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 STUDIES AND APPRECIATIONS 
 
-y^^^ 
 
STUDIES AND 
 
 APPRECIATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 LEWIS E. GATES 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1900 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
5033' 
 
 L.tbr»«ry of Cunt.f^i'ss 
 
 SEP 22 1900 
 
 S£C<'Nt' COPY. 
 
 0«*»vwe(< to 
 
 OhOtri DIVISION, 
 OCr 13 1900 
 
 
 COPTBIOHT, 1900, 
 
 bt the macmillan company. 
 
 NortoooU Vre88 
 
 J. S. Cushiug Jk Co. — Berwiclc k 
 Norwood, Mail., U. S. ▲. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ; f'/ 
 
 The Romantic Movement . . 
 The Return to Conventional Life . 
 Tennyson's Relation to Common Life 
 Nature in Tennyson's Poetry 
 Hawthorne .... 
 Edgar Allan Poe . 
 Charlotte Bronte 
 Three Lyrical Modes . 
 Taine's Influence as a Critic 
 Impressionism and Appreciation 
 
 1 
 
 27 
 
 60 
 
 77 
 
 92 
 
 110 
 
 129 
 
 171 
 
 192 
 
 205 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 ■ The era of modern life, in England as in France, 
 dates from 1789. The nineteenth century began 
 in the year in which the shock of the French 
 Eevolution went crisping over the nerves of the 
 nations of Europe, stirred all men to novel thoughts 
 and new moods, and startled them into fresh ways 
 of envisaging life. If, however, the student of 
 English literature wants a specifically literary 
 and a national date for the beginning of the new 
 era, the year 1800 offers itself as curiously apt; 
 in that year appeared Wordsworth's Preface to the 
 Lyrical Ballads, which as truly though not so con- 
 sciously as Hugo's f*reface to Cromwell nearly 
 thirty years later, was the manifesto of a revo- 
 lutionary movement. Wrong-headed as was Words- 
 worth's declaration that the Muse ought to speak 
 with the burr of Cumberland peasants, and absurd 
 as was the tangle of inconsistencies into which his 
 acceptance of metre and his rejection of all other 
 differences between prose and poetry betrayed 
 him, yet even these parts of his Preface, because 
 of their plea for veraciousness in poetry and their 
 insistence on poetry as the natural idiom for deep 
 
2 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 feeling, were essentially modern and were on the 
 whole salutary in their influence; and as for the 
 rest of the Preface, it stated doctrine after doc- 
 trine about the nature of poetry and the relations 
 of poetry to life that for a quarter of a century 
 the new age went on working out and illustrat- 
 ing, often, of course, in the persons of poets who 
 were quite unaware of Wordsworth's programme. 
 Poetry was no longer to be thought of as an in- 
 genious stringing together of moral epigrams by 
 clever craftsmen; it was to be the "spontaneous 
 overflow of powerful feelings.'' The old doctrine 
 that a poem gets its worth from the dignity of its 
 subject was condemned; the poet's moods were to 
 be the measure of all things; any subject from a 
 primrose or a Cumberland beggar to man's longing 
 for immortality might furnish forth the substance 
 for a poem, providing it stirred the poet's heart 
 sincerely and deeply. Above all, poetry was not 
 to be regarded as a mere graceful pastime ; it was 
 to be reverenced as the one mode of utterance 
 for the most intimate truths about man and nature 
 that the human spirit can reach; it was to be ex- 
 alted as " the first and last of all knowledge . . . 
 immortal as the heart of man." 
 
 One could hardly ask for a better account of the 
 new spirit in literature — of the spirit that was 
 to inform the best poetry and prose during the 
 next twenty-five years — than Wordsworth's Pre- 
 face offers. It specifies or suggests nearly all 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 3 
 
 the aspects of the complete renovation of litera- 
 ture which the new age was to accomplish, and 
 nearly all the varieties of new spiritual experience 
 which the men of the new dispensation were to 
 win and interpret. In one of his letters, Keats 
 sums up life as a soul-making process. " Call the 
 world if you please," he says, "'The Vale of Soul- 
 Making. ' " This may well stand as the legend 
 of the Komanticists. They were the rediscoverers 
 of the soul 5 or, if one prefers the word that M. 
 Pellissier uses in describing the similar movement 
 in France, they were reasserters of the primacy of 
 the spirit. Under this formula may be brought 
 whatever is most characteristic alike in the poetry 
 of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, 
 and Keats, and. in the prose of Hazlitt, Lamb, 
 Leigh Hunt, and De Quincey. 
 
 To speak of Scott's poems and romances as hav- 
 ing spiritual quality may seem fantastic. Jenny 
 Lind used to say querulously of Scott that he did 
 no good to her soulj and Peacock's favourite jeer 
 at the Wizard of the North was that he was merely 
 a gigantic master of pantomime and harlequinade, 
 no end clever in engineering showy spectacles and 
 in decking out mock pageants in tinsel and stage- 
 finery, but a bungler in all that concerns the mind 
 and the heart. Yet 'despite such jeers as these, it 
 may safely be asserted that the influence of Scott's 
 writings was in large measure a spiritual influence. 
 Scott quickened and fostered in the race a new 
 
4 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 spiritual sense — the sense for its historical pastj 
 he deepened and widened the national conscious- 
 ness and made it include not merely its own pass- 
 ing phases, but also the earlier stages of thought 
 and of feeling, of custom, of belief, and of worship 
 through which in the Middle Ages it had worked 
 its way. His Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert and 
 Richard Coeur de Lion and Quentin Durward may 
 not have been either very minutely or very accu- 
 rately realized ; yet their hopes and their longings 
 and their hates and their struggles, their passions 
 of pursuit and repulsion were with some degree of 
 faithfulness captured and portrayed and were thus 
 brought within the sympathetic appreciation of the 
 men of the early nineteenth century ; and the vari- 
 ous social forces of feudalism — these, too, with 
 their rhythms of aspiration and achievement, were 
 imaginatively reproduced and a vital sense of them 
 was conveyed into the minds and the hearts of the 
 new generation. This meant the enrichment and 
 the deepening of consciousness, the infusion into 
 it of new colour, new variety, new elements of feel- 
 ing, new sources of delight. The eighteenth-cen- 
 tury consciousness had been but a shallow affair. 
 It had contented itself in its typical state with such 
 ideas and feelings as a man of the world might need 
 at an assembly so as to chatter about the foibles or 
 follies of the town, or in a council-chamber for the 
 analysis of court intrigue or political manoeu- 
 vring, or with such conceptions as at the utmost an 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 5 
 
 abstract thinker might in his closet discover and 
 tabulate, — reasoning on prosaic experience with 
 the help of mathematics and logic. The good folk 
 of the eighteenth century were, above all, people 
 of intellect who prided themselves on their ration- 
 ality, who despised the insensate enthusiasm and 
 the fatuous superstitions that the Middle Ages had 
 revelled in, and who did their best to forget the 
 Gothic absurdities of those Don-Quixote-like ances- 
 tors of theirs whose imaginations, as Swift put 
 it, were perpetually astride on their reasons. The 
 eighteenth century boasted of being an age of quite 
 novel refinement and enlightenment: it purged 
 itself of old prejudices, old beliefs, old passions ; it 
 concentrated itself on common-sense tasks both in 
 practical life and in the life of the intellect; it 
 scorned in actual life whatever could not be made 
 to tally with its own somewhat ironical social in- 
 stincts and in intellectual life whatever defied the 
 rule of three or the sorites and the syllogism. 
 Hence the beautiful clearness and also the impov- 
 erished simplicity of the experience of this century 
 and of its literature. Against the shallowness of 
 this purely intellectual and conventional life a 
 mighty reaction began in the last half of the cen- 
 tury, and Scott^s work was one phase of the cul- 
 mination of this reaction. Scott himself, it is true, 
 had no new insight into what are technically called 
 spiritual problems. He was no transcendentalist or 
 "ideal-blind" enthusiast; he offered nothing either 
 
6 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 in his poems or in his romances that could directly 
 help his readers into a surer relation toward the 
 mysterious powers of the spiritual world. But his 
 influence tended, with a decisiveness that we now 
 find it hard to realize, to break down the bounds 
 of the old-time, narrow, conventional, and purely 
 intellectual world in which the witty men of the 
 eighteenth century had lived and had tried to be- 
 lieve they were thriving. He touched the men of 
 his day into a vital sense of kinship with the men 
 of the Middle Ages — with the men of those " ages 
 of faith " wherein life was lived passionately and 
 imaginatively under haunted heavens. And so he 
 gave to his readers both a new belief in their 
 hearts and imaginations and a great mass of new 
 feelings and new sympathies. He made a poten- 
 tial gift to each of his readers of an individual past 
 of a thousand years of intense living. 
 
 Scott's vogue as a poet yielded to that of Byron, 
 and in Byron's verse the revolt against the com- 
 monplace, that in Scott had been only implicit, 
 became fiercely aggressive. In the interests of 
 individual freedom Byron quarrelled with life in a 
 twofold way; he assailed conventional prejudice 
 that held in check free play of feeling and action, 
 and that tried to compel every respectable person 
 to form himself on an eighteenth-century tradi- 
 tional pattern of rational correctness ; and he went 
 still farther and arraigned the whole scheme of the 
 universe for not conspiring to minister obediently 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 7 
 
 to the needs of his craving egoism. If Scott had 
 been chiefly decorative, Byron was above all things 
 ethical, and his enormous popularity was due to the 
 audacious moral challenge of his verse. He had 
 the declamatory eloquence of the hustings which an 
 English public readily understands; and as he ha- 
 rangued in somewhat garish rhetoric on " custom's 
 falsest scale," and on "the fire and motion of the 
 soul," described ornately the splendid carnal orgies 
 of his Oriental heroes, and above all hinted darkly 
 at his own mischances and misdeeds and hymned 
 in triumphant rhythms his own despair, all Eng- 
 land, from old maiden ladies who read and shrieked 
 and read again, to the dandies and macaronis at the 
 clubs, felt that the spirit of the hour had spoken 
 and had uttered what every one was burning to 
 listen to. Here, at last, was that passion the false 
 semblance of which they had cheated themselves 
 with in Monk Lewis and Kotzebue ; passion as real 
 and fierce as anything of which the Middle Ages 
 could boast, yet mightily modern and with a dis- 
 tinguished pessimistic note that was new in this 
 Western world. Open neckcloths became the only 
 wear. People of fashion dared to look beyond the 
 drawing-room and the coffee-house and the club and 
 to realize that they were perhaps something more 
 than exquisitely fashioned social automata. Byron 
 gave aristocratic sanction to the rebel heart. 
 
 Intense, passionate personal experience of all 
 kinds — this was Byron's ideal. The experience 
 
8 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 was to be won for the most part through action; 
 Byron was not subtle and did not anticipate the 
 modern dilettante's refined methods of savouring 
 life at second hand and enriching one's spirit 
 imaginatively and by proxy. Life meant to him the 
 play of a fiercely egoistic will in the search for self- 
 realization. Through adventure, through travel, 
 through intrigue, through love, the craving of the 
 individual for overwhelmingly vivid emotion was 
 perpetually to be gratified. In eighteenth-century 
 literature, only emotions had been expressed and 
 sanctioned such as men could share in common, — 
 such as made for the safety of a conventionally 
 wrought social organism. In Byron the individual 
 came to his rights with a vengeance, and indeed 
 came to more than his rights. Byron once for all 
 opened a career for talent in the matter of emotion ; 
 every man was to feel as richly and intensely as the 
 gods had given him power to feel. The needs of 
 his own heart, not the needs of the social organism, 
 were to be the test of the fitness of his feeling. 
 "Custom's scale" was false; and conventional 
 society was through and through made what it was 
 by misleading traditions and prescriptions. From 
 all these the individual should turn away and 
 should turn toward Nature. Individual passion 
 was working out for itself a new destiny ; and con- 
 ventional society had to come in for much random 
 abuse as well as for quite justifiable criticism and 
 invective. 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 9 
 
 What "Wordsworth did for the spiritual regenera- 
 tion of the century has become, of course, a very 
 familiar story. In point of fact, however, Words- 
 worth's influence made itself felt at the start with 
 surprising slowness. He had been publishing his 
 earliest poems while Byron was still trundling hoop 
 and quarrelling with his nurse, and the first edition 
 of the Lyrical Ballads had appeared when Byron 
 was only ten years old. Yet not till 1829 — so 
 Lord Houghton notes — did Wordsworth — five 
 years after Byron's death — begin to supplant the 
 poet of Childe Harold and the Giaour in the favour 
 of University youth. Wordsworth was essentially 
 the most conservative of the Romanticists ; and for 
 that reason his vogue came more slowly, and for 
 that reason, too, his influence has been farther- 
 reaching and more permanent. Like all the 
 Romanticists Wordsworth was anti-conventional; 
 but, unlike so many of them, he was never for a 
 moment essentially anti-social. 
 
 Wordsworth's anti-conventionalism showed itself 
 in many ways and forms. He contemned "the 
 world " with a spiritual scorn that was in its own 
 fashion as withering as Byron's cynical satire in 
 Don Juan. His hatred of conventional life utters 
 itself alike in his poetry and in his correspondence. 
 In Thitern Abbey he bewails the unloveliness of 
 ordinary human intercourse and grieves over the 
 "rash judgments," "the sneers of selfish men," the 
 " greetings where no kindness is, " which make up 
 
10 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 SO large a part of it. In one of his letters he 
 describes the round of idleness and frivolity in 
 which the frequenter of routs and assemblies 
 spends his time, and asserts that the man who 
 leads such an existence can have no insight into 
 poetry. Wordsworth loathed the artificial life of 
 the town and he never would have consented to 
 accept, as M. Sully-Prudhomme in La Justice 
 accepts, the modern city as being the treasure- 
 house and the symbol of the best that the human 
 race has wrought out for itself. At times, it almost 
 seems as if Wordsworth would have liked to have 
 all men and women take to the woods. Moreover, 
 Wordsworth's romantic anti-conventionalism shows 
 itself not only in his attacks on the world, but in 
 the positive parts of his moral doctrine. He was 
 bent on regenerating the individual human being, 
 on transforming him in many ways, on waking in 
 him manifold new instincts, new feelings, new 
 passions, and new aspirations, on making him over 
 almost as radically, so it sometimes seems, as even 
 Byron wished. 
 
 Yet despite all his hatred of old artificial con- 
 ventions and despite all his desire to bring new 
 tracts of experience within reach of the individual, 
 Wordsworth was not for a moment anti-social. In 
 all his tinkering with the human type, he regarded 
 the complex of moral affections that had been tra- 
 ditionally approved in English life as sacrosanct. 
 The love of husband for wife, and of parents for 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 11 
 
 children, all the domestic sanctities, the veneration 
 of the Christian for the Church, and the allegiance 
 of the citizen to the state, and of the common man 
 to all the squirearchical powers above him — these 
 Wordsworth reverenced as the essential elements 
 of individual worth; he had no Shelleyan mission 
 to manufacture a totally new brand of human 
 nature, no cynical Byronic rage for destruction for 
 its own delightful sake. 
 
 Wherein then consisted Wordsworth's regenerat- 
 ing influence, — the indubitable renovation of the 
 spirit that his poetry wrought and was meant to 
 effect? This influence came in a twofold way. 
 The old affections and instincts received through 
 Wordsworth's imaginative treatment of them a 
 special new virtue; and they were also supple- 
 mented and reenforced by new masses of delicate 
 and tender and ennobling emotion that Words- 
 worth was the first to experience, to express with 
 imaginative power, and to infect others with. 
 
 Through his transcendentalism Wordsworth gave 
 a new meaning not simply to Physical Nature but 
 to Human Nature as well. Securely convinced as 
 he was of the existence of an Infinite Spiritual 
 Power that revealed itself in the conscience of man 
 and also ministered to him through the splendour 
 and beauty of Nature, — embracing the individual 
 on all sides with caressing and sustaining sym- 
 bolism, — Wordsworth believed, further, that the 
 humblest of human creatures, by yielding himself 
 
12 THE KOMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 obediently to the influence of this Power and ful- 
 fill ng its mandates, could reach true dignity and 
 grandeur. Every one knows Wordsworth's trans- 
 figured Leech-gatherer. He and his transfiguration 
 are examples of the kind of redemption that 
 Wordsworth sought to work throughout the range 
 of common life. He aimed to simplify and inten- 
 sify life, — to emphasize the primal affections and 
 instincts and duties, to give them new grace and 
 glory by a spiritual sanction, and to confer on the 
 most ordinary offices of life a certain mystical 
 beauty through portraying them as watched by 
 Nature with a kind of conspiring approval. 
 
 But Wordsworth did not simply work transform- 
 ingly upon the primal elements of human nature; 
 he gave to his fellows what was almost a new spir- 
 itual sense; he waked in them a new, delicate 
 instinct for beauty; he stirred in them new forms 
 of imaginative sympathy. Often he gets the credit 
 of having invented Nature ; and in very truth the 
 peculiar modern feeling that nature and man are 
 close of kin and speak a common tongue first comes 
 into English poetry through Wordsworth. His 
 transcendentalism changed nature into a living 
 spiritual presence, thrillingly responsive to man's 
 spiritual moods and needs. The brazen heavens 
 that had weighed over the eighteenth century 
 became " the soft blue sky " that " melts into the 
 heart." The "horrid rocks'' that had daunted the 
 men of the eighteenth century, or that had at most 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 13 
 
 stirred them to rhetorical admiration as before 
 cleverly wrought stage-scenery, became the haunted 
 abode of "the sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 Everywhere in nature Wordsworth found spirit 
 waiting for recognition — gracious meanings ex- 
 quisitely involved in the meshes of beautiful 
 colours and sounds, in the flight of the lark, in 
 the dancing of daffodils, in the trumpets of the 
 cataract; man's own spirit, in sublimated form, 
 divinely smiling out from behind the apparently 
 fortuitous play of the atoms. Everywhere he dis^ 
 covered, as Shelley said of him half -mockingly, " a 
 soul in sense." And this fine spiritual irritability 
 in the presence of nature was a permanent gift of 
 his to the English temperament. Many later poets 
 have felt and interpreted the symbolic challenge 
 of nature more subtly, but none more nobly and 
 pervasively. 
 
 And so one might go through the other Romantic 
 poets and trace out by analysis the aesthetic and 
 ethical winnings they garnered, the new kinds of 
 spiritual experience and the new modes of bliss and 
 of woe that they explored and made possible. Keats 
 is perhaps the least easily brought under the 
 Eomantic formula; yet indubitably he belongs 
 there, despite the common talk about his Hellen- 
 ism. There was never a greater master of "natural 
 magic " than the poet of La Belle Dame sans Merci. 
 "A wild and harmonized tune" it was that his 
 "spirit," as he himself says of Endymion, "struck 
 
14 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 from all the beautiful." The beauty that he 
 created is an iridescent beauty, pulsingly indis- 
 tinct in its outlines, shimmering with elusive sug- 
 gestions, not the firm, plastic beauty of Pagan art. 
 In Keats the senses, so pitifully neglected by the 
 eighteenth century, which looked, as Dr. Johnson 
 said, "for large appearances" and rarely wrote 
 with the eye on the object, came once more into 
 luxurious possession of the world. If Wordsworth 
 found a soul in sense, Keats found senses in the 
 soul. More nearly, perhaps, than any other poet 
 except Dante Gabriel Eossetti he exorcised the 
 Demon of the Abstract from the world of poetry. 
 He could not even measure empty distance or blank 
 time without striking into life images of beauty. 
 
 Moreover, in Keats's poetry the division between 
 the Romantic world of dreams and the actual 
 world of everyday fact is marked even more 
 clearly than it is in other Eomantic poetry of the 
 time. Wordsworth and Byron, for example, both 
 rebelled against the tyranny of the actual; but 
 their awareness of the life they protested against 
 shows itself through the intensity or the fierceness 
 of their criticisms upon it. Keats for the most 
 part serenely disregards conventional life and all 
 its concerns and customs. There are, to be sure, in 
 Endymion two passages where he fantastically 
 breaks into outspoken scorn of the base interests 
 and false standards that rule in the practical world. 
 At the opening of Book iii., he describes the gro- 
 
THE ROMAN'TIC MOVEMENT 15 
 
 tesque enthusiasm with which worldings run after 
 their "tip-top nothings" and celebrate their mis- 
 taken triumphs. And at the beginning of Book ii., 
 he cries out against History because of its black 
 devotion to the details of politics and war. His- 
 tory is but a "swart planet in the universe of 
 deeds." For the rest, Keats hardly honours con- 
 ventional life even so far as explicitly to dislike it. 
 His own dream of beauty — this it is that monopo- 
 lizes him. His hero, Endymion, is in one place 
 portrayed as standing "upon a misty, jutting head 
 of land " and gazing sadly into the empyrean, long- 
 ing for " the soft shadow of his thrice-seen love " ; 
 only with this dream of beauty will he be content; 
 he can find " nought earthly worth his compassing." 
 Endymion's figure and mood symbolize well 
 Keats's own aloofness from life and his devotion 
 to the Dream. Not that he likes to play quaint 
 tricks with his imagination and to indulge in such 
 wildly fantastic visions as Shelley permits him- 
 self in his Witch of Atlas. Keats is always close to 
 the comfort-giving earth and to its bowers of quiet. 
 But within the compass of the earth, he surely and 
 delicately misses all that has not poetic value, — all 
 that has no charm for the senses, the heart, and 
 the imagination. And therefore he is the most 
 poetical of poets: the least troubled by what the 
 world and its objects and scenes mean to the prac- 
 tical man, the least worried by the blur of vulgar 
 associations and suggestions in which all material 
 
16 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 things tend to be involved by the use and wont of 
 daily life. Even the oyster takes on imaginative 
 beauty for Keats, who dares to place it at the very 
 climax of his praise of the ministering splendour 
 of the moon : — 
 
 "Thou art a relief 
 To the poor patient oyster, where it sleeps 
 Within its pearly house." 
 
 And indeed this mood of kindled sensitiveness to 
 the purely imaginative charm of the world becomes 
 for Keats the typical mood of the blessed life, and 
 he exalts into a religion the fervent pursuit of this 
 mood and of the sensations and images that awake 
 it. Endymion querying with himself "Wherein 
 lies happiness," answers : — 
 
 " In that which becks 
 Our ready minds to fellowship divine, 
 A fellowship with essence ; till we shine, 
 Full alchemized, and free of space. Behold 
 The clear religion of heaven ! *' 
 
 The votary of this religion, so Endymion murmurs 
 to himself, is able to elude the insistently prosaic 
 surface of things and to find the whole earth tin- 
 glingly suggestive of beauty and of nothing but 
 beauty : — 
 
 "... Old songs waken from enclouded tombs ; 
 Old ditties sigh above their father's grave ; 
 Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave 
 Bound every spot where trod Apollo's foot ; 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 17 
 
 Bronze clarions awake and faintly bruit, 
 Where long ago a giant battle was ; 
 And from the turf a lullaby doth pass 
 In every place where infant Orpheus slept." 
 
 War and political intrigue and all tliat has hap- 
 pened or happens on the crust of the earth become 
 at last the stuff that dreams are made of, — serve 
 simply to wake new vibrations in the beauty -lover's 
 temperament. The two sorts of bliss, to be sure, 
 that Keats most exalts are feelings that link the 
 individual to others; among passionate moods, 
 those that have " the chief intensity " are " friend- 
 ship and love." Yet even these passionate moods 
 as Keats represents them really have their rewards 
 in themselves ; they are moods ri " ardent listless- 
 ness " that have no issue in the world of conven- 
 tional routine. Keats's heroes never do aught save 
 wander ecstatically over the surface of the earth 
 and through the depths of the sea, or make love in 
 a lady's chamber. Even Hyperion's most super- 
 lative act is a magnificently picturesque entrance 
 into his palace. One has but to compare Keats 's 
 heroes with Landor's — Endymion with Gebir — and 
 Keats's moods with Landor's to see how subjective 
 Keats is, how the world becomes for him merely a 
 great forcing-house for passion and rich entangle- 
 ments of feeling, how entirely his earth and his 
 moods and his aspirations are different from those 
 that enter into the conventional drama of practical 
 life, and how little they can receive the sanction 
 
18 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 of the common sense. Through all these qualities 
 of his genius, through his remoteness from ordi- 
 nary life and his exquisite eccentricity, Keats 
 reveals himself as essentially Eomantic. 
 
 When we turn from poetry to prose we find that 
 the formula that has been suggested as summing 
 up the Romantic movement still holds true. In 
 its most characteristic forms the prose, like the 
 poetry of this period is used for the enrichment of 
 the inner life of the individual rather than for the 
 closer knitting of the bonds that bind men together 
 in conventional life. Prose like poetry works for 
 the spiritualization of humanity rather than for its 
 organization. In the pursuit of this somewhat un- 
 prosaic end, prose takes on many of the character- 
 istics of poetry and strives in manifold ways to win 
 new expressiveness. It gives over its monopoliz- 
 ing interest in abstract ideas and generalizations, 
 becomes aware of the surface of life, and tries to 
 portray the splendour and the magnificence of the 
 outside world as this world beats against thrilling 
 senses. It gains often an intensely personal note, 
 and a tone and a rhythm that are almost lyrical. 
 Its surface glows with a figurative richness and 
 with a warmth and a colour that to Swift or to 
 Dr. Johnson would have seemed indecorous and 
 even grotesque. The Preface of the Lyrical Bal- 
 lads, as has already been noted, claimed for the 
 poetic interpretation of life superiority over the 
 prose interpretation. This claim, the great prose- 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 19 
 
 writers of the period implicitly or explicitly 
 granted. And they therefore were more or less 
 consciously drawn to bring prose, their own mode of 
 expression, as close as they might to the idiom of 
 the gods. De Quincey's so-called "impassioned 
 prose" works out and expresses Eomantic ideals 
 with an art that is deliberate and elaborate. Lamb, 
 Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt all accomplish, in one way 
 or another, that peculiar redemption of the com- 
 monplace, in terms of intense personal feeling, in 
 which the essence of Eomantic art consists. 
 
 Characteristic of all these artists is the return for 
 models of excellence to writers earlier than the age 
 of Queen Anne, often to writers of the Elizabethan 
 period. De Quincey's sarcastic strictures on the 
 incompetent literalness of Swift's prose style have 
 become traditional instances of Eomantic prejudice; 
 the savage Dean is challenged to write a description 
 of the pageantry of Belshazzar's feast, and because 
 of his alleged prosy inability, he is scorned as a 
 mere base servitor in the train of art. Coleridge's 
 devotion to Jeremy Taylor and to the splendid elo- 
 quence of even earlier divines passed into a by- 
 word. Lamb's first important literary venture was 
 John Woodvil, a tragedy in the Elizabethan manner; 
 and his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) 
 contained delicately impressionistic criticism of 
 the passion and power of the Elizabethan drama — 
 criticism that sent readers by scores to the long- 
 neglected works of Marlowe, Webster, and Ford. 
 
20 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 The fantastically archaic beauty of Lamb's own 
 prose style would show how deeply he had been 
 subdued to the spell of sixteenth- and seventeenth- 
 century prose, even were his essays not so continu- 
 ally outspoken as they are in their devotion to 
 Isaak Walton, to Fuller, and to Burton. 
 
 Nor is the substance that enters into the prose of 
 Lamb, De Quincey, and Hazlitt less Romantic in 
 quality than their style. Lamb's whim converts 
 the commonest object it plays over into something 
 new and delicately individual, fashioned cunningly 
 out of Lamb's moods and fancies and imaginative 
 associations. Was there 'ever .a quainter change 
 than that which the London chimney-sweep goes 
 through in the pages of Lamb's essay? He comes 
 out all cobwebbed over with gossamer beauty, — 
 a sort of Prince from the Land of Droll Dreaming, 
 a sublimated little symbol of thoughts and feel- 
 ings that in actual life are leagues out of his ken. 
 To assure one's self of the Romantic note in Lamb, 
 one need but compare an essay of this sort with 
 Addison's or Steele's essays. Lamb is subjec- 
 tive, moody, imaginative, fantastic, always trem- 
 ulously aware of the mystery that lurks behind 
 the commonplace, though rarely expressing this 
 directly. 
 
 Nor, indeed, is Hazlitt's Romanticism any less 
 unmistakable. His essays are full of querulous 
 protest against the checks and scorns to which 
 conventional life subjects the special soul; full 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 21 
 
 of pathetic appeals to Nature for redress, and of 
 Kousseau-like passionate portrayal of natural 
 scenery; often poignant in their utterance of per- 
 sonal sorrow and grieving; often lyrical in their 
 tone and movement; at times, audacious in their 
 imagery. 
 
 As for De Quincey, almost the whole range of 
 Komantic effect is to be found in his impassioned 
 prose; he is the greatest and the most represen- 
 tative of Komantic prose-artists. More pertina- 
 ciously than any other prose-writer he tries to carry 
 prose beyond its old-time boundaries and to give it 
 a new emotional and imaginative scope. Perhaps 
 the most persistent mannerism to be traced in his 
 methods of communicating impressions of beauty 
 and power is his frequent recourse to a kind of vis- 
 ionary second-sight. Doubtless this trick of mind 
 and of treatment was fostered, if nothing more, by 
 his opium-eating. The beauty of the trance, the 
 splendour of the vision, the mystery of the seventh 
 heaven and of Plato's sphere lie over the most 
 characteristic scenes of his prose. The chambers 
 of the air suddenly open, and on some insignifi- 
 cant portion of common life there rains down influ- 
 ence through infinite distances from a mysterious 
 spiritual world, which thus reveals itself as em- 
 bracing common life, pressing upon it as it were 
 on all sides, though from measureless distances, 
 terribly involving it in momentous issues for good 
 or evil. The mysteries that infinite space may 
 
22 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 hold in concealment, the mysteries that may have 
 been enacted in past aeons of time, or that still 
 may be waiting in endless perspective — these De 
 Quincey suggests with necromantic power, so that 
 before them the imagination is appalled. More- 
 over, he is often not content with suggesting these 
 mysteries vaguely or symbolically; he actually 
 opens before his readers, through the use of elabo- 
 rately picturesque imagery, endless vistas to the 
 outermost walls of space ; or he dizzies the mind 
 with ingenious mimicry of the never-ending flight 
 of hours and days and years and centuries. Even 
 in dealing with historical subjects, De Quincey, if 
 he is bent on artistic effect, is apt to use, in work- 
 ing out his material, many of these same methods, 
 so as to produce a visionary representation of life 
 that carries with it an atmosphere of mysterjr and 
 that at the same time has sensuous splendour. His 
 Flight of a Tartar Tribe is the Rime of the Ancient 
 Mariner done into prose, with a whole people's 
 wanderings for the motif instead of one poor sea- 
 man's misadventure; De Quincey 's prose almost 
 rivals Coleridge's verse in giving to a tale the 
 strenuous movement, the sustained sensuousness, 
 as well as the mysteriousness, of a dream. What- 
 ever enters into De Quincey's mind, — whether it 
 be Oxford Street, or a wandering Malay, or poor 
 Ann, the London waif, or Joan of Arc, — is trans- 
 formed when it appears in his impassioned prose, in 
 this same marvellous fashion, rendered exceeding 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 23 
 
 mystical, shimmeringly beautiful, and irresistibly 
 credible withal, as if it had indeed been spun into 
 opium-visions by the "just, subtle, and mighty'^ 
 spirit whose home was in the famous " little golden 
 receptacle." One is sometimes tempted to make 
 this spirit and this receptacle the symbol and the 
 talisman of the whole Eomantic movement. 
 
 The preceding analyses of poets and prose- 
 writers will perhaps have justified in some measure 
 the formulas which have been suggested as sum- 
 ming up the most characteristic literature of the 
 first quarter of our century. In England there was 
 never a Eomantic school as there was in both Ger- 
 many and France. The English poems and prose- 
 writings which have just been analyzed were in 
 many and important particulars radically and 
 almost irreconcilably unlike. Their authors were 
 never in league in the pursuit of a common and 
 clearly recognized end, artistic or moral; indeed, 
 they were often not personally known to each other, 
 or they were even outspoken foes. Yet, as it were 
 in spite of themselves, they gave to their poems 
 and their prose certain common characteristics; 
 their imaginations, through a sort of secret under- 
 standing, acknowledged a kinship, which the men 
 themselves would have been the last to claim. So, 
 for example, there is a curious likeness to be traced 
 in the heroes of the great poems of this period. 
 These heroes — whether Greek Endymions, mock- 
 mediseval Childe Harolds, Cumberland Pedlars, or 
 
24 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 worshippers of Alastor — are all lonely, dreamy 
 wanderers. They are adventurers in the world of 
 the spirit, searchers after new sensations, new 
 moods, new strains of passion, "ideal-blind" en- 
 thusiasts of one sort or another. They are questers 
 after the Holy Grail, followers of the vision, 
 aspirers after some new form of the blessed life. 
 They all trust the imagination and the heart and 
 have scant respect for the understanding and the 
 reason. And this striking similarity of theirs 
 comes from the fact that, diverse as they are in 
 equipment and in fortune, they are one and all 
 essentially personifications of the spirit of a Koman- 
 tic age, and symbolize in their ambitions its one 
 preoccupation. The Romantic imagination, through 
 its inevitable bias toward the creation of these 
 dreamy wanderers, reveals the essential striving of 
 the Romantic movement. 
 
 The age was an age of expansion. The human 
 spirit was reaching out delicately or strenuously in 
 many ways for new forms of experience. It was 
 emancipating itself once and for all from the hard 
 and fast restrictions of prosaic eighteenth-century 
 life. It sought out and conned the story of its own 
 past, and found there a ncCice passionateness and 
 a decorative splendour which rationalism and 
 "refinement" had later drained from both national 
 and individual life, and which the new age was 
 longing to realize once more in its own experience. 
 The heart, the senses, and the imagination reas- 
 
THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 25 
 
 serted their rights after the long tyranny of the 
 understanding. The senses became alert and 
 thrillingly sensitive; they learned to catch all the 
 pretty configuration and the shadow-play of the 
 surface of the earth; and they gathered, too, 
 the impressions of awful beauty and power in 
 nature to which the eighteenth century had been 
 blind. Moreover, beneath what the tremulous 
 senses discerned in nature, the quickened spirit 
 divined everywhere a subtle play of energy cor- 
 respondent to its own, and it dreamed the dream of 
 transcendentalism and found the universe instinct 
 with symbolism and spiritual meanings. In short, 
 the whole nature of man was once more vitalized 
 into free, confident play after the long period of 
 paralyzing over-intellectualism which had so curi- 
 ously prevailed since the days of Descartes and 
 Hobbes. And as the result of this mysticism and 
 passion and audacious dreaming, the human spirit 
 won many new aptitudes and new powers and 
 acquired a new range of sensitiveness to a myriad 
 hitherto unperceived shades of beauty and feeling. 
 But all this was accomplished at the risk or the 
 expense of conventional society. These dreamers, 
 both the poets themselves and their heroes, were 
 scorners of commonplace life, and cultivated their 
 souls at the expense of their citizenship. Not one 
 of Byron's or Shelley's or Keats's heroes can 
 be pictured going intelligently and successfully 
 through the ordinary round of a sane man's duties. 
 
26 THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 
 A state whose citizens should frame themselves on 
 the model of Childe Harold or Laon or even of 
 Wordsworth's Pedlar would soon be brought into 
 a very sadly disorganized plight. Moreover, the 
 unregulated wills, the morbid nerves, and the 
 erratic lives of the poets themselves, — these, too, 
 seemed almost to offer palpable proof of the ab- 
 surdity of the ideals that the poets embodied in 
 their verse. And so it was that in the character- 
 istic literature of the period that followed the age 
 of Romanticism, remote and untempered Romantic 
 dreaming was indulged in with less and less con- 
 fidence — sometimes, perhaps, with self-conscious 
 saduess, or with self-pitying scorn, or with despair- 
 ing regret, but hardly at all with the old-time 
 fervent faith; and men turned back to conven- 
 tional life with a sense that it must after some 
 fashion be reckoned with more seriously than 
 the Idealists and the Romanticists had been apt 
 to think. 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL 
 LIFE 
 
 By 1824 the Eomantic impulse, pure and simple, 
 had in poetry very nearly spent its creative force. 
 Keats and Shelley were dead. Scott was long since 
 given over to prose. Coleridge was spinning meta- 
 physical webs in the fastnesses of Highgate. Even 
 Wordsworth, who lived half through the century, 
 published after 1824 only a single volume of verse 
 that had not been written long before that date. 
 In 1824, too, Byron died and Carlyle, the great 
 prose-foe of Byronic Welt-Sclimerz, published his 
 first volume — significantly enough a translation of 
 Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. The wayward dreaming 
 of "Romanticism had had its day, and in the char- 
 acteristic poetry of the following period a new re- 
 lation to the conventional world of everyday fact 
 showed itself continually. 
 
 Great as were the gains that accrued to the 
 human spirit from the Eomanticists' passionate 
 questing after new experience of all sorts, the 
 limitations of the Eomantic genius, and its danger- 
 ous eccentricities became clearer and clearer as 
 this genius worked itself out into thorough expres- 
 sion. The Eomanticists were web-spinners and 
 27 
 
28 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 fancy-mongers, who were apt to move through life 
 in a kind of divine bewilderment. They were 
 beauty-blind and music-deaf. They lived inside 
 their own individual heads, in the circle of their 
 own eccentric personalities, — in fantastic air-spun 
 worlds of their own devising. They had little wish 
 or power to grapple with commonplace facts either 
 in life or in art. The world portrayed in their 
 poetry is a visionary world quite out of the ken 
 of ordinary folk, surcharged with strangeness, and 
 treacherous to the uninitiated. Their favourite 
 characters are uncanny creatures, spectral, prone to 
 posing, psychologically shallow. Fancy Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson's growls of disapproval at the Wanderer 
 in Shelley's Alastor, who goes soliloquizing through 
 impossible landscapes on a hopeless quest for im- 
 possible beauty, and dies in despair to the light of 
 an impossible moon. Thomas Love Peacock has 
 put into a cleverly satirical summary the essential 
 absurdity that seems to the worldly-wise man to 
 lurk in Byron's romantic despair: "You talk," 
 says Mr. Hilary to Mr. Cypress, "like a Rosi- 
 crucian who will love nothing but a sylph, who 
 does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and 
 who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not 
 containing a sylph." The wordly-wise man does 
 not stake his happiness on the problematical 
 favours of an ideal that would not exist unless 
 he himself took the trouble to call it into being. 
 Romantic dreamers were victims of their own mag- 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 29 
 
 gots, so it seemed to the common-sense onlooker; 
 and incontestably their overmuch indulgence in 
 dreaming tended to destroy in them the controlling 
 sense of their kinship with ordinary men. All of 
 them, save perhaps Scott, made war, though with 
 varying degrees of bitterness, on custom and con- 
 vention. They were creatures of whim and caprice. 
 They shunned the routine of ordinary life. They 
 sought to wrest for themselves from the world, each 
 in his own way, some individual bliss. Even the 
 moral Wordsworth went ^* booing'' his verses over 
 the Westmoreland hills in a fashion that would 
 have made Jeffrey gasp and stare. Their heroes, 
 from Byron's and Shelley's adventurers to Words- 
 worth's Peter Bell and Idiot Boy, were at odds with 
 society. Consciously or unconsciously the Roman- 
 ticists were preaching the gospel of fad and of ec- 
 centricity. They were underrating the worth of 
 tradition and precedent and the established order. 
 They were audaciously challenging reason and com- 
 mon sense, and were letting impulse and unauthen- 
 ticated instinct run riot. In their fostering of 
 spirit they became sadly contemptuous of the in- 
 tricate relationships — prejudices, beliefs, customs, 
 fashions, laws — that unite actual living men and 
 women into a complex, prosperously working social 
 organism. Eomantic poets had a genius for tran- 
 scending everyday concerns and the facts and per- 
 sonages of the work-day world. God, Freedom, 
 Immortality, Nature — these were the presences 
 
30 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 and the themes that fixed their gaze and domi- 
 nated their imaginations. Their own souls, their 
 own moods, their exaltations and despairs, their 
 aspirations toward the infinite, their languors or 
 ecstasies on the moors or beside the , sea-breakers 
 or under the free cope of heaven, — these were 
 their preoccupations, not the turmoil of the town 
 or the complexities of actual human character. 
 Their poetry was the expression of brooding lone- 
 liness and concerned their own relations to God 
 and to Nature, not their relations to other men. 
 As a consequence of all this it followed that Eo- 
 manticism bid fair to lead to social disintegration ; 
 or at any rate, it encouraged and fostered a wide 
 variety of dangerously morbid individualities hard 
 to be reconciled and welded together into a well- 
 wrought social fabric. Because of its subjectivity, 
 its whimsical emotionalism, its wayward imagina- 
 tiveness, Komanticism tended, while developing 
 the individual spirit into rich variety of life, to 
 shatter conventional society, and to replace its 
 compact organization of harmonious types with a 
 loosely related mass of abnormal personalities. 
 One cannot but sympathize with Matthew Arnold's 
 impatient outcry over Shelley's droll domesticity. 
 Brook Farm in America was for a time very ap- 
 petizing make-believe, but it had not within its 
 organization the blood and the sinew of reality 
 necessary to insure permanence and complexity 
 of life. 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 31 
 
 Such were in general the dangerous tendencies 
 that after 1824 were more and more clearly dis- 
 ce'rned in Eomanticism ; and it was because of this 
 discernment that the characteristic poetry of the 
 following period took a new tone and a new direc- 
 tion. Not, however, that the poetry of the later 
 period repudiated Romance; not that it returned 
 to the arid intellectual habit of eighteenth-century 
 life. What it really aimed to do was to avoid the 
 extravagance of the Romanticists and to realize 
 more intimately and successfully what was vital 
 and quintessential in Idealism. The new poets 
 took into their blood and tempers the Romantic 
 increment ; they taught their hearts to beat to the 
 tunes of Romantic rhythms; their senses were 
 trained to all the delicacy and alertness that Ro- 
 mantic experience made possible; their imagina- 
 tions ran to and fro through nature with much of 
 the fine Romantic instinct for hidden symbolism. 
 They dreamed the dreams of the Romanticists, and 
 yielded themselves with one and another Romantic 
 seer to the Vision on the Mount. But they could 
 not be content with the evasive visionariness of 
 Romanticism or with its remoteness from actual 
 life. They felt more and more keenly the claims 
 of the commonplace and the conventional. They 
 saw the evil trick of Romance — its way of dispers- 
 ing itself in iridescent mists and leaving the crass 
 world of fact still unlovely and sordid. And so 
 they came to feel the need of bringing down the 
 
32 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 Vision on the Mount, the Idealists' dream of 
 beauty, into the rumouring, turbulent life below, 
 and of converting Eomance into a vital transform- 
 ing force that should actually recreate in terms of 
 beauty that common life, a loyal sharing in which 
 can alone enable the individual, be he dreamer or 
 worker, to fulfil the whole scope of his nature and 
 reach his utmost effectiveness. A persistent striv- 
 ing to secure a synthesis between the Ideal and the 
 Actual is characteristic of the poetry of the post- 
 Eomantic period. 
 
 This period extends roughly to 1860, and in- 
 cludes the most important poems of Arthur Hugh 
 Clough, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew 
 Arnold; its typical representative in prose is 
 Thomas Carlyle. Much of the work of Tennyson 
 and Browning was also given to the world before 
 1860; but these poets passed beyond the post- 
 Romantic period both in the years of their activity 
 and in the spirit in which they interpreted life; 
 and they can therefore be better considered by 
 themselves. 
 
 Arthur Hugh Clough cannot be ranked, on the 
 basis of pure poetic achievement, in the same class 
 with Arnold and Mrs. Browning. He has left, to 
 be sure, in the Bothie of Tober na Vuolich, a 
 richly fragrant idyll of country life, which is 
 almost unique in its union of humour and transfigur- 
 ing passion in the treatment of everyday English 
 incident. A few of his lyrics, too, where fate 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 33 
 
 seems to have guided him into melody, are memo- 
 rable for their simple beauty of phrase as well as 
 for their spiritual ardour. But in the main — let it 
 be said with all possible respect to his eulogist in 
 Thyrsis — Clough was but a bungling workman 
 in verse. He must nearly always be read with 
 allowances. And yet his poetrj'- is historically of 
 high interest because of its sensitive reflection of 
 the spirit of his age. His Dipsychus is a deli- 
 cately sure, analytic record, half-lyrical and half- 
 dramatic, of the typical moods of sad recollection, 
 distrust, hesitation, and final acquiescence, with 
 which many men of his day, who had listened long 
 to the music of romantic poetry, turned back at 
 last from vague dreaming and laid hold of the 
 tasks of conventional life. 
 
 The scene of the poem is laid in Venice, and at 
 the start the hero, Dipsychus, the Double-minded, 
 a young Englishman, of exceptional fineness of 
 temperament, comes before us very much in the 
 guise of one of the Romantic Wanderers of the pre- 
 ceding poetic age. He soliloquizes over the fantas- 
 tic splendour of the scenes around him, bewails in 
 good set terms the vileness of human society, and 
 turns with true Romantic queasiness to nature for 
 consolation : — 
 
 ♦' Clear stars above, thou roseate westward sky, 
 Take up my being into yours ; assume 
 My sense to know you only ; steep my brain 
 In your essential purity.*' 
 
 D 
 
34 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 Significantly, however, this early passage is the 
 only one in the poem where Nature is apostro- 
 phized or where the suffering special soul turns 
 to her for refuge from actual life. Moreover, in 
 Clough's poem, the reader feels from the very start 
 that he is looking out upon actual throngs of mov- 
 ing men and women, is caught in the veritable swirl 
 of the world's business, and is not, as he always is 
 in reading the Eomantic poets, wandering in some 
 excellent remote region filled with dream-splendours 
 and a fantastic populace. 
 
 As the poem goes on, Dipsychus scans the drama 
 of conventional life, feels the charm of its whim 
 and vigour and brilliance, is stirred with a sense 
 of its energy and stupendous, unquestioning onrush 
 after tangible good; and yet he revolts from its 
 selfishness, its carnal preoccupations, its pitiful 
 narrowness of interest, and its inveterate frivolity. 
 He glides in a gondola through all the gnarring 
 turmoil as one might let one's self be swept by a 
 dream safely through uncanny noises and threaten- 
 ing complications; he lulls himself with fancies 
 of what the world ought to be and with the images 
 of beauty and truth that his heart summons before 
 him. And as he feeds his desire on these golden 
 imaginations, the refrain sounds again and again 
 in an undertone, — 
 
 " Life should be as the gondola." • 
 
 At last, however, when he sets foot on shore, he 
 sadly concedes that " Life is not as the gondola j '' 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 35 
 
 and he passes into a new mood. Life is not dream- 
 ing, it is action ; " live we must ; " and he turns to 
 the Spirit of this World who has been all the time 
 beside him, carping Mephistopheles-wise at what 
 he deems Dipsychus's sentimental maunderings, 
 and demands how he is to become practical and 
 mingle successfully in the great game of life. 
 
 The Spirit in answer welcomes with fine satirical 
 humour the prodigal who seems repenting of his 
 idealism. He ridicules Dipsychus's late dreams as 
 " but moonshine after all," *^ airy blisses, skiey joys, 
 of vague romantic girls and boys." He reproaches 
 him with having made " mows to the blank sky " 
 quite long enough. He sneers at Dipsychus's silly 
 slavery to deluding visions ; Dipsychus, he declares, 
 has been walking about with his eyes shut, — 
 
 ** Treating for facts the self-made hues that flash 
 On tight-pressed pupils." 
 
 And finally he chants a prettily satirical lyric in 
 praise of submission to the God of this World : — 
 
 *' Submit, submit ! 
 For tell me then, in earth's great laws 
 Have you found any saving clause, 
 Exemption special granted you 
 From doing what the rest must do ? 
 Of common sense who made you quit 
 And told you you'd no need of it, 
 Nor to submit ? 
 
 *' To move on angel's wings were sweet ; 
 But who would therefore scorn his feet ? 
 
36 THE KETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 It cannot walk up to the sky ; 
 It therefore will lie down and die. 
 Rich meats it don't obtain at call ; 
 It therefore will not eat at all. 
 Poor babe, and yet a babe of wit ! 
 But common-sense, not much of it, 
 Or 'twould submit. 
 Submit, submit!" 
 
 After a good deal of crackling badinage of this 
 sort, the Spirit finally grows more serious, promises 
 to teach Dipsychus "the Second Eeverence — for 
 things around, " — the allusion to Goethe is worth 
 noting, — and sets forth the absolute need there is 
 for the individual to accept the bonds of custom- 
 ary life with all their chafing limitations, if he is 
 not to be a mere helpless, fantastic, isolated unit. 
 
 " This stern necessity of things 
 On every side our being rings ; 
 Our sallying eager actions fall 
 Vainly against that iron wall. 
 Where once her finger points the way, 
 The wise thinks only to obey ; 
 Take life as she has ordered it, 
 And come what may of it, submit, 
 Submit, submit." 
 
 During all the Spirit's raillery and haranguing, 
 Dipsychus has been considering and reconsider- 
 ing his relation to the world. He has felt the 
 cogency of the Spirit^s words ; he has realized his 
 own remoteness from fact, his impotence, his idle 
 dreaminess. Yet he has shrunk from the sordid- 
 ness of common life; he has rebelled against the 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 37 
 
 need of losing his personal stamp and becoming a 
 mere unrecognizable portion of the world^s mechan- 
 ical routine ; he has inveighed against the triviality 
 and commonness of the tasks at which the indi- 
 vidual must set himself, and against the lack of all 
 chance for original and noble effort; and he has 
 bewailed the apparent aimlessness of the stupid 
 world-process to which he must enslave himself. 
 Nevertheless he finally makes his choice and com- 
 mits himself to the region of fact. 
 
 Yet after all it is not to the power of the half- 
 malevolent Spirit of this World that Dipsychus 
 resigns his will; and just here lies the crucial 
 difference by virtue of which the conventionality of 
 the new age was to be something far nobler than 
 the conventionality of the eighteenth century. 
 Although Dipsychus finally elects for the world 
 of action and resigns himself to practical life, he. 
 nevertheless remains in his heart true to his ideal- 
 istic dreaming. He declares himself, perhaps a bit 
 grotesquely, "a kidnapped child of heaven"; and 
 it is with the memory of his celestial origin still 
 alive and active within him that he surrenders him- 
 self to temporary thraldom. So he exclaims to the 
 Spirit of this World : — 
 
 " Not for thy service, thou imperious fiend, 
 Not to do thy work, or the like of thine ; 
 Not to please thee, O base and fallen spirit ! 
 But One Most High, Most True, whom without thee 
 It seems I cannot serve. O the misery 
 That one must truck and practise with the world 
 
38 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 To gain the vantage-ground to assail it from ; 
 To set upon the Giant one must first, 
 O Perfidy ! have eat the Giant's bread. 
 If I submit, it is but to gain time 
 And arms and stature." 
 
 And so the Dreamer enters the field of action with 
 the resolve to utilize loyally the delicacy, the sen- 
 sitiveness, the spiritual alertness that the Koman- 
 ticists have developed in him, to embody in the 
 harsh material of conventional fact the dreams he 
 has long nourished, and to realize in the regions of 
 common endeavour the Vision on the Mount. 
 
 In Mrs. Browning's poetry there is both more and 
 less Romanticism than in Clough's. In many ways 
 she seemed doomed in the very nature of things to 
 be a mere dreamer; as a woman, with a woman's 
 tremulous nerve-fibres and delicate sensibility, as a 
 woman of genius, and, therefore, exceptionally im- 
 pressionable and imaginative, and, above all as an 
 invalid, shut for many years within the hothouse 
 precincts of a sick-chamber, she seemed consigned 
 beyond redress to a life of subjective moodiness 
 and of visionary remoteness from fact. Yet in 
 truth in reading her poetry we are taken far more 
 into the thick of the tumult of living, into the 
 murk and the flaring confusion, and among the 
 blows and the counter-blows of the actual battle of 
 life than we are in reading Keats or Shelley, or in- 
 deed any of the Romanticists. She belonged vitally 
 to her age. Even in her solitude she had felt the 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 39 
 
 stream of tendency that was setting back toward 
 conventional life. Her longer poems, Casa Guidi 
 Windows, Lady Geraldine's Courtship, Aurora 
 Leigh, all strive to catch the very lineaments of 
 the human drama that was around her as she 
 wrote. 
 
 And indeed that Art should thus deal courageously 
 with the immediate facts of daily life was a cardinal 
 tenet of Mrs. Browning's. She has expounded her 
 Theory of Art elaborately in various parts of Avr 
 rora Leigh, — a theory too involved and abstract 
 to be summarized here. An essential part of the 
 theory, however, is her conception of the poet's task 
 and of his relations to his fellows. The poet is not 
 to be a weaver of visions, a spinner of decorative 
 beauty, or a lonely specialist in eccentric moods; 
 he is to be " God's truth-teller," the authentic inter- 
 preter of the innermost meaning of daily events, 
 the revealer of the core of spiritual energy that 
 utters itself sensuously in the often apparently 
 haphazard fact and incident of the cosmic-process. 
 He is not to run like a recreant to the past in search 
 of his subjects : " I do distrust," Mrs. Browning 
 declares, 
 
 " the poet who discerns 
 No character or glory in his times, 
 And trundles back his soul five hundred years, 
 Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court.'* 
 
 He is to preserve in his verse the living image of 
 his own day and generation : — 
 
40 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 "Never flinch, 
 But still unscrupulously epic, catch 
 Upon the burning lava of a song 
 The full-veined, heaving, double-breasted age." 
 
 He should be able to find even in the most sordid 
 aspects of life, and in the most seemingly vulgar 
 characters, meaning and suggestiveness that shall 
 redeem them and give them imaginative power : — 
 
 *' Humanity is great ; 
 And if I would not rather pore upon 
 An ounce of common, ugly human dust, 
 An artisan's palm or a peasant's brow, 
 Unsmooth, ignoble, save to me and God, 
 Than track old Nilus to his silver roots, 
 And wait on all the changes of the moon 
 Among the mountain peaks of Tuscany, 
 (Until her magic crystal round itself 
 For many a witch to see in) — set it down 
 As weakness, — strength by no means." 
 
 Mrs. Browning's longest narrative poem, Avr 
 rora Leigh, is conceived and wrought out in close 
 harmony with these ideals of what should be the 
 sphere and the aim of poetry. The story concerns 
 the life of a young girl, half-Italian and half- 
 English, who grows up in an old-fashioned country 
 house in England in the midst of books and of 
 nature, who chooses letters for a profession, and 
 who goes to London and captures the world with 
 her poetry. Her love for her cousin — a keenly 
 intellectual social reformer, an apostle of statistics 
 and political economy — furnishes the conventional 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 41 
 
 motif of passion for the narrative. But though 
 thus ostensibly portraying the life of a visionary 
 girl and though continually revealing the world 
 through her eyes, the poem is really an interpreta- 
 tion and criticism of the entire age in which it was 
 written. The characters are drawn from the whole 
 range of English society; the incident is widely 
 varied and typical, and yet not extravagant or out 
 of the bounds of daily experience ; the analysis of 
 motive, and of the play of the social forces which 
 in large measure determine the action, is searching 
 and suggestive; and the poem is continually — too 
 continually for the taste of some uncourageous 
 readers — unfolding the ways of God to man as 
 they reveal themselves through the fortunes and 
 the fates of the actors in the story. There is 
 withal much glowing rhetoric — often brilliantly 
 imaginative, albeit sometimes florid and hysterical 
 — concerning the economic and social and artistic 
 questions that were most canvassed in the later 
 fifties. And everywhere the reader is kept within 
 sound of the busy rumour of daily life : he breathes 
 the actual air of the smoky London streets; he 
 explores squalid tenements; he watches the pag- 
 eantry of church weddings; he flashes on railway 
 journeys across the continent ; he is never for long 
 allowed to lose sight of the expressive visage of the 
 great world of fact. 
 
 As a result of her absorbing interest in the human 
 drama, nature plays no such role in Mrs. Browning's 
 
42 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 poetry as with the Komanticists. Nature she knows 
 with an intimate command of detail that is surpris- 
 ing when one thinks of her long years of illness. 
 But she never or rarely makes a deliberate emo- 
 tional study of nature for its own sake or gives 
 herself over to lonely dreaming in the midst of 
 nature. She offers her readers no lyric of the West 
 Wind or of the Skylark or of Mont Blanc, and no 
 " Tintern Abbey." She sees nature a trifle askance ; 
 she cannot for long in her narrative poems desert 
 her men and women ; and even in her shorter poems, 
 it is with the human heart — not perhaps her own 
 — that her imagination busies itself rather than 
 with nature. Nature is secondary with her. True, 
 some of her passing sketches of landscapes are 
 surprisingly broad and vigorous — as, for example, 
 that of the Alps from the train on the way to Italy. 
 Moreover, in one other kind of sketching from the 
 outside world, Mrs. Browning attains almost unique 
 brilliance and truth of effect, namely, in her swift 
 impressions of great cities : — 
 
 "So, I mused 
 Up and down, up and down, the terraced streets, 
 The glittering Boulevards, the white colonnades 
 Of fair fantastic Paris who wears trees 
 Like plumes, as if man made them ; spire and tower 
 As if they had grown by nature, tossing up 
 Her fountains in the sunshine of the squares." 
 
 The beauty of Paris, a beauty that seems all spun 
 of gossamer and silver, and the spacious, airy ways 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 43 
 
 of the city, could hardly be more delicately and 
 surely captured and suggested. There are parallel 
 studies of London — smudgy, and done in India ink 
 — which give the very texture of London air and 
 the slant of London roofs and chimney-pots. Flor- 
 ence, too, Mrs. Browning puts impressionistically 
 before us with the same dexterous touch, — Florence 
 gleaming in Italian sunshine and with proper atmos- 
 pheric modulations. But all these sketches are, of 
 course, not of nature pure and simple, but of man's 
 handiwork in the outside world ; so that here again 
 Mrs. Browning diverges from Romantic paths ; she 
 turns from nature back toward man. 
 
 Yet, be it always remembered, she brings back 
 with her to real life, as Clough and his hero brought, 
 though even more valorously, faith in the ideal; 
 and she interprets both nature and man with a 
 sensitiveness and an insight that the Eomanticists 
 had alone made possible. Her whole theory of art 
 and of life involved a far-reaching and uncompro- 
 mising idealism. There is a long passage in the 
 seventh book of Aicrora Leigh that gives to this 
 idealism brilliantly imaginative and yet fairly for- 
 mal expression, and brings it into close connection 
 with those conceptions of the poet and the artist as 
 revealers of hidden truth that have already been 
 noted. 
 
 " A twofold world 
 Must go to a perfect cosmos. Natural things 
 And spiritual, — who separates those two 
 
44 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 In art, in morals, or the social drift. 
 Tears up the bond of Nature and brings death, 
 Paints futile pictures, writes unreal verse, 
 Leads vulgar days, deals ignorantly with men, 
 Is wrong in short at all points. 
 
 " Without the spiritual, observe, 
 The natural 's impossible ; no form, 
 No motion ! Without sensuous, spiritual 
 Is inappreciable ; — no beauty or power : 
 And in this twofold sphere the twofold man 
 (And still the artist is intensely a man) 
 Holds firmly by the natural, to reach 
 The spiritual beyond it, — fixes still 
 The type with mortal vision, to pierce through, 
 With eyes immortal, to the antetype 
 Some call the ideal." 
 
 In accordance with this doctrine, Mrs. Browning, 
 in her portrayal of conventional life, tries to exhibit 
 the forces that in the midst of the most prosaic 
 conditions are at work for the realization of ideal 
 ends ; she aims to confer dignity and splendour upon 
 human existence by showing that even in its worst 
 complications of sorrow and evil there are beauty 
 and good in the making. And thus she endeavours 
 to bring about that synthesis between the Ideal 
 and the Actual of which the post-Romanticists so 
 keenly felt the need. 
 
 In the preface to one of his volumes of verse, 
 Matthew Arnold definitely condemned the personal 
 point of view of the Eomanticists as unfitted for 
 the creation of poetry of the highest order. The 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 45 
 
 poet, he urged, should be objective ; he should emu- 
 late pagan art in its tempera teness of mood, its 
 fine severity, and its burnished beauty. But when 
 Arnold came to put his doctrine to the test, he 
 found that the spirit of the age was not to be thus 
 easily defied; that its vital impulse was not to be 
 held in check simply at the dictates of an academic 
 ideal. Arnold had " learnt the lore " of the Eoman- 
 ticists "too well," and he could not keep out of 
 his verse the recollected airs of Eomantic art. His 
 Sohrah and Rustum and Balder Dead, written in 
 loyal illustration of his theory, are at best fairly 
 proficient academic exercises — too late to take the 
 Newdigate prize. The poems by virtue of which 
 he lives are for the most part those in which 
 his personal moods utter themselves sincerely — 
 moods of tender grieving for the recollected glory 
 of the Eomantic age. M. Zola has described some 
 living French poet as having been touched by the 
 chilling finger of science. The phrase fits Arnold 
 well. He had been in his youth, as he himself 
 records in more than one poem, fervently enam- 
 oured of Eomantic ideals; but he had later lost 
 the power of yielding himself to them uncritically 
 and sincerely. His most characteristic note is an 
 elegiac note of regret for the waning of the glories 
 of the earlier age when faith was still on the earth. 
 He is the poet of a lost cause — the lost cause of 
 Romance . 
 Arnold's treatment of what may be called the 
 
46 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 Wanderer-mo^i/" makes clear the change of mood 
 that parts him from the Eomanticists. The tra- 
 ditional Wanderer of the Romantic poets is wholly 
 the victim of his own joy or teen; he follows 
 through regions of fantastic beauty after some elu- 
 sive ideal of passionate bliss ; he believes in him- 
 self utterly, whether he be Byron's Childe Harold 
 or one of Shelley's wan poets; and his creators too 
 — they believe in him implicitly and recount with 
 poignant sincerity his spiritual joys and woes. He 
 is indeed the imaginative embodiment of their 
 most vital impulse — their vagrant, unresting pur- 
 suit of new modes of bliss and pain, of new forms 
 of spiritual experience. Arnold's imagination has 
 also busied itself more than once with the fate of 
 a Wanderer — notably in the Scholar- Gypsy and in 
 Thy r sis. The Scholar-Gypsy, as one first encoun- 
 ters him, seems to have much of the old-time 
 Romantic turn of figure and cast of countenance ; 
 every one remembers his "dark, vague eyes and 
 soft, abstracted air"; and every one remembers, 
 too, how he is represented in Thyrsis as seeking, 
 apparently in true Romantic wise, " a fugitive and 
 gracious light . . . shy to illumine"; he "wends 
 unfollowed"; he "must house alone"; onward 
 "he fares by his own heart inspired." Yet in 
 spite of the seeming resemblance of Arnold's Wan- 
 derers to the Romantic type, a little analysis will 
 show that the play of the poet's imagination as it 
 creates these later Wanderers is very different from 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 47 
 
 that whicli wrouglit out the Wanderers of an earlier 
 age ; and that the world through which these later 
 Wanderers dream their way has also changed in 
 significant wise. Arnold's poems about Wander- 
 ers are all confessedly tender make-believe — ex- 
 quisitely refined elaborations of an artistic theme; 
 the Scholar-Gypsy is merely a legendary figure 
 which Arnold's imagination captures from the 
 pages of Glanvil and shapes with sad and gracious 
 art into a symbol of Idealism. Throughout the 
 poem, while this charming visionary Wanderer is 
 "waiting for the spark from heaven," he is fol- 
 lowed by regretful and — shall we say? — half- 
 patronizing, worldly - wise onlookers, — " light 
 half -believers of our casual creeds," — whose 
 " vague resolves " and speculative disillusionment 
 set the standard of fact and convert the Scholar- 
 Gypsy into a mere pathetic, though lovely, wraith. 
 He is a phantom, for whose apparition the poet, 
 tenderly as he treats him, half apologizes. And 
 the landscapes that he wanders through — these, 
 too, are very different from purely Eomantic land- 
 scapes, from the landscapes, for example, in 
 Alastor. They have none of the courageous and 
 persuasive falseness of Shelley's landscapes. Over 
 them there broods "the soft canopy of English 
 air " ; they are wrought out with loving fidelity of 
 detail; their "scarlet poppies," their "wide fields 
 of breezy grass," their "green-muffled Cumner 
 hills," and the rural figures, too, that move in the 
 
48 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 midst of familiar scenes through homely rustic 
 tasks, all have the colour and accent of actual Eng- 
 lish life. They are incontestably real, and their 
 delicate truth and good faith but make the flitting 
 figure of the Scholar-Gypsy seem the more elusive, 
 and render him the more unmistakably a symbol, 
 imaginatively wrought out with conscious artistry. 
 For Arnold, Idealism has become but an undetain- 
 able reminiscence; the world of exquisite natural 
 fact defeats, even against the poet's wish, the spirit 
 of Romance. 
 
 This same tenderly heroic loyalty to ideals that 
 are still felt to be half -futile is expressed in the 
 famous Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, A 
 very well-known passage in the poem sets definitely 
 over against each other the earlier world of the 
 idealists and the modern world of conventional 
 experience — the flaunting world of science and 
 triumphant fact. Arnold elects for the world of 
 dreamers; his heart is with the "shy recluses," 
 inheritors of the spirit of a visionary age, who 
 cannot reconcile themselves to the bewildering, 
 albeit splendid, pageantry of actual life. The pas- 
 sage is almost too trite to quote; but its extreme 
 appositeness will justify it. 
 
 *' Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride — 
 I come to shed them at their side." 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 49 
 
 There follows in the poem a brilliantly picturesque 
 passage describing the joy and the splendour of 
 worldly life : troops flash by in the sun with pen- 
 nons and plumes and lances; hunters gather and 
 staghounds bay; the laughter and the silver speech 
 of gay women and men float by with the bugle-calls 
 on the breeze. But from all this brightness and 
 music, which the poet's imagination conjures up, 
 symbolizing the glitter and the indomitable energy 
 of actual life, he turns back to the " shy recluses " 
 whose world is the world of dreams and of conse- 
 cration to the inner life. And so it is with Arnold 
 again and again in his poetry; the fanfare of the 
 present strikes dauntingly and with disillusioning 
 power through the tender music of Eomantic dream- 
 ing; the poet hears the insistent summons, but 
 turns away half -fearfully, half -piously, toward the 
 ideals of a less strenuous age. 
 
 Yet not even in his poetry is this Arnold's last 
 word as to the worth of the world of everyday fact; 
 nor is this his final imaginative appreciation of 
 modern conventional life. The truth of the matter' 
 is that Komantic dreaming was for Arnold possi- 
 ble only in defiance of his conscience; the world 
 of conventional fact had convicted him of sin, had 
 imposed its claims upon him in spite of himself, 
 and had made him feel that his duty lay in the 
 acceptance of the commonplace and the fulfilment 
 of everyday tasks. Accordingly, even in his poetry 
 he substantially admits, as Clough admitted, that 
 
60 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 "fact must be fact, and life the thing it can." His 
 acceptance of fact is never confident and grateful, 
 never very hopeful. As he looks out on the mod- 
 ern world he has much to say of his " dwindling 
 faculty of joy"; of his soul which "perishes of 
 cold"; of a "weariness" which "no energy can 
 reach." He has much to say, too, of the unloveli- 
 ness of the prospect that real life offers. Our age 
 is "an iron time"; its wisdom is harshness; its 
 gayety is frivolity. The world is made up of 
 "triflers," who amiably while life away, or of 
 slaves, who are dull victims of routine. Yet this 
 world, unlovely as it is, is the world where, as 
 Wordsworth urged, men must find their happiness 
 or not at all. The wise man will accept the con- 
 ditions of life — will "submit, submit." He must 
 not "fly to dreams," yet he need not despair. He 
 will learn "to neither strive nor cry." He will 
 train himself to that "wide and luminous view" 
 which substitutes for the petulance of individual 
 desire the calm and the resignation of philosophy. 
 He will open his soul to the temperate splendour 
 of nature and will steady himself through watching 
 and emulating her untroubled rhythms of achieve- 
 ment. He will form himself in the spirit of her 
 "greatness," will "rally the good in the depths" 
 of himself, and "share in the world's toil." His 
 faith in the ideal, he will retain as a kind of secret 
 life — a " Buried Life " — whence he may draw in- 
 spiration for his practical struggle with recalcitrant 
 reality. 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 51 
 
 Certainly there is nothing frolic or buoyant in 
 this return of Arnold's to the regions of everyday 
 fact. His home-coming almost suggests in its tem- 
 pered meekness that of Goldsmith's Moses from 
 the Fair with his famous gross of green spectacles. 
 Yet Arnold has the pith of the matter in him ; he 
 accepts the laws of the great game of life. And 
 though his mood, when compared with that of 
 Browning or of Walt Whitman, may seem at the 
 best a mood of finely controlled disheartenment, 
 yet that there was much conscientious courage and 
 stern endurance beneath what sometimes seems 
 the pose of "weariness," his strenuous discharge 
 through a long period of time of exasperatingly 
 prosaic duties makes clear beyond the possibility 
 of a query or a quibble. 
 
 During the last thirty years of his life, Arnold's 
 medium of expression was almost wholly prose. 
 His work during these years falls outside the period 
 with which this essay is dealing, and is, moreover, 
 in spirit and substance part and parcel of our mod- 
 ern age. This much, however, must at least be 
 said of his prose — that alike in its origin and in 
 its execution, it bears witness to his faith in the 
 possibility of a reconciliation between the ideal and 
 the real. His turning to prose may perhaps not 
 too fantastically be regarded as his frank accept- 
 ance of conventional life with all its limitations. 
 He turned to prose very much as Dipsychus finally 
 submitted provisionally to the Power of this World. 
 
52 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 "Welcome, world, henceforth; and farewell 
 dreams! " In the poem Obermann once More, there 
 occurs a passage that seems meant by Arnold as an 
 imaginative account of the purposes that guided 
 him during his later life. The words are put into 
 the mouth of the typical Eomantic dreamer, Ober- 
 mann, who in the poem appears to Arnold in 
 visionary wise. He describes the hard, pitiless 
 splendour of the pagan world, the passion of ten- 
 derness revealed in Christianity — in its Madonna- 
 legend, its child-Christ, and its consolatory Man of 
 Sorrows — the fervours of self-abnegation and of 
 aspiring spirituality in Mediaevalism, the pathetic 
 dissolution of its dream-world and the defeat of its 
 hopes and purposes. For Senancour, the Romantic 
 age was the age of vain regret over the vanishing 
 of delicate spirituality and the waning of mystical 
 ardour; and there is much in Arnold's verse that 
 tallies with this limited conception of the Roman- 
 tic temper. Obermann describes the tumult of 
 grieving and the bitter confusion of soul that over- 
 took the men of his own age as they looked out 
 upon a half-ruinous, half-recreated society in an 
 era that had none of the spiritual or imaginative 
 charm that their hearts exacted. And then he im- 
 poses upon his English follower the task of preserv- 
 ing for the men of the cruder modern age whatever 
 he may of the beauty and the truth and the in- 
 spiriting power of mystical and Romantic ideals. 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 68 
 
 *♦ Though more than half thy years be past, 
 And spent thy youthful prime ; 
 Though round thy firmer manhood cast, 
 Hang weeds of our sad time 
 
 "Whereof thy youth felt all the spell, 
 And traversed all the shade — 
 Though late, though dimm'd, though weak, yet tell 
 Hope to a world new-made ! " 
 
 And it was precisely to this task that Arnold 
 devoted himself in his prose-writings. He sought 
 to bring the real world into harmony, so far as he 
 might, with what seemed to his mature thought 
 best in Komantic ideals. He set himself with 
 rigorous and patient minuteness and unfaltering 
 ingenuity to a close struggle with the trivial and 
 prosaic details of actual life. He contended 
 against materialistic conceptions of life, against 
 "machinery," and against the worship of the fa- 
 vourite idols of a commercial and industrial age. 
 He sought to quicken in his fellows the life of the 
 spirit and to enlarge the range of their imagina- 
 tions. He made familiar to Englishmen novel 
 ideas and novel points of view derived from abroad. 
 In every way he sought to increase the power of 
 spiritual and poetic ideals, always within the lim- 
 its imposed by a sane regard for conventional 
 standards of thought and feeling and for the com- 
 mon sense. One is sometimes tempted to say im- 
 patiently that in his poetry Arnold^s typical hero 
 is, after all, that philosophical poltroon Empedo- 
 
54 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 cles who, in despair over the unloveliness of actual 
 life, flings himself headlong into a crater. Whether 
 or no this be a fair charge, certain it is that in his 
 prose criticism of life Arnold's model of all excel- 
 lence, his lord and master, is Goethe, whose " large 
 and luminous view " he sought loyally to attain to, 
 and whose union of sane practicality with idealistic 
 fervour he recommends and emulates. 
 
 When we turn to Carlyle from Arnold we seem 
 going back to an earlier age. Carlyle is far more 
 audaciously loyal than Arnold to the idiom and the 
 manner of the idealists. In Sartor Resartus he at 
 times attacks the deadening power of custom and 
 convention with almost the virulence of the revolu- 
 tionists. Custom, he points out, makes " dotards " 
 of us all, subjects us to routine, victimizes us and 
 materializes us in countless ways. It is because 
 of his desire to free men from conventional blind- 
 ness that in Sartor Resartus he makes such persist- 
 ent and often such grotesque use of the famous 
 clothes-metaphor. He aims by the very grotesque- 
 ness of his imagery to shock men out of their 
 slavery to conventional ideas, to emancipate them 
 from the customary, to stir them to a fresh envis- 
 agement of the facts of life, to compel them to 
 realize that their beliefs, their religious forms and 
 creeds, their political institutions, their intellect- 
 ual systems ought not to be adopted with the con- 
 ventional nonchalance with which one accepts the 
 traditional and correct thing in hats and trousers. 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 55 
 
 In lieu of the materialistic and so-called common- 
 sense notions about man and life and the universe 
 that the ordinary Englishman unthinkingly con- 
 tents himself with, Carlyle aims to substitute spir- 
 itual and even mystical conceptions. He would 
 replace, or at any rate supplement, eighteenth- 
 century sound sense with German transcendental- 
 ism. He quotes from that fierce realist, Swift, a 
 definition of man, — "a forked, straddling animal 
 with bandy legs," — and adds, "yet also a Spirit, 
 and unutterable Mystery of Mysteries." This is 
 typical of Carlyle's method and aim. He was the 
 first Englishman to deal victoriously in widely 
 read prose with^that fallacious and cynical distrust 
 of genius and imagination and of all the more mys- 
 terious elements in human nature which had ruled 
 English thought and literature since at least the 
 days of Swift. 
 
 Carlyle's transcendentalism, as expounded in 
 Sartor Resartus, is, of course, nowadays an old and 
 somewhat discredited story. Transcendentalism 
 is apt to seem to the modern mind simply one of 
 the beautiful vagaries of a web-spinning age. Yet 
 very beautiful it still is as one follows its elabora- 
 tion in Carlyle's richly imaginative dialect. And 
 by more than one generation of readers it has been 
 welcomed with the utmost eagerness as a prevailing 
 defence against those mechanical theories of the 
 universe that so thrive among English Philistines. 
 For Carlyle, the only two realities in the universe 
 
66 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 are the Divine Will and the Human Will. Nature 
 is a mass of beautiful sensuous symbols whereby 
 God speaks to the human soul. The world is " but 
 an air-image." Man's body is "dust and shadow; 
 a shadow-system gathered round our Me, wherein, 
 through some moments or years, the Divine Es- 
 sence is to be revealed in the Flesh." Laws, 
 religious beliefs and ceremonies, artistic methods, 
 political institutions, are merely the spiritual forms 
 through which man's ceaseless striving for ideal 
 ends records its progress and seeks to make this 
 progress continuous and permanent ; their dwelling 
 is in the mind of man, and their life from genera- 
 tion to generation is a spiritual life. Cities, tilled 
 fields, books — these, too, are but treasuries in 
 which infinite spiritual energy has been stored 
 through the past experience of the race. "So 
 spiritual is our whole daily Life ; all that we do 
 springs out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force; 
 only like a little Cloud-image, or Armida's Palace, 
 air-built, does the Actual body itself forth from 
 the great mystic Deep." And so Carlyle's imagi- 
 nation ranges far and wide among the records of 
 civilization, through the regions of nature, over the 
 revolving earth-ball, and throughout the Cosmos, 
 finding underneath material disguises spirit- 
 ual energy everywhere in play. He unbuilds the 
 seemingly solid frame of the universe and dissolves 
 its base corporeal substance; he refines away all 
 perturbing alloy until he reveals everywhere the 
 
THE EETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 57 
 
 pulsing energy of pure spirit, Human Power and 
 Divine Power weaving tirelessly the fabric of 
 existence. 
 
 Yet in spite of all his magniloquent dreaming, 
 Carlyle is true, or means to be true, to the uncom- 
 promising facts of life; he dreams only that he 
 may the more victoriously labour; and in his Gos- 
 pel of Work and his doctrine of Hero-worship he 
 returns from the misty regions of transcendental- 
 ism and confronts the practical concerns of common 
 life. No one is more contemptuous than Carlyle 
 of dilettante web-spinning or of idle playing with 
 emotion. Byron's egoistic woe, he scorns and 
 ridicules. One of his mandates in Sartor Besartus V 
 is "Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe." "What 
 if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, 
 but to be Unhappy ! Art thou nothing other than 
 a Vulture, then, that fliest through the Universe 
 seeking after somewhat to eat; and shrieking dole- 
 fully because carrion enough is not given thee?" 
 All the private, individual grieving which the Ro- 
 manticists had so plangently or so delicately and 
 picturesquely phrased for the delectation of their 
 age, Carlyle contemns. He sends the laggard 
 euphuist back to actual life, and bids him forget 
 himself and his fine words in some practical task. 
 /'There is endless hope in work." "'Tools and 
 the Man ' — that, henceforth to all time, is now 
 our Epic." " Do the Duty which lies nearest thee." 
 In these principles and precepts, Carlyle reveals a 
 
58 THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 
 
 practical, ethical interest not to be found in such 
 purely Eomantic prose-writers as Lamb, Hazlitt, 
 and De Quinceyj and by virtue of this new and 
 decisive interest he belongs to the later or post- 
 Eomantic age. He is not primarily an imaginative 
 artist, not a mere dreamer ; he insists that dreams 
 be realized in the hard, unmalleable stuff of life. 
 His "Heroes" are simply the workers who thus 
 victoriously embody their dreams in solid fact. 
 Mahomet, Dante, Luther, Cromwell, — they all saw 
 beyond the conventional shows of things; they 
 were all seers or dreamers; but they were also 
 more than dreamers, and triumphantly brought 
 their dreams to pass in some portion or other of the 
 recalcitrant material of daily life. Carlyle's Hero 
 is the Deformed Eomanticist Transformed into a 
 heroic worker of results. His last word to beauti- 
 fully complaining visionaries is a charge that they 
 immerse themselves in the Actual: "Yes here, in 
 this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, 
 wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere 
 is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, 
 believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thy- 
 self, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Con- 
 dition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same 
 Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of 
 this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be 
 heroic, be poetic ? " 
 
 On the need, then, of a synthesis between the 
 Actual and the Ideal, Carlyle insists with much 
 
THE RETURN TO CONVENTIONAL LIFE 59 
 
 gorgeous rhetoric. But if lie be asked for definite 
 and close suggestions about this synthesis, his 
 answers are apt to be vague or even impatient. 
 "Let not any Parliament Member ask of this 
 Editor, What is to be done? . . . Editors are not 
 here, foremost of all, to say How. ... An Ed- 
 itor's stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must 
 be done. The 'way to do it '' — is to try it, know- 
 ing that thou shalt die if it be not done." This is 
 both ungracious and tantalizingly elusive. But its 
 vagueness is characteristic of the whole post-Ro- 
 mantic attitude toward conventional life. After 
 all, the post-Eomanticists were not passionately 
 enough in love with the Actual to follow out its 
 facts and their laws with patient fidelity through 
 all their complications and variations. They saw 
 life and they loved life in its large contours, in its 
 pageantry, under its more moving and more typical 
 aspects. They lacked the microscopic eye and the 
 ingenious instinct for detail that are characteristic 
 of the modern artist and of the modern commen- 
 tator on life. It remained for the scientific spirit 
 with its fine loyalty to fact, and for realism with 
 its delicate sense of the worth of the passing 
 moment — of the phase — to carry still further 
 the return to the regions of the Actual. 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO 
 COMMON LIFE 
 
 Tennyson's poetry passes decisively beyond that 
 of Clough, Mrs. Browning, and Matthew Arnold in 
 its reaction against Eomanticism. Earlier than any 
 of these poets Tennyson recognized in verse the 
 dangers of lonely Eomantic dreaming. The Palace 
 of Artj first published in 1833, portrays in richly 
 ornate allegory the mental and moral disasters that 
 are apt to overtake the dilettante who isolates him- 
 self from his fellows in the pursuit of beauty. It 
 seems almost a prophecy of what later befell Dante 
 Gabriel Eossetti and a poetical diagnosis of his 
 morbidness and maladies. It may justly be taken 
 as expressing once for all Tennyson's unswerving 
 conviction that an artist, in order both to preserve 
 his normality and to give his art its widest scope 
 and most vital power, must keep in close sympathy 
 with the common life of his time. The recluse 
 dreamer that Tennyson portrays in the poem is the 
 typical Eomantic Wanderer, fallen heir to a fortune 
 and endowed with a sense of ways and means. He 
 builds his soul a lordly pleasure-house, gathers into 
 it all forms and objects of art that may minister to 
 60 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 61 
 
 a nobly passionate search for visionary beauty, and 
 devotes himself in the midst of these new and 
 exquisitely directed conditions to the old Eomantic 
 quest after the ideal. But, as every one remem- 
 bers, bad dreams force themselves upon him 
 through all his safeguards and mar the calculated 
 perfection of his visionary world; he is tortured 
 with strange fancies ; he feels the bonds of 
 saue self-possession dissolving; the universe seems 
 closing in upon him impalpably and terribly, — 
 destroying with its threats the tranquil and har- 
 monious movement of his imaginative life. And 
 so he at last abandons his many-chambered palace 
 of dreams, and goes down to make his abode in " a 
 cottage in the vale,'' where he may draw solace 
 and strength from " the common heart and need." 
 To Tennyson, isolated dreaming, even though one. 
 yield to it under the most exquisite and least sen- 
 suous conditions, seems bound to prove futile and 
 disastrous. 
 
 But though Tennyson thus early and deci- 
 sively condemned the waywardness and the re- 
 moteness of Eomanticism, his own manner of life 
 was curiously unaccordant. He was himself less 
 reconciled with the conventionalities, less at home 
 in the world of sheer fact, than perhaps any other 
 great poet of his day. From first to last, in his 
 relations with his fellow men, he was wilful, 
 almost grotesque, in his maintenance of the pose of 
 the special soul. In bearing, dress, and manner he 
 
62 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 ■was singular, picturesque, irreducible to rule. He 
 wore all the forms of life with a somewhat chal- 
 lenging difference. He had none of Browning's 
 frank interest in the routine of society ; he guarded 
 for himself a kind of splendid privacy ; he shut 
 himself away from the dulness or the clamour of 
 commonplace life in the beautiful wood-girdled 
 fastness of Farringford, or in the heart of the 
 heather in the Surrey hills at Aldworth. Of course, 
 the whole world knows the greatness of the man, 
 his flawless sincerity, and the scope and largeness 
 of his nature ; there was in him no strain of little- 
 ness, no taint of affectation. And so the slight, but 
 persistent, strangeness of his movement among his 
 fellows must be accepted as the genuine and neces- 
 sary expression of peculiarities of temperament, 
 which made it impossible for him to conventionalize 
 himself without harming what was quintessential 
 in his nature. 
 
 Throughout Tennyson's art there run traces of 
 this same inconsistency between theory and prac-. 
 tice. Theoretically, he was convinced of the im- 
 perative need of a synthesis between the actual 
 and the ideal, and of the incontrovertible claims 
 of commonplace life and the conventional world of 
 organized society. Law, order, cooperative effort, 
 — these conceptions are in his verse everywhere 
 exalted. The individual is tutored into subjection 
 to the rights of the body politic. Wellington and 
 King Arthur — his typical heroes — are men whose 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 63 
 
 natures are through and through wrought into obe- 
 dience to law. The ideal of the State calls forth 
 Tennyson's passionate devotion, and often stirs 
 his imagination into the creation of fervent beauty. 
 He is conspicuously patriotic, and is indeed almost 
 insular in his keen loyalty to English traditions, 
 English habits of life, English religious ideas, 
 English landscapes, and the British Constitution. 
 Under this Constitution, he finds reconciled as 
 nowhere else, passion for individual freedom and 
 reverence for order, and he celebrates the Consti- 
 tution as the symbol of the marvellous English 
 genius for self-government ; he finds treasured up 
 in it the results of long generations of strenuous, 
 but controlled, effort after more perfect social adjust- 
 ment. He sings of England as, 
 
 " A land of settled government, 
 A land of just and old renown, 
 Where Freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 Tennyson's fervid patriotism and his ardent ex- 
 altation of order distinguish him from most of 
 the great poets of the century : from the rebels, 
 Byron and Shelley, whose tirades against English 
 tyranny were notoriously fierce; and also from 
 Clough and Arnold, whose love of country was 
 tempered with much philosophic doubt. 
 
 In his relations to science, too, Tennyson is far 
 more modern than Clough or Arnold j here also he 
 
64 TENNYSON'S KELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 shows an increased closeness to fact and a striving 
 to reconcile, at least theoretically, the world of 
 fact with the world of dreams. The purpose of In 
 Memoriam is, of course, from first to last to brings 
 about this reconciliation. The poem sets itself to 
 envisage unflinchingly under all its aspects the 
 commonest and ugliest fact of human existence — 
 death. It keeps continually in view the most 
 discouraging conclusions that the scientific intel- 
 lect urges about man's base origin, about nature's 
 indifference to man's destiny, and about the in- 
 significance of the human drama as a part of the 
 great cosmic process. Yet the poet wins to beauty 
 through all this adversity ; he brings sweetness out 
 of the bitterness of death ; he convinces at least the 
 heart that the grief and the tragedy of actual life 
 are not absolute evil. 
 
 In such poems as these, then, and in such ways 
 as these, — through insistence by means of pictur- 
 esque symbols on the intimate relation of art to life 
 and through a lyrical outpouring of personal con- 
 viction as regards the worth of life, — Tennyson at- 
 tempts a reconciliation of the actual with the ideal. 
 In so far he has got the better of the detachment 
 that is characteristic of Romantic poetry. 
 
 But when we go beyond his theories of life and 
 his lyrical poems, and question how far he can veri- 
 tably lay hold of the world of everyday experience 
 and reproduce it in his art visibly and audibly, so 
 that it shall have perfect truth of detail and yet 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 65 
 
 a redeeming glamour, then we become aware of 
 the limitations of his genius, and are once more 
 troubled by that shrinking from the commonplace 
 and from the crude, and by that monopolizing, in- 
 terest in subjective emotion, which have already 
 been noted as characteristic of him as a man. 
 With the actual drama of human life Tennyson 
 cannot cope; he cannot redeem its triviality; he 
 cannot bring beauty out of its turmoil and confu- 
 sion ; he cannot interpret into fine significance its 
 puzzling complexities of motive, character, and 
 passionate action. He cannot vanquish the repel- 
 lent imperfections and defects of actual experience, 
 and show, in the unwrought dross and tortured 
 material of commonplace existence, God in the 
 making; he cannot reveal God in the passing 
 hours. For this kind of renovating imaginative 
 realism he lacks courage ; he lacks also the neces- 
 sary frank hospitality toward all kinds of experit, 
 ence, the quick insight into motive and character, 
 and the wide and close familiarity with the drama 
 of life. 
 
 External nature he can reproduce with what 
 seems like truth and yet with beauty, for here he 
 can be selective and subjective. But when he 
 uses these same capricious methods for the treat- 
 ment of character and conduct, his poetry comes 
 perilously near taking on Eomantic falseness of 
 tone and substance;, and it is this falsification of 
 actual life that is meant when Tennyson is spoken 
 
66 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 of as still under the sway of Romantic moods, as 
 still using Eomantic methods. 
 
 In considering these limitations of Tennyson's 
 genius as affecting his relation to actual life, the 
 Idylls of the King and other narrative poems that 
 deal with legendary subjects may at once be set 
 aside. In such poems Tennyson confessedly gives 
 himself over to remote and beautiful dreaming. 
 The dramas, too, may be neglected; these are by 
 universal consent unreal, unconvincing, lyrically 
 beautiful, but weak in characterization and untrue. 
 There remain two classes of poems that profess to 
 treat common and contemporary life sincerely and 
 yet imaginatively : first, poems that may be called 
 Idylls of Eustic Life, such poems as Dora and 
 the Gardener^ s Daughter; here, too, belongs Enoch 
 Arden: secondly, poems that take their subjects 
 and characters direct from the artificial world of 
 conventional society; the most important of these 
 poems are Locksley Hall and the monodrama, Maud. 
 
 Tennyson's relation to actual life in poems of 
 the first class may be illustrated from Enoch Arden. 
 Walter Bagehot has in one of his essays briefly 
 pointed out how remote this poem continually keeps 
 from the world of fact. Never for a moment in 
 Enoch Arden is the reader brought into touch with 
 real characters or with the real experiences of 
 sailors. What the poem does is to put before the 
 reader with exquisite deftness what such characters 
 and such experiences become as they pass through 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 67 
 
 the dreamy mind and before the visionary imagi- 
 nation of the poet who wrote the Lady of Shalott 
 and Tears, idle tears. The poem has none of the 
 savour of fact. It is lyrically falsified from first 
 to last — qualified into grace and music through the 
 poet's refinement of temperament. An excellent 
 illustration of this lyrical falsification is to be 
 found in the description of Enoch on the desert 
 island : — 
 
 *• The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns 
 And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, 
 The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, 
 The lightning flash of insect and of bird, 
 The lustre of the long convolvuluses 
 That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran 
 Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows 
 And glories of the broad belt of the world, 
 All these he saw ; but what he fain had seen 
 He could not see, the kindly human face, 
 Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard 
 The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, 
 The league-long roller thundering on the reef. 
 The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
 And blossora'd in the zenith, or the sweep 
 Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave. 
 As down the shore he ranged, or all day long 
 Sat often in the seaward -gazing gorge, 
 A shipwreck' d sailor, waiting for a sail : 
 No sail from day to day, but every day 
 The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
 Among the palms and ferns and precipices j 
 The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
 The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
 The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 
 Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
 
68 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
 The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 
 
 The splendour and the beauty of these lines, their 
 imaginative power, are beyond cavil ; but what they 
 really convey to us is Tennyson's lyrical comment 
 on Enoch's isolation, not for a moment a vivid, vital 
 sense of Enoch's own actual appreciation of his 
 fate. Fancy Robinson Crusoe trying to find his 
 mind mirrored in Tennyson's rhodomontade. 
 
 There is no truth in the psychology of Enoch ; 
 he is a sentimental, soft-hearted dreamer. There 
 is no truth in the emotional atmosphere through 
 which the background of minor characters and of 
 nature is shown to us. The whole story is con- 
 ceived in sentiment and brought forth in melodious 
 lyricism. As a plea, therefore, for the essential 
 worth of common life the poem has no constraining 
 power. We feel persistently that the charm and 
 the glamour come not from life itself, but from the 
 temperament and the technique of the poet. We 
 cannot be made in love with life by the delicate 
 imagery and the musical cadences of this tale of 
 self-sacrifice. There is no genuine synthesis of. 
 the actual and the ideal ; for the poet shows no 
 firm grasp on the actual. The sailor he describes 
 is ansemic and semi-hysterical ; the refinements of 
 the sailor's spiritual struggle are highly improb- 
 able ; the returning wanderer would far more likely 
 have conducted himself as Guy de Maupassant's 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 69 
 
 seaman did in Le Retour. Finally, even if char- 
 acters and incidents and atmosphere all seemed 
 true, the poem would, nevertheless, because of the 
 faint-heartedness of the sentiment, not be a success- 
 ful renovation of life ; it would be more apt to give 
 the reader a fit of the spleen than to send him out 
 frankly and willingly into the world to take what 
 it offers. 
 
 When we turn to the second group of poems that 
 portray actual life, we find Tennyson's Eomantic 
 proclivities no less in evidence, although revealing 
 themselves in a new fashion. In Maud, a typical 
 poem of this class, the author's own personality 
 less obviously interposes a false atmosphere be- 
 tween the reader and actual life. But the falsifi- 
 cation nevertheless exists, and Tennyson's inability 
 to re-create the commonplace in terms of beauty 
 shows itself as unmistakably as ever. The whole 
 poem is the overwrought, half-frenzied dream of 
 a mind diseased, — the mind of the hero, whose 
 ideas and feelings and fancies make up the sub- 
 stance of the poem, and through whose eyes and 
 morbid temperament we are continually forced to 
 look at whatever happens. This hero is the son of 
 a suicide; he has a bias toward insanity; he has 
 been all his days a lonely, myopic, inconsolable 
 misanthrope; he inveighs much and often against 
 the common lot and his own individual fate; he 
 kills a man in a duel, — the brother of the woman he 
 loves ; he is separated from his betrothed and goes 
 
70 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 mad. Einally, a^ter suffering from various hallu- 
 cinations, lie gets back his reason ; and he escapes 
 from his private woe through going for a soldier. 
 
 All this may be contemporary, but it certainly is 
 not common life, and it certainly is morbid. The 
 undeniable beauty of the poem is won through the 
 help of a madman. To seem to Tennyson worth 
 portrayal, the actual life of the present has to 
 be edited in terms of the mind and the imagination 
 of a monomaniac. Once more, then, Tennyson, 
 though he professedly concerns himself with a 
 subject drawn from the life around him, fails to 
 bring about any satisfactory synthesis of the ideal 
 and the actual. The piece of actual life that 
 attracts his imagination is too unusual and strange 
 to be representative; and the mode of portrayal, 
 though true to the hero's temper, completely falsifies 
 the values of normal existence. Moreover, the 
 poem ends with a curious Eomantic flourish; the 
 hero rushes off to fight for his country. Only in 
 the pageantry and the excitement of war can he 
 hope to forget his selfish passion and despair. 
 The poem seems almost like a survival from the 
 period of storm and stress. 
 
 But besides the unreality of his narrative poems, 
 there are several minor ways in which Tennyson's 
 Eomantic discomfort in the presence of actual life 
 shows itself. He is fond of allegory, and this fond- . 
 ness is perhaps a sign of his powerlessness over the 
 actual stuff of life, — of his inability to give us 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 71 
 
 witli accuracy and yet with beauty the contours and 
 the configurations and the rugged aspects of the 
 world of fact. He likes to build his own cosmos 
 of truth, instead of finding and revealing God's 
 truth in God's cosmos. He delights in fashioning 
 beautiful stories in which personified abstractions 
 or simplified typical characters are the actors, and 
 in which some theory or set of impressive ideas is 
 symbolically illustrated. In the Palace of Art he 
 demonstrates abstractly the dangers of dilettant- 
 ism ; in the Vision of Sin he shows in a splendid 
 and terrible pageant the pleasures and the pains 
 of wickedness ; the Idylls of the King are through- 
 out conceived and executed in accordance with 
 an allegorical design. This instinct in an artist 
 toward the region of allegorical abstractions is apt 
 to go along with a shrinking dislike of the stark 
 facts of actual life. The artist withdraws from 
 the turmoil of the real universe into the fortress of 
 his own mind, and beats the enemy in toy battles 
 with toy soldiers. He demonstrates on maps and 
 on paper that the devil must at last get the worst 
 of it in the world. 
 
 The same lack of control over concrete facts 
 shows itself in the shallowness and vagueness of 
 Tennyson's characterization. The men and the 
 women in his lyrics and his narratives have no 
 minutely realized individualities ; they are of inter- 
 est to Tennyson because of the moods and the 
 dreams they suggest to him; they do not tempt 
 
T2 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 him into close analysis of their minds and hearts, of 
 the peculiar interplay of their moods, motives, and 
 acts ; indeed, as conceived by Tennyson they rarely 
 have any complex inner life of thought and feeling. 
 Sometimes they are types, — characters simplified 
 for a moral purpose; sometimes, as in the Idylls, 
 they are effective figures in romantic stories of love 
 and war, and their acts flow directly and simply 
 from elemental desires and passions, and express 
 the somewhat conventional qualities of brave 
 knights and fair ladies. But whatever the special 
 value for Tennyson of the men and the women in 
 his poems, they do not challenge him to subtle 
 psychological studies, of the sort, for example, that 
 Browning delights in. The actual facts of the 
 inner lives of men and women have little interest 
 or fascination for him; he cares hardly more for 
 these inner facts than for the actual outward facts of 
 everyday existence. His own moods and his own 
 dreams are what he instinctively watches and inter- 
 prets. Characters are worth while according to 
 their power to excite rare moods of reverie and 
 exquisite dreams. Tennyson is little better than a 
 lotos-eater in his interpretation of character. 
 
 Tennyson's curious self-involvement in the pres- 
 ence of the personalities he watches or creates, his 
 lack of vital dramatic sympathy and insight, are 
 well illustrated in the series of poems that bear the 
 names of women, — Lilian, Isabel, Madeline, Eled- 
 nore, Adeline, and Margaret. About each of these 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 73 
 
 fair women Tennyson " dreams deliciously " ; each 
 is "made one with nature/' is portrayed through, 
 beautiful symbols drawn from landscape and forest 
 and hillside and " the blue regions of the air. " 
 But what is portrayed? Not a mind and an in- 
 tricate character, but a peculiar type of beauty 
 (involving a temperament, to be sure), as the type 
 plays luxuriously upon the moods and the imagina- 
 tion of the poet. 
 
 *' How may full-sail'd verse express, 
 How may measured words adore 
 The full-flowing harmony 
 Of thy swan-like stateliness, 
 Eleanore ? 
 The luxuriant symmetry 
 Of thy floating gracefulness, 
 Eleanore ? 
 Every turn and glance of thine, 
 Every lineament divine, 
 
 Eleanore, 
 
 And the steady sunset glow. 
 
 That stays upon thee ? " 
 
 This is very beautiful, but it is certainly not 
 psychology. Nor is there a subtler interpretation 
 of character in Fatima, (Enone, and the two Mari- 
 anas; they are merely studies of passion in terms 
 of landscape. The picturesque aspects of charac- 
 ter are what interest Tennyson, not the subtleties 
 or the intricacies of mind and heart. This lack 
 of psychological truth is only one more illustration 
 of Tennyson's lack of instinct for the actual, — of 
 
74 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 his remoteness from the common lot, — of his half- 
 romantic subjectivity, — of his preoccupation with 
 the dream or with his own moods. 
 
 In all these ways, then, and for all these reasons, 
 Tennyson fails of perfect imaginative control of 
 common life, comes short of being a renovating 
 interpreter of the commonplace. The truth of the 
 matter is, that he had no vital faith in the common- 
 place such as Browning had, or belief in its essen- 
 tial worth. He was undemocratic in every fibre 
 of his delicate recluse nature. He does his utmost 
 in his art to be loyal to his age, to the wearisome 
 tracts of the trivial in human life, even to the 
 claims of the ugly and to the rights of pain and 
 sin. He succeeds in theoretically justifying to 
 himself all these repulsive elements in the uni- 
 verse as part of some divinely guided process which 
 shall ultimately lead to crowning good. The clos- 
 ing lines of In Memoriam express the poet^s 
 belief in 
 
 " One far-off divine event 
 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 Yet this very confession of faith is, after all, an 
 illustration of Tennyson's distrust and dislike of 
 the present. In the actual moment he is unable 
 to find redeeming beauty or worth ; he can regard 
 the passing moment, the welter of good and evil 
 that he looks out upon, as worth while only as it 
 may be atoned for by some far-away excellence to- 
 
TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 75 
 
 ward whicli it is groping. The present lie tolerates 
 simply as it contains the promise and potency 
 of some remote future. This is merely, in a more 
 refined form, the old Komantic blasphemy against 
 life and the spirit that informs it. Greater faith, 
 greater heartiness, more courage than this, are 
 needed in a poet; otherwise he can hardly hope 
 to portray a fragment of our actual fleeting life 
 so as to make it seem divinely significant in spite 
 of all its apparent triviality and its undeniable 
 grossness and ugliness. 
 
 Finally, even when Tennyson renders some piece 
 of actual life exquisite in its appeal to us, the 
 charm too often seems something adventitious, 
 something artificially added to life, not resident in 
 life and simply revealed by the poet. The beauty, 
 for example, in Enoch Arden seems distilled into 
 the story from the poet's temperament through the 
 aid of musical rhythms and delicately wrought 
 imagery. This is the old dubious method of 
 Romanticism to which long ago Jeffrey and Peacock 
 narrowly and unintelligently objected and in which 
 later criticism has more precisely noted the eccen- 
 tricity and untrustworthiness. Romantic poets — 
 so the charge runs — give us their capricious 
 moods about life ; they show us life with the em- 
 bellishment imparted to it by their quaintly irides- 
 cent temperaments. They give us a report, not of 
 some actual region of fact, but of the mirage 
 thereof cast against the heavens by the haze of 
 
76 TENNYSON'S RELATION TO COMMON LIFE 
 
 intense emotion in the midst of which they are 
 perpetually moving and breathing. What they 
 have to offer is news of the state of the emotional 
 atmosphere, not news of the rugged earth. Their 
 ideal is a visionary ideal in the clouds ; the actual 
 remains below unredeemed. The beauty of the 
 mirage, we come often to feel, is an artificial affair, 
 the product of the refractions of personal feeling, 
 of the individual horizon, of the evanescent lights 
 and colours of poetic imagery, and of the shap- 
 ing winds of rhythm. Beauty of this kind is worth 
 while; yet it is in some degree accidental and 
 abnormal ; it is in very truth only exquisite feign- 
 ing. Tennyson in his imaginative treatment of 
 actual life fails for the most part to create beauty 
 more essential or permanent than this, or beauty 
 that is more organically and necessarily related to 
 common experience. He has still something of the 
 visionary blindness of Romanticism when he tries 
 to move about in the midst of the trivial incident 
 and the varying turmoil of daily life. Out of what 
 his vision has vouchsafed him, he creates lyrical 
 poetry of irresistible sweetness and beauty. But 
 his eye, while he has been watching the splendours 
 of dreamland, has not learned the aspect or the 
 meaning of the commonplace, and he makes his 
 way uncertainly through a world that he only par- 
 tially realizes. 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 One of the most important effects of the Roman- 
 tic movemenlf was the closeness of the relation it 
 established between nature and the human soul. 
 The intense and oftentimes eccentric emotions that 
 tended to throw the Eomantic poet out of sympathy 
 with his fellow men and with conventional life be- 
 came the solvent of the rigid forms of the material 
 universe. The poet's fervid mood proved the very 
 fire necessary to fuse nature once and for all with 
 emotion, to make it coalesce with thought and the 
 inner life of man, and to unite matter and spirit 
 more subtly and intimately than ever before. The 
 Eomantic poets subdued nature to spirit; they in- 
 terpreted nature in terms of human feeling ; they 
 sent their imaginations out along countless lines of 
 subtle association, drew all nature into sympathy 
 with their intense experiences, and converted all 
 the facts and forms of nature into "the passion- 
 winged ministers of thought." Nature was no 
 longer to stand apart from man as a system of half- 
 hostile forces, or a mass of dry facts, meaningless 
 except for science : it was not to be as for Pope and 
 the Deists merely a great machine of infinitely 
 ingenious construction, set running once and for all 
 77 
 
78 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 by tlie great Mechanician and for ever after grind- 
 ing out effects unerringly and inevitably. For 
 many Eomantic poets — notably for Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and Shelley — nature was a direct emana- 
 tion from the one great spiritual force which mani- 
 fests itself also in the myriad individuals that make 
 up the human race. The countless ideas and feel- 
 ings that float through the mind of man and the 
 countless shapes and aspects of the world of nature 
 were alike the utterance of one great imaginative 
 Artist, who expressed through these two sets of 
 symbols his thoughts of beauty and truth. Hence 
 the poet who seeks a proper image to stand for his 
 thought has simply to let his imagination guide him 
 through the beautiful forms of nature till he finds 
 a fitting symbol ; his thoughts are God's thoughts, 
 and have been already uttered in some fixed shape 
 of beauty, or through some changing aspect, of 
 the outside world. This is really the postulate 
 on which Wordsworth's and Coleridge's theory 
 of imagination depends; imagination, they urge 
 leads to objective truth, while fancy only plays 
 prettily with images ; imagination discerns essential 
 analogies between mind and matter, and brings once 
 more into at least transient unity the world of spirit 
 and the world of nature. 
 
 Tennyson's poetry carries on with fine loyalty 
 and in some ways with increased effectiveness the 
 Romantic tradition in the treatment of nature. Not 
 that he accepts or expresses extreme transcendental 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 83 
 
 impressions of youth ; there rests on all of them the 
 light of early morning. The Lotos-Eaters portrays 
 a series of scenes from the land where " it seemed 
 always afternoon " ; the poem is a study in yellow 
 and gold and orange; the landscapes are seen 
 through a dreamy mellow haze and in the light of a 
 westering sun ; and not one of them could be con- 
 ceived of as occurring in the Ode to Memory, Nor 
 could the following landscape be found by any 
 possibility in the Lotos-Eaters : — 
 
 " Pour round my ears the livelong bleat 
 Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, 
 
 Upon the ridged wolds, 
 When the first matin-song hath waken'd loud 
 Over the dark dewy earth forlorn, 
 What time the amber morn 
 Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud.'* 
 
 There breathe through these lines the sense of mys- 
 tery and the awe and yet the hope and the keen 
 delight that are stirred in the heart of an impres- 
 sionable boy by the sights and sounds of dawn. 
 The Lotos-Eaters knew no such nature as this. 
 
 Nor is it only in Tennyson's early or short poems 
 that this atmospheric treatment of landscape is to 
 be found. His later long narrative poems are full of 
 equally good illustrations of his power to re-create 
 nature in terms of a dominating mood. The action 
 of these poems goes on in the midst of natural 
 scenery which is perpetually varying in tone and 
 colour, and light and shade, in sympathy with the 
 
84 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 mood of the moment. In Maud, this suffusion of 
 nature with passion is especially noticeable ; and 
 the hysterics and bad psychology of that poem are 
 made endurable by the beauty of such imaginative 
 sketches as the following : — 
 
 "I heard no sound where I stood 
 But the rivulet on from the lawn 
 Running down to my own dark wood ; 
 Or the voice of the long sea-wave as it swell'd 
 Now and then in the dim -gray dawn ; 
 But I look'd, and round, all round the house I beheld 
 The death-white curtain drawn ; 
 Felt a horror over me creep, 
 Prickle my skin and catch my breath, 
 Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep, 
 Yet I shudder' d and thought like a fool of the sleep of 
 death." 
 
 This should be compared with Wordsworth's 
 " Strange fits of passion have I known " ; the mood 
 is substantially the same ; but Tennyson's lines are 
 far finer in phrasing, more suggestive in imagery, 
 and more thoroughly atmospheric. 
 
 In Enoch Arden, too, there are many passages 
 where, with like intensity and imaginative power, 
 nature is subdued to the passion of the moment. - 
 What could be finer from this point of view or more 
 inappropriate from the point of view of Enoch's 
 psychology than the famous lines describing 
 Enoch's sense of isolation on the desert island ? — 
 
 " No sail from day to day, but every day 
 The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 85 
 
 Among the palms and ferns and precipices ; 
 
 The blaze upon the waters to the east ; 
 
 The blaze upon his island overhead ; 
 
 The blaze upon the waters to the west ; 
 
 Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, 
 
 The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again 
 
 The scarlet shafts of sunrise — but no sail." 
 
 In order to bring out more unmistakably the 
 peculiar transformation to wMch. in such descrip- 
 tions as these nature submits in passing through 
 Tennyson's temperament, it may be well to quote 
 two or three of his simpler descriptions of natural 
 scenery where he merely portrays frankly and 
 delicately some clearly visualized aspect or object 
 of the outside world. Descriptions of this sort also 
 abound, and are wrought out with an exquisite fine- 
 ness of detail that does not preclude breadth of 
 treatment, and with marvellous felicity of phrase. 
 The first of the following passages is from Margaret 
 and the second from Maud : — 
 
 *' The sun is just about to set, 
 The arching limes are tall and shady, 
 And faint, rainy lights are seen, 
 Moving in the leavy beech." 
 
 •* I was walking a mile, 
 More than a mile from the shore, 
 The sun look'd out with a smile 
 Betwixt the cloud and the moor, 
 And riding at set of day 
 Over the dark moor land, 
 Rapidly riding far away, 
 She waved to me with her hand. 
 
86 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 There were two at her side, 
 Something flash' d in the sun, 
 Down by the hill I saw them ride, 
 In a moment they were gone." 
 
 The lines from Margaret show as loving and faith- 
 ful a study of nature as Wordsworth's, and as great 
 delicacy of phrase in recording unusual or little 
 noticed aspects of the outside world. The passage 
 from Maud is a masterpiece of description; the 
 landscape is sketched, in its broad features, with 
 bold, free strokes, and the figures are flashed upon 
 the reader's imagination by a gleam of light and a 
 motion. In both these passages the treatment is 
 sincere and simple ; nature is shown under a white 
 light, with no modifying or harmonizing atmos- 
 phere. But description of this kind, though attrac- 
 tive enough in its way and bearing witness to the 
 perfection of Tennyson's technique, lacks the specific 
 charm and peculiar power of Romantic description ; 
 it is not imaginative in the distinctively Romantic 
 meaning of the term ; it does not, to use Lamb's 
 words, " draw all things to one." In the passages 
 earlier considered, the unifying and harmonizing 
 power of imagination pervades every line, phrase, 
 and word, and makes them all eloquent of a single 
 thought and mood. This action of imagination is 
 compared by Wordsworth in a famous passage of 
 the last book of the Prelude, to the light of the 
 moon as this light is seen, from the summit of a 
 lofty hill, falling on a widespread landscape, and 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 87 
 
 blending all the infinitely various details into a sin- 
 gle harmonious impression of splendour and power. 
 Such Romantic imagination in dealing with nature 
 Tennyson possessed in a high degree ; and indeed, 
 from one point of view, he may be said simply to 
 have carried on to richer conclusions the work 
 which the Romanticists began. As has already 
 been suggested, he has probably been more influen- 
 tial than even Wordsworth, in conveying widely 
 and permanently into the English temperament a 
 delicate and swiftly responsive sensitiveness to the 
 emotional suggestiveness of nature. Wordsworth 
 was, in large measure, preoccupied with the moral 
 meaning of the external world ; to quote his own 
 words, he sought "to exhibit the most ordinary 
 appearances of the material universe under moral 
 relations." Tennyson subdues nature still further 
 and makes it eloquent of all our moods and passions. 
 Wordsworth's moods are comparatively limited in 
 variety and in subtlety; their very grandeur and 
 their lofty elevation, when Wordsworth is at his 
 best, prevent great refinement or great subtlety of 
 feeling. His temperament is too simple, and his 
 nature has too great mass, to admit of complex 
 combinations of feelings or of quick and ravishing 
 changes. "Admiration, love, and awe," these are 
 the moods Wordsworth most insists on ; and in the 
 service of these cogent but comparatively simple 
 feelings he is fondest of interpreting the great world 
 of nature. Tennyson's moods, on the other hand, 
 
88 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 run through a very wide range and shade into each 
 other through an infinite series of gradations. He 
 plays on an instrument of far greater delicacy of 
 adjustment and of much greater variety of tone- 
 colour. He was heir to all the rich emotional life of 
 the Komantic poets, and received by way of artistic 
 inheritance a temperament already sensitive to a 
 thousand influences that would have left the men 
 of an earlier century unmoved ; and to these inher- 
 ited aptitudes for feeling subtly and richly were 
 added all the half-tones and minor gradations of 
 feeling that the intense spiritual and intellectual 
 life of the post-Eomantic period tended to develop. 
 With this exquisitely sensitive temperament, he 
 looked on the outside world and found everywhere 
 correspondences between his moods and the aspects^ 
 of nature. To catch and interpret, in all its range 
 and subtlety and evanescent beauty, this emotional 
 suggestiveness of nature was Tennyson's task, just 
 as Wordsworth's task was to catch and register 
 its moral and spiritual suggestiveness. Tennyson's, 
 poetry, then, may be regarded as in a very special 
 sense, a continuation of the Wordsworthian tra- 
 dition, and as carrying still further that subdual 
 of nature to the needs of man's spirit that Words- 
 worth wrought at so faithfully. 
 
 The variety and the subtlety of Tennyson's 
 moods are most noticeable when we turn from his 
 treatment of landscape to his use of natural sights 
 and sounds as symbols. It is, of course, only by 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 89 
 
 the use of these symbols that he could hope to sug- 
 gest the thousand and one changes of mood he tried 
 to portray. These evanescent moods have no 
 names ; there are no conventional signs that the poet 
 can use to place them before his readers ; hence for 
 each mood he must find some natural equivalent — 
 sor^ symbol that shall stand in its place, and, by 
 touching secret springs in our minds and hearts, 
 evoke the subtle complex of feeling he aims to sug- 
 gest. These equivalents and symbols Tennyson 
 finds chiefly in nature ; and his use of them is the 
 last means to be noted by which he brings about a 
 closer union between matter and spirit. 
 
 This symbolical use of nature, together with its 
 effect in giving a spiritual meaning to the world of 
 the senses, is well illustrated in the lyric, " Tears, 
 idle tears." The mood that the thought of the past 
 calls up is highly complex — a resultant of many 
 strangely blending elements; and the poet uses a 
 series of sensuous images, a series of natural sights 
 and sounds, to suggest the elementary feelings that 
 enter into this mood. The " freshness " of delight 
 with which the past is for a moment restored, 
 the infinite " sadness " with which its irrevocable- 
 ness forces itself once more on the thought, the 
 "strangeness" of the far-away dim regions of 
 memory, — these are the notes of feeling that go to 
 make up the whole rich chord of the mood; and 
 each has as its symbol, to call it into being, an 
 image from nature : — 
 
90 NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 
 
 " Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, 
 That brings our friends up from the under-world, 
 Sad as the last which reddens over one 
 That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
 So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 
 
 *' Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
 The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 
 To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more." 
 
 Eacli of the images in these verses is a symbol 
 charged with feeling. And not only does the series 
 of symbols serve to suggest at the moment of read- 
 ing the precise mood of the poet, but always there- 
 after a reddening sail at sunset and the song of 
 birds at dawn mean something more to us than 
 they meant before Tennyson used them as symbols. 
 Nature has taken on a whole new range of spiritual 
 associations. 
 
 There are later poets who have surpassed Tenny- 
 son in variety and complexity of mood and in sug- 
 gestiveness and subtlety of symbolic phrasing. In 
 both these respects Dante Gabriel Kossetti was 
 probably Tennyson's superior. But his superiority 
 was gained at great cost. Nature, in his poetry, is 
 broken up into a mere collection of symbolic sights 
 and sounds ; we miss the breadth of treatment and 
 the fine open-air quality of Tennyson's work ; there 
 is often a sense of artificiality, of exaggeration, 
 almost of violence done to nature to force her into 
 the service of the poet's moods. Moreover, the 
 
NATURE IN TENNYSON'S POETRY 91 
 
 variety and the subtlety of Kossetti's moods are 
 gained at a like cost. Delight in moods became 
 with Kossetti moodiness, and the study of moods 
 reached the point of morbid introspection: subjec- 
 tivity became a disease. 
 
 Tennyson, then, resembles the Romantic poets in 
 his lack of sympathy with real life. He lived in a 
 dream-world rather than in the world of real men 
 and real women ; and it is this dream-world, with 
 its iridescence of beauty and its simplified and 
 intensified characters, that he portrays for us in his 
 poetry ,\save where he shows us the distorted pic- 
 tures of life to be found in the minds of men half- 
 mad with disappointed passion. His impatience of 
 conventional life, his lack of interest in concrete 
 character, and his intense subjectivity mark him 
 out as akin to the Romantic poets, and as not 
 having passed so decisively beyond the Romantic 
 point of view and the Romantic mood as Browning, 
 for example, passed beyond them. He was like 
 the Romantic poets, too, in the fact that it was 
 to nature that he turned to find escape from the 
 crude actualities of everyday life; and it is prob- 
 ably through his share in the great Romantic work 
 of spiritualizing nature that he will be most en- 
 duringly influential. 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 It used to be the fashion a generation ago to 
 have much to say about the morbidness of the life 
 that Hawthorne's stories portray. But of late 
 years the decadents have been in their romances so 
 ingeniously busy with disease and death that to 
 turn back to Hawthorne seems like returning to 
 nature — to what is normal and healthy and sana- 
 tive. It may, indeed, be true that Hawthorne had 
 a hypertrophied conscience, and that the portrayal 
 of life seemed to him chiefly worth while because 
 it gave him a chance to indulge that conscience in 
 its somewhat morbid desire to be troublesome. 
 But, after all, to have an overanxious conscience is 
 a more human state of affairs than to have, as is so 
 often true of the decadents, no conscience at all, or 
 to have one only to the end that clever defiance of 
 it may lead to finely calculated discords in the 
 music of art. Just here lies the difference between 
 the novels of Hawthorne and the stories that mod- 
 ern decadence is so liberal with. In both forms of 
 art, sin, disease, death, the grisliest facts of human 
 destiny are perpetually in evidence; but Haw- 
 thorne is sincere in dealing with them, and meas- 
 92 
 
HAWTHORNE ^ S3 
 
 ures their results and computes their meaning in 
 terms of normal life and the conventional moral 
 consciousness, whereas modern decadents are pri- 
 marily concerned to juggle out of the evil facts of 
 life and their impact on our moral nature some 
 new fantastic artistic effect, and care not a doit for 
 the ethical point of view. , 
 
 It is amusing to find Hawthorne now and then 
 having an inkling of the existence of the primrose 
 path of decadence, or coquetting with the notion of 
 irresponsibility. In the Blithedale Romance he 
 seems nearest to defying his conscience and being 
 recklessly studious of artistic effects for their own 
 dear sakes. Miles Coverdale, who tells the story, 
 is, as he assures us, " a devoted epicure of his own 
 emotions." In one place, after describing a mood 
 in which " the actual world '^ was robbed for him 
 " of its solidity," Coverdale tells us, in a self-satis- 
 fied way, that he " resolved to pause and enjoy the 
 moral sillabub" of the mood "until it was quite 
 dissolved away." In another place he confesses to 
 the habit of observing and analyzing from a dis- 
 tance the characters of his fellows, and he is evi- 
 dently somewhat proud of his speculative and half- 
 cynical detachment. "It is not, I apprehend, a 
 healthy kind of mental occupation," he declares, 
 with apparently a pleasant sense of abnormality, 
 " to devote one's self too exclusively to the study 
 of individual men and women." Yet despite a few 
 such superficial symptoms of dilettantism, Coverdale 
 
94 ' HAWTHORNE 
 
 has a very respectable conscience, which insinuates 
 its vigorous prejudices into his interpretation of the 
 lives and actions he is observing and reporting. 
 
 What is true of Coverdale is true in a yet 
 higher degree of Hawthorne's other characters; 
 sooner or later they all become acutely aware of 
 having fostered or violated a Puritan conscience — 
 with the possible exception of Zenobia ; and on her, 
 poor woman! Hawthorne, while he portrays her, 
 keeps fixed a kind of evil eye, which ultimately 
 drives her into suicide as the only fitting expiation 
 for her venturesome originality. As for Donatello, 
 in the Marble Faun, who is at the start ostensibly 
 the very type of unmoral humanity, he is, despite 
 all his flourish of animality, never anything else 
 than a thoroughly well-tamed creature, fit to caper 
 in a lady's chamber. His wildness is a hothouse 
 wildness, a studio wildness, a manipulated, care- 
 fully fostered wildness, that is useful only for pur- 
 poses of ornament and demonstration. When one 
 really contemplates Donatello in the light of mod- 
 ern science, there is something curiously grotesque 
 in trying to regard Hawthorne's Faun as the Miss- 
 ing Link or as Primeval Man before he evolved a 
 conscience. There is more of outdoors in one verse 
 of Walt Whitman's than in all Hawthorne's pages 
 about Donatello. •? 
 
 No ; the simple truth is that Hawthorne is in all 
 his romances normal in spite of himself, and per- 
 sistently moral and ethical in his interests despite 
 
HAWTHORNE 95 
 
 his constitutional nnsociability, his contempt for 
 conventions, and his overweening imaginativeness. 
 He is ruled by his Puritan ancestors, and in his 
 most fantastic individual dreams is loyal to inher- 
 ited moral prejudices. His earnestness of purpose 
 and his unfailing moral scrupulousness give to his 
 dream-world and its shadowy populace a genuine- 
 ness and cogency which the art of the decadents, 
 dealing as it does in many of the same motifs^ 
 never rivals. 
 
 Still, it remains true that not more with Haw- 
 thorne than with the decadents are we in the 
 actual world of every day. Hawthorne is a 
 dreamer who " dreams true,''^ but who, nevertheless, 
 merely dreams, and whose world has the delicate 
 intangibility of all dream-worlds. We never 
 escape, in reading Hawthorne's romances, from the 
 temperament of the author, and from his unobtru- 
 sive but persistent imaginative control. He 
 creates for a purpose, and in each romance he sub- 
 dues to this purpose the background, the incident, 
 the plot, the characters, and even the imagery and 
 phrasing. The thoroughness with which his gene- 
 rating purpose runs through every detail and word 
 of a romance, and fashions and tempers and unifies 
 all to a single predetermined end, is one of the 
 most convincing proofs of Hawthorne's power as 
 an imaginative artist. There is no piecemeal 
 working in Hawthorne — none of the haphazard 
 procedure that takes details and suggestions good- 
 
96 HAWTHORNE 
 
 naturedly as chance offers them and weaves them 
 dextrously, as Thackeray, for example, is wont to 
 do, into a motley web of fiction. Each of Haw- 
 thorne's long romances is a perfectly wrought work 
 of art, wherein every part is nicely aware of all the 
 rest and of the central purpose and total effect. 
 
 Hawthorne is a master spinner of beautiful webs, 
 and the most rabid devotee of art for art's sake can- 
 not well refuse to enjoy the fineness and consist- 
 ency of his designs, the continuity and firmness of 
 his texture, and the richness and depth of his tint- 
 ing. The pattern, to be sure, always contains a 
 moral for apt pupils. But though Hawthorne 
 dreams in terms of the ten commandments, he 
 dreams beauty none the less ; and, indeed, for some 
 of us who still believe that life is greater than art, 
 his dreams are all the more fascinating artistically 
 because they are deeply, darkly, beautifully true. 
 Dreaming, that in all its wayward caprice is deli- 
 cately aware of the worth of the moral law and the 
 rational bias at the heart of things, and pays a 
 pretty respect to the categorical imperative and the 
 principle of sufficient reason, seems after all to 
 gain an intensity and force and persuasive beauty 
 not otherwise to be won. 
 
 In all his romances Hawthorne is more or less 
 plainly in pursuit of some moral or spiritual truth. 
 In the desire to illustrate such a truth is to be 
 found the originating motive of each of his longer 
 works. The Scarlet Letter is the Eomance of Expi- 
 
HAWTHORNE 97 
 
 ation, done in deeply glowing colours against the 
 dark, sullen background of the Puritan tempera- 
 ment. The House of the Seven Gables is the Ro- 
 mance of Heredity. The colours are gray and 
 sombre, with some pretty fantastic detail in pale 
 rose and green where Phoebe's tender girlishness or 
 womanliness appears. The Marble Faun is the 
 Romance of the Mystery of Evil. It is the most 
 elaborate of all Hawthorne's stories, and as a work 
 of art is nearer lacking unity of tone and design, 
 because of the archaeological and landscape detail 
 of which the author is so lavish. Yet even here 
 the background, though elaborate, has propriety. 
 The story deals in symbolic form with the deepest 
 mystery of human destiny — the origin and the 
 meaning of evil ; and the background for the action 
 is Rome, the very stones of whose streets tell tales 
 of the struggles toward good and toward evil of 
 many races of men. Rome, with its long perspec- 
 tives through a picturesque past, is the symbol of 
 civilized man in all his history, from the far away 
 origin of society down to latter-day love of anarchy. 
 Against this background is depicted the symbolic 
 fate of Donatello and Hilda and Miriam, as types 
 of the human will in its relation to evil. 
 
 For the analyst of novelists' methods there is a 
 real delight to be won from noting how consistent 
 Hawthorne is in constructing his stories. He 
 works invariably just as he ought to work to suit 
 the theorist's notions. Being a creator of allegor- 
 
 H 
 
98 HAWTHORNE 
 
 ical romances, lie ought to work from vvithin his 
 own mind out toward the world of actual fact, for 
 which world he should have a fine disdain. His 
 main purpose should be the creation and illustra- 
 tion of moral effects. In an essay on Hawthorne's 
 Tales, Poe has very happily laid down the law for 
 this kind of fiction : " A skilful literary artist has 
 constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned 
 his thoughts to accommodate his incidents, but 
 having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain 
 unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then 
 invents such incidents — he then combines such 
 events — as may best aid him in establishing this 
 preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence 
 tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he 
 has failed in his first step. In the whole composi- 
 tion there should be no word written of which the 
 tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre- 
 established design." All these prescriptions, 
 which, according to Poe, should govern the short 
 tale, will be found duly observed in Hawthorne's 
 long romances. In tale and romance Hawthorne's 
 methods are nearly the same. His imagination, in 
 its dreamy play over the records of the remote 
 drama of life, has been fascinated by some one of 
 its typical and oft-recurring aspects — the bitter- 
 ness of the expiation of sin, the tragic oppression 
 wherewith the vices and even the virtues of the 
 past weigh down on the innocent present. Such a 
 large aspect of life usually carries with it into the 
 
HAWTHORNE 99 
 
 dark-chamber of Hawthorne's mind some typical 
 man or woman whose character and fate incarnate 
 for him, with picturesque detail, the special truths 
 about life that for the time being preoccupy him. 
 From these original elements, the action of the 
 story and all subordinate detail gradually shape 
 themselves forth and take shadowy form, never 
 with the wish or the hope of bringing the reader 
 close to some glaring piece of actual life, but 
 always with the aim of enveloping him subduingly 
 in an atmosphere of spiritual emotion, and of offer- 
 ing him unobtrusively at every moment, in the acts, 
 in the thoughts and feelings of the actors, in the 
 byways and vistas of nature, in the very air that 
 he breathes, hints and symbols of certain large 
 truths about human life and human endeavour. 
 The regions where the action takes place are often- 
 est nameless ; they are in dreamland — " vaporous, 
 unaccountable, forlorn of light ; " they are not veri- 
 fiable as actual corners of the world-ball, unless 
 they are already so instinct with romance as to be 
 fit to conspire with the author's purpose and help 
 on the moral necromancy. The people that inhabit 
 this dream-world are " goblins of flesh and blood " ; 
 they are spirited up before us out of an unknown 
 past. Priscilla, Hawthorne assures us, seemed to 
 have "fallen out of the clouds"; Miriam's past 
 and even large parts of her present are tantaliz- 
 ingly unverifiable. The gossip of those who sur- 
 round the principal actors tends to veil them still 
 
1 00 HAWTHORNE 
 
 more deftly in a dim cloud of strangeness, rather 
 than to expound their personalities with scientific 
 accuracy, as would happen in a modern realistic 
 story. We never know thoroughly the details of 
 the lives of Chillingworth or Donatello; we are 
 kept in uncertainty about them through surmises 
 and suspicions that run in the story from lip to lip. 
 What is sure about such characters is their pursuit 
 of a few symbolic purposes which serve to fit them 
 unerringly into the large design of the fable. Don- 
 atello is all the time busied with the process of 
 getting a soul. Judge Pyncheon is bent on selfish 
 triumph at all costs, in pursuit of hereditary 
 schemes of aggrandizement. Dimmesdale writhes 
 his way pallidly through the Scarlet Letter, — hand 
 on heart, — the visible symbol of repentance. 
 Neither in these characters nor in any others is 
 there an attempt at thoroughness or minuteness of 
 realization, or at any delicate complication of mo- 
 tives or at scientific analysis. Hawthorne keeps 
 his characterization carefully free from the intrica- 
 cies of actual life, and preserves uncontaminate the 
 large outlines and glowing colours of his simplified 
 men and women. Even in speech the people of his 
 stories are nicely unreal ; his workmen are choice 
 in their English, and his children lisp out sen- 
 tences that are prettily modelled. Here, as so often, 
 Hawthorne cares nothing for crude fact. 
 
 His world, too, is a world where symbols are as 
 frequent as in the happy days before Newton, the 
 
HAWTHORNE 101 
 
 arch-foe of symbols, unwove the rainbow. The 
 main action itself of each romance is one great 
 symbol, and it germinates persistently in minor 
 symbols. Scarlet letters flash out unexpectedly, 
 even on the face of the heavens ; the House of the 
 Seven Gables visibly shadows Hepzibah, Clifford, 
 and Phoebe with the evil influences of the past; 
 Hilda's doves encircle her and her tower with sug- 
 gestions of unsullied innocence. So, too, Haw- 
 thorne's characters themselves have features or 
 tricks of manner that mark them out as symbolic 
 and as meaning more than meets the eye; Dona- 
 tello's ears, Priscilla's tremulous, listening look, 
 Dimmesdale's persistent clutching at his heart, 
 tease the reader into a continuous sense of the 
 haunted duplicity of the world in which Haw- 
 thorne keeps him. In each of Hawthorne's ro- 
 mances the world and its inhabitants echo and re- 
 echo a single importunate thought. 
 
 Of course, all this is very sadly removed from 
 the kind of art that the realists of recent years 
 have instructed us to delight in. No one of lit- 
 erary experience can cheat himself into fancying 
 as he reads Hawthorne that he is having to do 
 with real men or women or treading the solid 
 ground of fact. He is continually aware that the 
 world he moves in has been tampered with. Nev- 
 ertheless, Hawthorne's fiction is bound to remain 
 for most readers — both for uncritical readers and 
 for readers of cultivation and discernment, even 
 
102 HAWTHORNE 
 
 for those of them who are completely familiar 
 with the best work of the modern realists — a per- 
 manent source of delight. And this is true for 
 various reasons. The lover of skilful technique, 
 whatever his theory of the ultimate aims of fiction, 
 must relish the beauty of Hawthorne's workman- 
 ship. No one can gainsay Hawthorne's skill of 
 execution, the largeness and symmetry of his de- 
 signs, his delicately sure manipulation of detail, 
 the intelligence of his methods when his ends are 
 once granted, the freedom and uninterruptedness 
 of his draughting, and the perfect graduation of 
 his tones. Then, too, his romances have an 
 abiding source of charm, whatever the fluctuations 
 of fashion, in the fineness and nobleness of the tem- 
 perament in terms of which they make life over. 
 Doubtless this temperament has its limitations. 
 Hawthorne's conscience was a familiar spirit that 
 would not be laid, and Hawthorne allowed himself 
 to be driven to the almost invariable study of path- 
 ological states of soul and the analysis of guilt and 
 expiation, until a reader is tempted to exclaim that 
 life for Hawthorne is seven-eighths conduct and 
 the other eighth remorse. Still, through all this in- 
 herited Puritanic gloom there runs continually an 
 unsubduable love for human nature, which makes 
 the world of Hawthorne's stories a hospitable 
 region, and gives the reader a sense of well-being 
 even in the midst of the misdeeds and repentances 
 through which he makes his way. H'^. feels that 
 
HAWTHORNE 10^ 
 
 he breathes a genuine atmosphere of human sym- 
 pathy ; tenderness and love, all the elemental affec- 
 tions that form the abidingly worthy substance of 
 human nature, are generously active in Haw- 
 thorne's men and women — his people are real 
 enough for that; and, moreover, Hawthorne, the 
 author, bears himself toward all the folk of his 
 mimic drama with large-hearted charity and inde- 
 fatigable faith in the essential rightness of the uni- 
 verse. The romances are, to quote Hawthorne's 
 own words, "true to the human heart," and the 
 human heart, as Hawthorne interprets it, is a very 
 lovable and love-disseminating organ. For their 
 rich, strong humanity, Hawthorne's romances will 
 long be gratefully read by all who either naively or 
 instructedly believe life to be worth living. 
 
 Sometimes one is tempted to regret that Haw- 
 thorne did not oftener forego his artificial atmos- 
 pheres and his elaborate symbolism, and deal sin- 
 cerely and directly with the actual life of his day 
 and generation. Poe urged this on Hawthorne, 
 and took him roundly to task for following so in- 
 veterately the high priori, allegorical way. In 
 point of fact, Hawthorne has, in one or two of his 
 Twice Told Tales, actually reproduced bits of the 
 New England life that surrounded him — for exam- 
 ple, in the sketch called the Apple-Dealer. More- 
 over, he has portrayed very truly and delightfully, 
 in the Introduction to the Scarlet Letter, the pre- 
 cincts of the quaint custom-house of Salem, with 
 
104 HAWTHORNE 
 
 its retinue of lackadaisical, sleepy officials. Yet it 
 is to be noted that these subjects from actual life 
 which he has treated sympathetically and convinc- 
 ingly are all of the sort where life in its monot- 
 ony and patience of trifles and dimness of detail 
 almost passes over into the region of dreams. It 
 may be doubted whether a more variegated life and 
 more complex and brilliant characters would not 
 have been beyond Hawthorne's power of truthful 
 representation. He had in very fact something of 
 the night in his disposition, and whatever he pre- 
 vailingly portrays has either to have in its nature 
 a suggestion of the discoloured temperateness of 
 night, or else to be thinned away and modulated 
 through his imagination until it has lost the gross- 
 ness and actuality of fact and grown tenuous and 
 pallid. 
 
 In his causeries, where he professes to talk to the 
 reader directly about the commonplace affairs of 
 daily life, there is noticeable the same reduction of 
 all things to the texture of a dream, the same dis- 
 enthralment of the most prosaic objects and facts 
 from the tyranny of material law and everyday 
 aspect. We can fancy Hawthorne writing the 
 weird tale of a man who found whatever he 
 touched melt into an impalpable dream, and who 
 was thus doomed to wander ever in a region of en- 
 chanted, intangible forms. This man may typify 
 Hawthorne himself ; only it must be noted that his 
 dream-world has stability and truth and a welcome 
 
HAWTHORNE 105 
 
 for us because of its faithfulness to the great laws 
 of human nature, to the moral law, to the best feel- 
 ings of good men and good women, and also be- 
 cause of its exquisite consistency and the beauty of 
 its fluent self-revelation. We dream uninterrupt- 
 edly in accordance with certain essential needs of 
 our natures, and we instinctively accept the dream 
 without any jarring desire to compare it with 
 crude fact. 
 
 What oftenest disturbs the modern and exacting 
 reader of Hawthorne, and rouses him unpleasantly 
 from his dream, is Hawthorne's abuse of symbols. 
 Now and then, Hawthorne's instinct fails him in 
 making the nice distinction between art and arti- 
 fice. In his creation of atmosphere and search for 
 effect he is occasionally obvious and cheap, and 
 seems to tamper needlessly with facts and with the 
 laws of nature. The heat of the scarlet letter be- 
 comes after a time oppressive ; the display of the 
 A in the heavens, during the scene on the scaffold, 
 seems merely a theatrical bid for a shiver. The 
 shadow that is asserted always to have rested on 
 Chillingworth, even in the sunshine, seems the 
 result of a gratuitous juggling with the laws of 
 light. Now and again, in such cases as these, Haw- 
 thorne makes us aware that he is playing tricks on 
 our souls. Matthew Arnold has quoted Sainte- 
 Beuve as somewhere saying that every kind of art 
 has its characteristic defect, and that the defect of 
 Eomantic art is le faux. From this falseness 
 
106 HAWTHORNE 
 
 Hawthorne keeps, on the whole, wonderfully free ; 
 and yet at times he is betrayed into it. 
 
 Ordinarily, with Komantic writers, artificiality 
 comes from the exaggerated study of an effect that 
 is purely artistic ; but with Hawthorne this is not 
 so. His desire to point his moral is what misleads 
 him — his monomaniac wish to find the heavens 
 and the earth eloquent of the special truth that for 
 the moment rules his imagination. This wish in 
 one form or another pervades, as we have seen, all 
 Hawthorne's fiction ; and as long as it acts silently 
 and unobtrusively, like gravity or the law of chem- 
 ical affinities, to bind Hawthorne's world harmoni- 
 ously together and to make it a significant whole, 
 its presence is not only unobjectionable, but is 
 largely responsible for the cogency and impressive- 
 ness of his art. But when this underlying moral 
 impulse plays symbolic tricks with trifles, it de- 
 generates from being a natural power into a kind 
 of cheap legerdemain, and becomes little short of 
 offensive. At such moments Hawthorne's absorb- 
 ing preoccupation with a moral meaning and unstu- 
 diousness of artistic effect, pure and simple, seem 
 almost ludicrous to a modern reader who has been 
 trained to delight in the skill with which sophisti- 
 cated artists nowadays vanquish technical difficul- 
 ties for their own sake and embody a mood or realize 
 a situation with single-minded pleasure in their art 
 and without moral malice prepense. At times, then, 
 Hawthorne must impress us as naive in his devotion 
 
HAWTHORNE 107 
 
 to fairly obvious moral truth ; and at times, too, lie 
 seems naive in his ambitions. It would require 
 great courage for any one nowadays to attempt to 
 solve in a romance the mystery of the existence of 
 evil. Occasionally, Hawthorne is naive in his 
 enthusiasms, particularly in the Marble Faun. The 
 descriptions of Rome and its works of art have some- 
 thing of the exuberance of the first tour in Europe. 
 The praise of Guido woos nowadays unsympathetic 
 ears, and in general the discussions on art that the 
 American colony in the Marble Faun solemnly en- 
 gage in are quite sufficiently obvious and archaic. 
 Finally, it miist be admitted that Hawthorne has 
 never studied or portrayed sympathetically a man 
 or woman of real intellectual quality ; he has never 
 put before us a first-rate mind in perfect working 
 order, nor anywhere traced out, subtly and convinc- 
 ingly, the refinements of the intellectual life. It 
 is not simply that he has never given us a genuine 
 man of the world ; of course, his method and tem- 
 perament alike forbade that. From the very nature 
 of Hawthorne's art, a man of the world, had Haw- 
 thorne tried to portray him, would have become a 
 man out of the world. But why should not Haw- 
 thorne have portrayed, at least once in a way, a 
 thoroughly intellectual man or woman ? a man or 
 woman whose mind was well disciplined, brilliant, 
 and controlling ? Nowhere has he done this. His 
 men, the moment they grow accomplished, drift 
 into morbidness or villainy — hunt the philoso- 
 
108 HAWTHORNE 
 
 pher's stone, become grotesque philanthropists, 
 take to mesmerism or alchemy or unwise experi- 
 ments in matrimony. Hawthorne's fiction seems 
 really somewhat vitiated by Romantic distrust of 
 scholarship, of mental acuteness, and of whatever 
 savours of the pride of intellect. This bias in his 
 nature must be borne in mind when one is consid- 
 ering the shallowness and defectiveness of the indi- 
 vidual characterization in his novels — a shallow- 
 ness and defectiveness which, as has been noted, 
 are involved in his essentially romantic conception 
 of the art of fiction. 
 
 Yet, when all these disturbing elements in our 
 enjoyment of Hawthorne have been allowed for, 
 there remains a vast fund of often almost unal- 
 loyed delight to be won from his writings. More- 
 over, this delight seems likely to increase rather 
 than grow less. At present, Hawthorne is at a de- 
 cided disadvantage, because, while remote enough 
 to seem in trifles here and there archaic, he is yet 
 not remote enough to escape contemporary stan- 
 dards or to be read with imaginative historical 
 allowances and sympathy, as Richardson or Defoe 
 is read. Hawthorne's romances have the human 
 quality and the artistic beauty that ensure survival ; 
 and in a generation or two, when the limitations of 
 the Romantic ideal and the scope of Romantic 
 methods have become historically clear in all men's 
 minds, Hawthorne's novels will be read with an 
 even surer sense than exists to-day of that beauty 
 
HAWTHORNE 109 
 
 of form and style and that tender humanity which 
 come from the individuality of their author, and 
 with a more tolerant comprehension of the imper- 
 fectness of equipment and occasional faults of man- 
 ner that were the result of his environment and 
 age. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 PoE is a better poet in his prose than in his 
 poetry. A reader of Poe's poetry, if he be quick 
 to tal.e umbrage at artificiality and prone to Cttvii, 
 feels, after a dozen poems, like attempting an in- 
 ventory of Poe's literary workshop — the material 
 Poe uses is so uniform and the objects he fashions 
 are so few and inevitable. The inventory might 
 run somewhat as follows: One plaster bust of 
 Pallas slightly soiled; one many-wintered Eaven 
 croaking Nevermore ; a parcel of decorative names 
 — Auber, Yaanek, Zante, Israfel; a few robes of 
 sorrow, a somewhat frayed funeral pall, and a 
 coil of Conqueror Worms; finally, one beautiful 
 lay figure whom the angels name indifferently 
 Lenore, Ulalume, and Annabel Lee. Masterly as 
 is Poe's use of this poetical outfit, subtle as are his 
 cadences and his sequences of tone-colour, it is only 
 rarely that he makes us forget the cleverness of his 
 manipulation and wins us into accepting his moods 
 and imagery with that unconscious and almost hyp- 
 notic subjection to his will which the true poet 
 secures from his readers. 
 
 110 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 111 
 
 In the best of his visionary Tales^ on the other 
 hand, Poe is much more apt to have his way with 
 us. He works with a far greater variety of appli- 
 ances, which it is by no means easy to number and 
 call by name ; the effects he aims at are manifold 
 and not readily noted and classified; and the de- 
 tails that his imagination elaborates come upon us 
 with a tropical richness and apparent confusion 
 that mimic well the splendid lawlessness and un- 
 designedness of nature.- Moreover, even if the 
 artifice in these tales were more palpable than it 
 is, it would be less offensive than in poetry, in- 
 asmuch as the standard of sincerity is in such per- 
 formances confessedly less exacting. The likeness 
 in aim and in effect between the tales and the 
 poems, however, cannot be missed — between such 
 tales as Ligeia and Eleonora and such poems as 
 The Raven and Ulahcme. Mr. Leslie Stephen has 
 somewhere spoken of De Quincey's impassioned 
 prose as aiming to secure in unmeasured speech 
 very many of the same effects that Keats's Odes 
 produce in authentic verse. This holds true also 
 of the best of Poe's romances; they are really 
 prose-poems. And, indeed, Poe has himself recog- 
 nized in his essay on Hawthorne the close kinship 
 between tale and poem, assigning to the poem sub- 
 jects in the treatment of which the creation of 
 beauty is the ruling motive, and leaving to the 
 prose tale the creation of all other single effects, 
 such as horror, humour, and terror. Both poem and 
 
112 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 tale must be brief, absolutely unified, and must 
 create a single overwhelming mood. 
 
 The world that Poe's genuinely fantastic tales 
 take us into has the burnish, the glow, the vision- 
 ary radiance of the world of Eomantic poetry ; it is 
 as luxuriantly unreal, too, as phantasmagoric — 
 though it lacks the palpitating, buoyant loveliness 
 of the nature that such poets as Shelley reveal, and 
 is somewhat enamelled or metallic in its finish. Its 
 glow and burnish come largely from the concrete- 
 ness of Poe's imagination, from his inveterate fond- 
 ness for sensations, for colour, for light, for luxuri- 
 ant vividness of detail. Poe had the tingling senses 
 of the genuine poet, senses that vibrated like deli- 
 cate silver wire to every impact. He was an 
 amateur of sensations and loved to lose himself in 
 the Altitudo of a perfume or a musical note. He 
 pored over his sensations and refined upon them, 
 and felt to the core of his heart the peculiar thrill 
 that darted from each. He had seventy times 
 seven colours in his emotional rainbow, and was 
 swift to fancy the evanescent hue of feeling that 
 might spring from every sight or sound — from 
 the brazen note, for example, of the clock in The 
 Masque of the Bed Death, from " the slender stems " 
 of the ebony and silver trees in Eleonora, or from the 
 " large and luminous orbs " of Ligeia's eyes. Out 
 of the vast mass of these vivid sensations — " pas- 
 sion-winged ministers of thought'' — Poe shaped 
 and fashioned the world in. which his romances 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 113 
 
 confine us, a world that is, therefore, scintillating 
 and burnished and vibrant, quite unlike the world 
 in Hawthorne's tales, which is woven out of dusk 
 and moonlight. 
 
 Yet, curiously enough, this intense brilliancy of 
 surface does not tend to exorcise mystery, strange- 
 ness, terror from Poe's world, or to transfer his 
 stories into the region of everyday fact. Poe is a 
 conjurer who does not need to have the lights 
 turned down. The effects that he is most prone 
 to aim at are, of course, the shivers of awe, crisp- 
 ings of the nerves, shuddering thrills that come 
 from a sudden, overwhelming sense of something 
 uncanny, abnormal, ghastly, lurking in the heart 
 of life. And these nervous perturbations are even 
 more powerfully excited by those of his stories that, 
 like Eleonora and Ligeia, have a lustrous finish, 
 than by sketches that, like Shadow and Silence, 
 deal with twilight lands and half-visualized regions. 
 In TJie Masque of the Red Death, in The Fall of the 
 ffouse of Usher, and in A Descent into the Mael- 
 strom, the details of incident and background flash 
 themselves on our imaginations with almost painful 
 distinctness. 
 
 The terror in Poe's tales is not the terror of the 
 child that cannot see in the dark, but the terror of 
 diseased nerves and morbid imaginations, that see 
 with dreadful visionary vividness and feel a mortal 
 pang. Poe is a past master of the moods of dis- 
 eased mental life, and in the interests of some one 
 
114 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 or other of these semi-hysterical moods '.aany of 
 his most uncannily prevailing romances are written. 
 They are prose-poems that realize for us such half- 
 frenetic glimpses of the world as madmen have; 
 and suggest in us for the moment the breathless, 
 haggard mood of the victim of hallucinations. 
 
 It must not, however, be forgotten that Poe wrote 
 tales of ratiocination as well as romances of death. 
 In his ability to turn out with equal skill stories 
 bordering on madness and stories where intellec- 
 tual analysis, shrewd induction, reasoning upon 
 evidence, all the processes of typically sane mental 
 life, are carried to the utmost pitch of precision 
 and effectiveness, lies one of the apparent anomalies 
 of Poe's genius and art. In The Murders in the 
 Rue Morgue^ The Mystery of Marie RogH, and Tlie 
 Purloined Letter, Poe seems sanity incarnate, pure 
 mental energy untouched by moods or passions, 
 weaving and unweaving syllogisms and tracking out 
 acutely the subtlest play of thought. What in 
 these stories has become of Poe the fancy-monger, 
 the mimic maniac, the specialist in moodiness and 
 abnormality ? 
 
 After all, the difficulty here suggested is only 
 superficial and yields speedily to a little careful 
 analysis. We have not really to deal with a puz- 
 zling case of double personality, with an author 
 who at his pleasure plays at being Dr. Jekyll or 
 Mr. Hyde. In all Poe's stories the same personality 
 is at work, the same methods are followed, and the 
 
1 EDGAB ALLAN POE 115 
 
 material used, tHough. at first siglit it may seem in 
 the two classes of tales widely diverse, will also 
 turn out to be quite the same, at any rate in its 
 artificiality, in its remoteness from real complex 
 human nature, and in its origin in the mind of the 
 author. Certain instructions that in an essay on 
 Hawthorne Poe has given to would-be writers of 
 tales are delightfully serviceable to the anxious 
 unraveller of the apparent contradictions in Poe's 
 personality. 
 
 To him who would fashion a successful short 
 story, Poe prescribes as follows : He must first of 
 all pick out an effect — it may be of horror, it may 
 be of humour, it may be of terror — which his short 
 story is to aim to produce, to impose vibratingly 
 on the temperament of its readers. This effect is 
 to give the law to the whole of the short story, to 
 regulate its every detail, both of incident and char- 
 acter, its background of nature or town, its texture 
 of sensations, its imagery, phrasing, wording, tone, 
 even the cadences of its sentences. The very first 
 sentence must in some divining fashion prepare 
 for this effect, and every bit of material that is 
 used must help in the preparation, must be pre- 
 monitory, must whet curiosity, must set the nerves 
 nicely a-tremble, must make the reader more and 
 more ready to fall a prey to the final catastrophe. 
 In short, the tale, as Poe conceives it, is a marvel- 
 lously ingenious set of devices for so tuning a sensi- 
 tive temperament and giving it intensity of timbre 
 
116 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 that at just the right moment a special chord of 
 music may be struck upon it with overwhelming 
 power and richness of overtone and resonance. 
 This formula applies alike to Poe's romances of 
 death and to his tales of ratiocination; and one 
 of the first suggestions it carries with it has to do 
 with the artificiality of the material that Poe uses 
 in all his fiction. Whether the effect that Poe 
 aims at is a shiver of surprise at the sudden ingen- 
 ious resolution of a riddle, or a shudder of horror 
 at the collapse of a haunted house, his methods of 
 work are substantially the same, and the stuff from 
 which he weaves his tale is equally unreal and re- 
 mote from what ordinary life has to offer ; it is all 
 the product of an infinitely inventive intellect that 
 devises and plans and adroitly arranges with an 
 unflinching purpose to attain an effect. The better 
 poetry, the more feigning ; and Poe is an excellent 
 poet in these prose-poems. He can invent with 
 endless ingenuity and plausibility, play-passions, 
 play-moods, play-sensations, play-ideas, and play- 
 complications of incident. He is an adept in fitting 
 these mock images of life deftly together, in subtly 
 arranging these simulacra of real feeling and real 
 thought so that they shall have complete congru- 
 ity, shall have the glamour and the momentary 
 plausibility of truth, and shall rally together at 
 the right moment in a perfect acclaim of music. 
 But whether the tale deal professedly with abnor- 
 mal life or with rational life, its seemliness and 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 117 
 
 beauty and persuasive power come simply from 
 Poe's immense cleverness as a constructive artist, 
 as a technician, from his ability to play tunes on 
 temperaments, not from his honest command of 
 human life and character. In all that he does Poe 
 is emotionally shallow but artistically, like Joey 
 Bagstock, " devilish sly." 
 
 The shallowness of Poe's treatment of life and 
 character is almost too obvious to need illustration. 
 Not only does he disdain, as Hawthorne disdains, 
 to treat any individual character with minute real- 
 istic detail, but he does not even portray typical 
 characters in their large outlines, with a view to 
 opening before us the permanent springs of human 
 action or putting convincingly before us the radi- 
 cal elements of human nature. The actors in his 
 stories are all one-idea'd creatures, monomaniac 
 victims of passion, or grief, or of some perverse 
 instinct, or of an insane desire to guess riddles. 
 They are magniloquent poseurs, who dine off their 
 hearts in public, or else morbidly ingenious in- 
 tellects for the solving of complicated problems. 
 The worthy Nietzsche declares somewhere that the 
 actors in Wagner's music-dramas are always just a 
 dozen steps from the mad-house. We may say the 
 same of Poe's characters, with the exception of 
 those that are merely Babbage calculating ma- 
 chines. Complex human characters, characters 
 that are approximately true to the whole range 
 of human motive and interest, Poe never gives 
 
118 EDGAR ALLAN FOE 
 
 us. He conceives of characters merely as means 
 for securing his artificial effects on the nerves of 
 his readers. 
 
 The world, too, into which Poe takes us, bur- 
 nished as it is, vividly visualized as it is, is a 
 counterfeit world, magnificently false like his char- 
 acters. Sometimes it is a phantasmagoric world, 
 full of romantic detail and sensuous splendour. Its 
 bright meadows are luxuriant with asphodels, hya- 
 cinths, and acanthuses, are watered with limpid 
 rivers of silence that lose themselves shimmeringly 
 in blue Da Vinci distances, are lighted by triple- 
 tinted suns, and are finally shut in by the " golden 
 walls of the universe." When not an exotic region 
 of this sort, Poe's world is apt to be a dextrously 
 contrived toy universe, full of trap-doors, unex- 
 pected passages, and clever mechanical devices of 
 all sorts, fit to help the conjurer in securing his 
 effects. Elaborately artificial in some fashion or 
 other, Poe's world is sure to be, designed with nice 
 malice to control the reader's imagination and put 
 it at Poe's mercy. In short, in all that he does, in 
 the material that he uses, in the characters that he 
 conjures up to carry on the action of his stories, 
 in his methods of weaving together incident and 
 description and situation and action, Poe is radi- 
 cally artificial, a calculator of effects, a reckless 
 scorner of fact and of literal truth. 
 
 And, indeed, it is just this successful artificiality 
 that for many very modern temperaments consti- 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 119 
 
 tutes Poe's special charm ; he is thoroughly irre- 
 sponsible ; he whistles the commonplace down the 
 wind and forgets everything but his dream, its 
 harmony, its strenuous flight, its splendour and 
 power. The devotees of art for art's sake have 
 now for many years kept up a tradition of un- 
 stinted admiration for Poe. This has been spe- 
 cially true in France, where, indeed, men of all 
 schools have joined in doing him honour. Barbey 
 d'Aurevilly wrote an eulogistic essay on him as 
 early as 1853, an essay to which he has since from 
 time to time made various additions, the last in 
 1883. Baudelaire translated Poe's tales in several 
 instalments between 1855 and 1865. !Emile Hen- 
 nequin published, a few years ago, an elaborate 
 study and life of Poe ; and Stephane Mallarme has 
 of late conferred a new and perhaps somewhat du- 
 bious immortality upon the Raven, through a trans- 
 lation into very symbolistic prose. In truth, Poe 
 was a decadent before the days of decadence, and 
 he has the distinction of having been one of the 
 earliest defiant practisers of art for art's sake. 
 In his essay on the Poetic Principle, he expressly 
 declared that a poem should be written solely " for 
 the poem's sake," — a phrase which almost antici- 
 pates the famous formula of modern sestheticism. 
 The drift of this essay, Poe's opinion elsewhere 
 recorded, and his practice as a story-teller, all agree 
 in implying or urging that art is its own justifica- 
 tion, that the sole aim of art is the creation of 
 
120 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 beauty, and that art and actual life need have 
 nothing to do with one another. To be sure, Poe's 
 comments on everyday life have not acquired quite 
 the exquisite contempt and the epigrammatic finish 
 characteristic of modern decadence; yet the root 
 of the matter was in Poe — witness a letter in 
 which he boasts of his insensibility to the charms 
 of "temporal life," and of being "profoundly ex- 
 cited " solely " by music and by some poems." 
 
 Poe and his heroes curiously anticipate, in many 
 respects, the morbid dreamers whom French novel- 
 ists of the decadent school have of recent years re- 
 peatedly studied, and of whom Huysmans's Des 
 Esseintes may be taken as a type. The hero in The 
 Fall of the House of Usher ^ with his "cadaverous- 
 ness of complexion," his "eye large, liquid, and 
 luminous beyond comparison," his "habitual trep- 
 idancy," his "hollow-sounding enunciation," "his 
 morbid acuteness of the senses," and his suffering 
 when exposed to the odours of certain flowers and to 
 all sounds save those of a few stringed instruments, 
 might be a preliminary study for Huysmans's 
 memorable Des Esseintes. Usher has not the 
 French hero's sophistication and self-consciousness ; 
 he suffers dumbly, and has not Des Esseintes's con- 
 solation in knowing himself a "special soul," super- 
 sensitive and delicate beyond the trite experience 
 of nerves and senses prescribed by practical life. 
 He does not carry on his morbid experimentations 
 debonairly as does Des Esseintes, and he takes his 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 121 
 
 diseases too S' 'riously. But he nevertheless antici- 
 pates Des Esseintes astonishingly in looks, in nerves, 
 in physique, and even in tricks of manner. Poe's 
 heroes, too, are forerunners of modern decadents in 
 their refinings upon sensation, in their fusion of the 
 senses, and in their submergence in moods. As Herr 
 Nordau says of the Symbolists, they have eyes in 
 their ears; they see sounds; they smell colours. 
 One of them hears rays of light that fall upon his 
 retina. They are all extraordinarily alive to the 
 "unconsidered trifles" of sensation. The man in 
 the Pit and the Peyididum smells the odour of the 
 sharp steel blade that swings past him. They de- 
 tect with morbid delicacy of perception shades of 
 feeling that give likeness to the most apparently 
 diverse sensations. The lover in Ligeia feels in 
 his "intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes" the same 
 sentiment that at other times overmasters him "in 
 the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in the con- 
 templation of a moth, a butterfly, ... in the fall- 
 ing of a meteor, ... in the glances of unusually 
 aged people, ..." and when listening to "certain 
 sounds from stringed instruments." Moods become 
 absorbing and monopolizing in the lives of these 
 vibrating temperaments. "Men have called me 
 mad," the lover in Eleonora ingratiatingly assures 
 us; "but the question is not yet settled whether 
 madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence; 
 whether much that is glorious, whether all that is 
 profound, does not spring from disease of thought 
 
/ 
 
 122 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 — from moods of mind exalted at t.ie expense of 
 tlie general intellect." Finally, Poe's heroes antici- 
 pate the heroes of modern decadence in feeling the 
 delicate artistic challenge of sin and of evil : they 
 
 yhardly reach the audacities of French Diabolism 
 and Sadism; but at least they have the whim of 
 doing or fancying moral evil that aesthetic good 
 may come. 
 
 ]y All these characteristics of Poe's work may be 
 summed up by saying that his heroes are apt to be 
 I neuropaths or degenerates. And doubtless Poe 
 himself was a degenerate, if one cares to use the 
 somewhat outworn idiom of the evangelist of the 
 Philistines. /He had the ego-mania of the degener- 
 ate, a fact which shows itself strikingly in his art 
 through his preoccupation with death. In his 
 poetry and prose alike the fear of death as numbing 
 the precious core of personality is an obsession with 
 him, and such subjects as premature burial, metem- 
 psychosis, revivification after death, the sensations 
 that may go with the change from mortality to im- 
 mortality (see the Colloquy of Monos and Una), 
 had an irresistible fascination for him. # Moreover, 
 throughout Poe's art there are signs of ego-mania 
 in the almost entire lack of the social sympathies. 
 Where in Poe's stories do we find portrayed the 
 sweet and tender relationships and affections that 
 make human life endurable ? Where are friendship 
 and frank comradeship and the love of brothers and 
 sisters and of parents and children? Where are 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 123 
 
 the somewhat trite but after all so necessary virtues 
 of loyalty, patriotism, courage, pity, charity, self- 
 sacrifice? Such old-fashioned qualities and ca- 
 pacities, the stuff out of which what is worth while 
 in human nature has heretofore been wrought, 
 are curiously unrecognized and unportrayed in 
 Poe's fiction. They seem to have had no artistic 
 meaning for him — these so obvious and common- 
 place elements in man and life. Perhaps they 
 simply seemed to him not the stuff that dreams are 
 made of. 
 
 When all is said, there is something a bit inhu- 
 man in Poe, which, while at times it may give a 
 special tinge to our pleasure in his art, occasionally 
 vitiates or destroys that pleasure. His taste is not 
 immaculate; he will go any length in search of a 
 shudder. Sometimes he is fairly repulsive because 
 of his callous recital of loathsome physical details, 
 for example in his description of the decimated 
 Brigadier-General, in Tlie Man that Was Used Up. 
 In King Pest, TJie Premature Burial, and M. 
 Valdemar, there is this same almost vulgar in- 
 sensibility in the presence of the unclean and dis- 
 gusting. At times, this callousness leads to artistic 
 mischance, and causes a shudder of laughter where 
 Poe wants a shiver of awe. Surely this is apt to 
 be the case in Berenice, the story where the hero 
 is fascinated by the beautiful teeth of the heroine, 
 turns amateur dentist after her death, and in a 
 frenzy of professional enthusiasm breaks open her 
 
124 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 coffin, and extracts her incisors, bicuspids, and 
 molars, thirty-two altogether — the set was complete. 
 When this inhumanity of Poe's does not lead to 
 actual repulsiveness or to unintentional grotesque- 
 ness, it is nevertheless responsible for a certain 
 aridity and intellectual cruelty that in the last 
 analysis will be found pervading pretty much all he 
 has written. This is what Barbey d'Aurevilly has 
 in mind when he speaks of Poe's secheresse, the 
 terrible dryness of his art. And looking at the 
 matter wholly apart from the question of ethics, 
 this dryness is a most serious defect in Poe's work 
 as an artist. His stories and characters have none 
 of the buoyancy, the tender, elastic variableness, 
 and the grace of living things; they are hard in 
 finish, harsh in surface, mechanically inevitable in 
 their working out. They seem calculated, the re- 
 sult of ingenious calculation, not because any 
 particular detail impresses the reader as conspicu- 
 ously false — Poe keeps his distance from life 
 too skilfully and consistently for this — but be- 
 cause of their all-pervading lack of deeply human 
 imagination and interest, because of that shallow- 
 ness in Poe's hold upon life that has already been 
 noted. The stories and the characters seem the 
 work of pure intellect, of intellect divorced from 
 heart ; and for that very reason they do not wholly 
 satisfy, when judged by the most exacting artistic 
 standards. They seem the product of some ingen- 
 ious mechanism for the manufacture of fiction, of 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 125 
 
 some surpassing rival of MaelzePs chess-playing 
 automaton. This faultily faultless accuracy and 
 precision of movement may very likely be a penalty 
 Poe has to submit to because of his devotion to art 
 for art's sake. He is too much engrossed in treat- 
 ment and manipulation ; his dexterity of execution 
 perhaps presupposes, at any rate goes along with, 
 an almost exclusive interest in technical problems 
 and in " effects," to the neglect of what is vital and 
 human in the material he uses. 
 
 Closely akin to this dryness of treatment is a 
 certain insincerity of tone or flourish of manner, 
 that often interferes with our enjoyment of Poe. 
 We become suddenly aware of the gleaming eye 
 and complacent smile of the concealed manipu- 
 lator in the writing-automaton. The author is too 
 plainly lying in wait for us ; or he is too ostenta- 
 tiously exhibiting his cleverness and resource, his 
 command of the tricks of the game. One of the 
 worst things that can be said of Poe from this point 
 of view is that he contains the promise and potency 
 of Mr. Eobert Hichens, and of other cheap English 
 decadents. Poe himself is never quite a mere acro- 
 bat ; but he suggests the possible coming of the 
 acrobat, the clever tumbler with the ingenious 
 grimace and the palm itching for coppers. 
 
 The same perfect mastery of technique that is 
 characteristic of Poe's treatment of material is 
 noticeable in his literary style. When one stops to 
 consider it, Poe's style, particularly in his romances, 
 
126 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 is highly artificial, an exquisitely fabricated medium. 
 Poe is fond of inversions and involutions in his 
 sentence-structure, and of calculated rhythms that 
 either throw into relief certain picturesque words, 
 or symbolize in some reverberant fashion the mood 
 of the moment. He seems to have felt very keenly 
 the beauty of De Quincey's intricate and sophisti- 
 cated cadences, and more than once he actually 
 echoes some of the most noteworthy of them in his 
 own distribution of accents. Special instances of 
 this might be pointed out in Eleonora and in 
 The Premature Burial. Poe's fondness for arti- 
 ficial musical effects is also seen in his emphatic 
 reiteration of specially picturesque phrases, a trick 
 of manner that every one associates with his poetry, 
 and that is more than once found in his prose writ- 
 ings. "And, all at once, the moon arose through the 
 thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And 
 mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood 
 by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the 
 light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and 
 ghastly, and tall — and the rock was gray." Echo- 
 lalia, Herr Nordau would probably call this trick in 
 Poe's verse and prose, and he would regard it as an 
 incontestable proof of Poe's degeneracy. Never- 
 theless, the beauty of the effects to which this man- 
 nerism leads in Poe's more artificial narratives is 
 very marked. 
 
 In Poe's critical essays his style takes on an alto- 
 gether different tone and movement, and becomes 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 127 
 
 analytical, rapid, incisive, almost acrid in its sever- 
 ity and intellectuality. The ornateness and the 
 beauty of cadence and colour that are characteristic 
 of his decorative prose disappear entirely. Signifi- 
 cantly enough, Macaulay was his favourite literary 
 critic. "The style and general conduct of Mac- 
 aulay's critical papers," Poe assures his readers, 
 "could scarcely be improved." A strange article 
 of faith to find in the literary creed of a dreamer, 
 an amateur of moods, an artistic epicure. Yet that 
 Poe was sincere in this opinion is proved by the 
 characteristics of his own literary essays. He 
 emulates Macaulay in his briskness, in the down- 
 rightness of his assertions, in his challengingly de- 
 monstrative tone, and in his unsensitiveness to the 
 artistic shade. Of course, he is far inferior to 
 Macaulay in knowledge and in thoroughness of 
 literary training, while he surpasses him in acute- 
 ness of analysis and in insight into technical 
 problems. 
 
 Poe's admiration for Macaulay and his emulation 
 of him in his critical writings are merely further 
 illustrations of the peculiar intellectual aridity that 
 has already been noted as characteristic of him. 
 Demonic intellectual ingenuity is almost the last 
 word for Poe's genius as far as regards his real 
 personality, the quintessential vital energy of the 
 man. His intellect was real ; everything else about 
 him was exquisite feigning. His passion, his 
 human sympathy, his love of nature, all the emo- 
 
128 EDGAR ALLAN POE 
 
 tions that go into his fiction, have a counterfeit 
 unreality about them. Not that they are actually 
 hypocritical, but that they seem unsubstantial, 
 mimetic, not the expression of a genuine nature. 
 There was something of the cherub in Poe, and he 
 had to extract his feelings from his head. Much of 
 the time a reader of Poe is cajoled into a delighted 
 forgetfulness of all this unreality, Poe is so adroit 
 a manipulator, such a master of technique. He 
 adapts with unerring tact his manner to his matter 
 and puts upon us the perfect spell of art. More- 
 over, even when a reader forces himself to take 
 notice of Poe's artificiality, he may, if he be in the 
 right temper, gain only an added delight, the sort 
 of delight that comes from watching the exquisitely 
 sure play of a painter's firm hand, adapting its 
 action consciously to all the difficulties of its sub- 
 ject. Poe's precocious artistic sophistication is one 
 of his rarest charms for the appreciative amateur. 
 But if a reader be exorbitant and relentless and ask 
 from Poe something more than intellectual re- 
 source and technical dexterity, he is pretty sure 
 to be disappointed ; Poe has little else to offer him. 
 Doubtless it is Philistinish to ask for this some- 
 thing more ; but people have always asked for it in 
 the past, and seem likely to go on asking for it, 
 even despite the fact that Herr Max Nordau has 
 almost succeeded in reducing the request to an 
 absurdity. 
 
CHAELOTTE BRONTE 
 
 Charlotte Bkonte was once reproached by 
 the vivacious and ever-confident George Henry- 
 Lewes for not more nearly resembling, in her 
 artistic methods, that favourite novelist of the 
 gently cynical and worldly wise, — Jane Austen. 
 Her answering letter, while in tone very prettily 
 submissive, nevertheless justifies vigorously her 
 own methods of writing and her treatment of 
 life. " If I ever do write another book," she says, 
 "I think I will have nothing of what you call 
 ^melodrama'; I think so, but I am not sure. I 
 tliinhy too, I will endeavour to follow the counsel 
 which shines out of Miss Austen's ^mild eyes,' 
 < to finish more and be more subdued ' ; but neither 
 am I sure of that. When authors write best, or, at 
 least, when they write most fluently, an influence 
 seems to waken in them, which becomes their 
 master, — which will have its own way, — putting 
 out of view all behests but its own, dictating cer- 
 tain words, and insisting on their being used, 
 whether vehement or measured in their nature ; 
 new-moulding characters, giving unthought-of turns 
 to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old 
 K 129 
 
130 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new 
 ones." 
 
 These words of Miss Bronte's carry with them 
 a flash from eyes very different in quality from 
 " Miss Austen's mild eyes," and they express more 
 than a passing mood of protest. Charlotte Bronte 
 really believed in her daemon. She had the faith 
 which so many romantic poets from Blake to 
 Shelley have confessed to, that her words and 
 images were, not cleverly devised, but inevitably 
 suggested. Novelists do not often take themselves 
 so seriously, at least in public, particularly novel- 
 ists who keep so sanely near the world of fact as 
 Charlotte Bronte keeps. Your Poe and your Hoff- 
 mann may professedly dream out and set down 
 their wildly fantastic tales with the same vision- 
 ary glibness with which Coleridge wrote Kuhla 
 Khan. But the noteworthy fact is that Charlotte 
 Bronte lays claim to much this same sort of inspi- 
 ration for her narratives of actual Yorkshire life. 
 Her visions of characters and. incidents must have 
 mastered her like veritable hallucinations to lead 
 to such a claim; and this visionary eye of hers 
 may well account, at least in part, for the aston- 
 ishing vividness of her narratives and for their 
 success in again and again imposing themselves 
 for moments on our faith with a thoroughness that 
 the more sophisticated art of to-day rarely attains. 
 Charlotte Bronte has something of the seer's per- 
 suasiveness ; she captures our faith at unawares. 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 131 
 
 In the letter already quoted Charlotte Bronte, 
 while commenting on Jane Austen's work, puts 
 to Lewes a very pertinent question. " Can there 
 be a great artist," she asks, " without poetry ? " 
 She herself believed not, and her novels are 
 from first to last faithful illustrations of her 
 creed. It was not for nothing that she lived for 
 so many years a lonely, introspective life be- 
 tween an overcrowded graveyard and the deso- 
 late expanses of the Yorkshire moors. The world, 
 as she conceived of it, was not the world of con- 
 ventional intrigue in drawing-rooms or pump-rooms 
 or gossiping country-side towns ; and the news of 
 the world that she sent out through her novels 
 was news that had come to her not by hearsay 
 or tittle-tattle, or authenticated by painstaking 
 watchfulness in the midst of tea-drinkers and 
 scandal-mongers, but news that could bear the 
 comment of the sweep of the moors by day and 
 of the host of stars by night. She was a lyrical 
 poet, and in each of her novels she set herself 
 the task, or rather, her whole energy went into 
 the task, of re-creating the world in such guise 
 that it should have something of the intrinsic 
 beauty of poetry conferred upon it. 
 
 Her interpretation of life was, first of all, a 
 woman's interpretation. This is, of course, the 
 conventional thing to say of Charlotte Bronte ; but 
 here, as so often, the conventional thing is the true 
 thing, merely in need of a little exposition. Her 
 
132 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 novels are not feminine readings of life simply 
 in the sense of portraying the passion of love from 
 a woman's point of view. This she does, to be 
 sure, with a power and a beauty that George Eliot, 
 for example, with her impersonal point of view 
 and her withering sense of the rights of intel- 
 lect, never attains to. But vibrant Jane Eyrism 
 is far from being the sole staple out of which 
 Charlotte Bronte's novels are wrought. Intense 
 sympathy with human love in all its myriad forms, 
 together with an audacious belief in its power to 
 bring happiness, or something better than happi- 
 ness, is, one is tempted to assert, that sole staple. 
 She has an obsession of reckless faith in the worth 
 of love, and from first to last her novels are full 
 of the pathos of craving hearts, and of the worth 
 that life gains when their craving is contented. 
 It is in the tenderness and strength of her loyalty 
 to love in all its guises, and in her delicate per- 
 ception and brave portrayal of all the fine minis- 
 trations of love to life, that the peculiar feminine 
 quality of her novels resides. 
 
 Eor Charlotte Bronte, the struggle for life is the 
 struggle for affection. There is a pathetic uni- 
 formity in the development of her stories when 
 one stops to analyze them. In each, some creature 
 striving for happiness is the central controlling 
 character, and the plot of the story is the process 
 by which this needy pensioner of the author is 
 ultimately made heir to unexpected stores of ap- 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 133 
 
 preciation and sympathy and love. ; Jane Eyre, at 
 the opening of her history, is a tragically isolated 
 little figure, without a sincere friend in the world, 
 and symbolically busy over a woodcut of the 
 lonely and frigid arctic regions. At the close, 
 she has three excellent cousins— ^the two girls 
 are as good as sisters; she casually gets, at 
 the same time with her relatives, a very decent 
 fortune; and above all, she falls heir to the vast 
 hoard of passion long secreted in the caverns of 
 Rochester's heart. Lucy Snowe in Villette has much 
 the same fate ; after long months or years of lone- 
 liness, she gets back old friends who are thrice as 
 friendly as before; and the story of Villette is 
 simply the histor}^ of Lucy's search for sympathy 
 and of her acquisition of Monsieur Paul. The 
 same is true of Shirley; the reader's vital interest 
 in the story depends on his wish to see Caroline 
 Helstone, Shirley, and Louis Moore duly fitted 
 out with their fair share of love: Caroline wins 
 a mother and a lover in a month ; and Shirley also, 
 as the reader doubtless remembers, fares sump- 
 tuously at the last. It is droll to note how little 
 any of Charlotte Bronte's heroines care for litera- 
 ture or art. She herself was apparently hungry 
 for fame as a writer, but all her heroines are lovers 
 of life, and of life only ; not one of them so much 
 as coquets with art or literature except as she may 
 write " exercises " for some favourite master. Very 
 un-modern are all these young women, and the 
 
134 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 
 
 young men, too, for that matter, with, no subtle 
 dilettante theories, no morbid contempt for life, no 
 erratic veins of enthusiasm or strange kinds of 
 faculty or of genius. They are all simply bent on 
 getting happiness through love of one sort or 
 another. 
 
 Dorothea Brooke and her abstract ideal enthu- 
 siasm, Charlotte Bronte could not have conceived 
 or created, any more than she could have traced 
 out with relentless sociological and psychological 
 detail the revenge that the " world " took on 
 Dorothea for her fine passion of unconventionality. 
 Not that Charlotte Bronte was less brave in her 
 contempt of cheap worldly standards than George 
 Eliot ; but Dorothea's spiritual restlessness and 
 ambition sprang from a complexity of moral and 
 mental life that Charlotte Bronte's culture was too 
 narrow to have suggested to her, and involves a 
 passion for subtler kinds of goodness than Char- 
 lotte Bronte's simple, intense nature brought within 
 her ken. Jane Eyre, when waxing discontented 
 with the tameness of her early life at Thornfield 
 Hall, describes her longing to get away in search 
 of " other and more vivid kinds of goodness." 
 More vivid kinds of goodness than those that the 
 common run of mortals reach — these Charlotte 
 Bronte ardently believed in and portrayed. Much 
 of the permanent power of her stories comes from 
 the "impetuous honesty" (to quote from Thack- 
 eray's characterization of her), and the fiery inten- 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 135 
 
 sity of imagination with which, she puts before 
 even readers of the present day her sense and 
 vision of what life may be made to mean for those 
 who will live sincerely and resolutely. There is 
 something elemental in her. She gives a new 
 zest to life like the encounter with a bit of wild 
 nature, — with a sea-breeze or the tense germinat- 
 ing silence in the depths of a wood. But she is 
 elemental at the cost of being primitive, — primi- 
 tive in her devotion to a few great interests, and in 
 her lack of refining complexity of thought. Hence 
 one's sense in reading her that one is moving in a 
 world remote from the present. Her heroines 
 indulge in no self-analysis, have no quarrels with 
 their consciences, no torturing doubts about duty, 
 no moral or spiritual struggles. They are curiously 
 definite and resolute little persons, who at every 
 crisis know in a trice just where duty lies and just 
 what they want to do. Their minds are clear, their 
 ideas about what makes life worth while are cer- 
 tain, their wills are intact; their only quarrel is 
 with circumstance. They have no wish to play 
 with life imaginatively, no sense of the cost of 
 committing themselves to a single ideal, no critical 
 fear of the narrowing effects of action./ What 
 would Charlotte Bronte have made, one wonders, 
 of Marie Bashkirtzeff ? 
 
 Life itself, then, not fancies or speculations about 
 life, — life of an almost primitive intensity, — is 
 what Charlotte Bronte's novels still offer to 
 
136 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 
 
 /readers of to-day who may be surfeited with in- 
 tellectual refinements of thought and feeling. 
 Doubtless there is in her work something of the 
 romantic false preference for savagery and bar- 
 barism over civilization, and of the romantic in- 
 clination to confuse crudeness with strength. She 
 loathes conventional life and commonplace char- 
 acters, and her art has to pay the penalty through 
 growing now and then melodramatic and absurd: 
 Her heroes, notably Eochester and Monsieur Paul, 
 cannot always get themselves taken seriously. 
 Their grotesqueness is overaccentuated. They 
 seem to study oddity. They drape themselves in 
 extravagance as in a mantle. But although Miss 
 Bronte's romantic bias — her fondness for the 
 strange — may now and then distort the action and 
 the characters of her stories, she never, unless 
 rarely in her last novel, Villette, offends in her own 
 style. She never rants ; her taste is sure. Even 
 in describing the most exciting scenes, her style 
 has no strut and no stridency. And so it is easy 
 to forgive the occasional grotesqueness of her inci- 
 dent and to yield to the sincerity of her art. Her 
 romances deal with confessedly exceptional states 
 of passion, — with almost such passions as a lyrical 
 poet might deal with. And the imaginative truth 
 and the beauty of phrase with which she realizes 
 the moods of her heroines — moods which have 
 the beat of the heart behind them, and are not 
 mere fancies of brain-sick dilettantes — give to 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 137 
 
 many passages in her stories almost the splendour 
 and power of lyrical poetry. 
 
 It used to be said of Dante Gabriel Eossetti that 
 life was, with him, always at a crisis. Much the 
 same thing is true of Charlotte Bronte and of her 
 heroines. Her novels — and this, when one stops 
 to consider, helps largely to give them their peculiar 
 tone — are perpetually busy with emotional crises ; 
 they are bent on portraying just the feverish ex- 
 pectation, the poignant grief, the joy, the glow of 
 passion, which some special moment or incident 
 stirs in the heart of the heroine. Very often the 
 moods that colour her fiction are moods of anxiety, 
 of breathless waiting, of nervous suspense. Jane 
 Eyre's moods are continually of this sort. "I 
 shall be called discontented," she says in one place. 
 "I could not help it; the restlessness was in my 
 nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. Then 
 my sole relief was to walk along the corridor of the 
 third story, backward and forward, safe in the 
 silence and solitude of the spot." 
 
 Early and late in Jane Eyre, these moments of 
 eager waiting, sometimes for a definite sorrow or 
 joy or excitement, sometimes merely with poignant 
 longing for change, are described fully and vividly. 
 When Jane, still a wee girl, has to make a start 
 by coach before break of day for a distant school, 
 the childish, half-haggard worry of the early morn- 
 ing is not taken for granted, but is put before the 
 reader with almost oppressive truth. Jane's drive, 
 
138 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 many years later, across the country to Thornfield 
 Hall, and her tremulous sensitiveness meantime to 
 every new impression, — these also are keenly 
 realized and faithfully reproduced. Throughout 
 the story, wherever she is, Jane is continually 
 aware of the sky-line and half-consciously quarrel- 
 ling with the horizon. At Thornfield she often 
 climbed to the leads of the Hall and " looked out 
 afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim 
 sky-line," and " longed for a power of vision which 
 might overpass that limit." And earlier, at Lo- 
 wood, she speaks of " the hilly horizon," and adds : 
 *^My eye passed all other objects to rest on those 
 most remote, the blue peaks ; it was those I longed 
 to surmount." 
 
 Lucy Snowe, whose fortunes make up the story 
 of Villette, is not quite so fiery a young parti- 
 cle as Jane Eyre; but she has almost as many 
 moods of thrilling restlessness to tell about. Her 
 nerves vibrate to the " subtle, searching cry of the 
 wind " ; she answers half-superstitiously to all the 
 skyey influences ; she watches with a breathless 
 exhilaration the Aurora Borealis, — its " quivering 
 of serried lances," " its swift ascent of messengers 
 from below the north star." And so throughout 
 Jane Eyre and Villette, — Shirley, as will presently 
 be noted, is somewhat differently conceived, — 
 moods of acute and febrile intensity are imagina- 
 tively put before us. We are kept perpetually 
 within sound of the heroine's breathing, and are 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 139 
 
 forced to watch from hour to hour the anguished 
 or joyful play of her pulse. The moods are not 
 difficult moods, or subtly reflective moods ; they are 
 not the ingenious imitations of feelings which the 
 pseudo-artistic temperament of to-day vamps up to 
 while away the time and in emulation of the woes 
 of special souls. They are the veritable joys and 
 sorrows of eager and keenly sensitive natures that 
 are bent above all upon living, and that never think 
 of posing, or of mitigating the severity of life by 
 artistic watchfulness over their own experiences. 
 They are primitive, elemental, tyrannical emotions, 
 and not to be disbelieved. 
 
 ( Another source of the almost lyrical intensity 
 which runs through Charlotte Bronte's fiction is 
 her sensitiveness to natural beauty. She had all 
 a romantic poet's tremulous awareness of the bright 
 and shadowed world of moor and field and sky. 
 Her nerves knew nature through and through and 
 answered to all its changing moods, and rarely do 
 her stories, even when the scene is laid in a city, 
 leave long out of notice the coursing of the clouds, 
 the sound of the winds, the gay or ominous play of 
 light and shade through the hours of the day, the 
 look of the moon at night. The creativeness of 
 her imagination, its searching inclusiveness, are not 
 to be missed. It is a whole new world she gives us ; 
 she is not content with working out for us the acts or 
 thoughts or looks of imaginary folk who may move 
 satisfactorily across any sort of conventional stage. 
 
140 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 Her imagination is too elemental for this, too vital, 
 includes too much of the universe within its sensi- 
 tive grasp. Her people are knit by "organic fila- 
 ments" to the nature they inhabit, and they can 
 be thoroughly and persuasively realized only as 
 their sensitive union with this nature-world which 
 is their home is continually suggested.^ With the 
 romantic poet, the individual is far more closely 
 dependent on the vast instinctive world of nature 
 for comfort and help and even for the life of the 
 spirit, than on the conventional world of society, 
 to which his relations seem to such a poet more 
 nearly accidental. In her sympathy with this 
 conception of man as intimately communing with 
 the mysterious life of the physical universe, Char- 
 lotte Bronte shows once more her romantic bias. 
 
 Accordingly, the pages of her novels are full 
 of delicate transcripts of the changing aspects of 
 night and day, as these aspects record themselves 
 on sensitive temperaments — more particularly on 
 the temperaments of her heroines. Jane Eyre is 
 perhaps most richly wrought with these half-lyri- 
 cal impressions of what the earth and the sky have 
 to say to the initiated. Yet, even through the 
 more objective Shirley, Charlotte Bronte's love 
 of nature follows her unmistakably, — the hero, 
 Moore, owing his very name to her passion for 
 the wild Yorkshire downs. In Villette, the scene 
 is in Brussels ; yet Charlotte Bronte's imagination, 
 even when thus circumscribed, will not wholly 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 141 
 
 give up the world of nature, and Lucy Snowe finds 
 in the wind, in the sky, in the moon, companion- 
 able presences whose varying aspects and utter- 
 ances symbolize again and again her joys or griefs 
 or wringing anxieties. "It was a day of winter 
 east winds," she says in one place, "and I had 
 now for some time entered into that dreary fellow- 
 ship with the winds and their changes, so little 
 known, so incomprehensible, to the healthy. The 
 north and the east owned a terrific influence, mak- 
 ing all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The 
 south could calm, the west sometimes cheer ; unless 
 indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of 
 thunder-clouds, under the weight and warmth of 
 which all energy died.'' Of the moon as well as 
 the winds, Lucy is strangely watchful; and often 
 at some crisis in her externally placid but internally 
 stormy life she describes its splendour or its sad- 
 ness. So in Chapter xii: "A moon was in the 
 sky, not a full moon, but a young crescent. I 
 saw her through a space in the boughs overhead. 
 She and the stars, visible beside her, were no 
 strangers where all else was strange; my child- 
 hood knew them. I had seen that golden sign 
 with the dark globe in its curve leaning back 
 on azure, beside an old thorn at the top of an old 
 field, in Old England, in long past days, just as 
 it now leaned back beside a stately spire in this 
 continental capital." Again: "Leaving the radiant 
 park and well-lit Haute-Ville ... I sought the dim 
 
142 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 lower quarter. Dim I should not say, for the 
 beauty of the moonlight — forgotten in the park — 
 here once more flowed in upon perception. High 
 she rode, and calm and stainlessly she shone. . . . 
 The rival lamps were dying; she held her course 
 like a white fate." Finally, a single passage may 
 be quoted from Shirley because of the way it testi- 
 fies, through the moon's subjugation of the surly 
 and stormy temperament of old Yorke, to both 
 the dramatic and the romantic power of Charlotte 
 Bronte's imagination. Yorke, the brusque and vio- 
 lent Yorkshire squire, riding in the late evening 
 over the downs with Moore, the hero, has been 
 betrayed into talk about a woman he had long ago 
 loved ; suddenly he breaks off. " ^ The moon is up,' 
 was his first not quite relevant remark, pointing 
 with Jiis whip across the moor. * There she is, ris- 
 ing into the haze, staring at us in a strange red 
 glower. She is no more silver than old Helstone's 
 brow is ivory. What does she mean by leaning her 
 cheek on Kushedge i' that way, and looking at us 
 wi' a scowl and a menace?'" 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's sensitiveness to the sinister 
 or seductive beauty of the moon, illustrated by 
 all these passages, may be taken as typical of 
 her relation to all nature, and of her use of it 
 throughout her stories. She has an almost tran- 
 scendental faith in the meaning of natural sights 
 and sounds ; she reproduces them with a glamour 
 that only a romantic imagination can catch and 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 143 
 
 suggest; and the unmistakable sincerity of her 
 moods and the lyrical intensity of her interpreta- 
 tions help to give to her novels a peculiarly vivid 
 beauty that the modern instructed, scientific, and 
 faithless novelist can rarely attain to. 
 
 Finally, from the primitiveness, good faith, and 
 concentration on essentials that have been noted as 
 characteristic of Miss Bronte, and from her fiercely 
 insistent dramatic imagination, there results the 
 remarkable power and persuasiveness of the really 
 great scenes of crisis in her stories.- Perhaps the 
 grea:iest of these scenes are those that follow Jane's 
 discovery that Rochester's wife is still alive. The 
 seening truth of these, their air of being personal 
 experiences poignantly remembered, remains mar- 
 vellous even for the wariest and most modern of 
 readers. No rightly constituted mind can dis- 
 b3lieve in the details of Jane's flight from Thorn- 
 field across the moors, in her solitary night on the 
 heath under " the cloudless night-sky," in her sud- 
 den glimpse of " the mighty milky way," and her 
 "nestling to the breast of the hill." The end of 
 the flight may well enough seem ludicrously unreal 
 — Jane's lucky discovery of her cousins in their 
 little cottage set in the measureless waste of the 
 moors ; plainly there is some tampering here with 
 the world-order, some bribing of fate. But in spite 
 of this jarring of the antiquated mechanism of the 
 plot, — a disillusioning mischance against which 
 we are never quite safe with Miss Bronte — Jane's 
 
144 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 feelings and sensations, her agonizing dislieartea- 
 ment, her pathetic clinging to nature for com- 
 fort and momentary relief, her poignant passing 
 glimpses of the beauty of flowers and heath and 
 stars and of the freshness of the morning, her 
 growing weakness and half-delirious wanderings, 
 — all these experiences and moods refuse to be 
 disbelieved, and grasp at the very heart ot the 
 reader. A few such passages in Jane Eyre have 
 almost the burning colour and the self-suiflcing 
 vividness of great romantic poems like the Ancient 
 Mariner. 
 
 The new world, then, into which Charlotte Bronte's 
 imagination inducts the modern reader and of which 
 she makes him free, is a world where casuistry and 
 philosophy are unknown, where they put no mist 
 of abstractions between the reader and the poignant 
 fact. It is a world where love and hate and tie 
 few great primary savage passions, of which recent 
 literary folk of the first order fight so shy, aie 
 portrayed vigorously and convincingly. It is a 
 world in which the elements, air and earth and 
 water, flash and blossom and ripple, where the 
 clouds -and the winds, the sun and the moon, are 
 never quite out of mind, and set the nerves a-tin- 
 gle and put the imagination in play, even of 
 the folk who are shut indoors. 
 
 And yet, though life, as Charlotte Bronte portrays 
 it, is so passionate, and though the world is so primi- 
 tive and elemental, the life that she puts before us 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 145 
 
 is actual life, not a whimsical or fantastic or falsi- 
 fying counterfeit of life, and the world in which 
 her characters live and move and have their being, 
 is the actual world, not a mystical dream-region, 
 beautifully false in its colours and chiaroscuro 
 and artificially filled like Hawthorne's world, for 
 example, with omens and portents and moral sym- 
 bolism. Her characters, too, are real men and 
 women, not types, not figures in melodrama, not 
 creatures of one idea, or one humour, or one pas- 
 sion. Doubtless they are not studied with the 
 minuteness that modern realists use. Yet they 
 have complex personalities and lead thoroughly in- 
 dividual lives. And they are flashed on the reader's 
 retina with a vividness of colour and a dramatic 
 truthfulness and suggestiveness in act and gesture 
 that modern scientific novels rarely reach. Herein, 
 perhaps, lies Charlotte Bronte's unique power, — 
 in her ability to make her stories seem close to 
 fact and yet strange and almost mystically imagina- 
 tive. Her hallucinations are sane, and her victims 
 of passion keep, after all, within the bounds of 
 reason. 
 
 And indeed this is an aspect of Charlotte 
 Bronte's genius that has not in general been in- 
 sisted upon sufficiently — her self-control and her 
 loyalty to reason, in all that is essential, whether 
 in art or in morals, a loyalty that is none 
 the less consistent and controlling because it is 
 half-grudging. As a result of this loyalty she 
 
146 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 escapes in her stories mucli of the extravagance 
 and absurdity that her sisters were led into. In 
 some respects, Emily Bronte was a greater artist 
 than Charlotte ; she had an intenseness of vision, 
 and an occasional beauty of image and phrase, 
 that Charlotte Bronte never quite reaches. The 
 vividness of some of her scenes and the acrid 
 intensity of the counterfeit life in Wuthering 
 Heights are beyond anything in Jane Eyre or 
 Shirley. But the work of Emily Bronte is lacking 
 in the moral and artistic sanity which is charac- 
 teristic of Charlotte Bronte. Wuthering Heights has 
 here and there greater lyrical beauty and power 
 than anything that Charlotte Bronte has written. 
 But Emily Bronte takes us wholly out of ordi- 
 nary daylight into a region of nightmare horrors. 
 Dante Eossetti used to say of Wutheriyig Heights 
 that its scenes were laid in hell, though oddly 
 enough the places and the people had English 
 names. The story, too, is illogical and structure- 
 less, and hence fails to make a lastingly great 
 impression ; it spends itself in paroxysms and 
 lacks sustained power and cumulative effect. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte, on the other hand, is never 
 completely the victim of her hallucinations. Con- 
 temptuous as she may be of "common sense" in 
 conventional matters, she is never really false to 
 reason or careless of its dictates in the regions 
 either of conduct or of art. When all is said, Jane 
 EyrCf the wildest of her stories, is a shining example 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 147 
 
 of the infinite importance, both in life and in art, 
 of reason. As a story, it is from beginning to end 
 admirably wrought. It moves forward with an 
 inevitableness, a logic of passion, an undeviating 
 aim, that become more and more impressive, the 
 more familiar one is with the novel, and that mark 
 it as the work of a soundly intellectual artist — of 
 an artist who is instinctively true to the organizing 
 force of reason as well as to the visions of a pas- 
 sionate imagination. In spite of its length and 
 wealth of detail, Jane Eyre is an admirably unified 
 work of art. Every moment prepares for, or re- 
 enforces, or heightens by way of subsequent con- 
 trast, the effect of the tragic complication in the 
 lives of Eochester and Jane Eyre, — the complica- 
 tion in that passion which seeming for the moment 
 about to bring perfect happiness to the dreary 
 existence of the little green-eyed, desolate waif of 
 a woman, finally overwhelms her and seems to 
 have wrecked her life. The steady march of des- 
 tiny may be heard if one will listen for it; the 
 idi.iQ-moUf sounds almost as plainly as in Tristan 
 und Isolde. To give us now and then this sense 
 that we are watching the working out of fate, is 
 the great triumph of the imaginative artist. 
 
 To some, this praise of Jane Eyre may sound 
 like droll hyperbole, for there are undoubtedly 
 sadly distracting defects in the story which for 
 certain readers, particularly on a first reading, 
 mar irretrievably its essential greatness. The most 
 
148 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 important of these have already been noted. " The 
 long arm of coincidence" stretches out absurdly 
 in one or two places, and makes all thought of 
 fate for the moment grotesque. The vices and 
 the ugliness of Rochester are dwelt upon with a 
 fervour that suggests an old maid's belated infatua- 
 tion for a monstrosity. The sempiternally solemn 
 love-making of Jane and Eochester drones its piti- 
 lessly slow length along, with no slightest ironical 
 consciousness or comment on the part of the 
 author. These faults and these lapses of taste 
 are undeniably exasperating, but they grow less 
 prominent as one comes to know the story inti- 
 mately and to feel its strenuous movement and 
 sincerity ; and they finally sink, for any reader 
 who has an instinct for essentials, into their true 
 place, as superficial blemishes on a powerfully 
 original work of art. 
 
 Of the existence of these defects in Jane Eyre, 
 however, Charlotte Bronte was liberally informed 
 by the critics, and in her later stories she guards 
 against them. Both Shirley and Villette are freer 
 from absurdities than Jane Eyre; neither is quite 
 so frankly devout toward the outre, and in both a 
 certain insidious humour is cultivated. Shirley is a 
 roundabout tribute to Thackeray. The point of 
 view, the method, the tone, are the result of a 
 hero-worshipping study of the novelist to whom 
 Jane Eyre was finally dedicated. The story aims 
 to be more a criticism of life than Jane Eyre, and 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 149 
 
 less a personal confession; the point of view is 
 that of " the author," and the tone is often whim- 
 sical or ironical. From the very first page the 
 style betokens a changed attitude toward life. 
 The novel is not to be a semi-lyrical record of 
 moods of hope and grief and revolt and passion 
 and joy; it is to portray with a certain delicate 
 and at times ironical detachment the fortunes of a 
 small group of characters whom the author lov- 
 ingly but shrewdly watches. The brisk satire at 
 the expense of the curates is something that lies 
 quite out of the scope of Jane Eyre. The gain 
 that Shirley shows in conscious breadth of outlook 
 and in confidence of bearing, — in authority, — is 
 noteworthy. Jane Eyre is the work of an auda- 
 cious solitary dreamer ; Shirley is the work of an 
 author who has "arrived," who has made the 
 world listen, and who feels sure that she has a 
 right to speak. The monotonous poignancy of 
 Jane Eyre gives place in Shirley to a wide range 
 of moods ; the story moves forward with a buoy- 
 ant sense of the charm of life as well as with a 
 half-indignant sense of its daunting and harrowing 
 difficulty. The author escapes from the tyranny 
 of a single, somewhat morbid, though courageous, 
 temperament, and gives us incidents and characters 
 with more of the checkered light upon them that 
 ordinary mortals are from day to day aware of. 
 
 Shirley takes in, too, more of the light mis- 
 cellaneousness of life than Jane Eyre, — more 
 
150 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 of its variegated surface. Jane Eyre concen- 
 trates all the interest on the struggle of two 
 hearts with fate; Shirley^ while loyal to the for- 
 tunes of a few principal characters, suggests the 
 whole little world of the country-side, through con- 
 flict and cooperation with which these characters 
 gain their strength and quality. At least it tries to 
 suggest this world, — a world of curates, rectors, 
 squires, and even labourers. Tea-drinkings and 
 church festivals and labour riots are conscien- 
 tiously set forth, and in the midst of their bustle 
 and confusion the wooings of Robert Moore and 
 Louis Moore go on. 
 
 Yet one has after all but to think of Middle- 
 march to feel how superficial in Charlotte Bronte's 
 novels is the treatment of sociological detail. In 
 Shirley the labourers and their riotous attacks 
 on the mill are plainly enough simply used to 
 heighten the effect of the plot; the rioters come 
 in almost as perfunctorily as the mob in a melo- 
 drama, and they pass out of view the moment they 
 have served the purpose of giving the reader an 
 exciting scene in which Moore may act heroically, 
 and over which Shirley and Charlotte may feel 
 intensely. The genius of Charlotte Bronte lay 
 not in the power to realize minutely and thor- 
 oughly the dependence of character on social en- 
 vironment, but in her power to portray with lyrical 
 intensity the fates of a few important characters. 
 Shirley isolates its characters far less than Jane 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 151 
 
 Eyre, — tries to see them and portray them as 
 more intimately and complexly acted upon by a 
 great many forces. It is therefore a wiser, saner, 
 and more modern book than Jane Eyre. But in 
 proportion it loses in intensity, passionate colour, 
 and in subduing singleness of aim. The interest is 
 divided; the dreamlike involvement of the reader 
 in the mist of a single temperament's fancies and 
 feelings disappears ; the peculiar, half -hypnotizing 
 effect of Jane Eyre's murmurous, monotonous re- 
 cital vanishes ; and in the place of all this we have 
 a brilliant, often powerful, and undeniably pictur- 
 esque and entertaining criticism of various aspects 
 of Yorkshire life, written somewhat after the 
 method that George Eliot later used much more 
 skilfully. 
 
 In Villette Charlotte Bronte returns to the per- 
 sonal point of view and the more lyrical tone. 
 Lucy Snowe, who is merely a reincarnation of Jane 
 Eyre, though somewhat less energetic and less 
 ugly, puts upon us in this story, as Jane Eyre had 
 put upon us before, the spell of her dream, and 
 imposes on us the sad or happy hallucinations that 
 made up her life. In some respects, Villette is the 
 most of a tour de force of Charlotte Bronte's novels. 
 She takes for heroine a plain, shy, colourless school- 
 teacher; she puts her in the midst of a girl's 
 boarding-school, and keeps her there pitilessly 
 from almost the start to the finish of the story; 
 she makes use of hardly any exciting incident — 
 
152 CHAELOTTE BRONTE 
 
 the Spectral Nun is a mere picturesque hoax, 
 though her repeated introduction illustrates the 
 weakness for sensationalism in plots that Charlotte 
 Bronte could never quite rid herself of; there are, 
 however, this time no mad wives, no hollow mys- 
 terious laughter, no men or women with suspicious 
 pasts. Yet in spite of the commonplace characters 
 and the seemingly dull situations, the story that 
 results holds the reader's interest firmly with its 
 alternate gayety, pathos, and passion. In places 
 it is as poignant as Jane Eyre. After all, we 
 mortals are ridiculously sympathetic creatures; 
 it is the fluttering of the human heart that cap- 
 tures us; and Lucy Snowe's heart finds enough 
 excitement in her Belgian boarding-school to jus- 
 tify a great deal of passionate beating. 
 
 Villette suffers, however, from a divided alle- 
 giance on the part of the author. Her method in 
 the story is plainly a compromise between the 
 egoistic self-concentration of Jaiie Eyre and the 
 professional detachment of Shirley. Lucy Snowe 
 is made more speculative, less acridly self-assertive, 
 than Jane Eyre, to the very end that she may note 
 more of the ordinary happenings of life, and set 
 down a more reflective and inclusive record of what 
 goes on about her than the impassioned Jane would 
 have had patience for. As a consequence, Villette 
 gains in range but loses in intensity. The fortunes 
 of the Bassompierres, which, in spite of Lucy's 
 loyalty to the charm of these worthy folk, fail to 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 153 
 
 perturb the reader very deeply, fill far too much, 
 space. In a letter written about the time of the 
 publication of the novel, Charlotte Bronte laments 
 the weakness of the character of Paulina, and the 
 apparent non-sequitur that results in the story from 
 the early importance of the Bassompierres and of 
 Dr. John, and from their later obscuration by 
 Lucy's love for the Professor. This flickering 
 purpose is perhaps the sign of the difficulty the 
 author met in trying to be objective. The power 
 to portray the world with passionate truth as seen 
 through a woman's temperament, — a narrowly ex- 
 acting and somewhat morbidly self-centred temper- 
 ament, — this was the peculiar power of Charlotte 
 Bronte; and in Jane Eyre this power found its 
 perfect expression. In her other novels, though 
 she wins a greater range, she sacrifices her peculiar 
 coign of vantage. 
 
 It must, then, be admitted with all frankness 
 that life is not for most people the sort of thing 
 that Charlotte Bronte represents. The moods that 
 fill the pages of Jane Eyre are no more the com- 
 mon moods with which the ordinary man or 
 woman looks at life than are the lyrics of In 
 Memoriam like the daily records of a clubman's 
 thoughts. For most people, life is not perpetually 
 at a crisis ; nor are they all the time yearning in- 
 tensely for love and sympathy. Petty personal 
 rivalries and the pleasure that comes from success 
 in them, silly little vanities that fancy themselves 
 
154 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 flattered, cheap bodily delights, a pleased ironical 
 sense of the absurdities of other people, — these 
 are the satisfactions that for half the world re- 
 deem the monotony of existence and make it no 
 hardship to go on living ; and these are precisely 
 the phases of life that such novelists as Jane 
 Austen delight to depict. Of all these frivolous 
 feelings Charlotte Bronte's account of life con- 
 tains scarcely a hint. Shirley now and then has 
 glimpses of the absurd trivialities that the cynic 
 likes to find and sneer at. But for the most 
 part Charlotte Bronte is as oblivious as Shelley or 
 Wordsworth of the possible delights of irony. Per- 
 haps it is still an open question whether the iron- 
 ical or the passionately sincere relation to life is 
 the worthier in morals and in art. The imagina- 
 tions that can reconcile the two are doubtless the 
 most penetrating and potent. Miss Bronte showed 
 that she could appreciate the ironical manner 
 through her warm admiration of Thackeray, — an 
 admiration, however, be it noted that expressly in- 
 sists on the "sentiment, which, jealously hidden, but 
 genuine, extracts the venom from that formidable 
 Thackeray, and converts what might be corrosive 
 poison into purifying elixir." As for her own work, 
 however, she was too contemptuous of convention- 
 ality in all its forms to be a fit interpreter of the 
 Spirit of Comedy. 
 
 Indeed, she now and then herself becomes in her 
 art fair game for the Spirit of Comedy, because of 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 155 
 
 the dulness of her conventional conscience. She 
 does not always know when the laugh is bound to 
 be against her. Her heroes often wax silly or 
 grotesque. Eochester's smile which "he used but 
 on rare occasions," his " ebon eyebrows," his " pre- 
 cious grimness," his " bursts of maniacal rage," all 
 his extravagances of look and demeanour, are in- 
 sisted upon absurdly. Paul Emmanuel's tricks of 
 manner, his wilfulness, his self-conceit, his fidgeti- 
 ness, — these are played upon out of all measure, 
 and described with a fondness that must now and 
 then seem ludicrous. And so, too, with the peculiar- 
 ities of Louis Moore ; his sardonic self-satisfaction, 
 his somewhat pretentious iciness of demeanour, his 
 Satanic pride and so on, are made abundantly gro- 
 tesque through overemphasis. Melodramatic inci- 
 dent, too. Miss Bronte shows a perilous fondness 
 for. Not easy is it to take seriously the crazy wife 
 of Eochester, who goes on all fours in an upper 
 chamber, and now and then sallies forth to set fire 
 to something or other. Excesses of this sort both 
 in characterization and in incident are the penalty 
 that Miss Bronte has to pay for her contempt for 
 conventional standards and modes of judgment. 
 
 Gradually she doubtless came to recognize the 
 danger involved in her fondness for the abnormal, 
 and in her distrust of everyday virtues and modes 
 of life. In her last novel, ViUette, she tried to be 
 fair to conventional types of men and women, and 
 to portray worldly success sympathetically. In Dr. 
 
156 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 John Bretton she aims to draw the character of a 
 well-bred, good-tempered, prosperous gentleman, — 
 a man in no disgrace with fortune and men's eyes. 
 And in Paulina she makes a brave effort to depict 
 sympathetically a pretty and charming young soci- 
 ety girl. Both Bretton and Paulina, however, are 
 mere copperplate nonentities. Miss Bronte herself 
 laments in one of her letters her failure with Paul- 
 ina ; and John Graham Bretton, the handsome 
 young doctor at whom Lucy Snowe confesses she 
 dare not look for fear of being dazzled for a half- 
 hour afterward, is also a mere figment. Paul Em- 
 manuel is the real hero of Villette, — a hero in his 
 own way as outre as Rochester himself. In Shirley, 
 the insufferable Sympsons — Shirley's buckram 
 uncle and his faultless daughters — together with 
 Sir Philip Nunnely, the lily-fingered baronet, who 
 writes sentimental verses, are the only really con- 
 ventional folk portrayed. The daughters "knew 
 by heart a certain young-ladies'-schoolroom code of 
 laws on language, demeanour, etc. ; themselves 
 never deviated from its curious little pragmatical 
 provisions; and they regarded with secret, whis- 
 pered horror all deviations in others." Mr. Symp- 
 son's god was " the World," as Shirley tells him in 
 a virago-like speech toward the close of the story. 
 All these devotees of "correctness" Miss Bronte 
 detests ; " these things we artists hate," as Blake 
 said of the Mechanics^ Magazine. And her hatred 
 of them gives a kind of dissenting bitterness to 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 157 
 
 parts of her treatment of life, — a false note of 
 acerbity like that of the professional heretic. This 
 is another of the penalties she pays for that fervid 
 unconventionality which was alike her strength 
 aiid her weakness. 
 
 In morals, her unconventionality will hardly 
 seem nowadays very startling, although in her 
 own day there was much head-wagging among 
 prim persons, male and female, over the vagaries 
 and frank passionateness of Jane Eyre. Miss 
 Bronte never pleaded for a moral revolution. She 
 had no prophetic glimpses of " the modern woman," 
 and she neither preached nor implied a gospel of 
 woman^s rights. She makes brisk war on Mrs. 
 Grundy and on her notions of womanly propriety, 
 but beyond this she never ventures. She limits 
 herself expressly in the preface to the second edi- 
 tion of Jane Eyre. " Conventionality is not moral- 
 ity. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack 
 the first is not to assail the last. . . . These things 
 and deeds are diametrically opposed ; they are as 
 distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often con- 
 found them; they should not be confounded; ap- 
 pearance should not be mistaken for truth." Never 
 does one of Miss Bronte's heroines actually vio- 
 late a moral law. Jane Eyre is a signal martyr 
 to the sacredness of received ideas concerning 
 marriage and divorce; and Eochester has to pay 
 dearly for his lax notions about the rights of 
 crazy wives. His Hall is burned and he just 
 
158 CHARLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 misses burning with it; lie finally gets off with 
 the loss of an arm and an eye and with sev- 
 eral months of parboiled suffering. No ; Charlotte 
 Bronte is a relentless little conservative as regards 
 all the essentials of the moral code. Her ideal for 
 woman is the traditional domestic ideal freed from 
 worldliness and hypocrisy, — the domestic ideal 
 purged of non-essentials and carried to the wth 
 degree of potency. All her women are merely 
 fragments till they meet a man they can adore. 
 
 Perhaps, however, Shirley may be brought up 
 as premonitory of the modern woman. In the 
 "mutinous" Shirley, "made out of fire and air,'' 
 frank and wilful and just a bit mannish, who 
 parted her hair over one temple, who was not 
 afraid of a musket, and who managed her own 
 estate with a pretty air of self-sufficiency — surely, 
 in her, so one is at first tempted to think, there is 
 a suggestion of the new woman. Yet, after all, the 
 suggestion is very slight. Shirley wears her man- 
 nishness merely as a challenging bit of colour. She 
 is not intellectual ; she has no theories ; in her 
 heart of hearts she longs to be bitted and ruled; 
 in the core of her nature she is very woman of 
 very woman, delighting in bravado, in playing at 
 shrewishness, and then in suddenly obeying orders. 
 She is merely a modern Eosalind masquerading for 
 a summer's day in doublet and hose. 
 
 It nevertheless remains true that in one sense 
 Charlotte Bronte prepared the way for the crusade 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 159 
 
 of the modern woman. Her prodigiously vivid 
 portrayal of the endless possibilities of woman's 
 nature in power and passion and devotion inevi- 
 tably suggests the rights of women to richer fields 
 for the play of their faculties. *^ Women are 
 supposed to be very calm generally," Jane Eyre 
 exclaims; "but women feel just as men feel; they 
 need exercise for their faculties and a field for 
 their efforts as much as their brothers do; they 
 suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a 
 stagnation, precisely as men would suffer. ... It 
 is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, 
 if they seek to do more or to learn more than 
 custom has pronounced necessary for their sex." 
 This passage in Jane Eyre is indeed almost revo- 
 lutionary. And although it cannot readily be 
 paralleled elsewhere in Miss Bronte's writings, 
 the spirit that pervades it, the indignation of 
 its protest against tyrannical and contemptuous 
 limitations of woman's freedom, doubtless runs 
 through all her novels. In this sense she may 
 truly be described as preparing the way for the 
 saner and more generous conceptions of woman 
 and of her relations to man, that are characteristic 
 of our own day. 
 
 What is true of Charlotte Bronte's ideas about 
 women is true of her ethics in general. She has 
 no radically new, no really revolutionary, doctrine. 
 The great good in life — she is never weary of 
 praising it and of illustrating its pricelessness — 
 
160 CHAKLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 is pure human affection. Jane Eyre's cry, in a 
 childish outbreak of feeling, is typical of all Miss 
 Bronte's heroines: "If others don't love me, I 
 would rather die than live." Each of her novels, 
 as has already been noted, reduces in the last 
 analysis to a pathetic quest after affection. 
 
 Callousness of heart, lack of " true generous feel- 
 ing," — this is for Miss Bronte the one fatal defect 
 of character. Not even unflinching devotion to an 
 abstract moral code or to a systematic round of 
 religious observances can excuse in her eyes rigidity 
 of nature and dearth of genuine human affection. 
 Jane Eyre's cousin Eliza has her time parcelled out 
 into ten minute intervals, which she spends day 
 after day with splendid regularity on the same 
 round of duties ; yet she is to Jane Eyre, and to 
 Charlotte Bronte as well, anathema maranatlia, 
 because she is " heartless." St. John Eivers, with 
 whose fate the very last sentences in Jane Eyre 
 concern themselves, is a still more striking case in 
 point. He is consumed with religious zeal ; he is 
 absolutely sincere in his devotion to the cause of 
 religion. Yet because he sacrifices love to the 
 successful pursuit of his mission, and because he 
 acts from severely conceived principle instead of 
 from warm human feeling, the fiery little author 
 can hardly keep her hand from angry tremulous- 
 ness while she portrays him. She loathes him 
 because he forgets "the feelings and claims of little 
 people, in pursuing his own large views." Intense 
 
CHAKLOTTE BKONTE 161 
 
 imaginative sympathy with life in all its forms, — 
 even with animals and with nature, — this is what 
 Miss Bronte demands of the characters she will 
 approve. There must be no cheap sentiment ; her 
 heroes are apt to be stern or even ferocious in 
 manner; but under a wilful exterior there must 
 be a glowing spirit of human affection ready to 
 flash out loyally, though capriciously, whenever 
 there is real need. 
 
 And it is because she believes so unswervingly 
 in the worth of life as ministered to by love, and 
 because she sets forth with such manifold truth of 
 detail and such visionary intensity the realities of 
 life and love, that her novels, in spite of their obvi- 
 ous defects, keep their power, and are even in 
 some ways doubly grateful in these latter days of 
 cynical moralizing. She quickens faith in human 
 nature and in human destiny. She gives the reader 
 who will readily lend himself to her spell a new 
 sense of the heights and depths of passion and of 
 the unlimited possibilities of life. The finical reader 
 will find in her much to shock him and bring his 
 hand to his mouth, and the nicely intellectual 
 reader will be sure that her naivete is by no means 
 the finally satisfactory relation to life.i The ad- 
 mirers of George Eliot and of Mrs. Ward will carp 
 at her ethics or at her lack of them. Doubtless, 
 her characters love love almost selfishly, and seem 
 to struggle for it with something of the gambler^s 
 greed. George Eliot's analyses of the dangers of 
 
162 CHAKLOTTE BRONTfi 
 
 the self-centred and wilful pursuit even of love 
 may lead to a mucli more scientifically accurate 
 sense of tLe unimportance of the individual man or 
 woman, and of the absurdity of hoping that the 
 world will order itself to suit the needs of a single 
 heart. George Eliot asserted the rights of the 
 social order; Charlotte Bronte asserted the indi- 
 vidual. And for that very reason her novels are 
 tonic in these days when gently cynical resignation 
 has become so largely a fashionable habit of mind 
 in literature and art. George Eliot never tells of 
 love at first hand, and always puts a mist of philoso- 
 phizing and a blur of moral suasion between her 
 readers and any passionate experience she recites. 
 Charlotte Bronte tells of the joy and the terror and 
 the tragedy of love and life with the intense direct- 
 ness of the lyric poet, and hence even the direst 
 sufferings her characters undergo do not daunt or 
 depress the reader, but rather quicken his sense 
 of kinship with all forms of human experience and 
 his realization of the dignity and scope of man's 
 nature. The human will is never at a disadvantage 
 with Charlotte Bronte. The struggle with circum- 
 stance and with fate is bitter, often exhausting; 
 yet there is a curious constitutional buoyant cour- 
 age in her work that more than counteracts any 
 sympathetic sadness the story may for the moment 
 carry with it. 
 
 The same lyrical intensity that has been found 
 in Miss Bronte's modes of conceiving life is charac- 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 163 
 
 teristic of her style. It is a powerfully imaginative 
 and at its best an intensely idiomatic style, and its 
 beauty of imagery and passionate originality make 
 possible her peculiar poetic re-creation of life. Her 
 style has none of the sharp falsetto note that might 
 be expected from a woman in a passion ; in spite 
 of her fondness for melodramatic incident, Miss 
 Bronte bridles her tongue and speaks with a terse- 
 ness, a precision of phrase, and a reticence that 
 might well serve as models for such modern 
 masters of sensational fiction as Mr. Hall Caine. 
 Charlotte Bronte is in very truth an imaginative 
 artist in prose. She is loyal to the traditions of 
 the best English literature. She has a delicate 
 sense of the worth of words and of the possible 
 beauty of sentences and of the charm of the care- 
 fully-wrought paragraph. And this instinct for 
 style is one more reason — and a prepotent one — 
 why her novels are not going to be speedily swept 
 into the dust-bins like the thousand and one novels 
 of the 'Hady novelists'' of to-day, i— improvisers 
 all, ready and slovenly reporters of personal anec- 
 dote, ^'femmes qui parlent.^' 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's style varies sensitively from 
 novel to novel. In Jane Eyre it is nervous, eager, 
 staccato, impassioned. Its tone is curiously per- 
 sonal and intimate. One of the last chapters 
 begins — "Reader, I married him." This half- 
 appealing, confidential note sounds often through 
 the story, which may almost be described as a long 
 
164 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 
 
 series of strangely minute and frank confessions 
 murmured to the reader in Jane Eyre's own voice, 
 — in " that peculiar voice of hers," to quote from 
 Rochester, " so animating and piquant, as well as 
 soft." In Shirley the style is gayer, brisker, less 
 personal, more professional, more audacious, more 
 satirical. In Villette there is a return toward the 
 introspective and intensely emotional style of Jane 
 Eyre, but the tone is less vibrant with feeling, 
 more reflective and observantly amused. And 
 partly, doubtless, as a result of the author's success 
 and sense of responsibility, the vice of fine writing 
 appears in this last of her novels. Repeatedly she 
 writes at her readers, expatiates on art or on other 
 abstract topics, and in a few instances even in- 
 dulges in over-rhapsodical passages of sentimental 
 description. Yet, in spite of these lapses, Villette 
 contains as many memorable phrases and images 
 as Jane Eyre or Shirley. 
 
 In all her novels alike, her style is exquisitely 
 specific ; it gives us a great deal of the surface of 
 life — of the aspect both of characters and dramatic 
 scenes and of nature. Lucy Snowe somewhere 
 boasts of her liking for " nice details " ; she caught 
 this fancy from her creator. Charlotte Bronte 
 always has flashingly present in her mind the shapes 
 and the contours of the world and all the phases of 
 the dramatic action that she describes. The truth 
 of her transcripts from nature has already been 
 illustrated. She is "one of those for whom the 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 165 
 
 visible world exists." She has seen and loved the 
 colour-schemes of spring and autumn and winter, 
 and of morning and evening. "It was a still 
 night — calm, dewy, cloudless; the gables turned 
 to the west, reflected the clear amber of the horizon 
 they faced ; the oaks behind were black ; the cedar 
 was blacker; under its dense, raven boughs a 
 glimpse of the sky opened gravely blue; it was 
 full of the moon, which looked solemnly and 
 mildly down on Caroline from beneath that sombre 
 canopy." . . . "All the hot summer day burned 
 away like a Yule-log; the crimson of its close 
 perished; I was left bent among the cool blue 
 shades, over the pale and ashen gleams of its 
 night." Nor is she merely finely observant of 
 the hues and tints that play over the surface 
 of the great earth-ball and the crystal sphere of 
 the heavens; she knows the moods which these 
 colour-chords can send vibrating across sensitive 
 nerves, and these moods she suggests with great 
 beauty of phrasing. 
 
 Her style is prevailingly an imaginative style; 
 images continually spring to her lips to express 
 moods or to suggest the peculiar charm of the 
 life that she portrays. In Villette the heroine 
 speaks of "the strange necromantic joys of fancy" 
 that were hers; these necromantic joys Char- 
 lotte Bronte herself knew well; they cast flick- 
 ering lights and shadows across many of her 
 pages. Yet this hardly suggests, after all, the 
 
166 CHARLOTTE BRONTS 
 
 fervour and gravity of her most characteristic 
 imaginative prose. She is not playful ; she is not 
 whimsical; she is strenuous and sombre; or she 
 is tremulously eager in welcoming and treasuring 
 in words some serious splendour that nature or 
 human passion reveals to her. Passages enough 
 have already been quoted to illustrate the power 
 and beauty of her imaginative interpretation of 
 nature. But one or two more passages may be 
 adduced to illustrate her treatment of passion, — 
 the unfaltering and flawless sincerity, and the 
 sombre intensity of phrase with which she de- 
 scribes it. Take, for example, the paragraphs that 
 recite Jane Eyre's first moments of suffering when 
 she finds she must abandon Rochester : — 
 
 " One idea only throbbed life-like within me 
 — a remembrance of God: it begot an unuttered 
 prayer: these words went wandering up and down 
 in my rayless mind, as something that should be 
 whispered; but no energy was found to express 
 them — 
 
 " ' Be not far from me, for trouble is near : there 
 is none to help.' 
 
 " It was near : and as I had lifted no petition to 
 Heaven to avert it, — as I had neither joined my 
 hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved my lips, — it 
 came : in full heavy swing the torrent poured over 
 me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my 
 love lost, my hope quenched, my faith death-struck, 
 swayed full and mighty above me in one sullen 
 
CHAELOTTE BRONTE 167 
 
 mass. The bitter hour cannot be described: in 
 truth, ^the waters came into my soul; I sank in 
 deep mire ; I felt no standing ; I came into deep 
 waters; the floods overflowed me.'^' The same 
 sombre splendour that illuminates this long lyrical 
 passage glows out often in a single image. " The 
 human heart can suffer. It can hold more tears 
 than the ocean holds waters. We never know how 
 deep — how wide it is, till misery begins to un- 
 bind her clouds, and fill it with rushing black- 
 ness." Again and again Charlotte Bronte puts in a 
 single sentence a vivid and beautiful impression of 
 nature with a delicacy of perception and a sure- 
 ness of phrasing that show how essentially poetic 
 was her genius. ^' The wind sighed low in the 
 firs : all was moorland loneliness, and midnight 
 hush." Moore " wore a countenance . . . like a 
 still, dark day, equally beamless and breezeless." 
 " He met her with caution, and replied to her in 
 his softest tones, as if there was a kind of gossa- 
 mer happiness hanging in the air which he feared 
 to disturb by drawing too deep a breath." " The 
 rain is over and gone, and there is a tender shining 
 after it." "That morning I was disposed for si- 
 lence ; the austere beauty of the winter day had on 
 me an awing, hushing influence. That passion of 
 January, so white and so bloodless, was not yet 
 spent; the storm had raved itself hoarse, but 
 seemed no nearer exhaustion." Such sentences 
 as these are charged with beauty, and are almost 
 
168 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 as full of delight for the lover of style as a lyric 
 poem. The romantic glamour, too, of most of them 
 can hardly be missed. 
 
 The peculiar play of Charlotte Bronte's imagi- 
 nation must now be apparent. Eomantic she is 
 in the sense that she makes the world over in 
 terms of intense personal emotion. Life as she 
 portrays it is continually stirring with a pathetic 
 unrest ; it is wistful, — femininely reaching out 
 after completion. Life is haunted, too; the pass- 
 ing moments are full of presentiments; no single 
 hour is enough to itself; it is nervously aware of 
 change. Her characters are out of the common; 
 their hearts are with them late and soon; the 
 story of their lives is the story of some affection 
 or some passion that succeeds or fails. For the 
 things of the mind her people care only by the 
 way; the same is true, one is tempted to say, of 
 the practical concerns of business, and of the daily 
 routine of conventional human intercourse; these 
 take on meaning and worth only as in retrospect 
 or through anticipation they have some special 
 relation to the drama of feeling which is all the 
 time steadily moving forward. Of this drama, 
 even nature is sensitively aware; the winds have 
 echoes of it, and the moon and the stars are curi- 
 ously involved in its perturbations. Everywhere 
 the tensely vibrating temperament of the feminine 
 artist constrains us into moods that are by no 
 means those of every day. Of course, there are 
 
CHARLOTTE BRONTE 169 
 
 tracts in lier stories, particularly in Shirley, where 
 the friendly commonplaceness of life is nearer 
 being recognized, and where the reader conies 
 closer to watching and listening with the quiet 
 breathing and the half-amused look of one who 
 merely observes life's little ironies. But the dis- 
 tinctive tone of Miss Bronte's novels, when one 
 compares her novels with those of her really great 
 contemporaries, is of this irresistibly poignant sort. 
 Yet there is in her stories no faring afar into 
 the shadowy regions of romance for characters or 
 background, and no refining away of the substance 
 of life into fantastic dream-shapes and forms. Her 
 world has none of the strangeness, the prismatic 
 variableness, or the mystical dimness and the fugi- 
 tive magic of Poe's world, and none of the alle- 
 gorical prescience and duplicity of Hawthorne's 
 world. She keeps almost as rigorously within the 
 bounds of the possible as literal-minded novelists 
 keep ; and she is honestly in love with fact, — 
 with what the wrangle of the creative forces of 
 nature and society necessitates as opposed to what 
 the heart delights to dream. Her world is held 
 together by all the great laws that bind into sane 
 coherence the physical and the moral world of 
 sensible folk. And yet her world is an artificially 
 fashioned world, — a world in which a few inter- 
 ests rule far more persistently and potently than in 
 the world that most men know ; a world in which 
 the atoms of fact and incident are wrought into 
 
170 CHARLOTTE BRONTE 
 
 intelligible patterns far more exclusively by the 
 pulsing energy of human affections than they are 
 in the prosaic world of ordinary events. Not that 
 she is a sentimentalist; not that she blinks the 
 thwarting forces of nature or the cruel tangles in 
 which human wills involve each other. But she 
 has magnificent faith in the primal human feelings, 
 — above all in passion, — and in their power to 
 justify themselves in the midst of all the dul- 
 ness, the cruelties, and the tragedies of nature and 
 society. In terms of this faith and in harmony 
 with this ideal she creates her mimic worlds. She 
 is essentially loyal to fact; and yet she finds in 
 fact, even in cruel and tragic fact, subtle minis- 
 trations to the needs of the human heart. And 
 because she is able to convey to her readers her 
 peculiar appreciation of the power and the beauty 
 of life, with the consummate skill of the artist, 
 she belongs with Mrs. Browning among those who 
 domicile Eomance in the midst of the dull facts 
 of daily life. 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 The last eighteen months in England have given 
 a worthy account of themselves in the matter of 
 verse. Within this period two poets of distinction 
 have made themselves for the first time really- 
 known ; and another poet, who had for an unhappy- 
 interval been silent, has returned to the public with 
 a volume of verse of undeniable quality. The new- 
 comers are, of course, Mr. Francis Thompson and 
 Mr. John Davidson; and the poet who returns to 
 find his welcome more assured than ever, is, equally 
 of course, Mr. William Watson. 
 
 Of the younger generation of verse-writers in 
 England, Mr. Watson has, for obvious reasons, 
 won the most favour. He has been longest be- 
 fore the public, has accustomed the English retina 
 to his image, and has lost something of that 
 strangeness of aspect which in England so pro- 
 vokes distrust. Then he has been able to call Mr. 
 Richard Holt Hutton of the Spectator " his friend," 
 and has fared sumptuously in that journal after 
 
 1 Written in June, 1895. 
 171 
 
172 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 each of his appearances in print. Of a recent poem 
 of Mr. Watson's in the Yellow Book, Mr. Hutton 
 has asserted that it contains a symbol that Milton 
 never surpassed; and persistently during the last 
 year the Spectator has claimed for Mr. Watson the 
 right to rank with the greatest English poets. 
 Indeed, English critical journals in general have 
 received Mr. Watson^s work with a favour that 
 begets distrust. And yet it must be admitted that 
 his popularity has never been of quite that com- 
 promising sort that, for example, has welcomed Mr. 
 Lewis Morris, — the God-gifted hand-organ voice of 
 England. The eulogists of Mr. Watson have been 
 " people of importance " ; people perhaps rather 
 official and Academic, not to say priggish, but cer- 
 tainly people from whom one differs at one's peril. 
 Mr. Watson is a loyal Words worthian, as was 
 Matthew Arnold before him, and this fact alone 
 is enough to have ensured his acceptance with a 
 wide circle of orthodox English readers of poetry. 
 Not only are many single poems of Mr. Watson's 
 plainly reminiscences of Wordsworth, — as, for ex- 
 ample, the poem describing the swans that float into 
 view in visionary fashion down the Thames, trailing 
 clouds of glory from some unknown, half-mystical 
 region, — but Mr. Watson's entire spirit, when he is 
 at his best, is undeniably Wordsworth ian. In his 
 most characteristic moments, his poetry is an aspi- 
 ration toward that mood of passionate calm, of 
 perfectly controlled ardour, which Wordsworth of 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 173 
 
 all romantic poets most adequately realized and 
 expressed. 
 
 *' 'Tis from those moods in which life stands 
 With feet earth-planted, yet with hands 
 Stretched toward visionary lands, 
 
 Where vapours lift 
 A moment, and aerial strands 
 
 Gleam through the rift, 
 
 " The poet wins, in hours benign, 
 At older than the Delphic shrine, 
 Those intimations faint and fine, 
 
 To which belongs 
 Whatever character divine 
 
 Invests his songs. 
 
 *' And could we live more near allied 
 To cloud and mountain, wind and tide, 
 Cast this unmeaning coil aside. 
 
 And go forth free, 
 The World our goal, Desire our guide, — 
 
 We then might see 
 
 *' Those master moments grow less rare, 
 And oftener feel the nameless air 
 Come rumouring from we know not where.'* 
 
 The mood pervading these lines is distinctly Words- 
 worthian, and it is the mood most frequently found 
 in Mr. Watson. Like Wordsworth, he is always 
 hearkening for the "intimations" of man's more 
 than earthly destiny, but the "intimations" in 
 these later days have become sadly attenuated, 
 "fainter and finer" than of old; and Mr. Watson's 
 account of them lacks the " sober certainty " as well 
 
174 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 as the spiritual exaltation of Wordsworth's recital, 
 despite his loyalty to the Wordsworthian point of 
 view. 
 
 But Wordsworth is by no means the only poet 
 whose influence is traceable in Mr. Watson's work ; 
 echoes of Matthew Arnold may be heard again and 
 again. And when one bears these resemblances in 
 mind, and remembers also that Mr. Watson has 
 given an entire poem to the exceptionally delicate 
 and sure appreciation of the best English poets 
 in their long succession, one is forced to admit 
 that whatever else Mr. Watson may or may not be, 
 he is certainly traditional ; he has trained himself 
 in the school of the muses; he has formed him- 
 self patiently on the best models; he is a loyal 
 cherisher of precedent and good example. And 
 one is furthermore tempted on to the conclusion 
 that in this loyalty to tradition and to precedent 
 is to be found the explanation not only of Mr. 
 Watson's popularity and of the undeniable beauty 
 of much of his verse, but also of what, in the last 
 analysis, proves to be the disappointing quality 
 of his work as a poet, when judged by exacting 
 standards. He has subjected a by no means pow- 
 erful genius to a training and discipline that have 
 brought him exquisite sureness of taste and deft- 
 ness of technique, but have failed to develop real 
 richness of nature or any novel or distinctive en- 
 visagement of life. He is too much of a poetic 
 sacerdotalist ; his authenticity has been his ruiru 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 175 
 
 Mr. Watson is vaingloriously traditional; he has 
 the ideal temper for a laureate ; he prides himself 
 openly on being heir to a manner and a "mystery." 
 His art is intensely sophisticated and almost always 
 self-conscious. He even boasts in good, set terms 
 that he is a divinely dowered poet. It seems 
 strange to find an artist of his unquestionably 
 fijie taste including in his last volume verses as 
 youthfully self-conscious and arrogant as those on 
 Tlie Sovereign Poet : — 
 
 " He sits above the clang and dust of Time, 
 With the world's secret trembling on his lip, 
 He asks not converse or companionship 
 In the cold starlight where thou canst not climb." 
 
 Of course, Mr. Watson's pose is not often so relent- 
 less as this, and yet rarely, indeed, is he quite 
 unconscious of his mission ; he nearly always wears 
 his rue with a difference. 
 
 Traditional, too, are Mr. Watson's motifs; and 
 this is something that can less readily be pardoned 
 than his traditional manner. In his last volume 
 there are few important poems in going over which 
 the reader does not feel that he is on familiar 
 ground, — ground hallowed by its associations with 
 many earlier bards. Not that Mr. Watson does not 
 often give us glimpses of beauty for which we have 
 to thank primarily his quick poetic eyes ; but the 
 regions themselves through which he takes us have 
 been for generations sacred to the muses. One of 
 
176 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 his favourite contrasts is that between the scope 
 of human desire and the narrow limits imposed 
 upon human destiny. This is the old antinomy 
 which has been poetically expounded in countless 
 fashions since Byron's day and long before : — 
 
 " But I am fettered to the sod, 
 
 And but forget my bouds an hour ; 
 Li amplitude of dreams a god, 
 A slave in dearth of power." 
 
 Does not this lament, which the Komanticists and 
 the post-Komanticists have for so many years versi- 
 fied for us with so many beautiful modulations, 
 come to us to-day somewhat belated? So again, 
 with the poet's beautifully phrased regret as he 
 watches the flight of a lark. 
 
 ** Two worlds hast thou to dwell in, Sweet, — 
 The virginal untroubled sky, 
 And this vext region at my feet. — 
 Alas, but one have I ! " 
 
 Here, too, the motif, undeniably beautiful as is 
 its expression, is likely to seem a mere reminis- 
 cence. Not that the skylark is itself tabooed ; but 
 the special symbolism the poet finds in its song 
 is perilously near triteness. In recent years, Mr. 
 Meredith has heard in the lark's song a more 
 modern suggestion. Other motifs which Mr. Wat- 
 son elaborates are the sacredness of the poet's 
 mission, the tragic solemnity of life, the pathos of 
 the waning belief in immortality, the difficulty of 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 177 
 
 escaping from old religious formulas, and regret for 
 " the frost-bound, fire-girt scenes of long ago." All 
 these themes are eminently proper, but perhaps not 
 altogether new. 
 
 Finally, Mr. Watson is inclined to be morbidly 
 correct in all his doings and sayings, — in his man- 
 ner as well as in his moods. Passionate calm is 
 the ideal of the true Wordsworthian ; aspiration 
 intense in its visionary grasp of the ideal, but nobly 
 restrained in its allegiance to the actual. Unfortu- 
 nately, with all Wordsworth's disciples the calm and 
 the loyalty to fact have been much easier of emu- 
 lation than the transcendental fervour that with 
 Wordsworth redeemed and transformed them. In 
 Matthew Arnold the loss of fervour was noticeable 
 enough, and produced that wanness and anaemic 
 pallor that disfigures much of his poetry. In Mr. 
 Watson the poet's self-control has become almost 
 offensively complete; his face never glows or 
 darkens or quivers under the play of passion ; often 
 he gives the impression of speaking through a 
 mask. 
 
 II 
 
 Quite otherwise is it with the work of Mr. John 
 Davidson. To quote from one of his own poems, 
 " old and new " are ever " weltering upon the border 
 of " his " world." He is above all else modern and 
 individual, and the prevailing note of his art is 
 restless sincerity. He is the partially articulate 
 
178 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 bard of a new world in the process of making. 
 Doubtless these merits carry with them certain 
 countervailing defects. His passion is often turbid 
 and uncontrolled, and considering his age — Mr. 
 Davidson must now be thirty-five — he still finds 
 certain of the commonplace evil tricks of life 
 strangely novel and exasperating ; one would think 
 that the poet would have sooner grown used to the 
 laws of the game. But at any rate he is intensely 
 alive; he is "part of all that he has seen" and 
 experienced in this age of contending ideals, of 
 perishing creeds, and slowly evolving systems. 
 Everywhere he grasps uncompromisingly the rudest 
 facts of modern civilization, — facts material, in- 
 dustrial, social, and religious, — and his imagina- 
 tion is, at its best, compelling enough and his power 
 of enjoyment, rich enough to enable him to find 
 in these forbidding externalities an essential spirit 
 of beauty, which he knows words to evoke. The 
 stacks of a factory town that "lacquer the sooty 
 sky," the shrieks of steam whistles " that pipe the 
 morning up before the lark," the telegraph wire 
 " taut and lithe, within the wind a core of sound," 
 the train, a "monster taught to come to hand 
 amain," — these and similar modern corruptions 
 because of which Mr. Euskin refuses to be com- 
 forted, simply challenge Mr. Davidson's virile imag- 
 ination and put it into fierce play in the service of 
 a brave love of life. Humanity in all its forms, 
 forbidding as well as alluring, sends currents of 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 179 
 
 sympathy through his veins, and sets him to a swift 
 fashioning of dramatic scenes and a loving portrayal 
 of motive and mood. He has felt the tragic fate of 
 the wretchedest of respectabilities, the clerk "at 
 thirty bob a week," and has celebrated the courage 
 with which this starving victim of the English 
 social system suffers stanchly till he falls in his 
 place ; it is British pluck in its protoplasmic form 
 of which he here sings the praise and illustrates the 
 indomitableness. Nothing modern is foreign to Mr. 
 Davidson, and some of his best effects are secured 
 from the most sordid material. 
 
 In his relation to religion, Mr. Davidson is also 
 "modern"; but here the peculiar form of his 
 modernity is hardly so attractive. Some one has 
 dubbed him, because of his treatment of religious 
 themes, "the man who dares." But his daring 
 seems to many to be rather uninstructed and 
 flaunting. In his Exodus from Houndsditch, for 
 example, he describes a wild phantasmagoria of 
 woe, — " women on fire ! and tortured girls and 
 boys!" — and attributes all the suffering, with no 
 hint of compensating good, to the Christian religion. 
 This utterly unhistorical conception is the favour- 
 ite one with those who have been used to look 
 up to the late Mr. Bradlaugh and Mr. Ingersoll 
 as men of light and leading, but seems a bit sur- 
 prising in a man of Mr. Davidson's literary attain- 
 ments. In Tlie Ballad in Blank Verse of the 
 Making of a Poet, religion is assailed with the 
 
180 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 same virulence ; the severities and strenuous spiritu- 
 ality of Christianity are contrasted in true Swin- 
 burnian fashion with the luxuriant beauty and 
 frank, sensuous splendour of Hellenism : ultimately, 
 however, the poet turns from both Christianity and 
 modern Paganism to what seems to him a still more 
 modern mood, in which he gives over the attempt 
 to formulate truth, whether religious or moral, and 
 accepts all life indifferently as worthy of passionate 
 sympathy and imaginative expression. 
 
 " No creed for me ! I am a man apart : 
 A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world ; 
 A soulless life that angels may possess 
 Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things 
 May loll at ease beside the loveliest ; 
 A martyr for all mundane moods to tear." 
 
 Surely, this is a shallow and ranting account of 
 the irresponsibility of the artist; it is dilettant- 
 ism " without the manner's charm," — dilettantism 
 grown violent and raucous. Not in these poems, 
 nor indeed in any of his poems, does Mr. Davidson 
 show that he has done much thinking or got at 
 what life means except as far as his senses or his 
 feelings can tell him. 
 
 In still another way religion enters often into Mr. 
 Davidson's poetry. He is fond of using the sym- 
 bols, the names, the terms of Christianity for purely 
 decorative effect. In his Ballad of Heaven and 
 his Ballad of Hell and Ballad of a Nun Satan, 
 the Virgin Mary, and even God the Father appear 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 181 
 
 as actors. Yet the action is always palpably 
 make-believe; the stories exist solely as stories, 
 and have at the utmost merely an allegorical 
 value. The strange point is to find this tendency 
 to treat Christianity as a beautiful myth existing 
 side by side with such intense hatred of the system 
 as Mr. Davidson elsewhere expresses, and also side 
 by side with such ethical sincerity as he shows in 
 much of his writing. In Dante Gabriel Eossetti's 
 poetry, also, Christianity fades into a series of 
 beautiful myths ; but it suffers this transformation, 
 only with everything else that enters the " dream- 
 land vaporous and unaccountable" of Eossetti's 
 mind. Eossetti never cares for anything outside 
 his dream. Mr. Davidson sympathizes intensely 
 with the feelings of all those whose world he 
 shares ; hence the strangeness of finding so vital a 
 system as Christianity, becoming to him merely a 
 means of fitting himself out with the paraphernalia 
 of art. 
 
 And yet, after all, coherence is not specially the 
 habit of Mr. Davidson's mind. In his narrative 
 poems he carries to its extreme the balladist's right 
 to move by leaps and bounds. In the Ballad of a 
 Nun the action is only sublimated hysteria, and the 
 actors. Virgin Mary and all, are merely irrespon- 
 sible degenerates. Doubtless the moral of this 
 Ballad and of the Ballads of Heaven and of Hell, 
 is Love Triumphant. But to the prosaic mind 
 Love as hymned by this very modern poet of the 
 
182 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 London streets seems rather a destroyer tlian a 
 saviour or regenerator. Love helps Mr. David- 
 son's heroes and heroines to go through some very- 
 picturesque paroxysms, and there the matter ends. 
 When all is said, however, Mr. Davidson's work 
 has an intense vitality that justifies it in spite of 
 minor faults. Such a poem as the Ballad in Blank 
 Verse pulses with the poet's blood from the first 
 line to the last. Mr. Davidson lives in his poetry 
 from moment to moment with a passion and a 
 fierceness of conception and an intimacy of relation 
 to the facts of the time that can hardly be matched 
 in any of the younger poets. 
 
 III. 
 
 To Mr. Francis Thompson we certainly must not 
 look for any similar valorous attempt to bring all 
 life within our scope and to find everywhere aspects 
 of beauty. Not that he does not offer us beauty 
 abundantly and unstintedly. Whatever is within 
 the range of his sympathy, whatever kindles his 
 imagination, forthwith becomes in his verse mysti- 
 cally beautiful beyond anything that Mr. Watson 
 or Mr. Davidson has power to produce. But his 
 spirit lives within a magic crystal sphere, which 
 gives entrance to but few of the commonplace 
 objects of modern life and holds afar, dimly in- 
 effectual, its crass immediacy and bewildering 
 insistence of appeal, and its coarse and glaring 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 183 
 
 disorder. It is as the poet of an inviolate region 
 of intense personal emotion that Mr. Thompson is 
 specially distinguished. 
 
 Mr. Thompson's rhythms are much subtler and 
 more varied and vital than those of our other two 
 poets and mark him at once as preeminently a 
 singer. Mr. Davidson in Ballads and Songs never 
 escapes from iambics, and Mr. Watson in his last 
 volume exchanges them only once for measures 
 of another kind. Mr. Thompson's poetry is not 
 simply rich in trochaic and anapaestic and dactylic 
 measures, but is full of the most delicate metrical 
 nuances, where from phrase to phrase, and verse to 
 verse, the rhythm vibrates more slowly or swiftly 
 in intimate response to the play of feeling and 
 imagination. 
 
 Mr. Watson's verse is "frozen music"; Mr. 
 Thompson's, the exquisitely modulated utterance 
 of a flexible, vibrant voice. In his poetry, words 
 lose their hard, individual outlines ; speech is no 
 longer merely a series of conventional signs which 
 are put together mechanically in accordance with 
 recognized laws ; sound becomes a new art medium, 
 created from moment to moment, continuous in its 
 subtle effects of contrast and correspondence, end- 
 lessly suggestive in its changing tone-colours and 
 emotional perturbations, magical and inexplicable 
 in its power to transfer a new mood from the heart 
 of the poet, the master of moods, to the heart of 
 the reader. This is, of course, what language be- 
 
184 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 comes in the poetry of every great artist; but in 
 the poetry of Mr. Thompson, far more impressively 
 than in that of most modern versifiers, language 
 undergoes this imaginative regeneration or re- 
 creation, and becomes vitally suggestive in number- 
 less novel ways. He is less at the mercy of indi- 
 vidual words than either Mr. Davidson or Mr. 
 Watson; he works in larger sound-masses, and 
 confers upon sound a subtler and more penetrat- 
 ing symbolic suggestiveness. These phases of his 
 genius can hardly be illustrated by means of ex- 
 tracts ; yet some glimpses of the music and beauty 
 of his verse may be caught from a stanza or two of 
 The Making of Viola. 
 
 I. 
 
 The Father of Heaven. 
 
 " Spin, daughter Mary, spin, 
 Twirl your wheel with silver din ; 
 Spin, daughter Mary, spin, 
 Spin a tress for Viola." 
 Angels. 
 
 " Spin, Queen Mary, a 
 Brown tress for Viola." 
 
 II. 
 
 The Father of Heaven. 
 
 " Weave, hands angelical, 
 "Weave a woof of flesh to pall — 
 Weave, hands angelical — 
 Flesh to pall our Viola." 
 Angels. 
 
 " Weave, singing brothers, a 
 Velvet flesh for Viola." 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 185 
 
 And so the verses go on, tremulously tender in 
 their modulations and evanescent in their shifting 
 tone-colours, through their archaic progressions of 
 harmony. Much simpler, but in its own way 
 equally suggestive, is the music of the first of 
 the Poems on Children : — 
 
 " Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face I 
 She gave me tokens three : 
 A look, a word of her winsome mouth, 
 And a wild raspberry. 
 
 *' A berry red, a guileless look, 
 
 A still word, — strings of sand I 
 And yet they made my wild, wild heart 
 Fly down to her little hand. 
 
 *• For standing artless as the air, 
 And candid as the skies, 
 She took the berries with her hand, 
 And the love with her sweet eyes. 
 
 " She looked a little wistfully, 
 Then went her sunshine way : 
 The sea's eye had a mist on it. 
 And the leaves fell from the day.'* 
 
 Such delicate and airily drifting effects, however, 
 are only a small part of those that Mr. Thompson 
 is master of. His richer and more intricate har- 
 monies are to be found in A Judgment in Heaven, 
 To Monica Thought Dying, and TJie Hound of 
 Heaven. For breadth and splendour of metrical 
 
186 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 effect, varied with delicate interludes of quieter 
 beauty, The Hound of Heaven is not to be matched 
 in recent years, except in the volumes of Mr. 
 Swinburne; and it has a sincerity and undecora- 
 tive truth of tone, that Mr. Swinburne's verse 
 is apt to lack. A Judgment in Heaven also is 
 remarkable for its metrical audacity ; in elaborate- 
 ness of rhythm and gorgeousness of tonal effects 
 it suggests the methods and colour-schemes of the 
 most picturesque modern orchestral pieces. 
 
 A Judgment in Heaven calls up at once the 
 charge so often urged against Mr. Thompson, that 
 he is affected and artificial. Without doubt, certain 
 of his poems are curiously reminiscent of the Meta- 
 physical Poets, — of Donne and of Cowley. In 
 Her Portrait, for example, mediaeval essences and 
 abstractions, of the kind that abound in the 
 works of poets for whom scholastic theology was 
 more than a name, are oddly in evidence, and we 
 hear a great deal of such entities as " encumbering 
 virility," "loveliness corporeal," "prison of femi- 
 neity," and so on. The mythology, too, and the 
 decorative allusions in such poems are continually 
 Biblical and add to the mediaeval effect ; the inge- 
 nuity of the play with imagery is often of Cowleian 
 quaintness or has the wayward splendour and subtle 
 suggestiveness of Donne. 
 
 "God laid his fingers on the ivories 
 Of her pure members as on smoothed keys, 
 And there out-breathed her spirit's harmonies." 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 187 
 
 The delight in conceits and in a strange, tricksy 
 manipulation of words recalls the manner of the 
 seventeenth century poets : — 
 
 ♦' Herself must with herself be sole compeer, 
 Unless the people of her distant sphere 
 Some gold migration send to melodise the year. 
 But first our hearts must burn in larger guise, 
 To reformate the uncharitable skies, 
 And so the deathless plumage to acclimatise." 
 
 For a few readers even the super-subtlety and the 
 wilful over-refinement of such passages will have 
 an archaic charm ; but it should be noted that this 
 mannerism almost disappears in the later poems of 
 the volume. 
 
 On the other hand, ornateness of phrasing, a cer- 
 tain ventriloquence of style, an attempt to gain 
 impressiveness for the voice by making it reverber- 
 ate through high-sounding words from an undeter- 
 mined distance, — this remains characteristic of Mr. 
 Thompson even in some of his very latest poems. 
 In A Judgment in Heaven, for example, he describes 
 ''a grisly jaw" of clouds "whose verges support- 
 lessly congest with fire, and suddenly spit forth 
 the moon.'* We feel like exclaiming with Maria 
 in Twelfth Night, — "Lo, how hollow the fiend 
 speaks within him." Yet even in such passages 
 there is something more than grandiloquent dic- 
 tion; there is always rich imagery, faithfully con- 
 ceived, though perhaps needlessly elaborated and 
 over-ornamental. Moreover, the imagery is vital 
 
188 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 and novel, and not of a conventional pattern like 
 that into which another great master of language, 
 Mr. Swinburne, is sometimes betrayed. Although 
 Mr. Thompson is doubtless a virtuoso of the dic- 
 tionary, and at times seems simply exhibiting his 
 technical command of its pages, yet in fact his 
 imagination in nearly every case keeps pace with 
 his phrasing, and his radical fault in showy pas- 
 sages is, perhaps, after all not so much luxuriance 
 of language as extravagance of imagery. 
 
 As a seer of visions Mr. Thompson is by all odds 
 the greatest of the younger poets. His imagination 
 is far-ranging in its scope, intensely brilliant in its 
 colouring, and penetrative and renovating in its 
 interpretations. Interstellar distances and celestial 
 magnitudes do not daunt him more than they 
 daunted Shelley ; "the blue regions of the air" and 
 the " planetary wheelings " of the heavens are 
 known to him in all their vicissitudes, and haunt 
 his imagination with their symbolic suggestions. 
 He has himself rather daringly described with a 
 phrase and an image the flashing scope of his vision 
 and the range and strength of his imagination, 
 where in The Hound of Heaven he speaks of 
 
 *'The linked fantasies in whose blossomy twist 
 I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist." 
 
 The hyperbole, audacious as it is, does not seem 
 beyond bounds as one reads Mr. Thompson's most 
 characteristic poems and follows the rapid and sure 
 
THREE LYRICAL MODES 189 
 
 questing of his imagination. Not since Shelley has 
 imagery had a finer cosmic scope and magnificence 
 of colour than in the following passages : — 
 
 *'I dimly guess what time in mists confounds ; 
 Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
 From the hid battlements of Eternity, 
 Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
 Round the half -glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.'* 
 
 ****** 
 
 " The calm hour strikes on yon golden gong, 
 In tones of floating and mellow light 
 A spreading summons to even-song : 
 See how there 
 The cowl6d night 
 Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary stair. 
 What is this feel of incense everywhere ? 
 Clings it round folds of the blanch-amiced clouds, 
 
 Upwafted by the solemn thurifer. 
 The mighty spirit unknown, 
 That swingeth earth before the embannered Throne ? " 
 
 ****** 
 ♦' This labouring, vast, Tellurian galleon. 
 Riding at anchor off the orient sun. 
 Had broken its cable, and stood out to space 
 Down some frore Arctic of the aerial ways : 
 And now, back warping from the inclement main. 
 Its vaporous shroudage drenched with icy rain. 
 It swung into its azure roads again ; 
 When, floated on the prosperous sun-gale, you 
 Lit, a white halcyon auspice, 'mid our frozen crew." 
 
 The unconscious courage of such passages as these, 
 their successful audacity, their adequacy of vision, 
 imaginative integrity, and largeness of utterance, 
 
190 THREE LYRICAL MODES 
 
 above all the unhalting and inborn ease of manner 
 with which great things are wrought before our 
 eyes, compel recognition of Mr. Thompson's origi- 
 nality and power as a creative artist. 
 
 In the intensity and the quality of his passion, as 
 well as in the scope and vividness of his imagina- 
 tion, Mr. Thompson is, among the younger poets of 
 to-day, preeminent. Mr. Watson, when compared 
 with him, is wan and conventional, and Mr. David- 
 son turbulent and murky. The magnifying and 
 transforming power of passion, its way of exalting 
 or intensifying trifles till they overshadow the soul 
 intolerably or pierce it irreparably, has rarely been 
 better portrayed than in the poem To Monica 
 Thought Dying. The quaint words that the child 
 had last used in whimsical comradeship with her 
 older friend, become in the poet's mind a haunting 
 refrain, tragic because of its incommensurability 
 with the passion of grief that he now tries to 
 express. One would almost have to go to King 
 Lear for a like terrible transformation of " child- 
 ish babble" and a like overwhelming contrast be- 
 tween the trivial and the tragic. Yet the tone is 
 throughout restrained, despite the passion and the 
 strenuous sweep of the verse. There is no turbu- 
 lence, no confusion of tongues, no blurring of out- 
 lines or shattering of imagery. The world is the 
 world of plastic imagination, where even the most 
 forbidding shapes and awful presences of life grow 
 *^ beautiful through love." 
 
THEEE LYRICAL MODES 191 
 
 Beauty, indeed, is the one word with which to 
 greet and to take leave of Mr. Thompson's poetry. 
 Not that he belongs among those who divorce art 
 from life, and seek beauty in disregard of all else. 
 Neither in mood nor in treatment is he to be classed 
 with the devotees of art for art's sake. His poetry 
 emancipates and strengthens, whereas theirs un- 
 nerves, and is evermore " wreathing a flowery band 
 to bind us to the earth." He gives us the piercing 
 bitter-sweet of myrrh, "like a sorrow having 
 wings," in place of the languorous perfumes of 
 nard of which their verses are redolent. Beauty 
 there everywhere is in his poetry : but it is beauty 
 spiritual as well as sensuous ; beauty quintessential, 
 primordial, regenerative; beauty that stings the 
 spirit into keener activity and more passionate 
 aspiration. 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC ^ 
 
 In March, 1857, Sainte-Beuve devoted two of his 
 Causeries du Lundi to the discussion of Divers 
 Merits de M. H. Taine. He chose for special analy- 
 sis Taine's Essai sur Tite-Live, his Doctor's thesis 
 on La Fontaine, which was later enlarged and 
 republished, and his Philosophes dassiques du 
 XIX' siMe. Taine had taken his Doctor's de- 
 gree only four years before, but he had marked 
 each succeeding year with a work of first-rate im- 
 portance ; he had also published from time to time 
 noteworthy essays on such widely different sub- 
 jects as Xenophon, Saint-Simon, Guizot, and Mme. 
 de la Fayette. In all these treatises and essays 
 the comparatively unknown author had pleaded for 
 and illustrated new methods and new aims in liter- 
 ary criticism, and despite his youth and inexpe- 
 rience and venturesomeness, his work had shown 
 none of the tentativeness or the weakness of first 
 experiments. It became plainer with each pub- 
 lication that the new critic was a man of genu- 
 ine power and originality ; and Sainte-Beuve, with 
 characteristic grace and generosity, made haste to 
 welcome him. 
 
 1 Published in the Nation, on Taine's death, in 1893. 
 192 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 193 
 
 There is something almost dramatic in this first 
 encounter between the two critics. Sainte-Beuve 
 was the representative of the old tradition in criti- 
 cism, while Taine was confessedly an innovator. 
 The idealists and the Romanticists who fared so ill 
 at the hands of Taine, had many of them been per- 
 sonal friends of Sainte-Beuve. The idealistic tra- 
 dition in literature with which Sainte-Beuve cer- 
 tainly sympathized, however completely he had rid 
 himself of early romantic illusions, was the special 
 object of Taine's contempt and ridicule. Again, 
 Sainte-Beuve was the literary critic pure and sim- 
 ple ; he had coquetted, it is true, with science, but 
 he had never let his coquetries pass beyond the 
 bounds of decorum or affect his professional work. 
 Now it was on science that Taine's whole method 
 was founded ; his terminology was drawn from sci- 
 ence, and it was in the name of science that he 
 came forward to reform literary criticism. There- 
 fore, if Sainte-Beuve had in his favour the prestige 
 of a great tradition, Taine on his side had the pres- 
 tige of a popular catchword, for just at this time 
 science was the cry of the hour, and realism was 
 revenging itself for the romantic excesses of 1830. 
 
 Of the tact and skill with which, under these 
 rather exacting conditions, Saint-Beuve acquits 
 himself, there can be but one opinion: they are 
 worthy of the great apostle of good taste. He rec- 
 ognizes at once Taine's scholarship, his curious ma- 
 turity, his sureness of touch, his certainty of aim 
 
194 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 
 
 and of method. He speaks pleasantly of the duty 
 that older men owe to such juniors as really 
 " count " — that of scanning them well and coming 
 to know them thoroughly. Moreover, to have to 
 do with these newest arrivals tends to make you 
 young again, even though the new-comers show 
 their youth only by their vigour, and present them- 
 selves before you full-grown and full-armed. But 
 it behoves you to be on your guard and to tighten 
 your belt as you approach them. 
 
 After this gracious and generous greeting, Sainte- 
 Beuve goes on to make some very searching strict- 
 ures on Taine's ideas and methods. Under guise 
 of a tribute to Taine's thoroughness and scholar- 
 ship, he at once suggests the points in which, he 
 thinks, Taine most offends against the spirit and 
 the ideals of good criticism. Taine is too desper- 
 ately serious : he has the set look and the business- 
 like bearing of a man in a laboratory, who handles 
 hot crucibles and deals with dangerous compounds. 
 And again, he is too disputatious: he is always 
 bent on proving a thesis ; the air of the Sorbonne 
 lecture-rooms clings about his volumes. These 
 faults of bearing are for Sainte-Beuve significant of 
 radical defects of temperament and of method. 
 Taine does not put himself in touch with his 
 author ; he does not enter sympathetically into the 
 spirit of the work he criticises ; he uses his author 
 for his own special purposes ; he wrests his author's 
 ideas into illustrations of his own pet theories j or, 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 195 
 
 as Sainte-Beuve elsewhere puts it, the critic pulls 
 the blankets all to his side of the bed. 
 
 These charges — though charges is too harsh and 
 criminating a word for the suave insinuations of 
 Sainte-Beuve — take up a large part of the first 
 essay. But here and there in the first essay, and 
 at still greater length in the second essay, Sainte- 
 Beuve adopts a different point of view, and with 
 admirable ingenuity turns Taine's own principles 
 against Taine himself. The sum and substance of 
 the earlier criticisms was that Taine was not an 
 " appreciator," but a scientific student of literary 
 forms and an historian of ideas ; Sainte-Beuve's 
 quarrel was with Taine's whole ideal. The later 
 criticisms suggest that Taine is false to his own 
 ideal ; that while he is professing to reform liter- 
 ary criticism in the name of science and to put it 
 on a scientific basis, he is continually violating the 
 laws of science and departing from the methods of 
 scientific investigation. He is too much of a sys- 
 tematizer and too ambitious in his ideal construc- 
 tions ; he is impatient of doubt or uncertainty, and 
 forges links out of nothing wherever there are 
 breaks in the chain of his evidence. In attempting 
 to sum up an individual under a formula, he sins 
 against science, by disregarding the infinite com- 
 plexity of the problem and by using rough-and- 
 ready methods for solving it. Before " talents " or 
 characters can be classed or grouped under formu- 
 las, an almost endless series of observations must 
 
196 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 
 
 be made on all kinds of men and under a vast 
 variety of conditions ; to attempt to frame out 
 of hand a few cheap formulas for typical characters 
 is a radically unscientific mode of procedure. 
 
 By some of Sainte-Beuve's suggestions Taine un- 
 doubtedly profited ; in his subsequent work, he in- 
 sists less dogmatically on the significance of ^'7a 
 facultd maltresse " and on the possibility of finding 
 a single phrase by which to sum up an individual 
 in a formula. The parable of Adam naming the 
 beasts of the field at the behest of the Lord had 
 had its effect. Taine's love of system, however, 
 and his general methods of work remained un- 
 changed. He was still invariably bent on proving 
 a thesis, and he was as far as ever from being sat- 
 isfied, after the manner of impressionistic critics, 
 with merely dabbling in the standing pool of his 
 feelings. Of the importance of method in the 
 study of literature and of the value of his own 
 method in its main features, he was as firmly con- 
 vinced as ever ; and his next great work, his His- 
 toire de la litterature anglaise, published in 1864, 
 was constructed from first to last in illustration of 
 his method and in obedience to his principles. In 
 fact, the possibility of a scientific explanation of 
 literature was the specific thesis which in this case 
 Taine nailed up to be proved, and his History of 
 English Literature was merely the four volume 
 demonstration of a thirty-page theorem. 
 
 Certainly this work of Taine's must always 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 197 
 
 stand as a superb tour de force. It is easy enougli 
 to carp at it ; to disagree with this or that estimate ; 
 to blame the critic for overrating Byron and for 
 doing scant justice to Shelley; to exclaim at the 
 yeoman's service exacted from a few such terms as 
 Berserker rage, Puritan cant, English stolidity ; to 
 mock at French prejudice, and to accuse the critic 
 of being mechanical and hard and unsympathetic, 
 of turning everything into demonstration, and of 
 being hypnotized by a theory. But, after the bit- 
 terest possible things have been said, it still 
 remains true that the History is a magnificent 
 achievement and a work of the greatest possible 
 significance. Merely as a piece of literary engi- 
 neering, it is a marvel of skill : its books, its chap- 
 ters, and its sections are massed with a sure eye 
 both for literary effect and for sequences of 
 thought; and the table of contents alone is more 
 stimulating reading than the texts of most histo- 
 ries of English literature. But, of course, what 
 makes the book unique is its thoroughgoing 
 attempt to explain a whole literature in terms 
 of national character, inherited culture, and 
 environment. 
 
 Not that the underlying principle on which 
 Taine's method depends had not been enunciated 
 long before. That principle is, of course, the his- 
 toric continuity and the organic unity of national 
 life; and for the earliest suggestion of that prin- 
 ciple and the earliest development of a method 
 
198 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 
 
 somewhat in harmony with it, we should have to 
 go back at least to Taine's great countryman, Mon- 
 tesquieu, whose Esprit des Lois was a more or 
 less conscious attempt to find in all a nation's insti- 
 tutions and activities the expression of one mould- 
 ing and guiding spirit. Later on, in the eighteenth 
 century, the principle was grasped at least partially 
 by Winckelmann, whose Geschichte der Kunst des 
 AUerthums (1764) recognized the relativity of the 
 arts, and the essential and necessary connection 
 between the life of a people and its art- expression. 
 It was Herder, however, who first realized all that 
 the principle involved, and undertook to apply it 
 systematically and in detail to the study of litera- 
 ture. Literary criticism, in passing into his hands 
 from those of Lessing, was totally changed in 
 scope, methods, and aims; it no longer sought to 
 appraise the aesthetic value of pieces of literature 
 according as they met or fell short of the abstract 
 requirements of ideal standards; it studied litera- 
 ture historically, and regarded it as necessarily de- 
 termined in form and in matter through its direct 
 relation to the life of the people for whom and by 
 whom it was produced. This conception of litera- 
 ture as an organic growth was one of the best gifts 
 of Herder to Goethe, and from their day to our 
 own it has been a commonplace of German literary 
 criticism. 
 
 It is not, then, because of the originality of his 
 fundamental principle that Taine's History of 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 199 
 
 English Literature is so important and significant 
 a book. But nowhere else, unless in Scherer's 
 GescJiichte der Deutschen Literatur, has the prin- 
 ciple in question been applied so brilliantly for the 
 explanation of a whole national literature. The 
 magnitude of the attempt, the importance of the 
 subject, and the brilliancy of the execution, have 
 insured the book a great vogue; and to-day, for 
 most English readers, Taine stands as the one 
 great representative of scientific method in the 
 study of literature. Taine's work has done more 
 to popularize the conception of literature as the 
 direct and necessary expression of national life 
 than all the numberless tomes of conscientious 
 German philosophizing. 
 
 Then, again, Taine's theory, from its union of ap- 
 parent simplicity and comprehensiveness, is always 
 at first sight enormously taking, and seems to 
 offer a perfect organon for the study of literature. 
 With characteristic love of clearness, precision, 
 and system, Taine tried to find a few ultimate 
 forces in terms of which to express all the infi- 
 nitely various influences that shape and colour na- 
 tional life and determine its form and content. 
 The result of this effort was his adoption of the 
 now well-known categories, race, moment, and 
 milieu. The thoroughness and the skill with which 
 the influence of these ultimate forces is traced out 
 in all the minor groups of social facts, in religion, 
 philosophy, art, and science, are bound to be capti- 
 
200 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 
 
 vating, particularly to young students who are 
 hungry for generalizations and eager to impose 
 themselves on the facts they handle. Perhaps the 
 value of Taine's theory then depends fully as much 
 on its stimulating power as on any absolute cer- 
 tainty that can be claimed either for its subordi- 
 nate principles or for the conclusions to which it 
 leads. 
 
 Attacks on the theory have from the first been 
 plentiful. Among comparatively recent criticisms 
 that of M. £mile Hennequin in La Critique scien- 
 tifique is most interesting and suggestive. M. 
 Hennequin appeared as a champion of " the great 
 man" in history and literature. Under Taine's 
 treatment "the great man" seemed in danger of 
 being ruthlessly and prematurely resolved into his 
 elements ; M. Hennequin was bent on rescuing him 
 and reconstituting him at any cost. "The great 
 man," he insists, is not the product of his age ; he 
 fashions his age in his own image. He creates out 
 of nothing a beautiful ideal, either of action or of 
 passion, and imposes it on his sympathetic, impres- 
 sionable, but uncreative contemporaries. He can- 
 not be the mere product of his age, for both he and 
 his very opposite may exist under precisely the 
 same social conditions. Goethe and Schiller be- 
 longed to one and the same nation in one and the 
 same age; so also with Hobbes and Milton, with 
 Byron and Crabbe, with Scott and Landor, and 
 with a host of other ill-mated couples, whom M. 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 201 
 
 Hennequin holds up to view for the bewilderment 
 of the faithful followers of Taine. The great man, 
 then, is not the product of his age, but is a mys- 
 terious original force, out of all explicable relation 
 to his time, except as he brings his time under the 
 spell of his genius. 
 
 It is, of course, not at all difficult to see how all 
 this can be met from Taine's point of view; the 
 criticism, though clever, is not damaging or convinc- 
 ing. But certain conclusions that M. Hennequin 
 draws from this form of the great-man theory are 
 interesting to the literary critic because of their 
 practical applications. Society, M. Hennequin in- 
 sists, can properly be studied only through its typ- 
 ical great men, whose ideals dominate various 
 social groups, and whose temperaments are their 
 followers' temperaments intensified and magnified. 
 Now, for the successful study of these typical tem- 
 peraments, we must have, M. Hennequin urges, a 
 thorough and elaborate system of psychological 
 analysis, with points of view, methods, and terms 
 which shall be used in common by all critics. This 
 plea for cooperation among all critics in the thor- 
 ough and systematic study of temperaments seems 
 wholly in Taine's spirit, and suggests certain lines 
 along which Taine's method can profitably be sup- 
 plemented. 
 
 Such a scheme for the scientific study of the 
 temperaments of authors, M. Hennequin, indeed, 
 with a courage that may very well have come from 
 
202 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 
 
 youth, and inexperience, tried to outline. It is easy 
 for the ill-disposed to scoff at his elaborately deter- 
 mined points of view, at his ingenious terminology, 
 and at his formal schedules of facts and conclu- 
 sions. But it is, nevertheless, perfectly plain that 
 some such, scheme must be devised and put into 
 practice if criticism is ever to become a science, as 
 Taine and his followers have always been bent 
 upon making it. Moreover, Taine himself recog- 
 nized this need with perfect distinctness. In the 
 eighth section of the introduction to his History 
 of English Literature he writes : " There is a par- 
 ticular system of inner impressions and operations 
 which makes an artist, a believer, a musician, a 
 painter, a man in a nomadic or social state ; and of 
 each the birth and growth, the connection of ideas 
 and emotions, are different; each has his moral his- 
 tory and his special structure, with some govern- 
 ing disposition and some dominant feature. To 
 explain each, it would be necessary to write a 
 chapter of psychological analysis, and barely yet 
 has such a method been rudely sketched." This 
 passage may well enough have given M. Henne- 
 quin the first hint for his scheme of psychological 
 analysis. 
 
 Taine never for a moment claimed completeness 
 or finality for his method. He knew far better 
 than his assailants the difficulty of his problems, 
 and the necessary imperfections of any method 
 that can yet be devised for dealing with them. 
 
TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CRITIC 203 
 
 But " his faith was large in time " and in the ulti- 
 mate outcome of the cooperation of many ardent 
 students along the lines he had sketched. In 1866, 
 in his preface to Essais de critique et dliistoire, 
 he writes of the science of history: "Tel est le 
 champ qui lui est ouvert; il n'a pas de limites; 
 dans un pareil domain e, tous les efforts d'un 
 homme ne peuvent le porter en avant que d'un ou 
 deux pas ; il observe un petit coin, puis un autre ; 
 de temps en temps il s'arrete pour indiquer la voie 
 qui lui semble la plus courte et la plus sure. C'est 
 tout ce que j 'essay e de faire: le plus vif plaisir 
 d'un esprit qui travaille consiste dans la pensee du 
 travail que les autres feront plus tard." This pas- 
 sage contains the quintessence of Taine's spirit — 
 his generosity in appreciating the work of others, 
 his faith in the future, his indomitable energy, 
 and his enthusiastic devotion to the task in hand. 
 In his article on that prince of amateurs. Prosper 
 Merimee, he says of the need of fixity of purpose 
 and of concentration : " Un homme ne produit tout 
 ce dont il est capable que lorsque, ayant conqu 
 quelque forme d'art, quelque methode de science, 
 bref, quelque idee generale, il la trouve si belle 
 qu'il la prefere a tout, notamment a lui-m§me, et 
 I'adore comme une deesse qu'il est trop heureux de 
 servir." This fine singleness of purpose and stren- 
 uousness of pursuit characterizes all Taine's work 
 in literature. The great debt we owe to his schol- 
 arship and to his philosophic insight is too con- 
 
204 TAINE'S INFLUENCE AS A CEITIC 
 
 stantly in our minds to need to find its way often 
 into speech ; but perhaps we are not so apt to real- 
 ize how much he has done to redeem literary criti- 
 cism from being a paltry juggling with fine 
 phrases and to give it seriousness of purpose, dig- 
 nity, and a recognized standing. He was charged 
 with thorough-going materialism ; but in an age of 
 decadence, when the descendants of the Eomanti- 
 cists and idealists are for the most part engaged in 
 dilettante experiments on their senses and emo- 
 tions, . such materialism as Taine's is as healthy as 
 sea air. It is no wonder that when the death of 
 M. Taine was announced, many students of litera- 
 ture felt as if they had lost a personal friend. 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIA- 
 TION 
 
 Pure impressionism in literary criticism has of 
 late years grown into great favour, both among 
 critics themselves and with the public. The essen- 
 tials of a good critic — so the rubric has come to 
 run — are sensitiveness to the varying appeal of 
 art, and the ability to translate this appeal into 
 images and phrases. The impressionist must have 
 delicacy of perception, mobility of mood, reverence 
 for the shade, and a sure instinct for the specific 
 integrating phrase, and for the image tinged with 
 feeling. 
 
 The popular legend that places Matthew Arnold 
 at the head of this critical tradition in England is 
 at least partly true; he certainly cared more for 
 the shade and sought more patiently to define it, 
 than any earlier English critic. The cult of the 
 shade was one of the many good things that came to 
 him from Erance. But Arnold the critic was no 
 match for Arnold the foe of Philistinism. Though 
 he had early insisted on the need of detachment in 
 literary criticism, Arnold suffered his moods to be 
 perturbed and his temperament to be blurred by 
 206 
 
206 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 worry over practical and public questions of the 
 hour; and in later years he grew so intent on 
 coaching his fellow-countrymen in morals and 
 religion as to lose in some degree his critical zest 
 for refinements that had no direct ethical value. 
 It is rather to Walter Pater among English essay- 
 ists that the modern impressionist looks for precept 
 and example in his search for disinterestedness, for 
 artistic sincerity, and for flexibleness of tempera- 
 ment; and it is Pater who, more than all other 
 English critics, has illustrated what appreciative 
 criticism may accomplish. 
 
 Yet if we consider the matter more carefully, 
 impressionism is neither Arnold's nor Pater's 
 importation or invention. It is the result of far 
 deeper influences than any one man could have put 
 in play. It is indeed the expression in literature 
 of certain spiritual tendencies that have long been 
 developing, — tendencies the growth of which may 
 be traced in man's relation to nature as well as to 
 art. And it is because the moods and the instincts 
 and the methods of impressionism may thus be 
 discovered working themselves out connectedly 
 and progressively in the history of the human 
 spirit, that they must be regarded as justifying 
 themselves, and as deserving from even the most 
 conservative judges some degree of recognition and 
 acceptance. Little by little, during the last two 
 centuries, the human spirit has gained a finer and 
 closer sense of the worth and meaning of every 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 207 
 
 individual moment of pleasure in the presence alike 
 of nature and of art. The record of this increase 
 of sensitiveness toward nature is to be found in 
 poetry, and toward art in criticism. 
 
 Thomson's Seasons may be taken as represent- 
 ing the utmost sensitiveness to nature of which 
 the early eighteenth century was capable. Even 
 for a modern reader, Thomson's descriptions 
 still have considerable charm ; but what such 
 a reader soon notes is that the effects Thomson 
 portrays are all generalized effects, grouped sig- 
 nificantly under the names of the four seasons. 
 Typical spring, typical summer, and so on — 
 these Thomson portrays, and of these he feels 
 what may be called the generalized emotional 
 value. Beyond this typical treatment of na- 
 ture and these generalized emotions he does 
 not pass. As we go on, however, through the 
 poetry of the century, nature becomes gradually 
 more localized; poets dare to mark with specific 
 detail — to picture vividly — individual objects, 
 and they feel, and set down in their verse, the 
 general charm that this landscape, this smiling 
 valley, or this brimming river, has for an impres- 
 sionable observer. Cowper has thus recorded much 
 of the beauty of the valley of the Ouse, with deli- 
 cate truth and finished art. Yet, be it noted, he 
 has included in his record little or no suggestion of 
 his own peculiar momentary moods. In Words- 
 worth and the Eomantic poets, the impressions 
 
208 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 of nature are still further defined — are individual- 
 ized both in place and in time; at last we have 
 "the time and the place and the loved one all 
 together." Continually, in Eomantic poetry, a 
 special bit of nature, tinged with the colour of a 
 fleeting mood, is enshrined in verse; the fusion 
 of nature with man's spirit is relatively com- 
 plete. 
 
 In criticism, too, — that is, in man's conscious 
 relation to art, — a similar growth in sensitiveness 
 and in concreteness of matter and mood may be 
 traced. Addison was the first to try to work out, 
 in his Pleasures of the Imagination, the psychology 
 of artistic enjoyment; and his papers on Paradise 
 Lost come nearer being patient and vital apprecia- 
 tion of literature than any earlier English criticism 
 comes. Yet, after all, they get little beyond a 
 conventional and general classification of impres- 
 sions. Addison's words of praise and blame are 
 few, literal, abstract, colourless. "Just," "natu- 
 ral," "elegant," "beautiful," " wonderfully beauti- 
 ful and poetical" — these words and phrases, and 
 others like them, are used again and again; and 
 rarely indeed does Addison escape from such tag- 
 ging generalities, and define a personal impression 
 vividly and imaginatively. The history of literary 
 criticism from Addison's day to our own is, if 
 viewed in one way, the history of the ever-increas- 
 ing refinement of the critic's sensorium; it is the 
 history of the critic's increasing sensitiveness to 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 209 
 
 delicate shades of spiritual experience in his reac- 
 tion on literature; and finally, it is the history of 
 a growing tendency on the part of the critic to 
 value, above all else, his own intimate personal 
 relation to this or that piece of literature — a 
 tendency that more and more takes the form of 
 prizing the fleeting mood, the passing poignant 
 moment of enjoyment in the presence of art, 
 until at last certain modern critics refuse, on prin- 
 ciple, to feel twice alike about the same poem. In 
 short, what has occurred is this : a poem in its re- 
 lation to the critic has been gradually carried over 
 from the outside world and made an intimate part 
 of the critic's personality; it has been transformed 
 from an external object, loosely related to univer- 
 sal mind and generalized emotion of which the 
 critic stands as type, into a series of thought-waves 
 and nerve-vibrations that run at a special moment 
 through an active brain and a sensitive tempera- 
 ment. For the pre- Addisonian critic, a poem was 
 something to be scanned and handled, like an 
 exquisite casket, and to be praised in general terms 
 for its conventional design, its ingenious setting 
 of jewel-like ornaments, and its sure and skilful 
 execution; for the modern impressionistic critic, it 
 is like the tone of a dear voice, like the breath of 
 early morning, like any intangible greeting that 
 steals across the nerves and cherishes them with an 
 intimately personal appeal. 
 
 Impressionism, then, justifies itself historically. 
 
210 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 But more than this, it justifies itself psychologi- 
 cally; for it recognizes with peculiar complete- 
 ness the vitalizing power of literature — its fashion 
 of putting into play the whole nature of each 
 reader it addresses and its consequent, unlimited, 
 creative energy. A piece of scientific writing offers 
 to every man the same studiously unequivocal 
 message; as far as the writer is consistently scien- 
 tific, his terms have only an intellectual value, put 
 only the mind into play, and guide all minds 
 through the same routine of syllogism and inference 
 to an inevitable conclusion. In contrast with this 
 uniformity in the appeal of science is the infinite 
 variableness and adaptability of literature. Every 
 piece of literature is a mimic piece of life that 
 tempts the reader to capture from it, with mind 
 and heart and imagination, an individual bliss; he 
 may, in some measure, shape it as he will — work 
 out his own destiny with it. A theorem from 
 Euclid once mastered is one and the same thing to 
 every man — perennially monotonous. A play of 
 Shakespeare's (or, for that matter, a sonnet of Kos- 
 setti's) speaks a language that varies in its power 
 and suggestion according to the personality of the 
 hearer, and even according to his mood; the poem 
 gets its value, as life gets its value, from the 
 temperament that confronts it; and it is this en- 
 chanting fickleness in literature that of late years 
 impressionism has been more and more noting and 
 illustrating, until some critics, like M. Anatole 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 211 
 
 France, assure us that literary criticism is nothing, 
 and should be nothing, but the recital of one's per- 
 sonal adventures with a book. 
 
 It is a mistake, then, to protest against the 
 growth of impressionism, as some nervous guar- 
 dians of the public literary conscience are inclined 
 to protest, as if a parasitic form of literature were 
 creeping into undue importance. Eegarded as lit- 
 erature about literature, impressionism may seem 
 an overrefined product — two degrees removed from 
 actual life, fantastically unreal; but regarded as the 
 intimate record of what a few happy moments have 
 meant to an alert mind and heart, impressionism is 
 transcendently close to fact. The popularity of 
 impressionism is only one sign more that we are 
 learning to prize, above most things else, richness 
 of spiritual experience. The sincere and signifi- 
 cant mood — this is what we have come to care for, 
 whether the mood be suggested by life, by nature, 
 or by art and literature. False moods expressed 
 maladroitly will doubtless try to get themselves 
 accepted, just as artificial poems about nature have 
 multiplied endlessly since Wordsworth's day. The 
 counterfeit merely proves the worth of the original. 
 In an age that has learned to look on art with 
 conscious sincerity, and to recognize that the expe- 
 rience offered in art rivals religious experience in 
 renovating and stimulating power, there must more 
 and more come to be an imaginative literature that 
 takes its inspiration direct from art 5 of such 
 
212 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 imaginative literature critical impressionistic writ- 
 ing is one of the most vital forms. 
 
 But though, impressionistic writing may, as 
 literature, not only justify itself, but prove to be 
 sincerely expressive of some of the most original 
 tendencies of the modern mind, the case is some- 
 what different when such writing is considered as 
 literary criticism pure and simple, and is cross- 
 questioned as to whether or no it can do the 
 work that has hitherto been exacted of literary 
 criticism. Some French critic, perhaps M. Jules 
 Lemaitre, has been accused of turning an essay on 
 a volume of Eenan's Histoire des origines du chris- 
 tianisme into a lyrical recital of his own boyish 
 delights with a Noah's ark. Instances enough of 
 such critical waywardness must have fallen under 
 every one's eye who keeps the run of current essay- 
 work. Sainte-Beuve long ago said of Taine that 
 in criticising an author he was apt to pull all the 
 blankets to his own side of the bed. And what 
 was true of Taine, because of his devotion to 
 theory, is true of many modern critics, because of 
 their wilfulness and caprice — or, to put the mat- 
 ter more sympathetically, because of their over- 
 ruling delight in their own sensibility and im- 
 pressionableness ; they care for themselves more 
 jthan for their author. When such egoism goes 
 with genius and with artistic resource, the resulting 
 essays justify themselves, because they reveal in 
 fascinating wise new phases of the ever-varying 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 213 
 
 spiritual consciousness of the age. But even in 
 such cases, where a really original personality, 
 under the chance stimulus of literature, flashes out 
 at us winning and imaginatively suggestive glimpses 
 of itself, it may be doubted whether the essay that 
 results is, properly speaking, criticism. Nor is this 
 doubt a mere quibble over terms. The doubt in- 
 volves several serious questions as regards the 
 nature of a work of art and the critic's proper mode 
 of approach to art. Paradoxical folk have some- 
 times asserted that what is best worth while in a 
 work of art is what the author never meant to put 
 in it, and that the superlative act of the critic is to 
 find in a work of art for the delight of modern tem- 
 peraments some previously unsuspected implication 
 of beauty. Paradoxes aside, how much truth is 
 there in this conception of the critic's task ? and 
 how much truth in the conception that goes with 
 it of the essentially relative and variable character 
 of art ? We may grant that a piece of writing is 
 literature, providing it is a beautiful and significant 
 revelation of personality, whether the nerve-vibra- 
 tions that it utters take their start from life or 
 nature or art. But is such a piece of writing 
 criticism if in commenting on a work of art it 
 wilfully neglects its intended value as conceived in 
 the mind of the original artist and as expressing, at 
 least in part, the genius of the age whose life he 
 shared ? Can criticism properly neglect this origi- 
 nal pleasure-value in a work of art ? Can it 
 
214 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 furthermore neglect that permanent and deeply 
 enwrought pleasure, involved in a work of art, 
 through which it has always ministered and will 
 always minister to normal human nature? Can 
 criticism properly confine itself to the record of a 
 momentary shiver across a single set of possibly 
 degenerate nerves ? 
 
 Surely, there is something objective in a work of 
 art even when the work of art is regarded simply 
 and solely as potential pleasure ; and surely it is 
 part of the task of the critic to take this objective 
 character into full consideration. Unless he does 
 so, his appreciation of the work will not be 
 properly critical ; nor indeed, for that matter, will 
 his appreciation gather the full measure of per- 
 sonal delight that the work of art offers him. Just 
 here lies the distinction between whimsical impres- 
 sionism — which may be literature, very delightful 
 literature, but lacks the perspective essential to 
 criticism — and vital appreciation, which is indeed 
 criticism in its purest and most suggestive form. 
 
 A work of art is a permanent incarnation of 
 spiritual energy waiting for release. Milton long 
 ago called a good book " the precious life-blood of a 
 master-spirit stored up on purpose to a life beyond 
 life." We nowadays may go even farther than 
 this, and find treasured up in a piece of literature 
 certain definite blisses and woes and flashes of 
 insight that once went thrilling through a special 
 temperament and mind. The most recent psycho- 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 215 
 
 logical explanations of artistic creation^ concern 
 themselves continually with the feelings of the 
 artist ; they trace out minutely the ways in which 
 through the play of the artist's feelings a work 
 of art is instinctively and surely generated. The 
 poet concentrates his thought on some concrete 
 piece of life, on some incident, character, or bit of 
 personal experience ; because of his emotional tem- 
 perament, this concentration of interest stirs in him 
 a quick play of feeling and prompts the swift con- 
 currence of many images. Under the incitement 
 of these feelings, and in accordance with laws of 
 association that may at least in part be described, 
 these images grow bright and clear, take definite 
 shapes, fall into significant groupings, branch and 
 ramify, and break into sparkling mimicry of the 
 actual world of the senses — all the time delicately 
 controlled by the poet's conscious purpose and so 
 growing intellectually significant, but all the time, 
 if the work of art is to be vital, impelled also in 
 their alert weaving of patterns by the moods o£ the 
 poet, by his fine instinctive sense of the emotional 
 expressiveness of this or that image that lurks in 
 the background of his consciousness. For this 
 intricate web of images, tinged with his most 
 intimate moods, the poet through his intuitive 
 command of words finds an apt series of sound- 
 symbols and records them with written characters. 
 
 1 See, for example, Professor Dilthey's Die EinUldungs- 
 kraft des Dichters. 
 
216 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 And so a poem arises through, an exquisite distilla- 
 tion of personal moods into imagery and into lan- 
 guage, and is ready to offer to all future genera- 
 tions its undiminishing store of spiritual joy and 
 strength. 
 
 But it is not merely the poet's own spiritual 
 energy that goes into his poem. The spirit of the 
 age — if the poem include much of life in its scope, 
 if it be more than a lyric — enters also into the 
 poem, and moulds it and shapes it, and gives it in 
 part its colour and emotional cast and intellectual 
 quality. In every artist there is a definite mental 
 bias, a definite spiritual organization and play of 
 instincts, which results in large measure from the 
 common life of his day and generation, and which 
 represents this life — makes it potent — within the 
 individuality of the artist. This so-called " acquired 
 constitution of the life of the soul " — it has been 
 described by Professor Dilthey with noteworthy 
 acuteness and thoroughness — determines in some 
 measure the contents of the artist's mind, for it 
 determines his interests, and therefore the sensa- 
 tions and perceptions that he captures and auto- 
 matically stores up. It guides him in his 
 judgments of worth, in his instinctive likes and 
 dislikes as regards conduct and character, and con- 
 trols in large measure the play of his imagination 
 as he shapes the action of his drama or epic and 
 the destinies of his heroes. Its prejudices inter- 
 filtrate throughout the molecules of his entire 
 
IMPKESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 217 
 
 moral and mental life, and give to each image and 
 idea some slight shade of attractiveness or repul- 
 siveness, so that when the artist's spirit is at work 
 under the stress of feeling, weaving into the fabric 
 of a poem the competing images and ideas in his 
 consciousness, certain ideas and images come more 
 readily and others lag behind, and the resulting 
 work of art gets a colour and an emotional tone 
 and suggestions of value that subtly reflect the 
 genius of the age. Thus it is that into a work of art 
 there creeps a prevailing sort of spiritual energy 
 that may be identified as also operating throughout 
 the social life of the time, and as finding its further 
 expressions in the precepts and the parables of the 
 moralist, in the statecraft of the political leader, 
 in the visionary dreams of the prophet and priest, 
 and, in short, in all the various ideals, mental, 
 moral, and social, that rule the age. 
 
 Now, as for the impressionistic writer about 
 literature — he is apt to concern himself very little 
 with this historical origin of a work of art. In 
 dealing with the poetry of a long past age, he 
 will very likely refuse the hard task of " trundling 
 back his soul" two hundred or two thousand years 
 and putting himself in close sympathy with the 
 people of an earlier period. He is apt to take a 
 poem very much as he would take a bit of nature 
 — as a pretty play of sound or imagery upon the 
 senses ; and he may, indeed, capture through this 
 half-sensuous treatment of art, a peculiar, though 
 
218 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 wayward, delight. But the appreciative critic is 
 not content with this. He is, to be sure, well aware 
 that his final enjoyment of a poem of some earlier 
 age will be a far subtler and richer experience than 
 would be the mere repetition of the pleasures that 
 the poem gave its writer; that his enjoyment will 
 have countless overtones and undertones that could 
 not have existed for the producer of the poem or for 
 its original hearers. But he also believes that the 
 generating pleasures that produced the work of 
 art, and that once thrilled in a single human spirit, 
 in response to the play and counter-play upon him 
 of the life of his time, must remain permanently 
 the central core of energy in the work of art ; and 
 that only as he comes to know those pleasures with 
 fine intimacy, can he conjure out of the work of 
 art its perfect acclaim of delight for now and here. 
 Therefore the appreciative critic makes use of 
 the historical method in his study of literature. 
 He does not use this method as the man of science 
 uses it, for the final purpose of understanding and 
 explaining literature as a mass of sociological facts 
 governed by fixed laws. This rationalization of 
 literature is not his chief concern, though he may 
 pass this way on his journey to his special goal. 
 But he is persuaded that in all the art and all the 
 literature that reach the present out of the past, 
 spirit speaks to spirit across a vast gulf of time ; 
 that he can catch the precise quality of one of these 
 voices that come down the years only through the 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 219 
 
 aid of delicate imaginative sympathy with the life 
 of an elder generation ; and that he can develop to 
 certainty of response this divining sympathy only 
 through patient and loyal study of the peculiar 
 play of the powers that built up in the minds and 
 the imaginations of those earlier men their special 
 vision of earth and heaven. 
 
 DiflBcult and elusive indeed are the questions he 
 must ask himself about the art from a distant age, 
 if he is to be sure of just the quality of the pleas- 
 ure that went into its creation. If it be Greek 
 art that he seeks to appreciate, he will study and 
 interpret it as the expression of the spirit of Greek 
 life, of a spirit that lived along the nerves and 
 fibres of an entire social organism, of a spirit that 
 sprung from the unconscious depths of instinct,, out 
 of which slowly bodied themselves forth conscious 
 purposes and clear ideals, and that penetrated and 
 animated all fashions and forms of belief and be- 
 haviour, and gave them their colour and shape and 
 rhythm. He will trace out and capture the quality 
 of this spirit as it expressed itself in the physical 
 life of the Greeks, in their social customs, in their 
 weaving of scientific systems, in their worship of 
 nature, and in the splendid intricacies of their re- 
 ligious ritual and mysteries. And so he will hope 
 to gain at last a sure sense of the peculiar play of 
 energy that found release in some one of their 
 poems, or in the marble or bronze of a hero or a 
 god. 
 
220 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 But the universal element in the poetry of an 
 age by no means completes the objective character 
 of the feeling the poetry has treasured for the 
 delight of later times. In the case of all poetry 
 not communal in its origin, the pleasure involved 
 in a poem was generated in the consciousness of a 
 single artist, and had a definite quality that partook 
 of his individuality. Therefore the appreciative 
 critic has a further nice series of identifications 
 before him in his ideal search for the delight that 
 inheres in a poem. Just what was the innermost 
 nature of the poet who appeals to us in it, often 
 so pathetically, down through the perilous ways 
 of time ? What was the special vision of life 
 that he saw and felt the thrill of? What were 
 the actual rhythms of the quicksilver passion 
 in his veins ? What was the honeydew on which 
 he fed? What was the quintessential pleasure 
 that he, among all men of his day, distilled into 
 his verse ? 
 
 Fantastic or insoluble these questions may seem 
 unless with regard to poets about whom we have 
 the closest personal memoranda. Yet critics have 
 now and then answered such questions with sur- 
 prising insight, even in the case of poets the 
 gossip of whose lives is wholly unknown to us, and 
 whose form of art was least personal in its reve- 
 lations. Professor Dowden's grouping of Shake- 
 speare's plays in accordance with the prevailing 
 spiritual tone-colour of each and the moods toward 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 221 
 
 life that are imaginatively uttered — moods of 
 debonair light-heartedness, of rollicking jollity, 
 of despairing pessimism, or of luminous golden- 
 tempered comprehension — is an admirable example 
 of the possible intimate interpretation of a poet's 
 varying emotions as treasured in his art. 
 
 Here, then, are suggested two ways in which the 
 appreciative critic who would make his impression 
 of a work of art something more than a superficial 
 momentary irritation of pleasure and pain will 
 contrive to direct the play of his spiritual energy. 
 He will realize, as far as he can, the primal vital 
 impulse that wrought out the work of art ; he will, 
 in appreciating a poem, discover and recreate in 
 his own soul the rhythms of delight with which 
 the poem vibrated for the men of the age whose 
 life the poem uttered ; and he will also discern and 
 realize those actual moods, those swift counter- 
 changes of feeling, which once, in a definite place 
 and at a definite moment, within the consciousness 
 of a single artist evoked images and guided them 
 into union, charged them with spiritual power, and 
 called into rhythmical order sound-symbols to 
 represent them thenceforth for ever. 
 
 But it must at once be noted that this mimetic 
 enjoyment is after all only the beginning of that 
 process of vitalization by which an appreciative 
 critic wins from a work of art its entire store of 
 delight. The mood of the modern critic is some- 
 thing far subtler than any mere repetition of the 
 
222 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 mood of the original creative artist ; it contains in 
 itself a complexity and a richness of suggestion and 
 motifs that correspond to all the gains the human 
 spirit has made since the earlier age. Indeed, these 
 subtle spiritual differences begin to declare them- 
 selves the moment the critic tries to describe the 
 earlier enjoyment enshrined in a work of art. 
 Walter Pater, for example, in noting in his essay 
 on Winckelmann, the serene equipoise in Greek 
 art between man's spirit and his body, at once 
 involuntarily sets over against this mood the later 
 mood in which spirit usurps and so tyrannizes over 
 matter in its exaction of expression as to distort 
 the forms of art, and render them " pathetic." No 
 such contrast as this was present in the mind of 
 the Greek as he enjoyed his own art; nor any 
 contrast with a hungry, over-subtle intellectualism, 
 such as nowadays makes the modern consciousness 
 anxious for the individualizing accurate detail and 
 the motley effects of realism. Yet these contrasts 
 and others like them are part of the very essence of 
 our modern delight in the freedom and largeness 
 and calm strength of Greek art. Perhaps the 
 Greek had more zest in his art than we have in 
 it ; but his enjoyment certainly had not the luxuri- 
 ous intricacy and the manifold implications of our 
 enjoyment. 
 
 Always, then, in the complete appreciation of a 
 work of art there is this superim position of other 
 moods upon the mood of the creative artist — 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 223 
 
 there is a reinforcement of the original effect by 
 the delicate interfusion of new tones and strains 
 of feeling. Often this is as if harmonies once 
 written for a harpsichord were played upon a 
 modern piano whose " temperament " has been 
 made rich and expressive through the artful use and 
 adjustment of all possible overtones. We shall be 
 able to draw from the music new shades of mean- 
 ing and of beauty. But the original chords — those 
 we should scrupulously repeat; and the original 
 tone-colour, too, it were well to have at least in 
 memory. If a critic will win from early Floren- 
 tine painting — from the work, for example, of 
 Fra Lippo Lippi — its innermost value for the 
 modern temperament, he will first recover imagi- 
 natively the sincere religious impulse and the 
 naive religious faith, as well as the dawning delight 
 in the opening possibilities of a new art, which ani- 
 mated those early painters. He will try to catch 
 the very mood that underlies the tender mystic 
 wistfulness of Lippo Lippi's Madonnas, and that 
 gives them their soft and luminous constraint in 
 the midst of the eager adoration of shepherd boys 
 and attending angels. He will recognize this mood 
 as perhaps all the more appealing because of the 
 quaint incompleteness of the artist's technique, 
 his loyal archaic awkwardness, his religious formal- 
 ism and symbolism, his unsure perspective, all the 
 tantalizing difficulties of execution through which 
 his vision of beauty made its way into colour and 
 
224 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 form. This mood will define itself for the critic 
 through the aid of many nicely modulated contrasts 
 
 — through contrast, it may be, with the more 
 shadowed and poignantly mysterious Madonnas of 
 Botticelli, and with the splendid and victorious 
 womanhood of Titian's Madonnas, with the gentle 
 and terrestrial grace of motherhood in those of 
 Andrea del Sarto, and with the sweetly ordered 
 comeliness of Van Dyck's Madonnas. But above 
 all, it will define itself through contrast with our 
 modern mood toward the Madonna and the re- 
 ligious ideas she symbolizes — through contrast 
 with our sophisticated reverie, our hardly won half- 
 credence, and our wise, pathetic insight. And 
 through this contrast the earlier mood will gain for 
 us a certain poignancy of delight; for the mood 
 will come to us as something restored as by miracle 
 out of the otherwise irrecoverable past of the spirit 
 
 — out of the past of that spirit whose wayfaring 
 through passions of aspiration and joy, and through 
 drear times of sadness and desolation, was our 
 wayfaring, since we have gathered into ourselves 
 all the usufruct of it : — 
 
 *' Oh ! what is this that knows the road I came, 
 The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame, 
 The lifted, shifted steeps and all the way ?" 
 
 The appreciative critic, then, should know the 
 characteristic joy of every generation of men, and 
 the special joy of each individual artist. He is to 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 225 
 
 be a specialist in historic delight, as the poet is 
 a specialist in the joys of his own day and genera- 
 tion. And therefore in trying to make real to 
 the men of his own time the special bliss that 
 an older work of art contains for them, the 
 appreciative critic will not be content, as is the 
 impressionistic critic, with interpreting it in terms 
 of some chance wayward mood. He will wish to 
 relumine and make potent all that is emotionally 
 vital in the work of art ; he will capture again its 
 original quality ; he will revive imaginatively those 
 moments of bliss in the history of the human spirit 
 which are closely akin to this bliss and which yet 
 vary from it finely, and moments, too, that con- 
 trast broadly and picturesquely with it, all the 
 moments, indeed, which his divining instinct directs 
 him toward, as fit to throw into relief by contrast 
 what is quintessential in this one moment of spirit- 
 ual ardour. Thus he will try to offer to the men of 
 his own day a just appreciation of the peculiar joy 
 that, in the passage of years, the human spirit has 
 stored up for itself in this record of one of its 
 earlier phases of experience. 
 
 Throughout all his patient search for the precise 
 quality of a work of art, the critic will, of course, 
 make wise use of the science of aesthetics. Its 
 analyses and principles are supposed to reveal and 
 sum up in terse formulas the mystery of beauty, 
 and they should therefore offer the critic a means 
 of steadying himself into a sincerely sympathetic 
 
 Q 
 
226 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 and uneccentric report of the special charm that 
 lurks in a work of art. Yet it must at once be 
 noted that for the appreciative critic the whole 
 region of aesthetics is full of danger. Esthetic 
 theorizing has been the pet pastime of many callous 
 and horny-eyed philosophers, whose only knowledge 
 of beauty has come by hearsay. Nothing worse can 
 happen to a critic than to be caught in the meshes of 
 such thinkers' a priori theories, so much depends 
 on the critic's keeping an intimately vital relation 
 to the art of which he will interpret the peculiar 
 power. Of recent years, however, the science of 
 sesthetics has been rescued from the region of 
 metaphysics, and has been brought very close to 
 fact and made very real and suggestive through 
 the use of psychological methods of study. The 
 peculiar genius of the artist has been analyzed and 
 described; the characteristics of his temperament 
 have been noted with the nicest loyalty ; and par- 
 ticularly the play of his special faculty, the imagi- 
 nation, as this faculty through the use of sensations 
 and images and moods and ideas creates a work of 
 art, has been followed out with the utmost delicacy 
 of observation by such acute and sensitive analysts 
 as M. Gabriel Seailles, M. Michaut, and Professor 
 Dilthey. The behaviour, too, of the mind that is 
 enjoying a work of art — this has been minutely 
 studied and described ; the " effects " and the " im- 
 pressions " have been recorded by such masters of 
 silvery instruments for weighing a fancy and meas- 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 227 
 
 uring a motive as Fecliner. The relations between 
 all these impressions and effects and the form and 
 content of a work of art have been tabulated. And 
 so the science of aesthetics has become a really 
 vital record of what may be called the mind's nor- 
 mal behaviour both in the creation and in the 
 enjoyment of art. 
 
 The expert critic must some time or other have 
 followed out all these devious analyses and tracked 
 out the intricate workings both of the typical 
 artist's and of the typical appreciator's mind. Such 
 an abstract initiation will have quickened his powers 
 of perception in numberless ways, will have made 
 him alive to countless signs and suggestions in a 
 work of art that might otherwise have appealed to 
 him in vain, and above all will serve to steady him 
 against extravagance and grotesque caprice in ap- 
 preciation. In these analyses and principles he 
 has the sensitive record of a consensus of expert 
 opinion on the nature of artistic enjoyment — its 
 causes and varieties. Through the help of these 
 canons he may guard against meaningless egoism ; 
 he may manoeuvre wisely within the region of the 
 normal ; he may keep within measurable distance of 
 the tastes and the temperaments of his fellows. 
 He will be able to test his impressions, to judge of 
 their relative importance, to restrain personal whim 
 within bounds, and to remain sanely true to the pre- 
 dominating interests of the normal human mind. 
 
 Not that the critic will let his use of aesthetic 
 
228 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 formulas and points of view conventionalize or 
 stereotype his treatment of art. If he be happily 
 individual and alert, he will refuse to have forced 
 upon him a system, a method, unalterable precon- 
 ceptions, or habitual modes of approach to art. He 
 will keep in his repeated encounters with a work 
 of art much of the dilettante's bright wilfulness 
 and fickleness. He will go to it in all moods and 
 all weathers, will wait upon its good pleasure, and 
 will note delightedly all its fleeting aspects. But 
 these stray impressions will not content him, nor 
 will he care to report them as of themselves form- 
 ing a valid and final appreciation. He will play 
 the pedant with himself; he will, in sober moments 
 of wise hypocrisy, test the worth of his impres- 
 sions by approved and academic standards ; and he 
 will scrutinize them in the light of those canons 
 which the best modern theorizers in things aesthetic 
 have worked out psychologically. He will select 
 and arrange and make significant and unify. And 
 so, while approaching a work of art unconvention- 
 ally and communing with it intimately, he will, in 
 commenting on it, keep his casual and personal 
 sense of its charm within limits, and be intent on 
 doing full justice to what the work of art may well 
 mean to the normal man in normal moods. 
 
 Moreover, this aesthetic initiation will reveal to 
 the critic one special sort of pleasure stored in a 
 work of art that the layman is peculiarly apt to 
 miss — the pleasure that may be won from tracing 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 229 
 
 out the artist's mastery of teclinique and the secrets 
 of his victorious execution. Here, again, the critic, 
 if he is to make the work of art give up its quint- 
 essential qualitj'-, must call the historical method to 
 his aid. An artist who, at any moment in the 
 history of art, wishes to express his vision of 
 beauty through the medium and the technique of 
 his special art, whether it be painting, or music, or 
 poetry, always confronts a definite set of limiting 
 conditions. He finds certain fashions prevailing 
 in his art; he finds in vogue certain conventional 
 ways of treating material; he finds certain fixed 
 forms offering themselves for his use — forms like 
 the sonata and the concerto in music, or like the 
 sonnet and the drama in poetry. These forms are 
 traditional, have various laws and regulations 
 attached to their handling, and in a sense limit 
 the freedom of the artist, require him to make cer- 
 tain concessions, force him to conceive his material 
 in stereotyped ways, and to cast it in predetermined 
 moulds. An artist has always to find out for him- 
 self how far he can use these old forms ; how far 
 he can limit himself advantageously through 
 accepting old conventions, whether his peculiar 
 vision of beauty can be fully realized within the 
 limits of the established technique, or whether he 
 must be an innovator. 
 
 There is a curious and exquisite pleasure to be 
 won from watching artists at close quarters with 
 technical problems of this sort, and from observ- 
 
230 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 ing the fine certainty with which genius gets the 
 better of technical difficulties, through accepting 
 a convention here, through following a fashion 
 there, through slightly or even audaciously alter- 
 ing received forms or modes to secure scope for 
 novel moods or hitherto unattained effects. An 
 artist's vital relation to the past of his art — this 
 is something that as it shows itself here and there 
 in his work, the sensitive and alert critic finds 
 keen pleasure in detecting. Here, again, the 
 critic's specialized temperament and knowledge 
 mediate between the art of earlier times and the 
 men of his own day, and reveal through the help 
 of aesthetics and history the peculiar pleasure with 
 which art has, consciously or unconsciously, been 
 charged. 
 
 Finally, the critic must bear in mind that it is 
 distinctly for the men of his own day that he is 
 revitalizing art ; that it is for them that his 
 specialized temperament is to use its resources. 
 Every age, some one has said, must write its own 
 literary criticism; and this holds specially true 
 of appreciative criticism. The value of a work 
 of art depends on what it finds in the conscious- 
 ness to which it appeals ; and because individuality 
 is deeper and richer now than it has ever been 
 before, and because the men of to-day are "the 
 heirs of the ages," and have "ransacked the ages 
 and spoiled the climes," a great traditional work 
 of art ought to have a richer, more various, more 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 231 
 
 poignant value for modern men than it had for 
 their predecessors. Even in the matter of sense- 
 perceptions this progress is noticeable. " Our fore- 
 fathers," says a recent essayist on M. Claude Monet, 
 " saw fewer tones and colours than we ; they had, in 
 fact, a simpler and more naive vision ; the modern 
 eye is being educated to distinguish a complexity 
 of shades and varieties of colour before unknown." 
 If there has been this increase of delicate power 
 even in a slowly changing physical organ, far 
 greater have been the increase and diversification 
 of sensitiveness in the region of spiritual percep- 
 tion. New facts and ideas have been pouring into 
 the national consciousness from the physical sci- 
 ences during the last half -century, tending to trans- 
 form in countless subtle ways man's sense of his 
 own place in the universe, his ideals of brotherhood, 
 of justice, of happiness, and his orientation toward 
 the Unseen. The half-mystical control that has of 
 late years been won over physical forces, the in- 
 creased speed with which news flies from country 
 to country, the cheap and swift modes of travel 
 from land to land which break down the barriers 
 between the most widely divergent civilizations — 
 all these influences are reacting continually on the 
 life of the spirit, are stirring men's minds to new 
 thoughts and new moods, and developing in them 
 new aptitudes and new powers. For minds thus 
 changed and thus touched into new alertness and 
 sensitiveness, past art must take on new phases, 
 
232 IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 reveal in itself new suggestions, and acquire or 
 lose stimulating power in manifold ways. These 
 alterations of value the appreciative critic ought 
 to feel and transcribe. 
 
 And therefore the critic's must not be a " clois- 
 tered virtue " ; at least imaginatively, he must be 
 in sympathy with the whole life of his time. 
 He must be intimately aware of its practical 
 aims and preoccupations, of its material striv- 
 ings, of all the busy play of its social activities, 
 of its moral and religious perturbations, even of its 
 political intrigues. Doubtless Matthew Arnold 
 was right when he insisted on "detachment" as 
 the first requisite of good criticism. But in urg- 
 ing detachment, Arnold meant simply that the 
 critic must not let himself become the victim of 
 practical problems or party organizations ; that he 
 must not let his imagination be seized upon by a 
 set of definite ideas that are at once to be realized 
 in fact ; that he must not become an intellectual or 
 moral or political bigot or a mere Tory or Eadical 
 advocate — the one-idea'd champion of a pro- 
 gramme. The critic must have much of the dilet- 
 tante's fine irresponsibility, perhaps even something 
 of the cynic's amused aloofness from the keen com- 
 petitions of daily life. But he must also have the 
 dilettante's infinite variety, his intense dramatic 
 curiosity, and his alert, wide-ranging vision. He 
 should know the men of his own day through and 
 through in all their tastes and tempers, and should 
 
IMPRESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 233 
 
 be even more sensitively aware than they are them- 
 selves of their collective prejudices. So he should 
 deepen his personality and as far as possible include 
 within it whatever is most characteristic of his age. 
 In the terms of all this, as well as of his own fleet- 
 ing moods, he will try to appreciate past art. And 
 so he will become, in very truth, the specialized 
 temperament of the moment, interpreting the past 
 to the present. 
 
 Continually, then, in his search for the pleasure 
 involved in a work of art, the critic finds that he 
 must go outside the work of art and go beyond his 
 own momentary state of consciousness; he must 
 see the work of art in its relations to larger and 
 larger groups of facts ; and he can charm out of it 
 its true quality only by interpreting its sensations 
 and images and rhythms as expressing something 
 far greater than themselves, and as appealing to 
 something far more permanent than his own fleet- 
 ing moods. He must put the work of art in its 
 historical setting ; he must realize it in its psycho- 
 logical origin ; he must conceive of it as one char- 
 acteristic moment in the development of the 
 human spirit, and in order thus to vitalize it he 
 must be aware of it in its contrasting relations 
 with other characteristic moments and phases of 
 this development ; and, finally, he must be alive to 
 its worth as a delicately transparent illustration of 
 sesthetic law. In regarding the work of art under 
 all these aspects, his aim is primarily not to 
 
234 IMPEESSIONISM AND APPRECIATION 
 
 explain and not to judge or dogmatize, but to enjoy; 
 to realize the manifold charm the work of art has 
 gathered into itself from all sources, and to inter- 
 pret this charm imaginatively to the men of his 
 own day and generation. 
 
THREE STUDIES IN 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 LEWIS EDWARDS GATES, 
 
 Assistant Professor of English in Harvard University, 
 Cloth. i2mo. $1.50. 
 
 FRANCIS JEFFREY. ASPECTS OF THE 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. ROMANTIC PERIOD OF 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 "Professor Gates is fortunate in his subjects; his 
 subjects are fortunate in his justly discriminating 
 appreciation. The reader is fortunate in his illumi- 
 nating treatment of these notable characters, often 
 misunderstood and disparaged, — the brilliant re- 
 viewer, the spiritual rhetorician, the humanistic critic. 
 These masterly Studies should be in the hands of 
 all students of our literature in this century." 
 
 — Outlook, 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 
 
NATIONAL STUDIES IN AMERICAN LETTERS 
 
 GEORGE E. WOODBERRY, Editor 
 
 OLD CAMBRIDGE 
 
 By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON 
 i2mo. Cloth. $1.25 
 
 Chicago Evening Post. 
 
 " No better possible choice than Col. Higginson could have been 
 made for the recording and perpetuation of the literary glories of the 
 old college town. To the accurate knowledge of the pleasant Massa- 
 chusetts city, obtainable only by a long lifetime spent within its bor- 
 ders, Col Higginson adds a close intimacy with the chief characters 
 in the part played by the place in the formation of American letters. 
 . . . The volume is only too short for such matter as the writer has 
 tried to put into it, and were the matter of another sort, the charm 
 of manner would still leave too little of the contents." 
 
 BROOK FARM 
 
 By LINDSAY SWIFT 
 i2mo. Cloth. $1.25 
 
 The Boston Courier. 
 
 " The book has a value apart from its delineation of Brook Farm. 
 . . . It ought to be widely and carefully read, especially where . . . 
 socialistic notions are gaining many adherents, for it will aid the 
 young enthusiast to define what may be and what cannot be for a 
 very long century at least." 
 
 IN PREPARATION 
 THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL 
 
 By Paul Leicester Ford. 
 
 THE KNICKERBOCKERS 
 
 By The Rev. Henry Van Dyke, D.D. 
 
 SOUTHERN HUMORISTS 
 
 By John Kendrick Bangs. 
 
 THE CLERGY IN AHERICAN LIFE AND 
 
 LETTERS. By The Rev. Daniel Dulaney Addison. 
 
 FLOWER OF ESSEX 
 
 By the Editor. 
 
 THE HOOSIER WRITERS 
 
 By Meredith Nicholson. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
 

 
 
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