been stricken out by 
 some proof-reader who limited the number of 
 syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his 
 finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first 
 of these lines, and says that to make it regular 
 by accenting the word bottomless on the second 
 syllable would be " too horrible." Certainly not, 
 if Milton so accented it, any more than blasphe- 
 mous and twenty more which sound oddly to us 
 now. However that may be, Milton could not 
 
36 MILTON 
 
 have intended to close not only a period, but a 
 paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in 
 the only other passage where the word occurs 
 it is accented as now on the first syllable: — 
 
 *' With hideous ruin and combustion down 
 To bottomless perdition, there to dwell." 
 
 As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom^ 
 may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according 
 to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last 
 passage quoted (and all three refer to the same 
 event) gives us the word wanting in the two 
 others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to 
 write, 
 
 *' Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit," 
 
 which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of 
 ripple that Milton liked best.' 
 
 Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Intro- 
 duction of the way in which the verses of Mil- 
 ton should be read is judicious enough, though 
 some of the examples he gives, of the "com- 
 icality " which would ensue from compressing 
 every verse into an exact measure often sylla- 
 bles, are based on a surprising ignorance of the 
 
 * Milton, however, would not have balked at M' bottom- 
 less any more than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at tK 
 sea. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for 
 he corrects /' tJi' midst to ;* the midst, and takes pains to men- 
 tion it in a note. He might better have restored the 7i in /', 
 where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunci- 
 ation, as ff' for o/'and on. 
 
 V 
 
MILTON 37 
 
 laws which guided our poets just before and 
 during Milton's time in the structure of their 
 verses. Thus he seems to think that a strict 
 scansion would require us in the verses 
 
 " So he with difficulty and labor hard," 
 
 and 
 
 '* Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold " 
 
 to pronounce diffikty and purp \ Though Mr. 
 Masson talks of " slurs and elisions," his ear 
 would seem somewhat insensible to their exact 
 nature or office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus 
 where none is intended, and his making purple 
 of one syllable wrecks the whole verse, the real 
 slur in the latter case being on azure or.^ When 
 he asks whether Milton required " these pro- 
 nunciations in his verse," no positive answer 
 can be given, but I very much doubt whether 
 he would have thought that some of the lines 
 Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank 
 Verse even with the most leisurely natural enun- 
 ciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure he 
 would have stared if told that " the number of 
 accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable." 
 It may be doubted whether elisions and com- 
 pressions which would be thought in bad taste 
 or even vulgar now were more abhorrent to the 
 ears of Milton's generation than to a cultivated 
 
 * Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened 
 to two syllables. 
 
38 MILTON 
 
 Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose. 
 After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced 
 to the infallible axiom that poetry should be read 
 as poetry. 
 
 Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main 
 principles, but the examples he quotes make 
 one doubt whether he knows what a verse is. 
 For example, he thinks it would be a " horror," 
 if in the verse 
 
 ♦♦That invincible Samson far renowned," 
 
 we should lay the stress on the first syllable of 
 invincible. It is hard to see why this should 
 be worse than conventicle or remonstrance or suc- 
 cessor or incompatible (the three latter used by the 
 correct Daniel), or why Mr. Masson should 
 clap an accent on surface merely because it 
 comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to in- 
 vincible. If one read the verse just cited with 
 those that go with it, he will find that the accent 
 must come on the first syllable of invincible, or 
 else the whole passage becomes chaos.' Should 
 we refuse to say obleeged with Pope because the 
 fashion has changed ? From its apparently 
 greater freedom in skilful hands, blank verse 
 
 ' Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him 
 guilty of a verse like 
 
 " Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep," 
 
 while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions 
 that he loved. 
 
MILTON 39 
 
 gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and 
 dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup- 
 let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in 
 the one that would not be good in the other 
 when handled by a master like Dryden, Mil- 
 ton, like other great poets, wrote some bad 
 verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so 
 than to conjure up some unimaginable reason 
 why the reader should accept them as the better 
 for their badness. Such a bad verse is 
 " Rocks, caves, lakes, _/>»/, bogs, dens and shapes of death," 
 
 which might be cited to illustrate Pope's 
 
 "And ten low words oft creep in one dull line." 
 
 Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any 
 partiality for low words. He rather loved them 
 tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six 
 feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into 
 the grenadiers. He loved them as much for 
 their music as for their meaning, — perhaps 
 more. His style, therefore, when it has to deal 
 with commoner things, is apt to grow a little 
 cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says 
 that when the owl would boast, he boasts of 
 catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shake- 
 speare would have understood this. Milton 
 would have made him talk like an eagle. His 
 influence is not to be left out of account as par- 
 tially contributing to that decline toward poetic 
 diction which was already beginning ere he died. 
 
40 MILTON 
 
 If it would not be fair to say that he is the most 
 artistic, he may be called in the highest sense 
 the most scientific of our poets. If to Spenser 
 younger poets have gone to be sung to, they 
 have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught. 
 Our language has no finer poem than "Samson 
 Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of au- 
 stere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's 
 personal experience is generalized into a classic 
 tragedy. 
 
 Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would 
 seem to show him, he had in him by nature, or 
 bred into him by fate, something of the haughty 
 and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michael 
 Angelo. In no other English author is the man 
 so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty 
 conception of himself enters into all he says 
 and does. Always the necessity of this one man 
 became that of the whole human race for the 
 moment. There were no walls so sacred but 
 must go to the ground when he wanted elbow- 
 room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary 
 Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of 
 a roundhead schoolmaster incompatible and leave 
 it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an 
 easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If 
 he is bhnd, it is with excess of light, it is a 
 divine partiality, an overshadowing with angels' 
 wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted 
 among the prophets because they, too, had lost 
 
MILTON 41 
 
 their sight, and the bhndness of Homer is of 
 more account than his " Iliad." After writing in 
 rhyme till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuit- 
 able for his epic, and it at once becomes " the 
 invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched 
 matter and lame metre." If the structure o^ his 
 mind be undramatic, why, then, the English 
 drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shake- 
 speare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will 
 compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the 
 blinded Samson for its hero, and he will com- 
 pose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he belongs to 
 the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are 
 in no way responsible for their to-morrows. And 
 this makes him perennially interesting even to 
 those who hate his politics, despise his Socinian- 
 ism, and find his greatest poem a bore, A new 
 edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as 
 he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each 
 new student, and Mr. Masson, in his three 
 handsome volumes, has given us, with much 
 that is superfluous and even erroneous, much 
 more that is a solid and permanent acquisition 
 to our knowledge. 
 
 It results from the almost scornful withdrawal 
 of Milton into the fortress of his absolute per- 
 sonality that no great poet is so uniformly self- 
 conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare 
 that he had the power of transforming himself 
 into everything ; of Milton, that he had that of 
 
42 MILTON 
 
 transforming everything into himself. Dante is 
 individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the 
 cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at 
 the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves 
 of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go 
 for a moment. As other poets are possessed by 
 their theme, so is he Jd-^-possessed, his great 
 theme being John Milton, and his great duty 
 that of interpreter between him and the world. 
 I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy 
 translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the 
 version is made. Pope says he makes God 
 the Father reason " like a school-divine." The 
 criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He makes 
 Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and 
 had the poem been written a few years later, the 
 Almighty would have become more heterodox. 
 Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting 
 terms with heaven. 
 
 Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reli- 
 ance, I suspect, which goes far toward making 
 the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's- 
 breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. 
 Puritanism showed both the strength and weak- 
 ness of its prophetic nurture ; enough of the 
 latter to be scoffed out of England by the very 
 men it had conquered in the field, enough of 
 the former to intrench itself in three or four im- 
 mortal memories. It has left an abiding mark 
 in politics and religion, but its great monuments 
 
MILTON 43 
 
 are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Mil- 
 ton. It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor 
 of great events ; to have been a partaker in them, 
 and to have seen noble purposes by their own 
 self-confidence become the very means of igno- 
 ble ends, if it do not wholly repress, may kindle 
 a passion of regret, deepening the song which 
 dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand 
 loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it 
 makes him the most impressive figure in our 
 literary history, is reflected also in his maturer 
 poems by a sublime independence of human 
 sympathy like that with which mountains fasci- 
 nate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of the 
 loneliness of one the habitual companions of 
 whose mind were the Past and Future. I always 
 seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand 
 on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will 
 guard the song which the other had inspired. 
 
DRYDEN ' 
 
 1868 
 
 BENVENUTO CELLINI tells us that 
 when, in his boyhood, he saw a salaman- 
 der come out of the fire, his grandfather 
 forthwith gave him a sound beating, that he 
 might the better remember so unique a prodigy. 
 Though perhaps in this case the rod had 
 another application than the autobiographer 
 chooses to disclose, and was intended to fix in 
 the pupil's mind a lesson of veracity rather than 
 of science, the testimony to its mnemonic virtue 
 remains. Nay, so universally was it once be- 
 lieved that the senses, and through them the 
 faculties of observation and retention, were quick- 
 
 ' The Dramatuk Works of "John Dryden, Esq. In six 
 volumes. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, in the Strand. 
 MDCCxxxv. 1 8mo. 
 
 The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose- Works of "John Dry- 
 den, now first collected. With Notes and Illustrations. An 
 Account of the Life and Wntings of the Author, grounded on 
 Original and Authentick Documents ; and a Collection of his 
 Letters, the greatest Part of which has never before been pub- 
 lished. By Edmund Malone, Esq. London: T. Cadell and 
 W. Davies, in the Strand. 4 vols. 8vo. 
 
 The Poetical Works of John Dryden. (Edited by Mit- 
 ford.) London: W. Pickering. 1832. 5 vols. i8mo. 
 
DRYDEN 45 
 
 ened by an irritation of the cuticle, that in France 
 it was customary" to whip the children annually 
 at the boundaries of the parish, lest the true place 
 of them might ever be lost through neglect of 
 so inexpensive a mordant for the memory. From 
 this practice the older school of critics should 
 seem to have taken a hint for keeping fixed the 
 limits of good taste, and what was somewhat 
 vaguely called classical Kngl'ish. To mark these 
 limits in poetry, they set up as Hermas the im- 
 ages they had made to them of Dryden, of Pope, 
 and later of Goldsmith. Here they solemnly 
 castigated every new aspirant in verse, who in 
 turn performed the same function for the next 
 generation, thus helping to keep always sacred 
 and immovable the ne plus ultra alike of inspira- 
 tion and of the vocabulary. Though no two 
 natures were ever much more unlike than those 
 of Dryden and Pope, and again of Pope and 
 Goldsmith, and no two styles, except in such 
 externals as could be easily caught and copied, 
 yet it was the fashion, down even to the last 
 generation, to advise young writers to form them- 
 selves, as it was called, on these excellent models. 
 Wordsworth himself began in this school ; and 
 though there were glimpses, here and there, of 
 a direct study of Nature, yet most of the epithets 
 in his earlier pieces were of the traditional kind 
 so fatal to poetry during great part of the last 
 century ; and he indulged in that alphabetic per- 
 
46 DRYDEN 
 
 sonification which enhvens all such words as 
 Hunger, Solitude, Freedom, by the easy magic 
 of an initial capital. 
 
 '* Where the green apple shrivels on the spray. 
 
 And pines the unripened pear in summer's kindliest ray. 
 
 Even here Content has fixed her smiling reign 
 
 With Independence, child of high Disdain. 
 
 Exulting 'mid the winter of the skies. 
 
 Shy as the jealous chamois. Freedom flies. 
 
 And often grasps her sword, and often eyes." 
 
 Here we have every characteristic of the artifi- 
 cial method (if we except the unconscious alex- 
 andrine in the second line), even to the triplet, 
 which Swift hated so heartily as " a vicious way 
 of rhyming wherewith Mr. Dryden abounded, 
 imitated by all the bad versifiers of Charles the 
 Second's reign." Wordsworth became, indeed, . 
 very early the leader of reform ; but, like Wes- 
 ley, he endeavored a reform within the Establish- 
 ment. Purifying the substance, he retained the 
 outward forms with a feeling rather than convic- 
 tion that, in poetry, substance and form are but 
 manifestations of the same inward life, the one 
 fused into the other in the vivid heat of their 
 common expression. Wordsworth could never 
 wholly shake off the influence of the century 
 into which he was born. He began by propos- 
 ing a reform of the ritual, but it went no further 
 than an attempt to get rid of the words of Latin 
 original where the meaning was as well or better 
 
DRYDEN 47 
 
 given in derivatives of the Saxon. He would 
 have stricken out the " assemble " and left the 
 " meet together." Like Wesley, he might be 
 compelled by necessity to a breach of the canon ; 
 but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, 
 and his singing-robes were the full and flowing 
 canonicals of the church by law established. In- 
 spiration makes short work with the usage of 
 the best authors and with the ready-made ele- 
 gances of diction ; but where Wordsworth is not 
 possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Cor- 
 neille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Mil- 
 tons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes 
 his diction beyond Dryden. The fact was, that 
 he took up his early opinions on instinct, and 
 insensibly modified them as he studied the mas- 
 ters of what may be called the Middle Period 
 of English verse.' As a young man, he dispar- 
 aged Virgil (" We talked a great deal of non- 
 sense in those days," he said when taken to task 
 for it later in life) ; at fifty-nine he translated 
 three books of the JEne'id, in emulation of Dry- 
 den, though falling far short of him in everything 
 but closeness, as he seems, after a few years, to 
 have been convinced. Keats was the first reso- 
 lute and wilful heretic, the true founder of the 
 modern school, which admits no cis-Elizabethan 
 
 ' His Character of a Happy Warrior (1806), one of his 
 noblest poems, has a dash of Dryden in it, — still more his 
 Epistle to Sir George Beaumont (181 1). 
 
48 DRYDEN 
 
 authority save Milton, whose own English was 
 formed upon those earlier models. Keats de- 
 nounced the authors of that style which came 
 in toward the close of the seventeenth century, 
 and reigned absolute through the whole of the 
 eighteenth, as 
 
 ** A schism. 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism, 
 
 who went about 
 Holding a poor decrepit standard out. 
 Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large 
 The name of one Boileau! " 
 
 But Keats had never then ' studied the writers 
 of whom he speaks so contemptuously, though 
 he might have profited by so doing. Boileau 
 would at least have taught him th?it flimsy would 
 have been an apter epithet for the standard than 
 for the mottoes upon it. Dryden was the author 
 of that schism against which Keats so vehe- 
 mently asserts the claim of the orthodox teach- 
 ing it had displaced. He was far more just to 
 Boileau, of whom Keats had probably never read 
 a word. " If I would only cross the seas," he 
 says, " I might find in France a living Horace 
 and a Juvenal in the person of the admirable 
 Boileau, whose numbers are excellent, whose 
 expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, 
 whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, 
 and whose sense is just. What he borrows from 
 ■ He studied Dryden' s versification before writing his 
 Lamia. 
 
DRYDEN 49 
 
 the ancients he repays with usury of his own, 
 in coin as good and almost as universally valu- 
 able." ' 
 
 Dryden has now been in his grave nearly a 
 hundred and seventy years ; in the second class 
 of English poets perhaps no one stands, on the 
 whole, so high as he; during his lifetime, in 
 spite ofjealousy, detraction, unpopular politics, 
 and a suspicious change of faith, his preemi- 
 nence was* conceded ; he was the earliest com- 
 plete type of the purely literary man, in the 
 modern sense ; there is a singular unanimity in 
 allowing him a certain claim to greatness which 
 would be denied to men as famous and more 
 read, — to Pope or Swift, for example ; he is 
 supposed, in some way or other, to have re- 
 formed English poetry. It is now about half 
 a century since the only uniform edition of his 
 works was edited by Scott. No library is com- 
 plete without him, no name is more familiar 
 than his, and yet it may be suspected that few 
 writers are more thoroughly buried in that great 
 cemetery of the " British Poets." If contempo- 
 rary reputation be often deceitful, posthumous 
 fame may be generally trusted, for it is a verdict 
 made up of the suffrages of the select men in 
 succeeding generations. This verdict has been 
 as good as unanimous in favor of Dryden. It 
 
 ' On the Origin and Progress of Satire. See Johnson's 
 counter-opinion in his life of Dryden. 
 
5° DRYDEN 
 
 is, perhaps, worth while to take a fresh observa- 
 tion of him, to consider him neither as warning 
 nor example, but to endeavor to make out what 
 it is that has given so lofty and firm a position 
 to one of the most unequal, inconsistent, and 
 faulty writers that ever lived. He is a curious 
 example of what we often remark of the Hving, 
 but rarely of the dead, — that they get credit 
 for what they might be quite as much as for 
 what they are, — and posterity has* applied to 
 him one of his own rules of criticism, judging 
 him by the best rather than the average of his 
 achievement, a thing posterity is seldom wont 
 to do. On the losing side in politics, it is true 
 of his polemical writings as of Burke's, — whom 
 in many respects he resembles, and especially 
 in that supreme quality of a reasoner, that his 
 mind gathers not only heat, but clearness and 
 expansion, by its own motion, — that they have 
 won his battle for him in the judgment of after 
 times. 
 
 To me, looking back at him, he gradually 
 becomes a singularly interesting and even pic- 
 turesque figure. He is, in more senses than 
 one, in language, in turn of thought, in style 
 of mind, in the direction of his activity, the first 
 of the moderns. He is the first literary man 
 who was also a man of the world, as we under- 
 stand the term. He succeeded Ben Jonson as 
 the acknowledged dictator of wit and criticism, 
 
DRYDEN 51 
 
 as Dr. Johnson, after nearly the same interval, 
 succeeded him. All ages are, in some sense, 
 ages of transition ; but there are times when 
 the transition is more marked, more rapid ; and 
 it is, perhaps, an ill fortune for a man of letters 
 to arrive at maturity during such a period, still 
 more to represent in himself the change that is 
 going on, and to be an efficient cause in bring- 
 ing it about. Unless, like Goethe, he be of 
 a singularly uncontemporaneous nature, capable 
 of being tutta in se romita^ and of running 
 parallel with his time rather than being sucked 
 into its current, he will be thwarted in that har- 
 monious development of native force which has 
 so much to do with its steady and successful 
 application. Dryden suffered, no doubt, in this 
 way. Though in creed he seems to have drifted 
 backward in an eddy of the general current ; yet 
 of the intellectual movement of the time, so far 
 certainly as literature shared in it, he could say, 
 with iEneas, not only that he saw, but that him- 
 self was a great part of it. That movement was, 
 on the whole, a downward one, from faith to 
 scepticism, from enthusiasm to cynicism, from 
 the imagination to the understanding. It was 
 in a direction altogether away from those springs 
 of imagination and faith at which they of the 
 last age had slaked the thirst or renewed the 
 vigor of their souls. Dryden himself recognized 
 that indefinable and gregarious influence which 
 
52 DRYDEN 
 
 \Ye call nowadays the Spirit of the Age, when 
 he said that " every Age has a kind of universal 
 Genius." ' He had also a just notion of that in 
 which he lived ; for he remarks, incidentally, 
 that " all knowing ages are naturally sceptic and 
 not at all bigoted, which, if I am not much de- 
 ceived, is the proper character of our own." ' 
 It may be conceived that he was even painfully 
 half aware of having fallen upon a time incap- 
 able, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of 
 any poet at all ; for nothing is so sensitive 
 to the chill of a sceptical atmosphere as that 
 enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least 
 the beautiful illusion that saves it from the baf- 
 fling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice un- 
 happy he who, born to see things as they might 
 be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as 
 people say they are, — to read God in a prose 
 translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, 
 for a good part of his days, it was by his own 
 choice. He who was of a stature to snatch the 
 torch of life that flashes from lifted hand to 
 hand along the generations, over the heads 
 of inferior men, chose rather to be a link-boy 
 to the stews. 
 
 As a writer for the stage, he deliberately 
 adopted and repeatedly reaffirmed the maxim 
 that 
 
 ** He who -lives to please, must please to live." 
 * Essay on Dramatick Poesy. ^ Life of Lucian. 
 
DRYDEN 53 
 
 Without earnest convictions, no great or sound 
 literature is conceivable. But if Dry den mostly 
 wanted that inspiration which comes of belief 
 in and devotion to something nobler and more 
 abiding than the present moment and its petu- 
 lant need, he had, at least, the next best thing 
 to that, — a thorough faith in himself. He was, 
 moreover, a man of singularly open soul, and 
 of a temper self-confident enough to be candid 
 even with himself. His mind was growing to 
 the last, his judgment widening and deepening, 
 his artistic sense refining itself more and more. 
 He confessed his errors, and was not ashamed 
 to retrace his steps in search of that better know- 
 ledge which the omniscience of superficial study 
 had disparaged. Surely an intellect that is still 
 pliable at seventy is a phenomenon as interesting 
 as it is rare. But at whatever period of his life we 
 look at Dryden, and whatever, for the moment, 
 may have been his poetic creed, there was some- 
 thing in the nature of the man that would not 
 be wholly subdued to what it worked in. There 
 are continual glimpses of something in him 
 greater than he, hints of possibilities finer than 
 anything he has done. You feel that the whole 
 of him was better than any random specimens, 
 though of his best, seem to prove. Incessupatety 
 he has by times the large stride of the elder race, 
 though it sinks too often into the slouch of a 
 man who has seen better days. His grand air 
 
54 DRYDEN 
 
 may, in part, spring from a habit of easy superi- 
 ority to his competitors; but must also, in part, 
 be ascribed to an innate dignity of character. 
 That this preeminence should have been so 
 generally admitted, during his life, can only be 
 explained by a bottom of good sense, kindliness, 
 and sound judgment, whose solid worth could 
 afford that many a flurry of vanity, petulance, 
 and even error should flit across the surface and 
 be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have 
 been, the last and abiding impression of him 
 is, that he was thoroughly manly ; and while it 
 may be disputed whether he were a great poet, 
 it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of 
 Burke, that " he was by far the greatest man 
 of his age, not only abounding in knowledge 
 himself, but feeding, in various directions, his 
 most able contemporaries." ' 
 
 Dryden was born in 1631. He was accord- 
 ingly six years old when Jonson died, was 
 nearly a quarter of a century younger than Mil- 
 ton, and may have personally known Bishop 
 Hall, the first English satirist, who was living 
 till 1656. On the other side, he was older than 
 Swift by thirty-six, than Addison by forty-one, 
 and than Pope by fifty-seven years. Dennis 
 says that " Dryden, for the last ten years of his 
 
 ' "The great man must have that intellect which puts in 
 motion the intellect of others." (Landor, Imaginary Con- 
 versations, Diogenes and Plato.) 
 
DRYDEN 55 
 
 life, was much acquainted with Addison, and 
 drank with him more than he ever used to do, 
 probably so far as to hasten his end," being 
 commonly " an extreme sober man." Pope tells 
 us that, in his twelfth year, he " saw Dryden," 
 perhaps at Will's, perhaps in the street, as Scott 
 did Burns. Dryden himself visited Milton now 
 and then, and was intimate with Davenant, who 
 could tell him of Fletcher and Jonson from per- 
 sonal recollection. Thus he stands between the 
 age before and that which followed him, giving a 
 hand to each. His father was a country clergy- 
 man, of Puritan leanings, a younger son of an an- 
 cient county family. The Puritanism is thought 
 to have come in with the poet's great-grandfather, 
 who made in hiswill the somewhat singular state- 
 ment that he was "assured by the Holy Ghost 
 that he was elect of God." It would appear from 
 this that Dryden's self-confidence was an inher- 
 itance. The solid quality of his mind showed 
 itself early. He himself tells us that he had read 
 Polybius " in English, with the pleasure of a 
 boy, before he was ten years of age, and yet 
 even then had some dark notions of the prudence 
 with which he conducted his design^ ' The con- 
 cluding words are very characteristic, even if 
 Dryden, as men commonly do, interpreted his 
 boyish turn of mind by later self-knowledge. 
 We thus get a glimpse of him browsing — for, 
 
 ' Character of Po/ybius (1692). 
 
56 DRYDEN 
 
 like Johnson, Burke, and the full as distinguished 
 from the learned men, he was always a random 
 reader ' — in his father's library, and painfully 
 culling here and there a spray of his own proper 
 nutriment from among the stubs and thorns of 
 Puritan divinity. After such schooling as could 
 be had in the country, he was sent up to West- 
 minster School, then under the headship of the 
 celebrated Dr. Busby. Here he made his first 
 essays in verse, translating, among other school 
 exercises of the same kind, the third satire of 
 Persius. In 1650 he was entered at Trinity Col- 
 lege, Cambridge, and remained there for seven 
 years. The only record of his college life is a 
 discipline imposed, in 1652, for "disobedience 
 to the Vice-Master, and contumacy in taking 
 his punishment, inflicted by him." Whether 
 this punishment was corporeal, as Johnson in- 
 sinuates in the similar case of Milton, we are 
 ignorant. He certainly retained no very fond 
 recollection of his Alma Mater, for in his "Pro- 
 logue to the University of Oxford " he says: — 
 
 " Oxford to him a dearer name shall be 
 Than his own mother university; 
 Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage. 
 He chooses Athens in his riper age." 
 
 By the death of his father, in 1654, he came 
 
 ' " For my own part, who must confess it to my shame 
 that I never read anything but for pleasure." i^Life of Plu- 
 tarch, 1683.) 
 
DRYDEN 57 
 
 into possession of a small estate of sixty pounds 
 a year, from which, however, a third must be 
 deducted, for his mother's dower, till 1676. 
 After leaving Cambridge, he became secretary 
 to his near relative. Sir Gilbert Pickering, at 
 that time Cromwell's chamberlain, and a mem- 
 ber of his Upper House. In 1670 he succeeded 
 Davenant as Poet Laureate,' and Howell as 
 Historiographer, with a yearly salary of two 
 hundred pounds. This place he lost at the Re- 
 volution, and had the mortification to see his old 
 enemy and butt, Shadwell, promoted to it, as 
 the best poet the Whig party could muster. If 
 William was obliged to read the verses of his 
 official minstrel, Dryden was more than avenged. 
 From 1688 to his death, twelve years later, he 
 earned his bread manfully by his pen, without 
 any mean complaining, and with no allusion to 
 his fallen fortunes that is not dignified and 
 touching. These latter years, during which he 
 was his own man again, were probably the hap- 
 piest of his life. In 1664 or 1665 he married 
 Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl 
 of Berkshire. About a hundred pounds a year 
 were thus added to his income. The marriage 
 is said not to have been a happy one, and per- 
 
 ' Gray says petulantly enough that " Dryden was as dis- 
 graceful to the office, from his character, as the poorest 
 scribbler could have been from his verses. ' ' (Gray to Mason, 
 19th December, 1757.) 
 
58 DRYDEN 
 
 haps it was not, for his wife was apparently a 
 weak-minded woman ; but the inference from 
 the internal evidence of Dryden's plays, as of 
 Shakespeare's, is very untrustworthy, ridicule 
 of marriage having always been a common stock 
 in trade of the comic writers. 
 
 The earliest of his verses that have come 
 down to us were written upon the death of 
 Lord Hastings, and are as bad as they can be, 
 — a kind of parody on the worst of Donne. 
 They have every fault of his manner, without 
 a hint of the subtle and often profound thought 
 that more than redeems it. As the Doctor him- 
 self would have said, here is Donne outdone. 
 The young nobleman died of the small-pox, 
 and Dryden exclaims with truly comic pathos, — 
 
 ** Was there no milder way than the small-pox. 
 The very filthiness of Pandora's box ? " 
 
 He compares the pustules to " rosebuds 
 stuck i' the lily skin about," and says that 
 
 " Each little pimple had a tear in it 
 
 To wail the fault its rising did commit." 
 
 But he has not done his worst yet, by a great 
 deal. What follows is even finer : — 
 
 ** No comet need foretell his change drew on. 
 Whose corpse might seem a constellation. 
 O, had he died of old, how great a strife 
 Had been who from his death should draw their life ! 
 Who should, by one rich draught, become whate'er 
 Seneca, Cato, Numa, Cssar, were, 
 III 
 
DRYDEN 59 
 
 Learned, virtuous, pious, great, and have by this 
 An universal metempsychosis! 
 Must all these aged sires in one funeral 
 Expire ? all die in one so young, so small ? " 
 
 It is said that one of Allston's early pictures 
 was brought to him, after he had long forgotten 
 it, and his opinion asked as to the wisdom of 
 the young artist's persevering in the career he 
 had chosen. Allston advised his quitting it 
 forthwith as hopeless. Could the same experi- 
 ment have been tried with these verses upon 
 Dryden, can any one doubt that his counsel 
 would have been the same ? It should be re- 
 membered, however, that he was barely turned 
 eighteen when they were written, and the tend- 
 ency of his style is noticeable in so early an 
 abandonment of the participial ed in learned and 
 aged. In the next year he appears again in some 
 commendatory verses prefixed to the sacred epi- 
 grams of his friend, John Hoddesdon. In these 
 he speaks of the author as a 
 
 " Young eaglet, who, thy nest thus soon forsook. 
 So lofty and divine a course hast took 
 As all admire, before the down begin 
 To peep, as yet, upon thy smoother chin." 
 
 Here is almost every fault which Dryden's 
 later nicety would have condemned. But per- 
 haps there is no schooling so good for an author 
 as his own youthful indiscretions. Certainly 
 there is none so severe. After this effort Dry- 
 
6o DRYDEN 
 
 den seems to have lain fallow for ten years, and 
 then he at length reappears in thirty-seven 
 " heroic stanzas " on the death of Cromwell. 
 The versification is smoother, but the conceits 
 are there again, though in a milder form. The 
 verse is modelled after " Gondibert." A sin- 
 gle image from Nature (he was almost always 
 happy in these) gives some hint of the maturer 
 Dryden : — 
 
 " And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, 
 Made him but greater seem, not greater grow." 
 
 Two other verses — 
 
 " And the isle, when her protecting genius went. 
 Upon his obsequies loud sighs conferred" — 
 
 are interesting, because they show that he had 
 been studying the early poems of Milton. He 
 has contrived to bury under a rubbish of verbi- 
 age one of the most purely imaginative pass- 
 ages ever written by the great Puritan poet. 
 
 ♦' From haunted spring and dale. 
 Edged with poplar pale. 
 The parting genius is with sighing sent.' 
 
 This is the more curious because, twenty-four 
 years afterwards, he says, in defending rhyme : 
 "Whatever causes he [Milton] alleges for the 
 abolishment of rhyme, his own particular reason 
 is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent ; 
 he had neither the ease of doing it nor the 
 graces of it : which is manifest in his ' Juveniha,' 
 
DRYDEN 6i 
 
 , . . where his rhyme is always constrained and 
 forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age 
 when the soul is most pliant, and the passion 
 of love makes almost every man a rhymer, 
 though not a poet."' It was this, no doubt, 
 that heartened Dr. Johnson to say of "Lyci- 
 das " that " the diction was harsh, the rhymes 
 uncertain, and the numbers unpleaslng." It is 
 Dryden's excuse that his characteristic excellence 
 is to argue persuasively and powerfully, whether 
 in verse or prose, and that he was amply en- 
 dowed with the most needful quality of an 
 advocate, — to be always strongly and wholly of 
 his present way of thinking, whatever it might 
 be. Next we have, in 1660, "Astrsea Redux" 
 on the "happy restoration" of Charles II. In 
 this also we can forebode little of the full-grown 
 Dryden but his defects. We see his tendency 
 to exaggeration, and to confound physical with 
 metaphysical, as where he says of the ships that 
 brought home the royal brothers, that 
 
 ** The joyful London meets 
 The princely York, himself alone a freight. 
 The Swiftsure groans beneath great Gloster's weight," — 
 
 and speaks of the 
 
 '* Repeated prayer 
 Which stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence. ' ' 
 
 There is also a certain every-dayness, not to 
 
 ' Essay on the Origin and Progress of Satire. 
 
62 DRYDEN 
 
 say vulgarity, of phrase, which Dryden never 
 wholly refined away, and which continually 
 tempts us to sum up at once against him as the 
 greatest poet that ever was or could be made 
 wholly out of prose. 
 
 ** Heaven Would no bargain for its blessings drive " 
 
 is an example. On the other hand, there are a 
 few verses almost worthy of his best days, as 
 these : — 
 
 ♦* Some lazy ages lost in sleep and ease. 
 No action leave to busy chronicles; 
 Such whose supine felicity but makes 
 In story chasms, in epochas mistakes. 
 O'er whom Time gently shakes his wings of down. 
 Till with his silent sickle they are mown." 
 
 These are all the more noteworthy, that Dry- 
 den, unless in argument, is seldom equal for 
 six lines together. In the poem to Lord Clar- 
 endon (1662) there are four verses that have 
 something of the " energy divine " for which 
 Pope praised his master. 
 
 **Let envy, then, those crimes within you see 
 From which the happy never must be free; 
 Envy that does with misery reside. 
 The joy and the revenge of ruined pride." 
 
 In his "Aurengzebe " (1675) there is a pass- 
 age, of which, as it is a good example of Dryden, 
 I shall quote the whole, though my purpose 
 aim mainly at the latter verses : — 
 
DRYDEN 63 
 
 *• When I consider life, 't is all a cheat; 
 Yet, fooled with Hope, men favor the deceit. 
 Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay; 
 To-morrow 's falser than the former day. 
 Lies worse, and, while it says we shall be blest 
 With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
 Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again. 
 Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain. 
 And from the dregs of life think to receive 
 What the first sprightly running could not give. 
 I 'm tired of waiting for this chymic gold 
 Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 
 
 The " first sprightly running " of Dryden's 
 vintage was, it must be confessed, a Httle muddy, 
 if not beefy ; but if his own soil did not produce 
 grapes of the choicest flavor, he knew where they 
 were to be had ; and his product, like sound wine, 
 grew better the longer it stood upon the lees. H e 
 tells us, evidently thinking of himself, that in 
 a poet, " from fifty to threescore, the balance 
 generally holds even in our colder climates, for 
 he loses not much in fancy, and judgment, which 
 is the effect of observation, still increases. His 
 succeeding years afford him little more than 
 the stubble of his own harvest, yet, if his con- 
 stitution be healthful, hi? mind may still retain 
 a decent vigor, and the gleanings of that of 
 Ephraim, in comparison with others, will sur- 
 pass the vintage of Abiezer." ' Since Chaucer, 
 none of our poets has had a constitution more 
 
 ' Dedication of the Georgics. 
 
64 DRYDEN 
 
 healthful, and it was his old age that yielded the 
 best of him. In him the understanding was, 
 perhaps, in overplus for his entire good fortune 
 as a poet, and that is a faculty among the earliest 
 to mature. We have seen him, at only ten years, 
 divining the power of reason in Polybius.' The 
 same turn of mind led him later to imitate the 
 French school of tragedy, and to admire in Ben 
 Jonson the most correct of English poets. It 
 was his imagination that needed quickening, and 
 it is very curious to trace through his different 
 prefaces the gradual opening of his eyes to the 
 causes of the solitary preeminence of Shake- 
 speare. At first he is sensible of an attraction 
 towards him which he cannot explain, and for 
 which he apologizes, as if it were wrong. But he 
 feels himself drawn more and more strongly, till 
 at last he ceases to resist altogether, and is forced 
 to acknowledge that there is something in this 
 one man that is not and never was anywhere else, 
 something not to be reasoned about, ineffable, 
 divine ; if contrary to the rules, so much the 
 worse for them. It may be conjectured that 
 Dryden's Puritan associations may have stood 
 in the way of his more properly poetic culture, 
 and that his early knowledge of Shakespeare 
 was slight. He tells us that Davenant, whom 
 
 ' Dryden's penetration is always remarkable. His general 
 judgment of Polybius coincides remarkably with that of 
 Mommsen. (^Rom. Gesch. ii. 448, seq.') 
 
DRYDEN 65 
 
 he could not have known before he himself 
 was twenty-seven, first taught him to admire the 
 great poet/ But even after his imagination had 
 become conscious of its prerogative, and his ex- 
 pression had been ennobled by frequenting this 
 higher society, we find him continually dropping 
 back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on 
 the whole, to have been his more natural ele- 
 ment. We always feel his epoch in him, and that 
 he was the lock which let our language down 
 from its point of highest poetry to its level of 
 easiest and most gently flowing prose. His 
 enthusiasm needs the contagion of other minds 
 to arouse it; but his strong sense, his command 
 of the happy word, his wit, which is distinguished 
 by a certain breadth and, as it were, power of 
 generalization, as Pope's by keenness of edge 
 and point, were his, whether he would or no. 
 Accordingly, his poetry is often best and his 
 verse more flowing where (as in parts of his ver- 
 sion of the twenty-ninth ode of the third book 
 of Horace) he is amplifying the suggestions of 
 another mind."" Viewed from one side, he justi- 
 
 ' Preface to the Tempest. He helped Davenant to vulgar- 
 ize this play. 
 
 ^ ♦• I have taken some pains to make it my masterpiece in 
 English." (Preface to Second Miscellany.^ Fox said that it 
 " was better than the original." J. C. Scaliger said of Eras- 
 mus: ** Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo versificator. " Fox 
 indeed preferred the " Ode to Fortune" above its Horatian 
 original. Dryden has certainly let out a reef or two and given 
 
66 DRYDEN 
 
 fies Milton's remark of him, that " he was a good 
 rhymist, but no poet." To look at all sides, and 
 to distrust the verdict of a single mood, is, no 
 doubt, the duty of a critic. But how if a certain 
 side be so often presented as to thrust forward in 
 the memory and disturb it in the effort to recall 
 that total impression (for the office of a critic is 
 not, though often so misunderstood, to s?iy guilty 
 or not guilty of some particular fact) which is the 
 only safe ground of judgment ? It is the weight 
 of the whole man, not of one or the other limb 
 of him, that we want. Expende Hannibalem. 
 Very good, but not in a scale capacious only of 
 a single quality at a time, for it is their union, 
 and not their addition, that assures the value of 
 each separately. It was not this or that which 
 gave him his weight in council, his swiftness of 
 decision in battle that outran the forethought of 
 other men, — it was Hannibal. But this prosaic 
 element in Dryden will force itself upon me. As 
 I read him, I cannot help thinking of an ostrich, 
 to be classed with flying things, and capable, 
 what with leap and flap together, of leaving the 
 earth for a longer or shorter space, but loving 
 the open plain, where wing and foot help each 
 other to something that is both flight and run 
 at once. What with his haste and a certain dash, 
 
 a fuller sail to the verse. But the elegance ? The restrained 
 rather than bellying expanse of phrase ? The perfect ade- 
 quacy without excess ? 
 
DRYDEN 67 
 
 which, according to our mood, we may call florid 
 or splendid, he seems to stand among poets 
 where Rubens does among painters, — greater, 
 perhaps, as a colorist than an artist, yet great 
 here also, if we compare him with any but the first. 
 We have arrived at Dryden's thirty-second 
 year, and thus far have found little in him to 
 warrant an augury that he was ever to be one 
 of the great names in English literature, the 
 most perfect type, that is, of his class, and that 
 class a high one, though not the highest. If 
 Joseph de Maistre's axiom, ^z^/ napasvaincu 
 a trente ans, ne vainer a jamais^ were quite true, 
 there would be little hope of him, for he has 
 won no battle yet. But there is something solid 
 and doughty in the man, that can rise from 
 defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in 
 due time, when we are able to choose our posi- 
 tion better, and the sun is at our back. Hith- 
 erto his performances have been mainly of the 
 obbligato sort, at which few men of original force 
 are good, least of all Dryden, who had always 
 something of stiffness in his strength. Waller 
 had praised the living Cromwell in perhaps the 
 manliest verses he ever wrote, — not very 
 manly, to be sure, but really elegant, and, on 
 the whole, better than those in which Dryden 
 squeezed out melodious tears. Waller, who had 
 also made himself conspicuous as a volunteer 
 Antony to the country squire turned Caesar, — 
 
68 DRYDEN 
 
 (" With ermine clad and purple, let him hold 
 A royal sceptre made of Spanish gold "), — 
 
 was more servile than Dryden in hailing the 
 return of ex officio Majesty. He bewails to 
 Charles, in snuffling heroics, — 
 
 *' Our sorrow and our crime 
 To have accepted life so long a time. 
 Without you here." 
 
 A weak man, put to the test by rough and 
 angry times, as Waller was, may be pitied, but 
 meanness is nothing but contemptible under 
 any circumstances. If it be true that " every 
 conqueror creates a Muse," Cromwell was un- 
 fortunate. Even Milton's sonnet, though digni- 
 fied, is reserved if not distrustful. Marvell's 
 " Horatian Ode," the most truly classic in our 
 language, is worthy of its theme. The same 
 poet's " Elegy," in parts noble, and everywhere 
 humanly tender, is worth more than all Car- 
 lyle's biography as a witness to the gentler quali- 
 ties of the hero, and of the deep affection that 
 stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly 
 masculine temper. As it is little known, a few 
 verses of it may be quoted to show the differ- 
 ence between grief that thinks of its object and 
 grief that thinks of its rhymes : — 
 
 ** Valor, religion, fiiendship, prudence died 
 At once with him, and all that 's good beside. 
 And we, death's refuse, nature's dregs, confined 
 To loathsome life, alas ! are left behind. 
 
DRYDEN 69 
 
 Where we (so once we used) shall now no more. 
 To fetch day, press about his chamber door. 
 No more shall hear that powerful language charm. 
 Whose force oft spared the labor of his arm. 
 No more shall follow where he spent the days 
 In war or counsel, or in prayer and praise. 
 
 I saw him dead; a leaden slumber lies. 
 
 And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes; 
 
 Those gentle rays under the lids were fled. 
 
 Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; 
 
 That port, which so majestic was and strong. 
 
 Loose and deprived of vigor stretched along. 
 
 All withered, all discolored, pale, and wan. 
 
 How much another thing! no more That Man! 
 
 O human glory! vain! O death! O wings! 
 
 O worthless world! O transitory things! 
 
 Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed 
 
 That still, though dead, greater than Death he laid. 
 
 And, in his altered face, you something feign 
 
 That threatens Death he yet will live again." 
 
 Such verses might not satisfy Lindley Mur- 
 ray, but they are of that higher mood which 
 satisfies the heart. These couplets, too, have 
 an energy worthy of Milton's friend : — 
 
 " When up the armed mountains of Dunbar 
 
 He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war." 
 
 ** Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse 
 
 Shall the English soldier, ere he charge, rehearse." 
 
 On the whole, one is glad that Dryden's 
 panegyric on the Protector was so poor. It 
 was purely official verse-making. Had there 
 
70 DRYDEN 
 
 been any feeling in it, there had been baseness 
 in his address to Charles. As it is, we may 
 fairly assume that he was so far sincere in both 
 cases as to be thankful for a chance to exercise 
 himself in rhyme, without much caring whether 
 upon a funeral or a restoration. He might 
 naturally enough expect that poetry would have 
 a better chance under Charles than under Crom- 
 well, or any successor with Commonwealth 
 principles. Cromwell had more serious matters 
 to think about than verses, while Charles might 
 at least care as much about them as it was in 
 his base good nature to care about anything 
 but loose women and spaniels. Dryden's sound 
 sense, afterwards so conspicuous, shows itself 
 even in these pieces, when we can" get at it 
 through the tangled thicket of tropical phrase. 
 But the authentic and unmistakable Dryden 
 first manifests himself in some verses addressed 
 to his friend Dr. Charlton in 1663. We have 
 first his common sense which has almost the 
 point of wit, yet with a tang of prose : — 
 
 " The longest tyranny that ever swayed 
 Was that wherein our ancestors betrayed 
 Their freeborn reason to the Stagyrite, 
 And made his torch their universal light. 
 So truth, while only 07ie supplied the itate^ 
 Grew scarce and dear and yet sophisticate. 
 Still it was bought, like empiric wares or charms. 
 Hard words sealed up with AristotW s arms. ' ' 
 
DRYDEN 71 
 
 Then we have his easy plenitude of fancy, where 
 he speaks of the inhabitants of the New World as 
 
 *' Guiltless men who danced away their time. 
 Fresh as their groves and happy as their clime." 
 
 And, finally, there is a hint of imagination where 
 " mighty visions of the Danish race " watch round 
 Charles sheltered in Stonehenge after the battle 
 of Worcester. These passages might have been 
 written by the Dryden whom we learn to know 
 fifteen years later. They have the advantage that 
 he wrote them to please himself. His contem- 
 porary, Dr. Heylin, said of French cooks, that 
 " their trade was not to feed the belly, but che 
 palate." Dryden was a great while in learning 
 this secret, as available in good writing as in 
 cookery. He strove after it, but his thoroughly 
 English nature, to the last, would too easily 
 content itself with serving up the honest beef 
 of his thought, without regard to daintiness of 
 flavor in the dressing of it.' Of the best English 
 poetry, it might be said that it is understanding 
 
 ' In one of the last letters he ever wrote, thanking his 
 cousin Mrs. Steward for a gift of marrow-puddings, he says: 
 ♦•A chine of honest bacon would please my appetite more than 
 all the marrow-puddings ; for I like them better plain, having 
 a very vulgar stomach." So of Cowley he says : "There was 
 plenty enough, but ill sorted, whole pyramids of sweetmeats 
 for boys and women, but little of solid meat for men." The 
 physical is a truer anti-type of the spiritual man than we are 
 willing to admit, and the brain is often forced to acknowledge 
 the inconvenient country-cousinship of the stomach. 
 
72 DRYDEN 
 
 aerated by imagination. In Dry den the solid 
 part too often refused to mix kindly with the 
 leaven, either remaining lumpish or rising to a 
 hasty puffiness. Grace and lightness were with 
 him much more a laborious achievement than a 
 natural gift, and it is all the more remarkable 
 that he should so often have attained to what 
 seems such an easy perfection in both. Always 
 a hasty writer,' he was long in forming his style, 
 and to the last was apt to snatch the readiest 
 word rather than wait for the fittest. He was not 
 wholly and unconsciously poet, buta thinker who 
 sometimes lost himself on enchanted ground and 
 was transfigured by its touch. This preponder- 
 ance in him of the reasoning over the intuitive 
 faculties, the one always there, the other flash- 
 ing in when you least expect it, accounts for that 
 inequality and even incongruousness in his writ- 
 ing which makes one revise one's judgment at 
 every tenth page. In his prose you come upon 
 passages that persuade you he is a poet, in spite 
 of his verses so often turning state's evidence 
 against him as to convince you he is none. He 
 is a prose-writer, with a kind of iEolian attach- 
 
 ' In his preface to All for Love, he says, evidently allud- 
 ing to himself: " If he have a friend whose hastiness in writ- 
 ing is his greatest fault, Horace would have taught him to have 
 minced the matter, and to have called it readiness of thought 
 and a flowing fancy." And in the Preface to the Fables he 
 says of Homer: " This vehemence of his, I confess, is more 
 suitable to my temper." He makes other allusions to it. 
 
DRYDEN 73 
 
 ment. For example, take this bit of prose from 
 the dedication of his version of Virgil's *' Pas- 
 torals," 1694: " He found the strength of his 
 genius betimes, and was even in his youth pre- 
 luding to his Georgicks and his T^neis. He 
 could not forbear to try his wings, though his 
 pinions were not hardened to maintain a long, 
 laborious flight ; yet sometimes they bore him 
 to a pitch as lofty as ever he was able to reach 
 afterwards. But when he was admonished by 
 his subject to descend, he came down gently 
 circling in the air and singing to the ground, like 
 a lark melodious in her mounting and continu- 
 ing her song till she alights, still preparing for a 
 higher flight at her next sally, and tuning her 
 voice to better music." This is charming, and 
 yet even this wants the ethereal tincture that 
 pervades the style of Jeremy Taylor, making it, 
 as Burke said of Sheridan's eloquence, " neither 
 prose nor poetry, but something better than 
 either." Let us compare Taylor's treatment of 
 the same image, which, I fancy, Dryden must 
 have seen : " For so have I seen a lark rising 
 from his bed of grass and soaring upwards, sing- 
 ing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven and 
 climb above the clouds ; but the poor bird was 
 beaten back by the loud sighings of an eastern 
 wind, and his motion made irregular and incon- 
 stant, descending more at every breath of the 
 tempest than it could recover by the libration 
 
74 DRYDEN 
 
 and frequent weighing of his wings, till the little 
 creature was forced to sit down and pant, and 
 stay till the storm was over, and then it made a 
 prosperous flight, and did rise and sing as if it 
 had learned music and motion of an angel as he 
 passed sometimes through the air about his min- 
 istries here below." Taylor's fault is that his 
 sentences too often smell of the library, but 
 what an open air is here ! How unpremeditated 
 it all seems ! How carelessly he knots each new 
 thought, as it comes, to the one before it with 
 an andy like a girl making lace ! And what a 
 slidingly musical use he makes of the sibilants 
 with which our language is unjustly taxed by 
 those who can only make them hiss, not sing ! 
 There are twelve of them in the first twenty 
 words, fifteen of which are monosyllables. We 
 notice the structure of Dryden's periods, but this 
 grows up as we read. It gushes, like the song 
 of the bird itself, — 
 
 " In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' 
 Let us now take a specimen of Dryden's bad 
 prose from one of his poems. I open the "An- 
 nus Mirabilis" at random, and hit upon this : — 
 
 *♦ Our little fleet was now engaged so far. 
 That, like the swordfish in the whale, they fought: 
 The combat only seemed a civil war. 
 Till through their bowels we our passage wrought." 
 
 Is this Dryden, or Sternhold, or Shadwell, those 
 Toms who made him say that " dulness was fatal 
 
DRYDEN 75 
 
 to the name of Tom " ? The natural history of 
 Goldsmith in the verse of Pye ! His thoughts 
 did not " voluntary move harmonious numbers." 
 He had his choice between prose and verse, and 
 seems to be poetical on second thought. I do 
 not speak without book. He was more than 
 half conscious of it himself. In the same letter 
 to Mrs. Steward, just cited, he says, " I am still 
 drudging on, always a poet and never a good 
 one "; and this from no mock-modesty, for he 
 is always handsomely frank in telling us what- 
 ever of his own doing pleased him. This was 
 written in the last year of his life, and at about 
 the same time he says elsewhere : " What judg- 
 ment I had increases rather than diminishes, and 
 thoughts, such as they are, come crowding in so 
 fast upon me that my only difficulty is to choose 
 or to reject, to run them into verse or to give 
 them the other harmony of prose; I have so long 
 studied and practised both, that they are grown 
 into a habit and become familiar to me," ' I 
 think that a man who was primarily a poet 
 would hardly have felt this equanimity of choice. 
 I find a confirmation of this feeling about 
 Dryden in his early literary loves. His taste 
 was not an instinct, but the slow result of reflec- 
 tion and of the manfulness v/ith which he always 
 acknowledged to himself his own mistakes. In 
 this latter respect few men deal so magnani- 
 
 ' Preface to the Fables. 
 
76 DRYDEN 
 
 mously with themselves as he, and accordingly 
 few have been so happily inconsistent. Ancora 
 imparo might have served him for a motto as 
 well as Michel Angelo. His prefaces are a com- 
 plete log of his life, and the habit of writing them 
 was a useful one to him, for it forced him to 
 think with a pen in his hand, which, according 
 to Goethe, " if it do no other good, keeps the 
 mind from staggering about." In these prefaces 
 we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas 
 to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Cor- 
 neille to Shakespeare. " I remember when I was 
 a boy," he says in his dedication of the " Spanish 
 Friar," 1681, " I thought inimitable Spenser a 
 mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du Bar- 
 tas, and was rapt into an ecstasy when I read 
 these lines : — 
 
 " * Now when the winter's keener breath began 
 To crystalhze the Baltic ocean. 
 To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods. 
 And periwig with snow ' the baldpate woods.' 
 
 I am much deceived if this be not abominable 
 fustian." Swift, in his "Tale of a Tub," has a 
 
 ' Woolh Sylvester's word. Dryden reminds us of Burke 
 in this also, that he always quotes from memory and seldom 
 exactly. His memory was better for things than for words. 
 This helps to explain the length of time it took him to master 
 that vocabulary at last so various, full, and seemingly extempo- 
 raneous. He is a large quoter, though, with his usual in- 
 consistency, he says, "I am no admirer of quotations." 
 (^Essay on Heroic Plays.^ 
 
DRYDEN n 
 
 ludicrous passage in this style : " Look on this 
 globe of earth, you will find it to be a very com- 
 plete and fashionable dress. What is that which 
 some call land but a fine coat faced with green ? 
 or the sea^ but a waistcoat of water-tabby ? Pro- 
 ceed to the particular works of creation, you will 
 find how curious journeyman Nature has been 
 to trim up the vegetable beaux ; observe how 
 sparkish a periwig adorns the head of a beech^ and 
 what a fine doublet of white satin is worn by the 
 birch," The fault is not In anyinaptness of the 
 images, nor in the mere vulgarity of the things 
 themselves, but in that of the associations they 
 awaken. The " prithee, undo this button " of 
 Lear, coming where it does and expressing what 
 it does, is one of those touches of the pathet- 
 ically sublime, of which only Shakespeare ever 
 knew the secret. Herrick, too, has a charming 
 poem on" Julia's petticoat," the charm being that 
 he exalts the familiar and the low to the region 
 of sentiment. In the passage from Sylvester, it 
 is precisely the reverse, and the wig takes as 
 much from the sentiment as it adds to a Lord 
 Chancellor. So Pope's proverbial verse — 
 
 ** True wit is Nature to advantage drest " — 
 unpleasantly suggests Nature under the hands 
 of a lady's-maid.' We have no word in English 
 
 ' In the Epimetheus of a poet usually as elegant as Gray 
 himself, one's finer sense is a little jarred by the 
 ' ' Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses. ' ' 
 
78 DRYDEN 
 
 that will exactly define this want of propriety in 
 diction. Vulgar is too strong, and commonplace 
 too weak. Perhaps bourgeois comes as near as 
 any. It is to be noticed that Dryden does not 
 unequivocally condemn the passage he quotes, 
 but qualifies it with an " if I am not much mis- 
 taken." Indeed, though his judgment in sub- 
 stantials, like that of Johnson, is always worth 
 having, his taste, the negative half of genius, 
 never altogether refined itself from a colloquial 
 familiarity, which is one of the charms of his 
 prose, and gives that air of easy strength in 
 which his satire is unmatched. In his " Royal 
 Martyr" (1669), the tyrant Maximin says to 
 the gods : — 
 
 *• Keep you your rain and sunshine in the skies. 
 And I '11 keep back my flame and sacrifice; 
 Tour trade of Heaven shall soon be at a stand. 
 And all your goods He dead upon your hand,''^ — 
 
 a passage which has as many faults as only Dry- 
 den was capable of committing, even to a false 
 idiom forced by the last rhyme. The same 
 tyrant in dying exclaims : — 
 
 ** And after thee I Ml go. 
 Revenging still, an following e'en to th' other world my 
 
 blow. 
 And, shoving back this earth on which I sit, 
 V II mount and scatter all the gods I hit.'''' 
 
 In the "Conquest of Granada" (1670), we 
 have : — 
 
DRYDEN 79 
 
 *• This little loss in our vast body shews 
 So small, that half have never heard the news; 
 Fame 's out of breath e'er she can fi^ so far 
 To tell 'em all that you have e'er made war." • 
 
 And in the same play, — 
 
 *♦ That busy thing. 
 The soul, is packing up, and just on wing 
 Like parting swallows when they seek the spring," — 
 
 where the last sweet verse curiously illustrates 
 that inequality (poetry on a prose background) 
 which so often puzzles us in Dryden. Infinitely 
 worse is the speech of Almanzor to his mother's 
 ghost : — 
 
 ** I '11 rush into the covert of the night 
 And pull thee backward by the shroud to light. 
 Or else I '11 squeeze thee hke a bladder there. 
 And make thee groan thyself away to air." 
 
 What wonder that Dryden should have been 
 substituted for Davenant as the butt of the 
 " Rehearsal," and that the parody should have 
 had such a run ? And yet it was Dryden who, 
 
 ' This probably suggested to Young the grandiose image 
 in his Last Day (bk. ii.): — 
 
 *' Those overwhelming armies . . . 
 Whose rear lay wrapt in night, while breaking dawn 
 Roused the broad front and called the battle on." 
 
 This, to be sure, is no plagiarism; but it should be carried to 
 Dryden' s credit that we catch the poets of the next half cen- 
 tury oftener with their hands in his pockets than in those of 
 any one else. 
 
8o DRYDEN 
 
 in speaking of Persius, hit upon the happy- 
 phrase of " boisterous metaphors " ; ' it was 
 Dryden who said of Cowley, whom he else- 
 where calls " the darling of my youth," "" that 
 he was " sunk in reputation because he could 
 never forgive any conceit which came in his 
 way, but swept, like a drag-net, great and 
 small." ^ But the passages I have thus far cited 
 as specimens of our poet's coarseness (for poet 
 he surely was intus^ though not always in cute) 
 were written before he was forty, and he had an 
 
 ' Essay on Satire. ^ Ibid. 
 
 3 Preface to Fables. Men are always inclined to revenge 
 themselves on their old idols in the first enthusiasm of conversion 
 to a purer faith. Cowley had all the faults that Dryden loads 
 him with, and yet his popularity was to some extent deserved. 
 He at least had a theory that poetry should soar, not creep, and 
 longed for some expedient, in the failure of natural wings, by 
 which he could lift himself away from the conventional and com- 
 monplace. By beating out the substance of Pindar very thin, he 
 contrived a kind of balloon which, tumid with gas, did certainly 
 mount a little, into the clouds, if not above them, though sure 
 to come suddenly down with a bump. His odes, indeed, are 
 an alternation of upward jerks and concussions, and smack 
 more of Chapelain than of the Theban, but his prose is very 
 agreeable, — Montaigne and water, perhaps, but with some 
 flavor of the Gascon wine left. The strophe of his ode to Dr. 
 Scarborough, in which he compares his surgical friend, oper- 
 ating for the stone, to Moses striking the rock, more than jus- 
 tifies all the ill that Dryden could lay at his door. It was into 
 precisely such mud-holes that Cowley's Will-o' -the- Wisp had 
 misguided him. Men may never wholly shake off a vice but 
 they are always conscious of it, and hate the tempter. 
 
DRYDEN 8i 
 
 odd notion, suitable to his healthy complexion, 
 that poets on the whole improve after that date. 
 Man at forty, he says, " seems to be fully in 
 his summer tropic, . . . and I believe that It 
 will hold In all great poets that, though they 
 wrote before with a certain heat of genius which 
 inspired them, yet that heat was not perfectly 
 digested." ' But artificial heat Is never to be 
 digested at all, as Is plain in Dryden's case. He 
 was a man who warmed slowly, and, In his hurry 
 to supply the market, forced his mind. The 
 result was the same after forty as before. In 
 " CEdipus " (1679) we find — 
 
 " Not one bolt 
 Shall err from Thebes, but more be called for, more, 
 New-rnouliied thunder of a larger size ! " 
 
 This play was written in conjunction with Lee, 
 of whom Dryden relates^ that, when some one 
 said to him, " It Is easy enough to write like a 
 madman," he replied, "No, It is hard to write 
 like a madman, but easy enough to write like a 
 fool," — perhaps the most compendious lecture 
 on poetryeverdellvered. The splendid bitof elo- 
 quence, which has so much the sheet-Iron clang 
 of Impeachment thunder (I hope that Dryden 
 Is not In the Library of Congress !) is perhaps 
 Lee's. The following passage almost certainly 
 is his : — 
 
 ' Dedication of Georgics. 
 
 ^ In a letter to Dennis, 1 693, 
 
82 DRYDEN 
 
 ** Sure 't is the end of all things ! Fate has torn 
 The lock of Time off, and his head is now 
 The ghastly ball of round Eternity! " 
 
 But the next, in which the soul is likened to the 
 pocket of an indignant housemaid charged with 
 theft, is wholly in Dryden's manner : — 
 
 " No; I dare challenge heaven to turn me outward. 
 And shake my soul quite empty in your sight," 
 
 In the same style, he makes his Don Sebastian 
 (1690) say that he is as much astonished as 
 " drowsy mortals " at the last trump, — 
 
 ♦< When, called in haste, they fumble for their limbs,*^ — 
 
 and propose to take upon himself the whole of 
 a crime shared with another by asking Heaven 
 to charge the bill on him. And in "King Arthur," 
 written ten years after the Preface from which I 
 have quoted his confession about Du Bartas, we 
 have a passage precisely of the kind he con- 
 demned : — 
 
 •* Ah for the many souls as hut this morn 
 Were clothed with flesh and warmed with vital blood. 
 But naked now, or shirted but with air." 
 
 Dryden too often violated his own admirable 
 rule, that " an author is not to write all he can, 
 but only all he ought." ' In his worst images, 
 however, there is often a vividness that half 
 excuses them. But it is a grotesque vividness, 
 
 ' Preface to Fables. 
 
DRYDEN 83 
 
 as from the flare of a bonfire. They do not flash 
 into sudden lustre, as in the great poets, where 
 the imaginations of poet and reader leap toward 
 each other and meet halfway. 
 
 English prose is indebted to Dryden for hav- 
 ing freed it from the cloister of pedantry. He, 
 more than any other single writer, contributed, 
 as well by precept as example, to give it supple- 
 ness of movement and the easier air of the mod- 
 ern world. His own style, juicy with proverbial 
 phrases, has that familiar dignity, so hard to 
 attain, perhaps unattainable except by one who, 
 like Dryden, feels that his position is assured. 
 Charles Cotton is as easy, but not so elegant ; 
 Walton as familiar, but not so flowing ; Swift 
 as idiomatic, but not so elevated ; Burke more 
 splendid, but not so equally luminous. That 
 his style was no easy acquisition (though, of 
 course, the aptitude was innate) he himself tells 
 us. In his dedication of" Troilus and Cressida " 
 (1679), where he seems to hint at the erection 
 of an Academy, he says that " the perfect know- 
 ledge of a tongue was never attained by any 
 single person. The Court, the College, and the 
 Town must all be joined in it. And as our Eng- 
 lish is a composition of the dead and living 
 tongues, there is required a perfect knowledge, 
 not only of the Greek and Latin, but of the Old 
 German, French, and Italian, and to help all 
 these, a conversation with those authors of our 
 
84 DRYDEN 
 
 own who have written with the fewest faults in 
 prose and verse. But how barbarously we yet 
 write and speak your Lordship knows, and I 
 am sufficiently sensible in my own English.' 
 For I am often put to a stand in considering 
 whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue, 
 or false grammar and nonsense couched beneath 
 that specious name of Anglicism, and have no 
 other way to clear my doubts but by translat- 
 ing my English into Latin, and thereby trying 
 what sense the words will bear in a more stable 
 language." I'antae moUs erat. Five years later: 
 "The proprieties and delicacies of the English 
 are known to few ; it is im.possible even for a 
 good wit to understand and practise them with- 
 out the help of a liberal education, long read- 
 ing and digesting of those few good authors we 
 have amongst us, the knowledge of men and 
 manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversa- 
 tion with the best company of both sexes, and, in 
 short, without wearing off the rust which he 
 contracted while he was laying in a stock of 
 learning." In the passage I have italicized, it 
 
 ' More than half a century later, Orrery, in his " Re- 
 marks " on Swift, says: "We speak and we write at ran- 
 dom; and if a man's common conversation were committed 
 to paper, he would be startled yi^r to find himself guilty in so 
 fczv sentences of so many solecisms and such false English." 
 I do not remember _/or to anywhere in Dryden's prose. So 
 few has long been denizened; no wonder, since it is nothing 
 more than si peu Anglicized. 
 
DRYDEN 85 
 
 will be seen that Dryden lays some stress upon 
 the influence of women in refining language. 
 Swift, also, in his plan for an Academy, says : 
 " Now, though I would by no means give the 
 ladies the trouble of advising us in the reforma- 
 tion of our language, yet I cannot help thinking 
 that, since they have been left out of all meet- 
 ings except parties at play, or where worse de- 
 signs are carried on, our conversation has very 
 much degenerated." ' Swift affirms that the 
 language had grown corrupt since the Restora- 
 tion, and that " the Court, which used to be the 
 standard of propriety and correctness of speech, 
 was then, and, I think, has ever since continued, 
 the worst school in England." " He lays the 
 
 ' Letter to the Lord High Treasurer. 
 
 2 Ibid. He complains of " manglings and abbreviations." 
 ** What does your Lordship think of the words drudg'd, dis- 
 turb' d, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others ^ " In a con- 
 tribution to the Tatler (No. 230) he ridicules the use o? ^ urn 
 for them, and a number of slang phrases, among which is mob. 
 " The war," he says, *' has introduced abundance of polysyl- 
 lables, which will never be able to live many more campaigns." 
 Speculations, operations, preliminaries, ambassadors, pallisa- 
 does, communication, circumvallation, battalions, are the in- 
 stances he gives, and all are now familiar. No man, or body 
 of men, can dam the stream of language. Dryden is rather 
 fond of ^ em for them, but uses it rarely in his prose. Swift 
 himself prefers V is to it is, as does Emerson still. In what 
 Swift says of the poets, he may be fairly suspected of glancing 
 at Dryden, who was his kinsman, and whose prefaces and 
 translation of Virgil he ridicules in the Tale of a Tub. Dry- 
 
86 DRYDEN 
 
 blame partly on the general licentiousness, partly 
 upon the French education of many of Charles's 
 courtiers, and partly on the poets. Dryden 
 undoubtedly formed his diction by the usage of 
 the Court. The age was a very free-and-easy, 
 not to say a very coarse one. Its coarseness 
 was not external, like that of Elizabeth's day, 
 but the outward mark of an inward depravity. 
 What Swift's notion of the refinement of women 
 was may be judged by his anecdotes of Stella. I 
 will not say that Dryden's prose did not gain by 
 the conversational elasticity which his frequent- 
 ing men and women of the world enabled him 
 to give it. It is the best specimen of every-day 
 style that we have. But the habitual dwelling 
 of his mind in a commonplace atmosphere, and 
 among those easy levels of sentiment which 
 befitted Will's Coffee-house and the Bird-cage 
 Walk, was a damage to his poetry. Solitude is 
 as needful to the imagination as society is whole- 
 some for the character. He cannot always dis- 
 tinguish between enthusiasm and extravagance 
 
 den is reported to have said of him, ** Cousin Swift is no 
 poet." The Dean began his literary career by Pindaric odes 
 to Athenian Societies and the like, — perhaps the greatest mis- 
 take as to his own powers of which an author was ever guilty. 
 It was very likely that he would send these to his relative, 
 already distinguished, for his opinion upon them. If this was 
 so, the justice of Dryden's judgment must have added to the 
 smart. Swift never forgot or forgave; Dryden was careless 
 enough to do the one, and large enough to do the other. 
 
DRYDEN 87 
 
 when he sees them. But apart from these influ- 
 ences which I have adduced in exculpation, there 
 was certainly a vein of coarseness in him, a want 
 of that exquisite sensitiveness which is the con- 
 science of the artist. An old gentleman, writing 
 to the " Gentleman's Magazine" in 1745, pro- 
 fesses to remember "plain John Dry den (before 
 he paid his court with success to the great) in 
 one uniform clothing of Norwich drugget. I 
 have eat tarts at the Mulberry Garden with him 
 and Madam Reeve, when our author advanced 
 to a sword and Chadreux wig." ' I always fancy 
 Dryden in the drugget, with wig, lace ruffles, 
 and sword superimposed. It is the type of this 
 curiously incongruous man. 
 
 ' Both Malone and Scott accept this gentleman's evidence 
 without question, but I confess suspicion of a memory that 
 runs back more than eighty-one years, and recollects a man 
 before he had any claim to remembrance. Dryden was never 
 poor, and there is at Oxford a portrait of him painted in 1 664, 
 which represents him in a superb periwig and laced band. 
 This was '* before he had paid his court with success to the 
 great." But the story is at least ben trovato, and morally true 
 enough to serve as an illustration. Who the " old gentleman " 
 was has never been discovered. Of Crowne (who has some 
 interest for us as a sometime student at Harvard) he says : 
 •* Many a cup of metheglin have I drank with little starch' d 
 Johnny Crown; we called him so, from the stiff, unalterable 
 primness of his long cravat." Crowne reflects no more credit 
 on his Alma Mater than Downing. Both were sneaks, and of 
 such a kind as, I think, can only be produced by a debauched 
 Puritanism. Crowne, as a rival of Dryden, is contemptuously 
 alluded to by Cibber in his Apology. 
 
88 DRYDEN 
 
 The first poem by which Dryden won a 
 general acknowledgment of his power was the 
 "Annus Mirabilis," written in his thirty-seventh 
 year. Pepys, himself not altogether a bad judge, 
 doubtless expresses the common opinion when 
 he says : " I am very well pleased this night 
 with reading a poem I brought home with me 
 last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden's, 
 upon the present war ; a very good poem." * 
 And a very good poem, in some sort, it con- 
 tinues to be, in spite of its amazing blemishes. 
 We must always bear in mind that Dryden 
 lived in an age that supplied him with no ready- 
 made inspiration, and that big phrases and 
 images are apt to be pressed into the service 
 when great ones do not volunteer. With this 
 poem begins the long series of Dryden's pre- 
 faces, of which Swift made such excellent, though 
 malicious, fun that I cannot forbear to quote it. 
 " I do utterly disapprove and declare against 
 that pernicious custom of making the preface 
 a bill of fare to the book. For I have always 
 looked upon it as a high point of indiscretion 
 in monster-mongersand other retailers of strange 
 sights to hang out a fair picture over the door, 
 drawn after the life, with a most eloquent de- 
 
 ' Diary, iii. 390. Almost the only notices of Dryden that 
 make him alive to me I have found in the delicious book of this 
 Polonius-Montaigne, the only man who ever had the courage 
 to keep a sincere journal, even under the shelter of cipher. 
 
DRYDEN 89 
 
 scription underneath ; this has saved me many 
 a threepence. . . . Such is exactly the fate at 
 this time oi prefaces. . . . This expedient was 
 admirable at first ; our great Dryden has long 
 carried it as far as it would go, and with incred- 
 ible success. He has often said to me in con- 
 fidence, * that the world would never have sus- 
 pected him to be so great a poet, if he had not 
 assured them so frequently, in his prefaces, that 
 it was impossible they could either doubt or 
 forget it.' Perhaps it may be so ; however, I 
 much fear his instructions have edified out of 
 their place, and taught men to grow wiser in 
 certain points where he never intended they 
 should." ' The monster-mongers is a terrible 
 thrust, when we remember some of the come- 
 dies and heroic plays which Dryden ushered in 
 this fashion. In the dedication of the "Annus " 
 to the city of London is one of those pithy sen- 
 tences of which Dryden is ever afterwards so 
 full, and which he lets fall with a carelessness 
 that seems always to deepen the meaning : " I 
 have heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons 
 who have ended unfortunately, but never of 
 any virtuous nation ; Providence is engaged too 
 deeply when the cause becomes so general." 
 
 ' Tale of a Tub, sect. v. Pepys also speaks of buying the 
 Maiden Queen of Mr. Dryden' s, which he himself, in his 
 preface, seems to brag of, and indeed is a good play. (i8th 
 January, 1668.) 
 
90 DRYDEN 
 
 In his " account " of the poem in a letter to 
 Sir Robert Howard he says: " I have chosen 
 to write my poem in quatrains or stanzas of four 
 in alternate rhyme, because I have ever judged 
 them more noble and of greater dignity, both 
 for the sound and number, than any other verse 
 in use amongst us. . . . The learned languages 
 have certainly a great advantage of us in not 
 being tied to the slavery of any rhyme. . . . 
 But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have al- 
 ways found the couplet verse most easy, though 
 not so proper for this occasion ; for there the 
 work is sooner at an end, every two lines con- 
 cluding the labor of the poet." A little further 
 on : " They [the French] write in alexandrines, 
 or verses of six feet, such as amongst us is the 
 old translation of Homer by Chapman : all 
 which, by lengthening their chain,' makes the 
 
 ^ He is fond of this image. In the Maiden Queen Cela- 
 don tells Sabina that, when he is with her rival Florimel, his 
 heart is still her prisoner, •' it only draws a longer chain after 
 it." Goldsmith's fancy was taken by it; and everybody ad- 
 mires in the ** Traveller " the extraordinary conceit of a 
 heart dragging a lengthening chain. The smoothness of too 
 many rhymed pentameters is that of thin ice over shallow 
 water; so long as we glide along rapidly, all is well; but if 
 we dwell a moment on any one spot, we may find ourselves 
 knee-deep in mud. A later poet, in trying to improve on 
 Goldsmith, shows the ludicrousness of the image: — 
 " And round my heart's leg ties its galling chain." 
 
 To write imaginatively a man should have — imagination! 
 
DRYDEN 91 
 
 sphere of their activity the greater." I have 
 quoted these passages because, in a small com- 
 pass, they include several things characteristic 
 of Dryden. " I have ever judged," and " 1 
 have always found," are particularly so. If he 
 took up an opinion in the morning, he would 
 have found so many arguments for it before 
 night that it would seem already old and fa- 
 miliar. So with his reproach of rhyme ; a year 
 or two before he was eagerly defending it ; ' 
 again a few years, and he will utterly condemn 
 and drop it in his plays, while retaining it in 
 his translations ; afterwards his study of Milton 
 leads him to think that blank verse would suit 
 the epic style better, and he proposes to try it 
 with Homer, but at last translates one book 
 as a specimen, and behold, it is in rhyme ! But 
 the charm of this great advocate is, that, what- 
 ever side he was on, he could always find ex- 
 cellent reasons for it, and state them with great 
 force and abundance of happy illustration. He 
 is an exception to the proverb, and is none the 
 worse pleader that he is always pleading his 
 own cause. The blunder about Chapman is of 
 a kind into which his hasty temperament often 
 betrayed him. He remembered that Chapman's 
 " Iliad " was in a long measure, concluded with- 
 
 ' See his epistle dedicatory to the Rival Ladies (1664). 
 For the other side, see particularly a passage in his Discourse 
 on Epic Poetry (1697). 
 
92 DRYDEN 
 
 out looking that it was alexandrine, and then 
 attributes it generally to his " Homer." Chap- 
 man's " Iliad "is done in fourteen-syllable verse, 
 and his " Odyssee " in the very metre that Dry- 
 den himself used in his own version.' I remark 
 also what he says of the couplet, that it was 
 easy because the second verse concludes the 
 labor of the poet. And yet it was Dryden who 
 found it hard for that very reason. His vehe- 
 ment abundance refused those narrow banks, 
 first running over into a triplet, and, even then 
 uncontainable, rising to an alexandrine in the 
 concluding verse. And I have little doubt that 
 it was the roominess, rather than the dignity, 
 of the quatrain which led him to choose it. As 
 apposite to this, I may quote what he elsewhere 
 says of octosyllabic verse : " The thought can 
 turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass. 
 When the rhyme comes too thick upon us, it 
 
 ' In the same way he had two years before assumed that 
 Shakespeare " was the first who, to shun the pains of con- 
 tinued rhyming, invented that kind of writing which we call 
 blank verse " ! Dryden was never, I suspect, a very careful 
 student of English literature. He seems never to have known 
 that Surrey translated a part of the jEneid (and with great 
 spirit) into blank verse. Indeed, he was hot a scholar, in 
 the proper sense of the word, but he had that faculty of rapid 
 assimilation without study, so remarkable in Coleridge and 
 other rich minds, whose office is rather to impregnate than to 
 invent. These brokers of thought perform a great office in 
 literature, second only to that of originators. 
 
DRYDEN 93 
 
 straitens the expression : we are thinking of the 
 close, when we should be employed in adorn- 
 ing the thought. It makes a poet giddy with 
 turning in a space too narrow for his imagina- 
 tion." • 
 
 Dryden himself, as was not always the case 
 with him, was well satisfied with his work. He 
 calls it his best hitherto, and attributes his suc- 
 cess to the excellence of his subject, " incom- 
 parably the best he had ever had, excepting only 
 the Royal Family." The first part is devoted to 
 the Dutch war ; the last to the fire of London. 
 The martial half is infinitely the better of the 
 two. He altogether surpasses his model, Dave- 
 nant. If his poem lack the gravity of thought 
 attained by a few stanzas of " Gondibert," it is 
 vastly superior in life, in picturesqueness, in the 
 energy of single lines, and, above all, in imagi- 
 nation. Few men have read " Gondibert," and 
 almost every one speaks of it, as commonly of 
 the dead, with a certain subdued respect. And 
 it deserves respect as an honest effort to bring 
 poetry back to its highest office in the ideal 
 treatment of life. Davenant emulated Spenser, 
 and if his poem had been as good as his pre- 
 face, it could still be read in another spirit than 
 
 ' Essay on Satire. What he has said just before this about 
 Butler is worth noting. Butler had had a chief hand in the 
 Rehearsal, but Dryden had no grudges where the question 
 was of giving its just praise to merit. 
 
94 DRYDEN 
 
 that of investigation. As it is, it always reminds 
 me of Goldsmith's famous verse. It is remote, 
 unfriendly, solitary, and, above all, slow. Its 
 shining passages, for there are such, remind one 
 of distress-rockets sent up at Intervals from a 
 ship just about to founder, and sadden rather 
 than cheer.' 
 
 The first part of the " Annus Mirabilis " is 
 by no means clear of the false taste of the time,^ 
 though it has some of Dryden's manliest verses 
 and happiest comparisons, always his two dis- 
 tinguishing merits. Here, as almost everywhere 
 else in Dryden, measuring him merely as poet, 
 we recall what he, with pathetic pride, says of 
 himself In the prologue to " Aurengzebe ": — 
 
 •* Let him retire, betwixt two ages cast. 
 The first of this, the hindmost of the last." 
 
 ' The conclusion of the second canto of Book Third is the 
 best continuously fine passage. Dryden's poem has nowhere 
 so much meaning in so small space as Davenant, when he 
 says of the sense of honor that, — 
 
 "Like Power, it grows to nothing, growing less." 
 
 Davenant took the hint of the stanza from Sir John Davies. 
 Wyatt first used it, so far as I know, in English. 
 
 2 Perhaps there is no better lecture on the prevailing vices 
 of style and thought (if thought -this frothy ferment of the 
 mind may be called) than in Cotton Mather's Magnolia. 
 For Mather, like a true provincial, appropriates only the man- 
 nerism, and, as is usual in such cases, betrays all its weakness 
 by the unconscious parody of exaggeration. 
 
DRYDEN 95 
 
 What can be worse than what he says of 
 comets ? — 
 
 •* Whether they unctuous exhalations are 
 Fired by the sun, or seeming so alone. 
 Or each some more remote and slippery star 
 Which loses footing when to mortals shown." 
 
 Or than this, of the destruction of the Dutch 
 India ships ? — 
 
 ** Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball. 
 And now their odors armed against them fly; 
 Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall. 
 And some by aromatic splinters die." 
 
 Dear Dr. Johnson had his doubts about Shake- 
 speare, but here at least was poetry ! This is one 
 of the quatrains which he pronounces " worthy 
 of our author." ' 
 
 But Dryden himself has said that " a man 
 who is resolved to praise an author with any 
 appearance of justice must be sure to take him 
 on the strongest side, and where he is least liable 
 
 ' The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of 
 the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the 
 thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, 
 the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. 
 The critical parts of his Life of Dryden seem to me the best 
 of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after 
 him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and 
 his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As 
 illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden' s reading 
 are curious. 
 
96 DRYDEN 
 
 to exceptions." This is true also of one who 
 wishes to measure an author fairly, for the higher 
 wisdom of criticism lies in the capacity to ad- 
 mire. 
 
 Leser, wie gefall ich dir? 
 
 Leser, wie gefallst du mir ? — 
 
 are both fair questions, the answer to the first 
 being more often involved in that to the second 
 than is sometimes thought. The poet in Dry- 
 den was never more fully revealed than in such 
 verses as these : — 
 
 *• And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove,* 
 Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand ' ' ; 
 
 *• Silent in smoke of cannon they come on "; 
 
 'Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, 
 monarque en peinture. Dryden seldom borrows, unless from 
 Shakespeare, without improving, and he borrowed a great 
 deal. Thus in Don Sebastian (of suicide): — 
 
 " Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls, 
 And give them furloughs for the other world ; 
 But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand 
 In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." 
 
 The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by the " star- 
 less nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it from his favorite, 
 Montaigne, who says, '* Que nous ne pouvons abandonner 
 cette garnison du monde, sans le commandement exprez de 
 celuy qui nous y a mis." (Lib. ii. chap. 3.) In the same 
 play, by a very Drydenish verse, he gives new force to an old 
 comparison : — 
 
 " And I should break, through laws divine and human. 
 And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, 
 Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks J'^ 
 
DRYDEN 97 
 
 " And his loud guns speak thick, like angry men "; 
 
 *' The vigorous seaman every port-hole plies. 
 And adds his heart to every gun he fires ' ' ; 
 
 "And, though to me unknown, they sure fought well. 
 Whom Rupert led, and who were British born." 
 
 This is masculine writing, and yet it must be 
 said that there is scarcely a quatrain in which 
 the rhyme does not trip him- into a platitude, 
 and there are too many swaggering with that 
 expression forte d'un sentiment faible which Vol- 
 taire condemns in Corneille, — a temptation to 
 which Dryden always lay too invitingly open. 
 But there are passages higher in kind than any I 
 have cited, because they show imagination. Such 
 are the verses in which he describes the dreams 
 of the disheartened enemy: — 
 
 •* In dreams they fearful precipices tread. 
 
 Or, shipwrecked, labor to some distant shore. 
 Or in dark churches walk among the dead "; — 
 
 and those in which he recalls glorious memories, 
 and sees where 
 
 "The mighty ghosts of our great Harries rose. 
 And armed Edwards looked with anxious eyes." 
 
 A few verses, like the pleasantly alliterative 
 one in which he makes the spider, " from the 
 silent ambush of his den," " feel far off the 
 trembling of his thread," show that he was 
 beginning to study the niceties of verse, instead 
 of trusting wholly to what he would have called 
 
98 DRYDEN 
 
 his natural fougue. On the whole, this part of 
 the poem is very good war poetry, as war poetry 
 goes (for there is but one first-rate poem of the 
 kind in English, — short, national, eager as if 
 the writer were personally engaged, with the 
 rapid metre of a drum beating the charge, — and 
 that is Drayton's " Battle of Agincourt " '), but 
 it shows more study of Lucan than of Virgil, 
 and for a long time yet we shall find Dryden 
 bewildered by bad models." He is always imi- 
 tating — no, that is not the word, always emulat- 
 ing — somebody in his more strictly poetical 
 attempts, for in that direction he always needed 
 some external impulse to set his mind in motion. 
 This is more or less true of all authors ; nor 
 does it detract from their originality,, which de- 
 pends wholly on their being able so far to for- 
 get themselves as to let something of themselves 
 slip into what they write.'' In his prologue to 
 " Albumazar " Dryden himself says of Ben 
 Jonson, — 
 
 ** But Ben made nobly his what he did mould. 
 What was another's lead becomes his gold." 
 
 The wise will call mould as good a euphemism 
 
 ' Not his solemn historical droning under that title, but 
 addressed *<To the Cambrio-Britons on their harp." 
 
 ^ '* Les poetes euxmemes s'animent et s'echauiFent par la 
 lecture des autres poetes. Messieurs de Malherbe, Corneille, 
 etc., se disposoient au travail par la lecture des poetes qui 
 etoient de leur gout." (Vigneul-Marvilliana, i. 64, 65.) 
 
DRYDEN * 99 
 
 as convey I Of absolute originality we will not 
 speak till authors are raised by some Deucalion- 
 and-Pyrrha process ; and even then our faith 
 would be small, for writers who have no past 
 are pretty sure of having no future. Dryden, at 
 any rate, always had to have his copy set him 
 at the top of the page, and wrote ill or well 
 accordingly. His mind (somewhat solid for a 
 poet) warmed slowly, but, once fairly heated 
 through, he had more of that good luck of self- 
 oblivion than most men. He certainly gave even 
 a liberal interpretation to Moliere's ruleof tak^ 
 ing his own property wherever he found it, 
 though he sometimes blundered awkwardly 
 about what was properly his ; but in literature, 
 it should be remembered,a thing always becomes 
 his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his 
 own.' 
 
 ' For example. Waller had said, — 
 
 " Others may use the ocean as their road. 
 Only the English maie it their abode ; 
 
 We tread on billoivs ivith a steady foot " — 
 
 long before Campbell. Campbell helps himself to both 
 thoughts, enlivens them into 
 
 " Her march is o'er^he mountain wave, 
 Her home is on the deep," — 
 
 and they are his forevermore. His "leviathans afloat" he 
 lifted from the Jnnus Mirabilis ; but in what court could 
 Dryden sue ? Again, Waller in another poem calls the Duke 
 of York's flag 
 
 "His dreadful streamer, like a comet's hair"j — 
 
loo DRYDEN 
 
 Mr. Savage Landor once told me that he said 
 to Wordsworth : " Mr. Wordsworth, a man may 
 mix poetry with prose as much as he pleases, 
 and it will only elevate and enliven ; but the 
 moment he mixes a particle of prose with his 
 poetry, it precipitates the whole." Wordsworth, 
 he added, never forgave him. The always hasty 
 Dryden, as I think I have already said, was 
 liable, like a careless apothecary's 'prentice, to 
 make the same confusion of ingredients, espe- 
 cially in the more mischievous way. I cannot 
 leave the " Annus Mirabilis " without giving an 
 example of this. Describing the Dutch prizes, 
 rather like an auctioneer than a poet, he says 
 that 
 
 ** Some English wool, vexed in a Belgian loom. 
 And into cloth of spongy softness made. 
 Did into France or colder Denmark doom. 
 To ruin with worse ware our staple trade." 
 
 One might fancy this written by the secretary 
 of a board of trade in an unguarded moment ; 
 
 and this, I believe, is the first application of the celestial por- 
 tent to this particular comparison. Yet Milton's " imperial 
 ensign " waves defiant behind his impregnable lines, and even 
 Campbell flaunts his '♦ meteor flag" in Waller's face. Gray's 
 bard might be sent to the lock-up, but even he would find bail. 
 
 " C'est imiter quelqu'un que de planter des choux." 
 
 "The lyrical cry" which has lately become as iteratively 
 tedious in the fields of criticism as that of the cicala in those 
 of Italy may perhaps be traced to the ♦* lyric-liring cries " of 
 Sidney's Arcadia. 
 
DRYDEN. loi 
 
 but we should remember that the poem Is dedi- 
 cated to the city of London. The depreciation 
 of the rival fabrics is exquisite ; and Dryden, the 
 most English of our poets, would not be so 
 thoroughly English if he had not in him some 
 fibre of la nation boutiquiere. Let us now see 
 how he succeeds in attempting to infuse science 
 (the most obstinately prosy material) with poetry. 
 Speaking of " a more exact knowledge of the 
 longitudes," as he explains in a note, he tells 
 us that, — 
 
 ** Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go. 
 And view the ocean leaning on the sky; 
 From thence our rolling neighbors we shall know. 
 And on the lunar world securely pry." 
 
 Dr. Johnson confesses that he does not under- 
 stand this. Why should he, when it is plain that 
 Dryden was wholly in the dark himself? To 
 understand it is none of my business, but I con- 
 fess that it interests me as an Americanism. We 
 have hitherto been credited as the inventors of 
 the "jumping-off place " at the extreme western 
 verge of the world. But Dryden was beforehand 
 with us. Though he doubtless knew that the 
 earth was a sphere (and perhaps that it was flat- 
 tened at the poles), it was always a flat surface 
 in his fancy. In his " Amphitryon," he makes 
 Alcmena say : — 
 
 "No, I would fly thee to the ridge of earth. 
 And leap the precipice to 'scape thy sight." 
 
I02 DRYDEN 
 
 And in his " Spanish Friar," Lorenzo says to 
 Elvira that they " will travel together to the 
 ridge of the world, and then drop together into 
 the next." It is idle for us poor Yankees to hope 
 that we can invent anything. To say sooth, if 
 Dryden had left nothing behind him but the 
 " Annus Mirabilis," he might have served as 
 a type of the kind of poet America would have 
 produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-moun- 
 tain recipe, — longitude and latitude in plenty, 
 with marks of culture scattered here and there 
 like the carets on a proof-sheet. 
 
 It is now time to say something of Dryden 
 as a dramatist. In the thirty-two years between 
 1662 and 1694 he produced twenty-five plays, 
 and assisted Lee in two. I have hinted that it 
 took Dryden longer than most men to find the 
 true bent of his genius. On a superficial view, 
 he might almost seem to confirm that theory, 
 maintained by Johnson, among others, that gen- 
 ius was nothing more than great intellectual power 
 exercised persistently in some particular direction 
 which chance decided, so that it lay in circum- 
 stance merely whether a man should turn out a 
 Shakespeare or a Newton. But when we come 
 to compare what he wrote, regardless of Mi- 
 nerva's averted face, with the spontaneous pro- 
 duction of his happier muse, we shall be inclined 
 to think his example one of the strongest cases 
 against the theory in question. He began his 
 
DRYDEN 103 
 
 dramatic career, as usual, by rowing against the 
 strong current of his nature, and pulled only the 
 more doggedly the more he felt himself swept 
 down the stream. His first attempt was at com- 
 edy, and, though his earliest piece of that kind 
 (the "Wild Gallant," 1663) utterly failed, he 
 wrote eight others afterwards. On the 23d Feb- 
 ruary, 1663, Pepys writes in his diary: "To 
 Court, and there saw the * Wild Gallant ' per- 
 formed by the king's house ; but it was ill acted, 
 and the play so poor a thing as I never saw in my 
 life almost, and so little answering the name, that, 
 from the beginning to the end, I could not, nor 
 can at this time, tell certainly which was the Wild 
 Gallant. The king did not seem pleased at all 
 the whole play, nor anybody else." After some 
 alteration, it was revived with more success. On 
 its publication in 1669 Dryden honestly admit- 
 ted its former failure, though with a kind of 
 salvo for his self-love. " I made the town my 
 judges, and the greater part condemned it. After 
 which I do not think it my concernment to 
 defend it with i:he ordinary zeal of a poet for his 
 decried poem, though Corneille is more resolute 
 in his preface before * Pertharite,' ' which was 
 condemned more universally than this. . . . Yet 
 it was received at Court, and was more than once 
 
 ' Corneille's tragedy of Pertharite was acted unsuccess- 
 fully in 1659. Racine made free use of it in his more fortu- 
 nate Andromaque. 
 
I04 DRYDEN 
 
 the divertisement of his Majesty, by his own 
 command." Pepys lets us amusingly behind 
 the scenes in the matter of his Majesty's diver- 
 tisement. Dryden does not seem to see that in 
 the condemnation of something meant to amuse 
 the public there can be no question of degree. 
 To fail at all is to fail utterly. 
 
 " Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux." 
 In the reading, at least, all Dryden's comic 
 writing for the stage must be ranked with the 
 latter class. He himself would fain make an 
 exception of the " Spanish Friar," but I confess 
 that I rather wonder at than envy those who 
 can be amused by it. His comedies lack every- 
 thing that a comedy should have, — lightness, 
 quickness of transition, unexpectedness of inci- 
 dent, easy cleverness of dialogue, and humorous 
 contrast of character brought out by identity 
 of situation. The comic parts of the " Maiden 
 Queen " seem to me Dryden's best, but the 
 merit even of these is Shakespeare's, and there 
 is little choice where even the best is only tol- 
 erable. The common quality, however, of ail 
 Dryden's comedies is their nastiness, the more 
 remarkable because we have ample evidence 
 that he was a man of modest conversation. 
 Pepys, who was by no means squeamish (for 
 he found " Sir Martin Marall " " the most en- 
 tire piece of mirth . . . that certainly ever was 
 writ . . . very good wit therein, not fooling "), 
 
DRYDEN 105 
 
 writes in his diary of the 19th June, 1668: 
 " My wife and Deb to the king's playhouse 
 to-day, thinking to spy me there, and saw the 
 new play ' Evening Love,' of Dryden's, which, 
 though the world commends, she likes not." 
 The next day he saw it himself, " and do not 
 Hke it, it being very smutty, and nothing so 
 good as the ' Maiden Queen ' or the ' Indian 
 Emperor ' of Dryden's making. / was troubled 
 at ity On the 22d he adds : " Calling this day 
 at Herringman's,' he tells me Dryden do him- 
 self call it but a fifth-rate play." This was no 
 doubt true, and yet, though Dryden in his pre- 
 face to the play says, " I confess I have given 
 [yielded] too much to the people in it, and am 
 ashamed for them as well as for myself, that I 
 have pleased them at so cheap a rate," he takes 
 care to add, " not that there is anything here 
 that I would not defend to an ill-natured judge." 
 The plot was from Calderon, and the author, 
 rebutting the charge of plagiarism, tells us that 
 the king (" without whose command they should 
 no longer be troubled with anything of mine") 
 had already answered for him by saying, " that 
 he only desired that they who accused me of 
 theft would always steal him plays like mine." ^ 
 
 ' Dryden's publisher, 
 
 ^ It is curious how good things repeat themselves. When 
 General Grant was accused of drinking too much, Mr. Lin- 
 coln drily replied that " he wished all our generals might get 
 hold of the same whiskey." 
 
io6 DRYDEN 
 
 Of the morals of the play he has not a word, 
 nor do I believe that he was conscious of any 
 harm in them till he was attacked by Collier, 
 and then (with some protest against what he 
 considers the undue severity of his censor) 
 he had the manliness to confess that he had 
 done wrong. " It becomes me not to draw my 
 pen in the defence of a bad cause, when I have 
 so often drawn it for a good one." ' And in 
 a letter to his correspondent, Mrs. Thomas, 
 written only a few weeks before his death, warn- 
 ing her against the example of Mrs. Behn, he 
 says, with remorseful sincerity : " I confess 1 am 
 the last man in the world who ought in justice 
 to arraign her, who have been myself too much 
 a libertine in most of my poems, which I should 
 be well contented I had time either to purge 
 or to see them fairly burned." Congreve was 
 less patient, and even Dryden,in the last epilogue 
 he ever wrote, attempts an excuse : — 
 
 •' Perhaps the Parson stretched a point too far. 
 When with our Theatres he waged a war; 
 He tells you that this very moral age 
 Received the first infection from the Stage, 
 But sure a banished Court, with lewdness fraught, 
 The seeds of open vice returning brought. 
 
 Whitehall the naked Venus first revealed. 
 Who, standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine. 
 The strumpet was adored with rites divine. 
 
 ' Preface to the Fables, 
 
DRYDEN 107 
 
 The poets, who must live by Courts or starve. 
 Were proud so good a Government to serve. 
 And, mixing with buiFoons and pimps profane. 
 Tainted the Stage for some small snip of gain." 
 
 Dryden least of all men should have stooped 
 to this palliation, for he had, not without jus- 
 tice, said of himself: " The same parts and 
 application which have made me a poet might 
 have raised me to any honors of the gown." 
 Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, 
 nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously 
 defends the Comedy of the Restoration as " the 
 sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," 
 where there was no pretence of representing 
 a real world.' But this was certainly not so. 
 Dryden again and again boasts of the superior 
 advantage which his age had over that of the 
 elder dramatists, in painting polite life, and 
 attributes it to a greater freedom of intercourse 
 between the poets and the frequenters of the 
 Court.^ We shall be less surprised at the kind 
 of refinement upon which Dryden congratulated 
 himself, when we learn (from the dedication of 
 " Marriage a la Mode ") that the Earl of 
 Rochester was its exemplar : " The best comic 
 
 ' I interpret some otherwise ambiguous passages in this 
 charming and acute essay by its tide: ** On the artificial 
 comedy of the last century." 
 
 2 See especially his defence of the epilogue to the Second 
 Part of the Conquest of Granada (1672). 
 
io8 DRYDEN 
 
 writers of our age will join with me to acknow- 
 ledge that they have copied the gallantries of 
 Courts, the delicacy of expression, and the de- 
 cencies of behavior from your Lordship." In 
 judging Dryden, it should be borne in mind 
 that for some years he was under contract to 
 deliver three plays a year, a kind of bond to 
 which no man should subject his brain who has 
 a decent respect for the quality of its products. 
 We should remember, too, that in his d'a.j man- 
 ners meant what we call morals^ that custom 
 always makes a larger part of virtue among 
 average men than they are quite aware, and that 
 the reaction from an outward conformity which 
 had no root in inward faith may for a time have 
 given to the frank expression of laxity an air 
 of honesty that made it seem almost refreshing. 
 There is no such hotbed for excess of license 
 as excess of restraint, and the arrogant fanati- 
 cism of a single virtue is apt to make men sus- 
 picious of tyranny in all the rest. But the riot 
 of emancipation could not last long, for the 
 more tolerant society is of private vice, the more 
 exacting will it be of public decorum, that ex- 
 cellent thing, so often the plausible substitute 
 for things more excellent. By 1678 the public 
 mind had so far recovered its tone that Dry- 
 den's comedy of " Limberham " was barely 
 tolerated for three nights. I will let the man 
 who looked at human nature from more sides, 
 
DRYDEN 109 
 
 and therefore judged it more gently than any 
 other, give the only excuse possible for Dry- 
 den : — 
 
 " Men's judgments are 
 A parcel of their fortunes, and things outward 
 Do draw the inward quality after them 
 To suffer all alike." 
 
 Dryden's own apology only makes matters 
 worse for him by showing that he committed his 
 offences with his eyes wide open, and that he 
 wrote comedies so wholly in despite of nature 
 as never to deviate into the comic. Failing as 
 clown, he did not scruple to take on himself the 
 office of Chiffinch to the palled appetite of the 
 public. " For I confess my chief endeavours 
 are to delight the age in which I live. If the 
 humour of this be for low comedy, small acci- 
 dents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey 
 it, though with more reputation I could write in 
 verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to 
 write comedy ; I want that gayety of humour 
 which is requisite to it. My conversation is slow 
 and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved : 
 In short, I am none of those who endeavour to 
 break jests in company or make repartees. So 
 that those who decry my comedies do me no 
 injury, except it be in point of profit : Reputa- 
 tion in them is the last thing to which I shall 
 pretend." ' For my own part, though I have 
 
 ' Defence of an Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 
 
no DRYDEN 
 
 been forced to hold my nose in picking my way 
 through these ordures of Dryden, I am free to 
 say that I think them far less morally mischiev- 
 ous than that corps-de-ballet literature in which 
 the most animal of the passions is made more 
 temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze. 
 Nor does Dryden's lewdness leave such a reek 
 in the mind as the filthy cynicism of Swift, who 
 delighted to uncover the nakedness of our com- 
 'mon mother. 
 
 It is pleasant to follow Dryden into the more 
 congenial region of heroic plays, though here 
 also we find him making a false start. Anxious 
 to please the king,' and so able a reasoner as to 
 convince even himself of the justice of whatever 
 cause he argued, he not only wrote tragedies in 
 the French style, but defended his practice in 
 an essay which is by far the most delightful re- 
 production of the classic dialogue ever written 
 in English. Eugenius (Lord Buckhurst), Lisi- 
 deius (Sir Charles Sidley), Crites (Sir R. How- 
 ard), and Neander (Dryden) are the four par- 
 takers in the debate. The comparative merits 
 of ancients and moderns, of the Shakespearian 
 and contemporary drama, of rhyme and blank 
 verse, the value of the three (supposed) Aristo- 
 
 ' "The favor which heroick plays have lately found upon 
 our theatres has been wholly derived to them from the coun- 
 tenance and approbation they have received at Court. ' ' ( Dedi- 
 cation o{ Indian Emperor to Duchess of Monmouth.) 
 
DRYDEN 1 1 1 
 
 telian unities, are the main topics discussed. The 
 tone of the discussion is admirable, midway 
 between bookishness and talk, and the fairness 
 with which each side of the argument is treated 
 shows the breadth of Dryden's mind perhaps 
 better than any other one piece of his writing. 
 There are no men of straw set up to be knocked 
 down again, as there commonly are in debates 
 conducted upon this plan. The " Defence " of 
 the Essay is to be taken as a supplement to 
 Neander's share in it, as well as many scattered 
 passages in subsequent prefaces and dedications. 
 All the interlocutors agree that " the sweetness 
 of English verse was never understood or prac- 
 tised by our fathers," and that " our poesy is 
 much improved by the happiness of some writers 
 yet living, who first taught us to mould our 
 thoughts into easy and significant words, to 
 retrench the superfluities of expression, and 
 to make our rhyme so properly a part of the 
 verse that it should never mislead the sense, 
 but itself be led and governed by it." In another 
 place he shows that by " living writers " he 
 meant Waller and Denham. " Rhyme has all 
 the advantages of prose besides its own. But 
 the excellence and dignity of it were never fully 
 known till Mr. Waller taught it : he first made 
 writing easily an art ; first showed us to conclude 
 the sense, most commonly in distiches, which 
 in the verse before him runs on for so many lines 
 
,12 DRYDEN 
 
 together that the reader is out of breath to over- 
 take it." * Dryden afterwards changed his mind, 
 and one of the excellences of his own rhymed 
 verse is, that his sense is too ample to be con- 
 cluded by the distich. Rhyme had been cen- 
 sured as unnatural in dialogue ; but Dryden 
 replies that it is no more so than blank verse, 
 since no man talks any kind of verse in real 
 life. But the argument for rhyme is of another 
 kind. " I am satisfied if it cause delight, for 
 delight is the chief if not the only end of poesy 
 [he should have said means~\ ; instruction can be 
 admitted but in the second place, for poesy only 
 instructs as it delights. . . . The converse, there- 
 fore, which a poet is to imitate must be height- 
 ened with all the arts and ornaments of poesy, 
 and must be such as, strictly considered, could 
 never be supposed spoken by any without pre- 
 meditation. . . . Thus prose, though the right- 
 ful prince, yet is by common consent deposed 
 as too weak for the government of serious plays, 
 and, he failing, there now start up two competi- 
 tors ; one the nearer in blood, which is blank 
 verse ; the other more fit for the ends of gov- 
 ernment, which is rhyme. Blank verse is, indeed, 
 the nearer prose, but he is blemished with the 
 weakness of his predecessor. Rhyme (for I will 
 deal clearly) has somewhat of the usurper in 
 him ; but he is brave and generous and his 
 * Dedication of Rival Ladies. 
 
DRYDEN 113 > 
 
 dominion pleasing." ' To the objection that the 
 difficulties of rhyme will lead to circumlocution, 
 he answers in substance, that a good poet will 
 know how to avoid them. 
 
 It is curious how long the superstition that 
 Waller was the refiner of English verse has 
 prevailed since Dryden first gave it vogue. He 
 was a very poor poet and a purely mechanical 
 versifier. He has lived mainly on the credit of 
 his " Rose," of his " Girdle " (soiled with a vile 
 pun), and of a single couplet, — 
 
 •* The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed. 
 
 Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made," — 
 
 in which the melody alone belongs to him, and 
 the conceit, such as it is, to Samuel Daniel, who 
 said, long before, that the body's 
 
 ♦* Walls, grown thin, permit the mind 
 To look out thorough and his frailty find." 
 
 Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the 
 transfusion. It might seem that Ben Jonson 
 had a prophetic foreboding of him when he 
 wrote : *' Others there are that have no compo- 
 sition at all, but a kind of tuning and rhyming 
 fall. In what they write. It runs and slides and 
 only makes a sound. Women's poets they are 
 called, as you have women's tailors. 
 
 ' Defence of the Essay. Dryden, in the happiness of his illus- 
 trative comparisons, is almost unmatched. Like himself, they 
 occupy a middle ground between poetry and prose, — they 
 are a cross between metaphor and simile. 
 
,,4 DRYDEN 
 
 •♦They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream 
 In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream. 
 
 You may sound these wits and find the depth 
 of them with your middle-finger."' It seems 
 to have been taken for granted by Waller, as 
 afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets be- 
 stowed no thought upon their verse. "Waller 
 was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, 
 and his importation of the French theory of the 
 couplet as a kind of thought-coop did nothing 
 but mischief. "* He never compassed even a 
 smoothness approaching this description of a 
 nightingale's song by a third-rate poet of the 
 earlier school, — 
 
 ** Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note 
 Through the sleek passage of her open throat, 
 A clear, unwrinkled song," — 
 
 one of whose beauties is its running over into 
 the third verse. Those poets indeed 
 
 •* Felt music's pulse in all her arteries "; — 
 
 ' Discoveries. 
 
 ^ What a wretched rhymer he could be we may see in his 
 alteration of the Maid'' s Tragedy of Beaumont and Fletcher: — 
 
 " Not long since walking in the field, 
 My nurse and I, we there beheld 
 A goodly fruit ; which, tempting me, 
 1 would have plucked ; but, trembling, she, 
 Whoever eat those berries, cried, 
 In less than half an hour died ! " 
 
 What intolerable seesaw! Not much of Byron's "fatal 
 facility " in these octosyllabics! 
 
DRYDEN 115 
 
 and Dryden himself found out, when he came 
 to try it, that blank verse was not so easy a 
 thing as he at first conceived it, nay, that it is the 
 most difficult of all verse, and that it must make 
 up in harmony, by variety of pause and modu- 
 lation, for what it loses in the melody of rhyme. 
 In what makes the chief merit of his later versi- 
 fication, he but rediscovered the secret of his 
 predecessors in giving to rhymed pentameters 
 something of the freedom of blank verse, and 
 not mistaking metre for rhythm. 
 
 Voltaire, in his Commentary on Corneille, 
 has sufficiently lamented the awkwardness of 
 movement imposed upon the French dramatists 
 by the gyves of rhyme. But he considers the 
 necessity of overcoming this obstacle, on the 
 whole, an advantage. Difficulty is his tenth and 
 superior muse. How did Dryden, who says 
 nearly the same thing, succeed in his attempt at 
 the French manner ? He fell into every one of 
 its vices, without attaining much of what con- 
 stitutes its excellence. From the nature of the 
 language, all French poetry is purely artificial, 
 and its high polish is all that keeps out decay. 
 The length of their dramatic verse forces the 
 French into much tautology, into bombast in 
 its original meaning, the stuffing out a thought 
 with words till it fills the line. The rigid system 
 of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to 
 manage than in English, has accustomed them 
 
ii6 DRYDEN 
 
 to inaccuracies of thought which would shock 
 them in prose. For example, in the " Cinna " of 
 Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to 
 Augustus, — 
 
 " Ces flammes dans nos cceurs des longtemps etoient nees, 
 Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre annees." 
 
 I say nothing of the second verse, which is 
 purely prosaic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, 
 nor of the jingling together of ceSy des^ etoienty 
 neeSy des, and secrets^ but I confess that nees 
 does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille 
 would have chosen for flammes^ if he could 
 have had his own way, and that flames would 
 seem of all things the hardest to keep secret. 
 But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse 
 thus, — 
 
 " Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans votre ordre etoient nees." 
 
 Can anything be more absurd than flames born 
 to order? Yet Voltaire, on his guard against 
 these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not 
 notice this in his minute comments on this play. 
 Of extravagant metaphor, the result of this same 
 making sound the file-leader of sense, a single 
 example from " Heraclius " shall suffice : — 
 
 •* La vapeur de mon sang ira grossir la foudre 
 Que Dieu tient deja prete a le reduire en poudre. " 
 
 One cannot think of a Louis Quatorze Apollo 
 except in a full-bottomed periwig, and the tragic 
 style of their poets is always showing the disas- 
 
DRYDEN ,,7 
 
 trous influence of that portentous comet. It is 
 the style perruque in another than the French 
 meaning of the phrase, and the skill lay in dress- 
 ing it majestically, so that, as Cibber says, "upon 
 the head of a man of sense, if it became him^ it 
 could never fail of drawing to him a more par- 
 tial regard and benevolence than could possibly 
 be hoped for in an ill-made one." It did not 
 become Dryden, and he left it off.' 
 
 Like his own Zimri, Dryden was " all for " 
 this or that fancy, till he took up with another. 
 But even while he was writing on French mod- 
 els, his judgment could not be blinded to their 
 defects. " Look upon the * Cinna ' and the 
 
 * Pompey,' they are not so properly to be called 
 plays as long discourses of reason of State, and 
 
 * Polieucte ' in matters of religion is as solemn 
 as the long stops upon our organs ; . . . their 
 actors speak by the hour-glass like our parsons. 
 ... I deny not but this may suit well enough 
 with the French, for as we, who are a more 
 sullen people, come to be diverted at our plays, 
 so they, who are of an airy and gay temper, come 
 thither to make themselves more serious." " 
 With what an air of innocent unconsciousness 
 the sarcasm is driven home ! Again, while he 
 was still slaving at these bricks without straw, 
 
 ' In more senses than one. His last and best portrait shows 
 him in his own gray hair. 
 * Essay on Dramatick Poesy. 
 
ii8 DRYDEN 
 
 he says : " The present French poets are gen- 
 erally accused that, wheresoever they lay the 
 scene, or in whatever age, the manners of their 
 heroes are wholly French. Racine's Bajazet is 
 bred at Constantinople, but his civilities are 
 conveyed to him by some secret passage from 
 Versailles into the Seraglio." It is curious that 
 Voltaire, speaking of the " Berenice " of Ra- 
 cine, praises a passage in it for precisely what 
 Dryden condemns : " II semble qu'on entende 
 Henriette d'Angleterre elle-meme parlant au 
 marquis de Vardes. La politesse de la cour de 
 Louis XIV., I'agrement de la langue Francaise, 
 la douceur de la versification la plus naturelle, le 
 sentiment le plus tendre, tout se trouve dans 
 ce peu de vers." After Dryden had broken 
 away from the heroic style, he speaks out more 
 plainly. In the Preface to his " All for Love," 
 in reply to some cavils upon " little, and not 
 essential decencies," the decision about which he 
 refers to a master of ceremonies, he goes on to 
 say : " The French poets, I confess, are strict 
 observers of these punctilios ; ... in this 
 nicety of manners does the excellency of French 
 poetry consist. Their heroes are the most civil 
 people breathing, but their good breeding sel- 
 dom extends to a word of sense. All their wit 
 is in their ceremony ; they want the genius which 
 animates our stage, and therefore 't is but neces- 
 sary, when they cannot please, that they should 
 
DRYDEN 119 
 
 take care not to offend. . . . They are so care- 
 ful not to exasperate a critic that they never 
 leave him any work, . . . for no part of a poem 
 is worth our discommending where the whole 
 is insipid, as when we have once tasted palled 
 wine we stay not to examine it glass by glass. 
 But while they affect to shine in trifles, they are 
 often careless in essentials. . . . For my part, 
 I desire to be tried by the laws of my own coun- 
 try." This is said in heat, but it is plain enough 
 that his mind was wholly changed. In his dis- 
 course on epic poetry he is as decided, but more 
 temperate. He says that the French heroic 
 verse " runs with more activity than strength.' 
 Their language is not strung with sinews like 
 our English ; it has the nimbleness of a grey- 
 hound, but not the bulk and body of a mastiff. 
 Our men and our verses overbear them by their 
 weight, and pondere^ non numeroy is the British 
 motto. The French have set up purity for the 
 standard of their language, and a masculine vigor 
 is that of ours. Like their tongue is the genius 
 
 ' A French hendecasyllable verse runs exactly like our ballad 
 measure : — 
 
 A cobbler there was and he lived in a stall, . . . 
 La ratson, pour marcher^ n a sou-vent qu une "voye. 
 
 (Dryden's note.) 
 
 The verse is not a hendecasyllable. " Attended watchfully 
 to her recitative (Mile. Duchesnois), and find that, in nine 
 lines out of ten, 'A cobbler there was,' etc., is the tune of 
 the French heroics." (^Moore' s Diary, 24th April, 1821.) 
 
I20 DRYDEN 
 
 of their poets, — light and trifling in comparison 
 of the EngUsh." ' 
 
 Dryden might have profited by an admirable 
 saving of his own, that " they who would com- 
 bat general authority with particular opinion 
 must first establish themselves a reputation of 
 understanding better than other men." He 
 understood the defects much better than the 
 beauties of the French theatre. Lessing was 
 even more one-sided in his judgment upon it.* 
 Goethe, with his usual wisdom, studied it care- 
 fully without losing his temper, and tried to 
 profit by its structural merits. Dryden, with his 
 eyes wide open, copied its worst faults, especially 
 its declamatory sentiment. He should have 
 known that certain things can never be trans- 
 planted, and that among these is a style of 
 poetry whose great excellence was that it was in 
 
 ' " The language of the age is never the language of poetry, 
 except among the French, whose verse, v\'here the thought or 
 image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose."' 
 (Gray to West.) 
 
 2 Diderot and Rousseau, however, thought their language 
 unfit for poetry, and Voltaire seems to have half agreed with 
 them. No one has expressed this feeling more neatly than 
 Fauriel: " Nul doute que Ton ne puisse dire en prose des 
 choses eminemment poetiques, tout comme il n'est que trop 
 certain que Ton peut en dire de fort prosaiques en vers, et 
 meme en excellents vers, en vers elegamment tournes, et en 
 beau langage. C'est un fait dont je n'ai pas besoin d'indiquer 
 d'exemples: aucune litterature n'en fournirait autant que le 
 notre." {^Histoire de la Po'esie Proven^ale, ii. 237.) 
 
DRYDEN 121 
 
 perfect sympathy with the genius of the people 
 among whom it came into being. But the truth 
 is, that Dryden had no aptitude whatever for the 
 stage, and in writing for it he was attempting to 
 make a trade of his genius, — an arrangement 
 from which the genius always withdraws in dis- 
 gust. It was easier to make loose thinking and 
 the bad writing which betrays it pass unobserved 
 while the ear was occupied with the sonorous 
 music of the rhyme to which they marched. 
 Except in " All for Love," " the only play," he 
 tells us, "which he wrote to please himself,"' 
 there is no trace of real passion in any of his 
 tragedies. This, indeed, is inevitable, for there 
 are no characters, but only personages, in any 
 except that. That is, in many respects, a noble 
 play, and there are few finer scenes, whether 
 in the conception or the carrying out, than that 
 between Antony and Ventidius in the first act.^ 
 As usual. Dry den's good sense was not blind 
 to the extravagances of his dramatic style. In 
 " Mac Flecknoe " he makes his own Maximin 
 the type of childish rant, — 
 
 "And little Maximins the gods defy "; — 
 
 * Parallel of Poetry and Painting. 
 
 ' " II y a seulement la scene de Ventidius et d'Antoine qui 
 est digne de Corneille. C'est la le sentiment de milord Bo- 
 lingbroke et de tous les bons auteurs; c'est ainsi que pensait 
 Addisson." (Voltaire to M. de Fromont, 15th November, 
 I735-) 
 
122 DRYDEN 
 
 but, as usual also, he could give a plausible rea- 
 son for his own mistakes by means of that most 
 fallacious of all fallacies which is true so far as it 
 goes. In his Prologue to the " Royal Martyr " 
 he says : — 
 
 ** And he who servilely creeps after sense 
 Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence. 
 
 But, when a tyrant for his theme he had. 
 He loosed the reins and let his muse run mad. 
 And, though he stumbles in a full career. 
 Yet rashness is a better fault than fear; 
 
 They then, who of each trip advantage take. 
 
 Find out those faults which they want wit to make." 
 
 And in the Preface to the same play he tells us : 
 " I have not everywhere observed the quality 
 of numbers in my verse, partly by reason of my 
 haste, but more especially because I would not 
 have my sense a slave to syllables.^' Dryden, when 
 he had not a bad case to argue, would have 
 had small respect for the wit whose skill lay in 
 the making of faults, and has himself, where his 
 self-love was not engaged, admirably defined the 
 boundary which divides boldness from rashness. 
 What Quintilian says of Seneca applies very 
 aptly to Dryden : " Velles eum suo ingenio 
 dixisse, alieno judicio." * He was thinking of 
 himself, I fancy, when he makes Ventidius say 
 of Antony, — 
 
 » Inst. X., i. 129. 
 
DRYDEN 123 
 
 ** He starts out wide 
 And bounds into a vice that bears him far 
 From his first course, and plunges him in ills; 
 But, when his danger makes him find his fault, 
 Quick to observe, and full of sharp remorse. 
 He censures eagerly his own misdeeds. 
 Judging himself with malice to himself. 
 And not forgiving what as man he did 
 Because his other parts are more than man." 
 
 But bad though they nearly all are as wholes, 
 his plays contain passages which only the great 
 masters have surpassed, and to the level of 
 which no subsequent writer for the stage has 
 ever risen. The necessity of rhyme often forced 
 him to a platitude, as where he says, — 
 
 ** My love was blind to your deluding art. 
 
 But blind men feel when stabbed so near the heart." ' 
 
 But even in rhyme he not seldom justifies his 
 claim to the title of "glorious John." In the 
 very play from which I have just quoted are 
 these verses in his best manner : — 
 
 "No, like his better Fortune I '11 appear. 
 With open arms, loose veil, and flowing hair. 
 Just flying forward from her rolling sphere." 
 
 His comparisons, as I have said, are almost 
 always happy. This, from the " Indian Em- 
 peror," is tenderly pathetic : — 
 
 *• As callow birds. 
 Whose mother 's killed in seeking of the prey. 
 Cry in their nest and think her long away, 
 
 ' Conquest of Granada, Second Part. 
 
124 DRYDEN 
 
 And, at each leaf that stirs, each blast of wind. 
 Gape for the food which they must never find." 
 
 And this, of the anger with which the Maiden 
 Queen, striving to hide her jealousy, betrays 
 her love, is vigorous : — 
 
 ♦• Her rage was love, and its tempestuous flame. 
 
 Like lightning, showed the heaven from whence it came." 
 
 The following simile from the " Conquest 
 of Granada " is as well expressed as it is apt in 
 conception: — 
 
 ** I scarcely understand my own intent; 
 
 But, silk-worm like, so long within have wrought. 
 That I am lost in my own web of thought." 
 
 In the " Rival Ladies," Angelina, walking in 
 the dark, describes her sensations naturally and 
 strikingly : — 
 
 •* No noise but what my footsteps make, and they 
 Sound dreadfully and louder than by day: 
 They double too, and every step I take 
 Sounds thick, methinks, and more than one could make." 
 
 In all the rhymed plays ' there are many 
 passages which one is rather inclined to like than 
 sure he would be right in liking them. The fol- 
 lowing verses from " Aurengzebe " are of this 
 sort : — 
 
 •' My love was such it needed no return. 
 Rich in itself, like elemental fire. 
 Whose pureness does no aliment require." 
 
 ' In most, he mingles blank verse. 
 
DRYDEN 125 
 
 This is Cowleyish, and pureness is surely the 
 wrong word ; and yet it is better than mere 
 commonplace. Perhaps what oftenest turns the 
 balance in Dryden's favor, when we are weigh- 
 ing his claims as a poet, is his persistent cap- 
 ability of enthusiasm. To the last he kindles, 
 and sometimes almost flashes out that super- 
 natural light which is the supreme test of poetic 
 genius. As he himself so finely and character- 
 istically says in " Aurengzebe," there was no 
 period in his life when it was not true of him 
 that 
 
 *' He felt the inspiring heat, the absent god return." 
 
 The verses which follow are full of him, and, 
 with the exception of the single word underwent, 
 are in his luckiest manner : — 
 
 '* One loose, one sally of a heroe's soul. 
 Does all the military art control. 
 While timorous wit goes round, or fords the shore. 
 He shoots the gulf, and is already o'er. 
 And, when the enthusiastic fit is spent. 
 Looks back amazed at what he underwent." ' 
 
 Pithy sentences and phrases always drop from 
 Dryden's pen as if unawares, whether in prose or 
 verse. I string together a few at random : — 
 
 "The greatest argument for love is love." 
 ** Few know the use of life before 't is past." 
 "Time gives himself and is not valued." 
 
 ' Conquest of Granada. 
 
126 DRYDEN 
 
 ♦Death in itself is nothing; but we fear 
 To be we know not what, we know not where.** 
 
 * Love either finds equality or makes it; 
 
 Like death, he knows no difference in degrees.** 
 
 * That 's empire, that which I can give away." 
 
 ' Yours is a soul irregularly great. 
 Which, wanting temper, yet abounds in heat." 
 
 * Forgiveness to the injured does belong. 
 
 But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong.** 
 
 * Poor women's thoughts are all extempore." 
 
 * The cause of love can never be assigned, 
 'Tis in no face, but in the lover's mind." ' 
 
 ' Heaven can forgive a crime to penitence. 
 For Heaven can judge if penitence be true; 
 But man, who knows not hearts, should make examples. 
 
 ' Kings' titles commonly begin by force. 
 Which time wears off and mellows into right.'* 
 
 * Fear's a large promiser; who subject live 
 
 To that base passion, know not what they give." 
 
 ' The secret pleasure of the generous act 
 Is the great mind's great bribe." 
 
 «*That bad thing, gold, buys all good things." 
 
 ' Why, love does all that 's noble here below.'* 
 
 ** To prove religion true. 
 If either wit or sufferings could suffice, 
 All faiths afford the constant and the wise." 
 
 ' This recalls a striking verse of Alfred de Musset: — 
 " La muse est toujours belle, 
 Meme pour Tinsense, meme pour'l'impuissant, 
 Car sa beaute pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elk.'" 
 
DRYDEN 127 
 
 But Dryden, as he tells us himself, — 
 
 ♦* Grew weary of his long-loved mistress. Rhyme; 
 Passion 's too fierce to be in fetters bound. 
 And Nature flies him like enchanted ground." 
 
 The finest things in his plays were written in 
 blank verse, as vernacular to him as the alexan- 
 drine to the French. In this he vindicates his 
 claim as a poet. His diction gets wings, and both 
 his verse and his thought become capable of a 
 reach which was denied them when set in the 
 stocks of the couplet. The solid man becomes 
 even airy in this new-found freedom : Antony 
 says, — 
 
 " How I loved. 
 Witness ye days and nights, and all ye hours 
 That danced away with down upon your feet. ^* 
 
 And what image was ever more delicately ex- 
 quisite, what movement more fadingly accord- 
 ant with the sense, than in the last two verses of 
 the following passage ? 
 
 *'I feel death rising higher still and higher. 
 Within my bosom; every breath I fetch 
 Shuts up my life within a shorter compass. 
 And, like the vanishing sound of bells, grows less 
 And less each pulse, till it be lost in air. ' ' ' 
 
 Nor was he altogether without pathos, though 
 it is rare with him. The following passage seems 
 to me tenderly full of it : — 
 
 ' Rival Ladies. 
 
128 DRYDEN 
 
 ** Something like 
 That voice methinks, I should have somewhere heard; 
 But floods of woe have hurried it far off 
 Beyond my ken of soul." ' 
 
 And this single verse from " Aurengzebe ": — 
 
 " Live still ! oh live ! live even to be unkind ! " 
 
 with its passionate eagerness and sobbing repe- 
 tition, is worth a ship-load of the long-drawn 
 treacle of modern self-compassion. 
 
 Now and then, to be sure, we come upon some- 
 thing that makes us hesitate again whether, after 
 all, Dryden was not grandiose rather than great, 
 as in the two passages that next follow : — 
 
 ** He looks secure of death, superior greatness. 
 Like Jove when he made Fate and said. Thou art 
 The slave of my creation." ^ 
 
 ** I 'm pleased with my own work; Jove was not more 
 With infant nature, when his spacious hand 
 Had rounded this huge ball of earth and seas. 
 To give it the first push and see it roll 
 Along the vast abyss." 3 
 
 I should say that Dryden is more apt to di- 
 late our fancy than our thought, as great poets 
 have the gift of doing. But if he have not the 
 potent alchemy that transmutes the lead of our 
 commonplace associations into gold, as Shake- 
 speare knows how to do so easily, yet his sense 
 is always up to the sterling standard ; and though 
 
 ' Don Sebastian. * Ibid. 3 Cleomenes. 
 
DRYDEN 129 
 
 he has not added so much as some have done 
 to the stock of bullion which others afterwards 
 coin and put in circulation, there are few who 
 have minted so many phrases that are still a part 
 of our daily currency. The first line of the fol- 
 lowing passage has been worn pretty smooth, 
 but the succeeding ones are less familiar : — 
 
 ** Men are but children of a larger growth. 
 Our appetites as apt to change as theirs. 
 And full as craving too and full as vain; 
 And yet the soul, shut up in her dark room. 
 Viewing so clear abroad, at home sees nothing; 
 But, like a mole in earth, busy and blind. 
 Works all her folly up and casts it outward 
 In the world's open view." ' 
 
 The image is mixed and even contradictory, 
 but the thought obtains grace for it. I feel as if 
 Shakespeare would have written seeing for view- 
 ing^ thus gaining the strength of repetition in 
 one verse and avoiding the sameness of it in the 
 other. Dryden, I suspect, was not much given 
 to correction, and indeed one of the great charms 
 of his best writing is that everything seems struck 
 off at a heat, as by a superior man in the best 
 mood of his talk. Where he rises, he generally 
 becomes fervent rather than imaginative ; his 
 thought does not incorporate itself in metaphor, 
 as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and rein- 
 forces itself in simile. Where he is imaginative, 
 
 ' All for Love. 
 
130 DRYDEN 
 
 it is in that lower sense which the poverty of 
 our language, for want of a better word, com- 
 pels us to call picturesque^ and even then he 
 shows little of that finer instinct which suggests 
 so much more than it tells, and works the more 
 powerfully as it taxes more the imagination of 
 the reader. In Donne's " Relic" there is an 
 example of what I mean. He fancies some one 
 breaking up his grave and spying 
 
 ** A bracelet of bright hair about the bone," — 
 
 a verse that still shines there in the darkness of 
 the tomb, after two centuries, like one of those 
 inextinguishable lamps whose secret is lost.' Yet 
 Dryden sometimes showed a sense of this magic 
 of a mysterious hint, as in the " Spanish 
 Friar": — 
 
 *♦ No, I confess, you bade me not in words; 
 The dial spoke not, but it made shrewd signs. 
 And pointed full upon the stroke of murder." 
 
 This is perhaps a solitary example. Nor is he 
 always so possessed by the image in his mind 
 as unconsciously to choose even the pictur- 
 
 ' Dryden, with his wonted perspicacity, follows Ben Jon- 
 son in calling Donne " the greatest wit, though not the best 
 poet, of our nation." (Dedication o^ Eleonora.^ Even as a 
 poet Donne 
 
 " Had in him those brave translunary things 
 That our first poets had." 
 
 To open vistas for the imagination through the blind wall of 
 the senses, as he could sometimes do, is the supreme function 
 of poetry. 
 
DRYDEN 131 
 
 esquely imaginative word. He has done so, 
 however, in this passage from " Marriage a la 
 Mode": — 
 
 " You ne'er must hope again to see your princess. 
 Except as prisoners view fair walks and streets. 
 And careless passengers going by their grates." 
 
 But after all, he is best upon a level, table-land, 
 it is true, and a very high level, but still some- 
 where between the loftier peaks of inspiration 
 and the plain of every-day life. In those passages 
 where he moralizes he is always good, setting 
 some obvious truth in a new light by vigorous 
 phrase and happy illustration. Take this (from 
 " CEdipus ") as a proof of it : — 
 
 '* The gods are just. 
 But how can finite measure infinite ? 
 Reason ! alas, it does not know itself ! 
 Yet man, vain man, would with his short-lined plummet 
 Fathom the vast abyss of heavenly justice. 
 Whatever is, is in its causes just. 
 Since all things are by fate. But purblind man 
 Sees but a part o' th' chain, the nearest links. 
 His eyes not carrying to that equal beam 
 That poises all above." 
 
 From the same play I pick an illustration of 
 that ripened sweetness of thought and language 
 which marks the natural vein of Dryden. One 
 cannot help applying the passage to the late Mr. 
 Quincy: — 
 
132 DRYDEN 
 
 *' Of no distemper, of no blast he died. 
 
 But fell like autumn fruit that mellowed long. 
 E'en wondered at because he dropt no sooner; 
 Fate seemed to wind him up for fourscore years; 
 Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more. 
 Till, hke a clock worn out with eating Time, 
 The wheels of weary life at last stood still." ' 
 
 Here is another of the same kind from " All for 
 Love " : — 
 
 ** Gone so soon! 
 Is Death no more ? He used him. carelessly. 
 With a familiar kindness; ere he knocked. 
 Ran to the door and took him in his arms. 
 As who should say. You 're welcome at all hours, 
 A friend need give no warning." 
 
 With one more extract from the same play, which 
 is in every way his best, for he had, when he wrote 
 it, been feeding on the bee-bread of Shakespeare, 
 I shall conclude. Antony says, — 
 
 ** For I am now so sunk from what I was. 
 Thou find'st me at my lowest water-mark. 
 The rivers that ran in and raised my fortunes 
 Are all dried up, or take another course: 
 What I have left is from my native spring; 
 I 've a heart still that swells in scorn of Fate, 
 And lifts me to my banks." 
 
 This is certainly, from beginning to end, in what 
 used to be called the grand style, at once noble 
 and natural. I have not undertaken to analyze 
 any one of the plays, for (except in " AH for 
 
 ' My own judgment is my sole warrant for attributing these 
 extracts from (Edipus to Dryden rather than Lee. 
 
DRYDEN 133 
 
 Love ") it would have been only to expose their 
 weakness. Dry den had no constructive faculty ; 
 and in every one of his longer poems that re- 
 quired a plot, the plot is bad, always more or less 
 inconsistent with itself, and rather hitched-on to 
 the subject than combining with it. It is fair 
 to say, however, before leaving this part of Dry- 
 den's literary work, that Home Tooke thought 
 " Don Sebastian " " the best play extant." ' 
 Gray admired the plays of Dryden, "not as dra- 
 matic compositions, but as poetry." ^ " There 
 are as many things finely said in his plays as 
 almost by anybody," said Pope to Spence. Of 
 their rant, their fustian, their bombast, their bad 
 English, of their innumerable sins against Dry- 
 den's own better conscience both as poet and 
 critic, I shall excuse myself from giving any 
 instances.^ I like what is good in Dryden so 
 
 ' Recollections of Rogers, p. 165. 
 
 2 Nicholls's Reminiscences of Gray. Pickering's edition of 
 Gray's Works, vol. v. p. 35. 
 
 3 Let one suffice for all. In the Royal Martyr, Porphyrius, 
 waiting his execution, says to Maximin, who had wished him 
 for a son-in-law: — 
 
 *' Where'er thou stand' st, I '11 level at that place 
 My gushing blood, and spout it at thy face ; 
 Thus not by marriage we our blood will join ; 
 Nay, more, my arms shall throw my head at thine." 
 
 ** It is no shame," says Dryden himself, "to be a poet, 
 though it is to be a bad one." Cibber seems to say that the 
 audience could not help laughing at Dryden' s Rhodomontades 
 as he calls them. 
 
134 DRYDEN 
 
 much, and it is so good, that I think Gray was 
 justified in always losing his temper when he 
 heard " his faults criticised.".' 
 
 It is as a satirist and pleader in verse that 
 Dryden is best known, and as both he is in some 
 respects unrivalled. His satire is not so sly as 
 Chaucer's, but it is distinguished by the same 
 good nature. There is no malice in it. I shall 
 not enter into his literary quarrels further than 
 to say that he seems to me, on the whole, to have 
 been forbearing, which is the more striking as he 
 tells us repeatedly that he was naturally vindic- 
 tive. It was he who called revenge " the darling 
 attribute of heaven." " I complain not of their 
 lampoons and libels, though I have been the 
 public mark for many years. I am vindictive 
 enough to have repelled force by force, if I could 
 imagine that any of them had ever reached me." 
 It was this feeling of easy superiority, I suspect, 
 that made him the mark for so much jealous 
 vituperation. Scott is wrong in attributing his 
 onslaught upon Settle to jealousy because one 
 of the latter's plays had been performed at Court, 
 — an honor never paid to any of Dryden's.,' 
 
 ' Gray, ul>i supra, p. 38. 
 
 2 Scott had never seen Pepys's Diary when he wrote this, 
 or he would have left it unwritten: ** Fell to discourse of the 
 last night's work at Court, where the ladies and Duke of 
 Monmouth acted the Indian Emperor wherein they told me 
 these things most remarkable that not any woman but the 
 Duchess of Monmouth and Mrs. Cornwallis did anything but 
 
DRYDEN 135 
 
 I have found nothing Hke a trace of jealousy in 
 that large and benignant nature. In his vindi- 
 cation of the " Duke of Guise,'* he says, with 
 honest confidence in himself: " Nay, I durst 
 almost refer myself to some of the angry poets 
 on the other side, whether I have not rather 
 countenanced and assisted their beginnings than 
 hindered them from rising." He seems to have 
 been really as indifferent to the attacks on him- 
 self as Pope pretended to be. In the same 
 vindication he says of the" Rehearsal," the only 
 one of them that had any wit in it, and it has 
 a great deal : " Much less am I concerned at the 
 noble name of Bayes ; that's a brat so like his 
 own father that he cannot be mistaken for any 
 other body. They might as reasonably have 
 called Tom Sternhold Virgil, and the resem- 
 blance would have held as well." In his " Essay 
 on Satire " he says : " And yet we know that in 
 Christian charity all offences are to be forgiven 
 as we expect the like pardon for those we daily 
 commit against Almighty God. And this con- 
 sideration has often made me tremble when I 
 was saying our Lord's Prayer; for the plain con- 
 dition of the forgiveness which we beg is the par- 
 doning of others the offences which they have 
 
 like fools and stocks, but that these two did do most extraor- 
 dinary T^ell; that not any man did anything well but Captain 
 O' Bryan, who spoke and did well, but above all things did 
 dance most incomparably." ( 1 4th January, 1668.) • 
 
136 DRYDEN 
 
 done to us ; for which reason I have many times 
 avoided the commission of that fault, even when 
 1 have been notoriously provoked." ' And in 
 another passage he says, with his usual wisdom : 
 " Good sense and good nature are never sep- 
 arated, though the ignorant world has thought 
 otherwise. Good nature, by which I mean bene- 
 ficence and candor, is the product of right reason, 
 which of necessity will give allowance to the 
 failings of others, by considering that there is 
 nothing perfect in mankind." In the same Es- 
 say he gives his own receipt for satire : " How 
 easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wit- 
 tily ! but how hard to make a man appear a fool, 
 a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of 
 those opprobrious terms ! . . . This is the mys- 
 tery of that noble trade. . . . Neither is it true 
 that this fineness of raillery is offensive : a witty 
 man is tickled while he is hurt in this manner, 
 and a fool feels it not. . . . There is a vast dif- 
 ference between the slovenly butchering of a 
 man and the fineness of a stroke that separates 
 the head from the body, and leaves it standing 
 in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack 
 Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece 
 of work, of a bare hanging ; but to make a male- 
 factor die sweetly was only belonging to her 
 
 ' See also that noble passage in The Hind and the Panther 
 (1573-1591), where this is put into verse. Dry den always 
 thought in prose. 
 
DRYDEN 137 
 
 husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if 
 the reader would be kind enough to think it 
 belongs to me. The character of Zimri in my 
 * Absalom ' is, in my opinion, worth the whole 
 poem. It is not bloody, but it is ridiculous 
 enough, and he for whom it was intended was 
 too witty to resent it as an injury. ... I 
 avoided the mention of great crimes, and ap- 
 plied myself to the representing of blind sides 
 and little extravagances, to which, the wittier 
 a man is, he is generally the more obnoxious." 
 Dryden thought his genius led him that way. 
 In his elegy on the satirist Oldham, whom 
 Hallam, without reading him, I suspect, ranks 
 next to Dryden,' he says: — 
 
 ** For sure our souls were near allied, and thine 
 Cast in the same poetic mould with mine; 
 One common note in either lyie did strike, 
 And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike." 
 
 His practice is not always so delicate as his 
 theory ; but if he was sometimes rough, he never 
 took a base advantage. He knocks his antag- 
 onist down, and there an end. Pope seems to 
 have nursed his grudge, and then, watching his 
 chance, to have squirted vitriol from behind a 
 corner, rather glad than otherwise if it fell on 
 
 ^ Probably on the authority of this very epitaph, as if epi- 
 taphs were to be believed even under oath! A great many 
 authors live because we read nothing but their tombstones. 
 Oldham was, to borrow one of Dryden's phrases, "a. bad 
 or, which is worse, an indifferent poet." 
 
138 DRYDEN 
 
 the women of those he hated or envied. And 
 if Dryden is never dastardly, as Pope often was, 
 so also he never wrote anything so maliciously 
 depreciatory as Pope's unprovoked attack on 
 Addison. Dryden's satire is often coarse, but 
 where it is coarsest, it is commonly in defence 
 of himself against attacks that were themselves 
 brutal. Then, to be sure, he snatches the first 
 ready cudgel, as in Shadwell's case, though even 
 then there is something of the good humor 
 of conscious strength. Pope's provocation was 
 too often the mere opportunity to say a biting 
 thing, where he could do it safely. If his victim 
 showed fight, he tried to smooth things over, as 
 with Dennis and Hill. Dryden could forget that 
 he had ever had a quarrel, but he never slunk 
 away from any, least of all from one provoked 
 by himself' Pope's satire is too much occupied 
 with the externals of manners, habits, personal 
 defects, and peculiarities. Dryden goes right 
 to the rooted character of the man, to the 
 weaknesses of his nature, as where he says of 
 Burnett : — 
 
 ** Prompt to assail, and careless of defence. 
 Invulnerable in his impudence. 
 He dares the world, and, eager of a name. 
 He thrusts about znd justks into fame. 
 
 • ** He was of a nature exceedingly humane and compas- 
 sionate, easily forgiving injuries, and capable of a prompt and 
 sincere reconciliation Wwh them that had offended him." 
 (Congreve.) 
 Ill 
 
DRYDEN 139 
 
 So fond of loud report that, not to miss 
 Of being known (his last and utmost bliss). 
 He rather would be known for what he is." 
 
 It would be hard to find in Pope such com- 
 pression of meaning as in the first, or such 
 penetrative sarcasm as in the second of the 
 passages I have underscored. Dryden's satire 
 is still quoted for its comprehensiveness of ap- 
 plication, Pope's rather for the elegance of its 
 finish and the point of its phrase than for any- 
 deeper qualities/ I do not remember that Dry- 
 den ever makes poverty a reproach/ He was 
 above it, alike by generosity of birth and mind. 
 Pope is always the parvenu, always giving him- 
 self the airs of a fine gentleman, and, like Horace 
 Walpole and Byron, affecting superiority to pro- 
 
 ' Coleridge says excellently: "You will find this a good 
 gauge or criterion of genius, — whether it progresses and 
 evolves, or only spins upon itself. Take Dryden's Achitophel 
 and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which 
 is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in 
 Pope's Timon, etc., the first two or three couplets contain all 
 the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that 
 follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, 
 or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized." (^Table- 
 Talk, 192.) Some of Dryden's best satirical hits are let fall 
 by seeming accident in his prose, as where he says of his 
 Protestant assailants, '♦ Most of them love all whores but her 
 of Babylon." They had first attacked him on the score of his 
 private morals. 
 
 ^ That he taxes Shadwell with it is only a seeming excep- 
 tion, as any careful reader will see. 
 
HO . DRYDEN 
 
 fessional literature. Dry den, like Lessmg,was a 
 hack-writer, and was proud, as an honest man 
 has a right to be, of being able to get his bread 
 by his brains. He lived in Grub Street all his 
 life, and never dreamed that where a man of 
 genius lived was not the best quarter of the 
 town. " Tell his Majesty," said sturdy old 
 Jonson, "that his soul lives in an alley." 
 
 Dry den's prefaces are a mine of good writing 
 and judicious criticism. His obiter dicta have 
 often the penetration, and always more than the 
 equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses 
 temper, and never altogether qualifies his judg- 
 ment by his self-love. " He was a more uni- 
 versal writer than Voltaire," said Home Tooke, 
 and perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, 
 though his learning was neither so extensive nor 
 so accurate. My space will not afford many ex- 
 tracts, but I cannot forbear one or two. He says 
 of Chaucer, that " he is a perpetual fountain of 
 good sense," ' and likes him better than Ovid, 
 — a bold confession in that day. He prefers 
 the pastorals of Theocritus to those of Virgil. 
 " Virgil's shepherds are too well read in the 
 philosophy of Epicurus and of Plato " ; " there 
 is a kind of rusticity in all those pompous 
 verses, somewhat of a holiday shepherd strut- 
 ting in his country buskins " ; ^ " Theocritus is 
 
 ' Preface to Fables. 
 
 ' Dedication of the Georgics. 
 
DRYDEN HI 
 
 softer than Ovid, he touches the passions more 
 delicately, and performs all this out of his own 
 fund, without diving into the arts and sciences 
 for a supply. Even his Doric dialect has an 
 incomparable sweetness in his clownishness, like 
 a fair shepherdess, in her country russet, talk- 
 ing in a Yorkshire tone." ' Comparing Virgil's 
 verse with that of some other poets, he says, 
 that his " numbers are perpetually varied to 
 increase the delight of the reader, so that the 
 same sounds are never repeated twice together. 
 On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though 
 they write in styles different from each other, 
 yet have each of them but one sort of music 
 in their verses. All the versification and little 
 variety of Claudian is included within the com- 
 pass of four or five lines, and then he begins 
 again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his 
 sense at the end of a verse, and that verse com- 
 monly which they call golden, or two substan- 
 tives and two adjectives with a verb betwixt 
 them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his 
 sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and 
 sound as he ; he is always, as it were, upon the 
 hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet- 
 ground." ^ What a dreary half century would 
 have been saved to English poetry, could Pope 
 have laid these sentences to heart, who, accord- 
 
 ' Preface to Second Miscellany, 
 » Ibid. 
 
142 DRYDEN 
 
 ing to Spence, " learned versification wholly 
 from Dryden's works " ! Upon translation, no 
 one has written so much and so well as Dryden 
 in his various prefaces. Whatever has been said 
 since is either expansion or variation of what he 
 had said before. His general theory may be 
 stated as an aim at something between the literal- 
 ness of metaphrase and the looseness of para- 
 phrase. " Where I have enlarged," he says, " I 
 desire the false critics would not always think 
 that those thoughts are wholly mine, but either 
 they are secretly in the poet^ or may be fairly 
 deduced from him." Coleridge, with his usual 
 cleverness of assimilation^ has condensed him in 
 a letter to Wordsworth : " There is no medium 
 between a prose version and one on the avowed 
 principle of compensation in the widest sense, i. e. 
 manner, genius, total effect." ' 
 
 I have selected these passages, not because 
 they are the best, but because they have a near 
 application to Dryden himself. His own char- 
 acterization of Chaucer (though too narrow for 
 the greatest but one of English poets) is the 
 best that could be given of himself: " He is a 
 perpetual fountain of good sense." And the 
 other passages show him a close and open- 
 minded student of the art he professed. Has 
 his influence on our literature, but especially on 
 our poetry, been on the whole for good or evil ? 
 ' Memoirs of Wordsworth, \o\.\\.Y>' 74 (American edition). 
 
DRYDEN H3 
 
 If he could have been read with the liberal un- 
 derstanding which he brought to the works of 
 others, I should answer at once that it had been 
 beneficial. But his translations and paraphrases, 
 in some ways the best things he did, were done, 
 like his plays, under contract to deliver a certain 
 number of verses for a specified sum. The ver- 
 sification, of which he had learned the art by 
 long practice, is excellent, but his haste has led 
 him to fill out the measure of lines with phrases 
 that add only to dilute, and thus the clearest, 
 the most direct, the most manly versifier of his 
 time became, without meaning it, the source 
 {fons et origo malorum) of that poetic diction from 
 which our poetry has not even yet recovered. 
 I do not like to say it, but he has sometimes 
 smothered the child-like simplicity of Chaucer 
 under feather-beds of verbiage. What this kind 
 of thing came to in the next century, when 
 everybody ceremoniously took a bushel-basket 
 to bring a wren's egg to market in, is only too 
 sadly familiar. It is clear that his natural taste 
 led Dryden to prefer directness and simplicity 
 of style. If he was too often tempted astray by 
 Artifice, his love of Nature betrays itself in many 
 an almost passionate outbreak of angry remorse. 
 Addison tells us that he took particular delight 
 in the reading of our old English ballads. What 
 he valued above all things was Force, though 
 in his haste he is willing to make a shift with its 
 
144 DRYDEN 
 
 counterfeit, Effect. As usual, he had a good 
 reason to urge for what he did : " I will not 
 excuse, but justify myself for one pretended 
 crime for which I am liable to be charged by 
 false critics, not only in this translation, but in 
 many of my original poems, — that I Latinize 
 too much. It is true that when 1 find an English 
 word significant and sounding, I neither borrow 
 from the Latin or any other language ; but when 
 I want at home I must seek abroad. If sound- 
 ing words are not of our growth and manufacture, 
 who shall hinder me to import them from a 
 foreign country ? I carry not out the treasure 
 of the nation which is never to return ; but what 
 I bring from Italy I spend in England : here 
 it remains, and here it circulates ; for if the coin 
 be good, it will pass from one hand to another. 
 I trade both with the living and the dead for 
 the enrichment of our native language. We 
 have enough in England to supply our necessity; 
 but if we will have things of magnificence and 
 splendor, we m.ust get them by commerce. . . . 
 Therefore, if I find a word in a classic author, I 
 propose it to be naturalized by using it myself, 
 and if the public approve of it the bill passes. 
 But every man cannot distinguish betwixt ped- 
 antry and poetry ; every man, therefore, is not 
 fit to innovate." ' This is admirably said, and 
 
 ■ A Discourse of Epick Poetry. " If the public approve." 
 «* On ne peut pas admettre dans le developpement des Ian- 
 
DRYDEN H5 
 
 with Dryden's accustomed penetration to the 
 root of the matter. The Latin has given us 
 most of our canorous words, only they must 
 not be confounded with merely sonorous ones, 
 still less with phrases that, instead of supple- 
 menting the sense, encumber it. It was of 
 Latinizing in this sense that Dryden was guilty. 
 Instead of stabbing, he "with steel invades 
 the life." The consequence was that by and 
 by we have Dr. Johnson's poet, Savage, telling 
 us, — 
 
 *' In front, a parlor meets my entering view. 
 Opposed a room to sweet refection due " ; — 
 
 Dr. Blacklock making a forlorn maiden say of 
 her "dear," who is out late, — 
 
 «* Or by some apoplectic fit deprest 
 
 Perhaps, alas! he seeks eternal rest" ; — 
 
 and Mr. Bruce, in a Danish war-song, calling 
 on the Vikings to " assume their oars." But it 
 must be admitted of Dryden that he seldom 
 makes the second verse of a couplet the mere 
 trainbearer to the first, as Pope was continually 
 doing. In Dryden the rhyme waits upon the 
 thought; in Pope and his school the thought 
 curtsys to the tune for which it is written. 
 
 gues aucune revolution artificielle et sciemment executee; il 
 n'y a pour elles ni conciles, ni assemblees deliberantes; on 
 neles reforme pas comma une constitution vicieuse." (Renan, 
 De P Origine du Langage, p. 95.) 
 
146 DRYDEN 
 
 Dryden has also been blamed for his galli- 
 cisms.' He tried some, it is true, but they have 
 not been accepted. I do not think he added a 
 single word to the language, unless, as I suspect, 
 he first used magnetism in its present sense of 
 moral attraction. What he did in his best writ- 
 ing was to use the English as if it were a spoken, 
 and not merely an inkhorn language ; as if it 
 were his own to do what he pleased with it, as 
 if it need not be ashamed of itself.^ In this re- 
 spect, his service to our prose was greater than 
 any other man has ever rendered. He says he 
 formed his style upon Tillotson's (Bossuet, on 
 the other hand, formed his upon Corneille's) ; 
 but I rather think he got it at Will's, for its 
 great charm is that it has the various freedom of 
 
 ' This is an old complaint. Puttenham sighs over such 
 innovation in Elizabeth's time, and Carew in James's. A 
 language grows, and is not made. Almost all the new-fangled 
 words with which Johnson in his Poetaster taxes Marston are 
 now current. 
 
 2 Like most idiomatic, as distinguished from correct writers, 
 he knew very little about the language historically or critically. 
 His prose and poetry swarm with locutions that would have 
 made Lindley Murray's hair stand on end. How little he 
 knew is plain from his criticising in Ben Jonson the use of one's 
 in the plural, of " Though Heaven should speak with all his 
 wrath," and be "as false English for are, though the rhyme 
 hides it." Yet all are good English, and I have found them 
 all in Dryden' s own waiting ! Of his sins against idiom I have 
 a longer list than I have room for. And yet he is one of our 
 highest authorities for real English. 
 
DRYDEN 147 
 
 talk.' In verse, he had a pomp which, excellent 
 in itself, became pompousness in his imitators. 
 But he had nothing of Milton's ear for various 
 rhythm and interwoven harmony. He knew 
 how to give new modulation, sweetness, and 
 force to the pentameter ; but in what used to 
 be called pindarics, I am heretic enough to think 
 he generally failed. His so much praised "Alex- 
 ander's Feast " (in parts of it, at least) has no 
 excuse for its slovenly metre and awkward ex- 
 pression, but that it was written for music. He 
 himself tells us, in the epistle dedicatory to 
 *' King Arthur," " that the numbers of poetry 
 and vocal music are sometimes so contrary, that 
 in many places I have been obliged to cramp my 
 verses and make them rugged to the reader that 
 they may be harmonious to the hearer." His 
 renowned ode suffered from this constraint, but 
 this is no apology for the vulgarity of concep- 
 tion in too many passages.^ 
 
 ' To see what he rescued us from in pedantry on the one 
 hand, and vulgarism on the other, read Feltham and Tom 
 Brown — if you can. 
 
 ^ " Cette ode, mise en musique par Purcell (si je ne me 
 trompe), passe en Angleterre pour le chef-d' ceuvre de la 
 poesie la plus sublime et la plus variee; et je vous avoue que, 
 comme je sais mieux I'anglais que le grec, j'aime cent fois 
 mieux cette ode que tout Pindare." (Voltaire to M. de 
 Chabanon, 9 mars, 1772.) 
 
 Dryden would have agreed with Voltaire. When Chief- 
 Justice Marlay, then a young Templar, "congratulated him 
 
h8 dryden 
 
 Dryden's conversion to Romanism has been 
 commonly taken for granted as insincere, and 
 has therefore left an abiding stain on his charac- 
 ter, though the other mud thrown at him by 
 angry opponents or rivals brushed off so soon as 
 it was dry. But I think his change of faith sus- 
 ceptible of several explanations, none of them in 
 any way discreditable to him. Where Church 
 and State are habitually associated, it is natural 
 that minds even of a high order should uncon- 
 sciously come to regard religion as only a subt- 
 ler mode of police.' Dryden, conservative by 
 nature, had discovered before Joseph de Maistre, 
 that Protestantism, so long as it justified its name 
 by continuing to be an active principle, was the 
 abettor of Republicanism, perhaps the vanguard 
 of Anarchy. I think this is hinted in more than 
 one passage in his preface to " The Hind and 
 the Panther." He may very well have preferred 
 Romanism because of its elder claim to author- 
 ity In all matters of doctrine, but I think he had 
 a deeper reason in the constitution of his own 
 mind. That he was " naturally inclined to scep- 
 ticism In philosophy," he tells us of himself in 
 
 on having produced the finest and noblest Ode that had ever 
 been written in any language, * You are right, young gentle- 
 man [replied Dryden], a nobler Ode never was produced, 
 nor ever w/7/.' " (Malone.) 
 
 ' This was true of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and still more 
 of Southey, who in some respects was not unlike Dryden. 
 
DRYDEN H9 
 
 the Preface to the *' ReHgio Laid " ; but he was 
 a sceptic with an imaginative side, and in such 
 characters scepticism and superstition play into 
 each other's hands. This finds a curious illus- 
 tration in a letter to his sons, written four years 
 before his death : " Towards the latter end of 
 this month, September, Charles will begin to 
 recover his perfect health, according to his Na- 
 tivity, which, casting it myself, I am sure is true, 
 and all things hitherto have happened accord- 
 ingly to the very time that I predicted them." 
 Have we forgotten Montaigne's votive offerings 
 at the shrine of Loreto ? 
 
 Dryden was short of body, inclined to stout- 
 ness, and florid of complexion. He is said to 
 have had " a sleepy eye," but was handsome 
 and of a manly carriage. He " was not a very 
 genteel man, he was intimate with none but poet- 
 ical men.' He was said to be a very good man 
 by all that knew him : he was as plump as Mr. 
 Pitt, of a fresh color and a down look, and not 
 very conversible." So Pope described him to 
 Spence. He was friendly to rising merit, as to 
 
 ' Pope's notion of gentility was perhaps expressed in a letter 
 from Lord Cobham to him: " I congratulate you upon the fine 
 weather. 'Tis a strange thing that people of condition and 
 men of parts must enjoy it in common with the rest of the 
 world." (RufFhead's Pope, p. 276, note.) His Lordship's 
 naive distinction between people of condition and men of parts 
 is as good as Pope's between genteel and poetical men. I fancy 
 the poet grinning savagely as he read it. 
 
I50 DRYDEN 
 
 Congreve, for instance. Cibber says he was a 
 poor reader. He still reigns in literary tradition, 
 as when at Will's' his elbow-chair had the best 
 place by the fire in winter, or on the balcony in 
 summer, and when a pinch from his snuff-box 
 made a young author blush with pleasure as 
 would nowadays a favorable notice in the " Sat- 
 urday Review." What gave and secures for him 
 this singular eminence ? To put it in a single 
 word, I think that his qualities and faculties were 
 in that rare combination which makes character. 
 This g^YQ. flavor to whatever he wrote — a very 
 rare quality. 
 
 Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the 
 narrowest definition. But he was a strong thinker 
 who sometimes carried common sense to a height 
 where it catches the light of a diviner air, and 
 warmed reason till it had well-nigh the illuminat- 
 ing property of Intuition. Certainly he is not, 
 like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have 
 also their rights. Even the Philistine is a man 
 and a brother, and is entirely right so far as he 
 sees. To demand more of him is to be unrea- 
 sonable. And he sees, among other things, that 
 a man who undertakes to write should first have 
 a meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then 
 should be able to set it forth clearly in the best 
 
 * ** This may confine their younger styles ' 
 
 Whom Dry den pedagogues at Will's." 
 
 (Prior, Epistle to Shephard, 1689.) 
 
DRYDEN 151 
 
 words. This is precisely Dryden's praise,' and 
 amid the rickety sentiment looming big through 
 misty phrase which marks so much of modern 
 literature, to read him is as bracing as a north- 
 west wind. He blows the mind clear. In mind 
 and manner his foremost quality is energy. In 
 ripeness of mind and bluff heartiness of expres- 
 sion, he takes rank with the best. His phrase is 
 always a short cut to his sense, for his estate was 
 too spacious for him to need that trick of wind- 
 ing the path of his thought about, and planting 
 it out with clumps of epithet, by which the land- 
 scape-gardeners of literature give to a paltry 
 half acre the air of a park. In poetry, to be 
 next-best is, in one sense, to be nothing; and 
 yet to be among the first in any kind of writing, 
 as Dryden certainly was, is to be one of a very 
 small company. He had, beyond most, the 
 gift of the right word. And if he does not, 
 like one or two of the greater masters of song, 
 stir our sympathies by that indefinable aroma 
 so magical in arousing the subtile associations 
 of the soul, he has this in common with the 
 few great writers, that the winged seeds of his 
 thought embed themselves in the memory and 
 germinate there. If I could be guilty of the 
 absurdity of recommending to a young man any 
 
 • "Nothing is truly sublime," he himself said, " that is 
 not just and proper." Sir Henry Wotton said of Sidney that 
 ** his wit was the very measure of congruity. " 
 
152 DRYDEN 
 
 author on whom to form his style, I should tell 
 him that, next to having something that will not 
 stay unsaid, he could find no safer guide than 
 Dryden, 
 
 Cowper, in a letter to Mr. Unwin (5th Janu- 
 ary, 1782), expresses what I think is the com- 
 mon feeling about Dryden, that, with all his 
 defects, he had that indefinable something we call 
 Genius. " But I admire Dryden most [he had 
 been speaking of Pope], who has succeeded by 
 mere dint of genius, and in spite of a laziness 
 and a carelessness almost peculiar to himself. 
 His faults are numberless, and so are his beau- 
 ties. His faults are those of a great man, and 
 his beauties are such (at least sometimes) as 
 Pope with all his touching and retouching could 
 never equal." But, after all, perhaps no man 
 has summed him up so well as John Dennis, 
 one of Pope's typical dunces, a dull man outside 
 of his own sphere, as men are apt to be, but who 
 had some sound notions as a critic, and thus 
 became the object of Pope's fear and therefore 
 of his resentment. Dennis speaks of him as his 
 " departed friend, whom I infinitely esteemed 
 when living for the solidity of his thought, for 
 the spring and the warmth and the beautiful turn 
 of it; for the power and variety and fulness of 
 his harmony ; for the purity, the perspicuity, the 
 energy of his expression ; and, whenever these 
 great qualities are required, for the pomp and 
 
DRYDEN 153 
 
 solemnity and majesty of his style." ' And yet 
 there is something unhappily suggestive in what 
 Congreve accidentally lets drop in describing his 
 funeral, where, he says, " We had an ode in 
 Horace sung instead of David's Psalms." His 
 burial, he tells us, " was the same with his life: 
 variety and not of a piece ; the quality and mob ; 
 farce and heroics ; the sublime and ridicule mixt 
 in a piece ; great Cleopatra in a hackney-coach." 
 I know not how true this may be, but the last 
 phrase better characterizes Dryden's poetry in 
 four words than a page of disquisition could. 
 But he knew how to " give his soul a loose," 
 and ours too, as only the great know. 
 
 ' Dennis, in a letter to Tonson, 1 7 1 5 . 
 
POPE 
 
 1871 
 
 THE condition of the English mind at 
 the close of the seventeenth century 
 was such as to make it particularly sen- 
 sitive to the magnetism which streamed to it 
 from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both 
 in politics and religion had been put out of 
 joint. A generation of materialists, by the 
 natural rebound which inevitably follows over- 
 tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of 
 the Puritans. As always when a political revo- 
 lution has been wrought by moral agencies, the 
 plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the 
 greedy, selfish and unscrupulous, whose dis- 
 gusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to 
 piety itself. Religion, from a burning convic- 
 tion of the soul, had grown to be with both 
 parties a political badge, as little typical of the 
 inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sin- 
 cerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole 
 being, and the pretence of it saps the very foun- 
 dation of character. There seems to have been 
 an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, 
 that is, with an outward conformity in the inter- 
 est of decorum and order. There was an unbe- 
 lief that did not believe even in itself. 
 
POPE 155 
 
 The difference between the leading minds of 
 the former age and that which was supplanting 
 it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton 
 was willing to peril the success of his crowning 
 work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse 
 for his theological convictions. What was that 
 Fame 
 
 "Which the clear spirit doth raise 
 To scorn delights and live laborious days " — 
 
 to the crown of a good preacher who sets 
 
 " The hearts of men on fire 
 To scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire " ? 
 
 Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could 
 write a book whose moral, if it had any, was 
 that one religion .was as good as another, since 
 all were political devices, and accepted a cure 
 of souls when it was more than doubtful whether 
 he believed that his fellow creatures had any 
 souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they 
 were worth saving. The answer which Pulci's 
 Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if 
 he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have 
 expressed well enough the creed of the majority 
 of that generation : — 
 
 " To tell thee truly. 
 My faith in black 's no greater than in azure. 
 
 But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli. 
 And in good wine my faith 's beyond all measure." * 
 
 ' Morgante, xs\\\. 115. 
 
156 POPE 
 
 It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when 
 men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at 
 once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their 
 interest, when they could swear one allegiance 
 and keep on safe terms with the other, when 
 prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could 
 be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, wh-en 
 even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pen- 
 sioner of France. What morality there was, 
 was the morality of appearances, of the side 
 that is turned toward men and not toward God. 
 The very shamelessness of Congreve is refresh- 
 ing in that age of sham. 
 
 It was impossible that anything truly great, 
 that is, great on the moral and emotional as well 
 as the intellectual side, should be produced by 
 such a generation. But something intellectually 
 great could be and was. The French mind, al- 
 ways stronger in perceptive and analytic than in 
 imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and 
 finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 
 power to the scientific regulation whether of 
 politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy 
 and the elegant arts of society to as great per- 
 fection as was possible by the a priori method. 
 Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion 
 within the magic circle of courtliness, or to com- 
 bine the appearance of careless ease and gayety 
 of thought with intellectual exactness of state- 
 ment. The eternal watchfulness of a wit that 
 
POPE 157 
 
 never slept had made it distrustful of the natural 
 emotions and the unconventional expression 
 of them, and its first question about a senti- 
 ment was, Will it be safe ? about a phrase. Will 
 it pass with the Academy ? The effect of its 
 example on English literature would appear 
 chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point 
 and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and 
 these in conveying conventional sentiments and 
 emotions, in appealing to good society rather 
 than to human nature. Its influence would be 
 greatest where its success had been most marked, 
 in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen 
 province was manners, and in which satire, with 
 its avenging scourge, took the place of that pro- 
 founder art whose office it was to purify, not 
 the manners, but the source of them in the soul, 
 by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole 
 school of French criticism, it seems to me, lay 
 in its tendency to confound what was common 
 with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive defer- 
 ence to authority at the expense of all free move- 
 ment of the mind. 
 
 There are certain defects of taste which cor- 
 rect themselves by their own extravagance. Lan- 
 guage, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by 
 the charm of some master of it, like Milton, 
 than by any amount of precept. The influence 
 of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephem- 
 eral, for true style, the joint result of culture 
 
158 POPE 
 
 and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine 
 manners always are, in whatever clothes. Per- 
 haps some reform was needed when Quarles, 
 who had no mean gift of poesy, could write, — 
 
 ** My passion has no April in her eyes: 
 I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle; 
 My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 
 Slight drops." ' 
 
 Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines 
 itself to its own rightful province of the proprie- 
 ties, but when it attempts to correct those pro- 
 found instincts out of whose judgments the 
 higher principles of esthetics have been formu- 
 lated, its success is a disaster. During the era 
 when the French theory of poetry was supreme, 
 we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, 
 from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses 
 image and thought in one, to simile, which sets 
 one beside the other, from the supreme code 
 of the natural sympathies to the parochial by- 
 laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively 
 Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry that 
 it should be unconventional, that the soul of 
 
 * Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led 
 astray by the vices of Donne's manner, he had good company 
 in Herbert and Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had 
 that luck of simpleness which is even more delightful than wit. 
 In the same poem he says, — 
 
 " Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 
 In Abram's bosom, in the sacred doivn 
 Of ioft eternity. ' ' 
 
POPE 159 
 
 it should subordinate the outward parts; while 
 the artificial method proceeds from a principle 
 the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the 
 form. 
 
 Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the 
 epilogue to the " Maid's Tragedy " : — 
 
 " Nor is 't less strange such mighty wits as those 
 Should use a style in tragedy like prose; 
 Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage. 
 Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." 
 
 That it should be beneath the dignity of princes 
 to speak in anything but rhyme can only be 
 paralleled by Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can 
 go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, 
 I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one 
 cannot be positive, uses " describe " in its Latin 
 sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear con- 
 lined to this go-cart ! Phillips touches the true 
 point when he says, " And the truth is, the use 
 of measure alone, without any rime at all, would 
 give far more ample scope and liberty both to 
 style and fancy than can possibly be observed 
 in rime." ' But let us test Waller's method by 
 an example or two. His monarch made reason- 
 able thus discourses : — 
 
 " Courage our greatest failings does supply. 
 And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 
 Life is a thing of common use; by heaven 
 As well to insects as to monarchs given; 
 
 ' Preface to the T heat rum. 
 
i6o POPE 
 
 But for the crown, 'tis a more sacred thing; 
 
 I '11 dying lose it, or I '11 live a king. 
 
 Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 
 
 And of a matter of importance talk." ^Exeunt. 
 
 Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as 
 here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal 
 distance, where it is in keeping with more im- 
 passioned parts, but commonplace set to this 
 rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is 
 nothing here to remind us of the older tragic 
 style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy con- 
 ciseness and the relief which it brings us from 
 his majesty's prosing give it an almost poetical 
 savor. Aspatia's reflections upon suicide (or 
 "suppressing our breath," as she calls it), in 
 the same play, will make few readers regret that 
 Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted bar- 
 barism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy on 
 the same topic : — 
 
 *• 'Twas in compassion of our woe 
 That Nature first made poisons grow. 
 For hopeless wretches such as I 
 Kindly providing means to die: 
 As mothers do their children keep. 
 So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. 
 The indisposed she does invite 
 To go to bed before 't is night." 
 
 Correctness in this case is but a synonym of 
 monotony, and words are chosen for the num- 
 ber of their syllables, for their rubbishy value 
 
POPE i6i 
 
 to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet 
 by the meaning which occupies the mind. Lan- 
 guage becomes useful for its diluting properties, 
 rather than as the medium by means of which 
 the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in 
 crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. 
 Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference 
 between the rude and the reformed styles. This 
 also shall be a speech of Aspatia's. Antiphila, 
 one of her maidens, is working the story of 
 Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older 
 masters loved a picturesque background and 
 knew the value of fanciful accessories. Aspatia 
 thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough : — 
 
 " Do it by me. 
 Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
 And you shall find all true but the wild island. 
 Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now. 
 Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind. 
 Wild as that desert; and let all about me 
 Be teachers of my story. Do my face 
 (If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) 
 Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me look 
 Like sorrow's monument; and the trees about me 
 Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks 
 Groan with continual surges; and behind me 
 Make all a desolation." 
 
 What instinctive felicity of versification I what 
 sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are 
 here ! 
 
i62 POPE 
 
 We see what the direction of the new tend- 
 ency was, but it would be an inadequate or a 
 dishonest criticism that should hold Pope re- 
 sponsible for the narrow compass of the instru- 
 ment which was his legacy from his immediate 
 predecessors, any more than for the wearisome 
 thrumming-over of his tune by those who came 
 after him and who had caught his technical skill 
 without his genius. The question properly stated 
 is, How much was it possible to make of the 
 material supplied by the age in which he lived ? 
 and how much did he make of it ? Thus far, 
 among the great English poets who preceded 
 him, we have seen actual life represented by 
 Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life 
 by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. 
 But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utter- 
 ance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new 
 phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found 
 or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands 
 for exactness of intellectual expression, for per- 
 fect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his 
 best), and is a striking instance how much suc- 
 cess and permanence of reputation depend on 
 conscientious finish as well as on native endow- 
 ment. Butler asks, — 
 
 *•' Then why should those who pick and choose 
 The best of all the best compose. 
 And join it by Mosaic art. 
 In graceful order, part to part. 
 
POPE 163 
 
 To make the whole in beauty suit. 
 Not merit as complete repute 
 As those who, with less art and pain. 
 Can do it with their native brain ? " 
 
 Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps 
 a man as an artist is this power of finding out 
 what is " the best of all the best." 
 
 I confess that I come to the treatment of 
 Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the 
 old superstition that he was the greatest poet 
 that ever lived ; and when 1 came to find that 
 I had instincts of my own, and my mind was 
 brought in contact with the apostles of a more 
 esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent 
 desire for smashing the idols I had been brought 
 up to worship, without any regard to their artis- 
 tic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. 
 What was it to me that Pope was called a master 
 of style? I felt, as Addison says in his "Free- 
 holder " when answering an argument in favor 
 of the Pretender because he could speak English 
 and George I. could not, "that I did not wish 
 to be tyrannized over in the best English that 
 ever was spoken." The young demand thoughts 
 that find an echo in their real and not their 
 acquired nature, and care very little about the 
 dress they are put in. It is later that we learn 
 to like the conventional, as we do olives. There 
 was a time when I could not read Pope, but dis- 
 liked him on principle, as old Roger Ascham 
 
1 64 POPE 
 
 seems to have felt about Italy when he says, 
 " I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God 
 my abode there was only nine days." 
 
 But Pope fills a very important place in the 
 history of English poetry, and must be studied 
 by every one who would come to a clear know- 
 ledge of it. I have since read over every line 
 that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written 
 by or to him, and that more than once. If I 
 have not come to the conclusion that he is the 
 greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in 
 a condition to allow him every merit that is 
 fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary 
 man represents precision and grace of expres- 
 sicm ; but as a poet he represents something 
 more, — nothing less, namely, than one of those 
 eternal controversies of taste which will last 
 as long as the imagination and understanding 
 divide men between them. It is not a matter to 
 be settled by any amount of argument or demon- 
 stration. There are born Popists or Words- 
 worthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is 
 nothing more to be said of the matter. 
 
 Wordsworth was not in a condition to do 
 Pope justice. A man brought up in sublime 
 mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a soli- 
 tude more vast than they, walking on earth 
 which quivered with the throe of the French 
 Revolution, the child of an era of profound 
 mental and moral movement, it could not be 
 
POPE 165 
 
 expected that he should be in sympathy with 
 the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was 
 the apostle of imagination, and came at a time 
 when the school which Pope founded had de- 
 generated into a mob of mannerists who wrote 
 with ease, and who with their congenial critics 
 united at once to decry poetry which brought 
 in the dangerous innovation of having a soul 
 in it. 
 
 But however it may be with poets, it is very 
 certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is 
 broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its 
 nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, pro- 
 vided they be only good of their kind. At any 
 rate, we must allow that the man who can pro- 
 duce one perfect work is either a great genius or 
 a very lucky one ; and so far as we who read are 
 concerned, it is of secondary importance which. 
 And Pope has done this in the "Rape of the 
 Lock." For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, 
 it has never been surpassed. I do not say there 
 is in it poetry of the highest order, or that 
 Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as 
 the companion of his best hours. There is no 
 inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure 
 entertainment it is unmatched. There are two 
 kinds of genius. The first and highest may be 
 said to speak out of the eternal to the present, 
 and must compel its age to understand // ; the 
 second understands its ^ge, and tells it what it 
 
1 66 POPE 
 
 wishes to be told. Let us find strength and 
 inspiration in the one, amusement and instruc- 
 tion in the other, and be honestly thankful for 
 both. 
 
 The very earliest of Pope's productions give 
 indications of that sense and discretion, as well as 
 wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished 
 him. The facility of expression is remarkable, 
 and we find also that perfect balance of metre, 
 which he afterward carried so far as to be weari- 
 some. His pastorals were written in his six- 
 teenth year, and their publication immediately 
 brought him into notice. The following four 
 verses from his first pastoral are quite character- 
 istic in their antithetic balance : — 
 
 ** You that, too wise for pride, too good for power. 
 Enjoy the glory to be great no more. 
 And carrying with you all the world can boast. 
 To all the world illustriously are lost!" 
 
 The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of 
 that future period of Pope's Correspondence 
 with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corrod- 
 ing with disappointed ambition at Dublin, 
 Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his 
 farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the 
 lampoons which embittered his life, played to- 
 gether the solemn farce of affecting indifference 
 to the world by which it would have agonized 
 them to be forgotten, and wrote letters ad- 
 dressed to each other, but really intended for 
 
POPE 167 
 
 that posterity whose opinion they assumed to 
 despise. 
 
 In these pastorals there is an entire want 
 of nature. For example, in that on the death of 
 Mrs. Tempest : — 
 
 ♦• Her fate is whispered by the gentle breeze 
 And told in sighs to all the trembling trees; 
 The trembling trees, in every plain and wood. 
 Her fate remurmur to the silver flood; 
 The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 
 Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears; 
 The winds and trees and floods her death deplore. 
 Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more ! " 
 
 All this is as perfectly professional as the mourn- 
 ing of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materi- 
 alizes and makes too palpably objective that 
 sympathy which our grief forces upon outward 
 nature. Milton, before making the echoes 
 mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in tune, 
 as it were, and hints at his own imagination as 
 the source of this emotion in inanimate things, — 
 
 *♦ But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!" 
 
 In " Windsor Forest " we find the same thing 
 again : — 
 
 ** Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 
 
 There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongue; 
 O early lost, what tears the river shed 
 When the sad pomp along his banks was led! 
 His drooping swans on every note expire. 
 And on his '"illows hung each muse's lyre!" 
 
i68 POPE 
 
 In the same poem he indulges the absurd 
 conceit that, — 
 
 ** Beasts urged by us, their fellow beasts pursue. 
 And learn of man each other to undo " ; — 
 
 and in the succeeding verses gives some striking 
 instances of that artificial diction, so inappropri- 
 ate to poems descriptive of natural objects and 
 ordinary life, which brought verse-making to 
 such a depth of absurdity in the course of the 
 century. 
 
 ** With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 
 Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves; 
 Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade. 
 And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade; 
 He lifts the tube and levels with his eye. 
 Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky: 
 Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath. 
 The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death; 
 Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare. 
 They fall and leave their little lives in air." 
 
 Now one would imagine that the tube of the 
 fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And 
 think of the larks preparing their notes like a 
 country choir ! Yet even here there are admir- 
 able lines, — 
 
 •' Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," 
 
 " They fall and leave their Httle lives in air," — 
 
 for example. 
 
 In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criti- 
 cism," the wit and poet become apparent. It is 
 
POPE 169 
 
 full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In 
 this poem, written when Pope was only twenty- 
 one, occur some of those lines which have be- 
 come proverbial ; such as 
 
 *' A little learning is a dangerous thing"; 
 
 ** For fools rush in where angels fear to tread "; 
 
 ** True wit is Nature to advantage dressed. 
 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.** 
 
 ** For each ill author is as bad a friend." 
 
 In all of these we notice that terseness in which 
 (regard being had to his especial range of thought) 
 Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help 
 being struck also with the singular discretion 
 which the poem gives evidence of. I do not 
 know where to look for another author in whom 
 it appeared so early; and, considering the vi- 
 vacity of his mind and the constantly besetting 
 temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. 
 In his boyish correspondence with poor old 
 Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the 
 man and Wycherley the youth. Pope's under- 
 standing was no less vigorous (when not the 
 dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was light- 
 some and sprightly. 
 
 I come now to what in itself would be enough 
 to have immortalized him as a poet, the " Rape 
 of the Lock," in which, indeed, he appears more 
 purely as poet than in any other of his produc- 
 tions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more 
 
lyo POPE 
 
 wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a 
 truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. 
 His genius has here found its true direction, 
 and the very same artificiality, which in his pas- 
 torals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and 
 adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shake- 
 speare is the poet of man, as God made him, 
 dealing with great passions and innate motives, 
 so truly is Pope the poet of society, the deline- 
 ator of manners, the exposer of those motives 
 which may be called acquired, whose spring is 
 in institutions and habits of purely worldly 
 origin. 
 
 The " Rape of the Lock " was written in 
 Pope's twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of 
 the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. 
 Garth, — a circumstance for which we can feel 
 a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writ- 
 ing the " Dispensary." The idea was taken from 
 that entertaining book " The Count de Gabalis," 
 in which Fouque afterward found the hint for 
 his " Undine " ; but the little sprites as they 
 appear in the poem are purely the creation of 
 Pope's fancy. 
 
 The theory of the poem is excellent. The 
 heroic is out of the question in fine society. It 
 is perfectly true that almost every door we 
 pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, 
 but the moment a great passion enters a man 
 he passes at once out of the artificial into the 
 
POPE 171 
 
 human. So long as he continues artificial, the 
 sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The 
 mock-heroic then is the only way in which the 
 petty actions and sufferings of the fine world 
 can be epically treated, and the contrast continu- 
 ally suggested with subjects of larger scope and 
 more dignified treatment, makes no small part 
 of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the 
 wit. The invocation is admirable: — 
 
 ** Say, what strange motive. Goddess, could compel, 
 A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle ? 
 O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored. 
 Could make a gentle belle reject a lord ? " 
 
 The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we 
 are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not 
 a. parody of the heroic style, but only a setting 
 it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events 
 and modes of thought with which it is in com- 
 ical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they 
 are shown in their triviality. The " clouded 
 cane," as compared with the Homeric spear, 
 indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane 
 of emotions and passions. The opening of the 
 action, too, is equally good : — 
 
 "Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray. 
 And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day. 
 Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake. 
 And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake; 
 Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground. 
 And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.'*' 
 
1-2 POPE 
 
 The mythology of the Sylphs is flill of the most 
 fanciful wit ; indeed, wir infused with fancv is 
 Pope's peculiar merit. The Svlph is addressing 
 
 Belinda : — 
 
 T-e5e. ::::-;- -rrrr-. are ever ;- :-f -^ ""c. 
 
 As now your ov^ r. :_: :.-_ -r :: ; ;. 
 
 And once encloses Li^ v^\.:i.az.' : :r _ r: ^ — ru^i: 
 
 Think not, when woman's traEii;: :-r .r ;. r;i, 
 
 That all her ranities at once are dead; 
 
 Succeeding vanities she still regards. 
 
 And, though she plays no nuHe, o'o^looks the cards. 
 
 For when the fair in all their pride expire. 
 
 To their first elements their souls retire; 
 
 The S|xites of fiery termagants in flame 
 
 Moont up and take a salamander's name; 
 
 Soft yielding nrraphs to water glide away 
 
 And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea; 
 
 The grayer pmde anks downward to a gnome. 
 
 In search of mischief still on earth to roam; 
 
 The fight coquettes in sylphs aloft rq>air 
 
 And ^MHt and flutter in the fields of air." 
 
 And the contrivance br which Belinda is awak- 
 ened is also perfectlv in keeping with all the 
 rest of the machinerv : — 
 
 ** Hf ^--■-- " '-— ?hock, who thoo^t she slept tec Ici-g^ 
 L : ~iked his mistress with his tongue; 
 
 '1 vrii ire-, Belinda, if report say true. 
 Thy eyes first opened on a billet-dtmx.** 
 
 Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope 
 
POPE 173 
 
 peeps out In the pleasantest little smiling 
 ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, 
 he says : — 
 
 *' Here files of pins extend their shining rows, 
 PufFs, powders, patches. Bibles, billet-doux.'''' 
 
 Or when, after the fatal lock has been sev- 
 ered, — 
 
 *• Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes. 
 And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies. 
 Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast 
 When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last; 
 Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high. 
 In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!" 
 
 And SO, when the conflict begins : — 
 
 •' Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air; 
 Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair; 
 The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; 
 At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." 
 
 But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the 
 perfect keeping of the poem deserves admiration. 
 Except a touch of grossness, here and there, 
 there is the most pleasing harmony in all the 
 conceptions and images. The punishments 
 which he assigns to the Sylphs who neglect 
 their duty are charmingly appropriate and in- 
 genious : — 
 
 "Whatever spirit, careless of his charge. 
 His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large. 
 Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'er take his sins; 
 Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins. 
 
174 POPE 
 
 Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie. 
 Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye; 
 Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain. 
 While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain; 
 Or alum styptics with contracting power, 
 Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower; 
 Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel 
 The giddy motion of the whirling wheel. 
 In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow. 
 And tremble at the sea that froths below! " 
 
 The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll 
 climax, is equally good : — 
 
 " Methinks already T your tears survey. 
 Already hear the horrid things they say. 
 Already see you a degraded toast. 
 And all your honor in a whisper lost! 
 How shall I then your helpless fame defend ? 
 'T will then be infamy to seem your friend! 
 And shall this prize, the inestimable prize. 
 Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes. 
 And heightened by the diamond's circling rays. 
 On that rapacious hand forever blaze ? 
 Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow. 
 And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow, 
 Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall. 
 Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!" 
 
 So also Belinda's account of the morning 
 omens: — 
 
 ** 'T was this the morning omens seemed to tell; 
 Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell; 
 The tottering china shook without a wind; 
 Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." 
 
POPE 175 
 
 The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her 
 palace, where 
 
 " The dreaded East is all the wind that blows," — 
 
 was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem 
 more truly deserves the name of a creation than 
 anything Pope ever wrote. The action is con- 
 fined to a world of his own, the supernatural 
 agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and 
 nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of 
 the subject. It ranks by itself as one of the 
 purest works of human fancy ; whether that 
 fancy be strictly poetical or not is another mat- 
 ter. If we compare it with the " Midsummer 
 Night's Dream," an uncomfortable doubt is sug- 
 gested. The perfection of form in the " Rape of 
 the Lock " is to me conclusive evidence that in 
 it the natural genius of Pope found fuller and 
 freer expression than in any other of his poems. 
 The others are aggregates of brilliant passages 
 rather than harmonious wholes. 
 
 It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies 
 of human nature, a more profound satire than 
 Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should 
 chiefly rest upon the " Essay on Man." It has 
 been praised and admired by men of the most 
 opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. 
 Bishops and free-thinkers have met here on a 
 common ground of sympathetic approval. And, 
 indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a 
 
176 .POPE 
 
 droll medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves 
 only two things beyond a question, — that Pope 
 was not a great thinker ; and that wherever 
 he found a thought, no matter what, he could 
 express it so tersely, so clearly, and with such 
 smoothness of versification as to give it an ever- 
 lasting currency. Hobbes's unwieldy " Levia- 
 than," left stranded there on the shore of the 
 last age, and nauseous with the stench of its 
 selfishness, — from this Pope distilled a fragrant 
 oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his 
 philosophy, — lamps like those in the tombs 
 of alchemists, that go out the moment the 
 healthy air is let in upon them. The only posi- 
 tive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of 
 Hobbes set to music, and the Pantheism of 
 Spinoza brought down from mysticism to com- 
 monplace. Nothing can be more absurd than 
 many of the dogmas taught in this "Essay on 
 Man." For example, Pope affirms explicitly 
 that instinct is something better than reason : — 
 
 ♦• See him from Nature rising slow to art. 
 To copy instinct then was reason's part; 
 Thus, then, to man the voice of Nature spake; — 
 Go, from the creatures thy instructions take; 
 Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield; 
 Learn from the birds the physic of the field; 
 The arts of building from the bee receive; 
 Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; 
 Learn of the little nautilus to sail. 
 Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." 
 
POPZ 177 
 
 I say nothing of the quiet way in which the 
 general term " Nature " is substituted for God, 
 but how unutterably void of reasonableness is 
 the theory that Nature would have left her high- 
 est product, man, destitute of that instinct with 
 which she had endowed her other creatures ! 
 As if reason were not the most sublimated form 
 of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided 
 himself, and for which he is commended, was 
 not accuracy of thought so much as of expres- 
 sion. And he cannot always even claim this 
 merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one 
 of the passages I have already quoted from the 
 " Rape of the Lock " he talks of casting shrieks 
 to heaven, — a performance of some difficulty, 
 except when cast is needed to rhyme with 
 last. 
 
 But the supposition is that in the " Essay on 
 Man " Pope did not himself know what he was 
 writing. He was only the condenser and epl- 
 grammatizer of Bolingbroke, — a very fitting 
 St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he did know, 
 we can account for the contradictions by sup- 
 posing that he threw in some of the common- 
 place moralities to conceal his real drift. John- 
 son asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed 
 at Pope's having been made the mouthpiece of 
 opinions which he did not hold. But this is 
 hardly probable when we consider the relations 
 between them. It is giving Pope altogether too 
 
178 POPE 
 
 little credit for intelligence to suppose that he 
 did not understand the principles of his intimate 
 friend. The caution with which he at first con- 
 cealed the authorship would argue that he had 
 doubts as to the reception of the poem. When 
 it was attacked on the score of infidelity, he 
 gladly accepted Warburton's championship, and 
 assumed whatever pious interpretation he con- 
 trived to thrust upon it. The beginning of the 
 poem is familiar to everybody : — 
 
 *• Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things 
 To low ambition and the pride of kings; 
 Let us (since life can little more supply 
 Than just to look about us and to die) 
 Expatiate free o'er all this scene of man, 
 A mighty maze, — but not without a plan." 
 
 To expatiate o' er a mighty maze is rather loose 
 writing, but the last verse, as it stood in the 
 original editions, was, — 
 
 " A mighty maze of walks without a plan " ; — 
 
 and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opin- 
 ion than the verse he substituted for it. Warbur- 
 ton is careful not to mention this variation in his 
 notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable 
 for its confusion of logic as it often is for ease 
 of verse and grace of expression. An instance 
 of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted : — 
 
 ** Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate; 
 All but the page prescribed, their present state; 
 
POPE 179 
 
 From brutes what men, from men what spirits know. 
 
 Or who would suffer being here below ? 
 
 The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day. 
 
 Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ? 
 
 Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food. 
 
 And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
 
 O, blindness to the future kindly given 
 
 That each may fill the circle meant by heaven ! 
 
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall. 
 
 Atoms or systems into ruin hurled. 
 
 And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " 
 
 Now, if " heaven from all creatures hides the 
 book of fate," why should not the lamb " skip 
 and play," if he had the reason of man ? Why, 
 because he would then be able to read the book 
 of fate. But if man himself cannot, why, then, 
 could the lamb with the reason of man ? For, 
 if the lamb had the reason of man, the book of 
 fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was 
 concerned. If the inferences we can draw from 
 appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of 
 destiny, the knowing enough to take an um- 
 brella in cloudy weather might be called so. 
 There is a manifest confusion between what we 
 know about ourselves and about other people ; 
 the whole point of the passage being that we are 
 always mercifully blinded to our own future, 
 however much reason we may possess. There 
 is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in say- 
 ing,— 
 
i8o POPE 
 
 *< Heaven, 
 
 Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
 A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 
 
 To the last verse Warburton, desirous of recon- 
 ciling his author with Scripture, appends a note 
 referring to Matthew x. 29 : " Are not two spar- 
 rows sold for one farthing ? and one of them 
 shall not fall to the ground without your Father." 
 It would not have been safe to have referred to 
 the thirty-first verse : " Fear ye not, therefore, 
 ye are of more value than many sparrows." 
 
 To my feeling, one of the most beautiful 
 passages in the whole poem is that familiar 
 one : — 
 
 *♦ Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind. 
 His soul proud science never taught to stray 
 Far as the solar walk or milky way: 
 Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 
 Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven; 
 Some safer world in depth of woods embraced. 
 Some happier island in the watery waste. 
 Where slaves once more their native land behold. 
 No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
 To be contents his natural desire, 
 He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire. 
 But thinks, admitted to that equal sky. 
 His faithful dog shall bear him company." 
 
 But this comes in as a corollary to what went 
 just before : — 
 
POPE 18 1 
 
 ** Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
 Man never is but always to be blest; 
 The soul, uneasy, and confined from home. 
 Rests and expatiates in a life to come. ' ' 
 
 Then follows immediately the passage about the 
 poor Indian, who, after all, it seems, is con- 
 tented with merely beings and whose soul, there- 
 fore, is an exception to the general rule. And 
 what have the " solar walk " (as he calls it) and 
 " milky way " to do with the affair ? Does our 
 hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of 
 astronomy ? Or does he mean that science and 
 faith are necessarily hostile ? And, after being 
 told that it is the " untutored mind " of the 
 savage which " sees God in clouds and hears 
 him in the wind," we are rather surprised to 
 find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is 
 that 
 
 " All are but parts of one stupendous whole. 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. 
 That, changed through all, and yet in all the same. 
 Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame. 
 Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze. 
 Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees." 
 
 So that we are no better off than the untutored 
 Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. War- 
 burton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off 
 the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. 
 He would have found it harder to show that 
 the acknowledgment of any divine revelation 
 
i82 POPE 
 
 would not overturn the greater part of its teach- 
 ings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the 
 bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we 
 must deny him what is usually claimed as his 
 first merit, — clearness. If he did not^ we grant 
 him clearness as a writer at the expense of sin- 
 cerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable 
 solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope's 
 precision of thought was no match for the fluency 
 of his verse. 
 
 Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speak- 
 ing of Pope, that he who executes the best, no 
 matter what his department, will rank the high- 
 est. I think there are enough indications in 
 these letters of Byron's, however, that they 
 were written rather more against Wordsworth 
 than for Pope. The rule he lays down would 
 make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, 
 than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an 
 example ; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more 
 into his sonnets than execution^ there are plenty 
 of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. 
 But, in point of fact, the department chooses 
 the man and not the man the department, and 
 it has a great deal to do with our estimate of 
 him. Is the department of Milton no higher 
 than that of Butler ? Byron took especial care 
 not to write in the style he commended. But I 
 think Pope has received quite as much credit 
 in respect even of execution as he deserves. 
 
POPE 183 
 
 Surely execution is not confined to versification 
 alone. What can be worse than this ? 
 
 " At length Erasmus, that great, injured name 
 (The glory of the priesthood and the shame). 
 Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age. 
 And drove those holy vandals off the stage." 
 
 It would have been hard for Pope to have found 
 a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small 
 authors he laughed at than this image of a great, 
 injured name stemming a torrent and driving 
 vandals off the stage. And in the following 
 verses the image is helplessly confused : — 
 
 '♦Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies. 
 Which no one looks in with another's eyes. 
 But, as the flatterer or dependant paint. 
 Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." 
 
 The use of the word " applies " is perfectly 
 un-English; and it seems that people who look 
 in this remarkable glass see their pictures and 
 not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope 
 attempts the sublime, his epithets become curi- 
 ously unpoetical, as where he says, in the 
 " Dunciad," — 
 
 " As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain. 
 The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain J** 
 
 And not seldom he is satisfied with the music 
 of the verse without much regard to fitness of 
 imagery ; in the " Essay on Man," for ex- 
 ample : — 
 
i84 POPE 
 
 "Passions, like elements, though born to fight. 
 Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite; 
 These 't is enough to temper and employ; 
 But what composes man can man destroy ? 
 Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road. 
 Subject, compound them, follow her and God. 
 Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train. 
 Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, 
 These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined 
 Make and maintain the balance of the mind." 
 
 Here Reason is represented as an apothecary 
 compounding pills of "Pleasure's smiling train" 
 and the " family of Pain." And in the " Moral 
 Essays," — 
 
 *' Know God and Nature only are the same; 
 In man the judgment shoots at flying game, 
 A bird of passage, gone as soon as found. 
 Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground." 
 
 The "judgment shooting at flying game " is 
 an odd image enough; but I think a bird of pass- 
 age, now in the moon and now under ground, 
 could be found nowhere — out of Goldsmith's 
 " Natural History," perhaps. An epigrammatic 
 expression will also tempt him into saying 
 something without basis in truth, as where he 
 ranks tosrether " Macedonia's madman and the 
 Swede," and says that neither of them "looked 
 forward farther than his nose," a slang phrase 
 which may apply well enough to Charles XII., 
 but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who 
 showed himself capable of a large political fore- 
 
POPE 185 
 
 thought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, Is a suf- 
 ficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, 
 as where he makes " Socrates bleed." 
 
 But it is in his "Moral Essays" and parts of 
 his " Satires " that Pope deserves the praise 
 which he himself desired : — 
 
 " Happily to steer 
 From grave to gay, from lively to severe. 
 Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease. 
 Intent to reason, or polite to please." 
 
 Here Pope must be allowed to have established 
 a style of his own, in which he is without a 
 rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at 
 any page. 
 
 " Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns. 
 Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns; 
 To ease the soul of one oppressive weight. 
 This quits an empire, that embroils a state; 
 The same adust complexion has impelled, 
 Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." 
 
 Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the 
 invariable this set off by the inevitable that, 
 and wishes antithesis would let him have a little 
 quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, 
 the conditional " frown " would have been more 
 elegant. But taken as detached passages, how 
 admirably the different characters are drawn, so 
 admirably that half the verses have become 
 proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading 
 again : — 
 
i86 POPE 
 
 ** Peace to all such; but were there one whose fires 
 True genius kindles and fair fame inspires; 
 Blest with each talent and each art to please. 
 And born to write, converse, and live with ease;' 
 Should such a man, too fond to rule alone. 
 Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne. 
 View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes. 
 And hate for arts that caused himself to rise. 
 Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer. 
 And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; 
 WilHng to wound and yet afraid to strike. 
 Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, 
 Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
 A timorous foe and a suspicious friend; 
 Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged. 
 And io obliging that he ne'er obliged; 
 Like Cato give his little Senate laws. 
 And sit attentive to his own applause. 
 While wits and templars every sentence raise. 
 And wonder with a foolish face of praise; — 
 Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
 Who would not weep if Atticus were he ? " 
 
 With the exception of the somewhat technical 
 image in the second verse of Fame blowing the 
 fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind 
 of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing 
 better of its kind was ever written. How ap- 
 plicable it was to Addison I shall consider in 
 another place. As an accurate intellectual ob- 
 server and describer of personal weaknesses, 
 Pope stands by himself in English verse. 
 
 In his epistle on the characters of women, no 
 one who has ever known a noble woman, nay. 
 
POPE 187 
 
 I should almost say no one who ever had a 
 mother or sister, will find much to please him. 
 The climax of his praise rather degrades than 
 elevates. 
 
 '* O, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
 Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day. 
 She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
 Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear. 
 She who ne'er answers till a husband cools. 
 Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules. 
 Charms by accepting, by submitting sways. 
 Yet has her humor most when she obeys; 
 Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will. 
 Disdains all loss of tickets or codille. 
 Spleen, vapors, or small-pox, above them all 
 And mistress of herself, though china fall." 
 
 The last line is very witty and pointed, — but 
 consider what an ideal of womanly nobleness he 
 must have had, who praises his heroine for not 
 being jealous of her daughter. Addison, in com- 
 mending Pope's " Essay on Criticism," says, 
 speaking of us "who live in the latter ages of 
 the world " : " We have little else to do left us 
 but to represent the common sense of mankind, 
 in more strong, more beautiful, or more un- 
 common lights." I think he has here touched 
 exactly the point of Pope's merit, and, in doing 
 so, tacitly excludes him from the position of 
 poet, in the highest sense. Take two of Jeremy 
 Taylor's prose sentences about the Countess of 
 Carbery, the lady in Milton's "Comus": "The 
 
188 POFE 
 
 religion of this excellent lady was of another 
 constitution : it took root downward in hu- 
 mility, and brought forth fruit upward in the 
 substantial graces of a Christian, in charity and 
 justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair friend- 
 ships and sweetness of society. . . . And though 
 she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest 
 experience of things and persons I ever yet 
 knew in a person of her youth and sex and cir- 
 cumstances, yet, as if she knew nothing of it, 
 she had the meanest opinion of herself, and like 
 a fair taper, when she shined to all the room, 
 yet round about her station she had cast a shadow 
 and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but 
 herself." This is poetry, though not in verse. 
 The plays of the elder dramatists are not with- 
 out examples of weak and vile women, but they 
 are not without noble ones either. Take these 
 verses of Chapman, for example : — 
 
 ** Let no man value at a little price 
 A virtuous woman's counsel: her winged spirit 
 Is feathered oftentimes with noble words 
 And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure; 
 The weaker body, still the stronger soul. 
 O, what a treasure is a virtuous wife. 
 Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth 
 Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. 
 She gives him double forces to endure 
 And to enjoy, being one with him. 
 Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense: 
 If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short; 
 
POPE 189 
 
 If he lament, she melts herself in tears; 
 
 If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir. 
 
 She moves his way, in all things his sweet ape. 
 
 Himself divinely varied without change. 
 
 All store without her leaves a man but poor. 
 
 And with her poverty is exceeding store." 
 
 Pope in the characters I have read was drawing 
 his ideal woman, for he says at the end that she 
 shall be his muse. The sentiments are those of 
 a bourgeois a.nd of the back parlor, more than of 
 the poet and the muse's bower. A man's mind 
 is known by the company it keeps. 
 
 Now it is very possible that the women of 
 Pope's time were as bad as they could be; but 
 if God made poets for anything, it was to keep 
 alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and 
 the beautiful. 1 grant the influence of the age, 
 but there is a sense in which the poet is of no 
 age, and Beauty, driven from every other home, 
 will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while 
 there is a poet's nature left, will never fail of the 
 tribute at least of a song. It seems to me that 
 Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the 
 beautiful. His nature delighted more in detect- 
 ing the blemish than in enjoying the charm. 
 
 However great his merit in expression, I 
 think it impossible that a true poet could have 
 written such a satire as the " Dunclad," which is 
 even nastier than it is witty. It is filthy even In 
 a filthy age, and Swift himself could not have 
 
I90 POPE 
 
 gone beyond some parts of it. One's mind needs 
 to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid after 
 reading it. I do not remember that any other 
 poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is 
 wholly without discrimination. De Foe is set 
 in the pillory forever ; and George Wither, the 
 author of that charming poem, " Fair Virtue," 
 classed among the dunces. And was it not in 
 this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the 
 finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he 
 said "that to love her was a liberal education".'' 
 Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is 
 that of a wit rather than of a poet. It might 
 not be just to compare his Sylphs with the Fair- 
 ies of Shakespeare ; but contrast the kind of 
 fancy shown in the poem with that of Drayton's 
 " Nymphidia," for example. I will give one 
 stanza of it, describing the palace of the Fairy : 
 
 "The walls of spiders' legs were made. 
 Well mortised, and finely laid 
 (He was the master of his trade 
 It curiously that builded): 
 The windows of the eyes of cats. 
 And, for the roof, instead of slats 
 'T is covered with the skins of bats. 
 With moonshine that are gilded." 
 
 In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are 
 recognized. 
 
 Personally we know more about Pope than 
 about any of our poets. He kept no secrets 
 
POPE 191 
 
 about himself. If he did not let the cat out cf the 
 bag, he always contrived to give her tail a wrench 
 so that we might know she was there. In spite 
 of the savageness of his satires, his natural dis- 
 position seems to have been an amiable one, 
 and his character as an author was as purely 
 factitious as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to 
 have suspected his sincerity ; but artifice more 
 than insincerity lay at the basis of his character. 
 I think that there was very little real malice in 
 him, and that his " evil was wrought from want 
 of thought." When Dennis was old and poor, 
 he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his 
 benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among 
 his friends the most illustrious men of his time. 
 The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, 
 less interesting than that of any other eminent 
 English poet, except that of Southey, and their 
 letters have the same fault of being labored com- 
 positions. Southey's are, on the whole, the more 
 agreeable of the two, for they inspire one (as 
 Pope's certainly do not) with a sincere respect 
 for the character of the writer. Pope's are alto- 
 gether too full of the proclamation of his own 
 virtues to be pleasant reading. It is plain th^t 
 they were mostly addressed to the public, per- 
 haps even to posterity. But letters, however 
 carefully drilled to be circumspect, are sure to 
 blab, and those of Pope leave in the reader's 
 mind an unpleasant feeling of circumspection,— 
 
192 POPE 
 
 of an attempt to look as an eminent literary 
 character should rather than as the man really 
 was. They have the unnatural constraint of a 
 man in full dress sitting for his portrait and en- 
 deavoring to look his best. We never catch 
 him, if he can help it, at unawares. Among all 
 Pope's correspondents, Swift shows in the most 
 dignified and, one is tempted to say, the most 
 amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that 
 the letters which Pope addressed to him are by 
 far the most simple and straightforward of any 
 that he wrote. No sham could encounter those 
 terrible eyes in Dublin without wincing. I think, 
 on the whole, that a revision of judgment would 
 substitute " discomforting consciousness of the 
 public " for " insincerity " in judging Pope's 
 character by his letters. He could not shake 
 off the habits of the author, and never, or almost 
 never, in prose, acquired that knack of seeming 
 carelessness that makes Walpole's elaborate com- 
 positions such agreeable reading. Pope would 
 seem to have kept a commonplace book of 
 phrases proper to this or that occasion ; and he 
 transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, 
 nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, 
 from one correspondent to another, with the 
 most cold-blooded impartiality. Were it not 
 for this curious economy of his, no one could 
 read his letters to Lady Wortley Montagu with- 
 out a conviction that they were written by a lover. 
 
POPE 193 
 
 Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretae 
 injuria formae will account for (though it will 
 not excuse) the savage vindictiveness he felt and 
 showed towards her. It may be suspected also 
 that the bitterness of caste added gall to his 
 resentment. His enemy wore that impenetrable 
 armor of superior rank which rendered her in- 
 difference to his shafts the more provoking that 
 it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses 
 its sting when we reflect that it is not in human 
 nature for a woman to have had two such ut- 
 terly irreconcilable characters as those of Lady 
 Mary before and after her quarrel with the poet. 
 In any view of Pope's conduct in this affair, 
 there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade 
 a woman whom he had once made sacred with 
 his love. Spenser touches the right chord when 
 he says of the Rosalinde who had rejected him, 
 
 ** Not, then, to her, that scorned thing so base. 
 But to myself the blame, that lookt so high; 
 Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 
 To simple swain, sith her I may not love. 
 Yet that I may her honor paravant 
 And praise her worth, though far my wit above; 
 Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 
 And long affliction which I have endured." 
 
 In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, 
 pushed to the wall, appears positively mean. 
 He vainly endeavors to show that his person- 
 alities had all been written in the interests of 
 
194 POPE 
 
 literature and morality, and from no selfish mo- 
 tive. But it is hard to believe that Theobald 
 would have been deemed worthy of his disgust- 
 ful preeminence but for the manifest superiority 
 of his edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison 
 would have been so adroitly disfigured unless 
 through wounded self-love. It is easy to con- 
 ceive the resentful shame which Pope must have 
 felt when Addison so almost contemptuously 
 disavowed all complicity in his volunteer de- 
 fence of " Cato " in a brutal assault on Dennis. 
 Pope had done a mean thing to propitiate a man 
 whose critical judgment he dreaded; and the 
 great man, instead of thanking him, had resented 
 his interference as impertinent. In the whole 
 portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling that 
 Pope's satire is not founded on knowledge, 
 but rather on what his own sensitive suspicion 
 divined of the opinions of one whose expressed 
 preferences in poetry implied a condemnation 
 of the very grounds of the satirist's own popu- 
 larity. We shall not so easily give up the purest 
 and most dignified figure of that somewhat vul- 
 gar generation, who ranks with Sidney and Spen- 
 ser as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our 
 literary annals. A man who could command the 
 unswerving loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick 
 Steele could not have been a coward or a back- 
 biter. The only justification alleged by Pope 
 was of the flimsiest kind, namely, that Addison 
 
POPE 195 
 
 regretted the introduction of the Sylphs in the 
 second edition of the "Rape of the Lock," say- 
 ing that the poem was merum sal before. Let any 
 one ask himself how he likes an author's emen- 
 dations of any poem to which his ear had adapted 
 itself in its former shape, and he will hardly 
 think it needful to charge Addison with any mean 
 motive for his conservatism in this matter. One 
 or two of Pope's letters are so good as to make 
 us regret that he did not oftener don the dress- 
 ing-gown and slippers in his correspondence. 
 One in particular, to Lord Burlington, describ- 
 ing a journey on horseback to Oxford with Lin- 
 tot the bookseller, is full of a lightsome humor 
 worthy of Cowper, almost worthy of Gray. 
 
 Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of 
 his essay on the genius and writings of Pope, 
 says that the largest part of his works *' is of 
 the didactic^ morale and satiric; and, conse- 
 quently, not of the most poetic species o( poetry ; 
 whence it is manifest that good sense and judg- 
 ment were his characteristical excellences rather 
 t]\?ir\ fancy and invention.'' It is plain that in 
 any strict definition there can be only one kind 
 of poetry, and that what Warton really meant 
 to say was that Pope was not a poet at all. This, 
 I think, is shown by what Johnson says in his 
 " Life of Pope," though he does not name War- 
 ton. The dispute on this point went on with 
 occasional lulls for more than a half century after 
 
196 POPE 
 
 Warton's death. It was renewed with peculiar 
 acrimony when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused 
 and confused Warton's critical opinions in his 
 own peculiarly helpless way in editing a new 
 edition of Pope in 1806. Bowles entirely mis- 
 took the functions of an editor, and maladroitly 
 entangled his judgment of the poetry with his 
 estimate of the author's character.' Thirteen 
 years later, Campbell, in his " Specimens," con- 
 troverted Mr. Bowles's estimate of Pope's char- 
 acter and position, both as man and poet. Mr. 
 Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on what 
 he called "the invariable principles of poetry." 
 This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criti- 
 cised by Gilchrist in the " Quarterly Review." 
 Mr. Bowles made an angry and unmannerly re- 
 tort, among other things charging Gilchrist with 
 the crime of being a tradesman's son, whereupon 
 the affair became what they call on the frontier 
 a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder 
 Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, 
 though with various fortune. The last shot, in 
 what had grown into a thirty years' war, between 
 
 ' Bowles's Sonnets, well-nigh forgotten now, did more than 
 his controversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their 
 influence upon the coming generation was great (greater than 
 we can well account for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us 
 that he made forty copies of them while at Christ's Hospital. 
 Wordsworth's prefaces first made imagination the true test of 
 poetry, in its more modern sense. But they drew little notice 
 till later. 
 
POPE 197 
 
 the partisans of what was called the Old School 
 of poetry and those of the New, was fired by 
 Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing his temper, 
 lost also what little logic he had, and though, 
 in a vague way, assthetically right, contrived 
 always to be argumentatively wrong. Anger 
 made worse confusion in a brain never very clear, 
 and he had neither the scholarship nor the crit- 
 ical faculty for a vigorous exposition of his own 
 thesis. Never was wilder hitting than his, and 
 he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, es- 
 pecially from Byron, whose two letters are mas- 
 terpieces of polemic prose. Bowles most happily 
 exemplified in his own pamphlets what was really 
 the turning-point of the whole controversy 
 (though all the combatants more or less lost 
 sight of it or never saw it), namely, that without 
 clearness and terseness there could be no good 
 writing, whether in prose or verse ; in other 
 words that, while precision of phrase presup- 
 poses lucidity of thought, yet good writing is an 
 art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that 
 here was the true knot of the question, though, 
 as his object was mainly mischief, he was not 
 careful to loosen It. The sincerity of Byron's 
 admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, 
 too hastily doubted. What he admired in him 
 was that patience in careful finish which he felt 
 to be wanting in himself and in most of his con- 
 temporaries. Pope's assailants went so far as to 
 
198 POPE 
 
 make a defect of what, rightly considered, was 
 a distinguished merit, though the amount of it 
 was exaggerated. The weak point in the case 
 was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about 
 the phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty 
 as it would, and that it seldom extended beyond 
 the couplet, often not beyond a single verse. 
 His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a 
 succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no 
 poet more often than he makes the second line 
 of the couplet a mere train-bearer to the first. 
 His more ambitious works may be defined as 
 careless thinking carefully versified. Lessing 
 was one of the first to see this, and accordingly 
 he tells us that " his great, I will not say greatest, 
 merit lay in what we call the mechanic of 
 poetry." ' Lessing, with his usual insight, par- 
 enthetically qualifies his statement; for where 
 Pope, as in the " Rape of the Lock," found a 
 subject exactly level with his genius, he was 
 able to make what, taken for all in all, is the 
 most perfect poem in the language. 
 
 It will hardly be questioned that the man 
 who writes what is still piquant and remember- 
 able, a century and a quarter after his death, 
 was a man of genius. But there are two modes 
 of uttering such things as cleave to the memory 
 
 ■" Brief e die neueste Litter atur betreffend, 1759, "• Brief, 
 See also his more elaborate criticism of the Essay o?i Man 
 {^Pope ein Metaphysiker'), 1755. 
 
POPE 199 
 
 of mankind. They may be said or sung. I do 
 not think that Pope's verse anywhere sings, but 
 it should seem that the abiding presence of 
 fancy in his best work forbids his exclusion from 
 the rank of poet. The atmosphere in which he 
 habitually dwelt was an essentially prosaic one, 
 the language habitual to him was that of con- 
 versation and society, so that he lacked the help 
 of that fresher dialect which seems like inspira- 
 tion in the elder poets. His range of associa- 
 tions was of that narrow kind which is always 
 vulgar, whether it be found in the village or the 
 court. Certainly he has not the force and 
 majesty of Dryden in his better moods, but he 
 has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, 
 a sensitiveness to impressions, that would incline 
 us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many 
 ways he so much resembles), as an author with 
 whom the gift of writing was primary, and that 
 of verse secondary. No other poet that I re- 
 member ever wrote prose which is so purely 
 prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial criticism, 
 the " Rape of the Lock " sets him even as a poet 
 far above many men more largely endowed with 
 poetic feeling and insight than he. 
 
 A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the 
 age in which he lived, and not a little, I think, 
 for the influence of Swift. In his own province 
 he still stands unapproachably alone. If to be 
 the greatest satirist of individual men, rather 
 
200 POPE 
 
 than of human nature, if to be the highest ex- 
 pression which the life of the court and the ball- 
 room has ever found in verse, if to have added 
 more phrases to our language than any other 
 but Shakespeare, if to have charmed four gen- 
 erations, make a man a great poet, — then he is 
 one. He was the chief founder of an artificial 
 style of writing, which in his hands was living 
 and powerful, because he used it to express arti- 
 ficial modes of thinking and an artificial state 
 of society. Measured by any high standard of 
 imagination, he will be found wanting ; tried by 
 any test of wit, he is unrivalled. 
 
WORDSWORTH 
 
 1875 
 
 A GENERATION has now passed away 
 since Wordsworth was laid with the family 
 in the churchyard at Grasmere.' Perhaps 
 it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impar- 
 tial measure of his value as a poet. To do this 
 is especially hard for those who are old enough 
 to remember the last shot which the foe was 
 sullenly firing in that long war of critics which 
 began when he published his manifesto as Pre- 
 tender, and which came to a pause rather than 
 to an end when they flung up their caps with 
 the rest at his final coronation. Something of the 
 intensity of the odium theologicum (if indeed 
 the aestheticum be not in these days the more 
 bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The 
 Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had 
 the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the 
 
 ' ** I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard 
 at Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Words- 
 worth) to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost 
 say canine pathos, thirteen years after his wife's death. Words- 
 worth was always considerate and kind with his servants, 
 Robinson tells us. 
 
202 WORDSWORTH 
 
 exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are 
 liable. The verses of the master had for them 
 the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of 
 zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of 
 cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns of the 
 Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs of 
 battle no less than of worship, and the combined 
 ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a fire 
 that was not naturally their own. As we read 
 them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out 
 of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is 
 gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It 
 is something like the difference between the 
 " Marseillaise " sung by armed propagandists 
 on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the 
 tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in 
 the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy 
 of Therese. It was natural in the early days of 
 Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on 
 those profounder qualities to appreciate which 
 settled in some sort the measure of a man's right 
 to judge of poetry at all. But now we must admit 
 the shortcomings, the failures, the defects as no 
 less essential elements in forming a sound judg- 
 ment as to whether the seer and artist were so 
 united in him as to justify the claim first put in by 
 himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to 
 a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's 
 minds, and give a right direction and safe out- 
 let to their passions through the imagination. 
 
WORDSWORTH 203 
 
 while insensibly helping them toward balance 
 of character and serenity of judgment by stimu- 
 lating their sense of proportion, form, and the 
 nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of 
 our poets has the constant propulsion of an un- 
 bending will, and the concentration of exclusive, 
 if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies 
 done so much to make the original endow- 
 ment of Nature effective, and in none accord- 
 ingly does the biography throw so much light 
 on the works, or enter so largely into their com- 
 position as an element whether of power or of 
 weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think 
 never wished to see, beyond the limits of his 
 own consciousness and experience. He early 
 conceived himself to be, and through life was 
 confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he 
 was, a " dedicated spirit," ' a state of mind likely 
 to further an intense but at the same time one- 
 sided development of the intellectual powers. 
 The solitude in which the greater part of his 
 mature life was passed, while it doubtless min- 
 istered to the passionate intensity of his musings 
 upon man and Nature, was, it may be suspected, 
 
 ' In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise 
 seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from 
 some village festival where he had danced all night : — 
 
 • ' My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit." (Bk. iv.) 
 
204 WORDSWORTH 
 
 harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him 
 of any standard of proportion outside himself 
 by which to test the comparative value of his 
 thoughts, and by rendering him more and more 
 incapable of that urbanity of mind which could 
 be gained only by commerce with men more 
 nearly on his own level, and which gives tone 
 without lessening individuality. Wordsworth 
 never quite saw the distinction between the 
 eccentric and the original. For what we call 
 originality seems not so much anything pecu- 
 liar, much less anything odd, but that quality 
 in a man which touches human nature at most 
 points of its circumference, which reinvigorates 
 the consciousness of our own powers by recall- 
 ing and confirming our own unvalued sensations 
 and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own 
 amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance 
 to our own stammering conceptions or emotions. 
 The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one 
 crying in the wilderness to a knot of already 
 magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the 
 throng of men, and lifting their common aspi- 
 rations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed 
 to themselves) on the wings of his song to a 
 purer ether and a wider reach of view. We 
 cannot, if we would, read the poetry of Words- 
 worth as mere poetry ; at every other page we 
 find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthet- 
 ics. The world-old question of matter and form. 
 
WORDSWORTH 205 
 
 of whether nectar is of precisely the same flavor 
 when served to us from a Grecian chalice or 
 from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for 
 decision anew. The Teutonic nature has al- 
 ways shown a sturdy preference of the solid 
 bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any 
 shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of 
 sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget 
 the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang, 
 — vien ben da lui. 
 
 The true rank of Wordsworth among poets 
 is, perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated, 
 so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of 
 judgment uninflamed by the tumult of parti- 
 sanship which besets the doors. 
 
 Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a 
 great poet, at a time when the artificial school 
 of poetry was enthroned with all the authority 
 of long succession and undisputed legitimacy, 
 it was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who, 
 both by nature and judgment, was a rebel against 
 the existing order, should become a partisan. 
 Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan 
 of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its 
 representative. Right in general principle, he 
 thus necessarily became wrong in particulars. 
 
2o6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Justly convinced that greatness only achieves 
 its ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts, 
 he perhaps reduced the following his instincts 
 too much to a system, mistook his own resent- 
 ments for the promptings of his natural genius, 
 and, compelling principle to the measure of his 
 own temperament or even of the controversial 
 exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the 
 error of making naturalness itself artificial. If 
 a poet resolve to be original, it will end com- 
 monly in his being merely peculiar. 
 
 Wordsworth himself departed more and more 
 in practice, as he grew older, from the theories 
 \yhich he had laid down in his prefaces ; but 
 those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in 
 retarding the growth of his fame. He had care- 
 fully constructed a pair of spectacles through 
 which his earlier poems were to be studied, and 
 the public insisted on looking through them at 
 his mature works, and were consequently unable 
 to see fairly what required a different focus. He 
 forced his readers to come to his poetry with a 
 certain amount of conscious preparation, and 
 thus gave them beforehand the impression of 
 something like mechanical artifice, and deprived 
 them of the contented repose of implicit faith. 
 To the child a watch seems to be a living crea- 
 ture ; but Wordsworth would not let his read- 
 ers be children, and did injustice to himself by 
 giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations 
 
WORDSWORTH 207 
 
 which really throbbed with the very heart's- 
 blood of genius, and were alive with Nature's 
 life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and 
 springs. A naturalness which we are told to ex- 
 pect has lost the crowning grace of Nature. The 
 men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's vision- 
 ary gardens had probably no more pleasurable 
 emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an 
 equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they 
 had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy ; but 
 to a tree that has grown as God willed we come 
 without a theory and with no botanical predilec- 
 tions, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the 
 Imagination re-creates for us its past summers 
 and winters, the birds that have nested and sung 
 in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade, 
 the winds that have visited it, the cloudbergs 
 that have drifted over it, and the snows that 
 have ermined it in winter. The Imagination 
 is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and 
 Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat 
 his readers of her company by laying out paths 
 with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel ! at 
 the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for 
 every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to 
 tell each when and where it must be caught. 
 
 But if these things stood in the way of im- 
 mediate appreciation, he had another theory 
 which interferes more seriously with the total 
 and permanent effect of his poems. He was 
 
2o8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 theoretically determined not only to be a philo- 
 sophic poet, but to be a great philosophic poet, 
 and to this end he must produce an epic. Leav- 
 ing aside the question whether the epic be 
 obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether 
 the history of a single man's mind is universal 
 enough in its interest to furnish all the require- 
 ments of the epic machinery, and it may be more 
 than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be 
 ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and 
 section. It is rather something which is more 
 energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and 
 our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its 
 simple Open sesame ! while they would stand 
 firm against the reading of the whole body of 
 philosophy. In point of fact, the one element 
 of greatness which " The Excursion " possesses 
 indisputably is heaviness. It is only the epi- 
 sodes that are universally read, and the effect 
 of these is diluted by the connecting and accom- 
 panying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth 
 had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto 
 Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to 
 throw in everything, debasing the metal lest it 
 should run short. Separated from the rest, the 
 episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and 
 without example in the language. 
 
 Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong 
 minds, was a good critic of the substance of 
 poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allow- 
 
WORDSWORTH 209 
 
 ance he made for those subsidiary qualities 
 which make it the charmer of leisure and the 
 employment of minds without definite object. 
 It may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much 
 store by any contemporary writing but his own, 
 and whether he did not look upon poetry too 
 exclusively as an exercise rather of the intellect 
 than as a nepenthe of the imagination.' He 
 says of himself, speaking of his youth : — 
 
 ** In fine, 
 I was a better judge of thoughts than words. 
 Misled in estimating words, not only 
 By common inexperience of youth. 
 But by the trade in classic niceties. 
 The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase 
 From languages that want the living voice 
 To carry meaning to the natural heart; 
 To tell us what is passion, what is truth. 
 What reason, what simplicity and sense." * 
 
 Though he here speaks in the preterite tense, 
 this was always true of him, and his thought 
 seems often to lean upon a word too weak to 
 bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight 
 can help regretting that he did not earlier give 
 himself to " the trade of classic niceties." It was 
 precisely this which gives to the blank verse of 
 Landor the severe dignity and reserved force 
 which alone among later poets recall the tune 
 
 ' According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to 
 be "not worth five shillings." 
 * Prelude, bk. iv. 
 
2IO WORDSWORTH 
 
 of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never 
 attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank verse 
 (though the passion be profounder) is always 
 essentially that of Cowper. They were alike 
 also in their love of outward nature and of simple 
 •things. The main difference between them is 
 one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between 
 the lifelong familiar of the mountains and the 
 dweller on the plain. 
 
 It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the 
 very highest powers of the poetic mind were 
 associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse 
 and commonplace. It Is in the understanding 
 (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of 
 his imagination are embedded.' He wrote too \ 
 much to write always well ; for it is not a great j 
 Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek 
 ten thousand, that march safely down to poster- 
 ity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is 
 much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle 
 do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout 
 " The Prelude " and " The Excursion " he seems 
 
 ^ This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss 
 Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of 
 Wordsworth's conversation: ** Sometimes he is annoying from 
 the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times 
 he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression 
 of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read Resolution and 
 Independence to a lady who was affected by it even to tears 
 and then said, " I have not heard anything for years that so 
 much delighted me; but, after all, it is not poetry.'* 
 
 J 
 
WORDSWORTH 211 
 
 striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the 
 sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have for- 
 gotten the potent spell-word which would make 
 the particles cohere. There is an arenaceous 
 quality in the style which makes progress weari- 
 some. Yet with what splendors as of mountain 
 sunsets are we rewarded ! what golden rounds 
 of verse do we not see stretching heavenward 
 with angels ascending and descending ! what 
 haunting harmonies hover around us deep and 
 eternal like the undying barytone of the sea ! and 
 if we are compelled to fare through sands and 
 desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear 
 airy shapes that syllable our names with a start- 
 ling personal appeal to our highest consciousness 
 and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for 
 in vain in any other poet ! Landor, in a letter 
 to Miss Holford, says admirably of him, "Com- 
 mon minds alone can be ignorant what breadth 
 of philosophy, what energy and intensity of 
 thought, what insight into the heart, and what 
 observation of Nature are requisite for the pro- 
 duction of such poetry." 
 
 Take from Wordsworth all which an honest 
 criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will 
 show how truly great he was. He had no hu- 
 mor, no dramatic power, and his temperament 
 was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all 
 his published correspondence you shall not find 
 a letter, but only essays. If we consider care- 
 
212 WORDSWORTH 
 
 fully where he was most successful, we shall find 
 that it was not so much in description of natural 
 scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid 
 expression of the effect produced by external 
 objects .and events upon his own mind, and of 
 the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which 
 they in turn took from his mood or tempera- 
 ment. His finest passages are always mono- 
 logues. He had a fondness for particulars, and 
 there are parts of his poems which remind us 
 of local histories in the undue relative impor- 
 tance given to trivial matters. He was the 
 historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of 
 particularization (for it is as truly a power as 
 generalization) is what gives such vigor and 
 greatness to single lines and sentiments of 
 Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single 
 thought or sentiment. It was this that made 
 him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered 
 nook forced upon him the limits which his 
 fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was 
 never self-denying enough to impose on itself. 
 It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and 
 it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of 
 what was permanent in literature) liked him best. 
 Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end 
 to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault 
 of giving undue prominence to every passing 
 emotion. He excels in monologue, and the law 
 of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy. 
 
 I 
 
WORDSWORTH 213 
 
 In " The Excursion " we are driven to the sub- 
 terfuge of a French verdict of extenuating cir- 
 cumstances. His mind had not that reach and 
 elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the 
 trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and im- 
 ages like stately fleets from every quarter ; some 
 deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over 
 the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, 
 but all swept forward in their destined track, 
 over the long billows of his verse, every inch of 
 canvas strained by the unifying breath of their 
 common epic impulse. It was an organ that 
 Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable 
 equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim deli- 
 cacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth 
 in great crashes through his prose, as if he 
 touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. 
 If Wordsworth sometimes put the trumpet to 
 his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly 
 for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. 
 And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, 
 but that which Apollo breathed through, tend- 
 ing the flocks of Admetus, — that which Pan 
 endowed with every melody of the visible uni- 
 verse, — the same in which the soul of the de- 
 spairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her 
 dual nature, — so that ever and anon, amid the 
 notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes sud- 
 denly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling 
 us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity. 
 
214 WORDSWORTH 
 
 Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while 
 it no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by 
 making him insensible both to the comical in- 
 congruity into which he was often led by his 
 earlier theory concerning the language of poetry 
 and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by 
 it, seems to have been Indicative of a certain 
 dulness of perception in other directions.' We 
 
 * Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-compla- 
 cency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of 
 Helen of Kirconnel, — a poem hardly to be matched in any 
 language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of 
 feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. 
 
 *' Curst be the heart that thought the thought, 
 And curst the hand that fired the shot, 
 When in my arms burd Helen dropt, 
 That died to succor me ! 
 
 " O, think ye not my heart was sair 
 
 When my love dropt down and spake na mair ? " 
 
 Compare this with — 
 
 " Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts 
 That through his brain are travelling, 
 And, starting up, to Bruce's heart 
 He launched a deadly javelin; 
 
 Fair Ellen saw it when it came. 
 
 And, stepp'ng forth to meet the same. 
 
 Did with her body cover . 
 
 The Youth, her chosen lover. 
 
 And Bruce (ai soon as he had slain 
 The Gordon') sailed away to Spain, 
 And fought with rage incessant 
 Against the Moorish Crescent." 
 
 These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk ** penning 
 a stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that 
 
WORDSWORTH 215 
 
 cannot help feeling that the material of his na- 
 ture was essentially prose, which, in his inspired 
 moments, he had the power of transmuting, but 
 which, whenever the inspiration failed or was 
 factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The 
 normal condition of many poets would seem to 
 approach that temperature to which Words- 
 worth's mind could be raised only by the white 
 heat of profoundly inward passion. And in 
 proportion to the intensity needful to make his 
 
 Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the 
 language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less 
 modern and familiar. Had he written — 
 
 " And Gordon never gave a hint, 
 
 But, having somewhat picked his flint, 
 
 Let fly the fatal bullet 
 
 That killed that lovely pullet," — 
 
 it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest. 
 He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient 
 Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: ** The 
 poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the 
 principal person has no distinct character, either in his profes- 
 sion of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long 
 under the control of supernatural impressions, might be sup- 
 posed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly, 
 that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly, 
 that the events, having no necessary connection, do not pro- 
 duce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat 
 Jaboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure, 
 and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk afore- 
 named. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge's 
 most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from 
 the laws of cause and effect. 
 
2i6 WORDSWORTH 
 
 nature thoroughly aglow is the very high quality 
 of his best verses. They seem rather the pro- 
 ductions of Nature than of man, and have the 
 lastingness of such, delighting our age with the 
 same startle of newness and beauty that pleased 
 our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shift- 
 ing inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? 
 It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. 
 He seems to have caught and fixed forever 
 in immutable grace the most evanescent and 
 intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple- 
 marks on the remotest shores of being. But this 
 intensity of mood which insures high quality is 
 by its very nature incapable of prolongation, 
 and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more 
 below himself, and is, more even than many 
 poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet 
 of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having 
 the feeling sometimes that the poem is there 
 for the sake of these passages, rather than that 
 these are the natural jets and elations of a mind 
 energized by the rapidity of its own motion. 
 In other words, the happy couplet or gracious 
 image seems not to spring from the inspiration 
 of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to 
 have dropped of itself Into the mind of the poet 
 in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt 
 mood, has patiently built up around it a setting 
 of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a 
 material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on 
 
WORDSWORTH 217 
 
 the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.' 
 During the most happily productive period of 
 his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may 
 be called the mechanical portion of his art. His 
 wife and sister seem from the first to have been 
 his scribes. In later years, he had learned and 
 often insisted on the truth that poetry was an 
 art no less than a gift, and corrected his poems 
 in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment. 
 But he certainly had more of the vision than of 
 the faculty divine, and was always a little numb 
 on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps 
 his best poem in these respects is the " Lao- 
 damia," and it is not uninstructive to learn from 
 his own lips that " it cost him more trouble 
 than almost anything of equal length he had 
 ever written." His longer poems (miscalled 
 epical) have no more intimate bond of union 
 than their more or less immediate relation to 
 his own personality. Of character other than 
 his own he had but a faint conception, and all 
 the personages of " The Excursion " that are 
 not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of 
 himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated 
 
 ' "A hundred times when, roving high and low, 
 I have been harassed with the toil of verse. 
 Much pains and little progress, and at once 
 Some lovely Image in the song rose up. 
 Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea." 
 
 Prelude, bk. iv. 
 
2i8 WORDSWORTH 
 
 nature was incapable of projecting itself into 
 the consciousness of other men and seeing the 
 springs of action at their source in the recesses 
 of individual character. The best parts of these 
 longer poems are bursts of impassioned solilo- 
 quy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the 
 callida junctura. The stream of narration is 
 sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflec- 
 tions {yiridesque -placido aequore sylvas) ; we are 
 forced to do our own rowing, and only when 
 the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge 
 of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel 
 ourselves snatched along on the smooth but 
 impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration. 
 The fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's 
 poetry was (more truly even than with some 
 greater poets than he) a gift ratherthan an achieve- 
 ment should always be borne in mind in taking 
 the measure of his power. I know not whether 
 to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his, 
 but it certainly endows those parts of his work 
 which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian 
 with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of 
 originality such as we feel in the presence of 
 Nature herself. He seems to have been half 
 conscious of this, and recited his own poems to 
 all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering 
 admiration that would have been profoundly 
 comic ' but for its simple sincerity and for the 
 
 * Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile. 
 
WORDSWORTH 219 
 
 fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, of 
 Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William 
 Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced 
 quite another. We recognize two voices in him, 
 as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah 
 and his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from 
 dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle, 
 employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes 
 of his master, how he one day went out and 
 saw an old woman, and the next day did not, 
 and so came home and dictated some verses on 
 this ominous phenomenon, and how another 
 day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations 
 have been carelessly taken up into the text, have 
 been religiously held by the pious to be ortho- 
 dox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have 
 been made to yield deeply oracular meanings. 
 Presently the real prophet takes up the word 
 again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the 
 Voice of a higher and invisible power. Words- 
 worth's better utterances have the bare sincerity, 
 the absolute abstraction from time and place, the 
 immunity from decay, that belong to the grand 
 simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more 
 his own than ours and every man's, the word 
 
 and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year) 
 says, •* These quotations [from his own works] he read in a 
 way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were 
 awed by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which 
 he had been endowed.'''' (The italics are mine.) 
 
220 WORDSWORTH 
 
 of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was 
 naturally very much a matter of temperament, 
 and accordingly by far the greater part of his 
 finer product belongs to the period of his prime, 
 ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal 
 that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.' 
 He did not grow as those poets do in whom the 
 artistic sense is predominant. One of the most 
 delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist, 
 Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had 
 his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand, 
 does his best afterwards to look like it. Many 
 of Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather 
 unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self. 
 They would never, as Sir John Harrington says 
 
 ' His best poetry was written when he was under the im- 
 mediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt 
 this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when 
 he speaks of ** those who have been so well pleased that I 
 should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills 
 into their main stream." (^Letters, Conversations, a?id Re~ 
 collections of S. T. C, vol. i. pp. 5, 6.) "Wordsworth 
 found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the 
 participles in Shakespeare's line about bees: — 
 
 " 'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' 
 
 This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. 
 Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in hr^r- 
 mony with the continued note of the singers." (Leigh Hunt's 
 Autobiography. ) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 
 1837, ** My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost 
 to disease." One cannot help thinking that his training in 
 these niceties was begun by Coleridge. 
 
WORDSWORTH 221 
 
 of poetry, "keep a child from play and an old 
 man from the chimney-corner," ' 
 
 Chief Justice Marshall once blandly inter- 
 rupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain 
 obvious points of law at needless length, by say- 
 ing, " Brother Jones, there are some things which 
 a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in 
 equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth 
 has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious 
 points till the reader feels as if his own intelli- 
 gence were somewhat underrated. He is over- 
 conscientious in giving us full measure, and once 
 profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own 
 voice, he knows not when to stop. If he feel 
 himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping 
 the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series 
 of questions sometimes not needing, and often 
 incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of 
 such near the close of the First Part of " Peter 
 Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the 
 dead body in the water, all happily incongruous, 
 and ending with one which reaches the height 
 of comicality : — 
 
 •' Is it a fiend that to a stake 
 Of fire his desperate self is tethering ? 
 Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell. 
 In solitary ward or cell, 
 Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? " 
 
 The same want of humor which made him 
 
 * In the Preface to his translation q{ the Orlando Furioso. 
 
222 WORDSWORTH 
 
 insensible to incongruity may perhaps account 
 also for the singular unconsciousness of dispro- 
 portion which so often strikes us in his poetry. 
 For example, a little farther on in " Peter Bell " 
 we find : — 
 
 •' Now — like a tempest-shattered bark 
 That overwhelmed and prostrate lies. 
 And in a moment to the verge 
 Is lifted of a foaming surge — 
 Full suddenly the Ass doth rise! " 
 
 And one cannot help thinking that the similes 
 of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud, 
 noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat 
 too lofty for the service to which they are put/ 
 The movement of Wordsworth's mind was 
 too slow and his mood too meditative for nar- 
 rative poetry. He values his own thoughts and 
 reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them 
 to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is 
 never action that interests him, but the subtle 
 motives that lead to or hinder it. " The Wag- 
 goner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with 
 " Tarn O'Shanter " infinitely to its own disad- 
 vantage. " Peter Bell," full though it be of pro- 
 found touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering 
 and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to con- 
 fess that he did not like it. " The White Doe," 
 the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best 
 meaning of the epithet, is also only the more 
 ' In Resolution and Independence. 
 
WORDSWORTH 223 
 
 truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What 
 charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever 
 
 is the 
 
 •' Happy tone 
 Of meditation slipping in between 
 The beauty coming and the beauty gone.'* 
 
 A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their 
 words to the tune of our own feelings and fan- 
 cies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable 
 as the sympathetic grace of woman, are every- 
 thing to us without our being able to say that 
 they are much in themselves. They rather nar- 
 cotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject 
 our mood to his own before he admits us to his 
 intimacy ; but, once admitted, it is for life, and 
 we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he 
 has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but 
 for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of 
 faltering purpose and personal independence 
 of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first 
 professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and continued by 
 Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The 
 Solitary of " The Excursion," who has not been 
 cured of his scepticism by living among the 
 medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see, 
 equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and 
 Parson, Wordsworth apparently felt that this 
 would be so, and accordingly never saw his way 
 clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment, 
 whether a panacea or not, is certainly whole- 
 
224 WORDSWORTH 
 
 some, inasmuch as It inculcates abstinence, ex- 
 ercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure, 
 indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not 
 tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than 
 Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugi- 
 tive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of 
 manlier qualities. The ancients and our own 
 Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become 
 fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by 
 taking a frank delight in its action and passion 
 and by grappling with the facts of this world, 
 rather than muddling themselves over the in- 
 soluble problems of another. If they had not 
 discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, 
 they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and 
 his destiny, and would have seen something 
 ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle 
 of a grown man running to hide his head in 
 the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he 
 had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the 
 tussle for existence. 
 
 But when, as I have said, our impartiality has 
 made all those qualifications and deductions 
 against which even the greatest poet may not 
 plead his privilege, what Is left to Wordsworth 
 is enough to justify his fame. Even where his 
 genius is wrapped In clouds, the unconquerable 
 lightning of Imagination struggles through, flash- 
 ing out unexpected vistas, and Illuminating the 
 humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a 
 
 1 
 
WORDSWORTH 225 
 
 radiance of momentary consciousness that seems 
 like a revelation. If it be the most delightful 
 function of the poet to set our lives to music, 
 yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our 
 maturer gratitude if he do his part also as mor- 
 aHst and philosopher to purify and enlighten ; 
 if he define and encourage our vacillating per- 
 ceptions of duty ; if he piece together our frag- 
 mentary apprehensions of our own life and that 
 larger life whose unconscious instruments we 
 are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected 
 map of experience a coherent chart. In the great 
 poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of 
 soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer 
 sea-moss with every movement of the element 
 in which it floats, but which is rooted on the 
 solid rock of our common sympathies. Words- 
 worth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of 
 organization than one or two of his contempo- 
 raries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ; but 
 he was a masculine thinker, and in his more 
 characteristic poems there is always a kernel of 
 firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that 
 stimulates thought and challenges meditation. 
 Groping in the dark passages of life, we come 
 upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that 
 gives us our bearings and enables us to find 
 an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that 
 he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which 
 results from breadth of culture ; nay, he seems 
 
226 WORDSWORTH 
 
 narrow, insular, almost provincial. He reminds 
 us of those saints of Dante who gather bright- 
 ness by revolving on their own axis. But through 
 this very limitation of range he gains perhaps 
 in intensity and the impressiveness which re- 
 sults from eagerness of personal conviction. If 
 we read Wordsworth through, as I have just 
 done, we find ourselves changing our mind about 
 him at every other page, so uneven is he. If 
 we read our favorite poems or passages only, he 
 will seem uniformly great. And even as regards 
 " The Excursion " we should remember how few 
 long poems will bear consecutive reading. For 
 my part I know of but one, — the " Odyssey." 
 None of our great poets can be called pop- 
 ular in any exact sense of the word, for the 
 highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions 
 which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubt- 
 ful limits of that shore between our abiding 
 divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted 
 in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid 
 bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional 
 moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no 
 other poet except Shakespeare have so many 
 phrases become household words as of Words- 
 worth. If Pope has made current more epigrams 
 of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the 
 nobler praise of having defined for us, and given 
 us for a daily possession, those faint and vague 
 suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle 
 
WORDSWORTH 227 
 
 ministry with our baser nature the hurry and 
 bustle of Hfe scarcely ever allowed us to be 
 conscious. He has won for himself a secure 
 immortality by a depth of intuition which makes 
 only the best minds at their best hours worthy, 
 or indeed capable, of his companionship, and 
 by a homely sincerity of human sympathy 
 which reaches the humblest heart. Our language 
 owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and 
 abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, 
 for having emboldened us to take delight in 
 simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own 
 instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs 
 not to bid 
 
 *' Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh 
 To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie 
 A little nearer Spenser " ; — 
 
 for there is no fear of crowding in that little 
 society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in 
 the succession of the great English Poets. 
 
CARLYLE- 
 
 1866 
 
 A FEELING of comical sadness is likely 
 to come over the mind of any middle- 
 aged man who sets himself to recollect- 
 inor the names of different authors that have 
 been famous, and the number of contemporary 
 immortalities whose end he has seen since com- 
 ing to manhood. Many a light, hailed by too 
 careless observers as a fixed star, has proved to 
 be only a short-lived lantern at the tail of a 
 newspaper kite. The literary heaven which our 
 youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we 
 find now to have been a stage-sky merely, arti- 
 ficially enkindled from behind ; and the cynical 
 daylight which is sure to follow all theatrical 
 enthusiasms shows us ragged holes where once 
 were luminaries, sheer vacancy instead of lustre. 
 Our earthly reputations, says a great poet, are 
 the color of grass, and the same sun that makes 
 the green bleaches it out again. But next morn- 
 ing is not the time to criticise the scene-painter's 
 firmament, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly 
 a part of some general illusion in the absence 
 ' Apropos of his Frederick the Great. 
 
 i 
 
CARLYLE 229 
 
 of that sympathetic enthusiasm, that self-surren- 
 der of the fancy, which made it what it was. 
 It would not be safe for all neglected authors 
 to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fashion, 
 inferring genius in an inverse proportion to 
 public favor, and a high and solitary merit from 
 the world's indifference. On the contrary, it 
 would be more just to argue from popularity a 
 certain amount of real value, though it may not 
 be of that permanent quality which insures en- 
 during fame. The contemporary world and 
 Wordsworth were both half right. He undoubt- 
 edly owned and worked the richest vein of his 
 period ; but he offered to his contemporaries 
 a heap of gold-bearing quartz where the baser 
 mineral made the greater show, and the pur- 
 chaser must do his own crushing and smelting, 
 with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner. 
 It was not enough that certain bolder adven- 
 turers should now and then show a nugget in 
 proof of the success of their venture. The gold 
 of the poet must be refined, moulded, stamped 
 with the image and superscription of his time, 
 but with a beauty of design and finish that are 
 of no time. The work must surpass the mate- 
 rial. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shap- 
 ing imagination which is the highest criterion 
 of a poet. 
 
 Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, 
 would seem to be the result of different quali- 
 
230 CARLYLE 
 
 ties, and not of mere difference in degree. It is 
 safe to prophesy a certain durability of recog- 
 nition for any author who gives evidence of 
 intellectual force, in whatever kind, above the 
 average amount. There are names in literary 
 history which are only names; and the works 
 associated with them, like acts of Congress 
 already agreed on in debate, are read by their 
 titles and passed. What is it that insures what 
 may be called living fame, so that a book shall 
 be at once famous and read ? What is it that 
 relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil 
 Pontus of the British Poets, and keeps gar- 
 rulous Pepys within the cheery circle of the 
 evening lamp and fire? Originality, eloquence, 
 sense, imagination, not one of them is enough 
 by itself, but only in some happy mixture and 
 proportion. Imagination seems to possess in 
 itself more of the antiseptic property than any 
 other single quality ; but, without less showy 
 and more substantial allies, it can at best give 
 only deathlessness, without the perpetual youth 
 that makes it other than dreary. It were easy 
 to find examples of this Tithonus immortality, 
 setting its victims apart from both gods and 
 men ; helpless duration, undying, to be sure, 
 but sapless and voiceless also, and long ago de- 
 serted by the fickle Hemera. And yet chance 
 could confer that gift on Glaucus, which love 
 and the consent of Zeus failed to secure for the 
 
CARLYLE 231 
 
 darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, then ? 
 Luck may, and often does, have some share in 
 ephemeral successes, as in a gambler's winnings 
 spent as soon as got, but not in any lasting tri- 
 umph over time. Solid success must be based 
 on solid qualities and the honest culture of them. 
 The first element of contemporary popularity 
 is undoubtedly the power of entertaining. If 
 a man have anything to tell, the world cannot 
 be called upon to listen to him unless he have 
 perfected himself in the best way of telling it. 
 People are not to be argued into a pleasurable 
 sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by any 
 syllogism, however stringent. An author may 
 make himself very popular, however, and even 
 justly so, by appealing to the passion of the 
 moment, without having anything in him that 
 shall outlast the public whim which he satisfies. 
 Churchill is a remarkable example of this. He 
 had a surprising extemporary vigor of mind; 
 his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he 
 undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as 
 Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth- 
 born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now, 
 solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers 
 columbarium, and without danger of violation. 
 His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, 
 while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is 
 still a good life on the books of the Critical 
 Insurance Office. " It is not, then, loftiness of 
 
232 CARLYLE 
 
 mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?" cries 
 poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' end. Certainly 
 not altogether that. There must be also the 
 great Mantuan's art ; his power, not only of 
 being strong in parts, but of making those parts 
 coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary 
 to it. Gray, if we may believe the commenta- 
 tors, has not an idea, scarcely an epithet, that he 
 can call his own ; and yet he is, in the best sense, 
 one of the classics of English literature. He had 
 exquisite felicity of choice ; his dictionary had 
 no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but all 
 culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and 
 with a faint but delicious aroma of association ; 
 he had a perfect sense of sound, and one idea 
 without which all the poetic outfit (si absit pru- 
 dentid) is of little avail, — that of combination 
 and arrangement, in short, of art. The poets 
 from whom he helped himself have no more 
 claim to any of his poems as wholes than the 
 various beauties of Greece (if the old story were 
 true) to the Venus of the artist. 
 
 Imagination, as we have said, has more vir- 
 tue to keep a book alive than any other single 
 faculty. Burke is rescued from the usual doom 
 of orators, because his learning, his experience, 
 his sagacity are rimmed with a halo by this be- 
 witching light behind the intellectual eye from 
 the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare 
 has impregnated his common sense with the 
 
CARLYLE 233 
 
 steady glow of it, and answers the mood of youth 
 and age, of high and low, immortal as that date- 
 less substance of the soul he wrought in. To 
 have any chance of lasting, a book must satisfy, 
 not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, but 
 a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 
 and it needs only a superficial study of literature 
 to be convinced that real fame depends rather 
 on the sum of an author's powers than on any 
 brilliancy of special parts. There must be wis- 
 dom as well as wit, sense no less than imagina- 
 tion, judgment in equal measure with fancy, and 
 the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the poor 
 wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would 
 mount and draw all eyes. There are some who 
 think that the brooding patience which a great 
 work calls for belonged exclusively to an earlier 
 period than ours. Others lay the blame on our 
 fashion of periodical publication, which necessi- 
 tates a sensation and a crisis in every number, 
 and forces the writer to strive for startling efi^ects, 
 instead of that general lowness of tone which is 
 the last achievement of the artist. The simplic- 
 ity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique 
 pathos, seems not merely to be gone out of fash- 
 ion, but out of being as well. Modern poets 
 appear rather to tease their words into a fury 
 than to infuse them with the deliberate heats of 
 their matured conception, and strive to replace 
 the rapture of the mind with a fervid intensity 
 
234 CARLYLE 
 
 of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous 
 platitudes of the last century has no doubt led 
 us to excuse this, and to be thankful for some- 
 thing like real fire, though of stubble ; but our 
 prevailing style of criticism, which regards parts 
 rather than wholes, which dwells on the beauty 
 of passages, and, above all, must have its languid 
 nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 
 whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm 
 us in our evil way. Passages are good when they 
 lead to something, when they are necessary parts 
 of the building, but they are not good to dwell 
 In. This taste for the startling reminds us of 
 something which happened once at the burn- 
 ing of a country meeting-house. The building 
 stood on a hill, and, apart from any other con- 
 siderations, the fire was as picturesque as could 
 be desired. When all was a black heap, licking 
 itself here and there with tongues of fire, there 
 rushed up a farmer gasping anxiously, " Hez 
 the bell fell yit ? " An ordinary fire was no more 
 to him than that on his hearthstone ; even the 
 burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic 
 rarity, could not (so long as he was of another 
 parish) tickle his outworn palate ; but he had 
 hoped for a certain tang in the downcome of the 
 bell that might recall the boyish flavor of con- 
 flagration. There was something dramatic, no 
 doubt, in this surprise of the brazen sentinel at 
 his post, but the breathless rustic has always 
 
CARLYLE 235 
 
 seemed to me a type of the prevailing delusion 
 in esthetics. Alas 1 if the bell must fall in every 
 stanza or every monthly number, how shall an 
 author contrive to stir us at last, unless with 
 whole Moscows, crowned with the tintinnabu- 
 lary crash of the Kremlin ? For myself I am 
 glad to feel that I am still able to find content- 
 ment in the more conversational and domestic 
 tone of my old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt 
 a great part of our pleasure in reading is unex- 
 pectedness, whether in turn of thought or of 
 phrase ; but an emphasis out of place, an inten- 
 sity of expression not founded on sincerity of 
 moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one 
 of the underscorings in young ladies' letters, a 
 wonder even to themselves under the colder 
 north light of matronage. It is the part of the 
 critic, however, to keep cool under whatever 
 circumstances, and to reckon that the excesses 
 of an author will be at first more attractive to 
 the many than that average power which shall 
 win him attention with a new generation of 
 men. It is seldom found out by the majority, 
 till after a considerable interval, that he was the 
 original man who contrived to be simply nat- 
 ural, — the hardest lesson in the school of art 
 and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing 
 capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome 
 and wayward of brooks draws now and then 
 some lover's foot to its intimate reserve, while 
 
236 CARLYLE 
 
 the spirt of a bursting water-pipe gathers a 
 gaping crowd forthwith. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been 
 so long before the world that we may feel to- 
 ward him something of the unprejudice of pos- 
 terity. It has long been evident that he had no 
 more ideas to bestow upon us, and that no new 
 turn of his kaleidoscope would give us anything 
 but some variation of arrangement in the bril- 
 liant colors of his style. It is perhaps possible, 
 then, to arrive at some not wholly inadequate 
 estimate of his place as a writer, and especially 
 of the value of the ideas whose advocate he 
 makes himself, with a bitterness and violence 
 that increase, as it seems to me, in proportion as 
 his inward conviction of their truth diminishes. 
 
 The leading characteristics of an author who 
 is in any sense original, that is to say, who does 
 not merely reproduce, but modifies the influence 
 of tradition, culture, and contemporary thought 
 upon himself by some admixture of his own, 
 may commonly be traced more or less clearly 
 in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, 
 no doubt, of poets, because the imagination is 
 a fixed quantity, not to be increased by any 
 amount of study and reflection. Skill, wisdom, 
 and even wit are cumulative ; but that diviner 
 faculty, which is the spiritual eye, though it 
 may be trained and sharpened, cannot be added 
 to by taking thought. This has always been 
 
CARLYLE 237 
 
 something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a 
 happy conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last 
 of the great poets, accordingly takes pains to 
 tell us under what planets he was born ; and in 
 him it is curious how uniform the imaginative 
 quality is from the beginning to the end of his 
 long literary activity. His early poems show 
 maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. 
 The apple already lies potentially in the blos- 
 som, as that may be traced also by cutting across 
 the ripened fruit. With a mere change of em- 
 phasis, Goethe might be called an old boy at 
 both ends of his career. 
 
 In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we 
 find some not obscure hints of the future man. 
 Nearly fifty years ago he contributed a few 
 Hterary and critical articles to the Edinburgh 
 Encyclopaedia. The outward fashion of them is 
 that of the period ; but they are distinguished 
 by a certain security of judgment remarkable at 
 any time, remarkable especially in one so young. 
 British criticism has been always more or less 
 parochial ; has never, indeed, quite freed itself 
 from sectarian cant and planted itself honestly 
 on the aesthetic point of view. It cannot quite 
 persuade itself that truth is of immortal essence, 
 totally independent of all assistance from quar- 
 terly journals or the British army and navy. 
 Carlyle, in these first essays, already shows the 
 influence of his master, Goethe, the most widely 
 
238 CARLYLE 
 
 receptive of critics. In a compact notice of Mon- 
 taigne, there is not a word as to his religious scep- 
 ticism. The character is looked at purely from 
 its human and literary sides. As illustrating the 
 bent of the author's mind, the following passage 
 is most to our purpose : " A modern reader will 
 not easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, 
 though exuberant egotism which brings back to 
 our view ' the form and pressure ' of a time long 
 past. T'he habits and humors^ the mode of acting 
 and thinkings which characterized a Gascon gentle- 
 man in the sixteenth century y cannot fail to amuse 
 an inquirer of the nineteenth ; while the faithful 
 delineation of human feelings ^ in all their strength 
 and weakness y will serve as a mirror to every mind 
 ' capable of self-examination^ We find here no 
 uncertain indication of that eye for the moral 
 picturesque, and that sympathetic appreciation 
 of character, which within the next few years were 
 to make Carlyle the first in insight of English 
 critics and the most vivid of English historians. 
 In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of 
 his master's great rule. Den Gegenstand fest zu 
 halten. He accordingly gave to Englishmen the 
 first humanly possiblelikeness'of Voltaire, Dide- 
 rot, Mirabeau, and others, who had hitherto 
 been measured by the usual British standard of 
 their respect for the geognosy of Moses and the 
 historic credibility of the Books of Chronicles. 
 What was the real meaning of this phenomenon? 
 
CARLYLE 239 
 
 what the amount of this man's honest perform- 
 ance in the world ? and in what does he show 
 that family likeness, common to all the sons of 
 Adam, which gives us a fair hope of being able 
 to comprehend him ? These were the questions 
 which Carlyle seems to have set himself honestly 
 to answer in the critical writings which fill the 
 first period of his life as a man of letters. In this 
 mood he rescued poor Boswell from the unmer- 
 ited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and 
 taught us to see something half-comically beau- 
 tiful in the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic 
 instinct of reverence for what was nobler, wiser, 
 and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. 
 Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with 
 the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and 
 beautiful in human nature, with the most vehe- 
 ment scorn of cowardly compromise with things 
 base ; and yet, immitigable as his demand for the 
 highest in us seems to be, there is always some- 
 thing reassuring in the humorous sympathy 
 with mortal frailty which softens condemnation 
 and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable 
 feature ' of Mr. Carlyle's criticism (see, for ex- 
 ample, his analysis and exposition of Goethe's 
 "Helena") is the sleuth-hound instinct with 
 which he presses on to the matter of his theme, 
 — never turned aside by a false scent, regard- 
 less of the outward beauty of form, sometimes 
 almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after 
 
24° CARLYLE 
 
 the Intellectual nourishment which It may hide. 
 The delicate skeleton of admirably articulated 
 and related parts which underlies and sustains 
 every true work of art, and keeps It from sinking 
 on itself a shapeless heap, he would crush re- 
 morselessly to come at the marrow of meaning. 
 With him the Ideal sense Is secondary to the 
 ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint 
 conception of their possible unity. 
 
 By degrees the humorous element in his na- 
 ture gains ground, till It overmasters all the rest. 
 Becoming always more boisterous and obtrusive, 
 it ends at last, as such humor must. In cynicism. 
 In " Sartor Resartus " It is still kindly, still in- 
 fused with sentiment; and the book, with Its 
 mixture of Indignation and farce, strikes one as 
 might the prophecies of Jeremiah, If the mar- 
 ginal comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his 
 wildest mood had by some accident been Incor- 
 porated with the text. In " Sartor " the marked 
 influence of Jean Paul is undeniable, both In 
 matter and manner. It Is curious for one who 
 studies the action and reaction of national litera- 
 tures on each other, to see the humor of Swift 
 and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through 
 Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Ger- 
 manism that makes it novel, alien, or even dis- 
 pleasing, as the case may be, to the English 
 mind. Unhappily the bit o^ mother from Swift's 
 vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour 
 
CARLYLE 24» 
 
 all the rest. The whimsicality of " Tristram 
 Shandy," which, even in the original, has too 
 often the effect of forethought, becomes a de- 
 liberate artifice in Richter, and at last a mere 
 mannerism in Carlyle. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the 
 advantage of a well-defined theme, and of limits 
 both in the subject and in the space allowed for 
 its treatment, which kept his natural extrava- 
 gance within bounds, and compelled some sort 
 of discretion and compactness. The great merit 
 of these essays lay in a criticism based on wide 
 and various study, which, careless of tradition, 
 applied its standard to the real and not the con- 
 temporary worth of the literary or other perform- 
 ance to be judged, and in an unerring eye for 
 that fleeting expression of the moral features of 
 character, a perception of which alone makes the 
 drawing of a coherent likeness possible. Their 
 defect was a tendency, gaining strength with 
 years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic 
 standard, and to make the value of an author's 
 work dependent on the general force of his na- 
 ture rather than on its special fitness for a given 
 task. In proportion as his humor gradually 
 overbalanced the other qualities of his mind, his 
 taste for the eccentric, amorphous, and violent 
 in men became excessive, disturbing more and 
 more his perception of the more commonplace 
 attributes which give consistency to portraiture. 
 
242 CARLYLE 
 
 His " French Revolution " is a series of lurid 
 pictures, unmatched for vehement power, in 
 which the figures of such sons of earth as Mira- 
 beau and Danton loom gigantic and terrible as 
 in the glare of an eruption, their shadows sway- 
 ing far and wide, grotesquely awful. But all is 
 painted by eruption flashes in violent light and 
 shade. There are no half tints, no gradations, 
 and one finds it impossible to account for the 
 continuance in power of less Titanic actors in 
 the tragedy like Robespierre, on any theory 
 whether of human nature or of individual char- 
 acter supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his success, 
 however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, 
 which was to haunt the mind with memories of 
 a horrible political nightmare, there can be no 
 doubt. 
 
 Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, 
 " The worthy Germans have persuaded them- 
 selves that the essence of true humor is form- 
 lessness." Heine had not yet shown that a 
 German might combine the most airy humor 
 with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe's own, 
 and that there was no need to borrow the bow 
 of Philoctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Car- 
 lyle's own tendency was toward the lawless, and 
 the attraction of Jean Paul made it an over- 
 mastering one. Goethe, I think, might have 
 gone farther, and affirmed that nothing but the 
 highest artistic sense can prevent humor from 
 
CARLYLE 243 
 
 degenerating into the grotesque, and thence 
 downwards to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a strik- 
 ing example of it. The moral purpose of his 
 book cannot give it that unity which the instinct 
 and forethought of art only can bring forth. 
 Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of humorous 
 literature to the fact that Cervantes had been 
 trained to authorship in a school where form 
 predominated over substance, and the most 
 convincing proof of the supremacy of art at the 
 highest period of Greek literature is to be found 
 in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle has no artistic 
 sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of proportion. 
 Accordingly he looks on verse with contempt 
 as something barbarous, — the savage ornament 
 which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has 
 tattooing and nose-rings. With a conceptive 
 imagination vigorous beyond any in his genera- 
 tion, with a mastery of language equalled only 
 by the greatest poets, he wants altogether the 
 plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, which 
 would have made him a poet in the highest 
 sense. He is a preacher and a prophet, — any- 
 thing you will, — but an artist he is not, and 
 never can be. It is always the knots and gnarls 
 o*f the oak that he admires, never the perfect 
 and balanced tree. 
 
 It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful 
 for what we owe an author than to blame him 
 for what he cannot give us. But it is sometimes 
 
244 CARLYLE 
 
 the business of a critic to trace faults of style 
 and of thought to their root in character and 
 temperament, to show their necessary relation 
 to, and dependence on, each other, and to find 
 some more trustworthy explanation than mere 
 wantonness of will for the moral obliquities of a 
 man so largely moulded and gifted as Mr. Car- 
 lyle. So long as he was merely an exhorter or 
 dehorter, we were thankful for such eloquence, 
 such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, 
 and such splendor of illustration as only he 
 could give ; but when he assumes to be a 
 teacher of moral and political philosophy, when 
 he himself takes to compounding the social 
 panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, and 
 advertises none as genuine but his own, we 
 begin to inquire into his qualifications and his 
 defects, and to ask ourselves whether his patent 
 pill differ from others except in the larger 
 amount of aloes, or have any better recommen- 
 dation than the superior advertising powers of 
 a mountebank of genius. Comparative criticism 
 teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are 
 more nearly related than is commonly supposed. 
 Had Mr. Carlyle been fitted out completely 
 by nature as an artist, he would have had an 
 ideal in his work which would have lifted his 
 mind away from the muddier part of him, 
 and trained him to the habit of seeking and see- 
 ing the harmony rather than the discord and 
 
CARLYLE 245 
 
 contradiction of things. His innate love of the 
 picturesque (which is only another form of the 
 sentimentalism he so scoffs at, perhaps as feel- 
 ing it a weakness in himself),' once turned in 
 the direction of character, and finding its chief 
 satisfaction there, led him to look for that ideal 
 of human nature in individual men which is but 
 fragmentarily represented in the entire race, and 
 is rather divined from the aspiration, forever 
 disenchanted to be forever renewed, of the im- 
 mortal part in us, than found in any example 
 of actual achievement. A wiser temper would 
 have seen something more consoling than dis- 
 heartening in the continual failure of men emi- 
 nently endowed to reach the standard of this 
 spiritual requirement, would perhaps have found 
 in it an inspiring hint that it is mankind, and not 
 special men, that are to be shaped at last into 
 the image of God, and that the endless life of 
 the generations may hope to come nearer that 
 goal of which the short-breathed threescore years 
 and ten fall too unhappily short. 
 
 But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, 
 and all who recommend any other method, or 
 see any hope of healing elsewhere, are either 
 quacks and charlatans or their victims. His 
 
 * Thirty years ago, when this was written, I ventured only 
 a hint that Carlyle was essentially a sentimentalist. In what 
 has been published since his death I find proof of what I had 
 divined rather than definitely formulated. (1888.) 
 
246 CARLYLE 
 
 lively imagination conjures up the image of an 
 impossible he, as contradictorily endowed as the 
 chief personage in a modern sentimental novel, 
 who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like 
 a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry 
 them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. 
 If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then recol- 
 lect that men are men, and not sheep, nay, that 
 the farther they are from being such, the more 
 well grounded our hope of one day making 
 something better of them ! It is indeed strange 
 that one who values Will so highly in the 
 greatest should be blind to its infinite worth in 
 the least of men ; nay, that he should so often 
 seem to confound it with its irritable and pur- 
 poseless counterfeit. Wilfulness. The natural 
 impatience of an imaginative temperament, 
 which conceives so vividly the beauty and de- 
 sirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner 
 political order, makes him fret at the slow 
 moral processes by which the All-Wise brings 
 about his ends, and turns the very foolishness 
 of men to his praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is 
 for calling down fire from Heaven whenever he 
 cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. 
 No doubt it is somewhat provoking that it 
 should be so easy to build castles in the air, and 
 so hard to find tenants for them. It is a sin- 
 gular intellectual phenomenon to see a man, 
 who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated the 
 
CARLYLE 247 
 
 innate weakness and futile tendency of the 
 "storm and thrust" period of German literature, 
 constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more 
 and more nearly to its principles and practice. It 
 is no longer the sagacious and moderate Goethe 
 who is his type of what is highest in human 
 nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron 
 Hand, some asserter of the divine legitimacy 
 oi Faustrecht, It is odd to conceive the fate 
 of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of any of his 
 heroes, how Cromwell would have scorned him 
 as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but 
 less clear and practical, how Friedrich would 
 have scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeug not 
 to be compared with the romances of Crebillon 
 filsy or possibly have clapped him in a marching 
 regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the 
 sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. Carlyle's 
 irritability is to be laid to the account of his 
 early schoolmastership at Kirkcaldy. This great 
 booby World is such a dull boy, and will not 
 learn the lesson we have taken such pains in 
 expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, 
 if eloquence, if example, if the awful warning of 
 other little boys who neglected their accidence 
 and came to the gallows, if none of these avail, 
 the birch at least is left, and we will try that. 
 The dominie spirit has become every year 
 more obtrusive and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle's 
 writing, and the rod, instead of being kept in 
 
248 CARLYLE 
 
 its place as a resource for desperate cases, has 
 become the alpha and omega of all successful 
 training, the one divinely appointed means of 
 human enlightenment and progress, in short, the 
 final hope of that absurd animal who fancies 
 himself a little lower than the angels. Have we 
 feebly taken it for granted that the distinction 
 of man was reason ? Never was there a more 
 fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason 
 that we are unenviably distinguished from the 
 brutes, whose nobler privilege of instinct saves 
 them from our blunders and our crimes. 
 
 But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed 
 with the hallucination that he is head-master of 
 this huge boys' school which we call the World, 
 his pedagogic birch has grown to the taller pro- 
 portions and more ominous aspect of a gallows. 
 His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of 
 the halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is 
 invoked for the self-appointed dictator who had 
 discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent 
 than that which produced the Jesuits' bark. 
 Mr. Carlyle seems to be in the condition of a 
 man who uses stimulants, and must increase his 
 dose from day to day as the senses become 
 dulled under the spur. He began by admir- 
 ing strength of character and purpose and the 
 manly self-denial which makes a humble fortune 
 great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone 
 on till mere strength has become such washy 
 
CARLYLE 249 
 
 weakness that there is no longer any titillation in 
 it; and nothing short of downright violence will 
 rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. 
 At first he made out very well with remarkable 
 men ; then, lessening the water and increasing 
 the spirit, he took to Heroes : and now he must 
 have downright /^humanity, or the draught has 
 no savor ; so he gets on at last to Kings, types 
 of remorseless Force, who maintain the political 
 views of Berserkers by the legal principles of 
 Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, re- 
 presentative government is a gabble, democracy 
 a birth of the bottomless pit; there is no hope 
 for mankind except in getting themselves under 
 a good driver who shall not spare the lash. And 
 yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are provi- 
 dential births not to be contrived by any cun- 
 ning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the 
 last of them. Meanwhile the world's wheels 
 have got fairly stalled in mire and other matter 
 of every vilest consistency and most disgustful 
 smell. What are we to do ? Mr. Carlyle will 
 not let us make a lever with a rail from the next 
 fence, or call in the neighbors. That would be 
 too commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. 
 No ; he would have us sit down beside him in 
 the slough and shout lustily for Hercules. If 
 that indispensable demigod will not or cannot 
 come, we can find a useful and instructive sol- 
 ace, during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty 
 
250 CARLYLE 
 
 abuse of human nature, which, at the long last, 
 is always to blame. 
 
 Since " Sartor Resartus " Mr. Carlyle has 
 done little but repeat himself with increasing 
 emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning 
 has steadily heated toward denunciation, and re- 
 monstrance soured toward scolding. The image 
 of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed 
 from Richter and turned to such humorous 
 purpose, might be applied to himself. The same 
 phrase comes round and round, only the ma- 
 chine, being a little crankier, rattles more, and 
 the performer is called on for a more visible ex- 
 ertion. If there be not something very like cant 
 in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not 
 the repetition of a creed after it has become a 
 phrase by the cooling of that white-hot convic- 
 tion which once made it both the light and 
 warmth of the soul. I do not mean intentional 
 and deliberate cant, but neither is that which 
 Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his 
 fellow men of that conscious kind. I do not mean 
 to blame him for it, but mention it rather as an 
 interesting phenomenon of human nature. The 
 stock of ideas which mankind has to work with 
 is very limited, like the alphabet, and can at best 
 have an air of freshness given it by new arrange- 
 ments and combinations, or by application to 
 new times and circumstances. Montaigne is but 
 Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century. 
 
CARLYLE 251 
 
 Voltaire but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both 
 are original, and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, 
 whose borrowing is mainly from his own former 
 works. But he does this so often and so openly 
 that we may at least be sure that he ceased grow- 
 ing a number of years ago, and is a remarkable 
 example of arrested development. 
 
 The cynicism, however, which has now be- 
 come the prevailing temper of his mind, has gone 
 on expanding with unhappy vigor. In Mr, Car- 
 lyle it is not, certainly, as in Swift, the result of 
 personal disappointment, and of the fatal eye 
 of an accomplice for the mean qualities by which 
 power could be attained that it might be used 
 for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natu- 
 ral corruption of his exuberant humor. Humor 
 in its first analysis is a perception of the incon- 
 gruous, and in its highest development, of the 
 incongruity between the actual and the ideal in 
 men and life. With so keen a sense of the ludi- 
 crous contrast between what men might be, nay, 
 wish to be, and what they are, and with a vehe- 
 ment nature that demands the instant realization 
 of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is 
 no wonder that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for 
 a thing and always disappointed, should become 
 bitter. Perhaps if he expected less he would find 
 more. Saul seeking his father's asses found him- 
 self turned suddenly into a king; but Mr. Car- 
 lyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems to 
 
252 CARLYLE 
 
 find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing 
 on any side of him but a procession of the Lord 
 of Misrule, in gloomier moments, a Dance of 
 Death, where everything is either a parody of 
 whatever is noble, or an aimless jig that stumbles 
 at last into the annihilation of the grave, and so 
 passes from one nothing to another. Is a world, 
 then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works 
 distinguished only for its " fair, large ears " ? If 
 he who has read and remembered so much would 
 only now and then call to mind the old proverb, 
 Nee deus^ nee lupus ^ sed homo I If he would only 
 recollect that, from the days of the first grand- 
 father, everybody has remembered a golden age 
 behind him ! No doubt Adam depreciated the 
 apple which the little Cain on his knee was 
 crunching, by comparison with those he himself 
 had tasted in Eden. 
 
 The very qualities, it seems to me, which came 
 so near making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, dis- 
 qualify him for the office of historian. The 
 poet's concern is with the appearances of things, 
 with their harmony in that whole which the 
 imagination demands for its satisfaction, and 
 their truth to that ideal nature which is the pro- 
 per object of poetry. History, unfortunately, is 
 very far from being ideal, still farther from an 
 exclusive interest in those heroic or typical fig- 
 ures which answer all the wants of the epic and 
 the drama and fill their utmost artistic limits. 
 
CARLYLE 253 
 
 Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled power and vivid- 
 ness in painting detached scenes, in bringing out 
 in their full relief the oddities or peculiarities of 
 character ; but he has a far feebler sense of those 
 gradual changes of opinion, that strange com- 
 munication of sympathy from mind to mind, 
 that subtle influence of very subordinate actors 
 in giving a direction to policy or action, which 
 we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the pro- 
 gress of events. His scheme of history is purely 
 an epical one, where only leading figures appear 
 by name and are in any strict sense operative. 
 He has no conception of the people as anything 
 else than an element of mere brute force in 
 political problems, and would snif^ scornfully at 
 that unpicturesque common sense of the many, 
 which comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, 
 but compels obedience even from rulers the m.ost 
 despotic when once its mind is made up. His 
 history of Frederick is, of course, a Fritziad; 
 but next to his hero, the cane of the drill-ser- 
 geant and iron ramrods appear to be the condi- 
 tions which to his mind satisfactorily account for 
 the result of the Seven Years* War. It is our 
 opinion, which subsequent events seem to jus- 
 tify, that, had there not been in the Prussian 
 people a strong instinct of nationality, Protest- 
 ant nationality too, and an intimate conviction 
 of its advantages, the war might have ended 
 quite otherwise. Frederick II. left the machine 
 
254 CARLYLE 
 
 of war which he received from his father even 
 more perfect than he found it, yet within a few 
 years of his death it went to pieces before the 
 shock of French armies animated by an idea. 
 Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, 
 inspired once more by the old national fervor, 
 were victorious. After all, is it not moral forces 
 that make the heaviest battalions, other things 
 being tolerably equal ? Were it not for the 
 purely picturesque bias of Mr. Carlyle's genius, 
 for the necessity which his epical treatment lays 
 upon him of always having a protagonist, we 
 should be astonished that an idealist like him 
 should have so little faith in ideas and so much 
 in matter. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to 
 the historian as to the essayist. He is always 
 great in single figures and striking episodes, but 
 there is neither gradation nor continuity. He 
 has extraordinary patience and conscientiousness 
 in the gathering and sifting of his material, but 
 is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, 
 impatient of whatever will not serve for one of 
 his clever sketches, or group well in a more 
 elaborate figure-piece. He sees history, as it 
 were, by flashes of lightning. A single scene, 
 whether a landscape or an interior, a single 
 figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be 
 snatched by the eye in that instant of intense 
 illumination, is minutely photographed upon 
 
CARLYLE 255 
 
 the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every 
 blade of grass ; every article of furniture in a 
 room ; the attitude or expression, nay, the very 
 buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; the 
 gestures of momentary passion in a wild throngs 
 — everything leaps into vision under that sud- 
 den glare with a painful distinctness that leaves 
 the retina quivering. The intervals are absolute 
 darkness. Mr. Carlyle makes us acquainted with 
 the isolated spot where we happen to be when 
 the flash comes, as if by actual eyesight, but 
 there is no possibility of a comprehensive view. 
 No other writer compares with him for vivid- 
 ness. He is himself a witness, and makes us 
 witnesses of whatever he describes. This is 
 genius beyond a question, and of a very rare 
 quality, but it is not history. He has 'not the 
 cold-blooded impartiality of the historian ; and 
 while he entertains us, moves us to tears or 
 laughter, makes us the unconscious captives of 
 his ever-changeful mood, we find that he has 
 taught us comparatively little. His imagination 
 is so powerful that it makes him the contempo- 
 rary of his characters, and thus his history seems 
 to be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with 
 hearty likes and dislikes, with something of 
 acridity in his partialities whether for or against, 
 more keenly sensitive to the grotesque than to 
 the simply natural, and who enters in his diary, 
 even of what comes within the range of his own 
 
256 CARLYLE 
 
 observation, only so much as amuses his fancy, 
 is congenial with his humor, or feeds his pre- 
 judice. Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly 
 altogether pictorial, his hasty temper making 
 narrative wearisome to him. In his " Friedrich," 
 for example, we get very little notion of the civil 
 administration of Prussia ; and when he comes, 
 in the last volume, to his hero's dealings with 
 civil reforms, he confesses candidly that it would 
 tire him too much to tell us about it, even if 
 he knew anything at all satisfactory himself. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions arewon- 
 derful prose poems, full of picture, incident, 
 humor, and character, where we grow familiar 
 with his conception of certain leading person- 
 ages, and even of subordinate ones, if they are 
 necessary to the scene, so that they come out 
 living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of 
 names ; but this is no more history than the 
 historical plays of Shakespeare. There is no- 
 thing in imaginative literature superior in its own 
 way to the episode of Voltaire in the Fritziad. 
 It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute 
 characterization. We feel as if the principal 
 victim (for we cannot help feeling all the while 
 that he is so) of this mischievous genius had 
 been put upon the theatre before us by some 
 perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied his 
 habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, 
 costume, trick of feature, and rendered them 
 
CARLYLE 257 
 
 •with the slight dash of caricature needful to 
 make the whole composition tell. It is in such 
 things that Mr. Carlyle is beyond all rivalry, 
 and that we must go back to Shakespeare for a 
 comparison. But the mastery of Shakespeare is 
 shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment 
 of the ordinary than of the exceptional. His 
 is the gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. 
 Carlyle's gift is rather in the representation than 
 in the evolution of character ; and it is a neces- 
 sity of his art, therefore, to exaggerate slightly 
 his heroic, and to caricature in like manner his 
 comic parts. His appreciation is less psycholog- 
 ical than physical and external. Grimm relates 
 that Garrick, riding once with Preville, proposed 
 to him that they should counterfeit drunkenness. 
 They rode through Passy accordingly, deceiving 
 all who saw them. When beyond the town 
 Preville asked how he had succeeded. " Excel- 
 lently," said Garrick, " as to your body ; but 
 your legs were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would 
 be as exact in his observation of nature as the 
 great actor, and would make us see a drunken 
 man as well ; but we doubt whether he could 
 have conceived that unmatchable scene in "An- 
 tony and Cleopatra," where the tipsiness of 
 Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no 
 less than the physical partof the triumvir. If his 
 sympathies bore any proportion to his instinct 
 for catching those traits which are the expression 
 
258 CARLYLE 
 
 of character, but not character itself, we might 
 have had a great historian in him instead of a his- 
 tory-painter. But that which is a main element in 
 Mr. Carlyle's talent, and does perhaps more than 
 anything else to make it effective, is a defect 
 of his nature. The cynicism which renders him 
 so entertaining precludes him from any just 
 conception of men and their motives, and from 
 any sane estimate of the relative importance of 
 the events which concern them. I remember a 
 picture of Hamon's, where before a Punch's 
 theatre are gathered the wisest of mankind in 
 rapt attention. Socrates sits on a front bench, 
 absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner 
 stands Dante making entries in his note-book. 
 Mr. Carlyle as an historian leaves us in some- 
 what such a mood. The world is a puppet- 
 show, and when we have watched the play out, 
 we depart with a half-comic consciousness of 
 the futility of all human enterprise, and the 
 ludicrousness of all man's action and passion 
 on the stage of the world. Simple, kindly, blun- 
 dering Oliver Goldsmith was after all wiser, 
 and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and not less 
 immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial 
 beauty and heroism of the homeliest human 
 nature. The cynical view is congenial to certain 
 moods, and is so little inconsistent with original 
 nobleness of mind that it is not seldom the 
 acetous fermentation of it ; but it is the view 
 
CARLYLE 259 
 
 of the satirist, not of the historian, and takes in 
 but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth. 
 Cynicism in itself is essentially disagreeable. It 
 is the intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and 
 though it may be very well in giving a relish to 
 thought for certain palates, it cannot supply the 
 substance of it. Mr. Carlyle's cynicism is not 
 that high-bred weariness of the outsides of life 
 which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 
 deeper than that to the satisfactions, not of the 
 body or the intellect, but of the very soul as 
 well. It vaunts itself; it is noisy and aggressive. 
 What the wise master puts into the mouth of 
 desperate ambition, thwarted of the fruit of its 
 crime, as the fitting expression of passionate 
 sophistry, seems to have become an article of 
 his creed. With him 
 
 ** Life is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. 
 Signifying nothing." 
 
 He goes about with his Diogenes dark lantern, 
 professing to seek a man, but inwardly resolved 
 to find a monkey. He loves to flash it sud- 
 denly on poor human nature in some ridicu- 
 lous or degrading posture. He admires still, or 
 keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, 
 silent, hard-working men who go honestly 
 about their business ; but when we come to his 
 later examples, we find that it is not loyalty to 
 
26o CARLYLE 
 
 duty or to an inward ideal of high-mindedness 
 that he finds admirable in them, but a blind 
 unquestioning vassalage to whomsoever it has 
 pleased him to set up for a hero. He would 
 fain replace the old feudalism with a spiritual 
 counterpart, in which there shall be an obliga- 
 tion to soul service. He who once popularized 
 the word flunkey by ringing the vehement 
 changes of his scorn upon it, is at last forced 
 to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 
 hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the 
 world. Failing this, his latest theory of Divine 
 government seems to be the cudgel. Poets 
 have sung all manner of vegetable loves ; Pe- 
 trarch has celebrated the laurel, Chaucer the 
 daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it 
 remained for the ex-pedagogue of Kirkcaldy to 
 become the volunteer laureate of the rod and 
 to imagine a world created and directed by a 
 divine Dr. Busby. We cannot help thinking 
 that Mr. Carlyle might have learned something 
 to his advantage by living a few years in the 
 democracy which he scoffs at as heartily a priori 
 as if it were the demagogism which Aristo- 
 phanes derided from experience. The hero, as 
 Mr. Carlyle understands him, was a makeshift 
 of the past ; and the ideal of manhood is to be 
 found hereafter in free communities, where the 
 state shall at length sum up and exemplify in 
 itself all those qualities which poets were forced 
 
CARLYLE 261 
 
 to Imagine and typify because they could not 
 find them in the actual world. 
 
 In the earlier part of his literary career, 
 Mr. Carlyle was the denouncer of shams, the 
 preacher-up of sincerity, manliness, and a liv- 
 ing faith, instead of a droning ritual. He had 
 intense convictions, and he made disciples. 
 With a compass of diction unequalled by any 
 other public performer of the time, ranging as 
 it did from the unbookish freshness of the 
 Scottish peasant to the most far-sought phrase 
 of literary curiosity, with humor, pathos, and 
 eloquence at will, it was no wonder that he 
 found eager listeners in a world longing for a 
 sensation, and forced to put up with the West- 
 End gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound 
 thinker, he had what was next best, — he felt 
 profoundly, and his cry came out of the depths. 
 The stern Calvinism of his early training was 
 rekindled by his imagination to the old fer- 
 vor of Wishart and Brown, and became a new 
 phenomenon as he reproduced It subtilized by 
 German transcendentalism and German cul- 
 ture. Imagination, If it lay hold of a Scotchman, 
 possesses him in the old demoniac sense of 
 the word, and that hard logical nature, if the 
 Hebrew fire once get fair headway in it, burns 
 unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But 
 to utilize these sacred heats, to employ them, 
 as a literary man is always tempted, to keep 
 
262 CARLYLE 
 
 the domestic pot a-boiling, — is such a thing 
 possible ? Only too possible, we fear ; and 
 Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the languid 
 public long for a sensation, the excitement of 
 making one becomes also a necessity of the 
 successful author, as the intellectual nerves 
 grow duller and the old inspiration that came 
 unbidden to the bare garret grows shier and 
 shier of the comfortable parlor. As he himself 
 said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, "Un- 
 consciously, for the most part in deep uncon- 
 sciousness, there was now the impossibility to 
 live neglected, — to walk on the quiet paths 
 where alone it is well with us. Singularity 
 must henceforth succeed singularity. O foulest 
 Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Ap- 
 plause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end 
 is Bedlam and the grave." Mr. Carlyle won 
 his first successes as a kind of preacher in print. 
 His fervor, his oddity of manner, his pugna- 
 cious paradox, drew the crowd ; the truth, or, 
 at any rate, the faith that underlay them all, 
 brought also the fitter audience, though fewer. 
 But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, 
 he must astonish. Thenceforth he has been 
 forced to revamp his telling things ; and the 
 oddity, as was inevitable, has become always 
 odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. No 
 very large share of truth falls to the appre- 
 hension of any one man ; let him keep it sacred. 
 
CARLYLE 263 
 
 and beware of repeating it till it turn to false- 
 hood on his lips by becoming ritual. Truth 
 always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, 
 and novelty at the first taste recalls that original 
 sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who 
 would make the one a substitute for the other ! 
 We seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old 
 sincerity. He has become the purely literary 
 man, less concerned about what he says than 
 about how he shall say it to best advantage. 
 The Muse should be the companion, not the 
 guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pro- 
 nounced " the wisest of this generation." What 
 would be a virtue in the poet is a vice of the 
 most fatal kind in the teacher, and, alas that 
 we should say it ! the very Draco of shams, 
 whose code contained no penalty milder than 
 capital for the most harmless of them, has 
 become at last something very like a sham 
 himself. Mr. Carlyle continues to be a voice 
 crying in the wilderness, but no longer a voice 
 with any earnest conviction behind it, or in a 
 wilderness where there is other than imaginary 
 privation. Hearing him rebuke us for being 
 humbugs and impostors, we are inclined to 
 answer, with the ambassador of Philip II., 
 when his master reproached him with forget- 
 ting substance in ceremony, " Your Majesty 
 forgets that you are only a ceremony yourself." 
 And Mr. Carlyle's teaching, moreover, if teach- 
 
264 CARLYLE 
 
 ing we may call it, belongs to what the great 
 German, whose disciple he is, condemned as 
 the "literature of despair." An apostle to the 
 Gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preach- 
 ing ; but of what avail an apostle who shouts 
 his message down the mouth of the pit to poor 
 lost souls, whom he can positively assure only 
 that it is impossible to get out ? Mr. Carlyle 
 lights up the lanterns of his Pharos after the 
 ship is already rolling between the tongue of 
 the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is very 
 brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the 
 crests of the breakers with an awful pictur- 
 esqueness ; but in so desperate a state of things, 
 even Dr. Syntax might be pardoned for being 
 forgetful of the picturesque. The Toryism 
 of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of 
 Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for 
 it is logically deduced from a deep disdain of 
 human nature. 
 
 Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an 
 old king sitting at the gate of his palace to judge 
 his people in the calm sunshine of that past 
 which never existed outside a poet's brain. It 
 is the sweetest of waking dreams, this of abso- 
 lute power and perfect wisdom in one supreme 
 ruler ; but it is as pure a creation of human 
 want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal 
 limitation and incompleteness, as the shoes of 
 swiftness, the cloak of darkness, the purse 
 
CARLYLE 265 
 
 of Fortunatus, and the elixir vitae. It Is the 
 natural refuge of imaginative temperaments im- 
 patient of our blunders and shortcomings, and, 
 given a complete man, all would submit to the 
 divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every 
 the most fortunate human birth hobbles up that 
 malign fairy who has been forgotten, with hei* 
 fatal gift of imperfection ! So far as my experi- 
 ence has gone, it has been the very opposite to 
 Mr. Carlyle's. Instead of finding men disloyal 
 to their natural leader, nothing has ever seemed 
 to me so touching as the gladness with which 
 they follow him, when they are sure they have 
 found him at last. But a natural leader of the 
 ideal type is not to be looked for nisi dignus vin- 
 dice nodus. The Divine Forethought had been 
 cruel in furnishing one for every petty occasion, 
 and thus thwarting in all inferior men that price- 
 less gift of reason, to develop which, and to 
 make it one with free will, is the highest use of 
 our experience on earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard 
 bestead and very far gone in his idolatry of mere 
 ■plucky when he was driven to choose Friedrich 
 as a hero. A poet, and Mr. Carlyle is nothing 
 else, is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a prosaic 
 theme which no force of wing can lift from the 
 dull earth. Charlemagne would have been a 
 wiser choice, far enough in the past for ideal 
 treatment, more manifestly the Siegfried of 
 Anarchy, and in his rude way the refounder 
 
266 CARLYLE 
 
 of that empire which is the ideal of despotism 
 in the Western world. 
 
 Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, 
 but surely very far below any lofty standard of 
 heroic greatness. He was the last of the Euro- 
 pean kings who could look upon his kingdom 
 as his private patrimony ; and it was this estate 
 of his, this piece of property, which he so 
 obstinately and successfully defended. He had 
 no idea of country as it was understood by an 
 ancient Greek or Roman, as it is understood by 
 a modern Englishman or American ; and there 
 is something almost pitiful in seeing a man of 
 genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully over 
 again those battles of the last century which 
 settled nothing but the continuance of the Prus- 
 sian monarchy, while he saw only the " burning 
 of a dirty chimney " in the war which a great 
 people was waging under his very eyes for the 
 idea of nationality and orderly magistrature, 
 and which fixed, let us hope, forever, a bound- 
 ary line on the map of history and of man's 
 advancement toward self-conscious and respon- 
 sible freedom. The true historical genius, as I 
 conceive it, is that which can see the nobler 
 meaning of events that are near him, as the true 
 poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; 
 and I somewhat suspect the depth of his insight 
 into the past, who cannot recognize the godlike 
 of to-day under that disguise in which it always 
 
CARLYLE ^(^7 
 
 visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. Carlyle that a 
 man may look on an heroic age, as well as on an 
 heroic master, with the eyes of a valet, as misap- 
 preciative certainly, though not so ignoble ? 
 
 What Schiller says of a great poet, that he 
 must be a citizen of his age as well as of his 
 country, may be said inversely of a great king. 
 He should be a citizen of his country as well as 
 of his age. Friedrich was certainly the latter in 
 its fullest sense ; whether he was, or could have 
 been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. 
 The man who spoke and wrote French in pre- 
 ference to his mother tongue, who, dying when 
 Goethe was already drawing toward his fortieth 
 year, Schiller toward his thirtieth, and Lessing 
 had been already five years in his grave, could 
 yet see nothing but barbarism in German liter- 
 ature, had little of the old Teutonic fibre in his 
 nature. The man who pronounced the "Nibe- 
 lungen Lied " not worth a pinch of priming, had 
 little conception of the power of heroic traditions 
 in making heroic men, and especially in strength- 
 ening that instinct made up of so many indis- 
 tinguishable associations which we call love of 
 country. Charlemagne, when he caused the old 
 songs of his people to be gathered and written 
 down, showed a truer sense of the sources of 
 national feeling and a deeper political insight. 
 This want of sympathy points to the somewhat 
 narrow limits of Friedrich 's nature. In spite of 
 
268 CARLYLE 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's adroit statement of the case (and 
 the whole book has an air of being the plea of 
 a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence), 
 we feel that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, 
 and selfish. His popularity will go for little with 
 any one who has studied the trifling and often 
 fabulous elements that make up that singular 
 compound. A bluntness of speech, a shabby 
 uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely famil- 
 iarity, may make a man the favorite of an army 
 or a nation, — above all, if he have the knack 
 of success. Moreover, popularity is much more 
 easily won from above downward, and is bought 
 at a better bargain by kings and generals than 
 by other men. We doubt if Friedrich would 
 have been liked as a private person, or even as 
 an unsuccessful king. He apparently attached 
 very few people to himself, fewer even than his 
 brutal old Squire Western of a father. His sister 
 Wilhelmina is perhaps an exception. We say 
 perhaps, for we do not know how much the 
 heroic part he was called on to play had to do 
 with the matter, and whether sisterly pride did 
 not pass even with herself for sisterly affection. 
 Moreover she was far from him ; and Mr. 
 Carlyle waves aside, in his generous fashion, 
 some rather keen comments of hers on her 
 brother's character when she visited Berlin after 
 he had become king. Indeed, he is apt to deal 
 rather contemptuously with all adverse criticism 
 
CARLYLE 269 
 
 of his hero. I sympathize with his impulse in 
 this respect, agreeing heartily as I do in Chau- 
 cer's scorn of those who '•'' gladlie demen to the 
 baser end " in such matters. But I am not quite 
 sure if this be a safe method with the historian. 
 He must doubtless be the friend of his hero if 
 he would understand him, but he must be more 
 the friend of truth if he would understand his- 
 tory. Mr. Carlyle's passion for truth is intense, 
 as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for 
 his mistress. He would have her all to himself, 
 and has a lover's conviction that no one is able, 
 or even fit, to appreciate her but himself. He 
 does well to despise the tittle-tattle of vulgar 
 minds, but surely should not ignore all testi- 
 mony on the other side. For ourselves, we 
 think, it not unimportant that Goethe's friend 
 Knebel, a man not incapable of admiration, and 
 who had served a dozen years or so as an officer 
 of Friedrich's guard, should have bluntly called 
 him " the tyrant." 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's history traces the family of his 
 hero down from its beginnings in the pictur- 
 esque chiaro-scuro of the Middle Ages. It was 
 an able and above all a canny house, a Scotch 
 version of the word able^ which implies thrift 
 and an eye to the main chance, the said main 
 chance or chief end of man being altogether 
 of this world. Friedrich, inheriting this family 
 faculty in full measure, was driven, partly by 
 
270 CARLYLE 
 
 ambition, partly by necessity, to apply it to war. 
 He did so, with the success to be expected where 
 a man of many expedients has the good luck to 
 be opposed by men with few. He adds another 
 to the many proofs that it is possible to be a 
 great general without a spark of that divine fire 
 which we call genius, and that good fortune in 
 war results from the same prompt talent and 
 unbending temper which lead to the same result 
 in the peaceful professions. Friedrich had cer- 
 tainly more of the temperament of genius than 
 Marlborough or Wellington ; but not to go 
 beyond modern instances, he does not impress 
 us with the massive breadth of Napoleon, or 
 attract us with the climbing ardor of Turenne. 
 To compare him with Alexander, or Hannibal, 
 or Cassar, were absurd. The kingship that was 
 in him, and which won Mr. Carlyle to be his 
 biographer, is that of will merely, of rapid and 
 relentless command. For organization he had a 
 masterly talent ; but he could not apply it to the 
 arts of peace, both because he wanted experience 
 and because the rash decision of the battle-field 
 will not serve in matters which are governed by 
 natural laws of growth. He seems, indeed, to 
 have had a coarse, soldier's contempt for all civil 
 distinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, 
 or even of a prudent one. He confers the title 
 of Hofrath on the husband of a woman with 
 whom his General Walrave is living in what Mr. 
 
CARLYLE 271 
 
 Carlyle justly calls " brutish polygamy," and 
 this at Walrave's request, on the ground that 
 " a general's drab ought to have a handle to her 
 name." Mr. Carlyle murmurs in a mild paren- 
 thesis that "we rather regret this"! (Vol. iii. 
 p. 559.) This is his usual way of treating un- 
 pleasant matters, sidling by with a deprecating 
 shrug of the shoulders. Not that he ever wil- 
 fully suppresses anything. On the contrary, 
 there is no greater proof of his genius than the 
 way in which, while he seems to paint a charac- 
 ter with all its disagreeable traits, he contrives 
 to win our sympathy for it, nay, almost our 
 liking. This is conspicuously true of his por- 
 trait of Friedrich's father ; and that he does not 
 succeed in making Friedrich himself attractive 
 is a strong argument with us that the fault is in 
 the subject and not the artist. 
 
 The book, it is said, has been comparatively 
 unsuccessful as a literary venture. Nor do we 
 wonder at it. It is disproportionately long, and 
 too much made up of those descriptions of bat- 
 tles, to read which seems even more difficult 
 than to have won the victory itself, more dis- 
 heartening than to have suffered the defeat. To 
 an American, also, the warfare seemed Lllipu- 
 tian in the presence of a conflict so much larger 
 in its proportions and significant in its results. 
 The interest, moreover, flags decidedly toward 
 the close, where the reader cannot help feeling 
 
272 CARLYLE 
 
 that the author loses breath somewhat painfully 
 under the effort of so prolonged a course. Mr. 
 Carlyle has evidently devoted to his task a labor 
 that may be justly called prodigious. Not only 
 has he sifted all the German histories and me- 
 moirs, but has visited every battle-field, and de- 
 scribes them with an eye for country that is 
 without rival among historians. The book is 
 evidently an abridgment of even more abundant 
 collections, and yet, as it stands, the matter 
 overburdens the work. It is a bundle of lively 
 episodes rather than a continuous narrative. In 
 this respect it contrasts oddly with the concinnity 
 of his own earlier " Life of Schiller." But the 
 episodes are lively, the humor and pathos spring 
 from a profound nature, the sketches of character 
 are masterly, the seizure of every picturesque 
 incident infallible, and the literary judgments 
 those of a thorough scholar and critic. There 
 is, of course, the usual amusing objurgation of 
 Dryasdust and his rubbish-heaps, the usual as- 
 sumption of omniscience, and the usual certainty 
 of the Duchess de la Ferte being always in the 
 right; yet I cannot help thinking that a little of 
 Dryasdust's ploddingexactness would have saved 
 Fouquet eleven years of the imprisonment to 
 which Mr. Carlyle condemns'him, would have 
 referred us to St. Simon rather than to Voltaire 
 for the character of the brothers Belle-Ile, and 
 would have kept clear of a certain ludicrous 
 
CARLYLE 27^ 
 
 etymology of the name Antwerp, not to mention 
 some other trifling sHps of the like nature. In 
 conclusion, after saying, as an honest critic must, 
 that "The History of Friedrich II. called Fred- 
 erick the Great " is a book to be read in with 
 more satisfaction than to be read through, after 
 declaring that it is open to all manner of criticism, 
 especially in point of moral purpose and tend- 
 ency, I must admit with thankfulness that it has 
 the one prime merit of being the work of a man 
 who has every quality of a great poet except that 
 supreme one of rhythm, which shapes both mat- 
 ter and manner to harmonious proportion, and 
 that where it is good, it is good as only genius 
 knows how to be. 
 
 With the gift of song, Carlyle would have 
 been the greatest of epic poets since Homer. 
 Without it, to modulate and harmonize and bring 
 parts into their proper relation, he is the most 
 amorphous of humorists, the most shining ava- 
 tar of whim the world has ever seen. Beginning 
 with a hearty contempt for shams, he has come 
 at length to believe in brute force as the only 
 reality, and has as little sense of justice as Thack- 
 eray allowed to women. I say brute force because, 
 though the theory is that this force should be 
 directed by the supreme intellect for the time 
 being, yet all inferior wits are treated rather as 
 obstacles to be contemptuously shoved aside 
 than as ancillary forces to be conciliated through 
 
274 CARLYLE 
 
 their reason. But, with all deductions, he remains 
 the profoundest critic and the most dramatic 
 imagination of modern times. Never was there 
 a more striking example of that ingenium perfer- 
 vidum long ago said to be characteristic of his 
 countrymen. His is one of the natures, rare in 
 these latter centuries, capable of rising to a white 
 heat ; but once fairly kindled, he is like a three- 
 decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as 
 the glow reaches them, alike dangerous to friend 
 or foe. Though he seems more and more to con- 
 found material with moral success, yet there is 
 always something wholesome in his unswerving 
 loyalty to reality, as he understands it. History, 
 in the true sense, he does not and cannot write, 
 for he looks on mankind as a herd without voli- 
 tion, and without moral force ; but such vivid 
 pictures of events, such living conceptions of 
 character, we find nowhere else in prose. The 
 figures of most historians seem like dolls stufl^ed 
 with bran, whose whole substance runs out 
 through any hole that criticism may tear in them, 
 but Carlyle's are so real in comparison, that, if 
 you prick them, they bleed. He seems a little 
 wearied, here and there, in his " Friedrich," with 
 the multiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in 
 rather shabbily ; but he still remains in his own 
 way, like his hero, the Only, and such episodes 
 as that of Voltaire would make the fortune 
 of any other writer. Though not the safest of 
 
CARLYLE 275 
 
 guides in politics or practical philosophy, his 
 value as an inspirer and awakener cannot be 
 overestimated. It is a power which belongs 
 only to the highest order of minds, for it is none 
 but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. 
 The debt due him from those who listened to 
 the teachings of his prime for revealing to them 
 what sublime reserves of power even the hum- 
 blest may find in manliness, sincerity, and self- 
 reliance, can be paid with nothing short of re- 
 verential gratitude. As a purifier of the sources 
 whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, his 
 influence has been second only to that of Words- 
 worth, if even to his. Indeed he has been in no 
 fanciful sense the continuator of Wordsworth's 
 moral teaching. 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 1861-68 
 
 IT is a singular fact that Mr. Emerson is the 
 most steadily attractive lecturer in America. 
 Into that somewhat cold-waterish region ad- 
 venturers of the sensational kind come down now 
 and then with a splash, to become disregarded 
 King Logs before the next season. But Mr. 
 Emerson always draws. A lecturer now for 
 something like a third of a century, one of the 
 pioneers of the lecturing system, the charm of 
 his voice, his manner, and his matter has never 
 lost its power over his earlier hearers, and contin- 
 ually winds new ones in its enchanting meshes. 
 What they do not fully understand they take on 
 trust, and listen, saying to themselves, as the 
 old poet of Sir Philip Sidney, — 
 
 ♦* A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 
 A full assurance given by looks, 
 Continual comfort in a face. 
 
 The lineaments of gospel books." 
 
 We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees 
 are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, 
 and nothing can be more remote from that than 
 his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER ^11 
 
 would rather hear about a new air-tight stove 
 than about Plato ; yet our favorite teacher's 
 practicality is not in the least of the Poor Rich- 
 ard variety. If he have any Buncombe constitu- 
 ency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of 
 philosophers which Plotinus proposed to estab- 
 lish ; and if he were to make an almanac, his 
 directions to farmers would be something like 
 this : " October : Indian Summer ; now is the 
 time to get in your early Vedas." What, then, 
 is his secret? Is it not that he out-Yankees us 
 all ? that his range includes us all ? that he is 
 equally at home with the potato-disease and 
 original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over- 
 Soul ? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried 
 all cultures ? and above all, that his mysticism 
 gives us a counterpoise to our super-practical- 
 ity ? 
 
 There is no man living to whom, as a writer, 
 so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge 
 so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses, 
 — none whom so many cannot abide. What 
 does he mean? ask these last. Where is his 
 system ? What is the use of it all ? What the 
 deuse have we to do with Brahma ? I do not 
 propose to write an essay on Emerson at this 
 time. I will only say that one may find gran- 
 deur and consolation in a starlit night without 
 caring to ask what it means, save grandeur 
 and consolation ; one may like Montaigne, 
 
278 EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 as some ten generations before us have done, 
 without thinking him so systematic as some 
 more eminently tedious (or shall we say tedi- 
 ously eminent ?) authors ; one may think roses 
 as good in their way as cabbages, though the 
 latter would make a better show in the witness- 
 box, if cross-examined as to their usefulness ; 
 and as for Brahma, why, he can take care of 
 himself, and won't bite us at any rate. 
 
 The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, 
 though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. 
 If you undertake to paraphrase what he says, 
 and to reduce it to words of one syllable for 
 infant minds, you will make as sad work of it 
 as the good monk with his analysis of Homer 
 in the " Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum." We 
 look upon him as one of the few men of genius 
 whom our age has produced, and there needs 
 no better proof of it than his masculine faculty 
 of fecundating other minds. Search for his 
 eloquence in his books and you will perchance 
 miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has 
 kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith 
 of language he belongs to a better age than 
 ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and 
 Browne, — though he does use that abominable 
 word reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase 
 that will carry true is like that of a backwoods- 
 man for a rifle ; and he will dredge you up a 
 choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 279 
 
 himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely 
 as his I know not where to match in these days 
 of writing by the page ; it is like homespun 
 cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his 
 meaning, and only the few can find it. It is 
 the open secret of all true genius. It is whole- 
 some to angle in those profound pools, though 
 one be rewarded with nothing more than the 
 leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side in 
 the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark 
 and dreamy waters again. There is keen excite- 
 ment, though there be no ponderable acquisi- 
 tion. If we carry nothing home in our baskets, 
 there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimu- 
 lated blood. What does he mean, quotha? He 
 means inspiring hints, a divining-rod to your 
 deeper nature. No doubt, Emerson, like all 
 original men, has his peculiar audience, and yet 
 I know none that can hold a promiscuous crowd 
 in pleased attention so long as he. As in all 
 original men, there is something for every pal- 
 ate. " Would you know," says Goethe, " the 
 ripest cherries ? Ask the boys and the black- 
 birds." 
 
 The announcement that such a pleasure as 
 a new course of lectures by him is coming, to 
 people as old as I am, is something like those 
 forebodings of spring that prepare us every year 
 for a familiar novelty, none the less novel, when 
 it arrives, because it is familiar. We know per- 
 
28o EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 fectly well what we are to expect from Mr. 
 Emerson, and yet what he says always pene- 
 trates and stirs us, as is apt to be the case with 
 genius, in a very unlooked-for fashion. Per- 
 haps genius is one of the few things which we 
 gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of the few 
 that multiply rather than weaken the force of 
 their impression by iteration ? Perhaps some of 
 us hear more than the mere words, are moved 
 by something deeper than the thoughts ? If it 
 be so, we are quite right, for it is thirty years 
 and more of" plain living and high thinking " 
 that speak to us in this altogether unique lav- 
 preacher. We have shared in the beneficence 
 of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality 
 in criticism and speculation, this masculine sin- 
 cerity, this sweetness of nature which rather 
 stimulates than cloys, for a generation long. If 
 ever there was a standing testimonial to the 
 cumulative power and value of Character (and 
 we need it sadly in these days), we have it in 
 this gracious and dignified presence. What an 
 antiseptic is a pure life 1 At sixty-five (or two 
 years beyond his grand climacteric, as he would 
 prefer to call it) he has that privilege of soul 
 which abolishes the calendar, and presents him 
 to us always the unwasted contemporary of 
 his own prime. I do not know if he seem old 
 to his younger hearers, but we who have known 
 him so long wonder at the tenacity with which 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 281 
 
 he maintains himself even in the outposts of 
 youth. I suppose it is not the Emerson of 
 1868 to whom we Hsten. For us the whole life 
 of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every 
 sentence, and behind each word we divine the 
 force of a noble character, the weight of a large 
 capital of thinking and being. We do not go 
 to hear what Emerson says so much as to hear 
 Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling- 
 ofF in anything that ever was essential to the 
 charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of 
 thought or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, 
 was more disjointed even than common. It was 
 as if, after vainly trying to get his paragraphs 
 into sequence and order, he had at last tried 
 the desperate expedient of shuffling them. It 
 was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full 
 of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. 
 The second lecture, on "Criticism and Poetry," 
 was quite up to the level of old times, full 
 of that power of strangely subtle association 
 whose indirect approaches startle the mind into 
 almost painful attention, of those flashes of mu- 
 tual understanding between speaker and hearer 
 that are gone ere one can say it lightens. 
 The vice of Emerson's criticism seems to be, 
 that while no man is so sensitive to what is poet- 
 ical, few men are less sensible than he of what 
 makes a poem. He values the solid meaning 
 of thought above the subtler meaning of style. 
 
282 EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spen- 
 ser, and sometimes mistakes the queer for the 
 original. 
 
 To be young is surely the best, if the most 
 precarious, gift of life ; yet there are some of us 
 who would hardly consent to be young again, 
 if it were at the cost of our recollection of 
 Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the con- 
 sulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in 
 from the country to the Masonic Temple (I think 
 it was), through the crisp winter night, and 
 listen to that thrilling voice of his, so charged 
 with subtle meaning and subtle music, as ship- 
 wrecked men on a raft to the hail of a ship that 
 came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics 
 might say what they liked. Did our own im- 
 aginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into 
 ambrosia ? At any rate, he brought us life^ 
 which, on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it 
 all transcendentalism ? magic-lantern pictures 
 on mist ? As you will. Those, then, were just 
 what we wanted. But it was not so. The 
 delight and the benefit were that he put us in 
 communication with a larger style of thought, 
 sharpened our wits with a more pungent phrase, 
 gave us ravishing glimpses of an ideal under 
 the dry husk of our New Englan'd ; made us 
 conscious of the supreme and everlasting origi- 
 nality of whatever bit of soul might be in any 
 of us ; freed us, in short, from the stocks of 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 283 
 
 prose in which we had sat so long that we 
 had grown well-nigh contented in our cramps. 
 And who that saw the audience will ever forget 
 it, where every one still capable of fire, or long- 
 ing to renew in himself the half- forgotten sense 
 of it, was gathered ? Those faces, young and 
 old, agleam with pale intellectual light, eager 
 with pleased attention, flash upon me once 
 more from the deep recesses of the years with 
 an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, 
 brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished 
 now in that other world we call the Past, or 
 peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam- 
 ing of memory, your light impoverishes these 
 cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sen- 
 sation, as they turned to exchange glances over 
 some pithier thought, some keener flash of that 
 humor which always played about the horizon 
 of his mind like heat-lightning, and it seems 
 now like the sad whisper of the autumn leaves 
 that are whirling around me. But would my 
 picture be complete if I forgot that ample and 
 
 vegete countenance of Mr. R of W , 
 
 — how, from its regular post at the corner of 
 the front bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to 
 the profaner audience as if he were the inex- 
 plicably appointed fugleman of appreciation ? 
 I was reminded of him by those hearty cherubs 
 in Titian's Assumption that look at you as 
 who should say, "Did you ever see a Madonna 
 
284 EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 like that? Did you ever behold one hundred 
 and fifty pounds of womanhood mount heaven- 
 ward before like a rocket?" 
 
 To some of us that long-past experience 
 remains as the most marvellous and fruitful we 
 have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved 
 us from the body of this death. It is the sound 
 of the trumpet that the young soul longs for, 
 careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard 
 it in the ballad of " Chevy Chase," and we in 
 Emerson. Nor did it blow retreat, but called 
 to us with assurance of victory. Did they say 
 he was disconnected ? So were the stars, that 
 seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with that 
 excitement, as we walked homeward with 
 prouder stride over the creaking snow. And 
 were they not knit together by a higher logic 
 than our mere sense could master ? Were we 
 enthusiasts ? I hope and believe we were, and 
 am thankful to the man who made us worth 
 something for once in our lives. If asked what 
 was left ? what we carried home ? we should not 
 have been, careful for an answer. It would have 
 been enough if we had said that something 
 beautiful had passed that way. Or we might 
 have asked in return what one brought away 
 from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough that 
 he had set that ferment of wholesome discontent 
 at work in us. There is one, at least, of those 
 old hearers, so many of whom are now in the 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 285 
 
 fruition of that intellectual beauty of which 
 Emerson gave them both the desire and the 
 foretaste, who will always love to repeat : — 
 
 *♦ Che in la mente m' e fitta, ed or m' accuora 
 La cara e buona immagine paterna 
 Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 
 M' insegnavaste come 1' uom s' eterna." 
 
 I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of 
 the third lecture of the present course, in which 
 Mr. Emerson gave some delightful reminis- 
 cences of the intellectual influences in whose 
 movement he had shared. It was like hearing 
 Goethe read some passages of the " Wahrheit 
 aus seinem Leben." Not that there was not a 
 little Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lec- 
 turer built up so lofty a pedestal under certain 
 figures as to lift them into a prominence of 
 obscurity, and seem to masthead them there. 
 Everybody was asking his neighbor who this 
 or that recondite great man was, in the faint 
 hope that somebody might once have heard of 
 him. There are those who call Mr. Emerson 
 cold. Let them revise their judgment in pre- 
 sence of this loyalty of his that can keep warm 
 for half a century, that never forgets a friend- 
 ship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to 
 the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of 
 shadows was but incidental, and pleasantly 
 characteristic of the man to those who know 
 and love him. The greater part of the lecture 
 
286 EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 was devoted to reminiscences of things substan- 
 tial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh 
 from Greece and Germany ; of Channing ; of 
 the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, 
 and Dwight ; of the " Dial " and Brook Farm. 
 To what he said of the latter an undertone of 
 good-humored irony gave special zest. But 
 what every one of his hearers felt was that the 
 protagonist in the drama was left out. The lec- 
 turer was no Tineas to babble the quorum magna 
 ■pars fui^ and, as one of his listeners, I cannot 
 help wishing to say how each of them was com- 
 menting the story as it went along, and filling 
 up the necessary gaps in it from his own private 
 store of memories. His younger hearers could 
 not know how much they owed to the benign 
 impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything 
 ignoble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, 
 that were personified in the man before them. 
 But the older knew how much the country's in- 
 tellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 
 of his teaching and example, how constantly he 
 had kept burning the beacon of an ideal life 
 above our lower region of turmoil. To him 
 more than to all other causes together did the 
 young martyrs of our civil war owe the sustain- 
 ing strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
 touching in every record of their lives. Those 
 who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of 
 us are, for what they feel to be most valuable 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 287 
 
 in their culture, or perhaps I should say their 
 impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct 
 teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which 
 only genius can give, and without which all doc- 
 trine is chaff. 
 
 This was something like the caret which some 
 of us older boys wished to fill up on the margin 
 of the master's lecture. Few men have been so 
 much to so many, and through so large a range 
 of aptitudes and temperaments, and this simply 
 because all of us value manhood beyond any or 
 all other qualities of character. We may sus- 
 pect in him, here and there, a certain thinness 
 and vagueness of quality, but let the waters go 
 over him as they list, this masculine fibre of his 
 will keep its lively color and its toughness of 
 texture. I have heard some great speakers and 
 some accomplished orators, but never any that 
 so moved and persuaded men as he. There is 
 a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his 
 that sweeps our' minds from their foothold into 
 deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would 
 not resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is 
 a long-studied artist in these things) does the 
 deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for 
 the fit word, appear to admit us partners in the 
 labor of thought and make us feel as if the 
 glance of humor were a sudden suggestion, as 
 if the perfect phrase lying written there on the 
 desk were as unexpected to him as to us ! In 
 
288 EMERSON THE LECTURER 
 
 that closely filed speech of his at the Burns 
 centenary dinner, every word seemed to have 
 just dropped down to him from the clouds. 
 He looked far away over the heads of his 
 hearers, with a vague kind of expectation, as 
 into some private heaven of invention, and the 
 winged period came at last obedient to his spell. 
 " My dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to 
 himself as he cast down his eyes as if in depre- 
 cation of the frenzy of approval and caught 
 another sentence from the Sibylline leaves that 
 lay before him, ambushed behind a dish of fruit 
 and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every 
 sentence brought down the house, as I never 
 saw one brought down before, — and it is not 
 so easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that 
 has no hint of native brogue in it. I watched, 
 for it was an Interesting study, how the quick 
 sympathy ran flashing from face to face down 
 the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling 
 as it went, and then exploded in a thunder of 
 plaudits. I watched till tables and faces van- 
 ished, for I, too, found myself caught up in 
 the common enthusiasm, and my excited fancy 
 set me under the bema listening to him who 
 fulmined over Greece. I can never help apply- 
 ing to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon: 
 " There happened In my time one noble 
 speaker, who was full of gravity in his speak- 
 ing. His language was nobly censorious. No 
 
EMERSON THE LECTURER 289 
 
 man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, 
 more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less 
 idleness, in what he uttered. No member of 
 his speech but consisted of his own graces. His 
 hearers could not cough, or look aside from 
 him, without loss. He commanded where he 
 spoke." Those who heard him while their na- 
 tures were yet plastic, and their mental nerves 
 trembled under the slightest breath of divine 
 air, will never ctase to feel and say : — 
 
 *• Was never eye did see that face. 
 
 Was never ear did hear that tongue. 
 Was never mind did mind his grace. 
 That ever thought the travail long; 
 But eyes, and ears, and every thought. 
 Were with his sweet perfections caught." 
 
THOREAU 
 
 1865 
 
 WHAT contemporary, if he was in the 
 fighting period of his Hfe (since Na- 
 ture sets Hmits about her conscription 
 for spiritual fields, as the state does in physical 
 warfare), will ever forget what was somewhat 
 vaguely called the " Transcendental Move- 
 ment " of thirty years ago ? Apparently set astir 
 by Carlyle's essays on the Signs of the Times, 
 and on History, the final and more immediate 
 impulse seemed to be given by " Sartor Resar- 
 tus." At least the republication in Boston of 
 that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon 
 on Falstaff 's text of the miserable forked radish 
 gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral 
 mutiny. Kcce nunc tempus acceptabile ! was 
 shouted on all hands with every variety of em- 
 phasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch, 
 representing the three sexes of men, women, 
 and Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The 
 nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about 
 to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed 
 from all sides, each eager to thrust under the 
 mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new 
 
THOREAU 291 
 
 and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due 
 time. Redeunt Saturnia regna^ — so far was cer- 
 tain, though in what shape, or by what methods, 
 was still a matter of debate. Every possible form 
 of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought 
 forth its gospel. Bran had its prc^phets, and the 
 presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tail- 
 ored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed 
 neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the " feath- 
 ered Mercury," as defined by Webster and 
 Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to 
 a pitch that would have taken away the breath 
 of George Fox ; and even swearing had its evan- 
 gelists, who answered a simple inquiry after their 
 health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation 
 that might have been honorably mentioned by 
 Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had 
 a mission (with a capital M) to attend to every- 
 body else's business. No brain but had its pri- 
 vate maggot, which must have found pitiably 
 short commons sometimes. Not a few impecu- 
 nious zealots abjured the use of money (unless 
 earned by other people), professing to live on 
 the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had 
 an assurance of instant millennium so soon as 
 hooks and eyes should be substituted forbuttons. 
 Communities were established where everything 
 was to be common but common sense. Men 
 renounced their old gods, and hesitated only 
 whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance 
 
292 THOREAU 
 
 on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for 
 every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The be- 
 lated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Mon- 
 archy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its 
 victims incomprehensible to all Christian men; 
 whether equally so to the most distant possible 
 heathen or not was unexperimented, though 
 many would have subscribed liberally that a fair 
 trial might be made. It was the pentecost of 
 Shinar. The day of utterances reproduced the 
 day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was 
 nothing so simple that uncial letters and the 
 style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn 
 it into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out 
 of work added to the general misunderstanding 
 their contribution of broken English in every 
 most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready 
 at a moment's notice to reform everything but 
 themselves. The general motto was : — 
 
 •*And we'll talk with them, too, 
 And take upon 's the mystery of things 
 As if we were God's spies." 
 
 Nature is always kind enough to give even 
 her clouds a humorous lining. 1 have barely 
 hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the 
 material was endless. This was the whistle and 
 trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very 
 solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly 
 explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but 
 the generality suspected nothing. The word 
 
THOREAU 293 
 
 " transcendental " then was the maid of all work 
 for those who could not think, as " Pre-Raph- 
 aelite " has been more recently for people of the 
 same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that 
 there was a much nearer metaphysical relation 
 and a much more distant aesthetic and literary 
 relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the 
 Newness, as they were called in New England, 
 than has commonly been supposed. Both repre- 
 sented the reaction and revolt against Philis- 
 tereiy a renewal of the old battle begun in modern 
 times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued 
 by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, 
 by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, 
 Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have 
 been the leaders in England. It was simply a 
 struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows 
 could not be opened, there was danger that panes 
 would be broken, though painted with images 
 of saints and martyrs. Light, colored by these 
 reverend effigies, was none the more respirable 
 for being picturesque. There is only one thing 
 better than tradition, and that is the original 
 and eternal life out of which all tradition takes 
 its rise. It was this life which the reformers 
 demanded, with more or less clearness of con- 
 sciousness and expression, life in politics, life in 
 literature, life in religion. Of what use to im- 
 port a gospel from Judsea, if we leave behind the 
 soul that made it possible, the God who keeps 
 
294 THOREAU 
 
 it forever real and present ? Surely Abana and 
 Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living 
 faith be mixed with those waters and none with 
 these. 
 
 Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spirit- 
 ual progress v/as dead ; New England Puritan^ 
 ism was in like manner dead; in other words. 
 Protestantism had made its fortune and no 
 longer protested ; but till Carlyle spoke out in 
 the Old World and Emerson in the New, no 
 one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mort : 
 vive le roi ! The meaning of which proclama- 
 tion was essentially this : the vital spirit has long 
 since departed out of this form once so kingly, 
 and the great seal has been in commission long 
 enough ; but meanwhile the soul of man, from 
 which all power emanates and to which it reverts, 
 still survives in undiminished royalty ; God still 
 survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commis- 
 sion seem to be aware of it, — nay, will possibly 
 outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may 
 appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Presby- 
 terianism and New England Puritanism made 
 their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the 
 heralds of their formal decease, and the tend- 
 ency of the one toward Authority and of the 
 other toward Independency might have been 
 prophesied by whoever had studied history. The 
 necessity was not so much in the men as in the 
 principles they represented and the traditions 
 
THOREAU 295 
 
 which overruled them. The Puritanism of the 
 past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the 
 rarest creative imagination of the century, the 
 rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare ; 
 but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritan- 
 ism that made New England what it is, and is 
 destined to make America what it should be, 
 found its voice in Emerson. Though holding 
 himself aloof from all active partnership in 
 movements of reform, he has been the sleeping 
 partner who has supplied a great part of their 
 capital. 
 
 The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as 
 every well-read critic must feel at once ; and 
 so is that of iEschylus, so is that of Dante, so 
 is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is 
 that of nearly every one except Shakespeare ; 
 but there is a gauge of height no less than of 
 breadth, of individuality as well as of compre- 
 hensiveness, and, above all, there is the stand- 
 ard of genetic power, the test of the masculine 
 as distinguished from the receptive minds. There 
 are staminate plants in literature that make no 
 fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, 
 quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had 
 been barren. Emerson's mind is emphatically 
 one of these, and there is no man to whom our 
 aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan 
 revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the 
 Revolution politically independent, but we were 
 
296 THOREAU 
 
 still socially and intellectually moored to Eng- 
 lish thought, till Emerson cut the cable and 
 gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of 
 blue water. No man young enough to have felt 
 it can forget or cease to be grateful for the men- 
 tal and moral nudge which he received from the 
 writings of his high-minded and brave-spirited 
 countryman. That we agree with him, or that 
 he always agrees with himself, is aside from the 
 question ; but that he arouses in us something 
 that we are the better for having awakened, 
 whether that something be of opposition or as- 
 sent, that he speaks always to what is highest 
 and least selfish in us, few Americans of the 
 generation younger than his own would be dis- 
 posed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta 
 Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years 
 ago, was an event without any former parallel 
 in our literary annals, a scene to be always trea- 
 sured in the memory for its picturesqueness and 
 its inspiration. What crowded and breathless 
 aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, 
 what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence 
 of foregone dissent ! It was our Yankee version 
 of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to 
 the last public appearances of Schelling. 
 
 I said that the Transcendental Movement 
 was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a 
 new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds 
 which compressed rather than expressed it. In 
 
THOREAU 297 
 
 its motives, its preaching, and its results, it dif- 
 fered radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The 
 Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor 
 gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown 
 shriller and shriller with years, degenerating 
 sometimes into a common scold, and emptying 
 very unsavory vials of wrath on the head of 
 the sturdy British Socrates of worldly common 
 sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much 
 more exclusively to self-culture and the inde- 
 pendent development of the individual man. 
 It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its 
 voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. 
 Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of 
 Goethe, but Emersoh in a far truer sense ; and 
 while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, 
 has degenerated more and more into mannerism, 
 the other has clarified steadily toward perfection 
 of style, — exquisite fineness of material, unob- 
 trusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, 
 the most high-bred garb of expression. What- 
 ever may be said of his thought, nothing can be 
 finer than the delicious limpidness of his phrase. 
 If it was ever questionable whether democracy 
 could develop a gentleman, the problem has been 
 affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cyni- 
 cism and his admiration of force in and for itself, 
 has become at last positively inhuman ; Emer- 
 son, reverencing strength, seeking the highest 
 outcome of the individual, has found that society 
 
298 THOREAU 
 
 and politics are also main elements in the attain- 
 ment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily 
 manward and worldward. The two men repre- 
 sent respectively those grand personifications 
 in the drama of i^schylus, Bta and Kparo?. 
 
 Among the pistillate plants kindled to fruitage 
 by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far 
 the most remarkable ; and it is something emi- 
 nently fitting that his posthumous works should 
 be offered us by Emerson, for they are straw- 
 berries from his own garden. A singular mixture 
 of varieties, indeed, there is ; — alpine, some of 
 them, with the flavor of rare mountain air; others 
 wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy 
 openings in the forest ; and not a few seedlings 
 swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine 
 natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange 
 books these are of his, and interesting in many 
 ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how con- 
 siderable a crop may be raised on a compara- 
 tively narrow close of mind, and how much a 
 man may make of his life if he will assiduously 
 follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it 
 at last. 
 
 I have just been renewing my recollection of 
 Mr. Thoreau's writings, and have read through 
 his six volumes in the order of their production. 
 I shall try to give an adequate report of their 
 impression upon me both as critic and as mere 
 reader. He seems to me to have been a man 
 
THOREAU 299 
 
 with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted 
 without questioning, and insisted on our accept- 
 ing, his defects and wealcnesses of character as 
 virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he 
 indolent, he finds none of the activities which 
 attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy 
 of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that 
 make success, it is success that is contemptible, 
 and not himself that lacks persistency and pur- 
 pose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed 
 evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he con- 
 demns doing good as one of the weakest of 
 superstitions. To be of use was with him the 
 most killing bait of the wily tempter Useless- 
 ness. He had no faculty of generalization from 
 outside of himself, or at least no experience 
 which would supply the material of such, and 
 he makes his own whim the law, his own range 
 the horizon of the universe. He condemns a 
 world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions 
 he had never had the means of testing, and 
 we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of 
 Timon. He had little active imagination ; of 
 the receptive he had much. His appreciation is 
 of the highest quality ; his critical power, from 
 want of continuity of mind, very limited and 
 inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from 
 Ossian, as an example of the superiority of 
 the old poetry to the new, though, even were 
 the historic evidence less convincing, the senti- 
 
300 THOREAU 
 
 mental melancholy of those poems should be 
 conclusive of their modernness. He had none 
 of the artistic mastery which controls a great 
 work to the serene balance of completeness, but 
 exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sen- 
 tences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short 
 bits of verse for the expression of a detached 
 thought, sentiment, or image. His works give 
 one the feeling of a sky full of stars, — some- 
 thing impressive and exhilarating certainly, 
 something high overhead and freckled thickly 
 with spots of isolated brightness ; but whether 
 these have any mutual relation with each other, 
 or have any concern with our mundane matters, 
 is for the most part matter of conjecture, — as- 
 trology as yet, and not astronomy. 
 
 It is curious, considering what Thoreau after- 
 wards became, that he was not by nature an 
 observer. He only saw the things he looked 
 for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he 
 built his Walden shanty, he did not know that 
 the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to 
 Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, 
 a phenomenon early familiar to most country 
 boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of 
 the pine as a new discovery, though one should 
 have thought that its gold-dust of blowing 
 pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Nei- 
 ther his attention nor his genius was of the 
 spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. 
 
THOREAU 301 
 
 He thought everything a discovery of his own, 
 from moonlight to the planting of acorns and 
 nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his char- 
 acter, but one of his chief charms as a writer. 
 Everything grows fresh under his hand. He 
 delved in his mind and nature ; he planted 
 them with all manner of native and foreign 
 seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not 
 merely solitary, he would be isolated, and suc- 
 ceeded at last in almost persuading himself that 
 he was autochthonous. He valued everything 
 in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively 
 his own. He complains in " Walden " that 
 there is no one in Concord with whom he could 
 talk of Oriental literature, though the man 
 was living within two miles of his hut who 
 had introduced him to it. This intellectual 
 selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful 
 in reading him. He lacked that generosity of 
 " communication " which Johnson admired in 
 Burke. De Quincey tells us that Wordsworth 
 was impatient when any one else spoke of 
 mountains, as if he had a peculiar property 
 in them. And we can readily understand why it 
 should be so : no one is satisfied with another's 
 appreciation of his mistress. But Thoreau 
 seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking 
 (often we should be inclined to call it a remote 
 one) not so much because it was good in itself 
 as because he wished few to share it with 
 
302 THOREAU 
 
 him. It seems now and then as if he did not 
 seek to lure others up "above our lower region 
 of turmoil," but to leave his own name cut on 
 the mountain peak as the first climber. This 
 itch of originality infects his thought and style. 
 To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns 
 commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes 
 something new of them. As we walk down 
 Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Winship's 
 dumb-bells, one of which bears an inscription 
 testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up at 
 arm's length by any athlete ; and in reading 
 Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling 
 as if he sometimes invited our attention to a 
 particular sophism or paradox as the biggest 
 yet maintained by any single writer. He seeks, 
 at all risks, for perversity of thought, and re- 
 vives the age of concetti while he fancies himself 
 going back to a pre-classical nature. " A day," 
 he says, " passed in the society of those Greek 
 sages, such as described in the ' Banquet ' of 
 Xenophon, would not be comparable with the 
 dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh 
 Attic salt of the moss-beds." It is not so much 
 the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. 
 As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by 
 exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extrava- 
 gance of statement. He wishes always to trump 
 your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. 
 Do you love Nature because she is beautiful ? 
 
THOREAU 303 
 
 He will find a better argument In her ugliness. 
 Are you tired of the artificial man ? He in- 
 stantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot 
 Indian, and attributes to this creature of his 
 otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things 
 that are common to all woodsmen, white or 
 red, and this simply because he has not studied 
 the pale-faced variety. 
 
 This notion of an absolute originality, as 
 if one could have a patent-right in it, is an ab- 
 surdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any 
 more than he can in language, from the past 
 and the present. As no one ever invents a 
 word, and yet language somehow grows by 
 general contribution and necessity, so it is with 
 thought, Mr. Thoreau seems to me to insist 
 in public on going back to flint and steel, when 
 there is a match-box in his pocket which he 
 knows very well how to use at a pinch. Origi- 
 nality consists in power of digesting and assimi- 
 lating thoughts, so that they become part of 
 our life and substance. Montaigne, for ex- 
 ample, is one of the most original of authors, 
 though he helped himself to ideas in every di- 
 rection. But they turn to blood and coloring 
 in his style, and give a freshness of complexion 
 that is forever charming. In Thoreau much 
 seems yet to be foreign and unassimllated, 
 showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A 
 preacher-up of Nature, we now and then detect 
 
304 THOREAU 
 
 under the surly and stoic garb something of the 
 sophist and the sentimentaHzer. I am far from 
 implying that this was conscious on his part. 
 But it is much easier for a man to impose on 
 himself when he measures only with himself. A 
 greater familiarity with ordinary men would have 
 done Thoreau good, by showing him how many 
 fine qualities are common to the race. The 
 radical vice of his theory of life was that he 
 confounded physical with spiritual remoteness 
 from men. A man is far enough withdrawn 
 from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their 
 weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as 
 exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. 
 " Solitude," says Cowley, " can be well fitted 
 and set right but upon a very few persons. 
 They must have enough knowledge of the 
 world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue 
 to despise all vanity." It is a morbid self-con- 
 sciousness that pronounces the world of men 
 empty and worthless before trying it, the in- 
 stinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some 
 innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of 
 it before any has made it but himself To a 
 healthy mind, the world is a constant chal- 
 lenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a 
 healthy mind, or he would not have been so 
 fond of prescribing. His whole life was a 
 search for the doctor. The old mystics had a 
 wiser sense of what the world was worth. They 
 
THOREAU 305 
 
 ordained a severe apprenticeship to law, and 
 even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of 
 freedom and mastery over these. Seven years 
 of service for Rachel were to be rewarded at 
 last with Leah. Seven other years of faithful- 
 ness with her were to win them at last the true 
 bride of their souls. Active Life was with them 
 the only path to the Contemplative. 
 
 Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that 
 he was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in 
 rhetoric, he confounds thought with style when 
 he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was 
 forever talking of getting away from the world, 
 but he must be always near enough to it, nay, 
 to the Concord corner of it, to feel the impres- 
 sion he makes there. He verifies the shrewd 
 remark of Sainte-Beuve, " On touche encore a 
 son temps et tres-fort, meme quand on le re- 
 pousse." This egotism of his is a Stylites pil- 
 lar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the 
 public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent 
 thing, but therefore to hold one's self too sacred 
 and precious is the reverse of excellent. There 
 is something delightfully absurd in six volumes 
 addressed to a world of such " vulgar fellows " as 
 Thoreau affirmed his fellow men to be. I once 
 had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent 
 his winters one hundred and fifty miles beyond 
 all human communication, and there dwelt with 
 his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with 
 
3o6 THOREAU 
 
 this, the shanty on Walden Pond has something 
 the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of 
 La Chevrette. I do not believe that the way 
 to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the 
 woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps 
 the narrowest provincialism is that of Self; that 
 of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural 
 man, like the singing birds, comes out of the for- 
 est as inevitably as the natural bear and the wild- 
 cat stick there. To seek to be natural implies a 
 consciousness that forbids all naturalness forever. 
 It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in 
 a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, 
 for what we call unnaturalness always has its 
 spring in a man's thinking too much about 
 himself. " It is impossible," said Turgot, " for 
 a vulgar man to be simple." 
 
 I look upon a great deal of the modern sen- 
 timentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. 
 It is one more symptom of the general liver- 
 complaint. To a man of wholesome constitution 
 the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a 
 vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who 
 have most loudly advertised their passion for 
 seclusion and their intimacy with Nature, from 
 Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimental- 
 ists, unreal men, misanthropes on the spindle 
 side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves 
 by professing contempt for their kind. They 
 make demands on the world in advance propor- 
 
THOREAU 307 
 
 tioned to their inward measure of their own 
 merit, and are angry that the world pays only by 
 the visible measure of performance. It is true 
 of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, 
 true of Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and 
 of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor, 
 we might almost say, of the primitive forest, and 
 who first was touched by the solemn falling of 
 a tree from natural decay in the windless silence 
 of the woods. It is a very shallow view that 
 affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and can- 
 not see that men in communities are just as true 
 to the laws of their organization and destiny ; 
 that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not 
 the fool and the knave ; that would shun pol- 
 itics because of its demagogues, and snuff up 
 the stench of the obscene fungus. The divine 
 life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, 
 more sublime in man than in any other of her 
 works, and the wisdom that is gained by com- 
 merce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare 
 gained it, or with one's own soul among men, 
 as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the 
 most precious, of all. In outward nature it is 
 still man that interests us, and we care far less 
 for the things seen than the way in which they 
 are seen by poetic eyes like Wordsworth's or 
 Thoreau's, and the reflections they cast there. 
 To hear the to-do that is often made over 
 
3o8 THOREAU 
 
 the simple fact that a man sees the image of 
 himself in the outward world, one is reminded 
 of a savage when he for the first time catches a 
 glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. " Vener- 
 able child of Nature," we are tempted to say, 
 " to whose science in the invention of the to- 
 bacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine 
 undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, 
 we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle 
 thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country 
 for a shilling!" If matters go on as they have 
 done, and everybody must needs blab of all the 
 favors that have been done him by roadside and 
 rIver-brInk and woodland walk, as if to kiss and 
 tell were no longer treachery, it will be a positive 
 refreshment to meet a man who is as superbly 
 indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By and 
 by we shall have John Smith, of No. —12 —12th 
 Street, advertising that he is not the J. S. who 
 saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw 
 one in his life, would not see one if he could, 
 and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in 
 question. 
 
 Solitary communion with Nature does not 
 seem to have been sanitary or sweetening in its 
 influence on Thoreau's character. On the con- 
 trary, his letters show him more cynical as he grew 
 older. While he studied with respectful atten- 
 tion the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, 
 
THOREAU 309 
 
 he looked with utter contempt on the august 
 drama of destiny of which his country was the 
 scene, and on which the curtain had already 
 risen. He w^as converting us back to a state of 
 nature " so eloquently," as Voltaire said of Rous- 
 seau, " that he almost persuaded us to go on 
 all fours," while the wiser fates were making it 
 possible for us to walk erect for the first time. 
 Had he conversed more with his fellows, his 
 sympathies would have widened with the assur- 
 ance that his peculiar genius had more apprecia- 
 tion, and his writings a larger circle of readers, 
 or at least a warmer one, than he dreamed of 
 We have the highest testimony ' to the natural 
 sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his tem- 
 per, and in his books an equally irrefragable one 
 to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a 
 strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his 
 mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. 
 A light snow has fallen everywhere in which he 
 seems to come on the track of the shier sensa- 
 tions that would elsewhere leave no trace. We 
 think greater compression would have done 
 more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes 
 over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded 
 with an over-minute punctuality and conscien- 
 tiousness of detail. He registers the state of his 
 personal thermometer thirteen times a day. We 
 
 ' Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the 
 Excursions. 
 
310 THOREAU 
 
 cannot help thinking sometimes of the man 
 who 
 
 *< Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats — 
 To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
 Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 
 
 and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, 
 that " when the owl would boast, he boasts of 
 catching mice at the edge of a hole." We could 
 readily part with some of his affectations. It 
 was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once 
 for all, " When I was Euphorbus at the siege 
 of Troy " ; not so well for Thoreau to travesty 
 it into " When I was a shepherd on the plains 
 of Assyria." A naive thing said over again is 
 anything but naive. But with every exception, 
 there is no writing comparable with Thoreau's 
 in kind, that is comparable with it in degree 
 where it is best ; where it disengages itself, that 
 is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a 
 second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and 
 smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for 
 whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. 
 
 George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not 
 a study of positive reality " [actuality were the 
 fitter word), " but a seeking after ideal truth." 
 It would be doing very inadequate justice to 
 Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this 
 ideal element did not exist in him, and that too 
 in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his 
 nature-worship. He took nature as the moun- 
 
THOREAU 311 
 
 tain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind 
 a good deal, if he record too faithfully every trip 
 over a root, if he botanize somewhat weari- 
 somely, he gives us now and then superb out- 
 looks from some jutting crag, and brings us out 
 at last into an illimitable ether, where the breath- 
 ing is not difficult for those who have any true 
 touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life 
 was a mere impossibility, so far as his own con- 
 ception of it goes, as an entire independency of 
 mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder 
 bottom. Thoreau's experiment actually presup- 
 posed all that complicated civilization which it 
 theoretically abjured. He squatted on another 
 man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his boards, 
 his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his 
 lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all 
 turn state's evidence against him as an accom- 
 plice in the sin of that artificial civilization which 
 rendered it possible that such a person as Henry 
 D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen 
 excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful 
 one, in the direction of " plain living and high 
 thinking." It was a practical sermon on Em- 
 erson's text that "things are in the saddle and 
 ride mankind," an attempt to solve Carlyle's pro- 
 blem (condensed from Johnson) of " lessening 
 your denominator." His whole life was a rebuke 
 of the waste and aimlessness of our American 
 luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry 
 
312 THOREAU 
 
 upholstery. He had " fine translunary things " 
 in him. His better style as a writer is in keep- 
 ing with the simplicity and purity of his life. 
 We have said that his range was narrow, but to 
 be a master is to be a master. He had caught 
 his English at its living source, among the poets 
 and prose-writers of its best days ; his literature 
 was extensive and recondite ; his quotations are 
 always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sen- 
 tences of his as perfect as anything in the lan- 
 guage, and thoughts as clearly crystallized ; his 
 metaphors and images are always fresh from the 
 soil ; he had watched Nature like a detective 
 who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him, 
 it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary 
 and become its own Montaigne ; we look at the 
 landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass ; com- 
 pared with his, all other books of similar aim, 
 even White's " Selborne," seem dry as a country 
 clergyman's meteorological journal in an old 
 almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne 
 and Novalis ; if not with the originally creative 
 men, with the scarcely smaller class who are 
 peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible 
 thought-seed like ferns.. 
 
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