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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 BY 
 
 AGNES REPPLIER 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 fCfoe ttitoersi&e Press, £ambnDge 
 
 1888 
 
75* HI 
 -IB 6 
 
 Copyright, 1888, 
 By AGNES REPPLIER. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 IZ-sKoxo 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge: 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Children, Past and Present 1 
 
 On the Benefits of Superstition 33 
 
 What Children Read 64 
 
 The Decay of Sentiment 94 
 
 Curiosities of Criticism 125 
 
 Some Aspects of Pessimism 157 
 
 The Cavalier 191 
 
 / 
 
BOOKS AND MEN". 
 
 CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 As a result of the modern tendency to de- 
 sert the broad beaten roads of history for the 
 bridle-paths of biography and memoir, we find 
 a great many side lights thrown upon matters 
 that the historian was wont to treat as alto- 
 gether beneath his consideration. It is by their 
 help that we study the minute changes of social 
 life that little by little alter the whole aspect 
 of a people, and it is by their help that we look 
 straight into the ordinary every-day workings 
 of the past, and measure the space between its 
 existence and our own. When we read, for 
 instance, of Lady Cathcart being kept a close 
 prisoner by her husband for over twenty years, 
 we look with some complacency on the roving 
 wives of the nineteenth century. When we 
 reflect on the dismal fate of Uriel Freuden- 
 berger, condemned by the Canton of Uri to be 
 
2 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 burnt alive in 1760, for rashly proclaiming his 
 disbelief in the legend of William Tell's apple, 
 we realize the inconveniences attendant on a 
 too early development of the critical faculty. 
 We listen entranced while the learned pastor 
 Dr. Johann Geiler von Keyersperg gravely 
 enlightens his congregation as to the nature 
 and properties of were-wolves ; and we turn 
 aside to see the half-starved boys at West- 
 minster boiling their own batter - pudding in 
 a stocking foot, or to hear the little John 
 Wesley crying softly when he is whipped, not 
 being permitted even then the luxury of a 
 hearty bellow. — 
 
 Perhaps the last incident will strike us as 
 the most pathetic of all, this being essentially 
 the children's age. Women, workmen, and 
 skeptics all have reason enough to be grate- 
 ful they were not born a few generations ear- 
 lier; but the children of to-day are favored 
 beyond their knowledge, and certainly far 
 beyond their deserts. Compare the modern 
 schoolboy with any of his ill-fated predeces- 
 sors, from the days of Spartan discipline down 
 to our grandfathers' time. Turn from the 
 free-and-easy school-girl of the period to the 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 3 
 
 miseries of Mrs. Sherwood's youth, with its 
 steel collars, its backboards, its submissive 
 silence and rigorous decorum. Think of the 
 turbulent and uproarious nurseries we all 
 know, and then go back in spirit to that severe 
 and occult shrine where Mrs. Wesley ruled 
 over her infant brood with a code of discipli- 
 nary laws as awful and inviolable as those of 
 the Medes and Persians. Of their supreme 
 efficacy she plainly felt no doubts, for she has 
 left them carefully written down for the bene- 
 fit of succeeding generations, though we fear 
 that few mothers of to-day would be tempted 
 by their stringent austerity. They are to 
 modern nursery rules what the Blue Laws of 
 Connecticut are to our more languid legisla- 
 tion. Each child was expected and required 
 to commemorate its fifth birthday by learning 
 the entire alphabet by heart. To insure this 
 all-important matter, the whole house was im- 
 pressively set in order the day before ; every 
 one's task was assigned to him ; and Mrs. 
 Wesley, issuing strict commands that no one 
 should penetrate into the sanctuary while the 
 solemn ordeal was in process, shut herself up 
 for six hours with the unhappy morsel of a 
 
4 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 child, and unflinchingly drove the letters into 
 its bewildered brain. On two occasions only 
 was she unsuccessful. " Molly and Nancy," 
 we are told, failed to learn in the given time, 
 and their mother comforts herself for their 
 tardiness by reflecting on the still greater in- 
 capacity of other people's bairns. 
 
 "When the will of a child is totally sub- 
 dued, and it is brought to revere and stand in 
 awe of its parents," then, and then only, their 
 rigid judge considers that some little inadver- 
 tences and follies may be safely passed over. 
 Nor would she permit one of them to " be chid 
 or beaten twice for the same fault," — a 
 stately assumption of justice that speaks vol- 
 umes for the iron-bound code by which they 
 were brought into subjection. Most children 
 nowadays are sufficiently amazed if a tardy 
 vengeance overtake them once, and a second 
 penalty for the same offense is something we 
 should hardly deem it necessary to proscribe. 
 Yet nothing is more evident than that Mrs. 
 Wesley was neither a cruel nor an unloving 
 mother. It is plain that she labored hard for 
 her little flock, and had their welfare and hap- 
 piness greatly at heart. In after years they 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 5 
 
 with one accord honored and revered her mem- 
 ory. Only it is not altogether surprising that 
 her husband, whose ministerial functions she 
 occasionally usurped, should have thought his 
 wife at times almost too able a ruler, or that 
 her more famous son should stand forth as the 
 great champion of human depravity. He too, 
 some forty years later, promulgated a system 
 of education as unrelaxing in its methods as 
 that of his own childhood. In his model 
 school he forbade all association with outside 
 boys, and would receive no child unless its par- 
 ents promised not to take it away for even a 
 single day, until removed for good. Yet after 
 shutting up the lads in this hot-bed of pro- 
 priety, and carefully guarding them from every 
 breath of evil, he ended by expelling part as 
 incorrigible, and ruefully admitting that the 
 remainder were very " uncommonly wicked." 
 
 The principle of solitary training for a child, 
 in order to shield it effectually from all out- 
 side influences, found other and vastly differ- 
 ent advocates. It is the key-note of Mr. and 
 Mi>s Edgeworth's Practical Education, a book 
 which must have driven over-careful and scru- 
 pulous mothers to the verge of desperation. 
 
6 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 In it they are solemnly counseled never to per- 
 mit their children to walk or talk with ser- 
 vants, never to let them have a nursery or a 
 school-room, never to leave them alone either 
 with each other or with strangers, and never 
 to allow them to read any book of which every 
 sentence has not been previously examined. 
 In the matter of books, it is indeed almost 
 impossible to satisfy such searching critics. 
 Even Mrs. Barbauld's highly correct and 
 righteous little volumes, which Lamb has an- 
 athematized as the " blights and blasts of all 
 that is human," are not quite harmless in their 
 eyes. Evil lurks behind the phrase " Charles 
 wants his dinner," which would seem to imply 
 that Charles must have whatever he desires ; 
 while to say flippantly, " The sun has gone to 
 bed," is to incur the awful odium of telling 
 a child a deliberate untruth. 
 
 In Miss Edgeworth's own stories the didactic 
 purpose is only veiled by the sprightliness of 
 the narrative and the air of amusing reality 
 she never fails to impart. Who that has ever 
 read them can forget Harry and Lucy making 
 up their own little beds in the morning, and 
 knocking down the unbaked bricks to prove 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 7 
 
 that they were soft ; or Rosamond choosing 
 between the famous purple jar and a pair of 
 new boots ; or Laura forever drawing the fur- 
 niture in perspective ? In all these little peo- 
 ple say and do there is conveyed to the young 
 reader a distinct moral lesson, which we are 
 by no means inclined to reject, when we turn 
 to the other writers of the time and see how 
 much worse off we are. Day, in Sandford 
 and Merton, holds up for our edification the 
 dreariest and most insufferable of pedagogues, 
 and advocates a mode of life wholly at vari- 
 ance with the instincts and habits of his age. 
 Miss Sewell, in her Principles of Education, 
 sternly warns young girls' against the sin of 
 chattering with each other, and forbids moth- 
 ers' playing with their children as a piece of 
 frivolity which cannot fail to weaken the dig- 
 nity of their position. 
 
 To a great many parents, both in England 
 and in France, such advice would have been 
 unnecessary. Who, for instance, can imagine 
 Lady Balcarras, with whom it was a word and 
 a blow in quick succession, stooping to any 
 such weakness ; or that august mother of Har- 
 riet Martineau, against whom her daughter 
 
8 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 has recorded all the slights and severities of 
 her youth ? Not that we think Miss Martineau 
 to have been much worse off than other chil- 
 dren of her day ; but as she has chosen with 
 signal ill-taste to revenge herself upon her fam- 
 ily in her autobiography, we have at least a 
 better opportunity of knowing all about it. 
 " To one person," she writes, " I was indeed 
 habitually untruthful, from fear. To my 
 mother I would in my childhood assert or deny 
 anything that would bring me through most 
 easily," — a confession which, to say the least, 
 reflects as little to her own credit as to her 
 parent's. Had Mrs. Martineau been as stern 
 an upholder of the truth as was Mrs. Wesley, 
 her daughter would have ventured upon very 
 few fabrications in her presence. When she 
 tells us gravely how often she meditated sui- 
 cide in these early days, we are fain to smile 
 at hearing a fancy so common among morbid 
 and imaginative children narrated soberly in 
 middle life, as though it were a unique and 
 horrible experience. No one endowed by na- 
 ture with so copious a fund of self -sympathy 
 could ever have stood in need of much pity 
 from the outside world. 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 9 
 
 But for real and uncompromising severity 
 towards children we must turn to France, 
 where for years the traditions of decorum 
 and discipline were handed down in noble 
 families, and generations of boys and girls 
 suffered grievously therefrom. Trifling faults 
 were magnified into grave delinquencies, and 
 relentlessly punished as such. We sometimes 
 wonder whether the youthful Bertrand du 
 Guesclin were really the wicked little savage 
 that the old chroniclers delight in painting, 
 or whether his rude truculence was not very 
 much like that of naughty and neglected boys 
 the world over. There is, after all, a pathetic 
 significance in those lines of C Livelier 's which 
 describe in barbarous French the lad's remark- 
 able and unprepossessing ugliness : — 
 
 11 II n'ot si lait de Resnes a Disnant, 
 Camus estoit et noirs, malostru et massant. 
 Li pere et la mere si le heoiant tant, 
 Que souvent en leurs cuers aloient desirant 
 Que fust mors, ou noiey en une eaue corant." 
 
 Perhaps, if he had been less flat-nosed and 
 swarthy, his better qualities might have shone 
 forth more clearly in early life, and it would 
 not have needed the predictions of a magician 
 
10 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 or the keen-eyed sympathy of a nun to evolve 
 the future Constable of France out of such 
 apparently hopeless material. At any rate, 
 tradition generally representing him either as 
 languishing in the castle dungeon, or exiled to 
 the society of the domestics, it is plain he bore 
 but slight resemblance to the cherished enfant 
 terrible who is his legitimate successor to-day. 
 Coming down to more modern times, we are 
 met by such monuments of stately severity as 
 Madame Quinet and the Marquise de Mont- 
 mirail, mother of that fair saint Madame de 
 Rochefoucauld, the trials of whose later years 
 were ushered in by a childhood of unremitting 
 harshness and restraint. The marquise was 
 incapable of any faltering or weakness where 
 discipline was concerned. If carrots were re- 
 pulsive to her little daughter's stomach, then 
 a day spent in seclusion, with a plate of the 
 obnoxious vegetable before her, was the surest 
 method of proving that carrots were neverthe- 
 less to be eaten. When Augustine and her 
 sister kissed their mother's hand each morning, 
 and prepared to con their tasks in her awful 
 presence, they well knew that not the small- 
 est dereliction would be passed over by that 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 11 
 
 inexorable judge. Nor might they aspire, like 
 Harriet Martineau, to shield themselves be- 
 hind the barrier of a lie. When from Augus- 
 tine's little lips came faltering some childish 
 evasion, the ten-year-old sinner was hurried as 
 an outcast from her home, and sent to expiate 
 her crime with six months' merciful seclusion 
 in a convent. "You have told me a false- 
 hood, mademoiselle," said the marquise, with 
 frigid accuracy; "and you must prepare to 
 leave my house upon the spot." 
 
 Faults of breeding were quite as offensive to 
 this grande dame as faults of temper. The fear 
 of her pitiless glance filled her daughters with 
 timidity, and bred in them a mauvaise honte, 
 which in its turn aroused her deadliest ire. 
 Only a week before her wedding-day Madame 
 de Rochefoucauld was sent ignominiously to 
 dine at a side table, as a penance for the awk- 
 wardness of her curtsy ; while even her fast - 
 growing beauty became but a fresh source of 
 misfortune. The dressing of her magnificent 
 hair occupied two long hours every day, and 
 she retained all her life a most distinct and 
 painful recollection of her sufferings at the 
 hands of her coiffeu 
 
12 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 To turn from the Marquis de Montmirail to 
 Madame Quinet is to see the picture intensified. 
 More beautiful, more stately, more unswerving 
 still, her faith in discipline was unbounded, 
 and her practice in no wise inconsistent with 
 her belief. It was actually one of the institu- 
 tions of her married life that a garde de mile 
 should pay a domiciliary visit twice a week to 
 chastise the three children. If by chance 
 they had not been naughty, then the punish- 
 ment might be referred to the acount of future 
 transgressions, — an arrangement which, while 
 it insured justice to the culprits, can hardly 
 have afforded them much encouragement to 
 amend. Her son Jerome, who ran away when 
 a mere boy to enroll with the volunteers of '92, 
 reproduced in later years, for the benefit of 
 his own household, many of his mother's most 
 striking characteristics. He was the father of 
 Edgar Quinet, the poet, a child whose preco- 
 cious abilities seem never to have awakened 
 within him either parental affection or paren- 
 tal pride. Silent, austere, repellent, he offered 
 no caresses, and was obeyed with timid sub- 
 mission. " The gaze of his large blue eyes," 
 says Dowden, "imposed restraint with silent 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 13 
 
 authority. His mockery, the play of an intel- 
 lect unsympathetic by resolve and upon prin- 
 ciple, was freezing to a child ; and the most 
 distinct consciousness which his presence pro- 
 duced upon the boy was the assurance that he, 
 Edgar, was infallibly about to do something 
 which would cause displeasure." That this 
 was a common attitude with parents in the old 
 regime may be inferred from Chateaubriand's 
 statement that he and his sister, transformed 
 into statues by their father's presence, recov- 
 ered their life only when he left the room ; and 
 by the assertion of Mirabeau that even while 
 at school, two hundred leagues away from his 
 father, " the mere thought of him made me 
 dread every youthful amusement which could 
 be followed by the slightest unfavorable re- 
 sult." 
 
 Yet at the present day we are assured by 
 Mr. Marshal] that in France " the art of 
 spoiling has reached a development which is un- 
 known elsewhere, and maternal affection not 
 infrequently descends to folly and imbecility." 
 But then the clever critic of French Home Life 
 had never visited America when lie wrote those 
 lines, although some of the stories he tells 
 
14 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 would do credit to any household in our land. 
 There is one quite delightful account of a 
 young married couple, who, being invited to a 
 dinner party of twenty people, failed to make 
 their appearance until ten o'clock, when they 
 explained urbanely that their three-year-old 
 daughter would not permit them to depart. 
 Moreover, being a child of great character and 
 discrimination, she had insisted on their un- 
 dressing and going to bed ; to which reason- 
 able request they had rendered a prompt com- 
 pliance, rather than see her cry. " It would 
 have been monstrous," said the fond mother, 
 " to cause her pain simply for our pleasure ; 
 so I begged Henri to cease his efforts to per- 
 suade her, and we took off our clothes and 
 went to bed. As soon as she was asleep we 
 got up again, redressed, and here we are with 
 a thousand apologies for being so late." 
 
 This sounds half incredible ; but there is 
 a touch of nature in the mother's happy in- 
 difference to the comfort of her friends, as com- 
 pared with the whims of her offspring,* that 
 closely appeals to certain past experiences of 
 our own. It is all very well for an English- 
 man to stare aghast at such a reversal of the 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 15 
 
 laws of nature ; we Americans, who have suf- 
 fered and held our peace, can afford to smile 
 with some complacency at the thought of 
 another great nation bending its head beneath 
 the iron yoke. 
 
 To return, however, to the days when chil- 
 dren were the ruled, and not the rulers, we find 
 ourselves face to face with the great question 
 of education. How smooth and easy are the 
 paths of learning made now for the little feet 
 that tread them ! How rough and steep they 
 were in bygone times, watered with many 
 tears, and not without a line of victims, whose 
 weak strength failed them in the upward strug- 
 gle ! We cannot go back to any period when 
 school life was not fraught with miseries. 
 Classic writers paint in grim colors the harsh- 
 ness of the pedagogues who ruled in Greece 
 and Rome. Mediaeval authors tell us more 
 than enough of the passionless severity that 
 swayed the monastic schools, — a severity 
 which seems to have been the result of an 
 hereditary tradition rather than of individual 
 caprice, and which seldom interfered with the 
 mutual affection that existed between master 
 and scholar. When St. Anselm, the future 
 
16 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 disciple of Lanfranc, and his successor in the 
 See of Canterbury, begged as a child of four 
 to be sent to school, his mother, Ermenberg, 
 — the granddaughter of a king, and the kins- 
 woman of every crowned prince in Christen- 
 dom, — resisted his entreaties as long as she 
 dared, knowing too well the sufferings in store 
 for him. A few years later she was forced to 
 yield, and these same sufferings very nearly 
 cost her son his life. 
 
 The boy was both studious and docile, and 
 his teacher, fully recognizing his precocious 
 talents, determined to force them to the ut- 
 most. In order that so active a mind should 
 not for a moment be permitted to relax its 
 tension, he kept the little scholar a ceaseless 
 prisoner at his desk. Rest and recreation 
 were alike denied him, while the utmost rigors 
 of a discipline, of which we can form no ade- 
 quate conception, wrung from the child's over- 
 worked brain an unflinching attention to his 
 tasks. As a result of this cruel folly, " the 
 brightest star of the eleventh century had been 
 well-nigh quenched in its rising." l Mind and 
 body alike yielded beneath the strain ; and 
 
 1 Life of St. Anselm, Bishop of Canterbury. By Martin 
 Rule. 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 17 
 
 Anselru, a broken-down little wreck, was re- 
 turned to his mother's hands, to be slowly- 
 nursed back to health and reason. " Ah, me ! 
 I have lost my child ! " sighed Ermenberg, 
 when she found that not all that he had suf- 
 fered could shake the boy's determination to 
 return ; and the mother of Guibert de Nogent 
 must have echoed the sentiment when her little 
 son, his back purple with stripes, looked her 
 in the face, and answered steadily to her lam- 
 entations, " If I die of my whippings, I still 
 mean to be whipped." 
 
 The step from the monastic schools to Eton 
 and AVestminster is a long one, but the gain 
 not so apparent at first sight as might be sup- 
 posed. It is hard for the luxurious Etonian 
 of to-day to realize that for many years his 
 predecessors suffered enough from cold, hun- 
 ger, and barbarous ill-treatment to make life 
 a burden on their hands. The system, while 
 it hardened some into the desired manliness, 
 must have killed many whose feebler constitu- 
 tions could ill support its rigor. Even as late 
 as 1834, we are told by one who had ample 
 opportunity to study the subject carefully that 
 " the inmates of a workhouse or a jail were 
 
18 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 better fed and lodged than were the scholars 
 of Eton. Boys whose parents could not pay 
 for a private room underwent privations that 
 might have broken down a cabin-boy, and 
 would be thought inhuman if inflicted on a 
 galley-slave." Nor is this sentiment as exag- 
 gerated as it sounds. To get up at five on 
 freezing winter mornings ; to sweep their own 
 floors and make their own beds ; to go two by 
 two to the "children's pump" for a scanty 
 wash; to eat no mouthful of food until nine 
 o'clock ; to live on an endless round of mutton, 
 potatoes, and beer, none of them too plentiful 
 or too good ; to sleep in a dismal cell without 
 chair or table ; to improvise a candlestick out 
 of paper ; to be starved, frozen, and flogged, — 
 such was the daily life of the scions of Eng- 
 land's noblest families, of lads tenderly nur- 
 tured and sent from princely homes to win 
 their Greek and Latin at this fearful cost. 
 
 Moreover, the picture of one public school 
 is in all essential particulars the picture of the 
 rest. The miseries might vary somewhat, but 
 their bulk remained the same. At Westmin- 
 ster the younger boys, hard pushed by hunger, 
 gladly received the broken victuals left from 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 19 
 
 the table of the senior election, and tried to 
 supplement their scanty fare with strange and 
 mysterious concoctions, whose unsavory de- 
 tails have been handed down among the mel- 
 ancholy traditions of the past. 
 
 In 1847 a young brother of Lord Mansfield 
 being very ill at school, his mother came to 
 visit him. There was but one chair in the 
 room, upon which the poor invalid was reclin- 
 ing ; but his companion, seeing the dilemma, 
 immediately arose, and with true boyish polite- 
 ness offered Lady Mansfield the coal-scuttle, 
 on which he himself had been sitting. At 
 Winchester, Sydney Smith suffered "many 
 years of misery and starvation," while his 
 younger brother, Courtenay, twice ran away, 
 in the vain effort to escape his wretchedness. 
 "There was never enough provided of even 
 the coarsest food for the whole school," writes 
 Lady Holland ; u and the little boys were of 
 course left to fare as well as they could. Even 
 in his old age my father used to shudder at the 
 recollections of Winchester, and I have heard 
 him speak with horror of the misery of the 
 years he spent there. The whole system, he 
 affirmed, was one of abuse, neglect, and vice." 
 
20 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 In the matter of discipline there was no 
 shadow of choice anywhere. Capricious cru- 
 elty ruled under every scholastic roof. On 
 the one side, we encounter Dean Colet, of St. 
 Paul's, whom Erasmus reported as " delight- 
 ing in children in a Christian spirit ; " which 
 meant that he never wearied of seeing them 
 suffer, believing that the more they endured 
 as boys, the more worthy they would grow in 
 manhood. On the other, we are confronted 
 by the still more awful ghost of Dr. Keate, 
 who could and did flog eighty boys in succes- 
 sion without a pause ; and who, being given 
 the confirmation list by mistake for the pun- 
 ishment list, insisted on flogging every one of 
 the catechumens, as a good preparation for 
 receiving the sacrament. Sir Francis Doyle, 
 almost the only apologist who has so far ven- 
 tured to appear in behalf of this fiery little 
 despot, once remarked to Lord Blachford that 
 Keate did not much mind a boy's lying to 
 him. "What he hated was a monotony of 
 excuses." " Mind your lying to him ! " re- 
 torted Lord Blachford, with a keen recollec- 
 tion of his own juvenile experiences ; " why, 
 he exacted it as a token of respect." 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 21 
 
 If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we 
 seek those rare cases in which a home edu- 
 cation was substituted, we are generally re- 
 warded by finding the comforts greater and 
 the cramming worse. It is simply impossible 
 for a pedagogue to try and wring from a hun- 
 dred brains the excess of work which may, un- 
 der clever treatment, be extracted from one ; 
 and so the Eton boys, with all their manifold 
 miseries, were at least spared the peculiar 
 experiments which were too often tried upon 
 solitary scholars. Nowadays anxious parents 
 and guardians seem to labor under an ill- 
 founded apprehension that their children are 
 going to hurt themselves by over-application 
 to their books, and we hear a great deal about 
 the expedience of restraining this inordinate 
 zeal. But a few generations back such com- 
 fortable theories had yet to be evolved, and 
 the plain duty of a teacher was to goad the 
 student on to every effort in his power. 
 
 Perhaps the two most striking instances of 
 home training that have been given to the 
 world are those of John Stuart Mill and Gia- 
 como Leopardi ; the principal difference be- 
 ing that, while the English boy was crammed 
 
22 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 scientifically by his father, the Italian poet 
 was permitted to relentlessly cram himself. 
 In both cases we see the same melancholy, 
 blighted childhood ; the same cold indifference 
 to the mother, as to one who had no part or 
 parcel in their lives ; the same joyless routine 
 of labor ; the same unboyish gravity and pre- 
 cocious intelligence. Mill studied Greek at 
 three, Latin at eight, the Organon at eleven, 
 and Adam Smith at thirteen. Leopardi at 
 ten was well acquainted with most Latin au- 
 thors, and undertook alone and unaided the 
 study of Greek, perfecting himself in that lan- 
 guage before he was fourteen. Mill's sole rec- 
 reation was to walk with his father, narrating 
 to him the substance of his last day's reading. 
 Leopardi, being forbidden to go about Reca- 
 nati without his tutor, acquiesced with pa- 
 thetic resignation, and ceased to wander outside 
 the garden gates. Mill had all boyish enthu- 
 siasm and healthy partisanship crushed out of 
 him by his father's pitiless logic. Leopardi's 
 love for his country burned like a smothered 
 flame, and added one more to the pangs that 
 eat out his soul in silence. His was truly a 
 wonderful intellect ; and whereas the English 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 23 
 
 lad was merely forced by training into a pre- 
 cocity foreign to his nature, and which, ac- 
 cording to Mr. Bain, failed to produce any 
 great show of juvenile scholarship, the Italian 
 boy fed on books with a resistless and craving 
 appetite, his mind growing warped and morbid 
 as his enfeebled body sank more and more un- 
 der the unwholesome strain. In the long lists 
 of despotically reared children there is no sad- 
 der sight than this undisciplined, eager, im- 
 petuous soul, burdened alike with physical and 
 moral weakness, meeting tyrannical author- 
 ity with a show of insincere submission, and 
 laying up in his lonely infancy the seeds of a 
 sorrow which was to find expression in the 
 key-note of his work, Life is Only Fit to be 
 Despised. 
 
 Between the severe mental training of boys 
 and the education thought fit and proper for 
 girls, there was throughout the eighteenth cen- 
 tury a broad and purposeless chasm. Before 
 that time, and after it, too, the majority of 
 women were happily ignorant of many sub- 
 jects which every school-girl of to-day aspires 
 to handle ; but during the reigns of Queen 
 Anne and the first three Georges, this igno- 
 
24 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 ranee was considered an essential charm of 
 their sex, and was displayed with a pretty 
 ostentation that sufficiently proves its value. 
 Such striking exceptions as Madame de Stael, 
 Mrs. Montagu, and Anne Darner were not 
 wanting to give points of light to the picture ; 
 but they hardly represent the real womanhood 
 of their time. Femininity was then based 
 upon shallowness, and girls were solemnly 
 warned not to try and ape the acquirements of 
 men, but to keep themselves rigorously within 
 their own ascertained limits. We find a fa- 
 mous school-teacher, under whose fostering 
 care many a court belle was trained for social 
 triumphs, laying down the law on this subject 
 with no uncertain hand, and definitely placing 
 women in their proper station. " Had a third 
 order been necessary," she writes naively, 
 "doubtless one would have been created, a 
 midway kind of being." In default, however, 
 of this recognized via media, she deprecates 
 all impious attempts to bridge over the chasm 
 between the two sexes ; and " accounts it a 
 misfortune for a female to be learned, a ge- 
 nius, or in any way a prodigy, as it removes 
 her from her natural sphere. 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 25 
 
 " Those were days," says a writer in Black- 
 wood, " when superficial teaching was thought 
 the proper teaching for girls ; when every 
 science had its feminine language, as Hindu 
 ladies talk with a difference and with softer 
 terminations than their lords : as The Young 
 Ladies' Geography, which is to be read in- 
 stead of novels ; A Young Ladies' Guide 
 to Astronomy ; The Use of the Globes for 
 Girls' Schools ; and the Ladies' Polite Let- 
 ter-Writer." What was really necessary for 
 a girl was to learn how to knit, to dance, to 
 curtsy, and to carve ; the last-named accom- 
 plishment being one of her exclusive privileges. 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu received lessons 
 from a professional carving-master, who taught 
 her the art scientifically ; and during her fa- 
 ther's grand dinners her labors were often so 
 exhausting that translating the Enchiridion 
 must have seemed by comparison a light and 
 easy task. Indeed, after that brilliant baby 
 entrance into the Kitcat Club, very little that 
 was pleasant fell to Lady Mary's share ; and 
 years later she recalls the dreary memories of 
 her youth in a letter written to her sister, 
 Lady Mar. " Don't you remember," she asks, 
 
26 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 pathetically, " how miserable we were in the 
 little parlor at Thoresby ? " 
 
 Her own education she always protested was 
 of the worst and flimsiest character, and her 
 girlish scorn at the restraints that cramped and 
 fettered her is expressed vigorously enough 
 in the well-known letter to Bishop Burnet. It 
 was considered almost criminal, she complains, 
 to improve her reason, or even to fancy she 
 had any. To be learned was to be held up 
 to universal ridicule, and the only line of 
 conduct open to her was to play the fool in 
 concert with other women of quality, " whose 
 birth and leisure merely serve to make them 
 the most useless and worthless part of crea- 
 tion." Yet viewed alongside of her contem- 
 poraries, Lady Mary's advantages were really 
 quite unusual. She had some little guidance 
 in her studies, with no particular opposition to 
 overcome, and tolerance was as much at any 
 time as a thoughtful girl could hope for. 
 Nearly a century later we find little Mary 
 Fairfax — afterwards Mrs. Somerville, and 
 the most learned woman in England — being 
 taught how to sew, to read her Bible, and to 
 learn the Shorter Catechism ; all else being 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 27 
 
 considered superfluous for a female. More- 
 over, the child's early application to her books 
 was regarded with great disfavor by her rela- 
 tives, who plainly thought that no good was 
 likely to come of it. " I wonder," said her 
 rigid aunt to Lady Fairfax, " that you let 
 Mary waste her time in reading ! " 
 
 " You cannot hammer a girl into any- 
 thing," says Euskin, who has constituted him- 
 self both champion and mentor of the sex ; 
 and perhaps this was the reason that so many 
 of these rigorously drilled and kept-down girls 
 blossomed perversely into brilliant and schol- 
 arly women. Nevertheless, it is comforting to 
 turn back for a moment, and see what Hol- 
 land, in the seventeenth century, could do for 
 her clever children. Mr. Gosse has shown us 
 a charming picture of the three daughters of 
 Roemer Visscher, the poetess Tesselschade and 
 her less famous sisters, — three little girls, 
 whose healthy mental and physical training 
 was happily free from either narrow contrac- 
 tion or hot-house pressure. " All of them," 
 writes Ernestus Brink, " were practiced in very 
 sweet accomplishments. They could play mu- 
 sic, paint, write, and engrave on glass, make 
 
28 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 poems, cut emblems, embroider all manner of 
 fabrics, and swim well ; which last thing they 
 had learned in their father's garden, where 
 there was a canal with water, outside the 
 city." What wonder that these little maid- 
 ens, with skilled fingers, and clear heads, and 
 vigorous bodies, grew into three keen-witted 
 and charming women, around whom we find 
 grouped that rich array of talent which sud- 
 denly raised Holland to a unique literary dis- 
 tinction ! What wonder that their influence, 
 alike refining and strengthening, was felt on 
 every hand, and was repaid with universal 
 gratitude and love ! 
 
 There is a story told of Professor Wilson, 
 that one day, listening to a lecture on educa- 
 tion by Dr. Whately, he grew manifestly im- 
 patient at the rules laid down, and finally 
 slipped out of the room, exclaiming irately to 
 a friend who followed him, " I always thought 
 God Almighty made man, but he says it was 
 the schoolmaster." 
 
 In like manner many of us have wondered 
 from time to time whether children are made 
 of such ductile material, and can be as readily 
 moulded to our wishes, as educators would 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 29 
 
 have us believe. If it be true that nature 
 counts for nothing and training for every- 
 thing, then what a gap between the boys and 
 girls of two hundred years ago and the boys 
 and girls we know to-day ! The rigid bands 
 that once bound the young to decorum have 
 dwindled to a silver thread that snaps under 
 every restive movement. To have " perfectly 
 natural " children seems to be the outspoken 
 ambition of parents, who have succeeded in 
 retrograding their offspring from artificial civ- 
 ilization to that pure and wholesome savagery 
 which is too plainly their ideal. " It is as- 
 sumed nowadaj T s," declares an angry critic, 
 " that children have come into the world to 
 make a noise ; and it is the part of every good 
 parent to put up with it, and to make all 
 household arrangements with a view to their 
 sole pleasure and convenience." 
 
 That the children brought up under this 
 relaxed discipline acquire certain merits and 
 charms of their own is an easily acknowledged 
 fact. We are not now alluding to those 
 spoiled and over-indulged little people who 
 are the recognized scourges of humanity, but 
 merely to the boys and girls who have been 
 
30 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 allowed from infancy that large degree of 
 freedom which is deemed expedient for en- 
 lightened nurseries, and who regulate their 
 own conduct on the vast majority of occasions. 
 They are as a rule light-hearted, truthful, 
 affectionate, and occasionally amusing ; but it 
 cannot be denied that they lack that nicety of 
 breeding which was at one time the distin- 
 guishing mark of children of the upper classes, 
 and which was in a great measure born of the 
 restraints that surrounded them. The faculty 
 of sitting still without fidgeting, of walking 
 without rushing, and of speaking without 
 screaming can be acquired only under tuition ; 
 but it is worth some little trouble to attain. 
 When Sydney Smith remarked that the chil- 
 dren of rank were generally so much better 
 bred than the children of the middle classes, 
 he recognized the greater need for self-restraint 
 that entered into their lives. They may have 
 been less natural, perhaps, but they were infi- 
 nitely more pleasing to his fastidious eyes ; and 
 the unconscious grace which he admired was 
 merely the reflection of the universal courtesy 
 that surrounded them. Nor is this all. " The 
 necessity of self -repression," says a recent 
 
CHILDREN, PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 31 
 
 writer in Blackwood, " makes room for thought, 
 which those children miss who have no formali- 
 ties to observe, no customs to respect, who blurt 
 out every irrelevance, who interpose at will with 
 question and opinion as it enters the brain. 
 Children don't learn to talk by chattering to 
 one another, and saying what comes upper- 
 most. Mere listening with intelligence in- 
 volves an exercise of mental speech, and ob- 
 servant silence opens the pores of the mind as 
 impatient demands for explanation never do." 
 This is true, inasmuch as it is not the child 
 who is encouraged to talk continually who in 
 the end learns how to arrange and express his 
 ideas. Nor does the fretful desire to be told 
 at once what everything means imply the ac- 
 tive mind which parents so fondly suppose ; 
 but rather a languid percipience, unable to 
 decipher the simplest causes for itself. Yet 
 where shall we turn to look for the " observant 
 silence," so highly recommended ? The young 
 people who observed and were silent have 
 passed away, — little John Ruskin being as- 
 suredly the last of the species, — and their 
 places are filled by those to whom observation 
 and silence are alike unknown. This is the 
 
32 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 children's age, and all things are subservient 
 to their wishes. Masses of juvenile literature 
 are published annually for their amusement ; 
 conversation is reduced steadily to their level 
 while they are present ; meals are arranged to 
 suit their hours, and the dishes thereof to suit 
 their palates; studies are made simpler and 
 toys more elaborate with each succeeding year. 
 The hardships they once suffered are now hap- 
 pily ended, the decorum once exacted is fading 
 rapidly away. We accept the situation with 
 philosophy, and only now and then, under the 
 pressure of some new development, are startled 
 into asking ourselves where it is likely to end. 
 
OX THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTI- 
 TION. 
 
 " We in England," says Mr. Kinglake, 
 "are scarcely sufficiently conscious of the 
 great debt we owe to the wise and watchful 
 press which presides over the formation of 
 our opinions, and which brings about this 
 splendid result, namely, that in matters of be- 
 lief the humblest of us are lifted up to the 
 level of the most sagacious ; so that really a 
 simple cornet in the Blues is no more likely 
 to entertain a foolish belief in' ghosts, or 
 witchcraft, or any other supernatural topic, 
 than the Lord High Chancellor or the leader 
 of the House of Commons." This delicate 
 sarcasm, delivered with all the author's habit- 
 ual serenity of mind, is quoted by Mr. Buskin 
 in his Art of England ; assentingly, indeed, 
 but with a half-concealed dismay that any one 
 could find it in his heart to be funny upon 
 such a distressing subject. When he, Mr. 
 
34 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 Ruskin, hurls his satiric shafts against the 
 spirit of modern skepticism, the points are 
 touched with caustic, and betray a deep impa- 
 tience darkening quickly into wrath. Is it 
 not bad enough that we ride in steam-cars in- 
 stead of post-chaises, live amid brick houses 
 instead of green fields, and pass by some of 
 the " most accomplished pictures in the 
 world " to stare gaping at the last new ma- 
 chine, with its network of slow-revolving, 
 wicked-looking wheels ? If, in addition to 
 these too prominent faults, we are going to 
 frown down the old appealing superstitions, 
 and threaten them, like naughty children, 
 with the corrective discipline of scientific re- 
 search, he very properly turns his back upon 
 us forever, and distinctly says he has no fur- 
 ther message for our ears. 
 
 Let us rather, then, approach the subject 
 with the invaluable humility of Don Bernal 
 Dias del Castillo, that gallant soldier who fol- 
 lowed the fortunes of Cortes into Mexico, and 
 afterwards penned the Historia Verdadera, an 
 ingenuous narrative of their discoveries, their 
 hardships, and their many battles. In one 
 of these, it seems, the blessed Saint Iago 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 35 
 
 appeared in the thickest of the fray, mounted 
 on a snow-white charger, leading his beloved 
 Spaniards to victory. Now the conquestador 
 freely admits that he himself did not behold 
 the saint; on the contrary, w r hat he did see 
 in that particular spot was a cavalier named 
 Francisco de Morla, riding on a chestnut 
 horse. But does he, on that account, puff 
 himself up with pride, and declare that his 
 more fortunate comrades were mistaken ? By 
 no means ! He is as firmly convinced of the 
 presence of the vision as if it had been appar- 
 ent to his eyes, and with admirable modesty 
 lays all the blame upon his own unworthiness. 
 " Sinner that I am ! " he exclaims devoutly, 
 " why should I have been permitted to behold 
 the blessed apostle ? " In the same spirit, 
 honest Peter Walker strained his sight in 
 vain for a glimpse of the ghostly armies that 
 crossed the Clyde in the summer of 1686, 
 and, seeing nothing, was content to believe in 
 them, all the same, on the testimony of his 
 neighbors. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, who appears to have 
 wasted a good deal of time in trying to per- 
 suade himself that he put no faith in spirits, 
 
36 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 confesses quite humbly, in his old age, that 
 " the tendency to belief in supernatural agen- 
 cies seems connected with and deduced from 
 the invaluable conviction of the certainty of a 
 future state." And beyond a doubt this ten- 
 dency was throughout his life the source of 
 many pleasurable emotions. So much so, in 
 fact, that, according to Mr. Pater's theory of 
 happiness, the loss of these emotions, bred in 
 him from childhood, would have been very 
 inadequately repaid by a gain in scientific 
 knowledge. If it be the true wisdom to direct 
 our finest efforts towards multiplying our sen- 
 sations, and so expanding the brief interval 
 we call life, then the old unquestioning cre- 
 dulity was a more powerful motor in human 
 happiness than any sentiment that fills its 
 ground to-day. In the first place it was closely 
 associated with certain types of beauty, and 
 beauty is one of the tonics now most ear- 
 nestly recommended to our sick souls. " Les 
 fions d'aut fais " were charming to the very 
 tips of their dewy, trembling wings ; the elfin 
 people, who danced in the forest glades under 
 the white moonbeams, danced their way with- 
 out any difficulty right into the hearts of men ; 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 37 
 
 the swan-maiden, who ventured shyly in the 
 fisher's path, was easily transformed into a 
 loving wife ; even the mara, most suspicious 
 and terrible of ghostly visitors, has often laid 
 aside her darker instincts, and developed into 
 a cheerful spouse, with only a tinge of mys- 
 tery to make her more attractive in her hus- 
 band's eyes. Melusina combing her golden 
 hair by the bubbling fountain of Lusignan, 
 Undine playing in the rain-drenched forest, 
 the nixie dancing at the village feast with her 
 handsome Flemish lad, and the mermaid re- 
 luctantly leaving her watery home to wed the 
 youth who captured her magic seal-skin, all 
 belong to the sisterhood of beauty, and their 
 images did good service in raising the vulgar 
 mind from its enforced contemplation of the 
 sordid troubles, the droning vexations, of life. 
 Next, the happy believers in the supernat- 
 ural owed to their simplicity delicious throbs 
 of fear, — not craven cowardice, but that more 
 refined and complex feeling, w T hich is of all 
 sensations the most enthralling, the most elu- 
 sive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, 
 like all other treacherous gifts, must be 
 handled with discrimination : a thought too 
 
38 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 much, and we are brutalized and degraded ; 
 but within certain limits it enhances all the 
 pleasures of life. When Captain Forsyth 
 stood behind a tree on a sultry summer morn- 
 ing, and saw the tigress step softly through 
 the long jungle grass, and the affrighted 
 monkeys swing chattering overhead, there 
 must have come upon him that sensation of 
 awe which alone makes courage possible. 1 
 He knew that his life hung trembling in the 
 balance, and that all depended upon the first 
 shot he fired. He respected, as a sane man 
 would, the mighty strength of his antagonist, 
 her graceful limbs instinct with power, her 
 cruel eyes blinking in the yellow dawn. And 
 born of the fear, which stirred but could not 
 conquer him, came the keen transport of the 
 hunter, who feels that one such supremely 
 heroic moment is worth a year of ordinary 
 life. Without that dread, not only would the 
 joy be lessened, and the glad rebound from 
 danger to a sense of safety lost forever, but 
 the disciplined and manly courage of the Eng- 
 lish soldier would degenerate into a mere 
 
 1 The Highlands of Central India. By Captain James 
 Forsyth. 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 39 
 
 brutish audacity, hardly above the level of the 
 beast he slays. 
 
 In children, this delicate emotion of fear, 
 growing out of their dependent condition, 
 gives dignity and meaning to their courage 
 when they are brave, and a delicious zest to 
 their youthful delinquencies. Gray, in his 
 chilly and melancholy manhood, years after 
 he has resigned himself to never again being 
 " either dirty or amused " as long as he lives, 
 goes back like a flash to the unlawful delight 
 of a schoolboy's stolen freedom : — 
 
 " Still as they run they look "behind, 
 They hear a voice in every wind, 
 And snatch a fearful joy." 
 
 And who that has ever watched a party of 
 children, listening with bright eyes and parted 
 lips to some weird, uncanny legend, — like 
 that group of little girls for instance, in Mr. 
 Charles Gregory's picture Tales and Won- 
 ders, — can doubt for a moment the " fearful 
 joy " that terror lends them ? Nowadays, it 
 is true, their youthful ears are but too well 
 guarded from such indiscretions until they are 
 old enough to scoff at all fantastic folly, and 
 the age at which they learn to scoff is one of 
 
40 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 the most astonishing things about our mod- 
 ern progress. They have ceased to read fairy 
 stories, because they no longer believe in 
 fairies ; they find Hans Andersen silly, and 
 the Arabian Nights stupid ; and the very 
 babies, " skeptics in long-coats," scorn you 
 openly if you venture to hint at Santa Claus. 
 " What did Kriss Kr ingle bring you this 
 Christmas ? " I rashly asked a tiny mite of 
 a girl ; and her answer was as emphatic as 
 Betsey Prig's, when, with folded arms and a 
 contemptuous mien, she let fall the ever mem- 
 orable words, " I don't believe there's no sich 
 a person." 
 
 Yet the supernatural, provided it be not too 
 horrible, is legitimate food for a child's mind, 
 nourishes its imagination, inspires a healthy 
 awe, and is death to that precocious pedantry 
 which is the least pleasing trait that children 
 are wont to manifest. While few are willing 
 to go as far as Mr. Buskin, who, having him- 
 self been brought up on fairy legends, con- 
 fesses that his " first impulse would be to in- 
 sist upon every story we tell to a child being 
 untrue, and every scene we paint for it impos- 
 sible," yet a fair proportion of the untrue and 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 41 
 
 the impossible should enter into its education, 
 and it should be left to the enjoyment of them 
 as long as may be. Those of us who have 
 been happy enough to believe that salaman- 
 ders basked in the fire and mermaids swam in 
 the deeps, that were-wolves roamed in the for- 
 ests and witches rode in the storm, are richer 
 by all these unfading pictures and unforgotten 
 memories than our more scrupulously reared 
 neighbors. And what if we could give such 
 things the semblance of reality once more, — 
 could set foot in spirit within the enchanted 
 forest of Broceliande, and enjoy the tempestu- 
 ous gusts of fear that shook the heart-strings 
 of the Breton peasant, as the great trees drew 
 their mysterious shadows above his head ? 
 On either side lurk shadowy forms of elf and 
 fairy, half hidden by the swelling trunks ; the 
 wind whispers in the heavy boughs, and he 
 hears their low, malicious laughter ; the dry 
 leaves rustle beneath his feet, — he knows 
 their stealthy steps are close behind ; a broken 
 twig falls on his shoulder, and he starts trem- 
 bling, for unseen hands have touched him. 
 Around his neck hang a silver medal of Our 
 Lady and a bit of ash w T ood given him by a 
 
42 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 wise woman, whom many believe a witch ; 
 thus is he doubly guarded from the powers of 
 evil. Beyond the forest lies the open path, 
 where wife and children stand waiting by the 
 cottage door. He is a brave man to wander 
 in the gloaming, and if he reaches home there 
 will be much to tell of all that he has seen, 
 and heard, and felt. Should he be devoured 
 by wolves, however, — and there is always this 
 prosaic danger to be apprehended, — then his 
 comrades will relate how he left them and 
 went alone into the haunted woods, and his sor- 
 rowing widow will know that the fairies have 
 carried him away, or turned him into stone. 
 And the wise woman, reproached, perhaps, for 
 the impotence of her charms, will say how 
 with her own aged eyes she has three times 
 seen Kourigan, Death's elder brother, flitting 
 before the doomed man, and knew that his 
 fate was sealed. So while fresh tales of mys- 
 tery cluster round his name, and his children 
 breathe them in trembling whispers by the 
 fireside, their mother will wait hopefully for 
 the spell to be broken, and the lost given back 
 to her arms ; until Pierrot, the charcoal- 
 burner, persuades her that a stone remains 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 43 
 
 a stone until the Judgment Day, and that in 
 the mean time his own hut by the kiln is 
 empty, and he needs a wife. 
 
 But superstition, it is claimed, begets cru- 
 elty, and cruelty is a vice now most rigorously 
 frowned down by polite society. Daring spir- 
 its, like Mr. Besant, may still urge its claims 
 upon our reluctant consideration ; Mr. Andrew 
 Lang may pronounce it an essential element 
 of humor ; or a purely speculative genius, like 
 Mr. Pater, may venture to show how adroitly 
 it can be used as a help to religious senti- 
 ment ; but every age has pet vices of its own, 
 and, being singularly intolerant of those it has 
 discarded, is not inclined to listen to any ar- 
 guments in their favor. Superstition burned 
 old women for witches, dotards for warlocks, 
 and idiots for were-wolves ; but in its gentler 
 aspect it often threw a veil of charity over 
 both man and beast. The Greek rustic, who 
 found a water-newt wriggling in his gourd, 
 tossed the little creature back into the stream, 
 remembering that it was the unfortunate As- 
 calaphus, whom the wrath of Demeter had con- 
 signed to this loathsome doom. The medi- 
 aeval housewife, when startled by a gaunt wolf 
 
44 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 gazing through her kitchen window, bethought 
 her that this might be her lost husband, roam- 
 ing helpless and bewitched, and so gave the 
 starving creature food. 
 
 " O was it war- wolf in the wood ? 
 Or was it mermaid in the sea ? 
 Or was it man, or vile woman, 
 
 My ain true love, that misshaped thee ? M 
 
 The West Indian negress still bestows chicken- 
 soup instead of scalding water on the invading 
 army of black ants, believing that if kindly- 
 treated they will show their gratitude in the 
 only way that ants can manifest it, — by tak- 
 ing their departure. 
 
 Granted that in these acts of gentleness 
 there are traces of fear and self -consideration ; 
 but who shall say that all our good deeds are 
 not built up on some such trestle-work of 
 foibles ? " La virtu n'iroit pas si loin, si la 
 vanite ne lui tenoit pas compagnie." And 
 what universal politeness has been fostered by 
 the terror that superstition breeds, what deli- 
 cate euphemisms containing the very soul of 
 courtesy ! Consider the Greeks, who christ- 
 ened the dread furies " Eumenides, , ' or " gra- 
 cious ones ; " the Scotch who warily spoke of 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 45 
 
 the devil as the "good man," lest his sharp 
 ears should catch a more unflattering title; 
 the Dyak who respectfully mentions the small- 
 pox as "the chief;" the East Indian who 
 calls the tiger " lord " or " grandfather ; " and 
 the Laplander, who gracefully alludes to the 
 white bear as " the fur-clad one," and then re- 
 alize what perfection of breeding was involved 
 in what we are wont to call ignorant credulity. 
 Again, in the stress of modern life, how lit- 
 tle room is left for that most comfortable van- 
 ity which whispers in our ears that failures are 
 not faults ! Now we are taught from infancy 
 that we must rise or fall upon our own merits ; 
 that vigilance wins success, and incapacity 
 means ruin. But before the world had grown 
 so pitilessly logical there was no lack of ex- 
 cuses for the defeated, and of unflattering 
 comments for the strong. Did some shrewd 
 Cornish miner open a rich vein of ore, then it 
 was apparent to his fellow-toilers that the 
 knackers had been at work, leading him on by 
 their mysterious tapping to this more fruitful 
 field. But let him proceed warily, for the 
 knacker, like its German brother, the kobold, 
 is but a capricious sprite, and some day may 
 
46 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 beguile him into a mysterious passage or long- 
 forgotten chamber in the mine, whence he 
 shall never more return. His bones will 
 whiten in their prison, while his spirit, wan- 
 dering restlessly among the subterranean cor- 
 ridors, will be heard on Christmas Eve, ham- 
 mering wearily away till the gray dawn 
 brightens in the east. Or did some prosper- 
 ous farmer save his crop while his neighbors' 
 corn was blighted, and raise upon his small 
 estate more than their broader acres could be 
 forced to yield, there was no opportunity af- 
 forded him for pride or self -congratulation. 
 Only the witch's art could bring about such 
 strange results, and the same sorceries that 
 had aided him had, doubtless, been the ruin 
 of his friends. He was a lucky man if their 
 indignation went no further than muttered 
 phrases and averted heads. Does not Pliny 
 tell us the story of Caius Furius Cresinus, 
 whose heavy crops awoke such mingled anger 
 and suspicion in his neighbors' hearts that he 
 was accused in the courts of conjuring their 
 grain and fruit into his own scanty ground ? 
 If a woman aspired to be neater than her gos- 
 sips, or to spin more wool than they were able 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 47 
 
 to display, it was only because the pixies 
 labored for her at night; turning her wheel 
 briskly in the moonlight, splitting the wood, 
 and drawing the water, while she drowsed idly 
 in her bed. 
 
 ' ' And every night the pixies good 
 Drive round the wheel with sound subdued, 
 And leave — in this they never fail — 
 A silver penny in the pail." 
 
 Even to the clergy this engaging theory 
 brought its consolations. When the Rever- 
 end Lucas Jacobson Debes, pastor of Thors- 
 haven in 1670, found that his congregation 
 was growing slim, he was not forced, in bit- 
 terness of spirit, to ask himself were his ser- 
 mons dull, but promptly laid all the blame 
 upon the biergen-trold, the spectres of the 
 mountains, whom he angrily accused, in a 
 lengthy homily, of disturbing his flock, and 
 even pushing their discourtesy so far as to 
 carry them off bodily before his discourse was 
 completed. 
 
 Indeed, it is to the clergy that we are in- 
 debted for much interesting information con- 
 cerning the habits of goblins, witches, and 
 gnomes. The Reverend Robert Kirke, of 
 
48 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 Aberfoyle, Perthshire, divided his literary la- 
 bors impartially between a translation of the 
 Psalms into Gaelic verse and an elaborate 
 treatise on the " Subterranean and for the 
 most part Invisible People, heretofore going 
 under the name of Elves, Faunes, and Fairies, 
 or the like," which was printed, with the au- 
 thor's name attached, in 1691. Here, unsul- 
 lied by any taint of skepticism, we have an 
 array of curious facts that would suggest the 
 closest intimacy between the rector and the 
 " Invisible People," who at any rate concealed 
 nothing from his eyes. He tells us gravely 
 that they marry, have children, die, and are 
 buried, very much like ordinary mortals ; that 
 they are inveterate thieves, stealing every- 
 thing, from the milk in the dairy to the baby 
 lying on its mother's breast ; that they can 
 fire their elfin arrow-heads so adroitly that the 
 weapon penetrates to the heart without break- 
 ing the skin, and he himself has seen animals 
 wounded in this manner ; that iron in any 
 shape or form is a terror to them, not for the 
 same reason that Solomon misliked it, but on 
 account of the proximity of the great iron 
 mines to the place of eternal punishment ; and 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 49 
 
 — strangest of all — that they can read and 
 write, and have extensive libraries, where light 
 and toyish books alternate with ponderous 
 volumes on abstruse mystical subjects. Only 
 the Bible may not be found among them. 
 
 How Mr. Kirke acquired all these particu- 
 lars — whether, like John Dietrich, he lived 
 in the Elfin Mound and grew wise on elfin 
 wisdom, or whether he adopted a less labori- 
 ous and secluded method — does not transpire. 
 But one thing is certain : he was destined to 
 pay a heavy price for his unhallowed knowl- 
 edge. The fairies, justly irritated at such an 
 open revelation of their secrets, revenged them- 
 selves signally by carrying off the offender, 
 and imprisoning him beneath the dun-shi, or 
 goblin hill, where he has since had ample op- 
 portunity to pursue his investigations. It is 
 true, his parishioners supposed he had died 
 of apoplexy, and, under that impression, 
 buried him in Aberf oyle churchyard ; but his 
 successor, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, informs us 
 of the widespread belief concerning his true 
 fate. An effort was even made to rescue him 
 from his captivity, but it failed through the 
 neglect of a kinsman, Grahame of Duchray; 
 
50 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 and Robert Kirke, like Thomas of Ercildoune 
 and the three miners of the Kuttenberg, still 
 " drees his weird " in the enchanted halls of 
 elfland. 
 
 When the unfortunate witches of Warbois 
 were condemned to death, on the testimony of 
 the Throgmorton children, Sir Samuel Crom- 
 well, as lord of the manor, received forty 
 pounds out of their estate ; which sum he 
 turned into a rent-charge of forty shillings 
 yearly, for the endowment of an annual lec- 
 ture on witchcraft, to be preached by a doc- 
 tor or bachelor of divinity, of Queen's Col- 
 lege, Cambridge. Thus he provided for his 
 tenants a good sound church doctrine on this 
 interesting subject, and we may rest assured 
 that the sermons were far from quieting their 
 fears, or lulling them into a skeptical indiffer- 
 ence. Indeed, more imposing names than Sir 
 Samuel Cromwell's appear in the lists to do 
 battle for cherished superstitions. Did not 
 the devout and conscientious Baxter firmly be- 
 lieve in the powers of witches, especially after 
 u hearing their sad confessions ; " and was not 
 the gentle and learned Addison more than 
 half disposed to believe in them, too ? Does 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 51 
 
 not Bacon avow that a " well-regulated " astrol- 
 ogy might become the medium of many bene- 
 ficial truths ; and did not the scholarly Domin- 
 ican, Stephen of Lusignan, expand the legend 
 of Melusina into so noble a history, that the 
 great houses of Luxembourg, Rohan, and Sas- 
 senaye altered their pedigrees, so as to claim 
 descent from that illustrious nymph? Even 
 the Emperor Henry VII. was as proud of his 
 fishy ancestress as was Godfrey de Bouillon of 
 his mysterious grandsire, Helias, the Knight 
 of the Swan, better known to us as the Lohen- 
 grin of Wagner's opera ; while among more 
 modest annals appear the families of Fantome 
 and Dobie, each bearing a goblin on their 
 crest, in witness of their claim to some shadowy 
 supernatural kinship. 
 
 There is often a marked contrast between 
 the same superstition as developed in different 
 countries, and in the same elfin folk, who 
 please or terrify us according to the gay or seri- 
 ous bent of their mortal interpreters. While 
 the Keltic ourisk is bright and friendly, with 
 a tinge of malice and a strong propensity to 
 blunder, the English brownie is a more clever 
 and audacious sprite, the Scottish bogle is a 
 
52 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 sombre and dangerous acquaintance, and the 
 Dutch Hudikin an ungainly counterpart of 
 Puck, with hardly a redeeming quality, save a 
 lumbering fashion of telling the truth when it 
 is least expected. It was Hudikin who foretold 
 the murder of James I. of Scotland ; though 
 why he should have left the dikes of Holland 
 for the bleak Highland hills it is hard to say, 
 more especially as there were murders enough 
 at home to keep him as busy as Cassandra. 
 So, too, when the English witches rode up the 
 chimney and through the storm-gusts to their 
 unhallowed meetings, they apparently confined 
 their attention to the business in hand, having 
 perhaps enough to occupy them in managing 
 their broomstick steeds. But when the Scot- 
 tish hags cried, " Horse and hattock in the 
 devil's name ! " and rushed fiercely through 
 the tempestuous night, the unlucky traveler 
 crossed himself and trembled, lest in very 
 wantonness they aim their magic arrows at his 
 heart. Isobel Gowdie confessed at her trial 
 to having fired in this manner at the Laird of 
 the Park, as he rode through a ford ; but the 
 influence of the running water turned her dart 
 aside, and she was soundly cuffed by Bessie 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 53 
 
 Hay, another witch, for her awkwardness in 
 choosing such an unpropitious moment. 1 In 
 one respect alone this evil sisterhood were all 
 in harmony. By charms and spells they re- 
 venged themselves terribly on their enemies, 
 and inflicted malicious injuries on their friends. 
 It was as easy for them to sink a ship in mid- 
 ocean as to dry the milk in a cow's udder, or 
 to make a strong man pine away while his 
 waxen image was consumed inch by inch on 
 the witch's smouldering hearth. 
 
 This instinctive belief in evil spells is the 
 essence, not of witchcraft only, but of every 
 form of superstition, from the days of Thes- 
 salian magic to the brutish rites of the Loui- 
 siana Voodoo. It has brought to the scaffold 
 women of gentle blood, like Janet Douglas, 
 Lady Glamis, and to the stake visionary enthu- 
 siasts like Jeanne d'Arc. It confronts us from 
 every page of history, it stares at us from the 
 columns of the daily press. It has provided an 
 outlet for fear, hope, love, and hatred, and a 
 weapon for every passion that stirs the soul of 
 man. It is equally at home in all parts of the 
 
 1 Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft. By Sir Walter 
 Scott. 
 
54 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 world, and has entered freely into the religion, 
 the traditions, and the folk-lore of all nations. 
 Actseon flying as a stag from the pursuit of 
 his own hounds ; Circe's swinish captives 
 groveling at their troughs ; Bjorn turned into 
 a bear through the malice of his stepmother, 
 and hunted to death by his father, King 
 Hring ; the Swans of Lir floating mournfully 
 on the icy waters of the Moyle ; the loup- 
 garou lurking in the forests of Brittany, and 
 the oborot coursing over the Russian steppes ; 
 Merlin sleeping in the gloomy depths of Broce- 
 liande, and Raknar buried fifty fathoms below 
 the coast of Helluland, are alike the victims 
 
 " Of woven paces and of waving hands." 
 
 whether the spell be cast by an outraged divin- 
 ity, or by the cruel hand of a malignant foe. 
 
 In 1857, Mr. Newton discovered at Cnidos 
 fragments of a buried and ruined chapel, 
 sacred to Demeter and Persephone. In it 
 were three marble figures of great beauty, 
 some small votive images of baked earth, sev- 
 eral bronze lamps, and a number of thin leaden 
 rolls, pierced with holes for the convenience of 
 hanging them around the chapel walls. On 
 these rolls were inscribed the dine, or spells, 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 55 
 
 devoting some enemy to the infernal gods, and 
 the motive for the suppliant's ill-will was given 
 with great naivete and earnestness. One 
 woman binds another who has lured away her 
 lover ; a second, the enemy who has accused 
 her of poisoning her husband ; a third, the 
 thief who has stolen her bracelet ; a fourth, 
 the man who has robbed her of a favorite 
 drinking-horn ; a fifth, the acquaintance who 
 has failed to return a borrowed garment ; and 
 so on through a long list of grievances. 1 It 
 is evident this form of prayer was quite a com- 
 mon occurrence, and, as combining a religious 
 rite with a comfortable sense of retaliation, 
 must have been exceptionally soothing to the 
 worshiper's mind. Persephone was appeased 
 and their own wrongs atoned for by this simple 
 act of devotion ; and would that it were given 
 to us now to inscribe, and by inscribing doom, 
 all those who have borrowed and failed to re- 
 turn our books ; would that by scribbling some 
 strong language on a piece of lead we could 
 avenge the lamentable gaps on our shelves, 
 and send the ghosts of the wrong-doers howling 
 dismally into the eternal shades of Tartarus. 
 1 The Myth of Demeter and Persephone. By Walter Pater. 
 
56 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 The saddest thing about these faded super- 
 stitions is that the very men who have studied 
 them most accurately are often least suscep- 
 tible to their charms. In their eagerness to 
 trace back every myth to a common origin, 
 and to prove, with or without reason, that they 
 one and all arose from the observation of 
 natural phenomena, too many writers either 
 overlook entirely the beauty and meaning of 
 the tale, or treat it with a contemptuous in- 
 difference very hard to understand. Mr. Bar- 
 ing-Gould, a most honorable exception to this 
 evil rule, takes occasion now and then to deal 
 some telling blows at the extravagant theorists 
 who persist in maintaining that every tradition 
 bears its significance on its surface, and who, 
 following up their preconceived opinions, 
 cruelly overtax the credulity of their readers. 
 He himself has shown conclusively that many 
 Aryan myths are but allegorical representa- 
 tions of natural forces ; but in these cases the 
 connection is always distinctly traced and 
 easily understood. It is not hard for any of us 
 to perceive the likeness between the worm 
 Schamir, the hand of glory, and the lightning, 
 when their peculiar properties are so much 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF 'SUPERSTITION. 57 
 
 alike : or to behold in the Sleeping Beauty or 
 Thorn-Rose the ice-bound earth slumbering 
 through the long winter months, until the sun- 
 god's kisses win her back to life and warmth. 
 But when we are asked to believe that Wil- 
 liam Tell is the storm-cloud, with his arrow of 
 lightning and his iris bow bent against the sun, 
 which is resting like a coin or a golden apple 
 on the edge of the horizon, we cannot but feel, 
 with the author of Curious Myths, that a little 
 too much is exacted from us. " I must pro- 
 test," he says, " against the manner in which 
 our German friends fasten rapaciously upon 
 every atom of history, sacred and profane, and 
 demonstrate all heroes to represent the sun ; 
 all villains to be the demons of night or win- 
 ter ; all sticks and spears and arrows to be the 
 lightning ; all cows and sheep and dragons 
 and swans to be clouds." 
 
 But then it must be remembered that Mr. 
 Baring-Gould is the most tolerant and catholic 
 of writers, with hardly a hobby he can call his 
 own. Sympathizing with the sad destruction 
 of William Tell, he casts a lance in honor of 
 Saint George against Reynolds and Gibbon, 
 and manifests a lurking weakness for mer- 
 
58 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 maids, divining-rods, and the Wandering Jew. 
 He is to be congratulated on his early training, 
 for he assures us he believed, on the testimony 
 of his Devonshire nurse, that all Cornishmen 
 had tails, until a Cornish bookseller stoutly 
 denied the imputation, and enlightened his in- 
 fant mind. He has the rare and happy faculty 
 of writing upon all mythical subjects with 
 grace, sympathy, and vraisemblance. Even 
 when there can be no question of credulity 
 either with himself or with his readers, he is 
 yet content to write as though for the time he 
 believes. Just as Mr. Birrell advises us to lay 
 aside our moral sense when we begin the mem- 
 oirs of an attractive scamp, and to recall it 
 carefully when we have finished, so Mr. Bar- 
 ing-Gould generously lays aside his enlightened 
 skepticism when he undertakes to tell us about 
 sirens and were-wolves, and remembers that he 
 is of the nineteenth century only when his 
 task is done. 
 
 This is precisely what Mr. John Fiske is un- 
 able or unwilling to accomplish. He cannot 
 for a moment forget how much better he 
 knows ; and instead of an indulgent smile at 
 the delightful follies of our ancestors, we de- 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 59 
 
 tect here and there through his very valuable 
 pages something unpleasantly like a sneer. 
 " Where the modern calmly taps his forehead," 
 explains Mr. Fiske, " and says, ' Arrested 
 development ! ' the terrified ancient made the 
 sign of the cross, and cried, ' Were-wolf ! ' " 1 
 Now a more disagreeable object than the 
 "modern" tapping his forehead, like Dr. 
 Blimber, and offering a sensible elucidation of 
 ,£very mystery, it would be hard to find. The 
 ignorant peasant making his sign of the cross 
 is not only more picturesque, but he is more 
 companionable, — in books, at least, — and it 
 is of far greater interest to try to realize how 
 he felt when the specimen of " arrested devel- 
 opment " stole past him in the shadow of the 
 woods. There is, after all, a mysterious 
 horror about the lame boy, — some impish 
 changeling of evil parentage, foisted on hell, 
 perhaps, as Nadir thrust his earth-born baby 
 into heaven, — who every Midsummer Night 
 and every Christmas Eve summoned the were- 
 wolves to their secret meeting, whence they 
 rushed ravenously over the German forests. 
 The girdle of human skin, three finger-breadths 
 
 1 Myths and Myihmakers. 
 
60 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 wide, which wrought the transformation ; the 
 telltale hairs in the hollow of the hand 
 which betrayed the wolfish nature ; the fatality 
 which doomed one of every seven sisters to 
 this dreadful enchantment, and the trifling- 
 accidents which brought about the same un- 
 desirable result are so many handles by which 
 we grasp the strange emotions that swayed 
 the mediaeval man. Jacque Roulet and Jean 
 Grenier, 1 as mere maniacs and cannibals, filL 
 every heart with disgust ; but as were-wolves 
 an awful mystery wraps them round, and the 
 mind is distracted from pity for their victims 
 to a fascinated consideration of their own 
 tragic doom. A blood-thirsty idiot is an ob- 
 ject that no one cares to think about ; but a 
 wolf-fiend, urged to deeds of violence by an 
 impulse he cannot resist, is one of those ghastly 
 creations that the folk-lore of every country 
 has placed sharply and persistently before our 
 startled eyes. Yet surely there is a touch of 
 comedy in the story told by Van Halm, of an 
 unlucky freemason, who, having divulged the 
 secrets of his order, was pursued across the 
 Pyrenees by the master of his lodge in the 
 
 1 Booh of Were- Wolves. By Baring-Gould. 
 
# ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 61 
 
 form of a were-wolf, and escaped only by- 
 taking refuge in an empty cottage, and hiding 
 under the bed. 
 
 " To us who are nourished from childhood," 
 says Mr. Fiske again, " on the truths revealed 
 by science, the sky is known to be merely an 
 optical appearance, due to the partial absorp- 
 tion of the solar rays in passing through a 
 thick stratum of atmospheric air ; the clouds 
 are known to be large masses of watery vapor, 
 which descend in rain-drops when sufficiently 
 condensed ; and the lightning is known to be 
 a flash of light accompanying an electric dis- 
 charge." But the blue sky-sea of Aryan folk- 
 lore, in which the cloud-flakes floated as stately 
 swans, drew many an eye to the contemplation 
 of its loveliness, and touched many a heart 
 with the sacred charm of beauty. On that 
 mysterious sea strange vessels sailed from un- 
 known shores, and once a mighty anchor was 
 dropped by the sky mariners, and fell right 
 into a little English graveyard, to the great 
 amazement of the humble congregation just 
 coming out from church. The sensation of 
 freedom and space afforded by this conception 
 of the heavens is a delicious contrast to the 
 conceit of the Persian poet, — ■ 
 
62 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 " That inverted Bowl they call the Sky, 
 Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die ; ' ' 
 
 or to the Semitic legend, which described the 
 firmament as made of hammered plate, with 
 little windows for rain, — a device so poor and 
 barbaric, that we wonder how any man could 
 look up into the melting blue and admit such 
 a sordid fancy into his soul. 
 
 " Scientific knowledge, even in the most 
 modest men," confesses Dr. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes, " has mingled with it something 
 which partakes of insolence. Absolute, per- 
 emptory facts are bullies, and those who keep 
 company with them are apt to get a bullying 
 habit of mind." Such an admission from so 
 genial and kindly a source should suffice to 
 put us all on the defensive. It is not agree- 
 able to be bullied even upon those matters 
 which are commonly classed as facts ; but when 
 we come to the misty region of dreams and 
 myths and superstitions, let us remember, 
 with Lamb, that " we do not know the laws of 
 that country," and with him generously for- 
 bear to " set down our ancestors in the gross 
 for fools." We have lost forever the fantasies 
 that enriched them. Not for us are the pink 
 
ON THE BENEFITS OF SUPERSTITION. 63 
 
 and white lions that gamboled in the land of 
 Prester John, nor his onyx floors, imparting 
 courage to all who trod on them. Not for us 
 the Terrestrial Paradise, with its " Welle of 
 Youthe, whereat thei that drynken semen alle 
 weys yongly, and lyven withouten sykeness ; " 1 
 nor the Fortunate Isles beyond the Western 
 Sea, where spring was ever green; where 
 youths and maidens danced hand in hand on 
 the dewy grass, where the cows ungrudgingly 
 gave milk enough to fill whole ponds instead of 
 milking-pails, and where wizards and usurers 
 could never hope to enter. The doors of these 
 enchanted spots are closed upon us, and their 
 key, like Excalibur, lies hidden where no hand 
 can grasp it. 
 
 " The whole wide world is painted gray on gray, 
 And Wonderland forever is gone past." 
 
 All we can do is to realize our loss with be- 
 coming modesty, and now and then cast back 
 a wistful glance 
 
 " where underneath 
 The shelter of the quaint kiosk, there sigh 
 A troup of Fancy's little China Dolls, 
 
 Who dream and dream, with damask round their loins, 
 
 And in their hands a golden tulip flower.' ' 
 
 1 Travels of Sir John Mandeville. 
 
WHAT CHILDREN EEAD. 
 
 It is part of the irony of life that our dis- 
 criminating taste for books should be built 
 up on the ashes of an extinct enjoyment. We 
 spend a great deal of our time in learning what 
 literature is good, and a great deal more in at- 
 tuning our minds to its reception, rightly con- 
 vinced that, by the training of our intellectual 
 faculties, we are unlocking one of the doors 
 through which sweetness and light may enter. 
 We are fond of reading, too, and have always 
 maintained with Macaulay that we would 
 rather be a poor man with books than a great 
 king without, though luckily for out resolu- 
 tion, and perhaps for his, such a choice has 
 never yet been offered. Books, we say, are 
 our dearest friends, and so, with true friendly 
 acuteness, we are prompt to discover their 
 faults, and take great credit in our ingenuity. 
 But all this time, somewhere about the house, 
 curled up, may be, in a nursery window, or 
 hidden in a freezing attic, a child is poring 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 65 
 
 over The Three Musketeers, lost to any con- 
 sciousness of his surroundings, incapable of an- 
 alyzing his emotions, breathless with mingled 
 fear and exultation over his heroes' varying 
 fortunes, and drinking in a host of vivid im- 
 pressions that are absolutely ineffaceable from 
 his mind. We cannot read in that fashion 
 any longer, but we only wish we could. 
 Thackeray used to sigh in middle age over the 
 lost delights of five shillings' worth of pastry ; 
 but what was the pleasure of eating tarts to 
 the glamour cast over us by our first romance, 
 to the enchanted hours we spent with Sintram 
 by the sea-shore, or with Nydia in the dark- 
 ened streets of Pompeii, or perhaps — if we 
 were not too carefully watched — with Emily 
 in those dreadful vaults beneath Udolpho's 
 walls ! 
 
 Nor is it fiction only that strongly excites 
 the imagination of a child. History is not to 
 him what it is to us, a tangle of disputed 
 facts, doubtful theories, and conflicting evi- 
 dence. He grasps its salient points with sim- 
 ple directness, absorbs them into his mind 
 with tolerable accuracy, and passes judgment 
 on them with enviable ease. To him, histori- 
 
66 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 cal characters are at least as real as those of 
 romance, which they are very far from being 
 to us, and he enters into their impressions and 
 motives with a facile sympathy which we 
 rarely feel. Not only does he firmly believe 
 that Marcus Curtius leaped into the gulf, but 
 he has not yet learned to question the expedi- 
 ency of the act ; and, having never been en- 
 lightened by Mr. Grote, the black broth of 
 Lykurgus is as much a matter of fact to him 
 as the bread and butter upon his own break- 
 fast table. Sir Walter Scott tells us that even 
 the dinner-bell — most welcome sound to boy- 
 ish ears — failed to win him from his rapt pe- 
 rusal of Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry ; 
 but Gibbon, as a lad, found the passage of the 
 Goths over the Danube just as engrossing, 
 and, stifling the pangs of hunger, preferred to 
 linger fasting in their company. The great 
 historian's early love for history has furnished 
 Mr. Bagehot with one more proof of the fasci- 
 nation of such records for the youthful mind, 
 and he bids us at the same time consider from 
 what a firm and tangible standpoint it regards 
 them. " Youth," he writes, " has a principle 
 of consolidation. In history, the whole comes 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 67 
 
 in boyhood ; the details later, and in manhood. 
 The wonderful series going far back to the 
 times of old patriarchs with their flocks and 
 herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, 
 the watchful Jew, the uncouth Goth, the hor- 
 rid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging 
 East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, 
 the rise of the cold and classical civilization, 
 its fall, the rough, impetuous Middle Ages, 
 the vague warm picture of ourselves and home, 
 — when did we learn these ? Not yesterday, 
 nor to-day, but long ago, in the first dawn of 
 reason, in the original flow of fancy. What 
 we learn afterwards are but the accurate little- 
 nesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious 
 facts. Those who begin late learn only these ; 
 but the happy first feel the mystic associations 
 and the progress of the whole." l 
 
 If this be true, and the child's mind be not 
 only singularly alive to new impressions, but 
 quick to concentrate its knowledge into a con- 
 sistent whole, the value and importance of his 
 early reading can hardly be overestimated. 
 That much anxiety has been felt upon the sub- 
 ject is proven by the cry of self -congratulation 
 
 1 Literary Studies, vol. ii. 
 
68 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 that rises on every side of us to-day. We are 
 on the right track at last, the press and the 
 publishers assure us ; and with tons of healthy 
 juvenile literature flooding the markets every 
 year, our American boys and girls stand fully 
 equipped for the intellectual battles of life. 
 But if we will consider the matter in a dis- 
 passionate and less boastful light, we shall 
 see that the good accomplished is mainly of a 
 negative character. By providing cheap and 
 wholesome reading for the young, we have 
 partly succeeded in driving from the field that 
 which was positively bad ; yet nothing is easier 
 than to overdo a reformation, and, through 
 the characteristic indulgence of American par- 
 ents, children are drugged with a literature 
 whose chief merit is its harmlessness. These 
 little volumes, nicely written, nicely printed, 
 and nicely illustrated, are very useful in their 
 way ; but they are powerless to awaken a 
 child's imagination, or to stimulate his mental 
 growth. If stories, they merely introduce 
 him to a phase of life with which he is already 
 familiar ; if historical, they aim at showing 
 him a series of detached episodes, broken pic- 
 tures of the mighty whole, shorn of its " mys- 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 69 
 
 tic associations," and stirring within his soul 
 no stronger impulse than that of a cheaply 
 gratified curiosity. 
 
 Not that children's books are to be neglected 
 or contemned. On the contrary, they are al- 
 ways helpful, and in the average nursery have 
 grown to be a recognized necessity. But when 
 supplied with a too lavish hand, a child is 
 tempted to read nothing else, and his mind be- 
 comes shrunken for lack of a vigorous stimu- 
 lant to excite and expand it. " Children," 
 wrote Sir Walter Scott, " derive impulses of a 
 powerful and important kind from hearing 
 things that they cannot entirely comprehend. 
 It is a mistake to write down to their under- 
 standing. Set them on the scent, and let 
 them puzzle it out." . Sir Walter himself, be 
 it observed, in common with most little people 
 of genius, got along strikingly well without 
 any juvenile literature at all. He shouted the 
 ballad of Hardyknute, to the great annoyance 
 of his aunt's visitors, long before he knew how 
 to read, and listened at his grandmother's 
 knee to her stirring tales about Watt of Har- 
 den, Wight Willie of Aikwood, Jamie Telfer 
 of the fair Dodhead, and a host of border 
 
70 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 heroes whose picturesque robberies were the 
 glory of their sober and respectable descend- 
 ants. Two or three old books which lay in the 
 window-seat were explored for his amusement 
 in the dreary winter days. Ramsay's Tea-Ta- 
 ble Miscellany, a mutilated copy of Josephus, 
 and Pope's translation of the Iliad appear to 
 have been his favorites, until, when about 
 eight years old, a happy chance threw him 
 under the spell of the two great poets who 
 have swayed most powerfully the pliant imag- 
 inations of the young. " I found," he writes 
 in his early memoirs, " within my mother's 
 dressing-room (where I slept at one time) 
 some odd volumes of Shakespeare ; nor can I 
 easily forget the rapture with which I sate up 
 in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire 
 in her apartment, until the bustle of the family 
 rising from supper warned me it was time to 
 creep back to my bed, where I was supposed 
 to have been safely deposited since nine 
 o'clock." And a little later he adds, " Spen- 
 ser I could have read forever. Too young to 
 trouble myself about the allegory, I consid- 
 ered all the knights, and ladies, and dragons, 
 and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 71 
 
 and Heaven only knows how delighted I was 
 to find myself in such society ! " 
 
 " How much of our poetry," it has been 
 asked, " owes its start to Spenser, when the 
 Fairy Queen was a household book, and lay in 
 the parlor window T -seat ? " And how many 
 brilliant fancies have emanated from those 
 same window-seats, which Montaigne so keen- 
 ly despised ? There, where the smallest child 
 could climb with ease, lay piled up in a cor- 
 ner, within the reach of his little hands, the 
 few precious volumes which perhaps comprised 
 the literary wealth of the household. Those 
 were not days when over-indulgence and a 
 multiplicity of books robbed reading of its 
 healthy zest. We know that in the window- 
 seat of Cowley's mother's room lay a copy of 
 the Fairy Queen, which to her little son was a 
 source of unfailing delight, and Pope has re- 
 corded the ecstasy with which, as a lad, he 
 pored over this wonderful poem ; but then 
 neither Cowley nor Pope had the advantage 
 of following Oliver Optic through the slums 
 of New York, or living with some adventur- 
 ous " boy hunters " in the jungles of Central 
 Africa. On the other hand, there is a deli- 
 
72 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 cious account of Bentham, in his early child- 
 hood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, 
 and sitting there night after night reading 
 Rapin's history by the light of two candles ; a 
 weird little figure, whose only counterpart in 
 literature is the small John Ruskin propped 
 up solemnly in his niche, " like an idol," and 
 hemmed in from the family reach by the table 
 on which his book reposed. It is quite evi- 
 dent that Bentham found the mental nutrition 
 he wanted in Rapin's rather dreary pages, 
 just as Pope and Cowley found it in Spenser, 
 Ruskin in the Iliad, and Burns in the marvel- 
 ous stories told by that " most ignorant and 
 superstitious old woman," who made the poet 
 afraid of his own shadow, and who, as 
 he afterwards freely acknowledged, fanned 
 within his soul the kindling flame of genius. 
 
 Look where we will, we find the author's 
 future work reflected in the intellectual pas- 
 times of his childhood. Madame de Genlis, 
 when but six years old, perused with un- 
 flagging interest the ten solid volumes of 
 Clelie, — a task which would appall the most 
 stout-hearted novel-reader of to-day. Gibbon 
 turned as instinctively to facts as Scott and 
 
WHAT CHILDREN BEAD. 73 
 
 Burns to fiction. Macaulay surely learned 
 from his beloved iEneid the art of presenting 
 a dubious statement with all the vigorous col- 
 oring of truth. Wordsworth congratulated 
 himself and Coleridge that, as children, they 
 had ranged at will 
 
 1 ' through vales 
 Rich with indigenous produce, open grounds 
 Of fancy ; » 
 
 Coleridge, in his turn, was wont to express 
 his sense of superiority over those who had 
 not read fairy tales when they were young, 
 and Charles Lamb, who was plainly of the 
 same way of thinking, wrote to him hotly on 
 the subject of the " cursed Barbauld crew," 
 and demanded how he would ever have be- 
 come a poet, if, instead of being fed with 
 tales and old wives' fables in his infancy, he 
 had been crammed with geography, natural 
 history, and other useful information. What 
 a picture we have of Cardinal Newman's sen- 
 sitive and flexible mind in these few words 
 which bear witness to his childish musings ! 
 " I used to wish," he says in the third chapter 
 of the Apologia, "that the Arabian Nights 
 were true ; my imagination ran on unknown 
 
74 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 influences, on magical powers and talismans. 
 ... I thought life might be a dream, or I 
 an angel, and all the world a deception, my 
 fellow angels, by a playful device, concealing 
 themselves from me, and deceiving me with 
 the semblance of a material world." Along- 
 side of this poetic revelation may be placed 
 Cobbett's sketch of himself : a sturdy country 
 lad of eleven, in a blue smock and red gar- 
 ters, standing before the bookseller's shop in 
 Richmond, with an empty stomach, three- 
 pence in his pocket, and a certain little book 
 called The Tale of a Tub contending with his 
 hunger for the possession of that last bit of 
 money. In the end, mind conquered matter : 
 the threepence was invested in the volume, 
 and the homeless little reader curled himself 
 under a haystack, and forgot all about his 
 supper in the strange, new pleasure he was 
 enjoying. " The book was so different," he 
 writes, " from anything that I had ever read 
 before, it was something so fresh to my mind, 
 that, though I could not understand some 
 parts of it, it delighted me beyond descrip- 
 tion, and produced what I have always consid- 
 ered a sort of birth of intellect. I read on till 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 75 
 
 it was dark, without any thought of food or 
 bed. When I could see no longer, I put my 
 little book in my pocket and tumbled down 
 by the side of the stack, where I slept till the 
 birds of Kew Gardens awakened me in the 
 morning. ... I carried that volume about 
 with me wherever I went ; and when I lost it 
 in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of 
 Fundy, the loss gave me greater pain than I 
 have since felt at losing thousands of pounds." 
 As for Lamb's views on the subject of 
 early reading, they are best expressed in his 
 triumphant vindication of Bridget Elia's hap- 
 pily neglected education : " She was tumbled 
 by accident or design into a spacious closet of 
 good old English books, without much selec- 
 tion or prohibition, and browsed at will upon 
 that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I 
 twenty girls they should be brought up ex- 
 actly in this fashion." It is natural that but 
 few parents are anxious to risk so hazardous 
 an experiment, especially as the training of 
 " incomparable old maids " is hardly the rec- 
 ognized summit of maternal ambition; but 
 Bridget Elia at least ran no danger of intel- 
 lectual starvation, while, if we pursue a mod- 
 
76 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 ern school-girl along the track of her self- 
 chosen reading, we shall be astonished that so 
 much printed matter can yield so little mental 
 nourishment. She has begun, no doubt, with 
 childish stories, bright and well-written, 
 probably, but following each other in such 
 quick succession that none of them have left 
 any distinct impression on her mind. Books 
 that children read but once are of scant ser- 
 vice to them; those that have really helped 
 to warm our imaginations and to train our 
 faculties are the few old friends we know 
 so well that they have become a portion of 
 our thinking selves. At ten or twelve the 
 little girl aspires to something partly grown- 
 up, to those nondescript tales which, trem- 
 bling ever on the brink of sentiment, seem 
 afraid to risk the plunge ; and with her appe- 
 tite whetted by a course of this unsatisfying 
 diet, she is soon ripe for a little more excite- 
 ment and a great deal more love-making, 
 so graduates into Rhoda Broughton and the 
 " Duchess," at which point her intellectual 
 career is closed. She has no idea, even, of 
 what she has missed in the world of books. 
 She tells you that she " don 't care for Dick- 
 
o 
 
 WHAT CHILDREN READ. 77 
 
 ens," and " can't get interested in Scott," 
 with a placidity that plainly shows she lays 
 the blame for this state of affairs on the two 
 great masters who have amused and charmed 
 the world. As for Northanger Abbey, or 
 Emma, she would as soon think of finding 
 entertainment in Henry Esmond. She has 
 probably never read a single masterpiece of 
 our language ; she has never been moved by a 
 noble poem, or stirred to the quick by a well- 
 told page of history ; she has never opened 
 the pores of her mind for the reception of a 
 vigorous thought, or the solution of a mental 
 problem ; yet she may be found daily in the 
 circulating library, and is seldom visible on 
 the street without a book or two under her 
 arm. 
 
 " In the love-novels all the heroines are very 
 desperate," wrote little Marjorie Fleming in 
 her diary, nearly eighty years ago, and added 
 somewhat plaintively, " Isabella will not allow 
 me to speak of lovers and heroins," — yearn- 
 ing, as we can see, over the forbidden topic, 
 and mutable in her spelling, as befits her ten- 
 der age. But what books had she read, this 
 bright-eyed, healthy, winsome little girl, — 
 
78 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 eight years old when she died, — the favorite 
 companion of Sir Walter Scott, and his com- 
 fort in many a moment of fatigue and depres- 
 sion ? We can follow her path easily enough, 
 thanks to those delicious, misspelt scrawls in 
 which she has recorded her childish verdicts. 
 " Thomson is a beautiful author," she writes 
 at six, " and Pope, but nothing to Shakespear, 
 of which I have a little knolege. Macbeth is 
 a pretty composition, but awful one. . . . The 
 Newgate Calender is very instructive." And 
 again, " Tom Jones and Grey's Elegy in a 
 country churchyard," surely never classed to- 
 gether before, " are both excellent, and much 
 spoke of by both sex, particularly by the 
 men. . . . Doctor Swift's works are very 
 funny ; I got some of them by heart. . . . 
 Miss Egward's [Edgeworth's] tails are very 
 good, particularly some that are much adapted 
 for youth, as Laz Lawrance and Tarleton." 
 Then with a sudden jump, " I am reading the 
 Mysteries of Udolpho. I am much interested 
 in the fate of poor poor Emily. . . . More- 
 head's sermons are, I hear, much praised, but 
 I never read sermons of any kind ; but I read 
 novelettes and my Bible, and I never forget 
 it or my prayers." 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 79 
 
 It is apparent that she read a great deal 
 which would now hardly be considered desir- 
 able for little girls, but who can quarrel with 
 the result ? Had the bright young mind been 
 starved on Dotty Dimple and Little Prudy 
 books, we might have missed the quaintest bit 
 of autobiography in the English tongue, those 
 few scattered pages which, with her scraps of 
 verse and tender little letters, were so care- 
 fully preserved by a loving sister after Pet 
 Maidie's death. Far too young and innocent 
 to be harmed by Tom Jones or the " funny " 
 Doctor Swift, we may perhaps doubt whether 
 she had penetrated very deeply into the New- 
 gate Calendar, notwithstanding a further as- 
 sertion on her part that " the history of all the 
 malcontents as ever was hanged is amusing." 
 But that she had the " little knolege " she 
 boasted of Shakespeare is proven by the fact 
 that her recitations from King John affected 
 Scott, to use his own words, " as nothing else 
 could do." He would sob outright when the 
 little creature on his knee repeated, quivering 
 with suppressed emotion, those heart-breaking 
 words of Constance : — 
 
80 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 " For I am sick and capable of fears, 
 Oppressed with wrong-, and therefore full of fears; " 
 
 and, knowing the necessity of relaxing a mind 
 so highly wrought, he took good care that she 
 should not be without healthy childish read- 
 ing. We have an amusing picture of her con- 
 soling herself with fairy tales, when exiled, 
 for her restlessness, to the foot of her sister's 
 bed ; and one of the first copies of Rosamond, 
 and Harry and Lucy found its way to Mar- 
 jorie Fleming, with Sir Walter Scott's name 
 written on the fly-leaf. 
 
 Fairy tales, and Harry and Lucy ! But the 
 real, old-fashioned, earnest, half-sombre fairy 
 tales of our youth have slipped from the hands 
 of children into those of folk-lore students, 
 who are busy explaining all their flavor out of 
 them ; while as for Miss Edgeworth, the little 
 people of to-day cannot be persuaded that she 
 is not dull and prosy. Yet what keen plea- 
 sure have her stories given to generations of 
 boys and girls, who in their time have grown 
 to be clever men and women! Hear what 
 Miss Thackeray, that loving student of chil- 
 dren and of childish ways, has to record about 
 them. " When I look back," she writes, 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 81 
 
 " upon my own youth, I seem to have lived in 
 company with a delightful host of little play- 
 mates, bright, busy children, whose cheerful 
 presence remains more vividly in my mind 
 than that of many of the real little boys and 
 girls who used to appear and disappear discon- 
 nectedly, as children do in childhood, when 
 friendship and companionship depend almost 
 entirely upon the convenience of grown-up 
 people. Now and again came little cousins or 
 friends to share our games, but day by day, 
 constant and unchanging, ever to be relied 
 upon, smiled our most lovable and friendly 
 companions: simple Susan, lame Jervas, the 
 dear little merchants, Jem, the widow's son, 
 with his arms around old Lightfoot's neck, 
 the generous Ben, with his whip-cord and his 
 useful proverb of ; Waste not, want not,' — 
 all of these were there in the window corner 
 waiting our pleasure. After Parents' Assist- 
 ant, to which familiar words we attached no 
 meaning whatever, came Popular Tales in big 
 brown volumes off a shelf in the lumber-room 
 of an apartment in an old house in Paris ; and 
 as we opened the books, lo ! creation widened 
 to our view. England, Ireland, America, 
 
82 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 Turkey, the mines of Golconda, the streets of 
 Bagdad, thieves, travelers, governesses, natural 
 philosophy, and fashionable life were all laid 
 under contribution, and brought interest and 
 adventure to our humdrum nursery corner." 1 
 
 And have these bright and varied pictures, 
 " these immortal tales," as Mr. Matthew Ar- 
 nold termed them, lost their power to charm, 
 that they are banished from our modern 
 nursery corners ; or is it because their didactic 
 purpose is too thinly veiled, or — as I have 
 sometimes fancied — because their authoress 
 took so moderate a view of children's func- 
 tions and importance ? If we place Miss Edge- 
 worth's and Miss Alcott's stories side by side, 
 we shall see that the contrast between them 
 lies not so much in the expected dissimilarity 
 of style and incident as in the utterly different 
 standpoint from which their writers regard the 
 aspirations and responsibilities of childhood. 
 Take, for instance, Miss Edgeworth's Rosa- 
 mond and Miss Alcott's Eight Cousins, both 
 of them books purporting to show the gradual 
 development of a little girl's character under 
 kindly and stimulating influences. Rosamond, 
 1 A Book of Sibyls. 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 83 
 
 who is said to be a portrait of Maria Edge- 
 worth herself, is from first to last the undis- 
 puted heroine of the volume which bears her 
 name. Laura may be much wiser, Godfrey- 
 far more clever ; but neither of them usurps 
 for a moment their sister's place as the cen- 
 tral figure of the narrative, round whom our 
 interest clings. But when we come to con- 
 sider her position in her own family, we find 
 it strangely insignificant. The foolish, warm- 
 hearted, impetuous little girl is of importance 
 to the household only through the love they 
 bear her. It is plain her opinions do not 
 carry much weight, and she is never called on 
 to act as an especial providence to any one. 
 We do not behold her winning Godfrey away 
 from his cigar, or Orlando from fast compan- 
 ions, or correcting anybody's faults, in fact, 
 except her own, which are numerous enough, 
 and give her plenty of concern. 
 
 Now with Rose, the bright little heroine of 
 Eight Cousins, and of its sequel A Rose in 
 Bloom, everything is vastly different. She is 
 of the utmost importance to all the grown-up 
 people in the book, most of whom, it must be 
 acknowledged, are extremely silly and inca- 
 
84 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 pable. Her aunts set the very highest value 
 upon her society, and receive it with gratified 
 rapture ; while among her male cousins she is 
 from the first like a missionary in the Feejees. 
 It is she who cures them of their boyish vices, 
 obtaining in return from their supine mothers 
 " a vote of thanks, which made her feel as if 
 she had done a service to her country." At 
 thirteen she discovers that " girls are made to 
 take care of boys," and with dauntless assur- 
 ance sets about her self-appointed task. " You 
 boys need somebody to look after you," she 
 modestly announces, — most of them are her 
 seniors, by the way, and all have parents, — 
 " so I 'm going to do it ; for girls are nice 
 peacemakers, and know how to manage peo- 
 ple." Naturally, to a young person holding 
 these advanced views of life, Miss Edgeworth's 
 limited field of action seems a very spiritless 
 affair, and we find Rose expressing herself with 
 characteristic energy on the subject of the 
 purple jar, declaring that Rosamond's mother 
 was " regularly mean," and that she " always 
 wanted to shake that woman, though she was 
 a model mamma " ! As we read the audacious 
 words, we half expect to see, rising from the 
 
WHAT CHILDREN BEAD. 85 
 
 mists of story-book land, the indignant ghost 
 of little English Rosamond, burning to defend, 
 with all her old impetuosity, the mother whom 
 she so dearly loved. It is true, she had no 
 sense of a " mission," this commonplace but 
 very amusing little girl. She never, like Rose, 
 adopted a pauper infant, or made friends with 
 a workhouse orphan ; she never vetoed pretty 
 frocks in favor of philanthropy, or announced 
 that she would "have nothing to do with love 
 until she could prove that she was something 
 beside a housekeeper and a baby-tender." In 
 fact, she was probably taught that love and 
 matrimony and babies were not proper sub- 
 jects for discussion in the polite society for 
 which she was so carefully reared. The hints 
 that are given her now and then on such mat- 
 ters by no means encourage a free expression 
 of any unconventional views. " It is particu- 
 larly amiable in a woman to be ready to yield, 
 and avoid disputing about trifles," says Rosa- 
 mond's father, who plainly does not consider 
 his child in the light of a beneficent genius ; 
 while, when she reaches her teens, she is de- 
 scribed as being " just at that age when girls 
 do not join in conversation, but when they sit 
 
86 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 modestly silent, and have leisure, if they have 
 sense, to judge of what others say, and to 
 form by choice, and not by chance, their opin- 
 ions of what goes on in that great world into 
 which they have not yet entered." 
 
 And is it really only ninety years since this 
 delicious sentence was penned in sober earnest, 
 as representing an existing state of things ! 
 There is an antique, musty, long - secluded 
 flavor about it, that would suggest a mono- 
 graph copied from an Egyptian tomb with 
 thirty centuries of dust upon its hoary head. 
 Yet Rosamond, sitting " modestly silent " un- 
 der the delusion that grown-up people are 
 worth listening to, can talk fluently enough 
 when occasion demands it, though at all times 
 her strength lies rather in her heart than in 
 her head. She represents that tranquil, un- 
 questioning, unselfish family love, which Miss 
 Edgeworth could describe so well because she 
 felt it so sincerely. The girl who had three 
 stepmothers and nineteen brothers and sisters, 
 and managed to be fond of them all, should 
 be good authority on the subject of domestic 
 affections ; and that warm, happy, loving at- 
 mosphere which charms us in her stories, and 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 87 
 
 which brought tears to Sir Walter Scott's eyes 
 when he laid down Simple Susan, is only the 
 reflection of the cheerful home life she stead- 
 fastly helped to brighten. 
 
 Her restrictions as a writer are perhaps 
 most felt by those who admire her most. Her 
 pet virtue — after prudence — is honesty ; and 
 yet how poor a sentiment it becomes under her 
 treatment ! — no virtue at all, in fact, but 
 merely a policy working for its own gain. 
 Take the long conversation between the little 
 Italian merchants on the respective merits of 
 integrity and sharpness in their childish traffic. 
 Each disputant exhausts his wits in trying to 
 prove the superior wisdom of his own course, 
 but not once does the virtuous Francisco make 
 use of the only argument which is of any real 
 value, — I do not cheat because it is not right. 
 There is more to be learned about honesty, 
 real unselfish, unrequited honesty, in Charles 
 
 Lamb's little sketch of Barbara S than in 
 
 all Miss Edgeworth has written on the subject 
 in a dozen different tales. 
 
 " Taking up one's cross does not at all mean 
 having ovations at dinner parties, and being 
 put over everybody else's head," says Ruskin, 
 
88 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 with visible impatience at the smooth and easy 
 manner in which Miss Edgeworth persists in 
 grinding the mills of the gods, and distribu- 
 ting poetical justice to each and every comer. 
 It may be very nice to see the generous Laura, 
 who gave away her half sovereign, extolled to 
 the skies by a whole room full of company, 
 " disturbed for the purpose," while " poor dear 
 little Rosamond " — he too has a weakness 
 for this small blunderer — is left in the lurch, 
 without either shoes or jar ; but it is not real 
 generosity that needs so much commendation, 
 and it is not real life that can be depended on 
 for giving it. Yet Ruskin admits that Harry 
 and Lucy were his earliest friends, to the ex- 
 tent even of inspiring him with an ambitious 
 desire to continue their history ; and he cannot 
 say too much in praise of an authoress " whose 
 every page is so full and so delightful. I can 
 read her over and over again, without ever 
 tiring. No one brings you into the company 
 of pleasanter or wiser people ; no one tells 
 you more truly how to do right." 1 
 
 He might have added that no one ever was 
 more moderate in her exactions. The little 
 
 1 Ethics of the Dust. 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 89 
 
 people who brighten Miss Edgeworth's pages 
 are not expected, like the children in more re- 
 cent books, to take upon their shoulders a load 
 of grown-up duties and responsibilities. Life 
 is simplified for them by an old-fashioned habit 
 of trusting in the wisdom of their parents ; 
 and these parents, instead of being foolish and 
 wrong-headed, so as to set off more strikingly 
 the child's sagacious energy, are apt to be very 
 sensible and kind, and remarkably well able 
 to take care of themselves and their families. 
 This is the more refreshing because, after read- 
 ing a few modern stories, either English or 
 American, one is troubled with serious doubts 
 as to the moral usefulness of adults ; and we 
 begin to feel that as we approach the age of 
 Mentor it behooves us to find some wise young 
 Telemachus who will consent to be our pro- 
 tector and our guide. There is no more charm- 
 ing writer for the young than Flora Shaw; 
 yet Hector and Phyllis Browne, and even that 
 group of merry Irish children in Castle Blair, 
 are all convinced it is their duty to do some 
 difficult or dangerous work in the interests of 
 humanity, and all are afflicted with a prema- 
 ture consciousness of social evils. 
 
90 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 " The time is out of joint ; oh, cursed spite ! 
 That ever I was born to set it right ! ' ' 
 
 cries Hamlet wearily ; but it is at thirty, and 
 not at thirteen, that he makes this unpleasant 
 discovery. 
 
 In religious stories, of which there are many 
 hundreds published every year, these peculiar 
 views are even more defined, presenting them- 
 selves often in the form of a spiritual contest 
 between highly endowed, sensitive children 
 and their narrow-minded parents and guar- 
 dians, who, of course, are always in the wrong. 
 The clever authoress of Thrown Together is 
 by no means innocent of this unwholesome 
 tone ; but the chief offender, and one who has 
 had a host of dismal imitators, is Susan War- 
 ner, — Miss Wetherell, — who plainly consid- 
 ered that virtue, especially in the young, was 
 of no avail unless constantly undergoing per- 
 secution. Her supernaturally righteous little 
 girls, who pin notes on their fathers' dressing- 
 tables, requesting them to become Christians, 
 and who endure the most brutal treatment — 
 at their parents' hands — rather than sing 
 songs on Sunday evening, are equaled only by 
 her older heroines, who divide their time im- 
 
WHAT CHILDREN READ. 91 
 
 partially between flirting and praying, between 
 indiscriminate kisses and passionate searching 
 for light. A Blackwood critic declares that 
 there is more kissing done in The Old Hel- 
 met than in all of Sir Walter Scott's novels 
 put together, and utters an energetic protest 
 against the penetrating glances, and earnest 
 pressing of hands, and brotherly embraces, 
 and the whole vulgar paraphernalia of pious 
 flirtation, so immeasurably hurtful to the un- 
 disciplined fancy of the young. " They have 
 good reason to expect," he growls, " from these 
 pictures of life, that if they are very good, and 
 very pious, and very busy in doing grown-up 
 work, when they reach the mature age of six- 
 teen or so, some young gentleman who has 
 been in love with them all along will declare 
 himself at the very nick of time ; and they 
 may then look to find themselves, all the strug- 
 gles of life over, reposing a weary head on his 
 stalwart shoulder. . . . Mothers, never in great 
 favor with novelists, are sinking deeper and 
 deeper in their black books, — there is a posi- 
 tive jealousy of their influence ; while the 
 father in the religious tale, as opposed to the 
 moral or sentimental, is commonly either a 
 
92 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 scamp or nowhere. The heroine has, so to 
 say, to do her work single-handed." 
 
 In some of these stories, moreover, the end 
 justifies the means to an alarming extent. 
 Girls who steal money from their relatives in 
 order to go as missionaries among the Indians, 
 and young women who pretend to sit up with 
 the sick that they may slip off unattended to 
 hear some inspired preacher in a barn, are not 
 safe companions even in books ; while, if no 
 grave indiscretion be committed, the lesson of 
 self-righteousness is taught on every page. 
 Not very long ago I had the pleasure of read- 
 ing a tale in which the youthful heroine con- 
 siders it her mission in life to convert her 
 grandparents ; and while there is nothing to 
 prevent an honest girl from desiring such a 
 thing, the idea is not a happy one for a narra- 
 tive, in view of certain homely old adages irre- 
 sistibly associated with the notion. " Girls," 
 wrote Hannah More, " should be led to dis- 
 trust their own judgment ; " but if they have 
 the conversion of their grandparents on their 
 hands, how can they afford to be distrustful ? 
 Hannah More is unquestionably out of date, 
 and so, we fear, is that English humorist who 
 
WHAT CHILDREN BEAD. 93 
 
 said, " If all the grown-up people in the world 
 should suddenly fail, what a frightful thing 
 would society become, reconstructed by boys! " 
 Evidently he had in mind a land given over to 
 toffy and foot-ball, but he was strangely mis- 
 taken in his notions. Perhaps the carnal lit- 
 tle hero of Vice Versa might have managed 
 matters in this disgraceful fashion ; but with 
 Flora Shaw's earnest children at the helm, so- 
 ciety would be reconstructed on a more serious 
 basis than it is already, and Heaven knows 
 this is not a change of which we stand in need. 
 In fact, if the young people who live and 
 breathe around us are one third as capable, as 
 strenuous, as clear-sighted, as independent, as 
 patronizing, and as undeniably our superiors as 
 their modern counterparts in literature, who 
 can doubt that the eternal cause of progress 
 would be furthered by the change ? And is 
 it, after all, mere pique which inclines us to 
 Miss Edgeworth's ordinary little boys and 
 girls, who, standing half dazed on the thresh- 
 old of life, stretch out their hands with child- 
 ish confidence for help ? 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 
 
 That useful little phrase, " the complexity 
 of modern thought," has been so hard worked 
 of late years that it seems like a refinement of 
 cruelty to add to its obligations. Begotten by 
 the philosophers, born of the essayists, and 
 put out to nurse among the novel-writers, it 
 has since been apprenticed to the whole body 
 of scribblers, and drudges away at every trade 
 in literature. How, asks Vernon Lee, can we 
 expect our fiction to be amusing, when a psy- 
 chological and sympathetic interest has driven 
 away the old hard-hearted spirit of comedy ? 
 How, asks Mr. Pater, can Sebastian Van Stork 
 make up his mind to love and marry and work 
 like ordinary mortals, when the many-sided- 
 ness of life has wrought in him a perplexed 
 envy of those quiet occupants of the church- 
 yard, " whose deceasing was so long since 
 over " ? How, asks George Eliot, can Mrs. 
 Pullet weep with uncontrolled emotion over 
 Mrs. Sutton's dropsy, when it behooves her 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 95 
 
 not to crush her sleeves or stain her bonnet- 
 strings ? The problem is repeated everywhere, 
 either in mockery or deadly earnestness, ac- 
 cording to the questioner's disposition, and the 
 old springs of simple sentiment are drying 
 fast within us. It is heartless to laugh, it is 
 foolish to cry, it is indiscreet to love, it is mor- 
 bid to hate, and it is intolerant to espouse any 
 cause with enthusiasm. 
 
 There was a time, and not so many years 
 ago, when men and women found no great 
 difficulty in making up their minds on ordinary 
 matters, and their opinions, if erroneous, were 
 at least succinct and definite. Nero was then 
 a cruel tyrant, the Duke of Wellington a 
 great soldier, Sir Walter Scott the first of 
 novelists, and the French Revolution a villain- 
 ous piece of business. Now we are equally 
 enlightened and confused by the keen re- 
 searches and shifting verdicts with which his- 
 torians and critics seek to dispel this comfort- 
 able frame of darkness. Nero, perhaps, had 
 the good of his subjects secretly at heart when 
 he expressed that benevolent desire to dispatch 
 them all at a blow, and Robespierre was but a 
 practical philanthropist, carried, it may be, a 
 
96 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 little too far by the stimulating influences of 
 the hour. " We have palliations of Tiberius, 
 eulogies of Henry VIII., and devotional exer- 
 cises to Cromwell," observes Mr. Bagehot, in 
 some perplexity as to where this state of 
 things may find an ending ; and he confesses 
 that in the mean time his own original notions 
 of right and wrong are growing sadly hazy 
 and uncertain. Moreover, in proportion as 
 the heavy villains of history assume a chas- 
 tened and ascetic appearance, its heroes dwin- 
 dle perceptibly into the commonplace, and its 
 heroines are stripped of every alluring grace ; 
 while as for the living men who are controlling 
 the destinies of nations, not even Macaulay's 
 ever useful schoolboy is too small and ignorant 
 to refuse them homage. Yet we read of Scott, 
 in the zenith of his fame, standing silent and 
 abashed before the Duke of Wellington, un- 
 able, and perhaps unwilling, to shake off the 
 awe that paralyzed his tongue. " The Duke 
 possesses every one mighty quality of the 
 mind in a higher degree than any other man 
 either does or has ever done ! " exclaimed Sir 
 Walter to John Ballantyne, who, not being 
 framed for hero-worship, failed to appreciate 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 97 
 
 his friend's extraordinary enthusiasm. While 
 we smile at the sentiment, — knowing, of 
 course, so much better ourselves, — we feel 
 an envious admiration of the happy man who 
 uttered it. 
 
 There is a curious little incident which Mrs. 
 Lockhart used to relate, in after years, as a 
 proof of her father's emotional temperament, 
 and of the reverence with which he regarded 
 all that savored of past or present greatness. 
 When the long-concealed Scottish regalia were 
 finally brought to light, and exhibited to the 
 public of Edinburgh, Scott, who had previously 
 been one of the committee chosen to unlock 
 the chest, took his daughter to see the royal 
 jewels. She was then a girl of fifteen, and 
 her nerves had been so wrought upon by all 
 that she had heard on the subject that, when 
 the lid was opened, she felt herself growing 
 faint, and withdrew a little from the crowd. 
 A light-minded young commissioner, to whom 
 the occasion suggested no solemnity, took up 
 the crown, and made a gesture as if to place it 
 on the head of a lady standing near, when 
 Sophia Scott heard her father exclaim passion- 
 ately, in a voice " something between anger 
 
98 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 and despair," " By G — , no ! " The gentle- 
 man, much embarrassed, immediately replaced 
 the diadem, and Sir Walter, turning aside, 
 saw his daughter, deadly pale, leaning against 
 the door, and led her at once into the open 
 air. " He never spoke all the way home," 
 she added, ci but every now and then I felt his 
 arm tremble ; and from that time I fancied he 
 began to treat me more like a woman than a 
 child. I thought he liked me better, too, than 
 he had ever done before." 
 
 The whole scene, as we look back upon it 
 now, is a quaint illustration of how far a 
 man's emotions could carry him, when they 
 were nourished alike by the peculiarities of 
 his genius and of his education. The feeling 
 was doubtless an exaggerated one, but it was 
 at least nobler than the speculative humor 
 with which a careless crowd now calculates 
 the market value of the crown jewels in the 
 Tower of London. " What they would bring " 
 was a thought which we may be sure never 
 entered Sir Walter's head, as he gazed with 
 sparkling eyes on the modest regalia of Scot- 
 land, and conjured up every stirring drama in 
 which they had played their part. For him 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 99 
 
 each page of his country's history was the sub- 
 ject of close and loving scrutiny. All those 
 Davids, and Williams, and Malcolms, about 
 whom we have an indistinct notion that they 
 spent their lives in being bullied by their 
 neighbors and badgered by their subjects, 
 were to his mind as kingly as Charlemagne 
 on his Throne of the West ; and their crimes 
 and struggles and brief glorious victories were 
 part of the ineffaceable knowledge of his boy- 
 hood. To feel history in this way, to come 
 so close to the world's actors that our pulses 
 rise and fall with their vicissitudes, is a better 
 thing, after all, than the most accurate and 
 reasonable of doubts. I knew two little 
 English girls who always wore black frocks on 
 the 30th of January, in honor of the " Royal 
 Martyr," and tied up their hair with black rib- 
 bons, and tried hard to preserve the decent 
 gravity of demeanor befitting such a doleful 
 anniversary. The same little girls, it must 
 be confessed, carried Holmby House to bed 
 with them, and bedewed their pillows with 
 many tears over the heart-rending descrip- 
 tions thereof. What to them were the " out- 
 raged liberties of England," which Mr. Gosse 
 
100 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 rather vaguely tells us tore King Charles to 
 pieces ? They saw him standing on the scaf- 
 fold, a sad and princely figure, and they heard 
 the frightened sobs that rent the air when the 
 cruel deed was done. It is not possible for 
 us now to take this picturesque and exclusive 
 view of one whose shortcomings have been so 
 vigorously raked to light by indignant disci- 
 ples of Carlyle ; but the child who has ever 
 cried over any great historic tragedy is richer 
 for the experience, and stands on higher 
 ground than one whose life is bounded by the 
 schoolroom walls, or who finds her needful 
 stimulant in the follies of a precocious flirta- 
 tion. What a charming picture we have of 
 Eugenie de Guerin feeding her passionate lit- 
 tle soul with vain regrets for the unfortunate 
 family of Louis XVI. and with sweet infan- 
 tile plans for their rescue. " Even as a 
 child," she writes in her journal, " I venerated 
 this martyr, I loved this victim whom I heard 
 so much talked of in my family as the 21st 
 of January drew near. We used to be taken 
 to the funeral service in the church, and I 
 gazed at the high catafalque, the melancholy 
 throne of the good king. My astonishment 
 
TEE DECAY OF SENTIMENT, 101 
 
 impressed me with sorrow and indignation. I 
 came away weeping over this death, and hat- 
 ing the wicked men who had brought it about. 
 How many hours have I spent devising means 
 for saving Louis, the queen, and the whole 
 hapless family, — if I only had lived in their 
 day. But after much calculating and con- 
 triving, no promising measure presented itself, 
 and I was forced, very reluctantly, to leave 
 the prisoners where they were. My compas- 
 sion was more especially excited for the beau- 
 tiful little Dauphin, the poor child pent up 
 between walls, and unable to play in freedom. 
 I used to carry him off in fancy, and keep 
 him safely hidden at Cayla, and Heaven 
 only knows the delight of running about our 
 fields with a prince." 
 
 Here at least we see the imaginative faculty 
 playing a vigorous and wholesome part in a 
 child's mental training. The little solitary 
 French girl who filled up her lonely hours 
 with such pretty musings as these, could 
 scarcely fail to attain that rare distinction of 
 mind which all true critics have been so 
 prompt to recognize and love. It was with 
 her the natural outgrowth of an intelligence, 
 
102 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 quickened by sympathy and fed with delicate 
 emotions. The Dauphin in the Temple, the 
 Princes in the Tower, Marie Antoinette on the 
 guillotine, and Jeanne d'Arc at the stake, 
 these are the scenes which have burned their 
 way into many a youthful heart, and the force 
 of such early impressions can never be utterly 
 destroyed. A recent essayist, deeply imbued 
 with this good principle, has assured us that 
 the little maiden who, ninety years ago, sur- 
 prised her mother in tears, " because the 
 wicked people had cut off the French queen's 
 head," received from that impression the very 
 highest kind of education. But this is ob- 
 ject-teaching carried to its extremest limit, 
 and even in these days, when training is rec- 
 ognized to be of such vital importance, one 
 feels that the death of a queen is a high price 
 to pay for a little girl's instruction. It might 
 perhaps suffice to let her live more freely in 
 the past, and cultivate her emotions after a 
 less costly and realistic fashion. 
 
 On the other hand, Mr. Edgar Saltus, who 
 is nothing if not melancholy, would fain per- 
 suade us that the " gift of tears," which Swin- 
 burne prized so highly and Mrs. Browning 
 
TEE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 103 
 
 cultivated with such transparent care, finds 
 its supreme expression in man, only because of 
 man's greater capacity for suffering. Yet if 
 it be true that the burden of life grows heav- 
 ier for each succeeding generation, it is no less 
 apparent that we have taught ourselves to 
 stare dry-eyed at its blankness. An old rab- 
 binical legend says that in Paradise God gave 
 the earth to Adam and tears to Eve, and it is 
 a cheerless doctrine which tells us now that 
 both gifts are equal because both are value- 
 less, that the world will never be any merrier, 
 and that we are all tired of waxing sentimen- 
 tal over its lights and shadows. But our 
 great-grandfathers, who were assuredly not a 
 tender-hearted race, and who never troubled 
 their heads about those modern institutions, 
 wickedly styled by Mr. Lang " Societies for 
 Badgering the Poor," cried right heartily 
 over poems, and novels, and pictures, and 
 plays, and scenery, and everything, in short, 
 that their great-grandsons would not now con- 
 sider as worthy of emotion. Jeffrey the ter- 
 rible shed tears over the long-drawn pathos 
 of little Nell, and has been roundly abused 
 by critics ever since for the extremely bad 
 
104 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 taste he exhibited. Macaulay, who was sel- 
 dom disposed to be sentimental, confesses 
 that he wept over Florence Dombey. Lord 
 Byron was strongly moved when Scott recited 
 to him his favorite ballad of Hardyknute; 
 and Sir Walter himself paid the tribute of 
 his tears to Mrs. Opie's dismal stories, and 
 Southey's no less dismal Pilgrimage to Water- 
 loo. When Marmion was first published, 
 Joanna Baillie undertook to read it aloud to a 
 little circle of literary friends, and on reach- 
 ing those lines which have reference to her 
 own poems, 
 
 " When she the bold enchantress came, 
 With fearless hand, and heart in flame," 
 
 the " uncontrollable emotion " of her hearers 
 forced the fair reader to break down. In 
 a modern drawing-room this uncontrollable 
 emotion would probably find expression in 
 such gentle murmurs of congratulation as 
 " Very pretty and appropriate, I am sure," or 
 " How awfully nice in Sir Walter to have put 
 it in that way ! " 
 
 Turn where we will, however, amid the 
 pages of the past, we see this precious gift of 
 tears poured out in what seems to us now a 
 
THE DEC A Y OF SENTIMENT. 105 
 
 spirit of wanton profusion. Sterne, by his own 
 showing, must have gone through life like 
 the Walrus, in Through the Looking Glass, 
 
 " Holding his pocket handkerchief 
 Before his streaming eyes ; ' ' 
 
 and we can detect him every now and then 
 peeping slyly out of the folds, to see what sort 
 of an impression he was making. " I am as 
 weak as a woman," he sighs, with conscious 
 satisfaction, " and I beg the world not to 
 smile, but pity me." Burns, who at least never 
 cried for effect, was moved to sudden tears by 
 a pathetic print of a dead soldier, that hung 
 on Professor Fergusson's wall. Scott was al- 
 ways visibly affected by the wild northern 
 scenery that he loved ; and Erskine was dis- 
 covered in the Cave of Staff a, " weeping like a 
 woman," though, in truth, a gloomy, danger- 
 ous, slippery, watery cavern is the last place 
 on earth where a woman would ordinarily stop 
 to be emotional. She might perhaps cry with 
 Sterne over a dead monk or a dead donkey, 
 — he has an equal allowance of tears for 
 both, — but once inside of a cave, her real 
 desire is to get out again as quickly as possi- 
 ble, with dry skirts and an unbroken neck. 
 
106 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 It may be, however, that our degenerate mod- 
 ern impulses afford us no safe clue to those 
 halcyon days when sentiment was paramount 
 and practical considerations of little weight ; 
 when wet feet and sore throats were not suf- 
 fered to intrude their rueful warnings upon 
 the majesty of nature ; when ladies, who 
 lived comfortably and happily with the hus- 
 bands of their choice, poured forth impas- 
 sioned prayers, in the Annual Register, for 
 the boon of indifference, and poets like Cow- 
 per rushed forward to remonstrate with them 
 for their cruelty. 
 
 " Let no low thought suggest the prayer, 
 Oh ! grant, kind Heaven, to me, 
 Long as I draw ethereal air, 
 Sweet sensibility.' ' 
 
 wrote the author of The Task, in sober earnest- 
 ness and sincerity. 
 
 " Then oh ! ye Fair, if Pity's ray 
 E'er taught your snowy breasts to sigh, 
 Shed o' er my contemplative lay 
 The tears of sensibility," 
 
 wrote Macaulay as a burlesque on the prevail- 
 ing spirit of bathos, and was, I think, un- 
 reasonably angry because a number of readers, 
 his own mother included, failed to see that he 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 107 
 
 was in fun. Yet all his life this mocking 
 critic cherished in his secret soul of souls a 
 real affection for those hysterical old romances 
 which had been the delight of his boyhood, 
 and which were even then rapidly disappear- 
 ing before the cold scorn of an enlightened 
 world. Miss Austen, in Sense and Sensibility, 
 had impaled emotionalism on the fine shafts of 
 her delicate satire, and Macaulay was Miss 
 Austen's sworn champion ; but nevertheless he 
 contrived to read and reread Mrs. Meek's and 
 Mrs. Cuthbertson's marvelous stories, until he 
 probably knew them better than he did Emma 
 or Northanger Abbey. When an old edition 
 of Santa Sebastiano was sold at auction in 
 India, he secured it at a fabulous price, — Miss 
 Eden bidding vigorously against him, — and 
 he occupied his leisure moments in making a 
 careful calculation of the number of fainting- 
 fits that occur in the course of the five vol- 
 umes. There are twenty-seven in all, so he 
 has recorded, of which the heroine alone comes 
 in for eleven, while seven others are distributed 
 among the male characters. Mr. Trevelyan 
 has kindly preserved for us the description of 
 a single catastrophe, and we can no longer 
 
108 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 wonder at anybody's partiality for the tale, 
 when we learn that " one of the sweetest 
 smiles that ever animated the face of mortal 
 man now diffused itself over the countenance 
 of Lord St. Orville, as he fell at the feet of 
 Julia in a death-like swoon." Mr. Howells 
 would doubtless tell us that this is not a 
 true and accurate delineation of real life, and 
 that what Lord St. Orville should have done 
 was to have simply wiped the perspiration 
 off his forehead, after the unvarnished fash- 
 ion of Mr. Mavering, in April Hopes. But 
 Macaulay, who could mop his own brow when- 
 ever he felt so disposed, and who recognized 
 his utter inability to faint with a sweet smile 
 at a lady's feet, naturally delighted in Mrs. 
 Cuthbertson's singularly accomplished hero. 
 Swooning is now, I fear, sadly out of date. 
 In society we no longer look upon it as a 
 pleasing evidence of feminine propriety, and 
 in the modern novel nothing sufficiently excit- 
 ing to bring about such a result is ever per- 
 mitted to happen. But in the good old impos- 
 sible stories of the past it formed a very im- 
 portant element, and some of Mrs. Radcliffe's 
 heroines can easily achieve twenty-seven faint- 
 
TEE DEC A Y OF SENTIMENT. 109 
 
 ing-fits by their own unaided industry. They 
 faint at the most inopportune times and 
 under the most exasperating circumstances: 
 when they are running away from banditti, or 
 hiding from cruel relatives, or shut up by 
 themselves in gloomy dungeons, with nobody 
 to look after and resuscitate them. Their 
 trembling limbs are always refusing to support 
 them just when a little activity is really neces- 
 sary for safety, and, though they live in an 
 atmosphere of horrors, the smallest shock is 
 more than they can endure with equanimity. 
 In the Sicilian Romance, Julia's brother, de- 
 siring to speak to her for a minute, knocks 
 gently at her door, whereupon, with the most 
 unexpected promptness, "she shrieked and 
 fainted ; " and as the key happens to be turned 
 on the inside, he is obliged to wait in the hall 
 until she slowly regains her consciousness. 
 
 Nothing, however, can mar the decorous sen- 
 timentality which these young people exhibit 
 in all their loves and sorrows. Emily the for- 
 lorn " touched the chords of her lute in solemn 
 symphony," when the unenviable nature of her 
 surroundings might reasonably have banished 
 all music from her soul ; Theodore paused to 
 
110 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 bathe Adeline's hand with his tears, in a mo- 
 ment of painful uncertainty ; and Hippolitus, 
 who would have scorned to be stabbed like an 
 ordinary mortal, " received a sword through 
 his body," — precisely as though it were a 
 present, — " and, uttering a deep sigh, fell to 
 the ground," on which, true to her principles, 
 "Julia shrieked and fainted." We read of 
 the Empress Octavia swooning when Virgil 
 recited to her his description of the death of 
 Marcellus ; and we know that Shelley fainted 
 when he heard Cristabel read ; but Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe's heroines, though equally sensitive, are 
 kept too busy with their own disasters to show 
 this sympathetic interest in literature. Their 
 adventures strike us now as being, on the whole, 
 more amusing than thrilling ; but we should 
 remember that they were no laughing matter 
 to the readers of fifty years ago. People did 
 not then object to the interminable length of 
 a story, and they followed its intricate wind- 
 ings and counter-windings with a trembling 
 zest which we can only envy. One of the ear- 
 liest recollections of my own childhood is a 
 little book depicting the awful results of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe's terror-inspiring romances upon the 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. Ill 
 
 youthful mind ; a well-intentioned work, no 
 doubt, but which inevitably filled us with a 
 sincere desire to taste for ourselves of these 
 pernicious horrors. If I found them far less 
 frightful than I had hoped, the loss was mine, 
 and the fault lay in the matter-of-fact atmos- 
 phere of the modern nursery ; for does not the 
 author of the now forgotten Pursuits of Lit- 
 erature tell us that the Mysteries of Udolpho 
 is the work of an intellectual giant ? — "a 
 mighty magician, bred and nourished by the 
 Florentine muses in their sacred solitary 
 caverns, amid the pale shrines of Gothic su- 
 perstition, and in all the dreariness of enchant- 
 ment." 
 
 That was the way that critics used to write, 
 and nobody dreamed of laughing at them. 
 When Letitia Elizabeth Landon poured forth 
 her soul in the most melancholy of verses, all 
 London stopped to listen and to pity. 
 
 " There is no truth in love, whate'er its seeming, 
 And Heaven itself could scarcely seem more true. 
 Sadly have I awakened. from the dreaming 
 Whose charmed slumher, false one, was of you," 
 
 wrote this healthy and heart-whole young wo- 
 man ; and Lord Lytton has left us an amusing 
 
112 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 account of the sensation that such poems ex- 
 cited. He and his fellow-students exhausted 
 their ingenuity in romantic speculations con- 
 cerning the unknown singer, and inscribed 
 whole reams of fervid but indifferent stanzas 
 to her honor. " There was always," he says, 
 " in the reading-room of the Union, a rush 
 every Saturday afternoon for the Literary 
 Gazette, and an impatient anxiety to hasten at 
 once to that corner of the sheet which con- 
 tained the three magical letters L. E. L. All 
 of us praised the verse, and all of us guessed 
 the author. We soon learned that it was a 
 female, and our admiration was doubled, and 
 our conjectures tripled." When Francesca 
 Carrara appeared, it was received with an 
 enthusiasm never manifested for Pride and 
 Prejudice, or Persuasion, and romantic young 
 men and women reveled in its impassioned 
 melancholy. What a pattering of tear-drops 
 on every page ! The lovely heroine — less 
 mindful of her clothes than Mrs. Pullet — 
 looks down and marks how the great drops 
 have fallen like rain upon her bosom. " Alas ! " 
 she sighs, " I have cause to weep. I must 
 weep over my own changefulness, and over the 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 113 
 
 sweetest illusions of my youth. I feel sud- 
 denly grown old. Never more will the flowers 
 seem so lovely, or the stars so bright. Never 
 more shall I dwell on Erminia's deep and en- 
 during love for the unhappy Tancred, and 
 think that I too could so have loved. Ah ! in 
 what now can I believe, when I may not even 
 trust my own heart ? " Here, at least, we have 
 unadulterated sentiment, with no traces in it 
 of that " mean and jocular life " which Emer- 
 son so deeply scorned, and for which the light- 
 minded readers of to-day have ventured to ex- 
 press their cheerful and shameless preference. 
 Emotional literature, reflecting as it does the 
 tastes and habits of a dead past, should not 
 stand trial alone before the cold eyes of the 
 mocking present, where there is no sympathy 
 for its weakness and no clue to its identity. 
 A happy cominonplaceness is now acknowl- 
 edged to be, next to brevity of life, man's best 
 inheritance ; but in the days when all the vir- 
 tues and vices flaunted in gala costume, people 
 were hardly prepared for that fine simplicity 
 which has grown to be the crucial test of art. 
 Love, friendship, honor, and courage w r ere as 
 real then as now, but they asserted themselves 
 
114 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 in fantastic ways, and with an ostentation that 
 we are apt to mistake for insincerity. When 
 Mrs. Katharine Philips founded her famous 
 Society of Friendship, in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century, she was working ear- 
 nestly enough for her particular conception of 
 sweetness and light. It is hard not to laugh 
 at these men and women of the world address- 
 ing each other solemnly as the " noble Silvan- 
 der " and the " dazzling Polycrete ; " and it is 
 harder still to believe that the fervent devo- 
 tion of their verses represented in any degree 
 the real sentiments of their hearts. But 
 Orinda, whose indefatigable exertions held the 
 society together, meant every word she said, 
 and credited the rest with similar veracity. 
 
 c ' Lucasia, whose harmonious state 
 The Spheres and Muses only imitate," 
 
 is for her but a temperate expression of re- 
 gard ; and we find her writing to Mrs. Annie 
 Owens — a most unresponsive young Welsh- 
 woman — in language that would be deemed 
 extravagant in a lover : — 
 
 " I did not live until this time 
 Crowned my felicity, 
 When I could say without a crime, 
 I am not thine, but thee." 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 115 
 
 One wonders what portion of her heart the 
 amiable Mr. Philips was content to occupy. 
 
 Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eight- 
 eenth centuries found their principal amuse- 
 ment in contracting, either with each other or 
 with men, those highly sentimental friend- 
 ships which were presumably free from all 
 dross of earthly passion, and which rested on 
 a shadowy basis of pure intellectual affinity. 
 Mademoiselle de Scudery delighted in por- 
 traying this rarefied intercourse between con- 
 genial souls, and the billing and cooing of 
 Platonic turtle-doves fill many pages of her 
 ponderous romances. Sappho and Phaon, in 
 the Grand Cyrus, " told each other every par- 
 ticular of their lives," which must have been 
 a little tedious at times and altogether unnec- 
 essary, inasmuch as we are assured that " the 
 exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that 
 all those in Sappho's mind passed into Pha- 
 on's, and all those in Phaon's came into Sap- 
 pho's." Conversation under these circum- 
 stances would be apt to lose its zest for ordi- 
 nary mortals, who value the power of speech 
 rather as a disguise than as an interpretation 
 of their real convictions ; but it was not so 
 
116 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 with this guileless pair. " They understood 
 each other without words, and saw their whole 
 hearts in each other's eyes." 
 
 As for the great wave of emotionalism that 
 followed in Rousseau's train, it was a pure 
 make-believe, like every other sentiment that 
 bubbled on the seething surface of French so- 
 ciety. Avarice and honor alone were real. 
 To live like a profligate and to die like a hero 
 were the two accomplishments common to 
 every grand seigneur in the country. For the 
 rest, there was a series of fads, — simplicity, 
 benevolence, philosophy, passion, asceticism; 
 Voltaire one day, Rousseau the next ; Arca- 
 dian virtues and court vices jumbled fantas- 
 tically together ; the cause of the people on 
 every tongue, and the partridges hatching in 
 the peasant's corn; Marie Antoinette milking 
 a cow, and the infant Madame Royale with 
 eighty nurses and attendants ; great ladies, 
 with jewels in their hair, on their bosoms, and 
 on their silken slippers, laboriously earning a 
 few francs by picking out gold threads from 
 scraps of tarnished bullion ; everybody anx- 
 iously asking everybody else, " What shall we 
 do to be amused? " and the real answer to all 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 117 
 
 uttered long before by Louis XIII., " Venez, 
 monsieur, allons - nous ennuyer ensemble." 
 Day and night are not more different than 
 this sickly hothouse pressure and the pure 
 emotion that fired Scott's northern blood, as 
 he looked on the dark rain-swept hills till his 
 eyes grew bright with tears. " We sometimes 
 weep to avoid the disgrace of not weeping," 
 says Rochefoucauld, who valued at its worth 
 the facile sentimentality of his countrymen. 
 Could he have lived to witness M. de Latour's 
 hysterical transports on finding Rousseau's 
 signature and a crushed periwinkle in an old 
 copy of the Imitatio, the great moralist might 
 see that his bitter truths have in them a piti- 
 less continuity of adjustment, and fit them- 
 selves afresh to every age. What excitation 
 of feeling accompanied the bloody work of 
 the French Revolutionists ! What purity of 
 purpose ! What nobility of language ! What 
 grandeur of device ! What bottled moonshine 
 everywhere ! The wicked old world was to 
 be born anew, reason was to triumph over 
 passion ; and self-interest, which had ruled 
 men for six thousand years, was to be sud- 
 denly eradicated from their hearts. When 
 
118 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 the patriots had finished cutting off every- 
 body else's head, then the reign of mutual ten- 
 derness would begin; the week — inestimable 
 privilege ! — would hold ten days instead of 
 seven ; and Frimaire and Floreal and Messi- 
 dor would prove to the listening earth that 
 the very names of past months had sunk into 
 merited oblivion. Father Faber says that a 
 sense of humor is a great help in the spiritual 
 life ; it is an absolute necessity in the tempo- 
 ral. Had the Convention possessed even the 
 faintest perception of the ridiculous, this 
 friendly instinct would have lowered their sub- 
 lime heads from the stars, stung them into 
 practical issues, and moderated the absurd de- 
 lusions of the hour. 
 
 At present, however, the new disciples of 
 " earnestness " are trying hard to persuade us 
 that we are too humorous, and that it is the 
 spirit of universal mockery which stifles all 
 our nobler and finer emotions. We would 
 like to believe them, but unhappily it is only 
 to exceedingly strenuous souls that this lawless 
 fun seems to manifest itself. The rest of us, 
 searching cheerfully enough, fail to discover 
 its traces. If we are seldom capable of any 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 119 
 
 sustained enthusiasm, it is rather because we 
 yawn than because we laugh. Unlike Emer- 
 son, we are glad to be amused, only the task 
 of amusing us grows harder day by day ; and 
 Justin McCarthy's languid heroine, who de- 
 clines to get up in the morning because she 
 has so often been up before, is but an exhaus- 
 tive instance of the inconveniences of modern 
 satiety. When we read of the Oxford stu- 
 dents beleaguering the bookshops in excited 
 crowds for the first copies of Rokeby and 
 Childe Harold, fighting over the precious vol- 
 umes, and betting recklessly on their rival 
 sales, we wonder whether either Lord Tenny- 
 son's or Mr. Browning's latest effusions cre- 
 ated any such tumult among the undergradu- 
 ates of to-day, or wiled away their money from 
 more legitimate subjects of speculation. Lord 
 Holland, when asked by Murray for his opin- 
 ion of Old Mortality, answered indignantly, 
 "Opinion! We did not one of us go to 
 bed last night ! Nothing slept but my gout." 
 Yet Eokeby and Childe Harold are both in 
 sad disgrace with modern critics, and Old 
 Mortality stands gathering dust upon our 
 bookshelves. Mr. Howells, who ought to 
 
120 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 know, tells us that fiction has become a finer 
 art in our day than it was in the days of our 
 fathers, and that the methods and interests we 
 have outgrown can never hope to be revived. 
 So if the masterpieces of the present, the tri- 
 umphs of learned verse and realistic prose, fail 
 to lift their readers out of themselves, like the 
 masterpieces of the past, the fault must be our 
 own. We devote some conscientious hours 
 to Parleyings with Certain People of Impor- 
 tance, and we are well pleased, on the whole, 
 to find ourselves in such good company ; but 
 it is a pleasure rich in the temperance that 
 Hamlet loved, and altogether unlikely to ruffle 
 our composure. We read The Bostonians 
 and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due 
 appreciation of their minute perfections ; but 
 we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual 
 hour, and are content to wait an interval of 
 leisure to resume them. Could Daisy Miller 
 charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us 
 sleepless until morning? When St. Pierre 
 finished the manuscript of Paul and Virginia, 
 he consented to read it to the painter, Joseph 
 Vernet. At first the solitary listener was 
 loud in his approbation, then more subdued, 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 121 
 
 then silent altogether. " Soon he ceased to 
 praise ; he only wept." Yet Paul and Vir- 
 ginia has been pronounced morbid, strained, 
 unreal, unworthy even of the tears that child- 
 hood drops upon its pages. But would Mr. 
 Millais or Sir Frederick Leighton sit weeping 
 over the delightful manuscripts of Henry 
 Shorthouse or Mr. Louis Stevenson? Did 
 the last flicker of genuine emotional enthusi- 
 asm die out with George Borrow, who lived 
 at least a century too late for his own con- 
 venience ? When a respectable, gray-haired, 
 middle-aged Englishman takes an innocent 
 delight in standing bare-headed in the rain, 
 reciting execrable Welsh verses on every spot 
 where a Welsh bard might, but probably does 
 not, lie buried, it is small wonder that the 
 "coarse-hearted, sensual, selfish Saxon " — we 
 quote the writer's own words — should find 
 the spectacle more amusing than sublime. 
 But then what supreme satisfaction Mr. Bor- 
 row derived from his own rhapsodies, what 
 conscious superiority over the careless crowd 
 who found life all too short to study the beau- 
 ties of Iolo Goch or Gwilym ab Ieuan ! 
 There is nothing in the world so enjoyable as 
 
122 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 a thorough-going monomania, especially if it 
 be of that peculiar literary order which insures 
 a broad field and few competitors. In a pas- 
 sionate devotion to Welsh epics or to Proven- 
 cal pastorals, to Roman antiquities or to 
 Gypsy genealogy, to the most confused epochs 
 of Egyptian history or the most private cor- 
 respondence of a dead author, — in one or 
 other of these favorite specialties our mod- 
 ern students choose to put forth their powers, 
 and display an astonishing industry and zeal. 
 There is a story told of a far too cultivated 
 young man, who, after professing a great love 
 for music, was asked if he enjoyed the opera. 
 He did not. Oratorios were then more to his 
 taste. He did not care for them at all. Bal- 
 lads perhaps pleased him by their simplicity. 
 He took no interest in them whatever. 
 Church music alone was left. He had no par- 
 tiality for even that. " What is it you do 
 like ? " asked his questioner, with despairing 
 persistency; and the answer was vouchsafed 
 her in a single syllable, " Fugues." This ex- 
 clusiveness of spirit may be detrimental to 
 that broad catholicity on which great minds 
 are nourished, but it has rare charms for its 
 
THE DECAY OF SENTIMENT. 123 
 
 possessor, and, being within the reach of all, 
 grows daily in our favor. French poets, like 
 Gautier and Sully Prudhomme, have been con- 
 tent to strike all their lives upon a single res- 
 onant note, and men of far inferior genius 
 have produced less perfect work in the same 
 willfully restricted vein. The pressure of the 
 outside world sorely chafes these unresponsive 
 natures ; large issues paralyze their pens. 
 They turn by instinct from the coarseness, the 
 ugliness, the realness of life, and sing of it 
 with graceful sadness and with delicate laugh- 
 ter, as if the whole thing were a pathetic or a 
 fantastic dream. They are dumb before its 
 riddles and silent in its uproar, standing apart 
 from the tumult, and letting the impetuous 
 crowd — " mostly fools," as Carlyle said — 
 sweep by them unperceived. Herrick is their 
 prototype, the poet who polished off his little 
 glittering verses about Julia's silks and Dia- 
 neme's ear-rings when all England was dark 
 with civil war. But even this armed neutral- 
 ity, this genuine and admirable indifference, 
 cannot always save us from the rough knocks 
 of a burly and aggressive world. The revolu- 
 tion, which he ignored, drove Herrick from 
 
124 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 his peaceful vicarage into the poverty and 
 gloom of London ; the siege of Paris played 
 sad havoc with Gautier's artistic tranquillity, 
 and devoured the greater part of his modest 
 fortune. We are tethered to our kind, and 
 may as well join hands in the struggle. Vex- 
 ation is no heavier than ennui, and " he who 
 lives without folly," says Rochefoucauld, u is 
 hardly so wise as he thinks." 
 
CUEIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 
 
 There is a growing tendency on the part of 
 literary men to resent what they are pleased 
 to consider the unwarrantable interference of 
 the critic. His ministrations have probably 
 never been sincerely gratifying to their recipi- 
 ents ; Marsyas could hardly have enjoyed be- 
 ing flayed by Apollo, even though he knew his 
 music was bad ; and worse, far worse, than 
 the most caustic severity are the few careless 
 w r ords that dismiss our cherished aspirations 
 as not even worthy the rueful dignity of pun- 
 ishment. But in former days the victim, if he 
 resented such treatment at all, resented it in 
 the spirit of Lord Byron, who, roused to a 
 healthy and vigorous wrath, 
 
 ' * expressed his royal views 
 In language such as gentlemen are seldom known to use," 
 
 and by a comprehensive and impartial attack 
 on all the writers of his time proved himself 
 both able and willing to handle the weapons 
 
126 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 that had wounded him. On the other side, 
 those authors whose defensive powers were of 
 a less prompt and efficient character ventured 
 no nearer to a quarrel than — to borrow a 
 simile of George Eliot's — a water-fowl that 
 puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can 
 be said to quarrel with a boy who throws 
 stones. Southey, who of all men entertained 
 the most comfortable opinion of his own mer- 
 its, must have been deeply angered by the 
 treatment Thalaba and Madoc received from 
 the Edinburgh Review ; yet we cannot see that 
 either he or his admirers looked upon Jeffrey 
 in any other light than that of a tyrannical 
 but perfectly legitimate authority. Ear nobler 
 victims suffered from the same bitter sting, 
 and they too nursed their wounds in a deco- 
 rous silence. 
 
 But it is very different to-day, when every 
 injured aspirant to the Temple of Fame as- 
 sures himself and a sympathizing public, not 
 that a particular critic is mistaken in his par- 
 ticular case, which we may safely take for 
 granted, but that all critics are necessarily 
 wrong in all cases, through an abnormal de- 
 velopment of what the catechism terms " dark- 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 127 
 
 ness of the understanding and a propensity to 
 evil." This amiable theory was, I think, first 
 advanced by Lord Beaconsfield, who sorely 
 needed some such emollient for his bruises. 
 In Lothair, when that truly remarkable ar- 
 tist Mr. Gaston Phoebus, accompanied by his 
 sister-in-law Miss Euphrosyne Cantacuzene, 
 — Heaven help their unhappy sponsors ! — 
 reveals to his assembled guests the picture he 
 has just completed, we are told that his air 
 " was elate, and was redeemed from arrogance 
 only by the intellect of his brow. ' To-mor- 
 row,' he said, ' the critics will commence. 
 You know who the critics are ? The men who 
 have failed in literature and art.' ' If Lord 
 Beaconsfield thought to disarm his foes by this 
 ingenious device, he was most signally mis- 
 taken ; for while several of the reviews were 
 deferentially hinting that perhaps the book 
 might not be so very bad as it seemed, Black- 
 wood stepped alertly to the front, and in a 
 criticism unsurpassed for caustic wit and mer- 
 ciless raillery held up each feeble extravagance 
 to the inextinguishable laughter of the world. 
 Even now, when few people venture upon the 
 palatial dreariness of the novel itself, there is 
 
128 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 no better way of insuring a mirthful hour than 
 by re - reading this vigorous and trenchant 
 satire. 
 
 Quite recently two writers, one on either 
 side of the Atlantic, have echoed with super- 
 fluous bitterness their conviction of the total 
 depravity of the critic. Mr. Edgar Fawcett, 
 in The House on High Bridge, and Mr. J. R. 
 Rees, in The Pleasures of a Book- Worm, 
 seem to find the English language painfully 
 inadequate for the forcible expression of their 
 displeasure. Mr. Fawcett considers all critics 
 "inconsistent when they are not regrettably 
 ignorant," and fails to see any use for them in 
 an enlightened world. " It is marvelous," he 
 reflects, " how long we tolerate an absurdity 
 of injustice before suddenly waking up to it. 
 And what can be a more clear absurdity than 
 that some one individual caprice, animus, or 
 even honest judgment should be made to in- 
 fluence the public regarding any new book? " 
 Moreover, he has discovered that the men and 
 women who write the reviews are mere " un- 
 derpaid vendors of opinions," who earn their 
 breakfasts and dinners by saying disagreeable 
 things about authors, " their superiors beyond 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 129 
 
 expression." But it is only fair to remind 
 Mr. Fawcett that no particular disgrace is in- 
 volved in earning one's breakfasts and din- 
 ners. On the contrary, hunger is a perfectly 
 legitimate and very valuable incentive to in- 
 dustry. " God help the bear, if, having little 
 else to eat, he must not even suck his own 
 paws ! " wrote Sir Walter Scott, with good- 
 humored contempt, when Lord Byron accused 
 him of being a mercenary poet ; and we prob- 
 ably owe the Vicar of Wakefield, The Li- 
 brary, and Venice Preserved to their authors' 
 natural and unavoidable craving for food. 
 Besides, if the reviewers are underpaid, it is 
 not so much their fault as that of their em- 
 ployers, and their breakfasts and dinners must 
 be proportionately light. When Milton re- 
 ceived five pounds for Paradise Lost, he was 
 probably the most underpaid writer in the 
 whole history of literature, yet Mr. Mark Pat- 
 tison seems to think that this fact redounds to 
 his especial honor. 
 
 But there are even worse things to be 
 learned about the critic than that he sells his 
 opinions for food. According to Mr. Fawcett 
 he is distinguished for " real, hysterical, vigi- 
 
130 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 lant, unhealthy sensitiveness," and nurses this 
 unpleasant feeling to such a degree that, 
 should an author object to being ill-treated at 
 his hands, the critic is immediately offended 
 into saying something more abominable still. 
 In fact, like an uncompromising mother I once 
 knew, who always punished her children till 
 they looked pleasant, he requires his smarting 
 victims to smile beneath the rod. Happily 
 there is a cure, and a very radical one, too, 
 for this painful state of affairs. Mr. Fawcett 
 proposes that all such offenders should be 
 obliged to buy the work which they dissect, 
 rightly judging that the book notices would 
 grow beautifully less under such stringent 
 treatment/ Indeed, were it extended a little 
 further, and all readers obliged to buy the 
 books they read, the publishers, the sellers, 
 and the reviewers might spare the time to 
 take a holiday together. 
 
 Mr. Rees is quite as severe and much more 
 ungrateful in his strictures ; for, after stating 
 that the misbehavior of the critic is a source 
 of great amusement to the thoughtful stu- 
 dent, he proceeds to chastise that misbehavior, 
 as though it had never entertained him at all. 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 131 
 
 In bis opinion, the reviewer, being guided ex- 
 clusively by a set of obsolete and worthless 
 rules, is necessarily incapable of recognizing 
 genius under any new development : " He 
 usually is as little fitted to deal with the tasks 
 he sets himself as a manikin is to growl about 
 the anatomy of a star, setting forth at the 
 same time his own thoughts as to how it 
 should be formed." Vanity is the mainspring 
 of his actions : " He fears to be thought be- 
 neath his author, and so doles out a limited 
 number of praises and an unlimited quantity 
 of slur." Like the Welshman, he strikes in 
 the dark, thus escaping just retribution ; and 
 in his stupid ignorance he seeks to " rein in 
 the winged steed," from having no conception 
 of its aerial powers. 
 
 Now this is a formidable indictment, and 
 some of the charges may be not without foun- 
 dation ; but if, as too often happens, the 
 " winged steed " is merely a donkey standing 
 ambitiously on its hind legs, who but the 
 critic can compel it to resume its quadru- 
 pedal attitude? If, as Mr. Walter Bagehot 
 warned us some years ago, " reading is about 
 to become a series of collisions against aggra- 
 
132 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 vated breakers, of beatings with imaginary- 
 surf," who but the critic can steer us safely- 
 through the storm ? Never, in fact, were his 
 duties more sharply defined or more sorely- 
 needed than at present, when the average 
 reader, like the unfortunate Mr. Boffin, stands 
 bewildered by the Scarers in Print, and finds 
 life all too short for their elucidation. The 
 self-satisfied who "know what they prefer," 
 and read accordingly, are like the enthusiasts 
 who follow their own consciences without first 
 accurately ascertaining whither they are being 
 taken. It has been well said that the object of 
 criticism is simply to clear the air about great 
 work for the benefit of ordinary people. We 
 only waste our powers when we refuse a guide, 
 and by forcing our minds hither and thither, 
 like navigators exploring each new stream 
 while ignorant of its course and current, we 
 squander in idle researches the time and 
 thought which should send us steadily for- 
 ward on our road. Worse still, we vitiate 
 our judgments by perverse and presumptuous 
 conclusions, and weaken our untrained facul- 
 ties by the very methods we hoped would 
 speed their growth. If Mr. Ruskin and Mr. 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 133 
 
 Matthew Arnold resemble each other in noth- 
 ing else, they have both taught earnestly and 
 persistently, through long and useful lives, the 
 supreme necessity of law, the supreme merit 
 of obedience. Mr. Arnold preached it with 
 logical coldness, after his fashion, and Mr. 
 Ruskin with illogical impetuosity, after his ; 
 but the lesson remains practically the same. 
 " All freedom is error," writes the author of 
 Queen of the Air, who is at least blessed with 
 the courage of his convictions. " Every line 
 you lay down is either right or wrong : it may 
 be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly 
 and impudently wrong ; the aspect of the im- 
 pudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar per- 
 sons, and is what they commonly call ' free ' 
 execution. . . • I have hardly patience to 
 hold my pen and go on writing, as I remem- 
 ber the infinite follies of modern thought in 
 this matter, centred in the notion that liberty 
 is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he 
 is likely to make of it." 
 
 But he does go on writing, nevertheless, 
 long after this slender stock of patience is ex- 
 hausted, and in his capacity of critic he lays 
 down Draconian laws which his disciples seem 
 
134 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 bound to wear as a heavy yoke around their 
 necks. " Who made Mr. Ruskin a judge or 
 a nursery governess over us ? " asks an irrev- 
 erent contributor to Macmillan ; and why, 
 after all, should we abstain from reading Dar- 
 win, and Grote, and Coleridge, and Kingsley, 
 and Thackeray, and a host of other writers, 
 who may or may not be gratifying to our own 
 tastes, because Mr. Ruskin has tried and 
 found them wanting ? It is not the province 
 of a critic to bar us in a wholesale manner 
 from all authors he does not chance to like, 
 but to aid us, by his practiced judgment, to 
 extract what is good from every field, and to 
 trace, as far as in us lies, those varying de- 
 grees of excellence which it is to our advan- 
 tage to discern. It was in this way that Mr, 
 Arnold, working with conscientious and dis- 
 passionate serenity, opened our eyes to new 
 beauty, and strengthened us against vicious 
 influences ; he added to our sources of pleas- 
 ure, he helped us to enjoy them, and not to 
 recognize his kindly aid would be an ungra- 
 cious form of self-deception. If he were oc- 
 casionally a little puzzling, as in some parts 
 of Celtic Literature, where the qualities he 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 135 
 
 detected fall meaningless on our ears, it is a 
 wholesome lesson in humility to acknowledge 
 our bewilderment. Why should the lines 
 
 " What little town by river or sea-shore, 
 Or mountain-built with quiet citadel, 
 Is emptied of its folk this pious morn ? ' ' 
 
 be the expression of a purely Greek form of 
 thought, " as Greek as a thing from Homer or 
 Theocritus ; " and 
 
 " In such anight 
 Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, 
 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
 To come again to Carthage, ' ' 
 
 be as purely Celtic ? Why should 
 
 " I know a bank where the wild thyme blows " 
 
 be Greek, and 
 
 " Fast-fading violets cover' d up in leaves " 
 
 be Celtic? That harmless nondescript, the 
 general reader, be he ever so anxious for en- 
 lightenment, is forced to confess he really does 
 not know ; and if his ignorance be of the com- 
 placent order, he adds an impatient doubt as 
 to whether Mr. Arnold knew either, just as 
 when he " comes up gasping " from a sudden 
 plunge into Browning, he is prompt to declare 
 his firm conviction that the poet never had the 
 faintest idea what he was writing about. 
 
136 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 But there is another style of enigma with 
 which critics are wont to harry and perplex us, 
 and one has need of a " complication-proof 
 mind/' like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, to 
 see clearly through the tangle. Mr. Churton 
 Collins, in his bitter attack on Mr. Gosse in 
 the Quarterly Review, objected vehemently to 
 ever-varying descriptions of a single theme. 
 He did not think that if Drayton's Barons' 
 Wars be a " serene and lovely poem," it could 
 well have a " passionate music running through 
 it," or possess " irregular force and. sudden 
 brilliance of style." Perhaps he was right ; 
 but there are few critics who can help us to 
 know and feel a poem like Mr. Gosse, and 
 fewer still who write with such consummate 
 grace and charm. It is only when we pass 
 from one reviewer to another that the shifting 
 lights thrown upon an author dazzle and con- 
 fuse us. Like the fifty-six different readings 
 of the first line of the Orlando Furioso, there 
 are countless standpoints from which we are 
 invited to inspect each and every subject ; and 
 unless we follow the admirable example of Mr. 
 Courthope, who solves a difficulty by gently 
 saying, " The matter is one not for argument, 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 137 
 
 but for perception," we are lost in the mazes 
 of indecision. Thus Mr. Ruskin demonstrates 
 most beautifully the great superiority of Sir 
 Walter Scott's heroines over his heroes, and 
 by the time we settle our minds to this convic- 
 tion we find that Mr. Bagehot, that most acute 
 and exhausting of critics, thinks the heroines 
 inferior in every way, and that Sir Walter 
 was truly felicitous only in his male characters. 
 Happily, this is a point on which we should 
 be able to decide for ourselves without much 
 prompting; but all disputed topics are not 
 equally intelligible. There is the vexed and 
 vexing question of romantic and classical, 
 conservative and liberal poetry, about which 
 Mr. Courthope and Mr. Andrew Lang and 
 Mr. Myers have had so much to say of late, 
 and which is, at best, but a dimly lighted path 
 for the uninitiated to travel. There is that 
 perpetual problem, Mr. Walt Whitman, the 
 despair and the stumbling-block of critics, to 
 whose extraordinary effusions, as the Quarterly 
 Review neatly puts it, "existing standards 
 cannot be applied with exactness." There is 
 Emily Bronte, whose verses we were permitted 
 for years to ignore, and in whom we are now 
 
138 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 peremptorily commanded to recognize a true 
 poet. Miss Mary Robinson, who, in common 
 with most female biographers, is an enthusiast 
 rather than a critic, never wearies of praising 
 the " splendid and vigorous movement " of 
 Emily Bronte's poems, " with their surplus 
 imagination, their sweeping impressiveness, 
 their instinctive music and irregular rightness 
 of form." On the other hand, Mr. Gosse, 
 while acknowledging in them a very high 
 order of merit, laments that such burning 
 thoughts should be " concealed for the most 
 part in the tame and ambling measures dedi- 
 cated to female verse by the practice of Felicia 
 Hemans and Letitia Landon." So far, in- 
 deed, from recognizing the " vigorous move- 
 ment " and " irregular rightness of form " 
 which Miss Robinson so much admires, he 
 describes A Death Scene, one of the finest in 
 point of conception, as " clothed in a measure 
 that is like the livery of a charitable institu- 
 tion." " There 's allays two 'pinions," says 
 Mr. Macey, in Silas Marner ; but we cannot 
 help sometimes wishing, in the cause of per- 
 spicuity, that they were not so radically dif- 
 ferent. 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 139 
 
 As for the pure absurdities of criticism, they 
 may be culled like flowers from every branch, 
 and are pleasing curiosities for those who have 
 a liking for such relics. Were human nature 
 less complacent in its self-sufficiency, they 
 might even serve as useful warnings to the im- 
 petuous young reviewers of to-day, and so be 
 not without their salutary influence on litera- 
 ture. Whether the result of ignorance, or 
 dullness, or bad temper, of national or reli- 
 gious prejudices, or of mere personal pique, 
 they have boldly challenged the ridicule of the 
 world, and its amused contempt has pilloried 
 them for all time. When Voltaire sneered at 
 the Inferno, and thought Hamlet the work of 
 a drunken savage, he at least made a bid for 
 the approbation of his countrymen, who, as 
 Schlegel wittily observes, were in the habit of 
 speaking as though Louis XIV. had put an 
 end to cannibalism in Europe. But what did 
 Englishmen think when Hume informed them 
 that Shakespeare was " born in a rude age, 
 and educated in the lowest manner, without 
 instruction from the world or from books ; " 
 and that he could not uphold for any time " a 
 reasonable propriety of thought " ? How did 
 
140 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 they feel when William Maginn brutally de- 
 clared that Keats 
 
 " the doubly dead 
 In that he died so young,' ' 
 
 was but a cockney poet, who wrote vulgar in- 
 decorums, " probably in the indulgence of his 
 social propensities " ? How did they feel when 
 the same Maginn called the Adonais " dreary 
 nonsense " and " a wild waste of words," and 
 devoted bitter pages to proving that Shelley 
 was not only undeserving, but " hopeless of 
 poetic reputation " ? Yet surely indignation 
 must have melted into laughter, when this 
 notable reviewer — who has been recently re- 
 printed as a shining light for the new genera- 
 tion — added serenely that " a hundred or a 
 hundred thousand verses might be made, equal 
 to the best in Adonais, without taking the pen 
 off the paper." This species of sweeping as- 
 sertion has been repeated by critics more than 
 once, to the annoyance of their friends and 
 the malicious delight of their enemies. Bus- 
 kin, who, with all his gifts, seems cursed with 
 what Mr. Bagehot calls " a mind of contrary 
 flexure, whose particular bent it is to contra- 
 dict what those around them say," has ven- 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 141 
 
 tured to tell the world that any head clerk of 
 a bank could write a better history of Greece 
 than Mr. Grote, if he would have the vanity to 
 waste his time over it ; and I have heard a man 
 of fair attainments and of sound scholarship 
 contend that there were twenty living authors 
 who could write plays as fine as Shakespeare's. 
 Jeffrey's extraordinary blunders are too well 
 known to need repetition, and Christopher 
 North w T as not without his share of similar 
 mishaps ; Walpole cheerfully sentenced Scan- 
 dinavian poetry in the bulk as the horrors of 
 a Runic savage ; Madame de Stael objected 
 to the " commonness " of Miss Austen's nov- 
 els ; Wordsworth thought Voltaire dull, and 
 Southey complained that Lamb's essays lacked 
 " sound religious feeling ; " George Borrow, 
 whose literary tastes were at least as erratic as 
 they were pronounced, condemned Sir Walter 
 Scott's Woodstock as " tiresome, trashy, and 
 unprincipled," and ranked Shakespeare, Pope, 
 Addison, and the Welsh bard Huw Morris to- 
 gether as " great poets," apparently without 
 recognizing any marked difference in their re- 
 spective claims. Then there is Taine, who 
 finds Pendennis and Vanity Fair too full of 
 
142 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 sermons ; Mr. Dudley Warner, who compares 
 the mild and genial humor of Washington 
 Irving to the acrid vigor of Swift ; and Mr. 
 Howells, who, perhaps in pity for our sense 
 of loss, would fain persuade us that we could 
 no longer endure either the " mannerisms " 
 of Dickens or the " confidential attitude " of 
 Thackeray, were we happy enough to see these 
 great men still in our midst. 
 
 Imagine, ye who can, the fiery Hazlitt's 
 wrath, if he but knew that in punishment for 
 his youthful admiration of the Nouvelle He- 
 loi'se a close resemblance has been traced by 
 friendly hands between himself and its author. 
 Think of Lord Byron's feelings, if he could 
 hear Mr. Swinburne saying that it was greatly 
 to his — Byron's — credit that he knew him- 
 self for a third-rate poet ! Even though it be 
 the only thing to his credit that Swinburne 
 has so far discovered, one doubts whether it 
 would greatly mollify his lordship, or reconcile 
 him to being classed as a " Bernesque poet," 
 and the companion of those two widely differ- 
 ent creatures, Southey and Offenbach. Per- 
 haps, indeed, his lively sense of humor would 
 derive a more positive gratification from 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 143 
 
 watching his angry critic run amuck through 
 adjectives with frenzied agility. Such sen- 
 tences as " the blundering, floundering, lum- 
 bering, and stumbling stanzas of Childe Har- 
 old, . . . the gasping, ranting, wheezing, 
 broken-winded verse, . . . the hideous absurd- 
 ities and jolter-headed jargon," must surely be 
 less deeply offensive to Lord Byron's admirers 
 than to Mr. Swinburne's. They come as near 
 to describing the noble beauty of Childe Har- 
 old as does Southey's senseless collection of 
 words to describing the cataract of Lodore, 
 or any other cataract in existence ; and, since 
 the days when Milton and Salmasius hurled 
 u Latin billingsgate" at each other's heads, 
 we have had no stronger argument in favor of 
 the comeliness of moderation. 
 
 " The most part of Mr. Swinburne's criti- 
 cism," hints a recent reviewer, " is surely very 
 much of a personal matter, — personal, one 
 may say, in expression as well as in sensation." 
 He has always a " neat hand at an epithet," 
 and the " jolter-headed jargon " of Byron is 
 no finer in its way than the " fanfaronade and 
 falsetto of Gray." But even the charms of 
 alliteration, joined to the fish-wife's slang 
 
144 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 which has recently so tickled the fancy of 
 Punch, 1 cannot wholly replace that clear- 
 headed serenity which is the true test of a crit- 
 ic's worth and the most pleasing expression of 
 his genius. He should have no visible inclina- 
 tion to praise or blame ; it is not his business, 
 as Mr. Bagehot puts it, to be thankful, and 
 neither is he the queen's attorney pleading for 
 conviction. Mr. Matthew Arnold, who con- 
 sidered that Byron was " the greatest natural 
 force, the greatest elementary power, which 
 has appeared in our literature since Shake- 
 speare," presented his arguments plainly and 
 without the faintest show of enthusiasm. He 
 did not feel the need of reviling somebody 
 else in order to emphasize his views, and he 
 did not care to advance opinions without some 
 satisfactory explanation of their existence. 
 Mr. Courthope may content himself with say- 
 ing that a matter is one not for argument, but 
 for perception ; but Mr. Arnold gave a reason 
 for the faith that was in him. Mere prefer- 
 ence on the part of a critic is not a sufficient 
 sanction for his verdicts, or at least it does not 
 
 1 " But when poet Swinburne steps into the fray, 
 
 And slangs like a fish- wife, what, what can one say ? " 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 145 
 
 warrant his imparting them to the public. 
 Swinburne may honestly think four lines of 
 Wordsworth to be of more value than the 
 whole of Byron, but that is no reason why 
 we should think so too. When Mr. George 
 Saintsbury avows a strong personal liking for 
 some favorite authors, — Borrow and Peacock, 
 for instance, — he modestly states that this 
 fact is not in itself a convincing proof of their 
 merit ; but when Mr. Ernest Myers says that 
 he would sacrifice the whole of Childe Har- 
 old to preserve one of Macaulay's Lays, he 
 seems to be offering a really impressive piece 
 of evidence. The tendency of critics to rush 
 into print with whatever they chance to think 
 has resulted in readers who naturally believe 
 that w^hat they think is every bit as good. 
 Macaulay and Walter Savage Landor are both 
 instances of men whose unusual powers of dis- 
 cernment were too often dimmed by their prej- 
 udices. Macaulay knew that Montgomery's 
 poetry was bad, but he failed to see that Fou- 
 que's prose was good; and Landor hit right 
 and left, amid friends and foes, like the 
 blinded Ajax scourging the harmless flocks. 
 It is quite as amusing and far less painful 
 
146 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 to turn from the critics' indiscriminate abuse 
 to their equally indiscriminate praise, and to 
 read the glowing tributes heaped upon authors 
 whose mediocrity has barely saved them from 
 oblivion. Compare the universal rapture which 
 greeted " the majestick numbers of Mr. Cow- 
 ley " to the indifference which gave scant wel- 
 come to the Hesperides. Mr. Gosse tells us 
 that for half a century Katherine Philips, the 
 matchless Orinda, was an unquestioned light 
 in English song. " Her name was mentioned 
 with those of Sappho and Corinna, and lan- 
 guage was used without reproach which would 
 have seemed a little fulsome if addressed to 
 the Muse herself." 
 
 11 For, as in angels, we 
 Do in thy verses see 
 Both improved sexes eminently meet ; 
 
 They are than Man more strong, and more than Woman 
 sweet." 
 
 So sang Cowley to this much admired lady ; 
 and the Earl of Roscommon, in some more ex- 
 travagant and amusing stanzas, asserted it to 
 be his unique experience that, on meeting a 
 pack of angry wolves in Scythia, 
 
 " The magic of Orinda' s name 
 Not only can their fierceness tame, 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 147 
 
 But, if that mighty word I once rehearse, 
 They seem submissively to roar in verse." 
 
 "It is easier to flatter than to praise," says 
 Jean Paul, but even flattery is not always the 
 facile work it seems. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, who was strangely dis- 
 posed to undervalue his own merit as a poet, 
 preserved the most genuine enthusiasm for the 
 work of others. When his little daughter was 
 asked by James Ballantyne what she thought 
 of The Lady of the Lake, she answered with 
 perfect simplicity that she had not read it. 
 " Papa says there is nothing so bad for young 
 people as reading bad poetry." Yet Sir Wal- 
 ter always spoke of Madoc and Thalaba with 
 a reverence that would seem ludicrous were it 
 not so frankly sincere. Southey himself could 
 not have admired them more ; and when Jeffrey 
 criticised Madoc with flippant severity in the 
 Edinburgh Review, we find Scott hastening to 
 the rescue in a letter full of earnest .and sooth- 
 ing praise. " A poem whose merits are of that 
 higher tone," he argues, " does not immediately 
 take with the public at large. It is even possi- 
 ble that during your own life you must be con- 
 tented with the applause of the few whom na- 
 
148 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 ture has gifted with the rare taste for discrim- 
 inating in poetry. But the mere readers of 
 verse must one day come in, and then Madoc 
 will assume his real place, at the feet of Mil- 
 ton." 2 The mere readers of verse, being in 
 no wise responsible for Milton's position in lit- 
 erature, have so far put no one at his feet ; nor 
 have they even verified Sir Walter's judgment 
 when, writing again to Southey, he says with 
 astonishing candor, " I am not such an ass as 
 not to know that you are my better in poetry, 
 though I have had, probably but for a time, 
 the tide of popularity in my favor." The 
 same spirit of self -depreciation, rare enough to 
 be attractive, made him write to Joanna Bail- 
 lie that, after reading some of her songs, he 
 had thrust by his own in despair. 
 
 But if Sir Walter was an uncertain critic, 
 his views on criticism were marked by sound 
 and kindly discretion, and his patience under 
 attack was the result of an evenly balanced 
 mind, conscious of its own strength, yet too 
 
 1 Compare Charles Lamb's letter to Coleridge: " On the 
 whole I expect JSouthey one day to rival Milton ; I already 
 deem him equal to Cowper, and superior to all living' poets 
 besides.' ' 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 149 
 
 sane to believe itself infallible. He had a sin- 
 gular fancy for showing his manuscripts to his 
 friends, and it is quite delicious to see how 
 doubtful and discouraging were their first com- 
 ments. Gray, when hard pressed by the " light 
 and genteel " . verses of his companion, Rich- 
 ard West, was not more frugal of his doled- 
 out praises. But Scott exacted homage neither 
 from his acquaintances nor from the public. 
 When it came — and it did come very soon in 
 generous abundance — he basked willingly 
 in the sunshine ; but he had no uneasy vanity 
 to be frightened by the shade. He would have 
 been as sincerely amused to hear Mr. Borrow 
 call Woodstock " tiresome, trashy, and unprin- 
 cipled " as Matthew Arnold used to be when 
 pelted with strong language by the London 
 newspapers. "I have made a study of the 
 Corinthian or leading-article style," wrote the 
 great critic, with exasperating urbanity ; " and 
 I know its exigencies, and that they are no 
 more to be quarreled with than the law of 
 gravitation." In fact, the most hopeless bar- 
 rier to strife is the steady indifference of a 
 man who knows he has work to do, and who 
 goes on doing it, irrespective of anybody's 
 
150 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 opinion. Lady Harriet Asliburton, who dearly- 
 loved the war of words, in which she was sure 
 to be a victor, was forced to confess that where 
 no friction was excited, even her barbed shafts 
 fell harmless. " It is like talking into a soft 
 surface," she sighed, with whimsical despond- 
 ency ; " there is no rebound." 
 
 American critics have the reputation of be- 
 ing more kind-hearted than discriminating. 
 The struggling young author, unless overween- 
 ingly foolish, has little to fear from their 
 hands ; and, if his reputation be once fairly 
 established, all he chooses to write is received 
 with a gratitude which seems excessive to the 
 more exacting readers of France and England. 
 If he be a humorist, we are always alert and 
 straining to see the fun ; if a story-teller, we 
 politely smother our yawns, and say something 
 about a keen analysis of character, a marked 
 originality of treatment, or a purely unconven- 
 tional theme ; if a scholar, no pitfalls are dug 
 for his unwary feet by reviewers like Mr. Col- 
 lins. Such virulent and personal attacks we 
 consider very uncomfortable reading, as in 
 truth they are, and we have small appetite at 
 any time for a sound kernel beneath a bitter 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 151 
 
 rind. Yet surely in these days, when young 
 students turn impatiently from the very foun- 
 tain-heads of learning, too much stress cannot 
 be laid on the continuity of literature, and on 
 the absolute importance of the classics to those 
 who would intelligently explore the treasure- 
 house of English verse. Moreover, Mr. Col- 
 lins has aimed a few well-directed shafts 
 against the ingenious system of mutual admira- 
 tion, by which a little coterie of writers, mod- 
 ern Delia Cruscans, help each other into prom- 
 inence, while an unsuspecting public is made 
 " the willing dupe of puffers." This delicate 
 game, which is now conducted with such well- 
 rewarded skill by a few enterprising players, 
 consists, not so much in open flattery, though 
 there is plenty of that too, as in the minute 
 chronicling of every insignificant circumstance 
 of each other's daily lives, from the hour at 
 which they breakfast to the amount of exercise 
 they find conducive to appetite, and the shape 
 and size of their dining-room tables. We are 
 stifled by the literary gossip which fills the 
 newspapers and periodicals. Nothing is too 
 trivial, nothing too irrelevant, to be told ; and 
 when, in the midst of an article on any subject, 
 
152 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 
 
 from grand-dukes to gypsies, a writer gravely 
 stops to explain that a perfectly valueless re- 
 mark was made to him on such an occasion 
 by his friend such a one, whose interesting pa- 
 pers on such a topic will be well remembered 
 by the readers of such a magazine, we are 
 forcibly reminded of the late Master of Trin- 
 ity's sarcasm as to the many things that are 
 too unimportant to be forgotten. 
 
 People fed on sugared praises cannot be ex- 
 pected to feel an appetite for the black broth 
 of honest criticism. There was a time, now 
 happily past, when the reviewer's skill lay 
 simply in the clever detection of flaws ; it was 
 his business in life to find out whatever was 
 weak or absurd in an author, and to hold it up 
 for the amusement of those who were not 
 quick enough to see such things for themselves. 
 Now his functions are of a totally different or- 
 der, and a great many writers seem to think it 
 his sole duty to bring them before the public 
 in an agreeable light, to say something about 
 their books which will be pleasant for them to 
 read and to pass over in turn to their friends. 
 If he cannot do this, it is plain he has no sanc- 
 tion to say anything at all. That the critic 
 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 153 
 
 has a duty to the public itself is seldom re- 
 membered ; that his work is of the utmost im- 
 portance, and second in value only to the orig- 
 inal conception he analyzes, is a truth few 
 people take the pains to grasp. Coleridge 
 thought him a mere maggot, battening upon 
 authors' brains ; yet how often has he helped 
 us to gain some clear insight into this most 
 shapeless and shadowy of great men ! Words- 
 worth underrated his utility, yet Wordsworth's 
 criticisms, save those upon his own poems, are 
 among the finest we can read ; and, to argue 
 after the fashion of Mr. Myers, the aver- 
 age student would gladly exchange The Idiot 
 Boy, or Goody Blake and Harry Gill, for an- 
 other letter upon Dryden. As a matter of 
 fact, the labors of the true critic are more es- 
 sential to the author, even, than to the reader. 
 It is natural that poets and novelists should 
 devoutly believe that the creative faculty alone 
 is of any true service to the world, and that 
 it cannot rightly be put to trial by those to 
 whom this higher gift is rigorously denied. 
 But the critical power, though on a distinctly 
 lower level than the creative, is of inestimable 
 help in its development. Great work thrives 
 
154 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 best in a critical atmosphere, and the clear 
 light thrown upon the past is the surest of 
 guides to the future. When the standard of 
 criticism is high, when the influence of classi- 
 cal and foreign literature is understood and 
 appreciated, when slovenly and ill-digested 
 work is promptly recognized as such, then, and 
 then only, may we look for the full expansion 
 of a country's genius. To be satisfied with 
 less is an amiable weakness rather than an in- 
 vigorating stimulant to perfection. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's definition of true criti- 
 cism is familiar to all his readers ; it is simply 
 " a disinterested endeavor to learn and propa- 
 gate the best that is known and thought in the 
 world." But by disinterestedness he did not 
 mean merely that a critic must have no dis- 
 tinct design of flattering either his subject or 
 his audience. He meant that in order to rec- 
 ognize what is really the best a man must free 
 himself from every form of passion or preju- 
 dice, from every fixed opinion, from every 
 practical consideration. He must not look at 
 things from an English, or a French, or an 
 American, standpoint. He has no business 
 with politics or patriotism. These things are 
 
CURIOSITIES OF CRITICISM. 155 
 
 excellent in themselves, and may be allowed to 
 control his actions in other matters ; but when 
 the question at issue is the abstract beauty of 
 a poem, a painting, a statue, or a piece of ar- 
 chitecture, he is expected to stand apart from 
 his every-day self, and to judge of it by some 
 higher and universal law. This is a difficult 
 task for most men, who do not respire easily 
 in such exceedingly rarefied air, and who have 
 no especial taste for blotting out their individ- 
 uality. With Macaulay, for instance, political 
 considerations frankly outweigh all others ; he 
 gives us the good Whig and the wicked Tory 
 on every page, after the fashion of Hogarth's 
 idle and industrious apprentices. Mr. Bage- 
 hot, while a far less transparent writer, man- 
 ifests himself indirectly in his literary prefer- 
 ences. When we have read his essay on 
 Shakespeare, we feel pretty sure we know his 
 views on universal suffrage. Mr. Andrew 
 Lang has indeed objected vehemently to the 
 intrusion of politics into literature, perhaps 
 because of a squeamish distaste for the harsh 
 wranglings of the political field. But Mr. 
 Arnold was incapable of confusing the two 
 ideas. His taste for Celtic poetry and his 
 
1 
 
 156 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 attitude towards home rule are both perfectly- 
 defined and perfectly isolated sentiments ; just 
 as his intelligent admiration and merciless con- 
 demnation of Heinrich Heine stand side by- 
 side, living witnesses of a mind that held its 
 own balance, losing nothing that was good, 
 condoning nothing that was evil, as far re- 
 moved from weak enthusiasm on the one hand 
 as from frightened depreciation on the other. 
 
 It is folly to rail at the critic until we have 
 learned his value ; it is folly to ignore a help 
 which we are not too wise to need. " The best 
 that is known and thought in the world " does 
 not stand waiting for admission on our door- 
 steps. Like the happiness of Hesiod, it 
 "abides very far hence, and the way to it is 
 long and steep and rough." It is hard to seek, 
 hard to find, and not easily understood when 
 discovered. Criticism does not mean a ran- 
 dom opinion on the last new novel, though 
 even the most dismal of light literature comes 
 fairly within its scope. It means a disinter- 
 ested endeavor to learn and to teach whatever 
 wisdom or beauty has been added by every 
 age and every nation to the great inheritance 
 of mankind. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 
 
 "When Mr. Matthew Arnold delivered his 
 lecture on Emerson in this country, several 
 years ago, it was delightful to see how the 
 settled melancholy of his audience, who had 
 come for a panegyric and did not get it, 
 melted into genial applause when the lecturer 
 touched at last upon the one responsive chord 
 which bound his subject, his hearers, and him- 
 self in a sympathetic harmony, — I mean 
 Emerson's lifelong, persistent, and unconquer- 
 able optimism. This was perhaps the more 
 apparent because Mr. Arnold's addresses were 
 not precisely the kind with which we Ameri- 
 cans are best acquainted ; they were singularly 
 deficient in the oratorical flights that are wont 
 to arouse our enthusiasm, and in the sudden 
 descents to colloquial anecdote by which we 
 expect to be amused. For real enjoyment it 
 was advisable to read them over carefully 
 after they were printed, and the oftener they 
 
158 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 were so read the better they repaid perusal ; 
 but this not being the point of view from 
 which ordinary humanity is apt to regard a 
 lecture, it was with prompt and genuine re- 
 lief that the audience hailed a personal appeal 
 to that cheerful, healthy hopefulness of dispo- 
 sition which we like to be told we possess in 
 common with greater men. It is always pleas- 
 ant to hear that happiness is " the due and 
 eternal result of labor, righteousness, and ve- 
 racity," and to have it hinted to us that we 
 have sane and wholesome minds because we 
 think so; it is pleasanter still to be assured 
 that the disparaging tone which religion as- 
 sumes in relation to this earthly happiness 
 arises from a well-intentioned desire to wean 
 us from it, and not at all from a clear-sighted 
 conviction of its feeble worth. When Mr. 
 Arnold recited for our benefit a cheerless little 
 scrap of would-be pious verse which he had 
 heard read in a London schoolroom, all about 
 the advantages of dying, — 
 
 1 ' For the world at best is a dreary place, 
 And my life is getting low," — 
 
 we were glad to laugh over such dismal phi- 
 losophy, and to feel within ourselves an exhila- 
 rating superiority of soul. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 159 
 
 But self-satisfaction, if as buoyant as gas, 
 has an ugly trick of collapsing when full- 
 blown, and facts are stony things that refuse 
 to melt away in the sunshine of a smile. Mr. 
 Arnold, like Mr. Emerson, preached the gos- 
 pel of compensation with much picturesque- 
 ness and beauty ; but his arguments would be 
 more convincing if our own observation and 
 experience did not so mulishly stand in their 
 way. A recent writer in Cornhill, who ought 
 to be editing a magazine for Arcady, asserts 
 with charming simplicity that man " finds a 
 positive satisfaction in putting himself on a 
 level with others, and in recognizing that he 
 has his just share of life's enjoyments." But 
 suppose that he cannot reach the level of 
 others, or be persuaded that his share is just ? 
 The good things of life are not impartially 
 divided, like the spaces on a draught-board, 
 and man, who is a covetous animal, will never 
 be content with a little, while his comrade 
 enjoys a great deal. Neither does he find the 
 solace that is expected in the contemplation of 
 the unfortunate who has nothing ; for this 
 view of the matter, besides being a singular 
 plea for the compensation theory, appeals too 
 
160 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 coarsely to that root of selfishness which we 
 are none of us anxious to exhibit. The aver- 
 age fustian-clad man is not too good to envy 
 his neighbor's broadcloth, but he is too good to 
 take comfort in his brother's nakedness. The 
 sight of it may quicken his gratitude, but can 
 hardly increase his happiness. Yet what did 
 Mr. Arnold mean in his poem of Consolation 
 — which is very charming, but not in the least 
 consoling — save that the joys and sorrows of 
 each hour balance themselves in a just propor- 
 tion, and that the lovers' raptures and the 
 blind robber's pain level the eternal scales. It 
 is not a cheering bit of philosophy, whatever 
 might have been the author's intention, for the 
 very existence of suffering darkens the horizon 
 for thoughtful souls. It would be an insult 
 on the part of the lovers — lovers are odious 
 things at best — to offer their arrogant bliss 
 as indemnification to the wretch for his brim- 
 ming cup of bitterness ; but the vision of his 
 seared eyeballs and sin-laden soul might justly 
 moderate their own expansive felicity. Sor- 
 row has a claim on all mankind, and when the 
 utmost that Mr. Arnold could promise for our 
 consolation was that time, the impartial, 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 161 
 
 ' ' Brings round to all men 
 Some undimm'd hours," 
 
 we did not feel that he afforded us any broad 
 ground for self-complacency. 
 
 The same key is struck with more firmness 
 in that strange poem, The Sick King in 
 Bokhara, where the vizier can find no better 
 remedy for his master's troubled mind than by 
 pointing out to him the vast burden of misery 
 which rests upon the world, and which he is 
 utterly powerless to avert. It is hardly worth 
 while, so runs the vizier's argument, for the 
 king to vex his soul over the sufferings of one 
 poor criminal, whom his pity could not save, 
 when the same tragic drama is being played 
 with variations in every quarter of the globe. 
 Behold, thousands are toiling for hard mas- 
 ters, armies are laying waste the peaceful land, 
 robbers are harassing the mountain shepherds, 
 and little children are being carried into cap- 
 tivity. 
 
 u The Kaffirs also (whom God curse !) 
 Vex one another night and day ; 
 There are the lepers, and all sick ; 
 There are the poor, who faint away. 
 
162 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 11 All these have sorrow and keep still, 
 Whilst other men make cheer and sing-. 
 Wilt thou have pity on all these ? 
 No, nor on this dead dog*, O king ! ' ' 
 
 Whereupon the sick monarch, who does not 
 seem greatly cheered by this category, adds in 
 a disconsolate sort of way that he too, albeit 
 envied of all men, finds his secret burdens 
 hard to bear, and that not even to him is 
 granted the fulfillment of desire, — 
 
 " And what I would, I cannot do." 
 
 Unless the high priests of optimism shall find 
 us some stouter arguments than these with 
 which to make merry our souls, it is to be 
 feared that their opponents, who have at least 
 the knack of stating their cases with pitiless 
 lucidity, will hardly think our buoyancy worth 
 pricking. 
 
 As for that small and compact band who 
 steadfastly refuse to recognize in " this sad, 
 swift life " any occasion for self -congratula- 
 tion, they are not so badly off, in spite of their 
 funereal trappings, as we are commonly given 
 to suppose. It is only necessary to read a 
 page of their writings — and few people care 
 to read more — to appreciate how thoroughly 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 163 
 
 they enjoy the situation, and how, sitting with 
 Hecate in her cave, they weave delicate 
 thoughts out of their chosen darkness. They 
 are full of the hopefulness of despair, and con- 
 fident in the strength of the world's weakness. 
 They assume that they not only represent 
 great fundamental truths, but that these truths 
 are for the first time being put forth in a con- 
 crete shape for the edification and adherence 
 of mankind. Mr. Edgar Salfcus informs us 
 that, while optimism is as old as humanity, 
 " systematic pessimism " is but a growth of 
 the last half century, before which transition 
 period we can find only individual expressions 
 of discontent. Mr. Mallock claims that he is 
 the first who has ever inquired into the worth 
 of life " in the true scientific spirit." But 
 when we come to ask in what systematic or 
 scientific pessimism differs from the older 
 variety which has found a home in the hearts 
 of men from the beginning, we do not receive 
 any very coherent answer. From Mr. Mal- 
 lock, indeed, we hardly expect any. It is his 
 province in literature to propose problems 
 which the reader, after the fashion of The 
 Lady or the Tiger ? is permitted to solve for 
 

 164 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 himself. But does Mr. Saltus really suppose 
 that Schopenhauer and Hartmann have made 
 much headway in reducing sadness to a sci- 
 ence, that love is in any danger of being sup- 
 planted by the " genius of the species," or that 
 the " principle of the unconscious " is at all 
 likely to extinguish our controlling force? 
 What have these two subtle thinkers said to 
 the world that the world has not practically 
 known and felt for thousands of years already ? 
 Hegesias, three centuries before Christ, was 
 quite as systematic as Schopenhauer, and his 
 system begot more definite results ; for several 
 of his disciples hanged themselves out of defer- 
 ence for his teachings, whereas it may be seri- 
 ously doubted whether all the persuasive argu- 
 ments of the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 
 have ever made or are likely to make a single 
 celibate. Marcus Aurelius was as logically 
 convinced of the inherent worthlessness of life 
 as Dr. Hartmann, and, without any scientific 
 apparatus whatever, he stamped his views on 
 the face of a whole nation. We are now 
 anxiously warned by Mr. Saltus not to con- 
 found scientific pessimism with that accidental 
 melancholy which is the result of our own per- 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 165 
 
 sonal misfortunes ; but Leopardi, whose unut- 
 terable despair arose solely from his personal 
 misfortunes, or rather from his moral inability 
 to cope with them, — for Joubert, who suffered 
 as much, has left a trail of heavenly light upon 
 his path, — Leopardi alone lays bare for us the 
 
 " Tears that spring and increase 
 In the barren places of mirth, ' ' 
 
 with an appalling accuracy from which we are 
 glad to turn away our shocked and troubled 
 eyes. 
 
 It is a humiliating fact that, notwithstand- 
 ing our avaricious greed for novelties, we are 
 forced, when sincere, to confess that " les 
 anciens out tout dit" and that it is probable 
 the contending schools of thought have always 
 held the same relative positions they do now : 
 optimism glittering in the front ranks as a 
 deservedly popular favorite ; pessimism speak- 
 ing with a still, persistent voice to those who, 
 unluckily for themselves, have the leisure and 
 the intelligence to attend. Schopenhauer 
 hated the Jews with all his heart for being 
 such stubborn optimists, and it is true that 
 their records bear ample witness to the strong 
 hold they took on the pleasures and the profits 
 
166 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 of the world. But their noblest and clearest 
 voices, Isaias, Jeremias, Ezekiel, speak a dif- 
 ferent language ; and Solomon, who, it must 
 be granted, enjoyed a wider experience than 
 most men, renders a cheerless verdict of vanity 
 and vexation of spirit for " all things that are 
 done under the sun." The Egyptians, owing 
 chiefly to their tender solicitude about their 
 tombs, have taken rank in history as a people 
 enamoured rather of death than of life ; and 
 from the misty flower-gardens of Buddha have 
 been gathered for centuries the hemlock and 
 nightshade that adorn the funeral-wreaths of 
 literature. 
 
 But the Greeks, the blithe and jocund 
 Greeks, who, as Mr. Arnold justly observed, 
 ought never to have been either sick or sorry, 
 — to them, at least, we can turn for that 
 wholesome joy, that rational delight in mere 
 existence, which we have somehow let slip 
 from our nerveless grasp. Whether it was 
 because this world gave him so much, such 
 rare perfection in all material things, or be- 
 cause his own conception of the world to come 
 promised him so exceedingly little, — for one 
 or both of these reasons, the average Greek 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 1G7 
 
 preferred to cling tenaciously to the good he 
 had, to the hills, and the sea, and the sunshine, 
 rather than to 
 
 "Move among shadows, a shadow, and wail by impassable 
 streams ; ' ' 
 
 and his choice, under the circumstances, is 
 perhaps hardly a matter for amazement. That 
 a people so richly endowed should be in love 
 with life seems to us right and natural ; that 
 amid their keen realization of its fullness and 
 beauty we find forever sounded — and not 
 always in a minor key — the same old notes 
 of weariness and pain is a discouraging item, 
 when we would like to build up an exhaustive 
 theory of happiness. Far, far back, in the 
 Arcadian days of Grecian piety and simplicity, 
 the devout agriculturist Hesiod looked sorrow- 
 fully over the golden fields, searching vainly 
 for a joy that remained ever out of reach. 
 Homer, in a passage which Mr. Peacock says 
 is nearly always incorrectly translated, has 
 given us a summary of life which would not 
 put a modern German to the blush : — 
 
 " Jove, from his urns dispensing- good and ill, 
 Gives ill unmixed to some, and good and ill 
 Mingled to many, good unmixed to none." 
 

 168 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 Sophocles says uncompromisingly that man's 
 happiest fate is not to be born at all; and 
 that, failing this good fortune, the next best 
 thing is to die as quickly as possible. Menan- 
 der expresses the same thought more sweet- 
 
 ly:- 
 
 " Whom the gods love die young ; " 
 
 and Euripides, the most reverent soul ever 
 saddened by the barrenness of paganism, 
 forces into one bitter line all the bleak hope- 
 lessness of which the Greek tragedy alone is 
 capable : — 
 
 11 Life is called life, but it is truly pain." 
 
 Even as isolated sentiments, these ever-recur- 
 ring reflections diminish perceptibly the sum 
 of a nation's gayety, and, if we receive the 
 drama as the mouthpiece of the people, we are 
 inclined to wonder now and then how they 
 ever could have been cheerful at all. It is 
 easy, on the other hand, to point to Admetos 
 and Antigone as two standing examples of the 
 great value the Greeks placed upon life ; for 
 the sacrifice of Alkestis was not in their eyes 
 the sordid bargain it appears in ours, and the 
 daughter of CEdipus goes to her death with a 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 169 
 
 shrinking reluctance seemingly out of keeping 
 with her heroic mould. But Admetos, excuse 
 him as we may, is but a refinement of a com- 
 mon type, old as mankind, and no great credit 
 to its ranks. He may be found in every page 
 of the world's history, from the siege of Jeru- 
 salem to the siege of Paris. A Kempis has 
 transfixed him with sharp scorn in his chapter 
 On the Consideration of Human Misery, and 
 a burning theatre or a sinking ship betray 
 him, shorn of poetical disguise, in all his un- 
 adorned brutality. But to find fault with 
 Antigone, the noblest figure in classical litera- 
 ture, because she manifests a natural dislike 
 for being buried alive is to carry our ideal 
 of heroism a little beyond reason. Flesh and 
 blood shrink from the sickening horror that 
 lays its cold hand upon her heart. She is 
 young, beautiful, and beloved, standing on the 
 threshold of matrimony, and clinging with 
 womanly tenderness to the sacred joys that 
 are never to be hers. She is a martyr in a 
 just cause, but without one ray of that divine 
 ecstasy that sent Christian maidens smiling to 
 the lions. Beyond a chilly hope that she will 
 not be unwelcome to her parents, or to the 
 
170 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 brother she has vainly striven to save from 
 desecration, Antigone descends 
 
 " Into the dreary mansions of the dead," 
 
 uncheered by any throb of expectation. Fi- 
 nally, the manner of her death is too appalling 
 to be met with stoicism. Juliet, the bravest 
 of Shakespeare's heroines, quails before the 
 thought of a few unconscious hours spent in 
 the darkness of the tomb ; and if our more 
 exalted views demand indifference to such a 
 fate, we must not look to the Greeks, nor to 
 him who 
 
 " Saw life steadily, and saw it whole," 
 
 for the fulfillment of our idle fancy. 
 
 Youth, health, beauty, and virtue were to 
 the ancient mind the natural requisites for 
 happiness; yet even these favors were so 
 far at best from securing it, that " nature's 
 most pleasing invention, early death," was too 
 often esteemed the rarest gift of all. When 
 Schopenhauer says of the fourth command- 
 ment, " c Honor thy father and thy mother, 
 that thy days may be long in the land,' — ah ! 
 what a misfortune to hold out as a reward for 
 duty ! " we feel both shocked and repulsed by 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 171 
 
 this deliberate rejection of what is offered us 
 as a blessing; but it is at least curious to note 
 that the happy Greeks held much the same 
 opinion. When the sons of Cydippe — those 
 models of filial devotion — shamed not to yoke 
 themselves like oxen to the cart, and with 
 strong young arms to drag their mother to the 
 feast of Hera, the ancient priestess begged of 
 the dread goddess that she would grant them 
 her best gift ; and the prayer was answered, 
 not with length of days, nor with the regal 
 power and splendor promised of old to Paris, 
 but with a boon more precious still than all. 
 
 " Whereat the statue from its jeweled eyes 
 Lightened, and thunder ran from cloud to cloud 
 In heaven, and the vast company was hushed. 
 But when they sought for Cleobis, behold, 
 He lay there still, and by his brother's side 
 Lay Biton, smiling- through ambrosial curls, 
 And when the people touched them they were dead. " * 
 
 It is hard to assert in the face of a narra- 
 tive like this that the Greeks valued nothing 
 as much as the mere delight of existence. 
 
 As for the favorite theory that Christianity 
 is responsible for the weakening of earthly 
 happiness, and that her ministers have system- 
 
 1 The Sons of Cydippe, by Edmund Gosse. 
 
172 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 atically disparaged the things of this world in 
 order to quicken our desire for things eternal, 
 it might suffice to hint that Christianity is a 
 large word, and represents at present a great 
 many different phases of thought. Mr. Ar- 
 nold objected, rationally enough, to the lugu- 
 brious hymns from which the English middle 
 classes are wont to draw their spiritual refresh- 
 ment ; and Dr. Holmes, it will be remem- 
 bered, has spoken quite as strongly in regard to 
 their depressing influence upon New England 
 households. But Christianity and the modern 
 hymn-book are by no means synonymous 
 terms, and to claim that the early church de- 
 liberately lowered the scale of human joy is 
 a very different and a very grave charge, and 
 one which Mr. Pater, in Marius the Epicu- 
 rean, has striven valiantly to refute. With 
 what clear and delicate touches he paints for 
 us the innocent gayety of that new birth, — a 
 gayety with no dark background, and no heart- 
 breaking limits of time and space. Compared 
 to it, the sombre and multitudinous rites of 
 the Romans and the far-famed blitheness of 
 the Greeks seem incurably narrow and insipid. 
 The Christians of the catacombs were essen- 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 173 
 
 tially a cheerful body, having for their favorite 
 emblem the serene image of the Good Shep- 
 herd, and believing firmly that " grief is the 
 sister of doubt and ill-temper, and beyond all 
 spirits destroyeth man." If in the Middle 
 'Ages the Church apparently darkened earth to 
 brighten heaven, it was simply because she 
 took life as she found it, and strove, as she 
 still strives, to teach the only doctrine of com- 
 pensation that the tyranny of facts cannot 
 cheaply overthrow. The mediaeval peasant 
 may have been less badly off, on the whole, 
 than we are generally pleased to suppose. He 
 was, from all accounts, a robust, unreasoning 
 creature, who held his neck at the mercy of 
 his feudal lord, and the rest of his scanty 
 possessions at the discretion of the tax-gath- 
 erer ; but who had not yet bared his back to 
 the intolerable sting of that modern gadfly, 
 the professional agitator and socialistic cham- 
 pion of the poor. Yet even without this last 
 and sorest infliction, it is probable that life 
 was to him but little worth the living, and that 
 religion could not well paint the world much 
 blacker than he found it. There was scant 
 need, in his case, for disparaging the pleasures 
 
174 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 of the flesn ; and hope, lingering alone in his 
 Pandora box of troubles, saved him from utter 
 annihilation by pointing steadily beyond the 
 doors of death. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the abstract question of 
 whether our present existence be enjoyable or 
 otherwise is one which creeds do not materi- 
 ally modify. A pessimist may be deeply re- 
 ligious like Pascal and Chateaubriand, or ut- 
 terly skeptical like Schopenhauer and Hart- 
 mann, or purely philosophical like faint- 
 hearted Amiel. He may agree with Lamen- 
 nais, that " man is the most suffering of all 
 creatures ; " or with Voltaire, that " happi- 
 ness is a dream, and pain alone is real." He 
 may listen to Saint Theresa, " It is given to 
 us either to die or to suffer ; " or to Leopardi, 
 " Life is fit only to be despised." He may 
 read in the diary of that devout recluse, Eu- 
 genie de Guerin that " dejection is the ground- 
 work of human life ; " or he may turn over 
 the pages of Sir Walter Raleigh, and see how 
 a typical man of the world, soldier, courtier, 
 and navigator, can find no words ardent 
 enough in which to praise " the workmanship 
 of death, that finishes the sorrowful business 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 175 
 
 of a wretched life." I do not mean to imply- 
 that Leopardi and Eugenie de Guerin re- 
 garded existence from the same point of view, 
 or found the same solace for their pain ; but 
 that they both struck the keynote of pessimis- 
 tic philosophy by recognizing that, in this 
 world at least, sorrow outbalances joy, and 
 that it is given to all men to eat their bread 
 in tears. On the other hand, if we are disin- 
 clined to take this view, we shall find no lack 
 of guides, both saints and sinners, ready to 
 look the Sphinx smilingly in the face, and 
 puzzle out a different answer to her riddle. 
 
 Another curious notion is that poets have a 
 prescriptive right to pessimism, and should 
 feel themselves more or less obliged, in virtue 
 of their craft, to take upon their shoulders the 
 weight of suffering humanity. Mr. James 
 Sully, for instance, whose word, as a student 
 of these matters, cannot be disregarded, 
 thinks it natural and almost inevitable that a 
 true poet should be of a melancholy cast, by 
 reason of the sensitiveness of his moral nature 
 and his exalted sympathy for pain. But it 
 has yet to be proved that poets are a more 
 compassionate race than their obscurer breth- 
 
176 . BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 x 
 
 ren who sit in counting-houses or brew beer. 
 They are readier, indeed, to moralize over the 
 knife-grinder, but quite as slow to tip him the 
 coveted sixpence. Shelley, whose soul swelled 
 at the wrongs of all mankind, did not hesitate 
 to inflict pain on the one human being whom 
 it was his obvious duty to protect. But then 
 Shelley, like Carlyle, belonged to the category 
 of reformers rather than to the pessimists; 
 believing that though the world as he saw it 
 was as bad as possible, things could be easily 
 mended by simply turning them topsy-turvy 
 under his direction. Now the pessimist proper 
 is the most modest of men. He does not flat- 
 ter himself for a moment that he can alter the 
 existing state of evil, or that the human race, 
 by its combined efforts, can do anything better 
 than simply cease to live. He may entertain 
 with Novalis a shadowy hope that when man- 
 kind, wearied of its own impotence, shall ef- 
 face itself from the bosom of the earth, a bet- 
 ter and happier species shall fill the vacant 
 land. Or he may believe with Hartmann that 
 there is even less felicity possible in the com- 
 ing centuries than in the present day ; that 
 humanity is already on the wane ; that the 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 177 
 
 higher we stand in the physical and intellect- 
 ual scale the more inevitable becomes our suf- 
 fering ; and that when men shall have thrown 
 aside the last illusion of their youth, namely, 
 the hope of any obtainable good either in this 
 world or in another, they will then no longer 
 consent to bear the burden of life, but, by the 
 supreme force of their united volition, will 
 overcome the resistance of nature, and achieve 
 the destruction of the universe. But under 
 no circumstances does he presume to imagine 
 that he, a mere unit of pain, can in any degree 
 change or soften the remorseless words of 
 fate. 
 
 To return to the poets, however, it is edify- 
 ing to hear Mr. Leslie Stephen assert that 
 " nothing is less poetical than optimism," or to 
 listen to Mr. John Addington Symonds, who, 
 scanning the thoughtful soul for a solution of 
 man's place in the order of creation, can find 
 for him no more joyous task than, Prome- 
 theus-like, 
 
 " To dree life's doom on Caucasus.' ' 
 
 Even when a poem appears to the uninitiated 
 to be of a cheerful, not to say blithesome cast, 
 
178 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 the critics are busy reading unutterable sad- 
 ness between the lines ; and while we smile at 
 Puck, and the fairies, and the sweet Titania 
 nursing her uncouth love, we must remember 
 that the learned Dr. Ulrici has pronounced 
 the Midsummer Night's Dream to be a serious 
 homily, preached with grave heart to an un- 
 thinking world. But is Robin Goodfellow 
 really a missionary in disguise, and are the 
 poets as pessimistic in their teaching as their 
 interpreters would have us understand ? Heine 
 undoubtedly was, and Byron pretended to be. 
 Keats, with all the pathos of his shadowed 
 young life, was nothing of the sort, nor was 
 Milton, nor Goethe, nor Wordsworth; while 
 Scott, lost, apparently, to the decent require- 
 ments of his art, confessed unblushingly that 
 fortune could not long play a dirge upon his 
 buoyant spirits. And Shakespeare? Why, 
 he was all and everything. Day and night, 
 sunlight and starlight, were embraced in his 
 affluent nature. He laid his hand on the 
 quivering pulses of the world, and, recogniz- 
 ing that life was often in itself both pleasant 
 and good, he yet knew, and knew it without 
 pain, that death was better still. Look only 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 179 
 
 at the character of Horatio, the very type of 
 
 the blithe, sturdy, and somewhat commonplace 
 
 young student, to whom enjoyment seems a 
 
 birthright, — 
 
 " A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
 Hast ta'en with equal thanks.'' 
 
 Yet it is to this man, of all others, that the 
 dying Hamlet utters the pathetic plea, — 
 
 " If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain 
 To tell my story." 
 
 Here at last is a ray of real light, guiding 
 us miles away from the murky paths of mod- 
 ern French and English poetry, where we have 
 stumbled along, growing despondent in the 
 gloom. To brave life cheerfully, to welcome 
 death gladly, are possible things, after all, and 
 better worth man's courage and convictions 
 than to dree on Caucasus forever. 
 
 It is ludicrous to turn from the poets to the 
 politicians, but nowadays every question, even 
 the old unanswered one, "Is life worth liv- 
 ing? " must needs be viewed from its political 
 standpoint. What can be more delightful 
 than to hear Mr. Courthope assert that op- 
 
180 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 timisni is the note of the Liberal party, while 
 the Conservatives are necessarily pessimistic? 
 — especially when one remembers the genial 
 utterance of Mr. Walter Bagehot, contending 
 that the very essence of Toryism is enjoyment. 
 " The way to be satisfied with existing things 
 is to enjoy them." Yet Sir Francis Doyle 
 bears witness in his memoirs that the stoutest 
 of Tories can find plenty to grumble at, which 
 is not altogether surprising in a sadly ill-regu- 
 lated world ; and while the optimistic Liberal 
 fondly believes that he is marching straight 
 along the chosen road to the gilded towers of 
 El Dorado, the less sanguine Conservative 
 contents himself with trying, after his dull, 
 practical fashion, to step clear of some of the 
 ruts and quagmires by the way. As for the 
 extreme Radicals, — and every nation has its 
 full share of these gentry, — their optimism is 
 too glittering for sober eyes to bear. A clas- 
 sical tradition says that each time Sisyphos 
 rolls his mighty stone up the steep mountain 
 side he believes that it will reach the summit ; 
 and, its ever-repeated falls failing to teach him 
 any surer lesson, his doom, like that of our 
 reforming brothers, is softened into eternal 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 181 
 
 hope. But it may at least be questioned 
 whether the other inhabitants of Tartarus — 
 none of whom, it will be remembered, are 
 without their private grievances — do not oc- 
 casionally weary of the dust and racket, and 
 of the great ball forever thundering about 
 their ears, as it rolls impotently down to the 
 level whence it came. 
 
 The pessimist, however, — be it recorded to 
 his credit, — is seldom an agitating individual. 
 His creed breeds indifference to others, and he 
 does not trouble himself to thrust his views 
 upon the unconvinced. We have, indeed, an 
 anecdote of Dr. Johnson, who broadly as- 
 serted upon one occasion that no one could 
 well be happy in this world, whereupon an un- 
 reasonable old lady had the bad taste to con- 
 tradict him, and to insist that she, for one, 
 was happy, and knew it. " Madam," replied 
 the irate philosopher, " it is impossible. You 
 are old, you are ugly, you are sickly and poor. 
 How, then, can you be happy ? " But this, 
 we think, was rather a natural burst of indig- 
 nation on the good doctor's part than a dis- 
 tinct attempt at proselytizing, though it is 
 likely that he somewhat damped the boasted 
 
182 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 felicity of his antagonist. Schopenhauer, the 
 great apostle of pessimism, while willing 
 enough to make converts on a grand scale, 
 was scornfully unconcerned about the every- 
 day opinions of his every-day — I was going 
 to say associates, but the fact is that Schopen- 
 hauer was never guilty of really associating 
 with anybody. He had at all times the cour- 
 age of his convictions, and delighted in illus- 
 trating his least attractive theories. Teaching 
 asceticism, he avoided women ; despising hu- 
 man companionship, he isolated himself from 
 men. A luminous selfishness guided him 
 through life, and saved him from an incredible 
 number of discomforts. It was his rule to 
 expect nothing, to desire as little as possible, 
 and to learn all he could. Want, he held to 
 be the scourge of the poor, as ennui is that of 
 the rich ; accordingly, he avoided the one by 
 looking sharply after his money, and the other 
 by working with unremitting industry. Pleas- 
 ure, he insisted, was but a purely negative 
 quality, a mere absence from pain. He smiled 
 at the sweet, hot delusions of youth, and 
 shrugged his shoulders over the limitless fol- 
 lies of manhood, regarding both from the 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 183 
 
 standpoint of a wholly disinterested observer. 
 If the test of happiness in the Arabian para- 
 dise be to hear the measured beating of one's 
 own heart, Schopenhauer was certainly quali- 
 fied for admission. Even in this world he 
 was so far from being miserable, that an at- 
 mosphere of snug comfort surrounds the man 
 whose very name has become a synonym for 
 melancholy; and to turn from his cold and 
 witty epigrams to the smothered despair that 
 burdens Leopardi's pages is like stepping at 
 once from a pallid, sunless afternoon into the 
 heart of midnight. It is always a pleasant 
 task for optimists to dwell as much as possible 
 on the buoyancy with which every healthy 
 man regards his unknown future, and on the 
 natural pleasure he takes in recalling the 
 brightness of the past ; but Leopardi, playing 
 the trump card of pessimism, demonstrates 
 with merciless precision the insufficiency of 
 such relief. We cannot in reason expect, he 
 argues, that, with youth behind us and old 
 age in front, our future will be any improve- 
 ment on our past, for with increasing years 
 come increasing sorrows to all men ; and as 
 for the boasted happiness of that past, which 
 

 184 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 of us would live it over again for the sake of 
 the joys it contained ? Memory cheats us no 
 less than hope by hazing over those things 
 that we would fain forget ; but who that has 
 plodded on to middle age would take back 
 upon his shoulders ten of the vanished years, 
 with their mingled pleasures and pains ? Who 
 would return to the youth he is forever pre- 
 tending to regret ? 
 
 Such thoughts are not cheerful companions ; 
 i>ut if they stand the test of application, it is 
 useless to call them morbid. The pessimist 
 does not contend that there is no happiness in 
 life, but that, for the generality of mankind, it 
 is outbalanced by trouble ; and this flinty as- 
 surance is all he has to offer in place of the fas- 
 cinating theory of compensation. It would 
 seem as though no sane man could hesitate 
 between them, if he had the choice, for one 
 pleasant delusion is worth a hundred disagree- 
 able facts ; but in this serious and truth-hunt- 
 ing age people have forgotten the value of fic- 
 tion, and, like sulky children, refuse to play 
 at anything. Certainly it would be hard to 
 find a more dispiriting literature than we en- 
 joy at present. Scientists, indeed, are reported 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 185 
 
 by those who have the strength of mind to fol- 
 low them as being exceedingly merry and 
 complacent ; but the less ponderous illumi- 
 nati, to whom feebler souls turn instinctively 
 for guidance, are shining just now with a se- 
 vere and chastened light. "When on pleasure 
 bent they are as frugal as Mrs. Gilpin, but 
 they sup sorrow with a long spoon, utterly re- 
 gardless of their own or their readers' diges- 
 tions. Germany still rings with Heine's dis- 
 cordant laughter, and France, rich in the 
 poets of decadence, offers us Les Fleurs du 
 Mai to wear upon our bosoms. England 
 listens, sighing, while Carlyle's denunciations 
 linger like muttering thunder in the air; or 
 while Mr. Ruskin, " the most inspired of the 
 modern prophets," vindicates his oracular 
 spirit by crying, 
 
 " Woe ! woe ! earth ! Apollo, Apollo ! " 
 
 with the monotonous persistency of Cassandra. 
 Mr. Mallock, proud to kneel at Mr. Ruskin's 
 feet as " an intellectual debtor to a public 
 teacher," binds us in his turn within the fine 
 meshes of his exhaustless subtleties, until we 
 grow light-headed rather than light-hearted 
 
186 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 under such depressing manipulation. Mr. 
 Pater, who at one time gave us to understand 
 that he would teach us how to enjoy life, has, 
 so far, revealed nothing but its everlasting sad- 
 ness. If the old Cyrenaics were no gayer than 
 their modern representatives, Aristippus of 
 Cyrene might just as well have been Diogenes 
 sulking in his tub, or Heraclitus adding use- 
 less tears to the trickling moisture of his cave. 
 Even our fiction has grown disconcertingly 
 sad within the last few years, and with a new 
 order of sadness, invented apparently to keep 
 pace with the melancholy march of mind. The 
 novelist of the past had but two courses open 
 to him : either to leave Edwin and Angelina 
 clasped in each other's arms, or to provide for 
 one of them a picturesque and daisy-strewn 
 grave. Ordinarily he chose the former alter- 
 native, as being less harassing to himself, and 
 more gratifying to his readers. Books that 
 end badly have seldom been really popular, 
 though sometimes a tragic conclusion is essen- 
 tial to the artistic development of the story. 
 When Tom and Maggie Tulliver go down, 
 hand in hand, amid the rushing waters of the 
 Floss, we feel, even through our tears, — and 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 187 
 
 mine are fresh each time I read the page, — 
 that the one possible solution of the problem 
 has been reached; that only thus could the 
 widely contrasting natures of brother and sis- 
 ter meet in unison, and the hard-fought battle 
 be gained. Such an end is not sad, it is happy 
 and beautiful ; and, moreover, it is in a mea- 
 sure inevitable, the climax being shadowed 
 from the beginning, as in the tragedy of the 
 Greeks, and the whole tale moving swiftly and 
 surely to its appointed close. If we compare 
 a finely chiseled piece of work like this with 
 the flat, faintly colored sketches which are at 
 present passing muster for novels, we feel that 
 beauty of form is something not compounded 
 of earthly materials only, and that neither the 
 savage strength of French and Russian real- 
 ism, nor the dreary monotony of German spec- 
 ulative fiction, can lift us any nearer the tran- 
 quil realms of art. 
 
 Nor can we even claim that we have gained 
 in cheerfulness what we have lost in sym- 
 metry, for the latest device of the pessimistic 
 story-writer is to marry his pair of lovers, and 
 then coldly inform us that, owing to the inevi- 
 table evils of life, they w r ere not particularly 
 
188 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 happy after all. Now Lady Martin (Helen 
 Faucit), that loving student and impersonator 
 of Shakespeare's heroines, has expressed her 
 melancholy conviction that the gentle Hero 
 was but ill-mated with one so fretful and 
 paltry-souled as Claudio ; and that Imogen 
 the fair was doomed to an early death, the 
 bitter fruit of her sad pilgrimage to Milford- 
 Haven. But be this as it may, — and we 
 more than fear that Lady Martin is rightly 
 acquainted with the matter, — Shakespeare 
 himself has whispered us no word of such ill- 
 tidings, but has left us free, an' it please us, 
 to dream out happier things. So, too, Doro- 
 thea Brooke, wedded to Will Ladislaw, has be- 
 fore her many long and weary hours of regret- 
 ful self -communings ; yet, while we sigh over 
 her doubtful future, we are glad, nevertheless, 
 to take our last look at her smiling in her hus- 
 band's arms. But when Basil Kansom, in 
 The Bostonians, makes a brave fight for his 
 young bride, and carries her off in triumph, 
 we are not for a moment permitted to feel 
 elated at his victory. We want to rejoice 
 with Verena, and to congratulate her on her 
 escape from Mr. Filer and the tawdry music- 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF PESSIMISM. 189 
 
 hall celebrity ; but we are forced to take leave 
 of her in tears, and to hear with unwilling 
 ears that " these were not the last she was des- 
 tined to shed." This hurts our best feelings, 
 and hurts them all the more because we have 
 allowed our sympathies to be excited. It re- 
 minds us of that ill-natured habit of the 
 Romans, who were ungrateful enough to spoil 
 a conqueror's triumph by hiring somebody to 
 stand in his chariot, and keep whispering in 
 his ear that he was only human, after all ; and 
 it speaks volumes for the stern self-restraint of 
 the Roman nature that the officious truth-teller 
 was not promptly kicked out in the dust. In 
 the same grudging spirit, Mr. Thomas Hardy, 
 after conducting one of his heroines safely 
 through a great many trials, and marrying her 
 at last to the husband of her choice, winds up, 
 by way of wedding-bells, with the following 
 consolatory reflections : " Her experience had 
 been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrong- 
 ly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit 
 through a sorry world hardly called for effu- 
 siveness, even when the path was suddenly 
 irradiated at some half-way point by day- 
 dreams rich as hers. . . . And in being forced 
 
190 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 to class herself among the fortunate, she did 
 not cease to wonder at the persistence of the 
 unforeseen, when the one to whom such un- 
 broken tranquillity had been accorded in the 
 adult stage was she whose youth had seemed 
 to teach that happiness was but the occasional 
 episode in a general drama of pain." " What 
 should a man do but be merry ? " says Hamlet 
 drearily ; and, with this reckless mirth per- 
 vading even our novels, we bid fair in time to 
 become as jocund as he. 
 
THE CAVALIER. 
 
 "An evil reputation is light to raise, but 
 heavy to bear, and very difficult to put aside. 
 No Rumor which many people chatter of alto- 
 gether dieth away ; she too is, after her kind, 
 an immortal." So moralizes Hesiod over an 
 exceedingly thankless truth, which, even in 
 the primitive simplicity of the golden age, had 
 forced itself upon man's unwilling convictions ; 
 and while many later philosophers have given 
 caustic expression to the same thought, few 
 have clothed it with more delicate and agree- 
 able irony. Rumor is, after her kind, an im- 
 mortal. Antaeus-like, she gains new strength 
 each time she is driven to the ground, and it 
 is a wholesome humiliation for our very en- 
 lightened minds to see how little she has suf- 
 fered from centuries of analysis and research. 
 Rumor still writes our histories, directs our 
 diplomacy, and controls our ethics, until we 
 have grown to think that this is probably what 
 is meant by the vox populi, and that any 
 
192 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 absurdity credited by a great many people 
 becomes in some mysterious way sacred to the 
 cause of humanity, and infinitely more pre- 
 cious than truth. When Wodrow, and Walk- 
 er, and the author of The Cloud of Witnesses, 
 were compiling their interesting narratives, 
 Rumor, in the person of " ilka auld wife in 
 the chimley-neuck," gave them all the infor- 
 mation they desired; and this information, 
 countersigned by Macaulay, has passed muster 
 for history down to the present day. As a 
 result, the introduction of Graham of Claver- 
 house into Mr. Lang's list of English Wor- 
 thies has been received with severely qualified 
 approbation, and Mr. Mowbray Morris has 
 written the biography of a great soldier in the 
 cautious tone of a lawyer pleading for a crimi- 
 nal at the bar. 
 
 If ever the words of Hesiod stood in need of 
 an accurate illustration, it has been furnished 
 by the memory of Claverhouse ; for his evil 
 reputation was not only raised with astonish- 
 ing facility, but it has never been put aside at 
 all. In fact, it seems to have been a matter 
 of pride in the griin-visaged Scottish saints to 
 believe that their departed brethren were, one 
 
THE CAVALIER. 193 
 
 and all, the immediate victims of his wrath ; 
 and to hint that they might perhaps have 
 fallen by any meaner hand was, as Aytoun 
 wittily expressed it, " an insult to martyrol- 
 ogy." The terror inspired by his inflexible 
 severity gave zest to their lurid denunciations, 
 and their liveliest efforts of imagination were 
 devoted to conjuring up in his behalf some 
 fresh device of evil. In that shameless pas- 
 quinade, the Elegy, there is no species of wick- 
 edness that is not freely charged, in most vile 
 language, to the account of every Jacobite in 
 the land, from the royal house of Stuart down 
 to its humblest supporter; yet even amid such 
 goodly company, Claverhouse stands preemi- 
 nent, and is the recipient of its choicest flowers 
 of speech. 
 
 " He to Rome's cause most firmly stood, 
 And drunken was with, the saints' blood. 
 He rifled houses, and did plunder 
 In moor and dale many a hunder ; 
 He all the shires in south and west 
 With blood and rapine sore opprest." 
 
 It is needless to say that Claverhouse, 
 though he served a Catholic master, had about 
 as much affinity for the Church of Rome as 
 the great Gustavus himself, and that the ex- 
 
194 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 tent of his shortcomings in this direction lay- 
 in his protesting against the insults offered by 
 a Selkirk preacher to King James through the 
 easy medium of his religion. 
 
 Now it is only natural that the Covenanters, 
 who feared and hated Dundee, should have 
 found infinite comfort in believing that he was 
 under the direct protection of Satan. In those 
 days of lively faith, the charge was by no 
 means an uncommon one, and the dark dis- 
 tinction was shared by any number of his 
 compatriots. On the death of Sir Robert 
 Grierson of Lag, the devil, who had waited 
 long for his prey, manifested his sense of satis- 
 faction by providing an elaborate funeral cor- 
 tege, which came over the sea at midnight, 
 with nodding plumes and sable horses, to carry 
 off in ostentatious splendor the soul of this 
 much-honored guest. Prince Rupert was be- 
 lieved by the Roundheads to owe his immunity 
 from danger to the same diabolic agency which 
 made Claverhouse proof against leaden bul- 
 lets; and his white dog, Boy, was regarded 
 with as much awe as was Dundee's famous 
 black charger, the gift of the evil one himself. 
 As a fact, Boy was not altogether unworthy of 
 
THE CAVALIER. 195 
 
 his reputation, for he could fight almost as 
 well as his master, though unluckily without 
 sharing in his advantages ; for the poor brute 
 was shot at Marston Moor, in the very act of 
 pulling down a rebel. Even the clergy, it 
 would seem, were not wholly averse to Satan's 
 valuable patronage ; for Wodrow — to whose 
 claims as an historian Mr. Morris is strangely 
 lenient — tells us gravely how the unfortunate 
 Archbishop of St. Andrew's cowered trembling 
 in the Privy Council, when Janet Douglas, 
 then on trial for witchcraft, made bold to re- 
 mind him of the " meikle black devil " who 
 was closeted with him the last Saturday at 
 midnight. 
 
 But even our delighted appreciation of these 
 very interesting and characteristic legends 
 cannot altogether blind us to the dubious 
 quality of history based upon such testimony, 
 and it is a little startling to see that, as years 
 rolled by, the impression they created remained 
 practically undimmed. Colonel Fergusson, 
 in the preface to his delightful volume on The 
 Laird of Lag, confesses that in his youth it 
 was still a favorite Halloween game to dress 
 up some enterprising member of the household 
 
196 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 as a hideous beast with a preternaturally long 
 nose, — made, in fact, of a saucepan handle ; 
 and that this creature, who went prowling 
 stealthily around the dim halls and firelit 
 kitchen, frightening the children into shrieks 
 of terror, was supposed to represent the stout 
 old cavalier searching for his ancient foes the 
 Covenanters. Lag's memory appears to have 
 been given up by universal consent to every 
 species of opprobrium, and his misdeeds have 
 so far found no apologist, unless, indeed, 
 Macaulay may count as one, when he grace- 
 fully transfers part of them to Claverhouse's 
 shoulders. Mr. Morris coldly mentions Sir 
 Robert Grierson as " coarse, cruel, and brutal 
 beyond even the license of those days ; " Col- 
 onel Fergusson is far too clever to weaken the 
 dramatic force of his book by hinting that his 
 hero was not a great deal worse than other 
 men ; and Scott, in that inimitable romance, 
 Wandering Willie's Tale, has thrown a per- 
 fect glamour of wickedness around the old 
 laird's name. Bat in truth, when we come to 
 search for sober proven facts ; when we dis- 
 card — reluctantly, indeed, but under compul- 
 sion — the spiked barrel in which he was 
 
THE CAVALIER. 197 
 
 pleased to roll the Covenanters, in Carthagin- 
 ian fashion, down the Scottish hills ; and the 
 iron hook in his cellar, from which it was his 
 playful fancy to depend them ; and the wine 
 which turned to clotted blood ere it touched 
 his lips ; and the active copartnership of Satan 
 in his private affairs, — when we lay aside 
 these picturesque traditions, there is little left 
 save a charge, not altogether uncommon, of 
 indecorum in his cups, the ever-vexed question 
 of the Wigtown martyrs, and a few rebels 
 who were shot, like John Bell, after scant 
 trial, but who, Heaven knows, would have 
 gained cold comfort by having their cases laid 
 before the council. On the other hand, it 
 might be worth while to mention that Lag 
 was brave, honest, not rapacious, and, above 
 all, true to his colors when the tide had turned, 
 and he was left alone in his old age to suf- 
 fer imprisonment and disgrace. 
 
 But if the memory of a minor actor in these 
 dark scenes has come down to us so artistically 
 embellished, what may we not expect of one 
 who played a leading part through the whole 
 stormy drama ? " The chief of this Tophet 
 on earth," is the temperate phrase applied to 
 
198 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 Claverhouse by Macaulay, and it sufficiently 
 illustrates the position popularly assigned him 
 by his foes. Rumor asserted in his behalf her 
 triumphant immortality, and crystallized into 
 tradition every floating charge urged by the 
 Covenanters against his fame. So potent and 
 far-reaching was her voice that it became in 
 time a virtuous necessity to echo it ; and we 
 actually find Southey writing to Scott in 1807, 
 and regretting that Wordsworth should have 
 thought fit to introduce the Viscount of Dun- 
 dee into the sonnet on Killiecrankie, without 
 any apparent censure of his conduct. Scott, 
 who took a somewhat easier view of poetical 
 obligations, and who probably thought that 
 Killiecrankie was hardly the fitting spot on 
 which to recall Dundee's shortcomings, wrote 
 back very plainly that he thought there had 
 been censure enough already ; and nine years 
 later he startled the good people of Edin- 
 burgh, on his own account, by the publica- 
 tion of that eminently heterodox novel, Old 
 Mortality. Lockwood tells us that the theme 
 was suggested to Sir Walter by his friend Mr. 
 Joseph Train, who, when visiting at Abbots- 
 ford, was much struck by the solitary picture 
 
THE CAVALIER. 199 
 
 in the poet's library, a portrait of Graham of 
 Claverhouse. 
 
 " He expressed the surprise with which 
 every one who had known Dundee only in the 
 pages of the Presbyterian annalists must see 
 for the first time that beautiful and melan- 
 choly visage, worthy of the most pathetic 
 dreams of romance. Scott replied that no 
 character had been so foully traduced as the 
 Viscount of Dundee ; that, thanks to Wodrow, 
 Cruikshanks, and such chroniclers, he who 
 was every inch a soldier and a gentleman still 
 passed among the Scottish vulgar for a ruffian 
 desperado, who rode a goblin horse, was proof 
 against shot, and in league with the devil. 
 
 " ' Might he not,' said Train, ' be made, in 
 good hands, the hero of a national romance, as 
 interesting as any about either Wallace or 
 Prince Charlie ? ' 
 
 " ' He might,' said Scott, ' but your western 
 zealots would require to be faithfully por- 
 trayed in order to bring him out with the 
 right effect.' " 
 
 Train then described to Sir Walter the sin- 
 gular character of Old Mortality, and the re- 
 sult was that incomparable tale which took 
 
200 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 the English reading world by storm, and pro- 
 voked in Scotland a curious fever of excite- 
 ment, indignation, and applause. The most 
 vigorous protest against its laxity came from 
 Thomas MacCrie, one of the numerous biog- 
 raphers of John Knox, " who considered the 
 representation of the Covenanters in the story 
 of Old Mortality as so unfair as to demand, at 
 his hands, a very serious rebuke." This re- 
 buke was administered at some length in a 
 series of papers published in the Edinburgh 
 Christian Instructor. Scott, the " Black Hus- 
 sar of Literature," replied with much zest and 
 spirit in the Quarterly Review ; cudgels were 
 taken up on both sides, and the war went 
 briskly on, until Jeffrey the Great in some 
 measure silenced the controversy by giving it 
 as his ultimatum that the treatment of an his- 
 torical character in a work of pure fiction was a 
 matter of very trifling significance. It is not 
 without interest that we see the same queru- 
 lous virtue that winced under Sir Walter's 
 frank enthusiasm for Claverhouse uttering its 
 protest to-day against the more chilly and 
 scrupulous vindications of Mr. Morris's biog- 
 raphy. "An apology for the crimes of a hired 
 
THE CAVALIER. 201 
 
 butcher," one critic angrily calls the sober lit- 
 tle volume, forgetting in his heat that the term 
 "hired butcher," though most scathing in sound, 
 is equally applicable to any soldier, from the 
 highest to the lowest, who is paid by his gov- 
 ernment to kill his fellow-men. War is a 
 rough trade, and if we choose to call names, 
 it is as easy any time to say " butcher " as 
 "hero." Stronger words have not been lack- 
 ing to vilify Dundee, and many of these choice 
 anathemas belong, one fears, to Luther's cata- 
 logue of " downright, infamous, scandalous 
 lies." Their freshness, however, is as amazing 
 as their ubiquity, and they confront us every 
 now and then in the most forlorn nooks and 
 crannies of literature. Not very long ago I 
 was shut up for half an hour in a boarding- 
 house parlor, in company with a solitary little 
 book entitled Scheyichbi and the Strand, or 
 Early Days along the Delaware. Its name 
 proved to be the only really attractive thing 
 about it, and I was speculating drearily as to 
 whether Charles Lamb himself could have ex- 
 tracted any amusement from its pages, when 
 suddenly my eye lighted on a sentence that 
 read like an old familiar friend : " The cru- 
 
202 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 elty, the brutality, the mad, exterminating 
 barbarity of Claverhouse, and Lauderdale, 
 and Jeffreys, the minions of episcopacy and 
 the king." There it stood, venerably correct 
 in sentiment, with a strangely new location 
 and surroundings. It is hard enough, surely, 
 to see Claverhouse pilloried side by side with 
 the brute Jeffreys ; but to meet him on the 
 banks of the Delaware is like encountering 
 Ezzelin Romano on Fifth Avenue, or Julian 
 the Apostate upon Boston Common. 
 
 Much of this universal harmony of abuse 
 may be fairly charged to Macaulay, for it is 
 he who in a few strongly written passages has 
 presented to the general reader that remark- 
 able compendium of wickedness commonly 
 known as Dundee. " Rapacious and profane, 
 of violent temper and obdurate heart," is the 
 great historian's description of a man who 
 sought but modest wealth, who never swore, 
 and whose imperturbable gentleness of manner 
 was more appalling in its way than the fiercest 
 transports of rage. Under Macaulay's hands 
 Claverhouse exhibits a degree of ubiquity and 
 mutability that might well require some su- 
 pernatural basis to sustain it. He supports as 
 
THE CAVALIER. 203 
 
 many characters as Saladin in the Talisman ; 
 appearing now as his brother David Graham, 
 in order to witness the trial of the Wigtown 
 martyrs, and now as his distant kinsman, Pat- 
 rick Graham, when it becomes expedient to 
 figure as a dramatic feature of Argyle's execu- 
 tion. He changes at will into Sir Robert Gri- 
 erson, and is thus made responsible for that 
 highly curious game which Wodrow and 
 Howie impute to Lag's troopers, and which 
 Macaulay describes with as much gravity as 
 if it were the sacking and pillage of some 
 doomed Roman town. It is hard to under- 
 stand the precise degree of pleasure embodied 
 in calling one's self Apollyon and one's neigh- 
 bor Beelzebub ; it is harder still to be properly 
 impressed with the tremendous significance 
 of the deed. I have known a bevy of school- 
 girls, who, after an exhaustive course of Para- 
 dise Lost, were so deeply imbued with the 
 sombre glories of the satanic court that they 
 assumed the names of its inhabitants ; and, 
 for the remainder of that term, even the myste- 
 rious little notes that form so important an el- 
 ement of boarding-school life began — heedless 
 of grammar — with "Chere Moloch," and 
 
204 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 ended effusively with " Your ever-devoted Be- 
 lial." It is quite possible that these children 
 thought and hoped they were doing something 
 desperately wicked, only they lacked a histo- 
 rian to chronicle their guilt. It is equally cer- 
 tain that Lag's drunken troopers, if they ever 
 did divert themselves in the unbecoming man- 
 ner ascribed to them, might have been more 
 profitably, and, it would seem, more agreeably, 
 employed. But, of one thing, at least, we may 
 feel tolerably confident. The pastime would 
 have found scant favor in the eyes of Claver- 
 house, who was a man of little imagination, of 
 stern discipline, and of fastidiously decorous 
 habits. Why, even Wandering Willie does 
 him this much justice, when he describes him 
 as alone amid the lost souls, isolated in his 
 contemptuous pride from their feasts and 
 dreadful merriment : " And there sat Claver- 
 house, as beautiful as when he lived, with his 
 long, dark, curled locks streaming down over 
 his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always 
 on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that 
 the silver bullet had made. He sat apart 
 from them all, and looked at them with a mel- 
 ancholy, haughty countenance." If history 
 
THE CAVALIER. 205 
 
 be, as Napoleon asserts, nothing but fiction 
 agreed upon, let us go straight to the fountain- 
 head, and enjoy our draught of romance un- 
 spoiled by any dubious taint of veracity. 
 
 Mr. Walter Bagehot, that most keen and 
 tolerant of critics, has pointed out to us with 
 his customary acumen that Macaulay never 
 appreciated in the highest degree either of the 
 two great parties — the Puritans and the Cav- 
 aliers — who through so many stirring events 
 embodied all the life and color of English his- 
 tory. In regard to the former, it may be 
 safely said that whatever slights they have 
 received at the hands of other historians have 
 been amply atoned for by Carlyle. He has 
 thrown the whole weight of his powerful per- 
 sonality into their scale, and has fairly fright- 
 ened us into that earnestness of mind which is 
 requisite for a due appreciation of their merits. 
 His fine scorn for the pleasant vices which 
 ensnare humanity extended itself occasionally 
 to things which are pleasant without being 
 vicious ; and under his leadership we hardly 
 venture to hint at a certain sneaking prefer- 
 ence for the gayer side of life. When Hazlitt, 
 with a shameless audacity rare among English- 
 
206 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 men, disencumbers himself lightly of his con- 
 science, and apostrophizes the reign of Charles 
 II. as that "happy, thoughtless age, when 
 king and nobles led purely ornamental lives," 
 we feel our flesh chilled at such a candid 
 avowal of volatility. Surely Hazlitt must have 
 understood that it is precisely the fatal pic- 
 turesqueness of that period to which we, as 
 moralists, so strenuously object. The courts 
 of the first two Hanoverians were but little 
 better or purer, but they were at least uglier, 
 and we can afford to look with some leniency 
 upon their short-comings. His sacred majesty 
 George II. was hardly, save in the charitable 
 eyes of Bishop Porteus, a shining example of 
 rectitude ; but let us rejoice that it never lay 
 in the power of any human being to hint that 
 he was in the smallest degree ornamental. 
 
 The Puritan, then, has been wafted into 
 universal esteem by the breath of his great 
 eulogist ; but the Cavalier still waits for his 
 historian. Poets and painters and romancers 
 have indeed loved to linger over this warm, 
 impetuous life, so rich in vigor and beauty, so 
 full to the brim of a hardy adventurous joy. 
 Here, they seem to say, far more than in 
 
THE CAVALIER. 207 
 
 ancient Greece, may be realized the throbbing 
 intensity of an unreflecting happiness. For 
 the Greek drank deeply of the cup of know- 
 ledge, and its bitterness turned his laughter 
 into tears ; the Cavalier looked straight into 
 the sunlight with clear, joyous eyes, and 
 troubled himself not at all with the disheart- 
 ening problems of humanity. How could a 
 mind like Macaulay's, logical, disciplined, and 
 gravely intolerant, sympathize for a moment 
 with this utterly irresponsible buoyancy ! 
 How was he, of all men, to understand this 
 careless zest for the old feast of life, this un- 
 reasoning loyalty to an indifferent sovereign, 
 this passionate devotion to a church and easy 
 disregard of her precepts, this magnificent 
 wanton courage, this gay prodigality of enjoy- 
 ment ! It was his loss, no less than ours, that, 
 in turning over the pages of the past, he should 
 miss half of their beauty and their pathos ; for 
 History, that calumniated muse, whose sworn 
 votaries do her little honor, has illuminated 
 every inch of her parchment with a strong, 
 generous hand, and does not mean that we 
 should contemptuously ignore the smallest 
 fragment of her work. The superb charge of 
 
208 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 Rupert's cavalry ; that impetuous rush to 
 battle, before which no mortal ranks might 
 stand unbroken ; the little group of heart-sick 
 Cavaliers who turned at sunset from the lost 
 field of Marston Moor, and beheld their 
 queen's white standard floating over the ene- 
 my's ranks ; the scaffolds of Montrose and 
 King Charles ; the more glorious death of 
 Claverhouse, pressing the blood-stained grass, 
 and listening for the last time to the far-off 
 cries of victory ; Sidney Godolphin flinging 
 away his life, with all its abundant promise 
 and whispered hopes of fame ; beautiful Fran- 
 cis Villiers lying stabbed to the heart in Sur- 
 biton lane, with his fair boyish face turned to 
 the reddening sky, — these and many other 
 pictures History has painted for us on her 
 scroll, bidding us forget for a moment our for- 
 midable theories and strenuous partisanship, 
 and suffer our hearts to be simply and whole- 
 somely stirred by the brave lives and braver 
 deaths of our mistaken brother men. 
 
 " Every matter," observes Epictetus, " has 
 two handles by which it may be grasped ; " and 
 the Cavalier is no exception to the rule. We 
 may, if we choose, regard him from a purely 
 
THE CAVALIER. 209 
 
 moral point of view, as a lamentably dissolute 
 and profligate courtier ; or from a purely pic- 
 turesque point of view, as a gallant and loyal 
 soldier ; or we may, if we are wise, take him 
 as he stands, making room for him cheerfully 
 as a fellow-creature, and not vexing our souls 
 too deeply over his brilliant divergence from 
 our present standard. It is like a breath of 
 fresh air blown from a roughening sea to feel, 
 even at this distance of time, that strong 
 young life beating joyously and eagerly against 
 the barriers of the past ; to see those curled 
 and scented aristocrats who, like the " dandies 
 of the Crimea," could fight as well as dance, 
 facing pleasure and death, the ball-room and 
 the battle-field, with the same smiling front, 
 the same unflagging enthusiasm. No wonder 
 that Mr. Bagehot, analyzing with friendly 
 sympathy the strength and weakness of the 
 Cavalier, should find himself somewhat out of 
 temper with an historian's insensibility to vir- 
 tues so primitive and recognizable in a not too 
 merry world. 
 
 " The greatness of this character is not in 
 Macaulay's way, and its faults are. Its license 
 affronts him, its riot alienates him. He is for- 
 
210 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 ever contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince 
 Rupert's horse with the restraint of Crom- 
 well's pikemen. A deep, enjoying nature 
 finds in him no sympathy. He has no tears 
 for that warm life, no tenderness for that 
 extinct mirth. The ignorance of the Cava- 
 liers, too, moves his wrath : ' They were igno- 
 rant of what every schoolgirl knows.' Their 
 loyalty to their sovereign is the devotion of the 
 Egyptians to the god Apis : ' They selected a 
 calf to adore.' Their non-resistance offends 
 the philosopher ; their license is commented 
 on in the tone of a precisian. Their indeco- 
 rum does not suit the dignity of the narrator. 
 Their rich, free nature is unappreciated ; the 
 tingling intensity of their joy is unnoticed. In 
 a word, there is something of the schoolboy 
 about the Cavalier; there is somewhat of a 
 schoolmaster about the historian." 1 
 
 That the gay gentlemen who glittered in 
 the courts of the Stuarts were enviably igno- 
 rant of much that,for some inscrutable reason, 
 we feel ourselves obliged to know to-day may 
 be safely granted, and scored at once to the 
 account of their good fortune. It is probable 
 
 1 Literary Studies, vol. ii. 
 
THE CAVALIER. 211 
 
 that they had only the vaguest notions about 
 Sesostris, and could not have defined an hy- 
 pothesis of homophones with any reasonable 
 degree of accuracy. But they were possessed, 
 nevertheless, of a certain information of their 
 own, not garnered from books, and not always 
 attainable to their critics. They knew life in 
 its varying phases, from the delicious trifling 
 of a polished and witty society to the stern 
 realities of the camp and battle-field. They 
 knew the world, women, and song, three things 
 as pleasant and as profitable in their way as 
 Hebrew, Euclid, and political economy. They 
 knew how to live gracefully, to fight stoutly, 
 and to die honorably; and how to extract 
 from the gray routine of existence a wonder- 
 fully distinct flavor of novelty and enjoyment. 
 There were among them, as among the Puri- 
 tans, true lovers, faithful husbands, and tender 
 fathers ; and the indiscriminate charge of dis- 
 soluteness on the one side, like the indiscrimi- 
 nate charge of hypocrisy on the other, is a 
 cheap expression of our individual intolerance. 
 The history of the Cavalier closes with 
 Killiecrankie. The waning prestige of a once 
 powerful influence concentrated itself in Cla- 
 
212 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 verhouse, the latest and strongest figure on its 
 canvas, the accepted type of its most brilliant 
 and defiant qualities. Readers of old-fash- 
 ioned novels may remember a lachrymose 
 story, in two closely printed volumes, which 
 enjoyed an amazing popularity some twenty 
 years ago, and which was called The Last of 
 the Cavaliers. It had for its hero a perfectly 
 impossible combination of virtues, a cross be- 
 tween the Chevalier Bayard and the Admir- 
 able Crichton, labeled Dundee, and warranted 
 proof against all the faults and foibles of 
 humanity. This automaton, who moved in a 
 rarefied atmosphere through the whole dreary 
 tale, performing noble deeds and uttering vir- 
 tuous sentiments with monotonous persistency, 
 embodied, we may presume, the author's con- 
 ception of a character not generally credited 
 with such superfluous excellence. It was a 
 fine specimen of imaginative treatment, and 
 not wholly unlike some very popular historic 
 methods by which similar results are reached 
 to-day. Quite recently, a despairing English 
 critic, with an ungratified taste for realities, 
 complained somewhat savagely that " a more 
 intolerable embodiment of unrelieved excel- 
 
THE CAVALIER. 213 
 
 lence and monotonous success than the hero 
 of the pious Gladstonian's worship was never 
 moulded out of plaster of Paris." He was 
 willing enough to yield his full share of admi- 
 ration, but he wanted to see the real, human, 
 interesting Gladstone back of all this conven- 
 tional and disheartening mock-heroism ; and, 
 in the same spirit, we would like sometimes to 
 see the real Claverhouse back of all the dra- 
 matic accessories in which he has been so lib- 
 erally disguised. 
 
 But where, save perhaps in the ever-delight- 
 ful pages of Old Mortality, shall we derive 
 any moderate gratification from our search? 
 Friends are apt to be as ill advised as foes, 
 and Dundee's eulogists, from Napier to 
 Aytoun, have been distinguished rather for 
 the excellence of their intentions than for any 
 great felicity of execution. The " lion-hearted 
 warrior," for whom Aytoun flings wide the 
 gates of Athol, might be Coeur-de-Lion him- 
 self, or Marshal Ney, or Stonewall Jackson, 
 or any other brave fighter. There is no dis- 
 tinctive flavor of the Graeme in the somewhat 
 long-winded hero, with his " falcon eye," and 
 his " war-horse black as night," and his trite 
 
214 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 commonplaces about foreign gold and High- 
 land honor. On the other hand, the verdict 
 of the disaffected may be summed up in the 
 extraordinary lines with which Macaulay 
 closes his account of Killiecrankie, and of 
 Dundee's brief, glorious struggle for his king : 
 " During the last three months of his life he 
 had proved himself a great warrior and poli- 
 tician, and his name is therefore mentioned 
 with respect by that large class of persons who 
 think that there is no excess of wickedness for 
 which courage and ability do not atone." No 
 excess of wickedness ! One wonders what 
 more could be said if we were discussing 
 Tiberius or Caligula, or if colder words were 
 ever used to chill a soldier's fame. Mr. Mow- 
 bray Morris, the latest historian in the field, 
 seems divided between a natural desire to sift 
 the evidence for all this wickedness and a 
 polite disinclination to say anything rude dur- 
 ing the process, " a common impertinence of 
 the day," in which he declares he has no wish 
 to join. This is exceedingly pleasant and 
 courteous, though hardly of primary impor- 
 tance ; for a biographer's sole duty is, after 
 all, to the subject of his biography, and not 
 
 \ 
 
THE CAVALIER. 215 
 
 to Macaulay, who can hold his own easily- 
 enough without any assistance whatever. 
 When Sir James Stephens published, some 
 years ago, his very earnest and accurate vindi- 
 cation of Sir Elijah Impey from the charges 
 so lavishly brought against him in that match- 
 less essay on Warren Hastings, he expressed 
 at the same time his serene conviction that the 
 great world would go on reading the essay and 
 believing the charges just the same, — a new 
 rendering of " Magna est Veritas et praevale- 
 bit," which brings it very near to Hesiod's 
 primitive experience. 
 
 As for Mr. Morris's book, it is a carefully 
 dispassionate study of a wild and stormy time, 
 with a gray shadow of Claverhouse flitting 
 faintly through it. In his wholesome dislike 
 for the easy confidence with which historians 
 assume to know everything, its author has 
 touched the opposite extreme, and manifests 
 such conscientious indecision as to the correct- 
 ness of every document he quotes, that our 
 heads fairly swim with accumulated uncer- 
 tainties. This method of narration has one 
 distinct advantage, — it cannot lead us far 
 into error ; but neither can it carry us for- 
 
216 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 ward impetuously with the mighty rush of 
 great events, and make us feel in our hearts 
 the real and vital qualities of history. Mr. 
 Morris proves very clearly and succinctly that 
 Claverhouse has been, to use his temperate 
 expression, " harshly judged," and that much 
 of the cruelty assigned to him may be easily 
 and cheaply refuted. He does full justice to 
 the scrupulous decorum of his hero's private 
 life, and to the wonderful skill with which, 
 after James's flight, he roused and held 
 together the turbulent Highland clans, impress- 
 ing even these rugged spirits with the charm 
 and force of his vigorous personality. In the 
 field Claverhouse lived like the meanest of his 
 men ; sharing their poor food and hard lodg- 
 ings, marching by their side through the bitter 
 winter weather, and astonishing these hardy 
 mountaineers by a power of physical endur- 
 ance fully equal to their own. The memory 
 of his brilliant courage, of his gracious tact, 
 even of his rare personal beauty, dwelt with 
 them for generations, and found passionate 
 expression in that cry wrung from the sore 
 heart of the old chieftain at Culloden, M Oh, 
 for one hour of Dundee ! " 
 
THE CAVALIER. 217 
 
 But in the earlier portions of Mr. Morris's 
 narrative, in the scenes at Drumclog and Both- 
 well Bridge, at Ayrshire and Clydesdale, we 
 confess that we look in vain for the Claver- 
 house of our fancy. Can it be that this ener- 
 getic, modest, and rather estimable young sol- 
 dier, distinguished, apparently, for nothing 
 save prompt and accurate obedience to his 
 orders, is the man who, in a few short years, 
 made himself so feared and hated that it be- 
 came necessary to credit him with the direct 
 patronage of Satan ? One is tempted to quote 
 Mr. Swinburne's pregnant lines concerning 
 another enigmatic character of Scottish his- 
 tory : — 
 
 " Some faults the gods will give to fetter 
 Man's highest intent, 
 But surely you were something hetter 
 Than innocent." 
 
 Of the real Dundee we catch only flying 
 glimpses here and there, — on his wedding 
 night, for instance, when he is off and away 
 after the now daring rebels, leaving his bride 
 of an hour to weep his absence, and listen with 
 what patience she might to her mother's assid- 
 uous reproaches. " I shall be revenged some 
 
218 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 time or other of the unseasonable trouble these 
 dogs give me," grumbles the young husband 
 with pardonable irritation. "They might 
 have let Tuesday pass." It is the real Dun- 
 dee, likewise, who, in the gray of early morn- 
 ing, rides briskly out of Edinburgh in scant 
 time to save his neck, scrambles up the castle 
 rock for a last farewell to Gordon, and is off 
 to the north to raise the standard of King 
 James, " wherever the spirit of Montrose shall 
 direct me." In vain Hamilton and the con- 
 vention send word imperatively, " Dilly, dilly, 
 dilly, come and be killed." The wily bird 
 declines the invitation, and has been censured 
 with some asperity for his unpatriotic reluc- 
 tance to comply. For one short week of rest 
 he lingers at Dudhope, where his wife is await- 
 ing her confinement, and then flies further 
 northward to Glen Ogilvy, whither a regiment 
 is quickly sent to apprehend him. There is a 
 reward of twenty thousand pounds sterling on 
 his head, but he who thinks to win it must 
 move, like Hodr, with his feet shod in silence. 
 By the time Livingstone and his dragoons 
 reach Glamis, Dundee is far in the Plighlands, 
 and henceforth all the fast-darkening hopes of 
 
THE CAVALIER. 219 
 
 the loyalists are centred in him alone. For 
 him remain thirteen months of incredible hard- 
 ships and anxiety, a single stolen visit to his 
 wife and infant son, heart-sick appeals to 
 James for some recognition of the desperate 
 efforts made in his behalf, a brilliant irregu- 
 lar campaign, a last decisive victory, and a 
 soldier's death. " It is the less matter for me, 
 seeing the day goes well for my master," he 
 answers simply, when told of his mortal hurt ; 
 and in this unfaltering loyalty we read the 
 life-long lesson of the Cavalier. If, as a recent 
 poet tells us, the memory of Nero be not 
 wholly vile, because one human being was 
 found to weep for him, surely the memory of 
 James Stuart may be forgiven much because 
 of this faithful service. It is hard to under- 
 stand it now. 
 
 " In God's name, then, what plague befell us, 
 To fight for such a thing ? ' ' 
 
 is our modern way of looking at the problem ; 
 but the mental processes of the Cavalier were 
 less inquisitorial and analytic. "I am no 
 politician, and I do not care about nice distinc- 
 tions," says Major Bellenden bluntly, when 
 requested to consider the insurgents' side of 
 
220 BOOKS AND MEN, 
 
 the case. " My sword is the king's, and when 
 he commands, I draw it in his service." 
 
 As for that other and better known Claver- 
 house, the determined foe of the Covenant, 
 the unrelenting and merciless punisher of a 
 disobedient peasantry, he, too, is best taken as 
 he stands ; shorn, indeed, of Wodrow's extrav- 
 agant embellishments, but equally free from 
 the delicate gloss of a too liberal absolution. 
 He was a soldier acting under the stringent 
 orders of an angry government, and he carried 
 out the harsh measures entrusted to him with 
 a stern and impartial severity. Those were 
 turbulent times, and the wild western Whigs 
 had given decisive proof on more than one 
 occasion that they were ill disposed to figure 
 as mere passive martyrs to their cause. 
 
 " For treason, d' ye see, 
 Was to them a dish of tea, 
 And murder, bread and butter." 
 
 They were stout fighters, too, taking as kindly 
 to their carnal as to their spiritual weapons, 
 and a warfare against them was as ingloriously 
 dangerous as the melancholy skirmishes of our 
 own army with the Indians, who, it would 
 seem, were driven to the war-path by a some- 
 
THE CAVALIER. 221 
 
 what similar mode of treatment. There is not 
 the slightest evidence, however, that Claver- 
 house was averse either to the danger or the 
 cruelty of the work he was given to do. Re- 
 ligious toleration was then an unknown quan- 
 tity. The Church of England and her Pres- 
 byterian neighbor persecuted each other with 
 friendly assiduity, while Rome was more than 
 willing, should an opportunity offer, to lay a 
 chastening hand on both. If there were any 
 new-fangled notions in the air about private 
 judgment and the rights of conscience, Claver- 
 house was the last man in England to have 
 been a pioneer in such a movement. He was 
 passionately attached to his church, unreserv- 
 edly loyal to his king, and as indifferent as 
 Hamlet to his own life and the lives of other 
 people. It is strange to hear Mr. Morris ex- 
 cuse him for his share in the death of the lad 
 Hyslop, by urging in his behalf a Pilate-like 
 disinclination to quarrel with a powerful ally, 
 and risk a censure from court. Never was 
 there a man who brooked opposition as impa- 
 tiently, when he felt that his interests or his 
 principles were at stake ; but it is to be feared 
 that the shooting of a Covenanter more or less 
 
222 BOOKS AND MEN 
 
 was hardly, in his eyes, a matter of vital im- 
 portance. This attitude of unconcern is amply 
 illustrated in the letter written by Claverhouse 
 to Queensberry after the execution of John 
 Brown, "the Christian carrier," for the sole 
 crime of absenting himself from the public 
 worship of the Episcopalians, says Macaulay ; 
 for outlawry and resetting of rebels, hint less 
 impassioned historians. Be this as it may, 
 however, John Brown was shot in the Plough- 
 lands ; and his nephew, seeing the soldiers' 
 muskets leveled next at him, consented, on the 
 promise of being recommended for mercy, to 
 make M an ingenuous confession," and give 
 evidence against his uncle's associates. Ac- 
 cordingly, we find Claverhouse detailing these 
 facts to Queensberry, and adding in the most 
 purely neutral spirit, — 
 
 " I have acquitted myself when I have told 
 your Grace the case. He [the nephew] has 
 been but a month or two with his halbert ; and 
 if your Grace thinks he deserves no mercy, 
 justice will pass on him; for I, having no 
 commission of justiciary myself, have delivered 
 him up to the lieutenant-general, to be disposed 
 of as he pleases." 
 
TEE CAVALIER. 223 
 
 Here, at least, is a sufficiently candid expo- 
 sition of Claverhouse's habitual temper. He 
 was, in no sense of the word, bloodthirsty. The 
 test oath was not of his contriving ; the pen- 
 alty for its refusal was not of his appointing. 
 He was willing enough to give his prisoner the 
 promised chance for life ; but as for any real 
 solicitude in the matter, you might as well ex- 
 pect Hamlet to be solicitous because, by an 
 awkward misapprehension, a foolish and inno- 
 cent old man has been stabbed like a rat 
 behind the arras. 
 
 When Plutarch was asked why he did not 
 oftener select virtuous characters to write 
 about, he intimated that he found the sinners 
 more interesting; and while his judgment is 
 to be deprecated, it can hardly be belied. We 
 revere Marcus Aurelius, but we delight in 
 Caesar; we admire Sir Robert Peel, but we 
 enjoy Richelieu ; we praise Wellington, but 
 we never weary of Napoleon. " Our being," 
 says Montaigne, " is cemented with sickly 
 qualities ; and whoever should divest man of 
 the seeds of those qualities would destroy the 
 fundamental conditions of human life." It is 
 idle to look to Claverhouse for precisely the 
 
224 BOOKS AND MEN. 
 
 virtues which we most esteem in John How- 
 ard ; but we need not, on that account, turn 
 our eyes reproachfully from one of the most 
 striking and characteristic figures in English 
 history. He was not merely a picturesque 
 feature of his cause, like Rupert of the Rhine, 
 nor a martyr to its fallen hopes, like the Mar- 
 quis of Montrose ; he was its single chance, 
 and, with his death, it died. In versatility and 
 daring, in diplomatic shrewdness and military 
 acumen, he far outranked any soldier of his 
 day. " The charm of an engaging person- 
 ality," says a recent critic, "belongs to Mon- 
 trose, and the pity of his death deepens the 
 romance of his life ; but the strong man was 
 Dundee." 
 
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