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 EDGAR ALLAN POE. In American Men of 
 
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 STUDIES IN LETTERS AND LIFE. Essays, 
 
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 Boston and New York. 
 
STUDIES IN LETTERS 
 AND LIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
TS 33 <TI 
 8<? 
 
 .§7 
 
 Copyright, 1890, 
 B* GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by II. O. Houghton & Company. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following Essays are reprinted from 
 The Atlantic Monthly and The Nation, 
 with little more revision than was necessary 
 to cover unimportant omissions or to com- 
 bine, in one or two instances, kindred arti- 
 cles. In the hope that they may afford some 
 illustration, however fragmentary and inter- 
 mittent, of the love of letters and of inter- 
 est in ideal living, the author offers them to 
 the reader. 
 
 Beverly, July 12, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 LANDOR 1 
 
 Crabbe 29 
 
 On the Promise op Keats 47 
 
 Aubrey de Vere on Poetry .... 66 
 Illustrations of Idealism. 
 
 I. The Pergamon Marbles ... 85 
 II. A Greek Trait noticed by Dr. 
 
 Waldstein 89 
 
 III. Mr. Pater on Ideal 2Estheticism . 98 
 
 IV. Italian Kenaissance Literature . .112 
 Remarks on Shelley. 
 
 I. His Career 124 
 
 II. His Acquaintances .... 133 
 III. His Italian Letters .... 156 
 
 Some Actors' Criticisms of Othello, Iago, 
 
 and Shylock 167 
 
 Sir George Beaumont, Coleridge, and Words- 
 worth 188 
 
 Three Men of Piety. 
 
 I. Bunyan 209 
 
 II. Cowper 219 
 
 IIL Channing 227 
 
 Darwin's Life 240 
 
 Byron's Centenary 261 
 
 Browning's Death 276 
 
CRITICISMS. 
 
 LANDOR. 
 
 Many of the most sensitive and dis- 
 criminating critics of this century have, in 
 the suffrage for fame, listed themselves for 
 Landor. He seemed almost to achieve im- 
 mortality within his lifetime, so continu- 
 ously was the subtle appreciation of the best 
 yielded to him, from the far-off years when 
 Shelley used, at Oxford, to declaim with 
 enthusiasm passages from Gebir, to the 
 time, that seems as yesterday, when Swin- 
 burne made his pilgrimage to Italy, to offer 
 his tribute of adoration to the old man at 
 the close of his solitary and troubled career ; 
 and still each finer spirit, 
 
 " As he passes, turns, 
 And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud." 
 
 During his long life he saw the springtime, 
 and outlived the harvest, of the great poetic 
 revival, and the labor of the Victorian poets 
 
2 LANDOB. 
 
 of the aftermath was half accomplished be- 
 fore his death ; but from all these powerful 
 contemporary influences he was free. He 
 remained apart ; and this single fact, attest- 
 ing, as it does, extraordinary self-possession 
 and assurance of purpose, suffices to make 
 his character interesting, even were his work 
 of inferior worth. As yet, however, even 
 to the minds of cultivated men, he is hard- 
 ly more than a great figure. He is known, 
 praised, and remembered for particular 
 scenes, dramatic fragments, occasional lyrics, 
 quatrains. This is the natural fate of a dis- 
 cursive writer. It matters not that Lan- 
 dor was wide ranging ; it matters not what 
 spoils of thought, what images of beauty, he 
 brought from those far eastern uplands 
 which it was his boast to haunt : he failed to 
 give unity to his work, to give interest to 
 large portions of it, to command public at- 
 tention for it as a whole. Indeed, his work 
 as a whole does not command the attention 
 even of the best. What does survive, too, 
 lives only in the favor of a small circle. He 
 forfeited popular fame at the beginning, 
 when he selected themes that presuppose 
 rare qualities in his audience, and adopted 
 an antique style ; but such considerations, 
 
LANDOB. 3 
 
 at least in their naked statement, do not tell 
 the whole story. Other poets have missed 
 immediate applause by dealing with sub- 
 jects that assumed unusual largeness of soul, 
 range of sympathy, and refinement of taste 
 in their readers: like Shelley, singing of un- 
 heeded hopes and fears to which the world 
 was to be wrought; like Wordsworth, nar- 
 rating the myth of Troy. Other poets, in 
 style, have set forth the object plainly, and 
 left it to work its will on the heart and im- 
 agination, unaided by the romantic spell, the 
 awakening glow, the silent but imperative 
 suggestion, the overmastering passion that 
 takes heart and imagination captive ; and 
 they have not lost their reward. A remote 
 theme, an impersonal style, are not of them- 
 selves able to condemn a poet to long neg- 
 lect. They may make wide appreciation of 
 him impossible ; they may explain the indif- 
 ference of an imperfectly educated public; 
 but they do not account for the fact that 
 Landor is to be read, even by his admirers, 
 in a book of selections, while the dust is 
 shaken from the eight stout octavos that 
 contain his works only by the professional 
 man of letters. 
 
 What first strikes the student of Landor 
 
4 LANBOB. 
 
 is the lack of any development in his genius. 
 This is one reason why Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 seizing on the characteristic somewhat rude- 
 ly, and leaping to an ungracious conclusion, 
 calls him " a glorified and sublime edition 
 of the sixth-form schoolboy." Men whose 
 genius is of this fixed type are rare in Eng- 
 lish literature, and not of the highest rank. 
 They exhibit no radical change ; they are at 
 the beginning what they are at the end; 
 their works do not belong to any particular 
 period of their lives ; they seem free from 
 their age, and to live outside of it. Hence, 
 in dealing with them, historical criticism — 
 the criticism whose purpose is to explain 
 rather than to judge — soon finds itself at 
 fault. When the circumstances that deter- 
 mined the original bent of their minds have 
 been set forth, there is nothing more to be 
 said. With Landor, this bent seems to have 
 been given by his classical training. To 
 write Latin verses was the earliest serious 
 employment of his genius, and his efforts 
 were immediately crowned with success. 
 These studies, falling in with natural in- 
 clinations and aptitudes, pledged him to a 
 classical manner ; they made real for him 
 the myths and history of Greece and Kome ; 
 
LANBOB. 5 
 
 they fed his devotion to the ancient virtues, 
 — love of freedom, aspiration for the calm 
 of wisdom, reverence for the dignity of he- 
 roism, delight in beauty for its own sake; 
 they supported him in what was more distinc- 
 tively his own, — his refinement in material 
 tastes, his burning indignation, his defense 
 of tyrannicide. These characteristics he had 
 in youth ; they were neither diminished nor 
 increased in age. In youth, too, he displayed 
 all his literary excellences and defects : the 
 fullness and weight of line ; the march of 
 sentences ; the obscurity arising from over- 
 condensation of thought and abrupt and el- 
 liptical constructions; his command of the 
 grand and impressive as well as the beauti- 
 ful and charming in imagery ; his fondness 
 for heroic situation and for the loveliness of 
 minute objects. This was a high endow- 
 ment ; why, then, do its literary results seem 
 inadequate ? 
 
 With all his gifts, Landor did not possess 
 unifying power. He observed objects as 
 they passed before him at hap-hazard, took 
 them into his mind, and gave them back, un- 
 transformed, in their original disorder. He 
 thought disconnectedly, and expressed his 
 thoughts as they came, detached and sepa- 
 
6 LANBOU. 
 
 rate. This lack of unity did not result sim- 
 ply from his choice of the classical mode of 
 treatment, or from a defect in logical or con- 
 structive power, although it was connected 
 with these. The ability to fuse experience, 
 to combine its elements and make them one, 
 to give it back to the world, transformed, 
 and yet essentially true, the real creative 
 faculty, is proportioned very strictly to the 
 self-assertive power of genius, to the energy 
 of the reaction of the mind on nature and 
 life ; it springs from a strong personality. 
 To say that Landor's personality was weak 
 would be to stultify one's self ; but yet the 
 difference between Land or the man and 
 Landor the author is so great as to make the 
 two almost antithetical ; and in his imagina- 
 tive work, by which he must be judged, it is 
 not too much to say that he denied and for- 
 swore his personality, and obliterated him- 
 self so far as was possible. He not only 
 eliminated self from his style, and, after the 
 classical manner, defined by Arnold, " relied 
 solely on the weight and force of that which, 
 with entire fidelity, he uttered," but he also 
 eliminated self, so far as one can, from his 
 subject. He did not bind his work together 
 by the laws of his own mind ; he did not 
 
LANBOB. 1 
 
 root it in the truth, as he saw truth ; he did 
 not interpenetrate and permeate it with his 
 own beliefs, as the great masters have al- 
 ways done. His principles were at the best 
 vague, hardly amounting to more than an 
 unapplied enthusiasm for liberty, heroism, 
 and the other great watchwords of social 
 rather than individual life. These illumi- 
 nate his work, but they do not give it consis- 
 tency. It is crystalline in structure, beau- 
 tiful, ordered, perfect in form when taken 
 part by part, but conglomerate as a whole ; 
 it is a handful of jewels, many of which are 
 singly of the most transparent and glowing 
 light, but unrelated one to another, — placed 
 in juxtaposition, but not set ; and in the crys- 
 talline mass is imbedded grosser matter, 
 and mingled with the jewels are stones of 
 dull color and light weight. A lovely object 
 caught his eye, and he set it forth in verse ; 
 a fine thought came to him, and he inserted 
 it in his dialogues; but his days were not 
 " bound each to each by natural piety," or 
 by any other of the shaping principles of 
 high genius. He was a spectator of life, not 
 an actor in life. Nature was to him a pano- 
 rama, wonderful, awful, beautiful, and he 
 described its scenes down to its most minute 
 
8 LAN DOB. 
 
 and evanescent details. History was his 
 theatre, where the personages played great 
 parts ; and he recorded their words and 
 gestures, always helping them with the de- 
 vice of the high buskin and something of a 
 histrionic air. He was content to be thus 
 guided from without ; to have his intellec- 
 tual activity determined by the chance of 
 sensation and of reading, rather than by a 
 well-thought-out and enthusiastic purpose of 
 his own soul. And so he became hardly 
 more than a mirror of beauty and an iEolian 
 harp of thought ; if the vision came, if the 
 wind breathed, he responded. 
 
 This self-effacement, this impersonality, 
 as it is called, in literature, is much praised. 
 It is said to be classical, and there is an im- 
 pression in some minds that such an ab- 
 dication of the individual's prerogatives is 
 the distinctive mark of classicism. There 
 is no more misleading and confusing error 
 in criticism. Not impersonality, but univer- 
 sality, is that mark ; and this is by no means 
 the same thing, differently stated. In any 
 age, the first, although not the sole, charac- 
 teristic of classical work is that it deals with 
 universal truth, of interest to all men : and 
 hence the poet is required to keep to him- 
 
LANDOB. 9 
 
 self his idiosyncrasies, hobbies, all that is 
 simply his own ; all that is not identical with 
 the common human nature ; all that men in 
 large bodies cannot sympathize with, under- 
 stand, and appreciate. Under these condi- 
 tions direct self -revelation is exceptional. 
 The poet usually expresses himself by so ar- 
 ranging his plot and developing his charac- 
 ters that they will illustrate the laws of life, 
 as he sees these laws, without any direct 
 statement, — though the Greek chorus is full 
 of didactic sayings ; and he may also express 
 himself by such a powerful presentation of 
 the morality intrinsic in beautiful things 
 and noble actions as "to soothe the cares 
 and lift the thoughts of men," without any 
 dogmatic insistence in his own person. In 
 these ways -ZEschylus obliterated himself 
 from his work just as much as Shakespeare, 
 and no more ; Swift just as much as Aristoph- 
 anes, and no more ; but the statement that 
 Shakespeare or Swift obliterated themselves 
 from their works needs only to be made to 
 be laughed at. The faith of iEschylus, the 
 wisdom of Sophocles, are in all their dramas ; 
 Anacreon is in all his songs, Horace in all 
 his odes. The lasting significance of their 
 productions to mankind is derived from the 
 
10 LANDOB. 
 
 clearness, the power, the skill, with which 
 they informed their works with their per- 
 sonality. These men had a philosophy of 
 life, that underlay and unified their work. 
 They rebuilt the world in their imagination, 
 and gave it the laws of their own minds. 
 Their spirits were active, moulding, shaping, 
 creating, subduing the whole of nature and 
 life to themselves. It is true that the an- 
 cients accomplished their purpose rather by 
 thought, the moderns rather by emotion; 
 but this difference is incidental to the change 
 in civilization. Either instrument is suffi- 
 cient for its end; but he who would now 
 choose the ancient instead of the modern 
 mode, narrows, postpones, and abbreviates 
 his fame only less than Land or, in his youth, 
 by writing in Latin. Whatever be the 
 mode of its operation, the energy of person- 
 ality is the very essence of effective genius. 
 
 That Landor had no philosophy of life, in 
 the same sense as Shakespeare or iEscbylus, 
 is plain to any reader. Those who look on 
 art, including poetry, as removed from ordi- 
 nary human life, who think that its chief 
 service to men lies in affording delight rather 
 than in that quickening of the spirit of 
 which delight is only the sign and efflores- 
 
LANBOB. 11 
 
 cence, would consider Landor's lack of this 
 philosophy a virtue. It accounts largely for 
 his failure to interest even the best in the 
 larger part of his work, and especially for 
 the discontinuity of his reflections. These 
 reflections are always his own ; and this fact 
 may seem to make against the view that he 
 eliminated self from his productions so far 
 as possible. But the presence of personality 
 in literature as a force, ordering a great 
 whole and giving it laws, is a very different 
 thing from its presence as a mere mouth- 
 piece of opinion. The thoughts may be nu- 
 merous, varied, wise, noble ; they may have 
 all the virtues of truth and grace ; but if 
 they are disparate and scattered, if they 
 tend nowhither, if they leave the reader 
 where they found him, if they subserve no 
 ulterior purpose and accomplish no end, 
 there is a wide gulf between them and the 
 thoughts of Shakespeare and iEschylus, no 
 less their own than were Landor's his. In 
 the former, personality is a power; in the 
 latter, it is only a voice. In Landor's eight 
 volumes there are more fine thoughts, more 
 wise apothegms, than in any other discursive 
 author's works in English literature; but 
 they do not tell on the mind. They bloom 
 
12 LANDOB. 
 
 like flowers in their gardens, but they crown 
 no achievement. At the end, no cause is 
 advanced, no goal is won. This incoherence 
 and inefficiency proceed from the absence of 
 any definite scheme of life, any compacted 
 system of thought, any central principles, 
 any strong, pervading, and ordering person- 
 ality. 
 
 In the same way the objectivity of Lan- 
 dor's work, its naturalism as distinguished 
 from imaginativeness, results from the same 
 cause, but with the difference that, while 
 the faults already mentioned are largely due 
 to an imperfect equipment of the mind, his 
 mode of art seems to have been adopted by 
 conscious choice and of set purpose. The 
 opinion of those who look on naturalism as 
 a virtue in art is deserving of respect. We 
 have been admonished for a long while that 
 men should see things as they are, and pre- 
 sent them as they are, and that this was the 
 Greek way. The dictum, when applied 
 with the meaning that men should be free 
 from prejudice and impartial in judgment, 
 no one would contest ; but when it is pro- 
 claimed with the meaning that poets should 
 express ideas nakedly, and should reproduce 
 objects by portraiture, there is excuse for 
 
LANDOB. 13 
 
 raising some question. No doubt, this was 
 in general the practice of the ancients. The 
 Athenians were primarily intellectual, the 
 Romans unimaginative. But by the opera- 
 tion of various causes — the chief of which 
 are the importance bestowed on the individ- 
 ual and the impulse given to emotion by the 
 Christian religion — mankind has changed 
 somewhat ; and therefore the methods of 
 appeal to men, the ways of touching their 
 hearts and enlightening their minds, have 
 been modified. In literature this change is 
 expressed by saying that the romantic man- 
 ner has, in general, superseded the classical. 
 The romantic manner aims at truth no less 
 than the classical ; it sets forth things as 
 they are no less completely and clearly. 
 The difference is rather one of methods than 
 of aims. The classical poet usually per- 
 ceives the object by his intellect, and makes 
 his appeal to the mind ; the romantic poet 
 seizes on the object with his imagination, 
 and makes his appeal to the heart. Not 
 that classical work is without imagination, 
 or romantic work devoid of intellectuality ; 
 but that in one the intellect counts for more, 
 in the other imagination. The classical poet, 
 having once presented ideas and objects, 
 
14 LANDOB. 
 
 leaves them to make their way ; the romantic 
 poet not only presents them, but, by awaken- 
 ing the feelings, predisposes the mood of the 
 mind, makes their reception by the mind 
 easier, wins their way for them. In clas- 
 sical work, consequently, success depends 
 mainly on lucidity of understanding, clear- 
 ness of vision, skill in verbal expression ; in 
 romantic work, the poet must not only pos- 
 sess these qualities, but must superadd, as 
 his prime characteristic, rightness, one might 
 better say sanity, of passion. The classical 
 virtues are more common among authors, 
 the romantic far more rare ; and hence er- 
 ror in the romantic manner is more frequent, 
 especially in dealing with ideas. But with 
 all its liability to mistake in weak hands, 
 romantic art, by its higher range, its fiercer 
 intensity, especially by its greater certainty, 
 has, in the hands of a master, a clear in- 
 crease of power over classical art, and under 
 the changed conditions of civilization its re- 
 sources are not to be lightly neglected. In- 
 deed, one who voluntarily adopts the clas- 
 sical manner as an exclusive mode seems to 
 choose an instrument of less compass and 
 melody, to prefer Greek to modern music. 
 He sings to a secluded and narrow circle, 
 
LANDOB. 15 
 
 and loses the ear of the world. Certainly 
 Landor made this choice, and by it he must 
 stand. 
 
 Let us take an example from the best of 
 Lander's work, and from that region of clas- 
 sical art where it is wholly competent, — the 
 brief description of small objects : — 
 
 " The ever-sacred cup 
 Of the pure lily hath between niy hands 
 Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." 
 
 How completely, how distinctly, the image 
 is given, — its form, its transparent purity, 
 its fragile and trembling gold ! How free 
 from any other than a strictly artistic charm ! 
 And yet how different is its method of ap- 
 peal from Shelley's 
 
 " tender blue-bells, at whose birth 
 The sod scarce heaved ; " 
 
 from Shakespeare's 
 
 "daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty." 
 
 Or, to select an illustration, also of Landor's 
 best, when the image, no less objective, 
 yields of itself an infinite suggestion : — 
 
 " Borgia, thou once wert almost too august 
 And high for adoration ; now thou 'rt dust. 
 All that remains of thee these plaits unfold, 
 Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold." 
 
16 LANDOB. 
 
 Again, Low perfect is the image, how effec- 
 tive the development of the third line ; how 
 the melody of the last blends with, its se- 
 lected epithets to place the object entire and 
 whole before the mind ; how free is the qua- 
 train from any self -intrusion of the poet! 
 But here, too, the method of appeal is very 
 different from Shakespeare's, as in the lines 
 on Yorick's skull: "Here hung those lips 
 that I have kissed I know not how oft." 
 The difference in mood between these two 
 only emphasizes the difference in method. 
 Enough has been said, however, in descrip- 
 tion and exemplification of the two kinds of 
 art. Either is sufficient for its ends, nor 
 would any one desire to dispense with that 
 which has resulted in work so admirable as 
 has been quoted from Landor. The distinc- 
 tively romantic poets do not consign the clas- 
 sical style to disuse. In the presentation of 
 images, Keats has frequent recourse to it, as 
 in his picture of Autumn lying 
 
 " on a half -reaped furrow sound asleep, 
 Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
 Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers." 
 
 So Wordsworth, in expressing ideas, is 
 sometimes more bald than the least imagina- 
 tive of the classics. But such poets do not 
 
LANDOR. 17 
 
 employ this style alone ; they are character- 
 ized by the modern manner ; they give us 
 those " sweet views " which in the ancient 
 mode "can never well be seen." Landor 
 droops below his great contemporaries, not 
 by merely adopting the classical method, 
 but by adopting it exclusively. Whether 
 this choice was entirely free, or partly de- 
 termined by natural incapacity, is doubtful. 
 Violent and tempestuous as his nature was, 
 with all his boyish intensity of indignation, 
 his boyish delicacy of tenderness, he seems 
 to possess temper rather than true passion. 
 In the verses to his poetic love, Ian the, there 
 are many fine sentiments, graceful turns; 
 there is courtliness of behavior; but the 
 note of passion is not struck. lanthe is 
 only another poetic mistress of the cavalier 
 school, and in the memory her name is less, 
 both for dignity and pathos, than Rose Ayl- 
 mer's. Without passion, of course, a poet is 
 condemned to the classical style. Passion 
 is the element in which the romantic writer 
 fuses beauty and wisdom; it is the means 
 by which personality pervades literary work 
 with most ease, directness, and glow. In 
 the great modern poets it is the substance of 
 their genius. But just as neither by a phi- 
 
18 LANDOR. 
 
 losophy o£ life nor in any other way did 
 Landor fill his subject with himself, so nei- 
 ther by passion nor by any other quality did 
 he breathe his own spirit into his style. 
 
 The consequence is that Landor, unclas- 
 sified in his own age, is now to be ranked 
 among the poets, increasing in number, who 
 appeal rather to the artistic than to the 
 poetic sense. He is to be placed in that 
 group which looks on art as a world re- 
 moved ; which prizes it mainly for the de- 
 light it gives ; which, caring less for truth, 
 deals chiefly with the t beauty that charms 
 the senses ; and which therefore weaves po- 
 etry like tapestry, and uses the web of speech 
 to bring out a succession, of fine pictures. 
 The watchwords of any school, whether in 
 thought or art, seldom awake hostility until 
 their bearing on the details of practice re- 
 veals their meaning. Art is, in a sense, a 
 world removed from the actual and present 
 life, and beauty is the sole title that admits 
 any work within its limits. Of this there is 
 no question. But that world, however far 
 from what is peculiar to any one age, has its 
 eternal foundations in universal life ; and 
 that beauty has its enduring power because 
 it is the incarnation of universal life. What 
 
LANBOE. 19 
 
 poem has a better right to admission there 
 than The Eve of St. Agnes? and in what 
 poem does the heart of life beat more 
 warmly? Laodamia belongs in that world, 
 but it is because it voices abiding human 
 feelings no less than because of its serenity. 
 Nature in itself is savage, sterile, and void ; 
 individual life in itself is trifling : each ob- 
 tains its value through its interest to human- 
 ity as a whole, and the office of art is to set 
 forth that value. A lovely object, a noble 
 action, are each of worth to men, but the 
 latter is of the more worth ; and, as was 
 long ago pointed out, poetry is by the limit- 
 ations of language at a considerable disad- 
 vantage in treating of formal beauty. But 
 without developing these remarks, of which 
 there is no need, the only point here to be 
 made is that in so far as poetry concerns it- 
 self with objects without relation to ideas, it 
 loses influence ; in so far as it neglects emo- 
 tion and thought for the purpose of gaining 
 sensuous effects it loses worth; in both it 
 declines from the higher to the lower levels. 
 Landor, notwithstanding his success in pre- 
 senting objects of artistic beauty — and his 
 poetry is full of exquisite delineations of 
 them — failed to interest men ; nor could his 
 
20 LANDOB. 
 
 skill in expressing thought, although he was 
 far more intellectual than his successors, 
 save his reputation. Landor mistook a few 
 of the marks of art for all. His work has 
 the serenity, the remoteness, that character- 
 ize high art, but it lacks an intimate rela- 
 tion with the general life of men; it sets 
 forth formal beauty, as painting does, but 
 that beauty remains a sensation, and does 
 not pass into thought. This absence of any 
 vital relation between his art and life, be- 
 tween his objects and ideas, denotes his fail- 
 ure. There are so many poets whose works 
 contain as perfect beauty, and in addition 
 truth and passion ; so many who instead of 
 mirroring beauty make it the voice of life, 
 — who instead of responding in melodious 
 thought to the wandering winds of reverie 
 strike their lyres in the strophe and anti- 
 strophe of continuous song, — that the world 
 is content to let Landor go by. The guests 
 at the famous late dinner-party to which he 
 looked forward will indeed be very few, and 
 they will be men of leisure. 
 
 Thus far, in examining the work of Lan- 
 dor as a whole, and endeavoring to under- 
 stand somewhat the public indifference to it, 
 the answer has been found in its objectivity 
 
LANDOB. 21 
 
 and its discontinuity, both springing from 
 the effacement of his personality as an ac- 
 tive power ; or, in other words, in the fact 
 that, by failing to link his images with his 
 thoughts, and his thoughts one with another, 
 so as to make them tell on the mind, and 
 especially by eliminating the romantic ele- 
 ment of passion, he failed to bring his work 
 into sympathetic or helpful relations with 
 the general emotional and intellectual life of 
 men. 
 
 Why, then, do the most sensitive and 
 discriminating critics, as was said at the be- 
 ginning, list themselves in Landor's favor? 
 They are, without exception, fellow-workers 
 with him in the craft of literature. They 
 have, by their continued eulogy of him, 
 made it a sign of refinement to be charmed 
 by him, a proof of unusually good taste to 
 praise him. His admirers, by their very di- 
 vergence in opinion from the crowd, seem 
 to claim uncommon sensibilities ; and the co- 
 terie is certainly one of the highest order, in- 
 tellectually : Browning, Lowell, Swinburne, 
 to name no more. They are all literary 
 men. They are loud in their plaudits of his 
 workmanship, but are noticeably guarded 
 in their commendation of his entire con- 
 
22 LANDOR. 
 
 tents ; the passages for which they express 
 unstinted enthusiasm are few. Landor was, 
 beyond doubt, a master-workman, and skill 
 in workmanship is dear to the craft ; others 
 may feel its effects, but none appreciate it 
 with the keen relish of the professional au- 
 thor. The fullness, power, and harmony of 
 Landor's language are clearly evident in his 
 earliest work. He had the gift of literary 
 expression from his youth, and in his mature 
 work it shows as careful and high cultiva- 
 tion as such a gift ever received from its 
 possessor. None could give keener point 
 and smoother polish to a short sentence ; 
 none could thread the intricacies of long and 
 involved constructions more unerringly. He 
 had at command all the grammatical re- 
 sources of lucidity, though he did not always 
 care to employ them. He knew all the de- 
 vices of prose composition to conceal and to 
 disclose ; to bring the commonplace to issue 
 in the unexpected ; to lead up, to soften, to 
 hesitate, to declaim ; to extort all the supple- 
 mentary and new suggestions of an old com- 
 parison ; to frame a new and perfect simile ; 
 in short, he was thoroughly trained to his 
 art. Yet his prose is not, by present canons, 
 perfect prose. It is not self-possessed, sub- 
 
LANDOB. 23 
 
 dued, and graceful conversation, modulated, 
 making its points without aggressive insist- 
 ence, yet with certainty, keeping interest 
 alive by a brilliant but natural turn and by 
 the brief and luminous flash of truth through 
 a perfect phrase. His prose is rather the 
 monologue of a seer. In reading his works 
 one feels somewhat as if sitting at the feet 
 of Coleridge. Landor has the presence that 
 abashes companions. His manner of speech 
 is more dignified, more ceremonial, his enun- 
 ciation is more resonant, his accent more ex- 
 quisite, than belong to the man of the world. 
 He silences his readers by the mere impos- 
 sibility of interrupting with a question so 
 noble and smooth-sliding a current of words. 
 The style is a sort of modern Miltonic ; it 
 has the suggestion of the pulpit divine in 
 Hooker, the touch of formal artificiality that 
 characterizes the first good English prose. 
 Landor goes far afield for his vocables ; his 
 page is a trifle too polysyllabic, has too 
 much of the surface glitter of Latinity. But 
 in the age that produced the styles of De 
 Quincey, Ruskin, and Carlyle, it would be 
 mere folly to find fault because Landor did 
 not write, we will not say after the French 
 fashion, but after the fashion of Swift, at 
 
24 LANDOB. 
 
 his highest and on his level, the unrivaled 
 master of simple English prose. Landor, at 
 his best, is not so picturesque as De Quin- 
 cey, nor so eloquent as Ruskin, nor so in- 
 tense as Carlyle ; but he has more self-pos- 
 session, more serenity, more artistic charm, 
 a wider compass, a more equal harmony, 
 than any of these. 
 
 Landor pleases his fellow-craftsmen, how- 
 ever, not only by this general command of 
 language as a means of expression, but by 
 the perfection of form in his short pieces. 
 Perfection of form is the great feature of 
 classical art ; it is an intellectual virtue, at 
 least in literature, and appeals to the mind. 
 The moderns are lacking in it. Landor's 
 command of form was limited, insufficient 
 for the construction of a drama ; impressive 
 as Count Julian is, it has not this final ex- 
 cellence. Landor's power in this respect is 
 analogous to Herrick's ; it is perfect only 
 within narrow bounds ; but it lacks Her- 
 rick's spontaneity. His verses are not the 
 " swallow flights of song ; " he was not a 
 singer. The lyric on Rose Aylmer is en- 
 tirely exceptional, and much of its charm lies 
 in the beauty of the name, the skillful repe- 
 tition, and, we must add, in the memory of 
 
LANDOB. 25 
 
 Lamb's fondness for it. Familiar as it is, it 
 would be unjust not to quote it : — 
 
 " Ah, what avails the sceptred race ! 
 
 Ah, what the form divine ! 
 What every virtue, every grace ! 
 
 Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
 Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
 
 May weep, hut never see, 
 A night of memories and of sighs 
 
 I consecrate to thee." 
 
 Ordinarily, however, Landor deals with a 
 beautiful image or one fine sentiment. His 
 objectivity, his discontinuity, help him here ; 
 they insure that simplicity and singleness 
 which are necessary for success. The lack 
 of any temptation in his mind to expound 
 and suggest is probably one reason why he 
 rejected the sonnet, certainly the most beau- 
 tiful poetic mould to give shape to such de- 
 tached thoughts and feelings. He scorned 
 the sonnet ; it was too long for him ; he 
 must be even more brief. He would present 
 the object at once, instead of gradually, as 
 the sonnet does; not unveiling the perfect 
 and naked image until the last word has 
 trembled away. His best work of this kind 
 is in the quatrain, which is rather the moral- 
 ist's than the poet's form, — Martial's, not 
 Horace's. 
 
26 LANDOB. 
 
 " I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 This is perfect ; but it is perfect speech, not 
 perfect song. "When Landor had something 
 to say at more length, when he had a story 
 to tell, he chose the idyl ; and his work in 
 this kind is no less perfect in form than are 
 his quatrains. Indeed, on the idyls his 
 poetic fame will mainly rest. They are very 
 remote from modern life, but the best of 
 them are very beautiful, and in the highest 
 rank of poetry that appeals to the artistic 
 sense. Those who are able still to hold fast 
 to the truth of Greek mythology to the im- 
 agination will not willingly let them die. To 
 read them is like looking at the youths and 
 maidens of an ancient bas-relief. The cul- 
 tivated will never tire of them ; the people 
 will never care for them. The limitations 
 of their interest are inherent in their sub- 
 ject and the mode of its presentation ; but 
 these limitations do not lessen their beauty, 
 although they make very small the number 
 who appreciate it. 
 
 Landor's influence over his critics is due 
 chiefly to his power as a stylist, and to the 
 
LANDOB. 27 
 
 perfection of form in his shorter poems and 
 his idyls ; but something is also due to the 
 passages which, apart from those mentioned, 
 they commend so unreservedly ; such as the 
 study of incipent insanity in the dialogue be- 
 tween Tiberius and Vipsania, and the scenes 
 from Antony and Octavius where the boy 
 Csesarion is an actor. Not to be conquered 
 by these argues one's self " dull of soul ; " 
 and scattered through the volumes are other 
 passages of only less mastery, especially in 
 the Greek dialogues, which cannot here be 
 particularized. For this reason no author is 
 more served than Landor by a book of se- 
 lections. After all, too, an author should be 
 judged by his best. Nevertheless, when one 
 remembers the extraordinary gifts of Lan- 
 dor, one cannot but regret the defects of 
 nature and judgment that have so seriously 
 interfered with his influence. His work as 
 a whole exhibits a sadder waste of genius 
 than is the case even with Coleridge. There 
 is no reason to suppose that the verdict of 
 the public on his value will be reversed. His 
 failure may well serve as a warning to the 
 artistic school in poetry ; it affords one more 
 of the long list of illustrations of that funda- 
 mental truth in literature, — the truth that a 
 
28 LANDOB. 
 
 man's work is of service to mankind in pro- 
 portion as, by expressing himself in it, by 
 filling it with his own personality, he fills it 
 with human interest. 
 
CEABBE. 
 
 "We have done with Crabbe. His tales 
 have failed to interest us. Burke and his 
 friends, as we all know, held a different 
 opinion from ours ; and their praise is not 
 likely to have been ill founded. The culti- 
 vated taste of Holland House, thirty years 
 later, is also against our decision. Through 
 two generations of markedly different liter- 
 ary temper Crabbe pleased the men best 
 worth pleasingc Indeed, we owe him to 
 Burke's approval ; for when Lord North, 
 Lord Shelburne, and Lord Thurlow had 
 neglected his entreaties for recognition and 
 aid, and had left him to write, pawn, and 
 go hungry, Burke saved him from the debt- 
 or's prison, took him into his friendship, 
 welcomed him to his home, and gave him to 
 literature. 
 
 Yet the verses which won this recognition 
 from Burke, and gained for Crabbe, besides, 
 praise from Johnson and talk with Fox and 
 idle mornings in Reynolds's studio, were 
 
30 CRABBE. 
 
 only his fledgeling flights. It was not until 
 after more than twenty years of silence, 
 spent in the obscurity of a country clergy- 
 man's life, that he showed the richness and 
 abundance of his vein. Then Burke and his 
 friends had given place to those younger 
 men, in whose lives a new age was dawn- 
 ing ; but as warm a welcome awaited Crabbe 
 among them as he had ever met with in 
 Burke's club. With them he passed his old 
 age, pleased with Byron's praise, and with 
 the friendliness of Moore and Rogers, and 
 with Scott's kindly regard and correspon- 
 dence. They liked to see him, with his beau- 
 tiful white hair, his formal, old-fashioned 
 garb and old-school manners, the last of that 
 long line of poets through whom the Queen 
 Anne taste had tyrannized for a century in 
 English verse, sitting familiarly among them- 
 selves, who were preparing the way for the 
 next generation to ignore the traditions 
 which Burke and Johnson had fixed in his 
 poetic faith. Especially did Sir Walter 
 honor him ; like Fox, he chose Crabbe's 
 poems to be read to him just before he died. 
 Without reckoning the approval of others, 
 what was the strong attraction in Crabbe's 
 work for Scott and Fox ? Their judgment 
 
CRABBE. 31 
 
 was not so worthless that it can be disre- 
 garded with the complacent assurance with 
 which the decisions of Gifford and Jeffrey 
 are set aside ; on the contrary, Scott had 
 such health and Fox such refinement that 
 their judgment ought to raise a doubt whe- 
 ther our generation is not making a mistake 
 and missing pleasure through its neglect of 
 Crabbe. 
 
 Crabbe is a story-teller. He describes the 
 life he saw, — common, homely life, some- 
 times wretched, not infrequently criminal ; 
 the life of the country poor, with occasional 
 light and shadow from the life of the gen- 
 tlefolk above them. He had been born into 
 it, in a village on the Suffolk coast, amid 
 stern and cheerless natural scenes : land- 
 ward, the bramble-overgrown heath encom- 
 passing crowded and mean houses; east- 
 ward, — 
 
 " Stakes and sea-weed withering- on the mud." 
 
 Here he had passed his boyhood, in the 
 midst of human life equally barren and 
 stricken with the ugliness of poverty, among 
 surly and sordid fishers given to hard labor 
 and rough brawl, — 
 
 " A joyless, wild, amphibious race, 
 With sullen woe displayed in every face," — 
 
32 CBABBE. 
 
 and the sight had been a burden to him. 
 The desire to throw off this twofold oppres- 
 sion of mean nature and humanity must 
 have counted for much in determining him 
 on that long - remembered December day, 
 when, as the bleak twilight came down, 
 darkening the marshy pool on the heath 
 where he stood, he took his resolve to go up 
 to London and seek poetical fame ; and glad 
 at heart he must have been, that morning of 
 early spring, when he left all this ugliness 
 behind him. ignorant of the struggle and dis- 
 tress he was to meet where he was going. 
 
 In that early poem which Johnson praised 
 Crabbe described this village life with the 
 vigor of a youth who had escaped out of its 
 dreary imprisonment, and without a touch of 
 that tenderness for early associations which 
 softened Goldsmith's retrospect of the scenes 
 of his early days. Crabbe told of exhaust- 
 ing labor leading on to prematurely useless 
 and neglected age ; of storms sweeping away 
 the shelter of the poor ; of smugglers, poach- 
 ers, wreckers, tavern debauchery, and, worst 
 of all, the poor-house — a terrible picture, 
 perhaps the best known of all his drawing 
 — with its deserted inmates cut off from all 
 human care except that of the heedless phy- 
 
CEABBE. 33 
 
 sician and the heartless parson ; a miserable 
 tale, but too much of it only what his own 
 eyes had seen. We do not know the con- 
 tents of those piles of manuscripts which he 
 wrote during his twenty years of silence, 
 and — not much to the world's loss, some 
 think — made bonfires of to amuse his chil- 
 dren ; but his first poem after that long in- 
 terval was the same story, the experience of 
 those whose names appeared in the year's 
 parish register of births, marriages, and 
 deaths, and was a sorrowful survey of seduc- 
 tion, desertion, crime, discontent, and folly. 
 In his later tales he dealt less in unrelieved 
 gloom and bitter misery, and at times made 
 a trial at humor. There are glimpses of plea- 
 sant English life and character, but these 
 are only glimpses; the ground of his painting 
 is shadow, — the shadow that rested on the 
 life of the English poor in his generation. 
 
 Where else would one turn for an ade- 
 quate description of that life, or gain so di- 
 rect an insight into the social sources and 
 conditions of the Methodist revival, or into 
 the motives and convictions of reformers 
 like Mary Wollstonecraft ? Where would 
 one obtain so keen a sense of the vast change 
 which has taken place in the conditions of 
 
34 CBABBE. 
 
 humble human life within this century ? 
 Mr. Leslie Stephen, in that essay which is 
 so good-humored but so unsuccessful an at- 
 tempt to appreciate Crabbe, mentions the 
 few illustrations in modern literature of the 
 life Crabbe described ; it is seen in Char- 
 lotte Bronte's Yorkshiremen, and George 
 Eliot's millers, and in a few other charac- 
 ters, " but," he says, " to get a realistic pic- 
 ture of country life as Crabbe saw it, we 
 must go back to Squire Western, or to some 
 of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh who 
 sat to Hogarth," The setting of Crabbe's 
 tales has this special historic interest. The 
 schools, houses, books, habits, occupations, 
 and all the external characteristics of the 
 tales belong to the time : the press-gang 
 comes to carry off the lover just before his 
 wedding-day, and leaves the bride to nurse 
 an unfathered child, to receive the courtship 
 of a canting and carnal preacher, and to find 
 a refuge from him, and from the father who 
 favors him, in suicide ; orphan boys are 
 bound over to brutal task-masters ; pictures 
 of the sects (from the pen of a respectable 
 clergyman of the Established Church, it is 
 true) recall the beginnings of Methodism 
 with a vividness only to be equaled by the 
 
CEABBE. 35 
 
 books and pamphlets of the early converts' 
 own writing. This historic value of the 
 tales, however, great as it is to the student 
 of manners, is secondary to their poetic 
 value, which lies in the sentiment, feeling, 
 and pathos with which the experience of life 
 embodied in them, the workings of simple 
 human nature, in however debased surround- 
 ings, is set forth. It is an experience which 
 results usually from the interplay of low and 
 selfish motives, and of ignoble or weak pas- 
 sions ; it is, too often, the course of brutal 
 appetite, thoughtless or heartless folly, ava- 
 rice, sensuality, and vice, relieved too seldom 
 by amiable character, sympathy, charity, 
 self-sacrifice, or even by the charm of nat- 
 ural beauty. Yet if all the seventy tales 
 be taken into account, they contain nearly 
 all varieties of character and circumstance 
 among the country poor ; and, though the 
 darker side may seem to be more frequently 
 insisted upon, it is because the nature of his 
 subject made it necessary, because he let his 
 light, as Moore said, — 
 
 " Through life's low, dark interior fall, 
 Opening the whole, severely bright," 
 
 rather than because he had any lack of 
 cheerfulness of temper. 
 
36 CBABBE. 
 
 Crabbe does not, in a true sense, give 
 expression to the life of the poor ; he merely 
 narrates it. Here and there, throughout the 
 poems, are episodes written out of his own 
 life ; but usually he is concerned with the 
 experience of other men, which he had ob- 
 served, rather than with what his own heart 
 had felt. A description of life is of course 
 far inferior to an utterance of it, such as 
 was given to us by Burns, who dealt with 
 the life of the poor so much more power- 
 fully than Crabbe ; and a realistic descrip- 
 tion has less poetic value than an imaginative 
 one, such as was given to us by Wordsworth 
 at his best. Crabbe's description is perhaps 
 the most nakedly realistic of any in English 
 poetry ; but it is an uncommonly good one. 
 Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe's 
 powers were confined strictly within it ; but 
 he had the best virtues of a realist. His 
 physical vision — his sight of what presents 
 itself to the eye — was almost perfect ; he 
 saw every object, and saw it as it was. Per- 
 haps the minuteness with which he saw was 
 not altogether an advantage, for he does not 
 seem to have taken in the landscape as a 
 whole, but only as a mosaic of separate ob- 
 jects. He never gives general effects of 
 
CEABBE. 37 
 
 beauty or grandeur ; indeed, he seldom saw 
 the beauty of a single object ; he did little 
 more than catalogue the things before him, 
 and employ in writing poetry the same fac- 
 ulty in the same way as in pursuing his fa- 
 vorite studies of botany and entomology. 
 Yet, with these limitations, what realist in 
 painting could exceed in truthfulness and 
 carefulness of detail this picture of a fall 
 morning ? — 
 
 " It was a fair and mild autumnal sky, 
 And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye ; 
 The wet and heavy grass where feet had strayed, 
 Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betrayed ; 
 Showers of the night had swelled the deep'ning rill, 
 The morning breeze had urged the quick'ning mill ; 
 Long yellow leaves, from osiers strewed around, 
 Choked the small stream and hushed the feeble sound." 
 
 Or this sketch of light in a decayed ware- 
 house turned into a tenement for the poor? — 
 
 " That window view ! oiled paper and old glass 
 Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass, 
 And give a dusty warmth to that huge room, 
 The conquered sunshine's melancholy gloom ; 
 When all those western rays, without so bright, 
 Within become a ghastly glimmering light, 
 As pale and faint upon the floor they fall, 
 Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall." 
 
 Nor is this carefulness of detail a trick, such 
 as is sometimes employed, to give the ap- 
 
38 CBABBE. 
 
 pearance of reality to unreal human life. 
 Crabbe's mental vision, his sight into the 
 workings of the passions and the feelings, 
 although not so perfect as his physical vis- 
 ion, was yet at its best very keen and clear ; 
 the sentiments, moods, reflections, and ac- 
 tions of his characters are seldom contrary 
 to nature. It would be difficult to show a 
 finer delineation of its kind than his descrip- 
 tion of the meeting of two long-parted broth- 
 ers. As Eichard approaches his brother's 
 hall, he reflects, — 
 
 " 'How shall I now my unknown way explore, — 
 He proud and rich, I very proud and poor ? 
 Perhaps my friend a dubious speech mistook, 
 And George may meet me with a stranger's look. 
 How stands the case ? My brother's friend and mine 
 Met at an inn, and set them down to dine ; 
 When, having settled all their own affairs, 
 And kindly canvassed such as were not theirs, 
 Just as my friend was going to retire, 
 
 " Stay ! you will see the brother of our squire," 
 Said his companion ; "be his friend, and tell 
 The captain that his brother loves him well, 
 And when he has no better thing in view 
 Will be rejoiced to see him. Now, adieu ! " 
 
 " 'Well, here I am ; and, brother, take you heed, 
 I am not come to flatter you and feed. 
 You shall no soother, fawner, hearer, find ; 
 I will not brush your coat, nor smooth your mind; 
 I will not hear your tales the whole day long, 
 
CBABBE. 39 
 
 Nor swear you' re right, if I believe you wrong ; 
 
 I will not earn my dinner when I dine 
 
 By taking all your sentiments for mine ; 
 
 Nor watch the guiding- motions of your eye 
 
 Before I venture question or reply. 
 
 Yet, son of that dear mother could I meet — 
 
 But lo ! the mansion, — 't is a fine old seat ! ' 
 
 " The brothers met, with both too much at heart 
 
 To be observant of each other's part. 
 ' Brother, I 'm glad ! ' was all that George could say, 
 Then stretched his hand, and turned Ins head away ; 
 Richard, meantime, made some attempt to speak, 
 Strong in his purpose, in his trial weak. 
 At length, affection, like a risen tide, 
 Stood still, and then seemed slowly to subside ; 
 Each on the other's looks had power to dwell, 
 And brother brother greeted passing well." 
 
 These qualities of fine, true physical and 
 mental vision are the essential qualities for 
 valuable realistic work ; if there be room 
 for regret in Crabbe's share of them, it is 
 because their range is contracted. The lim- 
 itations of his physical vision have been 
 mentioned ; in respect to his mental vision 
 Crabbe saw only a few and comparatively 
 simple operations of human nature, — the 
 workings of country-bred minds, not finely 
 or complexly organized, but slow-motioned, 
 and perplexed, if perplexed at all, not from 
 the difficulty of the problem, but from their 
 own dullness. Yet within these limits his 
 
40 CBABBE. 
 
 characters are often pathetic, sometimes 
 tragic, or even terrible, in their energy of 
 evil passion or remorse. 
 
 One other quality, without which clear 
 mental and physical vision would be inef- 
 fective, is essential to realism like Crabbe's, 
 — transparency, the quality by virtue of 
 which life is seen through the text plainly 
 and without distortion ; and this is the qual- 
 ity which Crabbe possessed in most perfec- 
 tion. He not only saw the object as it was ; 
 he presented it as it was. He neither added 
 nor took away; he did not unconsciously 
 darken or heighten color, soften or harden 
 line. Whatever was before his mind — the 
 conversation of a gossip, the brutality of a 
 ruffian, the cant of a convert — he repro- 
 duced truthfully ; whatever was the charac- 
 ter of his story, mean or tragic, trivial or 
 pathetic, he did not modify it. There was 
 no veil of fancy, no glamour of amiable de- 
 ception or dimness of charitable tears, to ob- 
 scure his view : if he found nudity and dirt, 
 they reappeared in his work nudity and dirt 
 still; if he found courage and patience, he 
 dealt the same even-handed justice. His 
 distinction is that he told a true story. 
 
 It was, perhaps, because he was thus able 
 
CBABBK 41 
 
 to present accurately and faithfully the hu- 
 man life which he saw so clearly that he won 
 such admiration from Scott; for Scott had 
 the welcome of genius for any new glimpse 
 of humanity, and he knew how rare, and 
 consequently how valuable, is the gift of 
 simple and direct narration of what one sees. 
 Fox had great sensibility and tenderness of 
 heart ; and Crabbe presented the lot of the 
 poor so vividly, so lucidly, so immediately, 
 that he stirred in Fox the same feelings with 
 which a better poet would have so charged 
 his verses that natures not so finely endowed 
 as Fox would have been compelled to feel 
 them too. Scott and Fox knew what a val- 
 uable acquisition this realistic sketch of hum- 
 ble life in their generation was, so faithful, 
 minute, and trustworthy ; they felt that 
 their experience was enlarged, that real hu- 
 manity had been brought home to them, and 
 in the sway of those emotions, which Crabbe 
 did not infuse into his work, but which his 
 work quickens in sympathetic hearts, they 
 could forgive him his tediousness, his fre- 
 quent commonplace, his not unusual absurd- 
 ity of phrase, his low level of flight with its 
 occasional feebleness of wing. 
 
 In their minds, too, his style must have 
 
42 CBABBE. 
 
 had more influence than we are apt to think, 
 — the style of the great school which died 
 with him, the form and versification which 
 they had been taught to believe almost es- 
 sential to the best poetry, and from a tradi- 
 tional respect for which they could hardly 
 free their minds as easily as ourselves. 
 Crabbe used the old heroic rhymed couplet, 
 that simplest form of English verse music, 
 which could rise, nevertheless, to the almost 
 lyric loftiness of the last lines of the Dun- 
 ciad ; so supple and flexible ; made for easy 
 simile and compact metaphor ; lending itself 
 so perfectly to the sudden flash of wit or 
 turn of humor ; the natural shell of an epi- 
 gram ; compelling the poet to practice all 
 the virtues of brevity ; checking the wan- 
 dering fancy, and repressing the secondary 
 thought ; requiring in a masterly use of it 
 the employment of more mental powers than 
 any other metrical form ; despised and neg- 
 lected now because the literature which is 
 embodied in it is despised and neglected, yet 
 the best metrical form which intelligence, as 
 distinct from poetical feeling, can employ. 
 Crabbe did not handle it in any masterful 
 way; he was careless, and sometimes slip- 
 shod ; but when he chose he could employ it 
 
CBABBE. 43 
 
 well, and should have credit for it. To take 
 one more example from his poems, how ex- 
 cellently he uses it in this passage ! — 
 
 " Where is that virtue which the generous boy 
 Felt, and resolved that nothing should destroy ; 
 He who with noble indignation glowed 
 When vice had triumph ; who his tear bestowed 
 On injured merit ? He who would possess 
 Power, but to aid the children of distress ! 
 Who has such joy in generous actions shown, 
 And so sincere they might be called his own ; 
 Knight, hero, patriot, martyr ! on whose tongue 
 And potent arm a nation's welfare hung, — 
 Where now this virtue's fervor, spirit, zeal ? 
 Who felt so warmly, has he ceased to feel ? 
 Or are these feelings varied ? Has the knight, 
 Virtue's own champion, now refused to fight ? 
 Is the deliverer turned th' oppressor now ? 
 Has the reformer dropt the dangerous vow ? 
 Or has the patriot's bosom lost its heat, 
 And forced him, shivering, to a snug retreat ? 
 Is such the grievous lapse of human pride ! 
 Is such the victory of the worth untried! " 
 
 Scott felt an attraction in such poetic form 
 which we have perhaps ceased to feel ; and 
 Fox, had he lived to read it, would equally 
 have acknowledged its power. 
 
 But Wordsworth said Crabbe was unpo- 
 etical ; he condemned him for " his unpoet- 
 ical mode of considering human nature and 
 society ; " and, after all, the world has agreed 
 with Wordsworth, and disagreed with Scott 
 
44 CBABBE. 
 
 and Fox. Wordsworth told Scott an anec- 
 dote in illustration of his meaning. Sir 
 George Beaumont, sitting with himself and 
 Crabbe one day, blew out the candle which 
 he had used in sealing a letter. Sir George 
 and Wordsworth, with proper taste, sat 
 watching the smoke rise from the wick in 
 beautiful curves; but Crabbe seeing — or 
 rather smelling — the object, and not seeing 
 the beauty of it, put on the extinguisher. 
 Therefore, said Wordsworth, Crabbe is un- 
 poetical, — as fine a bit of aesthetic priggish- 
 ness as is often met with. Scott's opinion 
 was not much affected by the anecdote, and 
 Wordsworth was on the wrong track. It 
 is true, however, that Crabbe was unpoet- 
 ical in Wordsworth's sense. Crabbe had no 
 imaginative vision, — no such vision as is 
 shown in that stormy landscape of Shelley's, 
 in the opening of The Revolt of Islam, which 
 lacks the truth of actuality, but possesses 
 the higher imaginative truth, like Turner's 
 painting, or as is shown in that other storm 
 in Pippa Passes. Crabbe saw sword-grass 
 and saltwort and fen, but he had no secret 
 of the imagination by which he could min- 
 gle them into harmonious beauty ; there is 
 loveliness in a salt marsh, but Crabbe could 
 
CRABBE. 45 
 
 not present it, nor even see it for himself. 
 As in landscape so in life. Goldsmith was 
 untrue to the actual Auburn, but he was 
 faithful to a far more precious truth, the 
 truth of remembered childhood, and he re- 
 vealed with the utmost beauty the effect of 
 the subtlest working of the spirit of man on 
 practical fact ; it is his fidelity to this psy- 
 chological and spiritual truth which makes 
 Auburn the " loveliest village of the plain." 
 Crabbe exhibited nothing of this imagina- 
 tive transformation of the familiar and the 
 commonplace, perhaps saw nothing of it ; he 
 described the fishing village of Aldborough 
 as any one with good powers of perception, 
 who took the trouble, might see it. Through 
 these defects of his powers he loses in poetic 
 value ; his poetry is, as he called it, poetry 
 without an atmosphere ; it is a reflection, 
 almost mirror-like, of plain fact. 
 
 Men go to poetry too often with a pre- 
 conceived notion of what the poet ought to 
 give, instead of with open minds for what- 
 ever he has to give. Too much is not to be 
 expected from Crabbe. He was only a sim- 
 ple country clergyman, half educated, with 
 no burning ideals, no reveries, no passion- 
 ate dreams; his mind did not rise out of 
 
46 CBABBE. 
 
 the capabilities and virtues of respectability. 
 His life was as little poetical, in Words- 
 worth's sense, as his poetry. Yet his gift 
 was not an empty one. Moore, Scott, and 
 Byron were story-tellers who were poetical, 
 in Wordsworth's sense ; but is Crabbe's true 
 description of humble life less valuable than 
 Scott's romantic tradition, or Moore's melt- 
 ing, senuous Oriental dream, or Byron's sen- 
 timental, falsely-heroic adventure ? It is far 
 more valuable, because there is more of the 
 human heart in it ; because it contains actual 
 suffering and joy of fellow-men ; because it 
 is humanity, and calls for hospitality in our 
 sympathies and charities. Unpoetical? Yes; 
 but it is something to have real life brought 
 home to our tears and laughter, although it 
 be presented barely, and the poet has trusted 
 to the Tightness and tenderness of our hearts 
 for those feelings the absence of which in 
 his verse led Wordsworth to call these tales 
 unpoetical. But it is only when Crabbe is 
 at his best that his verse has this extraor- 
 dinary power. 
 
ON THE PEOMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 In the domestic, chatty, and nonsense por- 
 tions of the letters of Keats, in their chaff- 
 ing, their abandon, their unregarded laugh- 
 ter (and admirable fooling they are, too), 
 there is a spontaneous and irresponsible 
 gayety, which, being quite natural only to 
 the young heart and mind, charmingly dis- 
 closes his youthfulness as a prime quality. 
 Of all the famous English poets, he had most 
 of the spirit of April in him. y His senses 
 were keen ; his temperament was feverish, 
 now jealous and irritable, and straightway 
 humble and indulgent ; his imaginary joys 
 and sorrows were spiritual possessions, sub- 
 jecting him ; his humor was scampering, 
 his fancy teeming, his taste erratic, his crit- 
 ical faculty exposed to balking enthusiasms ; 
 his opinions of men and affairs were hasty, 
 circumscribed, frequently adopted unreflect- 
 ingly at second-hand ; and, with all these boy- 
 ish traits, he was extremely self-absorbed. 
 At the centre of his individuality, never- 
 
48 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 theless, was the elemental spark, the sav- 
 ing power of genius, the temperance, sanity, 
 and self-reverence of a fine nature gradually 
 coming to the knowledge of its faculties 
 and unriddling the secret of its own moral 
 beauty. *- Hence Lord Houghton, doing more 
 essential justice to Keats than any of his 
 louder eulogists, describes his works as rather 
 the exercises of his poetical education than 
 the charactery of his original and free pow- 
 er ; and Matthew Arnold, even when plac- 
 ing him with Shakespeare, excuses him as a 
 'prentice hand in the wisest art. Too many 
 of his admirers, seizing upon the external, 
 accidental, and temporal in his biography 
 and the fragmentary and parasitical in his 
 poetry, have really wronged Keats more 
 than did the now infamous reviews ; they 
 have rescued him from among the cockneys 
 only to confound him with the neo-pagans. 
 In what did the promise of Keats lie ? 
 The first step in the inquiry is the recogni- 
 tion of his immaturity, — the acknowledg- 
 ment that his memorials must be searched 
 for the germ rather than the fruit. 
 
 Sensuous Keats was, as every poet whose 
 inspiration is direct from Heaven must be ; 
 unfortunately, the extraordinary beauty and 
 
ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 49 
 
 facility of his descriptions of sensation, and 
 his taste for climax and point in his prose 
 have made it easy to quote phrases which 
 seem to show that he was unduly attached 
 to delights of mere sense. To pass by the 
 anecdotes of Haydon, not too scrupulous a 
 truth-teller, here is a characteristic para- 
 graph written to his brother George : — 
 
 " This morning I am in a sort of temper, 
 indolent, and supremely careless ; I long 
 after a stanza or two of Thomson's Castle of 
 Indolence ; my passions are all asleep, from 
 my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and 
 weakened the animal fibre all over me to a 
 delightful sensation about three degrees this 
 side of faintness. If I had teeth of pearl 
 and the breath of lilies, I should call it 
 languor ; but as I am I must call it laziness. 
 In this state of effeminacy, the fibres of the 
 brain are relaxed in common with the rest 
 of the body, and to such a happy degree 
 that pleasure has no show of enticement and 
 pain no unbearable frown ; neither poetry, 
 nor ambition, nor love have any alertness of 
 countenance ; as they pass by me, they seem 
 rather like three figures in a Greek vase, 
 two men and a woman, whom no one but 
 myself could distinguish in their disguise- 
 
50 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 ment. This is the only happiness, and is a 
 rare instance of advantage in the body over- 
 powering the mind." 
 
 With siiniliar zest he enumerates the 
 pleasures of drinking claret or of eating a 
 peach, or he describes his " East Indian " 
 to his brother's wife : " She kept me awake 
 one night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. 
 I speak of the thing as a pastime and an 
 amusement, than which I can feel none 
 deeper than a conversation with an imperial 
 woman, the very 4 yes' and 'no' of whose 
 lips is to me a banquet. . . . As a man of 
 the world, I love the rich talk of a Char- 
 mian; as an eternal being, I love the thought 
 of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I 
 should like you to save me." 
 
 Such quick susceptibility to sensuous im- 
 pressions of every kind may be plentifully 
 illustrated by opening almost at random in 
 his works. But the characteristics that mark 
 the real sensualist — the content that the 
 lotus-leaf vapors forth, the fierceness of the 
 centaur's pursuit, the struggle of the faun's 
 transformation — are nowhere to be found 
 in the letters or the poems ; before his ill- 
 ness, at least, there is no debility, irresolu- 
 tion, or mastery of the instincts over the 
 
ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 51 
 
 mind. In fact, without any revolution of 
 his nature, without the slightest effort, by 
 mere growth it would seem, he passed on 
 into the "Chamber of Maiden Thought," 
 as he phrased it, and became absorbed as 
 deeply in his reflections as previously in 
 his impulses. At no time, indeed, was he 
 wholly unthoughtful. The passages that 
 have been given above are parenthetical, 
 and should be read in connection with such 
 as these, of the opposite tenor : — 
 
 " I must think that difficulties nerve the 
 spirit of a man ; they make our prime ob- 
 jects a refuge as well as a passion." 
 
 " I am becoming accustomed to the priva- 
 tions of the pleasures of sense. In the midst 
 of the world, I live like a hermit. I have 
 forgot how to lay plans for the enjoyment 
 of any pleasure. I feel I can bear anything, 
 — any misery, even imprisonment, — so long 
 as I have neither wife nor child." 
 
 " Women must want imagination, and 
 they may thank God for it ; and so may we, 
 that a delicate being can feel happy without 
 any sense of crime." 
 
 " Scenery is fine, but human nature is 
 finer ; the sward is richer for the tread of a 
 real nervous English foot ; the eagle's nest 
 
52 ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 is finer for the mountaineer having looked 
 into it." 
 
 Many a remark, based like these immedi- 
 ately upon his own experience, shows that 
 Keats had an insight into his own life and 
 an outlook on the world inconsistent with 
 the portrayal of him as merely impassioned 
 with sensuous beauty. 
 
 So far, in fact, was Keats from being 
 either lapped in Lydian airs or fed on food 
 of sweetest melancholy that he was some- 
 times a disagreeably unhappy person, if his 
 brother George's description of him be en- 
 tirely true, since his moodiness was vented 
 in complaints, irritable jealousies, and like 
 ways. However exceptional such occasions 
 were in the intercourse of the brothers, this 
 exposure, taken together with some of the 
 upbraidings in the letters to Fanny Brawne, 
 is very significant. Keats himself refers to 
 the strain of morbidity in him, and, although 
 from time to time he felt the strong awaken- 
 ing of the philanthropic instinct, frequently 
 expresses his distaste for society, his mis- 
 anthropy, his indifference to the public, his 
 wish to live withdrawn, free from human 
 relations, engaged in poetizing for his own 
 sake. Toward women especially he had a 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 53 
 
 bitter tongue, before he fell in love with 
 Fanny Brawne. 
 
 " When I was a schoolboy, I thought a 
 fair woman a pure goddess ; my mind was a 
 soft nest in which some one of them slept, 
 though she knew it not. . . . When I am 
 among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, 
 spleen ; I cannot speak or be silent ; I am 
 full of suspicions, and therefore listen to 
 nothing ; I am in a hurry to be gone. You 
 must be charitable, and put all this perver- 
 sity to my being disappointed since my boy- 
 hood. Yet with such feelings I am happier 
 alone, among crowds of men, by myself, or 
 with a friend or two." 
 
 He ascribes this peculiarity to his love for 
 his brothers, " passing the love of women : " 
 
 "I have been ill-tempered with them, I 
 have vexed them, — but the thought of them 
 has always stifled the impression that any 
 woman might otherwise have made on me." 
 
 He saw but little to choose, in his satirical 
 moods, between men and hawks : — 
 
 "The hawk wants a mate; so does the 
 Man. Look at them both ; they set about it 
 and procure one in the same manner ; they 
 want both a nest, and they set about one 
 in the same manner. The noble animal 
 
54 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 man, for his amusement, smokes a pipe ; the 
 hawk balances about the clouds : that is the 
 only difference of their leisures." 
 
 Experience did not teach him more charity, 
 though it made him more discriminating : — 
 
 " The more I know of men the more I 
 know how to value entire liberality in any 
 of them. Thank God, there are a great 
 many who will sacrifice their worldly inter- 
 est for a friend. I wish there were more 
 who would sacrifice their passions. The 
 worst of men are those whose self-interests 
 are their passions; the next, those whose 
 passions are their self-interest. Upon the 
 whole, I dislike mankind. Whatever people 
 on the other side of the question may ad- 
 vance, they cannot deny that they are always 
 surprised at hearing of a good action and 
 never of a bad one." 
 
 This temper toward man in the abstract is 
 the general feeling of which his mood toward 
 the public is a special instance. He simply 
 disregarded men who stood in no intimate 
 relation to him, whether he met them in so- 
 ciety or wrote verses for them to read. He 
 was not, if his word be literally taken, sen- 
 sitive to criticism or ambitious of popular- 
 ity: he neglected the one because he put 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 55 
 
 faith in his own judgment, and he despised 
 the other because it was to be got at a vul- 
 gar cost. His depreciation of the life of 
 men, as he saw it, arose partly from a con- 
 sciousness of power, partly from a sense of 
 the distance between his thoughts and hopes 
 and those of his fellows. The aloofness of 
 genius he had in full measure. That curi- 
 ously complex emotion, into which so many 
 instincts and perceptions enter that it is 
 scarcely analyzable at all, and is forced to 
 go under the name of pride, was often dom- 
 inant in his moods when others than his 
 friends were before his attention. In short, 
 Keats was as incompatible with his sur- 
 roundings as ever any young poet left to the 
 oblivion of his own society ; and he was as 
 indignant at stupidity, as tired of insignifi- 
 cance, as thoroughly world-weary, as a soli- 
 tary enthusiast for the ideal could well be. 
 In his last letter to George he sums the 
 whole matter up more fully than at first but 
 to the same purport : — 
 
 " 'T is best to remain aloof from people, 
 and like their good parts without being eter- 
 nally troubled with the dull process of their 
 every-day lives. When once a person has 
 smoked the vapidness of the routine of soci- 
 
56 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 ety, he must either have self-interest or the 
 love of some sort of distinction to keep him 
 in good humor with it. All I can say is 
 that, standing at Charing Cross and looking 
 east, west, north, and south, I can see no- 
 thing but dullness. I hope while I am young 
 to live retired in tho country. When I grow 
 in years and have a right to be idle, I shall 
 enjoy cities more." 
 
 In this opinion he did retire to one place 
 or another, — the Isle of Wight, or Win- 
 chester, or Teignmouth, and there isolating 
 himself dreamed out his poems. He lived 
 in a sort of ecstasy during no small portion 
 of these solitary hours, when he could call 
 the roaring of the wind his wife, the stars 
 through the window panes his children, and 
 rest contented in the abstract idea of beauty 
 in all things. This absorption in the idea 
 of beauty which determined the formulation 
 of his creed in the oft-quoted lines, — 
 
 " Beauty is truth, truth heauty, — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know ; " 
 
 which also led him into that much misunder- 
 stood exclamation, " O for a life of sensa- 
 tions rather than of thoughts ; " this intoxica- 
 tion, as it were, with the loveliness of earth, 
 was in his belief a true Pythian inspiration, 
 
ON THE PB0M1SE OF KEATS. 57 
 
 the medium of the divine revelation. The 
 world takes such expressions as extravagan- 
 zas, or as mystical philosophy ; but to Keats 
 they were as commonplace as the proverbs 
 of the hearth; he meant them as entirely 
 lucid expressions of plain sense. This point 
 in the criticism of Keats has been too little 
 insisted on and brought to notice. He put 
 his faith in the suggestions of the spirit ; he 
 relied on the intimations of what is veiled 
 from full sight ; he had little patience with 
 minds that cannot be content with half- 
 knowledge, or refuse to credit convictions 
 because they cannot be expressed in detail, 
 with logical support, and felt with the hand 
 of sense all round, if one may employ the 
 phrase; in other words, he believed in the 
 imagination as a truth-finding faculty, not 
 less valid because it presents truth in a 
 wholly different way from the purely logical 
 intellect. This was the deepest and most 
 rooted persuasion of his mind from the time 
 when he first comes under our observation. 
 To bring together a few expressions of it is 
 the only right way of setting forth his creed 
 in this matter. The following extracts are 
 from various parts of his letters, from the 
 earliest to the later ones : — 
 
58 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 " At once it struck me what quality went 
 to form a man of achievement, especially in 
 literature, and which Shakespeare possessed 
 so enormously — I mean negative capability, 
 that is, when a man is capable of being in 
 uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any 
 irritable reaching after fact and reason. 
 Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a 
 fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the 
 penetralium of Mystery, from being inca- 
 pable of remaining content with half-know- 
 ledge. This pursued through volumes would 
 perhaps take us no further than this, that 
 with a great poet the sense of Beauty over- 
 comes every other consideration, or rather 
 obliterates all consideration." 
 
 " Many a man can travel to the very 
 bourne of heaven, and yet want confidence 
 to put down his half-seeing." 
 
 " I never feel quite certain of any truth 
 but from a clear perception of its beauty, 
 and I find myself very young-minded, even 
 in that perceptive power." 
 
 " The whole thing must, I think, have ap- 
 peared to you, who are a consecutive man, 
 as a thing almost of mere words. But I 
 assure you that, when I wrote it, it was a 
 regular stepping of the imagination toward 
 a truth." 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 59 
 
 " What the imagination seizes as beauty 
 must be truth, whether it existed before or 
 not. . . . The imagination may be compared 
 to Adam's dream — he awoke and found it 
 truth. I am more zealous in this affair be- 
 cause I have never yet been able to perceive 
 how anything can be known for truth by 
 consecutive reasoning, and yet [so] it must 
 be. . . . However it may be, O for a life of 
 sensations rather than of thoughts ! It is a 
 4 vision in the form of youth,' a shadow of 
 reality to come." 
 
 A shadow of reality to come ! What a 
 light that sentence throws on the aspira- 
 tion for sensations rather than thoughts, for 
 beauty rather than logic, for the sight rather 
 than the inference, for the direct rather than 
 the mediate perception of the divine ! So, 
 at least, it is plain, Keats understood him- 
 self; and whether one counts his faith a 
 vague self-deception, meaningless except to 
 a mystic, or has found the most precious 
 truth borne in upon his heart only by this 
 selfsame way, the recognition of the poet's 
 philosophy not merely lifts Keats out of and 
 above the sphere of the purely sensuous, but 
 reveals at once the spiritual substance which 
 underlies his poetry, and which gives it vi- 
 
60 ON THE PBOMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 tality for all time. To other men beauty 
 has been a passion, but to him it was a faith ; 
 it was the substance of things hoped for, the 
 evidence of things unseen, — a shadow of 
 the reality to come. It was not, as with 
 other poets, in the beauty of nature, the 
 beauty of virtue, the beauty of a woman's 
 face, singly that he found his way to the 
 supra-sensible; he says in his most solemn 
 words, " I have loved the principle of beauty 
 in all things" Dying he said it proudly, 
 as one who had kept the faith that was given 
 him ; and since he chose that declaration as 
 the summary of his accomplishment, it needs 
 to be borne in mind, with all its large and 
 many-sided meaning, by those who would 
 pluck out the heart of his mystery. 
 
 But although to Keats the worship of 
 beauty in all things was the essence of his 
 life, and the delight that sprang from it the 
 essence of his joy, he did not find in these 
 the whole of life. At first he had been sat- 
 isfied if the melancholy fit fell on him, 
 "sudden from heaven, like a weeping cloud," 
 — eager to let the passion have its way 
 with him, until it wreaked itself upon ex- 
 pression; but he felt this overmastering of 
 his own will an injury, not merely exhaust 
 ing but wasteful. 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 61 
 
 " Some think I have lost that poetic ardor 
 and fire 't is said I once had ; — the fact is, 
 perhaps I have ; but, instead of that, I hope 
 I shall substitute a more thoughtful and 
 quiet power. I am more frequently, now, 
 contented to read and think, but now and 
 then haunted with ambitious thoughts, . . . 
 scarcely content to write the best verses for 
 the fever they leave behind. I want to com- 
 pose without this fever. I hope I one day 
 shall." 
 
 Similarly, he wishes to know more, and 
 is determined to " get learning, get under- 
 standing," if only that he may keep his bal- 
 ance in the " high sensations " that draw 
 him into their whirl. 
 
 " Although I take poetry to be the chief, 
 there is something else wanting to one who 
 passes his time among books and thoughts 
 on books. ... I find earlier days are gone 
 by — I find I can have no enjoyment in the 
 world but continual drinking of knowledge. 
 I find there is no worthy pursuit but the 
 idea of doing some good to the world. . . . 
 There is but one way for me. The road lies 
 through application, study, and thought. I 
 will pursue it ; and, for that end, purpose 
 retiring for some years." 
 
62 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 The years that should have perfected his 
 powers were denied to him ; his account was 
 made up. In these broken plans, however ; 
 in this constant expansion of his view and 
 faithful laying of his experience to heart ; 
 in the wisdom of his interpretation of what 
 came within his scope ; in a word, in his 
 teachableness as well as in his steadier en- 
 thusiasm, his uncloyed sensibility, his finer 
 spirituality, as the promise of Keats seems 
 brighter, so his worth seems greater. These 
 letters show that more had passed into his 
 character than was ever reproduced in his 
 poems. We come back to Lord Houghton's 
 decision. Fine as the work of Keats is, his 
 genius was, nevertheless, 
 
 " The bloom, whose petals, nipt "before they blew, 
 Died on the promise of the fruit." 
 
 It has been suggested in some quarters that, 
 notwithstanding his early death, he would 
 probably have done no better work, if in- 
 deed he even maintained himself at the 
 height he had reached. In support of this 
 it is urged that Wordsworth's best poetry 
 was written in youth, and that Coleridge's 
 powers were employed on really excellent 
 verse only for two years. These letters 
 make it folly to entertain such a belief -, 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 63 
 
 they (and the works too) exhibit not only 
 an increase of intellectual, but also of artis- 
 tic power. No criticism of his poetry is in- 
 tended here ; but, in connection with this 
 point, it may be remarked that his prin- 
 cipal defect is in style, as is shown by the 
 necessity he continually felt of studying lit- 
 erary models, which nevertheless affected his 
 productions hardly at all, except in linguis- 
 tic handling, — in the choice and flow of 
 words, after Spenser, the structure of sen- 
 tences, after Milton, and later (in Lamia), 
 after Dryden, and in a movement and kind 
 of verbal espidt, after Ariosto. This restless 
 change from one master to another, as well 
 as some few critical remarks, indicates a 
 power to form a distinctive style of his own. 
 Again, the marked pictorial character of his 
 poetry — the quality it has to impress one 
 like a cartoon or a bas-relief (" the brede 
 of marble men and maidens "), the grace of 
 form and attitude in the figures of his poetic 
 vision — was clearly recognized by him to 
 be in excess in his compositions. Originally, 
 this was due, in a high degree, to the acci- 
 dent of his friendship with Hay don ; the 
 portfolios of the masters helped his imagi- 
 nation in definiteness, in refinement, and es- 
 
64 ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 
 
 pecially in power of grouping. As the mind 
 became more to him, and the eye less, he 
 was dissatisfied with this trait of his works. 
 He condemned even the most perfect com- 
 position of this kind in English: "I wish 
 to diffuse the coloring of St. Agnes' Eve 
 throughout a poem in which character and 
 sentiment would be the figures to such drap- 
 ery." One who could speak of such a poem 
 as "drapery" was far from the conclusion 
 of his artistic education. Lastly, he was 
 from the beginning ambitious of writing 
 dramas. Otho and King Stephen are by no 
 means unmistakable prophecies of success, 
 had he continued in this hope. The effort, 
 however, proves an interest in humanity of 
 a different order from that shown in the 
 mythological or lyrical pieces, and makes 
 evident how far the naturalism of his pub- 
 lished poetry was from expressing the full- 
 ness of his mind. These three things — the 
 incipiency of his style, the acknowledged in- 
 sufficiency of picturesque art in creating the 
 best poetry, and the ardent desire to deal 
 with human life directly, and on the large 
 scale, in the drama — are enough to convince 
 us that Keats was truly a Chatterton, only 
 less unfortunate, — " born for the future, to 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS. 65 
 
 the future lost ; " one who, though he wears, 
 Adonis-like, the immortal youth that lies in 
 the gift of early death, would have been 
 even dearer to the world, had his name lost 
 in pathos and gained in honor, as it assur- 
 edly would have done if his grass-grown 
 grave wore the wheaten garland of England 
 instead of the Roman daisies. 
 
AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 It is rare good fortune to find criticism 
 in which the ideas are more excellent than 
 the manner, and the spirit finer than the 
 ideas ; in which it is not the keener sym- 
 pathy of the poet that speaks, or the sure 
 sense of the trained artist for expression, or 
 any single faculty, but the whole nature of 
 the man ; in which the judgment rendered 
 does not proceed from any particular part 
 of his mind — the scholarly or moral or aes- 
 thetic element by itself — but is felt to be 
 grounded upon his total convictions. Au- 
 brey de Yere's essays, therefore, are worth 
 more than ordinary attention. He writes 
 principally of Spenser and Wordsworth, and 
 also of Milton, Shelley, and Keats. He 
 considers mainly the doctrine of this poetry. 
 He values it chiefly for its highest office as a 
 teacher of moral wisdom, and a quickener of 
 the spiritual part of our nature. Pie justly 
 decides that its real subject is man's life ; 
 this is the centre of interest in all great 
 
 
AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 67 
 
 thought, and the rest is but ornament and 
 episode. He is a Christian idealist, and he 
 refuses to regard poetry except in the light 
 of those great ideas which belong to the 
 spirit, and, being nobly and beautifully in- 
 terpreted, are the substance of the poets 
 who live by their wisdom as well as by 
 charm. The ethical, the philosophical ele- 
 ment in a large sense, is to him the engross- 
 ing thing ; and criticism of this sort, so in- 
 cited and so aimed, has a reality that does 
 not fall far short of the worth of direct re- 
 flection upon the things of the mind, though 
 it deals with them through the medium of 
 literature instead of in life itself. 
 
 With Spenser, naturally, he has many 
 affinities. The medievalism, the sentiment 
 of chivalry, the allegorizing spirit, and not 
 less the Puritan elevation of the first of the 
 Elizabethan poets, exercise a special fasci- 
 nation over a Catholic mind for whom the 
 Ages of Faith, as he likes to call them, have 
 in a peculiar degree the ideality that clothes 
 the past. One no longer looks for original 
 criticism of the father of English verse, 
 who, more than Chaucer, may claim the pa- 
 ternity of great poets in later days ; but to 
 remind us of his excellence has become, in 
 
68 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 
 
 the lapse of time and the decline of poetic 
 taste, almost as desirable an office as it once 
 was to unfold its secret. Spenser is a poet 
 who requires no common critic to speak 
 justly of him. His position was a unique 
 one, and by some infelicity of his stars he 
 failed to rise to the greatness which seems to 
 have been possible to him. Aubrey de Yere 
 remarks that the great romantic poem of the 
 Middle Ages, one that should sum them up 
 on the human as Dante did upon the divine 
 side, was never written ; and, looking back, 
 it appears to us that Spenser was the choice 
 spirit that missed this destiny. His pure 
 poetic quality, that sensibility to beauty and 
 delight in it as in his element, was perfect 
 to such a degree that Milton and Keats, who 
 possessed it in something of the same meas- 
 ure, seem almost to have derived it from 
 him, whose poems nourished it in them. The 
 sweetness and noble ease of his expression 
 reveal the presence of a marvelous literary 
 faculty. His responsiveness to the histor- 
 ical and legendary elements in the past, his 
 power of abstracting and idealizing them 
 for poetic use, and his profound interest in 
 human life, were great endowments, and he 
 possessed in a high degree and a pure form 
 
ATJBBEY DE VERE ON POETRY. 69 
 
 that moral reason which is the attribute of 
 genius. But by defects as striking as this 
 gift he made his poem less than we fondly 
 think it might have been. The Elizabethan 
 prolixity, the obscure perception of the na- 
 ture of form in literary work, the artificial- 
 ity incident to the allegorizing temperament, 
 account for much of what he lost ; but, for 
 all that, his poems are marvels of the crea- 
 tive intellect, and it is this intellect that Au- 
 brey de Vere dwells on. Any one can point 
 out Spenser's loveliness, but the great spirit 
 that brooded over his verse is not so easily 
 realized. His aim was " to strengthen man 
 by his own mind," and it is this effort which 
 the critic analyzes, and by so doing tries 
 to show how well he deserved the epithet 
 "grave " as well as " gentle Spenser." 
 
 His work, with its intricate allegory, its 
 machinery of faeryland and chivalry, its 
 ideal landscape, is regarded as remote from 
 life ; but just as the creations of art, which 
 also have this unreality, are yet the expres- 
 sion, oftentimes, of the most real human 
 feeling and the most substantial thought of 
 the mind, so the figures of his embroidered 
 poem compose a procession of true life. 
 They are conceived and used in accordance 
 
70 AUBBEY BE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 with a comprehensive doctrine of the nature 
 of humanity, which Spenser undoubtedly 
 meant to enforce through the medium of the 
 imagination ; this doctrine, in fact, is the 
 stuff they are made of. 
 
 It is not an easy thing to resolve into its 
 moral elements the creations of a poet who 
 blends many strains of truth. His method 
 is not the consecutive process of logical re- 
 flection and explication, but the simultane- 
 ous embodiment of what, however arrived 
 at, he presents as intuitive, needing only to 
 be seen, to be acknowledged. In the analy- 
 sis, the distinctive poetic quality is too apt 
 to be dissipated, and the poet is forgotten in 
 the philosopher. Certain broad aspects may 
 be easily made out. Chivalry, with its crowd 
 of faery knights, certainly rests, in Spenser's 
 great work, upon the old conception of the 
 Christian life as one militant against the 
 enemies of the soul in the world ; and quite 
 as clearly he also represents this life as be- 
 ing, within the breast, ideal peace. Peace 
 within and war without : these are two root- 
 ideas out of which the poem flowers on its 
 great double branches. He teaches specif- 
 ically how to attain self-control, and how to 
 meet attacks from without; or rather how 
 
AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY. 71 
 
 to seek those many forms of error which do 
 mischief in the world, and to overcome them 
 for the world's welfare. This is a bald state- 
 ment, but it indicates well enough in what 
 way Spenser employed the knightly ideal of 
 succor on the one hand, and the Christian 
 ideal of moral perfection on the other, in or- 
 der to make a poem which should instruct 
 as well as delight the world. He himself as- 
 serts that his aim was so lofty, and to a man 
 such as he was a lower aim, a merely artistic 
 purpose, would have been impossible. It is 
 fortunate that he was not less endowed with 
 the sense of loveliness than with a serious 
 mind ; for he thus illustrates not only the 
 possible union of the two principal aims of 
 poetry in all times, but also the truth that 
 to a man whose perception of beauty is most 
 perfect the beauty of holiness is the more 
 impressive and authoritative in its com- 
 mands. Aubrey de Vere devotes himself 
 especially to the declaration and the proof 
 that Spenser's poetic character was essen- 
 tially that of a man deeply interested in 
 human life, and he tries to prevent the 
 poet's severely ideal, and sometimes fantas- 
 tic, method from obscuring, as for many 
 minds it does, the real nature of that alle- 
 
72 AUBREY DE VEEE ON POETRY. 
 
 gory, so marvelous for invention, eloquence, 
 and perpetual charm of style, which is sel- 
 dom thought to be more than an intricate 
 and lovely legend of the imagination. The 
 critic is not blind to the great defects of the 
 work, — and no poem of equal rank has 
 more, — nor does he neglect the excellences 
 that are obvious to the least thoughtful 
 reader ; but he succeeds in placing before 
 us its intellectual and moral substance. 
 
 In doing this he reveals his own theory of 
 poetry, and it is one that derives its philoso- 
 phy from the great historic works of our lit- 
 erature, and is grounded on the practice of 
 the English masters whose fame is secure. 
 Its cardinal principle is that man is the only 
 object of interest to man, all else being sub- 
 ordinate, and valuable only for its relations 
 to this main theme ; and more particularly 
 this subject is the spiritual life, not the ma- 
 terial manifestations of his energies in deeds 
 apart from their meaning. The Italian mas- 
 ters of Spenser too often lost themselves in 
 incident, in romance, in story for its own 
 sake ; they were destitute of that ethical 
 spirit which insists on planting in the deeds 
 their significance, and regarding this as an 
 integral, and indeed the only immortal, part 
 
AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 73 
 
 of the action. The laws of life, not the 
 chances of individuals, were Spenser's sub- 
 ject, and in this he differs from Ariosto, and 
 leaves his company. Spenser's genius was 
 thus abstract and contemplative, and Pla- 
 tonic in the sense that he used images always 
 with some reference to the general truths 
 that transcend imagination, and are directly 
 apprehended only intellectually. Allegory 
 was therefore his necessary method. Spen- 
 ser never succeeded in harmonizing the dis- 
 parate elements of the material to which he 
 fell heir by literary tradition ; and besides 
 the inconsistencies and incoherencies of the 
 Renaissance culture, which never reached 
 any unity in its own time, there were also 
 special disturbances in his intellectual life 
 because of the political and religious con- 
 flicts in England itself, from entanglement 
 with which he was not free ; and, moreover, 
 he does not seem to have subdued the philo- 
 sophical and poetic impulses of his own na- 
 ture to any true accord. His poem, there- 
 fore, did not take on that perfection, that 
 identity of purpose and execution, which 
 would have placed it in the first rank, and 
 he remains below the supreme poets of the 
 world. The study of his work, as an illus- 
 
74 AUBBET BE VEBE ON POETBY. 
 
 tration of the conditions and art of poetry, 
 is most instructive. Its defects teach more 
 than its excellence, but they do not disturb 
 the theory which Aubrey de Vere sets forth ; 
 and he would be but a blind critic who 
 should easily argue that Spenser succeeded 
 when he obeyed the pure artistic impulse, 
 and failed because of the interference of his 
 graver genius with the poetical mind, his 
 thought with his sensibility. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere's contemplative mind, his 
 strong hold on the abstract rather than on 
 the concrete, help him over the poetically 
 dry places in Spenser, and serve him even 
 better in the case of Wordsworth. This is 
 choosing the better of two alternatives ; for, 
 if the landscape of Arcady is incomplete for 
 him unless there is some "swan -flight of 
 Platonic ideas " over it, such as he says is 
 always in Spenser's sky, he has an appreci- 
 ation for beauty as steadfastly as for the 
 higher truths of life, and it is better to suffer 
 with deficiencies in poetic art for the sake of 
 the matter than to be content with art alone. 
 
 The great difference between Wordsworth 
 and Spenser is, that Spenser was concerned 
 with the moral virtues and man's acquire- 
 ment of them, while Wordsworth was more 
 
AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 75 
 
 narrowly limited to the influence o£ nature 
 in forming the soul. Both looked to the 
 same end, — spiritual life ; but Wordsworth 
 had a different starting-point. His mind 
 was more individual, and he assumed that 
 his own history was typical ; he was less rich 
 in the stores of antiquity, and he had less 
 sensibility to beauty in its ideal forms ; but 
 he knew the place that nature held in his 
 own development, and he became specifically 
 the poet of nature, not only as beauty visible 
 to the eye, but also, and mainly, as an invis- 
 ible influence in the lives of men. Much of 
 his verse was a pastoral form of philosophy ; 
 meditation counted for more than beauty in 
 it ; but the scene was the English country, 
 and the characters were rustics. There was, 
 too, something of imaginative untruth in 
 it, no doubt, similar to that inherent in all 
 pastoral poetry. These common men, how- 
 ever, were not individuals, but stood for 
 man, and Wordsworth, in delineating their 
 histories, was writing a parable as well as 
 a story. In other portions of his verse he 
 used a more abstract method. As a moral- 
 ist he was much given to maxims ; and in 
 all that concerns the social and political life 
 of man, as well as his personal relations to 
 
76 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 
 
 virtue, Wordsworth was, as the critic affirms 
 with much emphasis, filled with a certain 
 ardor, which may be called passion if one 
 likes. The lack of passion in the ordinary 
 sense — and it cannot be made out that 
 Wordsworth possessed this quality — only 
 renders more plain the moral endowment of 
 the poet, his absorbing interest in the manly 
 virtues, and the supreme value which he 
 placed on the spiritual life and its ideal rela- 
 tions. He considered these relations most di- 
 rectly as existing toward nature, and having 
 their operation in the emotion which nature 
 excites. He did not altogether escape from 
 the pantheism incident to such a constant 
 preoccupation of the mind with the works 
 and course of nature, and consequently he is 
 less distinctively Christian than Spenser ; 
 but Aubrey de Vere easily makes it out that 
 W r ordsworth's philosophy, much as it differed 
 from Spenser's, is concerned with the same 
 topics of moral and spiritual life, and is the 
 substance of his poetry. 
 
 It is not surprising that a writer of Au- 
 brey de Vere's temperament is annoyed by 
 the charge that Wordsworth is destitute of 
 "passion." He has much to say on this 
 point. Wordsworth himself gave as the rea- 
 
AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 77 
 
 son why he did not write love-poems the fear 
 that they would be too passionate. Aubrey 
 de Yere makes what defense he can by 
 pointing out the half-dozen idealizations of 
 woman in the shorter lyrics; but his real 
 apology consists in the counter-assertion that 
 Wordsworth is especially distinguished for 
 " passion." He uses the word, however, 
 with a difference, and means by it the poetic 
 glow, the exaltation of feeling, the lyrical 
 possession, which attends the moment of 
 creation and passes into the verse. Of this 
 sort of passion every form of poetry is as 
 capable as is the amorous : the sceva indig- 
 natio of satire would come under this head 
 as properly as the moral enthusiasm or the 
 patriotic fervor shown in the Ode to Duty 
 or the Sonnets. Wordsworth truly possessed 
 this capability, and it gives to his poems 
 their masculine strength. Whether equal 
 success is to be credited to the critic's glosses 
 upon the more commonplace subjects of 
 Wordsworth's muse, is doubtful; it seems 
 rather that he makes the mistake which Cole- 
 ridge attributed to Wordsworth himself, of 
 giving a value to the idea which it has in his 
 own mind, but which it does not have in the 
 bare words addressed to the reader. When 
 
78 AUBREY BE VERE ON POETRY. 
 
 the idea and the expression are not identi- 
 cal, every poet suffers from this cause ; in 
 his mind the idea, coming first, dignifies the 
 words, but to the reader the words coming 
 first, too often mutilate the idea. It is a 
 good result of Aubrey de Vere's Words- 
 worthianism that it gives him courage to 
 force into the front of his essay the Orphic 
 Odes, which are among the least known of 
 the poet's work, and contain some of the no- 
 blest of his lines. 
 
 To Milton he seems somewhat unjust. 
 The earlier poems receive his warm appreci- 
 ation, but of the later ones he is hardly so 
 tolerant, and nowhere does he give him his 
 due. This is the passage : — 
 
 " It is not, however, its deficient popu- 
 larity so much as its subject and its form 
 which proves that Milton's great work is not 
 a national poem, high as it ranks among our 
 national triumphs. Some will affirm that 
 he illustrated in that work his age if not his 
 country. His age, however, gave him an 
 impulse rather than materials. Puritanism 
 became transmuted, as it passed through his 
 capacious and ardent mind, into a faith He- 
 braic in its austere spirit — a faith that sym- 
 pathized indeed with the Iconoclastic zeal 
 
AUBREY DE VERE ON POETRY. 79 
 
 which distinguished the anti-Catholic and 
 anti-patristic theology of the age, but held 
 little consort with any of the complex defini- 
 tions at that time insisted on as the symbols 
 of Protestant orthodoxy. Had the Puritan 
 spirit been as genuine a thing as the spirit 
 of liberty which accompanied it ; had it been 
 such as their reverence for Milton makes 
 many suppose it to have been, the mood 
 would not so soon have yielded to the licen- 
 tiousness that followed the Restoration. . . . 
 To him the classic model supplied, not the 
 adornment of his poem, but its structure 
 and form. The soul that wielded that mould 
 was, if not exactly the spirit of Christianity, 
 at least a religious spirit — profound, zeal- 
 ous, and self-reverent — as analogous, per- 
 haps, in its temper to the warlike religion 
 of the Eastern Prophet as to the traditional 
 faith of the Second Dispensation. Such was 
 the mighty fabric which, aloof and in his 
 native land an exile, Milton raised ; not per- 
 fect, not homogeneous, not in any sense a 
 national work, but the greatest of all those 
 works which prove that a noble poem may 
 be produced with little aid from local sym- 
 pathies, and none from national traditions." 
 Some expressions in this passage, and 
 
80 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 
 
 many others scattered through these volumes, 
 indicate where the current of sympathy was 
 broken by default of which the critic under- 
 stands Milton imperfectly. Ideal he was, but 
 there is no poet who is more bone and flesh 
 of the English nation in the substance of his 
 genius, or in whom it developed a spirituality 
 more noble ; nor are his defects, in his concep- 
 tion of womanhood for example, such as can- 
 not be easily paralleled from the other poets 
 of highest genius in the line from Spenser. 
 But, on the other hand, the critic is more 
 than just to Keats, and towards Shelley he 
 exhibits a respect, a penetration of the ele- 
 ments of his thoughtful temperament, and a 
 comprehension of the remarkable and inti- 
 mate changes of his incessant growth, that 
 are almost unexampled in authors writing 
 from Aubrey de Vere's standpoint. In writ- 
 ing of the others he has opportunity for still 
 further illustration of the theory of poetry 
 he holds, and he shows that these later poets 
 have their best success the closer they keep 
 to the subject of man, and the more they 
 treat it with a pure, spiritual method ; while 
 on the other hand, they are defective in pro- 
 portion as they fail in this. 
 
 It would be impossible for a critic with 
 
AUBBEY DE VEBE ON POETBY. 81 
 
 such standards as these to pass in review the 
 work of the moderns, and not to notice the 
 general decline in the moral weight and the 
 spirituality of late poetic literature. Mate- 
 rialism, both as respects the objects of man's 
 pursuit and the character of his speculation 
 in philosophy, has been so important and 
 growing a factor of the times, that, if there 
 is any validity in this theory of poetry, it 
 must follow that our poetic work has lost 
 elevation, meaning, and utility. Religion it- 
 self, so far as the general thought of nine- 
 teenth-century civilization is concerned, has 
 suffered a diminution of its authority, and 
 consequently the spiritual life of man has 
 filled a less prominent part in the eyes of 
 these generations. 
 
 In connection with this, room should be 
 made for some original remarks of the wri- 
 ter upon the Pagan element in our modern 
 poetry. He is very well affected towards 
 Platonism, and recognizes it historically as 
 "the chief secondary cause of the diffusion 
 of Christianity, doing for it more than the 
 favor of Constantine could ever have done." 
 He thus affirms for Greek religion and 
 Greek philosophy " an element of greatness 
 and truth." Our poets, in returning to its 
 
82 AUBREY BE VEEE ON POETRY. 
 
 life and thought, seem to him to be making 
 a return to the spiritual element which in 
 the revolutionary ages has been obscured 
 and too often lost. He speaks in this as a 
 Catholic, but he is more Christian than 
 Catholic, if it may be permitted to say so ; 
 and all religious writers admit and lament 
 the inroad of skepticism and consequent 
 materialism. The turn he gives to these 
 facts is a striking one : — 
 
 "The arts of the Middle Ages soared 
 above Paganism : the imaginative mind of 
 modern times stands for the most part aloof 
 from it ; but it often stands aloof from 
 Christianity also. Secularity is its prevail- 
 ing character, while even in Paganism there 
 is a spiritual element. We may not, without 
 a risk of insincerity and presumption, in- 
 dulge in either an exultation or a regret 
 higher than corresponds with our low posi- 
 tion. Can we with truth say that the por- 
 tion of our modern literature which reverts 
 to ancient mythology is less religious than 
 the rest ? Is it not, in the case of some au- 
 thors, the only portion which has any rela- 
 tions, even through type or symbol, with re- 
 ligious ideas ? Would Dante, would even 
 Milton, have found more to sympathize with 
 
AUBREY BE VEBE ON POETRY. 83 
 
 in the average of modern literature than in 
 Homer or in Sophocles, in Wordsworth's 
 Laodamia or Keats's Hymn to Pan ? What 
 proportion of our late poetry is Christian 
 either in spirit or in subject — nay, in 
 traditions and associations? Admirable as 
 much of it is, it is not for its spiritual ten- 
 dencies that it can be commended. Com- 
 monly it shares the material character of our 
 age, and smells of the earth ; at other times, 
 recoiling from the sordid, it flies into the 
 fantastic. . . . It is our life which is to be 
 blamed ; our poetry has been but the reflec- 
 tion of that life." 
 
 This is valuable, not only for its sugges- 
 tion, but because it sums up and speaks out 
 plainly the protest which is implicit in all 
 this criticism. The aesthetic lover of beauty, 
 the artist who is satisfied with feats of poetic 
 craft, will not find anything to his liking in 
 Aubrey de Vere's essays. They are presided 
 over by a severe Platonism intellectually, by 
 an exacting and all - including Christianity 
 when the subject touches upon man's life, 
 and they will prove somewhat difficult read- 
 ing, perhaps, because the thought continu- 
 ally reverts to great ideas, to that doctrine 
 of life which the author seeks for in the poets, 
 
84 AUBBEY BE VEBE ON POETBY. 
 
 and prizes as the substance of their works. 
 But it is well, in poetic days like these, to 
 be brought back to the more serious muses 
 which inspired the great ideal works of our 
 literature, and to converse with them under 
 the guidance of such a spirit as fills these 
 essays with a sense of the continual presence 
 in great literature of the higher interests of 
 man, his life on earth, and his spiritual rela- 
 tion to the universe. These essays contain 
 the fruits of habitual familiarity with poetry, 
 the convictions of a lifetime with regard to 
 those things which are still important sub- 
 jects of thought to thoughtful men; and 
 there is, mingled with the style, the sweet 
 persuasiveness of a refined and liberal na- 
 ture, which is only too well aware that it 
 must plead its cause, and pleads with 
 strength and charm. 
 
ILLUSTKATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 I. THE PERGAMON MARBLES. 
 
 The development of the Greek genius in 
 sculpture, after it Lad passed its first ma- 
 turity in Phidias and his immediate succes- 
 sors, presented the same characteristic signs 
 shown in the history of other modes of artis- 
 tic expression in other nations. A reasoned 
 conception of the ends and means, a trained 
 appreciation of form, a complete mastery of 
 technique, were inherited by the sculptors of 
 Pergamon. The purpose being defined and 
 the tools perfected, no originality was al- 
 lowed them except in style ; and conse- 
 quently their work, like the last dramas of 
 Shakespeare, or the creations of Browning 
 or Carlyle, exhibits an excess of subject, 
 an effort to put the utmost of muscular 
 action, of narrative import, of allegorized 
 truth, into their marbles. And yet, in con- 
 nection with this intensity, as it is called, it 
 cannot fail to be observed that their sculp- 
 
86 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 ture (herein touched with the decadence) 
 breathes the self-glorifying spirit of trium- 
 phant skill, rather than the overmastering 
 idealism of the earlier patriotic and religious 
 motives. In their pictorial composition and 
 landscape backgrounds, also, one is tempted 
 to discern the harmful influence of that so 
 vaguely known school of painting that flour- 
 ished in the preceding period, and to piece 
 out by conjecture our fragmentary concep- 
 tions of its manner. It is complained that 
 modern sculpture is too pictorial ; almost as 
 soon as the art was recovered in Italy it fell 
 into the same error, particularly in relief 
 work ; but in Greece the profuse use of color 
 on the marble, as ground and also for direct 
 decoration, together with the employment of 
 metals and jewels as additional adornment, 
 must have brought the two arts so closely 
 together that the transference of modes 
 of treatment was inevitable. The striking 
 thing is that painting, then as now, seems 
 by its greater compass to overpower its more 
 hampered rival. 
 
 Besides this tendency to overtax the power 
 of expression by the weight of subject, and 
 this pride in mere technique in close associ* 
 ation with a humiliating imitation of a dif- 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 87 
 
 ferent art, these Pergamon sculptures dis- 
 play other marks of being essentially quite 
 modern. Their realism is especially notice- 
 able. The Greeks of the elder time, it must 
 be acknowledged, were remarkably fortu- 
 nate in that their realistic spirit fell in with 
 an actual existence which itself appealed 
 to the imagination in many ways. In the 
 Athenian prime the life that taught Sopho- 
 cles and Agathon was heroic or idyllic, and 
 needed hardly a touch to exalt its elements 
 into the most imaginative idealism. When 
 Plato could not write a dialogue without 
 making a drama, nor Aristophanes compose 
 a comedy without breaking into the sweetest 
 lyric song, nor Phidias chisel a flying fold 
 except for eternity, a presence was upon the 
 earth and a spirit in men that made realism 
 not less trustworthy as a guide to sculptors 
 than is the "Look into thy heart and write" 
 as a maxim for poets like Sidney. But 
 when the barbarians broke in from the north 
 upon Asia Minor, and the luxury of oriental 
 manners and the fantasies of oriental mind 
 stole upon the old order and changed it, to 
 study the real was not necessarily to achieve 
 the beautiful. The barbarians chiseled by 
 the Pergamon sculptors are very different 
 
88 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 from those that once adorned the Parthe- 
 non : they are fierce, ugly, portrait-like, stud- 
 ied from the life. The giants, too, by the 
 same artists are not even altogether human, 
 as in the older reliefs, but many are mon- 
 strous : conglomerates of snaky folds and 
 Titanic limbs and ox necks, finny wings, 
 pointed ears, horns, and such Egyptian and 
 Assyrian confusions. For this debasement 
 of the type, few will consider the wonderful 
 finish, the minute and successful imitation 
 of fur, scale, and stuff, a compensation. So, 
 too, the representation of mortal agony is, 
 in these works, carried to an extreme of 
 truthfulness that is upon the verge of the 
 revolting. This new bent of realism which, 
 ceasing to select from the beautiful in life, 
 now takes these three directions, — toward 
 the portraiture of types not noble, toward 
 the close copying of accessories not impor- 
 tant, and toward the reproduction of shock- 
 ing aspects of existence, — this essential dif- 
 ference between the art of Athens and of 
 Pergamon, it would be but too easy to par- 
 allel in more than one province of our own 
 intellectual life. These remarks, although 
 they were not meant to point such a moral, 
 incidentally illustrate how misleading is the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 89 
 
 the word " ancient " when applied to the 
 Greeks. Wherever approached, they are as 
 level to our own times in thought and deed 
 as any of the so-called moderns : and though 
 their language, in its former dialect, is dead, 
 its golden words always fall upon our ears 
 as if from the lips of some wiser contempo- 
 rary. In looking on these recovered marble 
 fragments, just as in reading the Antigone 
 or Alcestis, the centuries seem meaningless. 
 
 II. A GREEK TRAIT NOTICED BY DR. WALD- 
 STEIN. 
 
 One distinction between the Greeks and 
 ourselves may be expressed by saying that 
 our culture as a people rests upon literature, 
 on the printed word, while that of the Greeks 
 based itself rather upon observation, on the 
 thing seen. The divergence of intellectual 
 mood thus induced between ancient and 
 modern is profound, and affects the whole 
 higher life. In reflecting upon this classical 
 trait, however, something is to be guarded 
 against. It is well known that the illiter- 
 ate, generally speaking, think in images, 
 and that this power or habit of visualization, 
 sometimes thought to be characteristic of the 
 poet, be it observed, usually falls into disuse 
 
90 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 in proportion to the increase and continuity 
 of exclusively literary culture in the individ- 
 ual, until the point is reached at which a 
 man thinks without having a single image 
 definitely projected upon the mind's eye; 
 his mental processes are, in fact, as colorless 
 and formless as algebraic calculations. Mr. 
 Galton's experiments in this matter are still 
 fresh in our memories. Now it is not to be 
 inferred that this was always the case, nor 
 indeed that the intellect of highest develop- 
 ment may not in the past, at least, have ha- 
 bitually thought in images, as the unlettered 
 do to-day ; and in Greece it appears that the 
 picture language of the mind, as one may 
 call it, held a place more important than 
 with us, and perhaps equivalent to our own 
 idea language. The Greek, as every one 
 knows, peopled the earth with presiding ge- 
 niuses, of more or less exalted rank, from 
 Oread and Naiad, to the great Zeus of Olym- 
 pus. These forms we call imaginary, and to 
 our thought they are always tenuous ; the 
 point to be remembered is that, when the 
 Greek spoke of Athene, an image came be- 
 fore his mind, and one not hypothetical and 
 consciously symbolical, like Liberty with her 
 cap, but definite, real, and awful, like the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 91 
 
 statue on the pediment or in the temple. 
 The Greek mind leaned on these images as 
 our mind does on the alphabet in all mental 
 life; hence the poetry and the art of the 
 age had a certain ease and naturalness, an 
 intimacy with things seen by the eye, not 
 equaled in the work of later times, except 
 possibly in Italy. Dr. Waldstein points out 
 that the most striking expression of this 
 plastic necessity, inherent in Greek think- 
 ing, is the doctrine of Platonic ideas. To 
 the moderns, however tolerant they may be, 
 there seems always a childishness, a gro- 
 tesque quality, the more marked because 
 of Plato's splendid and rich endowment, in 
 the continual insistence in his philosophy on 
 the " ideas " of the table and the flute, — the 
 table without any definite number of legs, 
 the flute without any particular quality of 
 sound ; and the case is not much helped, 
 even if one perceives, as Schopenhauer 
 shows, that the doctrine is essentially ac- 
 curate in truth, and wholly intelligible, since 
 it is merely the modern statement of the sub- 
 jectivity of time and space put conversely. 
 Notwithstanding these admissions, our minds 
 still find the Platonic ideas awkward to deal 
 with. But that Plato, at the end of his ab- 
 
92 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 strusest speculations, and at the threshold of 
 one of the greatest generalizations of the hu- 
 man intellect, fell back upon the image-form- 
 ing faculty, and insisted on particularizing 
 the universal by means of a mystery or fic- 
 tion of thought, is a crowning proof of the 
 pervasiveness and inner mastery of the plas- 
 tic spirit in the culture of his civilization. 
 
 This trait of the Greeks has been dwelt 
 on, in the present instance, less for itself 
 than for its bearing on the idealism of the 
 art of Phidias, of which the marbles of the 
 Parthenon are the great examples. Of 
 course Dr. "Waldstein, who knows the value 
 of this supreme achievement of the idealistic 
 temperament in man, is himself an idealist, 
 and when he has occasion to analyze the 
 monuments treats at more or less length of 
 the theory of idealism. He distinguishes at 
 once two kinds of physical representation, 
 the portrait and the type, and affirms an 
 analogous difference in representations of 
 the spirit that animates the stone, — the 
 man as he is, and the man as he ought to be. 
 He observes, too, that the Greeks were fortu- 
 nately supplied with subjects of sculpture in 
 which both the physical and spiritual perfec- 
 tion of man were proper elements, and, in- 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 93 
 
 deed, requisite ; namely, the heroes and the 
 gods. The higher life was the theme of 
 their art in its greatest excellence, not as a 
 possible but as an actual existence. This of 
 itself was a valuable help to them, for cen- 
 tres of imagination were thus determined 
 for them and given a certain external valid- 
 ity ; whereas among the moderns art is felt 
 to be in its essence a mode of subjective cre- 
 ation, having no reality except in thought. 
 The resulting sense of uncertainty, the weak- 
 ened faith in such emanations of man's 
 brain, almost inevitable for the contemporary 
 poet or artist, is one cause of the recoil of 
 our imagination from the ideal, and of the 
 attraction of realism for our writers, and 
 perhaps of our content with a literature and 
 art that will have fact for its province. 
 " Let us have facts," is the cry ; " of truth 
 — that is, the relation of facts — who can 
 be certain ? Let us represent men as they 
 are; of men as they ought to be who has 
 any observation ? " And even within these 
 limits of the new school it is said, further- 
 more, that attention is to be paid to the in- 
 dividual; not to man as he is, but to this 
 man, taken at random, as he is. The type 
 is too general to be depicted, too far re- 
 
94 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 moved from actual seeing, too much an ab- 
 straction of the mind. It is plain that at 
 the root of the difficulty felt by the realists 
 who theorize in this way lies the conviction 
 that the further the literary or any other 
 representative art gets from the special fact, 
 trait, or passion in its particular manifesta- 
 tion, the more vague, doubtful, pale, rubbed- 
 out, — in a word, the more generalized, — it 
 becomes, and hence loses sharpness, vigor, 
 and illusiveness. But with the Greek the 
 case was clearly quite otherwise. There was 
 no loss of individualization in the type, 
 whether of physical or of spiritual perfec- 
 tion. This Theseus or that Hermes is ideal ; 
 both are generalized from men, but they 
 suffer no loss of vitality thereby. The ideal- 
 ism of Athens did not fade out in abstrac- 
 tion, but embodied the permanent elements 
 of harmonious beauty in body and spirit, in 
 forms " more real than living man." The 
 habit of thinking in images, or with fixed 
 associations of images, with general notions, 
 was one reason for this success, undoubt- 
 edly; but before concluding that the liter- 
 ary and rationalizing culture of our day for- 
 bids us to hope for a similar blending of 
 the type with individuality, let us remember 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 95 
 
 that as with Phidias, so with Shakespeare : 
 Hamlet is at once the type and the man. 
 The poet born cannot turn aside, on this 
 hand, into science, as the realists do ; nor 
 on that hand, into philosophy, as the alle- 
 gorists do. To him that ideal art alone is 
 possible in which the two are united in the 
 expression of permanent and universal truth 
 through selected facts. 
 
 Nevertheless, it may be urged, the Greeks 
 passed rapidly from the idealistic to the re- 
 alistic stage. And in connection with this 
 one observes the happiness with which Dr. 
 Waldstein identifies the elements of likeness 
 between the Greeks and the moderns, just 
 as he opposes their differences to each other. 
 The most admirable example is an inquiry 
 into the sesthetical qualities of the Hermes 
 of Praxiteles, and in the course of it he de- 
 lineates the characteristics of the age of 
 Praxiteles, and parallels them with the traits 
 of the time just subsequent to the French 
 Revolution. In doing this he incidentally 
 describes the common spirit in Shelley, 
 Musset, and other representatives of an art, 
 not of the noblest, but not of the worst 
 either, of the interval after the great age, 
 yet before the marked decadence. It may 
 
98 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 be said that the English never had an age 
 of the Phidian kind ; in European culture 
 that is to be sought, if at all, in mediaeval 
 art. The Praxitelean age, however, was re- 
 produced in essence in the first generation 
 of our romantic period. A certain pathos, 
 felt in view both of the world and of one's 
 self, is perhaps its dominant quality, and 
 with it go a sophistication, a self -conscious- 
 ness, a reflectiveness, a slight yet not com- 
 plete abstraction of the spirit from the ob- 
 ject before it, illustrated by the expression 
 of the head of Hermes in relation to the 
 infant Dionysus on his arm. It is the mood 
 of one whose spontaneous joy has been dis- 
 turbed forever by thought. In such work 
 one sees that the objective character of art, 
 as it was in Phidias, is yielding to a new 
 impulse ; that the hold of the imagination 
 on the divine and the eternal is slowly relax- 
 ing. At last, idealism went out in Greece, 
 and, either in the shape of the portrait stat- 
 ues, or of such sculptures as those of Per- 
 gamon, realism came in to be the be-all and 
 also the end-all of art. 
 
 Why was it, one asks, that the plastic na- 
 ture of the Greeks did not preserve them, if 
 the image-making faculty did in fact count 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 97 
 
 so much in their development? How did 
 they come to lose the ideal forms that sprang 
 in the mind of Phidias when he thought of 
 beauty and virtue? One cannot say that 
 idealism failed, for its triumph in the Par- 
 thenon marbles marks the highest point ever 
 reached by the human imagination in embod- 
 ying its vision. It died out, and one says 
 in explanation that the attention given to 
 technique at last led to a disregard of the 
 idea ; or that the mere ability to reproduce 
 details exactly was a temptation to apply 
 art to deceptive imitation of the seen instead 
 of to an illusive expression of the unseen ; 
 or that the age had lost the great ideas 
 themselves, the perception of beauty and 
 virtue, the belief in them and honor for 
 them, and hence necessarily declined upon 
 the things of this world, — that is, upon 
 what is seen by the bodily eye rather than 
 in the realm of thought and spiritual in- 
 sight: and of these explanations perhaps 
 one is as true as another, for they are all 
 descriptions, from different standpoints, of 
 what actually occurred. It is impossible, 
 however, that in view of this history, and of 
 the similar course in the development of 
 mediaeval painting, one should not ask him- 
 
98 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 self whether the rise and defense of realism 
 among us mean that literature is to follow 
 in the same track, and die, as sculpture and 
 painting died, until a new age shall set the 
 wheel turning again ; for if the history of 
 the arts teaches anything, it is that the ages 
 of idealism are the ages of power, and those 
 of realism the premonition and stiffening of 
 death. 
 
 III. MR. PATER ON IDEAL iESTHETICISM. 
 
 The heart of Mr. Pater's Marius lies 
 in his thought about the ideal, and it is in 
 the nature of all such thought to make a 
 peculiar demand upon the reader. Its wis- 
 dom is felt to be, as it were, sacerdotal, and 
 requires a conscious preparation of mind in 
 him who would know of it; its vision is 
 supernal, and disclosed only when some spir- 
 itual illumination has been sent before. So 
 runs a Platonic doctrine of election and 
 grace that has been held as rigorously in lit- 
 erature as in theology. This aristocracy of 
 idealism — its exclusiveness, its jealousy of 
 any intrusion of the common and worldly 
 within the company it keeps, its sense of a 
 preciousness, as of sacred things, within it- 
 self — is incorporate in every fibre of Mr. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 99 
 
 Pater's work ; and he makes the demand 
 natural to it, not only implicitly by an unre- 
 laxing use of such aesthetic and intellectual 
 elements as appeal exclusively to the subtlest 
 faculties of appreciation in their highest de- 
 velopment, but explicitly also by the charac- 
 ter of his hero. Marius, before he became 
 an Epicurean, was moulded for his fate ; his 
 creator demanded an exceptional nature for 
 the aesthetic ideal to react upon in a noble 
 way, and so Marius was born in the upland 
 farm among the fair mountains to the north 
 of Pisa, and was possessed from boyhood of 
 the devout seriousness, the mood of trustful 
 waiting for the god's coming, which is ex- 
 acted in all profound idealism. " Favete 
 Unguis ! With the lad Marius there was a 
 devout effort to complete this impressive 
 outward silence by that inward tacitness of 
 mind esteemed so important by religious 
 Romans in the performance of their sacred 
 functions." Marius was born one of the 
 choice natures in whom the heavenly powers 
 are well pleased ; and emphasis must be 
 given to this circumstance because it follows 
 that the ideal life which he lived, deeply 
 meditated though it is, is really an individ- 
 ual one. Marius is not typical, nor even 
 
100 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 illustrative in any broad way of the practice 
 of aesthetic morals ; and yet, since he is not 
 national, nor local, nor historic, in his essen- 
 tial self, since he is more than an enlight- 
 ened philosopher, and yet less than the en- 
 lightened Christian, since his personality 
 approaches the elect souls of other ages, 
 other sentiments and devotions, and yet is 
 without any real contact with them, he is 
 typical and illustrative perhaps of something 
 that might be. This confusedness of impres- 
 sion springs from the fact that Mr. Pater, 
 while he imagines in Italy, always thinks in 
 London ; he has modernized his hero, has 
 Anglicized him, indeed, and nevertheless has 
 not really taken him out of the second cen- 
 tury. It was a bold thing to attempt. It 
 was necessary for his purposes as an evange- 
 list of ideal living, and perhaps within the 
 range of moral teaching it is successful ; but 
 the way in which it was done is a main point 
 of interest. 
 
 A Roman Epicurean, one suspects, was 
 not unlike the proverbial Italianated Eng- 
 lishman. The native incompatibility be- 
 tween the distinctive Roman temperament 
 and the light-hearted gayety of Greek sen- 
 suousness was similiar to that between the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 101 
 
 English and the Italian character in the 
 later times; the perfection of Marius by 
 means of a Greek ideal may run parallel 
 with English culture under southern influ- 
 ences. There was, too, in Roman character 
 a trait or two which brings it near to quali- 
 ties that lie at the base of our own stock. 
 Even in the Italian landscape there are 
 Northern notes such as Mr. Pater mentions 
 when Marius, in his walks to the coast, sees 
 " the marsh with the dwarf roses and wild 
 lavender, the abandoned boat, the ruined 
 floodgates, the flock of wild birds." We are 
 told, also, that " poetic souls in old Italy 
 felt, hardly less strongly than the English, 
 the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with 
 the very dead warm in its generous heat, 
 keeping the young myrtles in flower, though 
 the hail is beating hard without." This 
 note of Marius's home-life and the love he 
 had for it, with his particular regard for 
 "Domiduca, the goddess who watches over 
 one's safe coming home," and with the ideal 
 of maternity that grew up in his memory 
 of home, — this peculiarly English note is 
 struck in the opening and is dominant at the 
 end. Certain other characteristics ally this 
 Etrurian boy with that nobler strain of 
 
102 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 English blood, the Puritan strain as it was 
 in Spenser. His instinctive seriousness, his 
 scrupulosity of conscience, his inheritance of 
 a certain sombreness from the stock that 
 adorned the Etruscan funeral urns, his at- 
 tachment to places and awe of some of them 
 as sacred by the touch of a divine power, 
 his sense of invisible enemies about his path, 
 his rigorous self -discipline in preparation for 
 certain hereditary sacred offices, a deadly 
 earnestness at times, — as when he gazes so 
 fixedly on the rigid corpse of his friend Fla- 
 vian, — such are some of the traits that de- 
 fine his nature as essentially rather North- 
 ern than Southern, and. provide a ground of 
 special sympathy and understanding for us. 
 The second device by which Marius is 
 modernized is by giving to him a power 
 which, for one who runs as he reads, makes 
 the character incredible. He is said to be 
 affected sometimes in a way the opposite of 
 the experience which many have who, on 
 seeing a new place, seem to have been there 
 before : Marius feels, in the most marked 
 of his experiences, something that shall be, 
 — he has always a prescience. Thus, in 
 the cadence of Flavian's verses he hears the 
 music of the Latin hymnology ; in the sight 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 103 
 
 of his second friend, Cornelius, who displays 
 and puts on his armor of a Roman knight 
 in the dusty sunshine of the shuttered coun- 
 try-house, he foresees the Christian chiv- 
 alry ; in the faces and groups of the worship- 
 ers in Cecilia's house he discerns the serene 
 light and streaming joy of Giotto's and of 
 Dante's vision, and looks on the Madonna 
 and the Child that Raphael first painted. 
 In all this there seems an unreality ; in 
 the Puritan Roman, the Cyrenaic Christian, 
 there is a sense almost of conscious artifice, 
 as if one were being befooled. And yet, as 
 for those Northern notes of landscape, cus- 
 tom, and character, scholarship can give 
 chapter and verse for them ; and as for the 
 gift of prescience, — well, if it were impos- 
 sible for Marius to have it, in a sufficient 
 measure at least, then the theory of ideal 
 living which he held to was at fault. And 
 this Marius, so constituted, his creator places 
 in an Italy over which the romantic desola- 
 tion, which we know, was laying its charm of 
 dreamful decay, and in a Rome which, then 
 as now, was the huddled deposit of religions. 
 The intellectual conviction on which Ma- 
 rius conducted his life was simple and com- 
 mon enough, as must be the case with every 
 
104 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 theory capable of being made a principle of 
 living. The world is what we think it, and 
 our part in existence is the fleeting moment 
 of present consciousness. What shall be 
 done with this moment ? Economize it, said 
 Marius, in dissent from the Stoic who said, 
 " Contemn it." Economize it ; make the 
 most of the phenomena that arise in it, and 
 see, so far as it depends on you, that these 
 phenomena, both of sensation and idea, as 
 they arise, are the most valuable possible to 
 the moment ; and so your experience - — in 
 other words, your life — will be the fullest 
 and most refined. Above all, do not forget 
 the main thing in this doctrine of economy, 
 which is that the worth of experience de- 
 pends, not on what it is at the moment in its 
 detached and transitory phase, but on what 
 it will prove in memory when it takes its 
 place permanently and in relation to the 
 whole of life. In such a scheme, receptivity, 
 the most alert and varied powers of taking 
 in impressions, is the one aim of cultivation. 
 Here, too, much depended on the nature of 
 Marius, this time on the side of his Southern 
 endowment. An impressibility through sen- 
 sation was his gift, his talent ; and especially 
 he was susceptible to what the eye observes : 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 105 
 
 he was one of those who are " made perfect 
 by the love of visible beauty." This is the 
 point of union of his life with the aesthetic 
 ideal, and makes the story of it a path- 
 way through scenes of loveliness not unlike, 
 in a certain mild beauty, the frescoes on an- 
 cient walls. The narrative is pictorial, al- 
 most to the point of decoration, and moves 
 always with an outlook on some fair sight. 
 From the landscape of the villa where Ma- 
 rius was born — among those delightful 
 Etrurian hills whence one looks to the mar- 
 bled rifts of Carrara gleaming above olive 
 and chestnut slopes, and gazes off through 
 the purple sea-valley of Venus's Port, the no- 
 blest gateway of the descending sun — to the 
 last throttling earthquake morning, a beau- 
 tiful visible world is about us, and exercises 
 its attractiveness both in nature and in hu- 
 manity. The one end of Marius was to ap- 
 propriate all this, to choose the best of sen- 
 sation and its most nearly connected emo- 
 tions, and to live in that. To do this in- 
 volves a secondary talent, a gift of insight, 
 a power to perceive relative values, which 
 in reality means a faculty of moral discrim- 
 ination ; and just here one may easily fail 
 to see whence Marius derived this. 
 
106 ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 Why was it, for example, that he, being 
 so attached to sensation and the emotions 
 that cling closest to it, rejected voluptuous- 
 ness, with all its forms of beauty and joy ful- 
 ness, as a thing essentially not beautiful nor 
 joyful ? What was it that kept him, the 
 comrade of Flavian, who represents the pa- 
 gan surrender to this life, pure, — so pure, 
 indeed, that with his visionary sense he fore- 
 saw in chastity an ideal that was to be, and 
 foreknew its coming beauty ? A mere inter- 
 preter of character, an analyst, would say, 
 that Marius obeyed in these choices his own 
 nature, — that Puritan nature whose com- 
 pulsion is always strong. He venerated his 
 own soul and cherished its early instincts, 
 and this was his salvation. But one might 
 also give another explanation, which would 
 seem more harmonious with the purpose of 
 the author ; one might say that what is moral 
 is in its outward manifestation so clothed 
 with beauty, visible beauty, that the man who 
 looks for beauty only, the noblest, the ideal 
 beauty, will find therewith the highest, the 
 ideal good. It is essential to such a seeker 
 that he shall look with his own eyes and 
 be frank with himself ; shall " look straight 
 out " and acknowledge what he sees ; and 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 107 
 
 this Marins does, thereby prefiguring in a 
 way and practically making that " return to 
 nature " which is the continually recurring 
 necessity of all sincerity. If virtue does in 
 fact wear this outward loveliness — and who 
 would deny it ? — why may not the lover of 
 beauty have truly seen the new and spring- 
 ing forms of goodness, recognized them, and 
 taken their promise into his life ? In other 
 words, was not that prescience of Marius 
 merely a power of clear and honest seeing 
 of the elements of beauty and ugliness there 
 before him ? 
 
 That this is Mr. Pater's view of the mat- 
 ter is indicated most definitely by the con- 
 trast which he continually insists on between 
 Marcus Aurelius and Marius, and which he 
 brings out clearly in the attitude of these 
 two toward the gladiatorial shows. In the 
 amphitheatre Marius is conscious of the Em- 
 peror, the strenuous Stoic, as " eternally his 
 inferior on the question of righteousness." 
 The young Epicurean has a " decisive con- 
 science on sight " which is indubitable, — 
 that conscience which, in its condemnation of 
 the great sin of an age, is the touchstone of 
 the select few in it, and makes them on the 
 side of the future and aware of its excellence 
 
108 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 to be, when " not to have been, by instinctive 
 election, on the right side was to have failed 
 in life." Aurelius, we are told, made the 
 great mistake : Vale, anima infelicissima 1 
 is the last word of our author to him on the 
 eve of the persecutions. And the reason is, 
 that the Stoic was truly blind ; he had pal- 
 tered with his senses until they lied to him, 
 or spoke not at all. Marius saw the de- 
 formity of the evil, and, while rejecting it as 
 something he might not see and live, chose 
 the good by its beauty, and so selected in 
 the midst of that Roman corruption the 
 Christian elements in whose excellence the 
 Church would triumph and be made fair. 
 
 There may be some surprise in perceiving 
 in the evangel of sestheticism a morality of 
 this height, a concentration of attention on 
 the beauty of austerity, an exaltation of a 
 noble Puritanism toward which the Cyrenaic 
 ideal may lead. When this is understood, 
 however, one finds it natural enough that 
 the pervading tone of this history of an ideal 
 life is really religious ; idealism, when it is 
 living, cannot be otherwise than essentially 
 religious. Nevertheless, it is a bold thing 
 to put the question, as Mr. Pater implicitly 
 does, whether an attention to the beautiful, 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 109 
 
 to visible beauty, may not only be equivalent 
 to moral discrimination and a safeguard of 
 virtue, but also a mode of solving the ulti- 
 mate religious questions of deity and man's 
 relation to it. Marius does arrive at an in- 
 timation, perhaps a faith, that a protective 
 divine companionship goes beside him, and 
 at an emotion of gratitude to that unseen 
 presence. 
 
 Two points only, in this wide branch of 
 the speculation, can be dwelt on now. He 
 says toward the end that he thinks he has 
 failed in love ; and here he touches on one 
 weakness of his ideal, for it is only by love, 
 as he perceives, that any reconciliation be- 
 tween the lover of beanty and the multitu- 
 dinous pitiful pain which is so large a part 
 of the objective universe can be obtained. 
 The second weakness is perhaps greater. In 
 his ideal there is both doubt and isolation ; 
 the subjective element in his knowledge, the 
 exclusive reliance on his own impressions, 
 the fact that in metaphysical belief the 
 world is only his world, and in actual living 
 the experience is individual, — all this holds 
 in it a basis of ultimate incertitude. True 
 and real for him it no doubt is, but is that, 
 indeed, the necessary limit of knowledge and 
 
110 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 life ? In effect, too, his creed is Protestant ; 
 independently of the necessary element of 
 doubt in it, it has the isolating force inev- 
 itable to the believer who will accept only 
 the results of his own examination by exer- 
 cise of private judgment. This position is 
 unsatisfactory ; and it seems to allow the 
 rationality of that principle of authority by 
 which an individual life obtains correction 
 for its idiosyncrasies, cancels the personal 
 error, and at the same time lets in upon it- 
 self the flood of the total experience of hu- 
 manity summed up and defined in the whole 
 body of the elect. Though stated here in 
 terms of the Stoical philosophy, this is the 
 Catholic conclusion. Or, if Marius does not 
 quite assent to this, he does accept it in a 
 half-hearted way as an hypothesis which is 
 worth making since it reunites him to man- 
 kind. There is, it may be observed, a ten- 
 dency toward Catholicism throughout the 
 religious speculation. Another note of it, 
 for example, is the attraction felt by Marius 
 in the ritual of worship, as the perfection of 
 that ceremonialism to which, in his boyish 
 worship of the old gods, he was devoutly 
 trained. 
 
 After all, at the end one still states the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. Ill 
 
 promises of this aesthetic ideal, even when 
 working on so unusual a nature as Marius's, 
 interrogatively. Marius's life does not set 
 it forth with convincing power. For one 
 thing, it is not a vital life, but a painted 
 one ; and there is an inconsequence in the 
 series of pictures, — they do not seem to fol- 
 low one another by any iron necessity. It 
 would be foolish to complain that a life 
 avowedly only receptive and contemplative 
 of the beautiful is inactive. Marius does 
 nothing except at the end. Yet, within such 
 limits, one never sees how beauty affected 
 Marius or developed his soul, and though he 
 is said to have got much from companionship, 
 one sees love operant in him very seldom, 
 and then it is a very silent and unexpressed 
 love. He repeats his own epitaph, — tristem 
 neminem fecit, — and it was true ; but all 
 his life seems negative, and continually one 
 asks, How did he really live ? and gets no 
 answer. His whole life was a meditatio 
 mortis, — that is all that is told us. 
 
 A sense of failure, or rather of incomplete- 
 ness, oppresses one at the end of the narra- 
 tive. Even granting that the success Ma- 
 rius is said to have achieved — one is never 
 quite sure that he did — by that exquisite 
 
112 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 appreciation of beauty and impassioned con- 
 templation of its ideal forms, was, in fact, 
 his; yet of what worth was it, — what did 
 it mean to either God or man ? The North- 
 ern idealist, the Puritan, cannot dispense 
 with some serviceableness as essential to 
 any high living. One should not push the 
 point too far, however. Independently of 
 all that has been said, any one who cares to 
 think on counsels of perfection for man's 
 life will find profound and original thought 
 about the ideal elements still at hand in 
 modern days for use, and many wise reflec- 
 tions, sown in this history. It is a rare 
 work, and not carelessly to be read. Some 
 exquisiteness of taste, some delight in schol- 
 arship, some knowledge of what is best 
 worth knowing in the historic expressions of 
 man's aspiration, and, above all, that "in- 
 ward tacitness of mind " the reader must 
 bring to its perusal. What of it? Have 
 we not the highest authority for casting our 
 pearls where Circe's herd cannot come ? 
 
 IV. ITALIAN KENAISSANCE LITEKATURE. 
 
 The traditional romance that hangs about 
 Italy has fostered a popular misapprehension 
 of nearly all things Italian. As the mother 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 113 
 
 of Christian art and the Catholic Church, 
 the land is supposed to be religious ; as the 
 long-enslaved and last-freed of the nations 
 of Europe, the race is believed to be defi- 
 cient in political sagacity. Yet it requires 
 but little reflection, hardly more than a 
 thought of the Reformation, to prevent sur- 
 prise at the fact that the Italians were at 
 heart the most irreligious of Christian peo- 
 ples, and that the Church, viewed by them 
 always as a secular institution, is a monu- 
 ment of their genius applied to practical 
 affairs. Italian art, too, as an expression of 
 national life, must be ascribed less to piety 
 than to the native beut of mind, the inbred 
 race disposition, which seeks to bring all 
 spiritual things within the perception of the 
 senses ; indeed, the course of development 
 in Italian art lies principally in the gradual 
 substitution of an aesthetic aim for a devout 
 motive as the source of inspiration. No 
 people is less dreamy, in the Northern sense ; 
 the genius of the race is positive, definite, 
 objective, practical, circumscribed in the 
 tangible and visible facts of experience. Be- 
 tween Italian intellect and Italian feeling 
 there seems to be no border-land. Ecstasy 
 may fall from heaven and kindle masses of 
 
114 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 men into passion, as in the case of the Fla- 
 gellanti, but it is a malady of emotion only ; 
 the madness passes, the mind remains un- 
 touched. In Dante's poem, as has been 
 often pointed out, these race qualities are 
 clearly apparent : the journey is mapped out 
 as on a chart ; the hours are duly reckoned ; 
 the world beyond is laid open to accurate 
 observation ; the dark places of his Comedy 
 are not dark with the spirit's excess of light, 
 but with mediaeval metaphysics. In later 
 authors, however different the subject, the 
 temper of mind is the same. The grasp on 
 reality is no less tenacious, the attention to 
 detail no less careful; the incidents of the 
 adventure, the look of the landscape, the 
 physiognomy of the characters, no less 
 plainly defined as phenomena ocularly seen. 
 In the poems of chivalry, whether roman- 
 tic, heroic, or burlesque, which seem to pos- 
 sess the characteristics of later Italian litera- 
 ture in most variety, this realism is veiled by 
 the apparent unreality of the fable. Arthur 
 and Roland belong to the North ; and to the 
 Northern mind itself, although they have 
 the substance of ideals, they are very re- 
 mote. But the Arthur of Italian nobles, 
 the Roland of the Italian people, are the 
 
ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 115 
 
 thinnest of shades ; nor were they less in- 
 substantial to most of the poets of the golden 
 age than to us. The people gave the Caro- 
 lingian myth to them as the burden of their 
 stories ; but, leaving Boiardo out of the ac- 
 count, they could not accept the conditions 
 of that imaginative world and believe in it ; 
 nor could Boiardo, who had without doubt 
 a real enthusiasm for chivalry, believe with 
 Spenser's faith. Italy had no feudal past ; 
 how could the citizen Pulci feel any living- 
 sympathy with feudal ideals ? The myth 
 was emptied of its moral contents; how 
 could Ariosto be earnest as Tennyson is? 
 In dealing with deeds of knight-errantry, 
 adventures in the lists and the forest, wizard 
 springs and invincible armor, all the poets 
 were conscious of something quixotic ; to 
 Ariosto it was the main element. He could 
 not be serious ; the mock gravity of irony 
 was the most he could compass. This sense 
 of unreality in the legend was not all that 
 led the last poets of the age especially to 
 play with their art. A more powerful rea- 
 son was the hopelessness of society in their 
 age, deep as that which in earlier times fell 
 on their ancestors, who witnessed the barba- 
 rian incursions on Roman soil. Politically, 
 
116 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 morally, and religiously, society was break- 
 ing up. What was there to be serious about ? 
 All that gives meaning to life was gone: 
 the ties of family, country, and God were 
 snapped. What better thing was there to 
 do than to retire to the country, and let the 
 world go " the primrose path " ? The strik- 
 ing thing in all this is, that the sense of the 
 pleasure to be derived from the refinements 
 of culture excluded from the minds of nearly 
 all the most gifted Italians that gloom, which 
 would have wrapped a Northern nation, at 
 the sight of an anarchy which, if less terrible 
 with blood than the French Revolution, was 
 more appalling to the spirit. The Italians, 
 however, went to their villas, to hear Ban- 
 dello tell stories and Berni read verses. The 
 City of the Plague, from which Boccaccio's 
 garden party fled, is the permanent back- 
 ground of this golden age. 
 
 Life was something left behind, but art 
 remained ; and for the purposes of art, 
 whose function was entertainment, the ad- 
 ventures of Orlando and his like were suf- 
 ficiently serviceable. Such myths afforded 
 opportunity for inexhaustible invention of 
 incident, for the play of fancy, and the exhi- 
 bition of the courtesies and humors of life ; 
 
ILLUSTBATIONS OF IDEALISM. 117 
 
 and should there he a lapse into serious- 
 ness, there was room for satire on the clergy, 
 and for sentiments of the Reformation. 
 These tales, it is true, were products of cul- 
 ture separated from the realities of society, 
 and neglectful of them ; but they were not, 
 as might have been anticipated, expressive 
 of individual rather than national tempera- 
 ment. They are prominently characterized 
 by the Italian love of incident, pictures, and 
 fun. The incidents are invented for their 
 own sake, not to develop character or exhibit 
 it in action ; they are only adventures, hap- 
 penings, skillfully interwoven and rapidly 
 passed ; but amid them the conduct of the 
 personages is true Italian, realistic. In pre- 
 senting these incidents, and the scenes in 
 which they take place, the poets, as Lessing 
 complained, adopt pictorial methods: they 
 describe the ladies piecemeal, the landscapes 
 leaf by leaf. Possibly, as has been sug- 
 gested, the habitual sight of pictures ena- 
 bles the Italian to succeed where the Ger- 
 man fails; to harmonize the colors on the 
 canvas and build up the fragments into a 
 proportioned statue, and thus obtain a single 
 mental impression. Whether this be so or 
 not, the pictorial quality is a tribute exacted 
 
118 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 from literature by the ruling art, and illus- 
 trates the Italian proclivity to identify the 
 mind's eye with the body's, to turn the things 
 of the intellect into objects of sense. This 
 realism, too, is shown as continuously in the 
 frequent lapsing of Pulci's story, for exam- 
 ple, into undisguised burlesque, low comedy, 
 and broad f nn ; and more subtly in the pre- 
 vailing irony of Ariosto. The poems thus 
 constructed were an acceptable, usually a 
 high, mode of amusement; they interested 
 the fancy, delighted the senses, and stirred 
 laughter. The Italians of the Renaissance 
 asked no more. 
 
 In the prose tales, of which so many were 
 written after the model of Boccaccio, the 
 absorption of interest in simple incident is 
 more plain, and the presence of contempo- 
 rary manners more manifest. Various as 
 they are, including every rank of life in 
 their characters, and every phase of action 
 in their events, they all bear a family resem- 
 blance. They are for the most part com- 
 edies of intrigue, arresting attention by 
 romantic or piquant situations ; usually im- 
 moral, not infrequently obscene. The crafty 
 seducer is the text, the fool of a husband 
 the comment ; and when the gloss is read, 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 119 
 
 afforded by the lives of the cardinals and 
 the wit of the cajntoli, no ground remains 
 for doubting that they hold the mirror up 
 to society as it then was. If they have any 
 other than a humorous or romantic interest, 
 it is the interest of the tragedy of physical 
 horror, as in our English Titus Andronicus. 
 Of course there are many stories to which 
 this broad and rapid generalization would 
 not apply, — tales wholly innocent, or harm- 
 less at least, full of movement, fancy, and 
 action, graceful and charming with the art 
 of story-telling at its Italian best; but, as 
 a whole, they must be described as exhibiting 
 a masque of sin. They are of the town in 
 taste and temper; the corruption they set 
 forth is not of the court or the curia only, 
 but of the citizens ; the laugh with which 
 they conclude is an echo from the lips of the 
 trades-people. Their principal value now is 
 historic ; they are the clear record of that 
 social decay which condemned Italy to cen- 
 turies of degradation. To ask why they did 
 not generate the novel or suggest the drama 
 is to state a literary puzzle ; but the hun- 
 dred considerations which have been put 
 forth to explain the abortive issue of the 
 miracle plays apply here also. It would 
 
120 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 seem as if the laws of spiritual development 
 were miperceived ; as if the knowledge of 
 right and wrong as indestructible agencies 
 to build or shatter character did not exist ; 
 as if the spirit had stiffened into that sense- 
 less stupor in which evil is no longer recog- 
 nized for itself. It was left for the drama- 
 tists of the Globe Theatre to take these 
 external incidents and show the meaning 
 they had for humanity ; to transfer the in- 
 terest from the momentary and outer act, 
 and centre it upon the living soul within. 
 The Italians could not work the mines they 
 owned ; the pure gold of poetry that the 
 novels held in amalgamation was to be the 
 treasure of England. The works of the last 
 years do not differ from the original of Boc- 
 caccio except for the worse ; his successors 
 never equaled their master ; nor have their 
 works obtained currency, like his, among 
 men, as a part of the general literature of 
 the cultivated world. 
 
 As the novelists make more prominent 
 the realistic element of the narrative poems, 
 the idyllic writers develop more plainly the 
 pure poetic quality ; in reading them one 
 willingly assents to the enthusiasm which 
 names their works the literature of the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 121 
 
 golden age. More than the epic or the 
 novel, the idyl influenced the future. Ar- 
 cadia is a well-known region in every great 
 literature of Europe, and its atmosphere 
 still hangs over the opera. The creator of 
 this pastoral myth was the father of much 
 beauty. Something was borrowed from the 
 Garden of Eden, from the Virgilian fields, 
 and from the Earthly Paradise; the reli- 
 gious, classical, and mediaeval moods united 
 in it ; but essentially it was pure Italian, — 
 Arcadia was an idealized Italy. The scene 
 presented was the same country life that 
 forms the background of all contemporary 
 literature, but charmed, ennobled, and bathed 
 in a softer than Italian air. There was lit- 
 tle left in that age of ruin but delight in 
 the natural beauty that was darkened by no 
 shadow of humanity. The villa, the culti- 
 vated fields, the still, calm morning sky, 
 were probably never more dear to the Ital- 
 ian heart than then, and it was this unso- 
 phisticated and keenly felt delight in nature 
 that flowered in the idyl. To Northern na- 
 tions Arcadia must always be a dream ; to 
 the Italians, then, at least, it was only the 
 refinement of what was most real to them. 
 It was because the idyl was so deeply rooted 
 
122 ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 
 
 in a genuine emotion that it outlived the 
 other modes of literature contemporary with 
 it, and developed its final perfection only in 
 the next age of the counter reformation in 
 the art of Tasso and Guarini. But even in 
 its earlier history the idyl shares with the 
 best narrative poems that beauty of form 
 which has conferred on both an immortal- 
 ity denied to the novel. The poets were all 
 literary artists: they polished their verses 
 with assiduous care ; they expended many 
 years in correction, elaboration, and adjust- 
 ment ; and they obtained that exquisite fin- 
 ish which, surface-like as it may seem, is ada- 
 mant to the tooth of time. They achieved 
 beauty, and won the delight that comes 
 from its creation and contemplation ; humor, 
 too, they made their own, and gave it uni- 
 versal interest; they illustrated in practice 
 the theory of art for art's sake ; yet, after 
 all, what is the judgment of posterity, we 
 will not say on the men who were never sus- 
 pected of being heroes, but on their works ? 
 They have left a literature, not of intellec- 
 tual or moral weight, but of recreation ; one 
 that does not reveal, but amuses, — does not 
 enlighten, inform, or guide life, but solaces 
 and helps to while it away. This literature 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS OF IDEALISM. 123 
 
 enriched the Northern minds by making 
 them more sensitive to beauty, and by sharp- 
 ening their perception of artistic refine- 
 ments ; it has left no other mark on civiliza- 
 tion. The interest which the golden age 
 excites in cultivated minds seldom loses its 
 dilettante character; the really serious in- 
 terest is in the Italy of Dante and Giotto, 
 or in the genius of isolated men who stand 
 apart, like Michel Angelo. 
 
 The Renaissance was a movement of civ- 
 ilization not less important than the Refor- 
 mation or the Revolution, and to Italy, as 
 its source, the debt of the world is great. 
 But the Renaissance was not conveyed to 
 Europe by the literature of its corruption ; 
 it was conveyed in far different ways. 
 
KEMAKKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 I. HIS CAREER. 
 
 The natural charm by which Shelley fas- 
 cinated his familiar friends lives after him, 
 and has gathered about him for his defense 
 a group of men whose affection for him 
 seems no whit lessened because they never 
 knew him face to face. The one common 
 characteristic prominent in all who have 
 written of him with sympathy, however mea- 
 gre or valuable their individual contributions 
 of praise, criticism, or information, is this 
 sentiment of direct, intimate, intense per- 
 sonal loyalty which he has inspired in them 
 to a degree rare, if not unparalleled, in lit- 
 erary annals. Under the impulse of this 
 strong love, they have championed his cause, 
 until his fame, overshadowed in his own 
 generation by the vigorous worldliness of 
 Byron, and slightly esteemed by nearly all 
 of his craft, has grown world-wide. With 
 the enthusiasts, however, who have aided in 
 bringing about this result, admiration for 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 125 
 
 Shelley's work is a secondary thing ; its vir- 
 tue is blended with and transfused into the 
 nature of Shelley himself, who is the centre 
 of their worship. To reveal the fineness 
 and lustre of his character, his essential 
 worth throughout that romantic and dark- 
 ened career of thirty years, is their chief 
 pleasure, and in this, too, they have now won 
 some success, and have partially reversed 
 the popular estimate of the poet as merely 
 an immoral atheist ; yet, although some 
 amends have been made for harsh contem- 
 porary criticism, Shelley's name is still for 
 orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and 
 of insult to God. It is still too early to de- 
 cide whether the modification of the harsh 
 criticism once almost universally bestowed 
 upon Shelley will go on permanently, or 
 whether it is not in some measure due to 
 peculiar results of culture in our own time. 
 Without attempting to prejudge this ques- 
 tion, especially in regard to poetic fame, 
 there seems to be, as the cause passes out of 
 the hands of those who knew Shelley per- 
 sonally into the guardianship of the new 
 generation, a tendency toward greater unity 
 of judgment in regard to the larger phases 
 of his character and conduct. 
 
126 REMABES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 Shelley, as Swinburne said of William 
 Blake, was born into the church of rebels ; 
 he was born, also, gentle, loving, and fear- 
 less. The dangers to which such a natu- 
 ral endowment would inevitably expose him 
 were aggravated by a misguided education, 
 and by the temper of that feverish and ill- 
 regulated age in which modern reform be- 
 gan. He was in early years first of all a 
 revolter; he would do only what seemed to 
 him best, and in the way which seemed to 
 him best ; he took nothing upon authority, 
 he acknowledged no validity in the customs 
 and beliefs which past experience had be- 
 queathed to men ; he must examine every 
 conclusion anew, and accept or reject it by 
 the light of his own limited thought and ob- 
 servation ; he carried the Protestant spirit 
 to its ultimate extreme — all legal and in- 
 tellectual results embodied in institutions or 
 in accepted beliefs must show cause to him 
 why they should exist. He was, moreover, 
 in haste ; he could not rest in a doubt, he 
 could not suspend his judgment, he could 
 not wait for fuller knowledge. Finding 
 only incomplete or incompetent answers to 
 his questioning, he leaped to the conclusion 
 that there was no answer. Had he been 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 127 
 
 contented with allowing this spirit to influ- 
 ence only his own private creed and conduct, 
 mischief enough was sure to be wrought for 
 him, error and suffering were in store for 
 him in no common degree. But he was not 
 merely building an ideal of life and formu- 
 lating a rule of living for himself ; he had, 
 as he afterward confessed, a passion for re- 
 forming the world. He was early in print, 
 and aspired to teach the world before he 
 was well out of his teens, — took in his 
 hands, indeed, the regeneration of Ireland 
 through pamphlets, and public eloquence, 
 and personal agitation and supervision. It 
 is easy to dismiss this as the foolish conceit 
 of a boy of talent much given to dreaming. 
 It is easy, too, to dismiss his exile from his 
 home and his expulsion from Oxford as 
 childish obstinacy, disobedience, ingratitude, 
 and presumption ; but if there was anything 
 of these faults in him there was also much 
 more made evident in these first trials of his 
 character : there was the capacity for sacri- 
 fice, the resolution to be faithful to the truth 
 as he saw it. The beginning of manhood 
 found him in the full sway of immature 
 conviction, and already suffering the penalty. 
 It is not necessary to follow out in detail 
 
128 EEMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the development of a life so entered upon. 
 It led him to attack Christianity and to dis- 
 regard the law of marriage, and this is the 
 sum and substance of his offense. Yet no 
 sign, perhaps, is so indicative of the in- 
 creased liberality of religion in our time as 
 the attempt which has been made to show 
 that Shelley was essentially Christian, an 
 attempt so common and vigorous that Tre- 
 lawney felt called upon to protest against 
 it. In this spirit Mr. Symonds writes from 
 one extreme : " It is certain that as Chris- 
 tianity passes beyond its mediaeval phase, 
 and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, 
 it will more and more approximate to Shel- 
 ley's exposition. Here, and here only, is a 
 vital faith adapted to the conditions of mod- 
 ern thought, indestructible because essential, 
 and fitted to unite instead of separating 
 minds of divers quality " ; and Rev. F. W. 
 Robertson, from the other extreme, writes : 
 "I cannot help feeling that there was a 
 spirit in poor Shelley's mind which might 
 have assimilated with the spirit of his Re- 
 deemer, — nay, which I will dare to say was 
 kindred with that spirit, if only his Re- 
 deemer had been differently imaged to him. 
 ... I will not say that a man who by his 
 
BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 129 
 
 opposition to God means opposition to a de- 
 mon, to whom the name of God in his mind 
 is appended, is an enemy of God ; . . . 
 change the name and I will bid that char- 
 acter defiance with you ! " A candid exami- 
 nation must show, however, that Trelawney 
 is right ; there is no doubt that Shelley re- 
 jected altogether what is properly known as 
 Christianity, in youth violently and with ha- 
 tred, while in later years he came to care 
 less about it. At the same time it is to be 
 remembered that he had seen Christianity 
 only in those forms whose most prominent 
 characteristic is defect in charity and love, 
 which Shelley believed to be the central 
 virtues. Probably he never dissociated the 
 Christian God from the Jewish Jehovah, 
 and his feeling towards him is well illus- 
 trated in the terrible indictment he makes 
 against him in reference to Milton's delinea- 
 tion of Satan as one fct who, in the cold secu- 
 rity of undoubted triumph, inflicts upon his 
 fallen enemy the most horrible punishment, 
 not from any mistaken hope of thereby re- 
 forming him, but with the avowed purpose 
 of exasperating him to deserve new tor- 
 ments." It is, therefore, impossible to deiry 
 Shelley's atheism ; the most that can be con- 
 
130 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 tended for is that in natural piety, in purity 
 of life and motive, in conscientious and un- 
 selfish action, Shelley was exceptionally con- 
 spicuous. 
 
 It is here that the second charge against 
 Shelley has its place. How, it is indignantly 
 asked, was he unselfish, loving, and con- 
 scientious, when he left his youthful wife to 
 circumstances which resulted in her suicide, 
 and transferred his devotion to another? 
 Nothing more can be done than to point out 
 the fact that Shelley acted in harmony with 
 his convictions of social duty ; that the first 
 marriage was the result of knight-errantry 
 rather than affection, and had become des- 
 titute of any pleasure ; that Shelley did not 
 desert his wife in such a way as to make 
 her suicide chargeable to him. These con- 
 siderations do not, it is true, relieve him of 
 condemnation, or remove the really great de- 
 fect in his moral perception of the responsi- 
 bility which rested upon him in consequence 
 of a thoughtless and foolish marriage. Yet 
 it is not doubtful that in his life he atoned 
 for his error, if suffering is atonement ; from 
 that time a shadow fell upon him which 
 never was removed. It is hard to find heart 
 for reproach when one, whose whole gospel 
 
 
EEMABES ON SHELLEY. 1S1 
 
 was love, is so cruelly entangled in the un- 
 foreseen consequences of his acts that he 
 seems to have wrought the work of hatred. 
 
 What, then, under this presentation of 
 the case, remains to be said for that ideal 
 character which those who love Shelley be- 
 lieve to have been his possession? That, 
 beginning life with a theory which left every 
 desire and impulse free course, which im- 
 posed no restrictions except those of his 
 own honor and self-respect, which acknow- 
 ledged no command not proceeding from his 
 own reason, he yet served the truth he saw 
 with entire loyalty and sincerity of heart ; 
 that, making many errors throughout a dark- 
 ened life, he did not strive by lightness of 
 heart or logical sophistication to avoid their 
 penalties of misery and remorse, but kept 
 them in memory and bore his burden of sor- 
 row courageously ; that by intense thought 
 and bitter experience he came at last to 
 find the laws of life and to obey them. He 
 found how impossible it is for the individ- 
 ual to solve the problems put before him, so 
 that he himself grew content to leave many 
 of these in doubt ; found how ignorant it 
 was in him to make his own experience the 
 measure of the conditions of general human 
 
132 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 life, and attempt to reform the world's mo- 
 tives and standards by reference to that 
 experience alone ; found how little the indi- 
 vidual counts for in life, so that the youth, 
 who with fervid hope took up the regenera- 
 tion of a whole nation in confidence, came to 
 doubt whether it was worth while for him 
 to write at all, and rated himself far below 
 his friend Byron. These characteristics are 
 the evidence of his strength, sincerity, and 
 Tightness of purpose ; and through these he 
 worked out an ideal of life and rule of liv- 
 ing, which differed much from those of his 
 early days. No ideal intrinsically more 
 powerful in influence or more exalted in vir- 
 tue has been worked out by men who, like 
 himself, found the old familiar standards 
 rationally inadequate and morally weak. 
 These are the essential elements in Shelley's 
 career, and to them his personal qualities 
 and his daily life give form and color. This, 
 too, is the work of a man framed for self- 
 destruction, against whom circumstances did 
 their worst throughout. The marvel is, not 
 that his life was so broken in private happi- 
 ness, and his public work so unequal in the 
 worth of its results, but, taking all into ac- 
 count, that he saved so much of his life and 
 
BEMAEKS ON SBELLEY. 133 
 
 work through his perception of the valuable 
 objects of living, and his clinging to them. 
 
 This, too, was the result of the imperfect 
 years of preparation. He had given him 
 only the traditional thirty years which be- 
 long to every genius for trial and training 
 before the finished work can be required. 
 He had just recognized the conditions to 
 which he must conform, and was only ready 
 to begin when he died. 
 
 II. HIS ACQUAINTANCES. 
 
 It is impossible to condense Shelley's Life 
 in a clear way. One turns the pages, and 
 owns for the thousandth time the fascination 
 of Shelley, from the first glimpse of the boy, 
 pressing his face against the window-pane to 
 kiss his sister, to the hot July afternoon 
 when he made his last embarkation, and the 
 summer storm swept the gleaming mountains 
 from his sight; but no art transmits the 
 spell, and the story, clasped between these 
 periods, must be left in its integrity. Shel- 
 ley lived in solitude, and died before he was 
 thirty years old ; but his career involved such 
 variety of scenes, persons, and incidents, was 
 so thick -strewn with interesting episodes, 
 and contained so many perplexed passages, 
 
134 BEMAEKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 that it is a study by itself, and requires 
 for its mastery an acquaintance with an ex- 
 tensive literature of its own. It were useless 
 to attempt a criticism, or to describe Shelley 
 anew, but some unstudied remarks upon his 
 fortunes in life may be ventured upon. 
 
 Must one incur the charge of being super- 
 cilious and aristocratic if he acknowledges 
 at once a feeling, after reading Shelley's life, 
 of having been in very disagreeable com- 
 pany ? Assuredly no one can rise from the 
 perusal with a heightened respect for human 
 nature, apart from Shelley. He was born a 
 gentleman ; his innate courtesy clothes him 
 with attractiveness, and distinguishes him 
 among his associates as a person of a differ- 
 ent kind from them, in his actions and bear- 
 ing ; and the deference which Byron showed 
 to him, it is not unlikely, sprang from a 
 perception of this strain of breeding in him 
 rather than from appreciation of his genius 
 or his nature. In his earliest fellowship with 
 school - friends, for whom he had a kindly 
 regard at Eton and after they went down 
 together to Oxford, though Hogg plainly ob- 
 scures it, there is a gleam here and there of 
 natural and equal companionship ; but this 
 morning ray soon dies out. He was, after- 
 
 
REMARKS ON SBELLEY. 135 
 
 wards, almost uniformly unfortunate in his 
 acquaintances. His life was truly one long 
 and sorrowful disillusion ; and in it not the 
 least part was the discovery of how he had 
 been deceived in his judgment of persons. 
 
 Hogg was his first example. Shelley be- 
 came familiar with him at Oxford, and, not 
 content with having him for a bosom friend, 
 wished to make him his brother-in-law. At 
 that time Shelley was in the first crude fer- 
 ment of his intellectual life, eagerly absorb- 
 ing the new knowledge which came to him 
 from his indiscriminate reading, and disput- 
 ing on all the usual topics with vehement 
 and unwearied earnestness, insatiable curi- 
 osity, and the delight of a youth who has 
 just made the discovery that he has a mind 
 of his own. His thoughts and letters were 
 mostly polemical; ideal elements of moral- 
 ity were growing up in him, and radical 
 views of conduct getting a hold in his 
 convictions. He was willful,, precipitate, 
 and heedless through inexperience ; he was 
 thrown the more upon himself, and given a 
 violent turn toward rebellion, to which he 
 was prone enough, by his expulsion from 
 Oxford, and the senseless attempt of his 
 family to make him suppress his mental and 
 
136 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 moral life by denying his first dear conclu- 
 sions. In this state, partly from adventure 
 and restlessness, perhaps, but also from a 
 sense of obligation, the desire to spread his 
 gospel, and by the mere favor of circum- 
 stances, he married his first wife, though he 
 knew that his sympathies were more engaged 
 than his heart. 
 
 At Edinburgh, whither the pair had gone, 
 Hogg joined them, and with him they re- 
 turned to York, where Shelley left his wife 
 in his friend's care during a brief necessary 
 absence. Hogg, who appears to have been 
 not so pure as might be wished in his uni- 
 versity days, tried to seduce her ; and when 
 Shelley came back he learned the facts. He 
 loved Hogg ; he was ashamed, he wrote, to 
 tell him how much he loved him ; he was 
 grateful to him for having stood by him and 
 shared his expulsion from the college ; and 
 he placed the most extravagant estimate 
 upon his abilities. What followed upon the 
 disclosure Shelley himself tells in a letter 
 written at the time : — 
 
 " We walked to the fields beyond York. 
 I desired to know fully the account of this 
 affair. I heard it from him, and I believe he 
 was sincere. All I can recollect of that ter- 
 
MEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 137 
 
 rible day was that I pardoned him, — fully, 
 freely pardoned him ; that I would still be 
 a friend to him, and hoped soon to convince 
 him how lovely virtue was ; that his crime, 
 not himself, was the object of my detesta- 
 tion ; that I value a human being not for 
 what it has been, but for what it is ; that I 
 hoped the time would come when he would 
 regard his horrible error with as much dis- 
 gust as I did. He said little ; he was pale, 
 terror-struck, remorseful. " 
 
 One may smile at this episode, if he be 
 cynical, and has left youth far enough be- 
 hind; but for all that, there is something 
 pathetic in these sentences of boyish good- 
 ness, this simple belief in the moral princi- 
 ples which Shelley had found in his first 
 search, and to which he had given the alle- 
 giance of his unworn heart; and in this 
 scene of forgiveness, still confused with the 
 emotions of first friendship betrayed, one 
 perceives the Shelley we know, though he 
 was not yet out of his teens. Some time 
 elapsed before Shelley realized all the inci- 
 dent meant ; then he wrote, " I leave him to 
 his fate ; " and when they met again in Lon- 
 don, the old footing was gone forever. 
 
 Godwin, too, affords a capital example of 
 
138 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 a shattered ideal. He was the Socrates of the 
 young poet, and Shelley, who derived the 
 main articles of his political and social creed 
 from the radical philosopher's great book, 
 was already adoring him as one in the pan- 
 theon of the immortal dead, when he learned 
 from Southey that his master and emanci- 
 pator still walked the earth. He sat down 
 at once and Wrote a characteristic epistle, in 
 which he expressed himself with the enthu- 
 siasm of a disciple not yet twenty, and re- 
 spectfully but earnestly besought the living 
 friendship and advice of him whom he re- 
 garded as the light of the new age. God- 
 win was interested, and long and frequent 
 letters, admirable in tone upon both sides, 
 passed between them. The elder endeav- 
 ored to check the irrepressible activity and 
 eager plans of the young reformer, who had 
 no notion of waiting until he should grow 
 old before setting to work to remake society ; 
 and the youth, on his part, exhibited a defer- 
 ence and willingness to be guided such as 
 he never showed before or afterwards. The 
 first modification of Shelley's idea of God- 
 win came in consequence of their personal 
 acquaintance, as was natural ; but in dis- 
 covering that Godwin was really an idiosyn- 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 139 
 
 cratic mortal, as well as an illuminating in- 
 tellect, Shelley did not yield his admiration 
 for the sage. One can still see the un- 
 bounded astonishment of the poet, which 
 Mary Godwin describes, when she told him 
 her father was annoyed by his addressing 
 him as " Mr." instead of " Esq.," in direct- 
 ing his letters. They got on very well to- 
 gether, however, until Shelley ran away with 
 Mary, — a practical exposition of Godwin's 
 doctrines, which he, having now grown re- 
 spectable and socially cautious, did not at 
 all relish. Shelley had before this aided 
 Godwin somewhat in financial embarrass- 
 ments. That philosopher was always in 
 debt ; and the young disciple, who, though 
 the heir to a great property, had no way of 
 realizing anything from it except by selling 
 post-obit bonds, agreed with his master that 
 philosophers have a paramount claim on any 
 money their friends might own. He was 
 willing to discharge his duty by getting 
 Godwin out of debt, or assisting him as far 
 as he could in the matter. When he re- 
 turned to England with Mary he found that 
 the philosopher would not see or forgive 
 him, and positively declined to correspond 
 except upon the subject of how much money 
 
140 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 Shelley could give him. Shelley had no 
 thought of not doing his own duty, because 
 of the conduct of other people; and while 
 he felt Godwin's hardness and inconsistency, 
 nevertheless he would relieve that great mind 
 from the little annoyances consequent on 
 borrowing money without providing means 
 of repayment. He, however, was not blind ; 
 and what he learned of Godwin in the course 
 of these transactions had a destroying influ- 
 ence upon that ideal of the man which he 
 had formed in his first days of revolutionary 
 hope. In the second year of his life with 
 Mary he told the philosopher what he 
 thought of the whole matter in a letter which 
 one may be excused for reading with pecu- 
 liar satisfaction : — 
 
 " It has perpetually appeared to me to 
 have been your especial duty to see that, so 
 far as mankind value your good opinion, we 
 were dealt justly by, and that a young fam- 
 ily, innocent and benevolent and united, 
 should not be confounded with prostitutes 
 and seducers. My astonishment, and, I will 
 confess, when I have been treated with most 
 harshness and cruelty by you, my indigna- 
 tion, has been extreme, that, knowing as you 
 do my nature, any considerations should 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 141 
 
 have prevailed on you to have been thus 
 harsh and cruel. I lamented also over my 
 ruined hopes of all that your genius once 
 taught me to expect from your virtue, when 
 I found that for yourself, your family, and 
 your creditors you would submit to that 
 communication with me which you once re- 
 jected and abhorred, and which no pity for 
 my poverty or sufferings, assumed willingly 
 for you, could avail to extort. Do not talk of 
 forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils 
 in my veins, and my gall rises against all 
 that bears the human form, when I think of 
 what 1, their benefactor and ardent lover, 
 have endured of enmity and contempt from 
 you and from all mankind." 
 
 The writer was that youth of twenty-three 
 years, of whom Godwin remarks that he 
 knew " that Shelley's temper was occasion- 
 ally fiery, resentful, and indignant." It is 
 true that it was so, and one is pleased to 
 find upon what fit occasions it broke out. 
 Shelley, however, had undertaken a hopeless 
 and endless task in trying to extricate God- 
 win from debt, and he spent much money, 
 raised at a great sacrifice, in the vain at- 
 tempt. What he thought of these transac- 
 tions, when his judgment had matured, we 
 
142 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 know from another delightfully plain-spoken 
 letter, written five years later, in answer to 
 renewed importunities : — 
 
 " I have given you the amount of a con- 
 siderable fortune, and have destituted my- 
 self, for the purpose of realizing it, of nearly 
 four times the amount. Except for the 
 good-will which this transaction seems to 
 have produced between you and me, this 
 money, for any advantage it ever conferred 
 on you, might as well have been thrown into 
 the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this 
 .£4,000 or <£5,000, and administered it in 
 trust for your permanent advantage, I should 
 indeed have been your benefactor. The 
 error, however, was greater in the man of 
 mature age, extensive experience, and pene- 
 trating intellect than in the crude and im- 
 petuous boy. Such an error is seldom com- 
 mitted twice." 
 
 But long before this, Shelley, though his 
 estimate of Godwin's powers, in common 
 with that of the people of the time, remained 
 extravagant, had found out the difference 
 between the author of Political Justice and 
 Plato and Bacon. 
 
 If any one wonders at the extent to which 
 Shelley let himself be fleeced by the philo- 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 143 
 
 sophicai radical of Skinner Street, he should 
 reserve some astonishment for the remainder 
 of the shearers. Shelley, it is to be remem- 
 bered, was never in possession of his prop- 
 erty, and had only a small allowance at first, 
 and a thousand pounds a year after he was 
 twenty-four years old ; he was extravagant 
 in his generosity, and gave money with a 
 free hand, whenever he had any, to the poor 
 about him, to his needy friends, and to 
 causes of one kind and another which ex- 
 cited in him his passion for philanthropy. 
 He was, consequently, in his early days, 
 commonly in debt for his own expenses, and 
 often in danger of arrest and imprisonment. 
 When he mentioned his days of poverty, in 
 that letter to Godwin, it was not a mere 
 phrase ; and though a settlement was at last 
 made which provided for him sufficiently, 
 he was never ahead in his savings. Under 
 these circumstances, his biography at times 
 reminds one of the old comedy, with its mob 
 of parasites and legacy - hunters. He was 
 simply victimized by those who could estab- 
 lish any claim on his benevolence. No doubt 
 he gave willingly, with all his heart, to Pea- 
 cock and Leigh Hunt and the rest, as he did 
 to Godwin, and thought it was his duty as 
 
144 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 well as his pleasure ; but his generosity does 
 not alter the fact that his acquaintances 
 were very dull of conscience in money mat- 
 ters. One begins to relent a little toward 
 Hogg, remembering that he did actually 
 share his own funds with Shelley just after 
 the expulsion from Oxford, when the latter 
 could get no money, owing to his father's 
 displeasure ; and for Horace Smith, the 
 banker, who sometimes advanced money to 
 Shelley, and not too much, one has a feeling 
 of amazed respect. 
 
 The worst misfortune of Shelley, however, 
 in the friends he made, was to have met and 
 married Harriet Westbrook. The circum- 
 stances of their nnion and its unlucky course 
 and tragical close have lately been for the 
 first time fully set forth. The marriage on 
 Shelley's side was not originally one of love, 
 but it became one of affection. For two 
 years life went on without the discovery of 
 anything to break the happiness of the pair ; 
 but after the birth of their first child trouble 
 arose, and rapidly culminated. It is most 
 likely that the sister-in-law, Eliza, who lived 
 with them, was the source of the original 
 dissension by her interference, arbitrariness, 
 and control of Harriet ; but, as Shelley had 
 
 
BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 145 
 
 grown in mind and character, the difference 
 between him and his wife in endowment and 
 in taste was bound to make itself felt, and 
 to put an end to the unity of study and 
 spirit of which he had dreamed ; and it is 
 clear enough that she had tired of the stud- 
 ies and the purposes in which Shelley's life 
 consisted, and that though overborne for a 
 time, by his influence, she was now showing 
 herself worldly, frivolous, and weak. She 
 had married the heir to a baronetcy and a 
 fortune, and desired to profit by it. In one 
 way and another she had become hard and 
 unyielding toward Shelley, had made him 
 thoroughly miserable, and, in the earlier 
 months of 1814, was living away from him ; 
 and he, on his side, as late as May in that 
 year, as appears from stanzas now first 
 printed, was trying to soften her. While 
 affairs were in this condition he first met 
 Mary Godwin, and he fell passionately in 
 love with her, all the more because of the 
 long strain of dejection and loneliness ; and 
 in addition to the story of the dissensions 
 that had arisen in his family, and the dif- 
 ference of character and temperament which 
 had declared itself between his wife and 
 himself, Shelley is said to have told Mary 
 
146 BEMABES ON SHELLEY, 
 
 that Harriet had been unfaithful to him. 
 If he did not tell her then, he did after- 
 wards. On what evidence he relied we do 
 not know; nor is there any confirmatory 
 proof from other quarters except a letter of 
 Godwin's written after Harriet's suicide, in 
 which he states the same fact as coming 
 from unquestionable authority unconnected 
 with Shelley. Not long before his death 
 Shelley renewed the charge, though in a 
 veiled and inferential way, in a letter to 
 Southey, in which he defends himself for his 
 conduct in this matter, declares his inno- 
 cence of any harm done or intended, refuses 
 to be held responsible for the suicide of Har- 
 riet, and practically asserts that he had 
 grounds for divorce, had he chosen to free 
 himself in that way. There is no need to 
 prove that Shelley was right in his belief of 
 his wife's infidelity ; but if it be thought 
 that Shelley did in trutli believe her guilty, 
 that has much to do with our estimate of 
 his action. He was twenty-two years old, 
 or nearly that, and he held radical views 
 as to the permanence and sacredness of the 
 marriage bond, as also did Mary, who in- 
 herited them from her mother. Their de- 
 cision to unite their lives, under these cir- 
 
BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 147 
 
 cumstances, was a practical admission that 
 Shelley's home was in fact broken up, and 
 that he was free to offer, and Mary to accept, 
 not legal union, but a common home, with 
 the expectation and purpose of complete 
 devotion one to the other, in a pure spirit 
 and for the ordinary ends of marriage. 
 
 Shelley did not proceed secretly. He sum- 
 moned Harriet, who had not thought of such 
 serious results of her action, to London, and 
 told her what he was going to do. She did 
 not consent to the separation, nor does she 
 seem to have regarded it as final. Shelley 
 had a settlement made for her by the law- 
 yers, provided credit for her, and two weeks 
 after the interview left England with Mary. 
 He wrote to Harriet on the journe} 7 ", assured 
 her of his affection and his care for her, and 
 indulged a plan that she should live near 
 them, which is, perhaps, the most surprising 
 instance of Shelley's purity of mind, and of 
 the unworldliness or unreality, as one chooses 
 to call it, of his conception of how human 
 life might be lived. On his return he saw 
 her, and agreed to leave the children with 
 her ; and when his allowance was fixed at a 
 thousand pounds, he gave orders to honor 
 her drafts for two hundred pounds annually. 
 
148 BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 She had an equal amount from her own 
 family, which had been paid since the be- 
 ginning of their married life. When Shel- 
 ley left England the second time, she was 
 thus provided for, one would think, suffi- 
 ciently. On his return he lost sight of her, 
 and was anxiously inquiring for her, when 
 the news of her suicide reached him. She 
 had put the children, of whom the eldest 
 was three years old, out to board, at a time 
 when he was ill ; she had not been permit- 
 ted to see her father ; but the circumstances 
 immediately surrounding her death are not 
 known. Shelley, though he bore his share o£ 
 natural sorrow for the death of one to whom 
 he had been tenderly attached, did not hold 
 himself guilty of any wrong. 
 
 It is no wonder that in the last few years 
 of his life Shelley would not talk of his 
 earlier days, and had a kind of shame in re- 
 membering in what ruin his hopes and pur- 
 poses and the enthusiasm of his youth had 
 fallen ; he felt it as an indignity to the 
 nobleness of spirit which, in spite of all his 
 failures, he knew had been his throughout. 
 As we see those years, it is only for himself 
 that we prize them ; and it is a pleasure to 
 be enabled to look on them free from that 
 
BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 149 
 
 saddening retrospect of his own mind, and 
 observe how natural and simple he really 
 was. No one has ever had the days of his 
 youth so laid open to the common gaze, and 
 this is one charm of his personality, that we 
 know him as a brother or a friend. The 
 pages afford many happy anecdotes ; but 
 one can linger here only to mark the con- 
 stant playfulness of Shelley, which was a 
 bright element in his earlier career and not 
 altogether absent in his Italian life. The 
 passion for floating paper - boats, which he 
 indulged unweariedly, is well known ; but 
 at all times he was ready for sport, and 
 could even trifle with his dearest plans, as 
 in the flotilla of bottles and aerial navy of 
 fire-balloons, all loaded with revolutionary 
 pamphlets, which he sent forth on the Dev- 
 onshire coast. His running about the little 
 garden, hand in hand with Harriet ; his im- 
 personating fabulous monsters with Leigh 
 Hunt's children, who begged him " not to do 
 the horn ; " and his favorite sport with his 
 little temporarily adopted Marlow girl, of 
 placing her on the dining-table, and rush- 
 ing with it across the long room, are in- 
 stances that readily recur to mind, and 
 illustrate the gayety and high spirits which 
 
150 BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 really belonged to him, and which perhaps 
 the Serehio last knew when it bore him and 
 his boat on his summer-day voyages. This 
 side of his nature ought to be remembered, 
 as well as that " occasionally fiery, resentful, 
 and indignant " quality which Godwin ob- 
 served, and the intense and restless practi- 
 cality of the impatient reformer, when one 
 thinks of Shelley (as he has been too often 
 represented) as only a morbid, sensitive, 
 idealizing poet, of a rather feminine spirit. 
 That portrait of him is untruthful, for he 
 was of a most masculine, active, and natu- 
 rally joyful nature. 
 
 After he left England for the last time, 
 and took up his abode in Italy, principally, 
 it would seem, because of the social re- 
 proach and public stigma under which he 
 lived, and by which he felt deeply wronged, 
 he was not really much more fortunate in 
 his company. The immediate reason for 
 the journey was to take Byron's natural 
 daughter, Allegra, to her father at Venice ; 
 the mother, Miss Clairmont, went with them, 
 and, as it turned out, continued to be a 
 member of Shelley's family, as she had been 
 since his union with Mary. It is now known 
 that the Shelleys were ignorant of the lia- 
 
EEMARES ON SHELLEY. 151 
 
 ison, both when it began in London, and 
 afterward when they first met Byron at 
 Geneva ; but Shelley had a warm affection 
 for Miss Clairmont, whose friendlessness 
 appealed to his sympathy, and he spent 
 much time in Italy in trying to make Byron 
 do his duty toward Allegra, and to soften 
 the ill-nature of her parents toward each 
 other. Byron's conduct in this matter was 
 a powerful element in generating in Shelley 
 that thorough contempt he expressed for the 
 former as a man. But though Shelley's 
 most winning qualities are to be observed, 
 and his tact was conspicuously called forth 
 by their negotiations in regard to the child, 
 yet the connection with Miss Clairmont was 
 unfortunate. That it repeatedly drew scan- 
 dal upon him was a minor matter ; it was of 
 more consequence that in his family she was 
 a disturbing element, and Mary, who had 
 disliked to have her as an inmate almost 
 from the first, finally insisted on her with- 
 drawal, but not until frequent disagreements 
 had sadly marred the peace of Shelley's 
 home. Mary, indeed, was not perfect, any 
 more than other very young wives ; and by 
 her jealousies, and yet more, it seems, by 
 her attempts to make Shelley conform to the 
 
152 EEMABES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 world, especially in the last year or two, she 
 tried and harassed him; and so it came 
 about that his love took the form of tender- 
 ness for her welfare and feelings, and often 
 of despondency for himself. Miss Clair- 
 mont was a source of continual trouble for 
 him in many ways : she was of an unhappy 
 temperament and hard to live with ; but with 
 his long-enduring and charitable disposition, 
 and his extraordinary tenacity in attachment, 
 and perfect readiness to admit the least ob- 
 ligation upon him, proceeding from any one 
 in trouble, he never wavered in his devotion 
 to her interests and care for her happiness. 
 It is a curious fact that Miss Clairmont, 
 who lived to be very old, manipulated the 
 written records of this portion of her life, 
 so that her evidence is of very questionable 
 worth, though better, one hopes, than that 
 of her mother, the second Mrs. Godwin, 
 whose lying about the Shelleys was of the 
 most wholesale and conscienceless kind. 
 
 As with Miss Clairmont, so in a less de- 
 gree with others of the Italian circle. But 
 enough has been said of the character of the 
 people whom Shelley knew. It cannot be 
 that they cut so poor a figure because of 
 Shelley's presence, hard as the contrast of 
 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 153 
 
 common human nature must be with him. 
 It is observable, and it is in some sort a test, 
 that he did not overvalue them. Hogg, Pea- 
 cock, and Medwin were all deceived, if they 
 thought he trusted them or held them closer 
 than mere friendly acquaintances ; there is 
 no evidence that he felt for Williams or 
 Trelawney any more than an affectionate 
 good will ; toward Leigh Hunt he had the 
 kindest feeling of gratitude and of respect, 
 and for Gisborne and Reveley a warm cor- 
 diality, but nothing more. Mary he loved, 
 though with full knowledge of her weak- 
 nesses, in a manly way ; for Miss Clairmont 
 he had a true affection ; and he recognized 
 poetically a womanly attractiveness in Mrs. 
 Williams, who seems to have represented to 
 him the spirit of restfulness and peace, in 
 the last months of his life. But at the end, 
 his errors respecting men and things being 
 swept away, his ideals removed into the 
 eternal world, and his disillusion complete, 
 the most abiding impression is of the loneli- 
 ness in which he found himself ; and remem- 
 bering this, one forgets the companions lie 
 had upon his journey, and fastens attention 
 more closely upon the man through whose 
 genius that journey has become one of un- 
 dying memory. 
 
154 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 There is no thought of eulogizing him in 
 saying that he represents the ideal of per- 
 sonal and social aspiration, of the love of 
 beauty and of virtue equally, and of the hope 
 of eradicating misery from the world ; hence 
 springs in large measure his hold on young 
 hearts, on those who value the spirit above 
 all else and do not confine their recognition 
 of it within too narrow bounds, and on all 
 who are believers in the reform of the world 
 by human agencies. He represents this 
 ideal of aspiration in its most impassioned 
 form ; and in his life one reads the saddest 
 history of disillusion. It is because, in the 
 course of this, he abated no whit of his life- 
 long hope, did not change his practice of 
 virtue, and never yielded his perfect faith in 
 the supreme power of love, both in human 
 life and in the universe, that his name has 
 become above all price to those over whom 
 his influence extends. It is, perhaps, more 
 as a man than as a poet merely that he is 
 beloved ; the shadows upon his reputation, 
 as one approaches nearer, are burnt away in 
 light ; and he is the more honored, the more 
 he is known. For it would be wrong; to 
 close even these informal remarks without 
 expressing dissent from the assumption that 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 155 
 
 Shelley's intellectual and moral life was one 
 long mistake. Disillusion it was, and the 
 nature of it has been indicated by the single 
 point of his acquaintances ; but a life of dis- 
 illusion and one of mere mistake are not 
 to be confounded together. Better fortune 
 cannot be asked for a youth than that he 
 should conceive life nobly, and, in finding 
 wherein it falls short, should yet not fall 
 short himself of his ideal beyond what may 
 be forgiven to human frailty. Shelley's 
 misconceptions were the conditions of his 
 living the ideal life at all, and differed from 
 those of other youths in face of an untried 
 world only by their moral elevation, passion, 
 and essential nobleness ; he matured as other 
 men do by time and growth and experience, 
 and he suffered much by the peculiar cir- 
 cumstances of his fate ; but in the issue the 
 substance of error in his life was less than 
 it seems. Shelley, at least, never admitted 
 he had been wrong in the essential doctrines 
 of his creed and the motives of his acts, 
 though he had been deceived in regard to 
 human nature and what was possible to it 
 in society. 
 
156 BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 
 
 III. HIS ITALIAN LETTERS. 
 
 The prose work of Shelley has remained 
 in the obscurity which it once shared with 
 his poetry. The formal essays, which con- 
 cern the transitory affairs of the world or 
 themes of thought remote through their 
 generality, are valued, even by admirers 
 of Shelley, mainly as media of his spirit ; 
 the familiar letters, scattered in old books, 
 or collected only in a costly edition, and de-^ 
 prived of literary effectiveness because those 
 of high and enduring interest have never 
 been selected and massed until recently, have 
 escaped any wide public attention ; even the 
 translations have been neglected. All this 
 really large body of prose, however exalted 
 by its informing enthusiasm, however exqui- 
 site in language, and melodious, lies outside 
 the open pathways of literature. It is this 
 fact which gave the element of surprise to 
 what Mr. Arnold called his doubt " whether 
 Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, 
 which deserve to be far more read than they 
 are now, will not resist the wear and tear of 
 time better, and finally come to stand higher, 
 than his poetry," — a judgment which well 
 deserved Dr. Garnett's quiet rejoinder that 
 
BEMABES ON SHELLEY. 157 
 
 " this deliverance will be weighed by those 
 to whose lot it may fall to determine Mr. 
 Arnold's own place as a critic." Dr. Gar- 
 nett adds that, in an age when all letters 
 approximate to the ideal set by men of busi- 
 ness, Shelley's alone, among those of his 
 time, rank with Gray's, Pope's, Cowper's, or 
 Walpole's in possessing a certain classical 
 impress similar to that of deliberate artistic 
 work ; and, secondly, that they exhibit the 
 mind of the poet as clearly as Marlborough's 
 do the mind of the general, or Macaulay's 
 the mind of the man of letters. Their two 
 prime qualities are beauty of form and trans- 
 parency. 
 
 The sense of form has usually been denied 
 to Shelley, and if by it is meant the purely 
 critical impulse to remodel, revise, and polish 
 for the sake of that finish which the schools 
 prize, Shelley neither possessed it nor sought 
 for it with any strong desire, but rather re- 
 jected it as dangerously submitting the mind 
 to system, against which he was prejudiced. 
 But if by the sense of form is meant the in- 
 stinct for proportion, for regulated combi- 
 nation, for natural development of sensation 
 into idea, idea into passion, so that the poem 
 issues in a single harmony in the mind and 
 
158 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 heart ; if, in other words, by that loose 
 phrase is meant, not the corrective power of 
 the critical, but the shaping power of the 
 creative faculty working out ideal beauty 
 directly, then both in his brief and in much 
 of his longer poems Shelley was singularly 
 distinguished by it. This spontaneous beauty 
 of form, if we may so phrase it, is the only 
 species that is found in these letters : fitness 
 of words, sweetness of cadence, modulation 
 of feeling in immediate response to thought 
 and image, all conspiring to make up per- 
 fection of utterance, are continually present, 
 but not through erasure and elaboration. 
 Shelley's self-training in literature, almost 
 unrivaled as an apprenticeship in its length 
 and continuity, more comprehensive, pro- 
 found, and ardent than Pope's, more vital 
 than Milton's, had made such literary lucid- 
 ity and grace the habit of his pen, and he 
 was fortunate in employing his gift upon 
 subjects intrinsically most interesting to cul- 
 tivated men : upon the art and landscape of 
 Italy, or his own always high human rela- 
 tions, or his poetic moods. 
 
 In what he says of statues and paintings 
 he shows but slight knowledge of art. The 
 keenness of his perceptions and the warmth 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 159 
 
 of his feelings made him particularly open 
 to sensuous effects, so that in general he 
 worships the later schools. In painting, 
 especially, he can hardly be considered a safe 
 guide for others, because his praise or cen- 
 sure is largely dependent on his tempera- 
 ment for its justification : a picture which is 
 consonant with his own imagination, and 
 stirs it, is thereby raised and glorified, but 
 one whose theme would have been differ- 
 ently developed by himself is at once made 
 pale by contrast with the quick visions of 
 his own vividly pictorial mind. Here is a 
 portion of his description of a Christ Beati- 
 fied:— 
 
 "The countenance is heavy, as it were, 
 with the rapture of the spirit; the lips 
 parted, but scarcely parted, with the breath 
 of intense but regulated passion ; the eyes 
 are calm and benignant ; the whole features 
 harmonized in majesty and sweetness." 
 
 One cannot but feel that the face which 
 Shelley thus summons up before us bears 
 the same relation to the original as what the 
 dull-minded call his plagiarisms from Lodge 
 do to that poet's lyrics. Shelley often paints 
 the picture over upon the outlines of the old 
 canvas; but this transforming or penetrat- 
 
160 BEMABES O-V SHELLEY. 
 
 ing power, as it will be differently named 
 just as one believes the given picture to lack 
 or possess what Shelley saw in it, lends such 
 passages not only surpassing beauty, but a 
 real value as interpretations of art. Much 
 as Ruskin would differ from Shelley's judg- 
 ments, the two are essentially similar in their 
 mode of treatment, and in their faculty of 
 giving the equivalent of form and color in 
 eloquence. 
 
 The description of landscape, which is an- 
 other principal topic, possesses even more 
 plainly classic beauty. Whether Shelley 
 writes of nature in her wild and picturesque 
 scenes, or where the presence of man has 
 added pathos or dignity to her loveliness; 
 whether he flashes the view upon us in one 
 perfect line, or unfolds it slowly in uncon- 
 fused detail, he displays the highest power 
 in this field of literature. This view from 
 the Forum of Pompeii, which, instead of be- 
 ing robed with "the gray veil of his own 
 words," seems filled with " the purple noon's 
 transparent light," cannot be surpassed as 
 speech at once familiar and noble : — 
 
 " At the upper end, supported on an ele- 
 vated platform, stands the temple of Jupi- 
 ter. Under the colonnade of its portico we 
 
BEMABKS ON SHELLEY. 161 
 
 sate, and pulled out our oranges, and figs, and 
 bread, and medlars, — sorry fare, you will 
 say, — and rested to eat. Here was a mag- 
 nificent spectacle. Above and between the 
 multitudinous shafts of the sun-shining col- 
 umns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple 
 noon of heaven above it, and supporting, as 
 it were, on its line the dark, lofty mountains 
 of Sorrento, of a blue inexpressibly deep, 
 and tinged toward their summits with 
 streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was 
 one small green island. To the right was 
 Caprese, Inarime, Prochyta, and Misenum. 
 Behind was the single summit of Vesuvius, 
 rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, 
 whose foam-like column was sometimes darted 
 into the clear dark sky, and fell in little 
 streaks along the wind. Between Vesuvius 
 and the nearer mountains, as through a 
 chasm, was seen the main line of the lof- 
 tiest Apennines to the east. The day was 
 radiant and warm. Every now and then 
 we heard subterranean thunder of Vesuvius ; 
 its distant, deep peals seemed to shake the 
 very air and light of day, which interpene- 
 trated our frames with the sullen and tre- 
 mendous sound." 
 
 Thus he wrote when merely passive to 
 
162 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 nature's influences ; but when he begins to 
 think he irradiates the scene ; he lifts it 
 with his aspiration and softens it with his 
 regret; he brings it near by reminiscences 
 t)f the English fields and cliffs and streams ; 
 he informs it with the large interests of the 
 intellectual life ; and not infrequently he 
 concludes with a passage which, in the ar- 
 rangement of its images, the sequence of its 
 thought and feeling, the unity of its effect, 
 in all except metrical structure, is a poem. 
 Many paragraphs might be cited which 
 show the character of his genius as directly 
 as do his verses, and which justify the claim 
 advanced for them as having the permanent 
 interest of ideal beauty. 
 
 The principal charm of these letters, how- 
 ever, as Dr. Garnett says, is not artistic, 
 but moral. It is not meant to refer by this 
 term to the practical morality of Shelley's 
 deeds, or to his conscientiousness, humanity, 
 self-sacrifice, or other such qualities as they 
 are here displayed; of these there is no 
 longer need to speak. Nor is it meant sim- 
 ply to express the gratification one feels at 
 finding that Shelley, unlike many men of 
 letters who disappoint us by being only 
 common mortals in private life, never falls 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 163 
 
 below our conception of him, indicative as it 
 is of his purity that his " unpremeditated 
 song " does not fail to reach the height of 
 his great argument. What impresses one 
 most is rather the character of the life it- 
 self, of the mind to which "trust in all 
 things high came natural," that moved with 
 equal ease among the things of beauty, on 
 the heights of thought, or amid the common 
 and trivial cares of household life and in 
 the offices of friendship, and knew no dif- 
 ference in the level of his life, so single was 
 his nature and so completely expressed in 
 all he did. In the most ideal passages, in 
 those most impersonal, one does not lose the 
 sense of friendliness in them, of the sweet 
 human relationship which underlies the tell- 
 ing of what he has to say, and keeps the 
 letters in their appropriate sphere. They 
 are not rhapsodies, or soliloquies, or dis- 
 quisitions ; in other words, the visitations of 
 the spirit that came to Shelley, and left 
 record of themselves in this beauty and elo- 
 quence and imaginative passion, did not iso- 
 late him even momentarily, and could not 
 sever him from his friends. Who these 
 were, we know well enough : Miss Hitche- 
 ner, the blue-stocking ; Hogg, the betrayer ; 
 
164 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the Williamses and Gisbornes, who seem to 
 have belonged to the class of people known 
 as satisfying ; Peacock, who, with all his 
 nympholepsy, was a born beef -eater ; Smith, 
 the obliging ; Hunt, the " wren," and Byron, 
 the " eagle," in Shelley's nomenclature, — 
 the too fortunate people who knew Shelley 
 and whom he loved. They formed the en- 
 vironment, which needs to be kept in mind 
 by any who would estimate Shelley's moral 
 power ; amid them he lived his high life and 
 made it theirs, in the case of the most, dur- 
 ing their communion with him. In a vague 
 analogical way he sometimes brings to mind 
 the Greek gods, who, with all their divine 
 attributes of beauty, power, dignity, were 
 singular among deities for their companion- 
 ableness ; Shelley had that divine quality of 
 being familiar and retaining his original 
 brightness. Toward Byron alone does he 
 show any repulsion ; he recognized Byron's 
 admirable qualities, but he was alienated 
 by the latter's selfishness, worldliness, and 
 earthliness, even while he kept terms of 
 amity. Shelley's sentence on Byron is most 
 serious evidence against him, and it is now 
 supported by much that Shelley could not 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 165 
 
 have known; but it need not be discussed 
 here. 
 
 It is especially fortunate that the letters 
 exhibit him after his boyhood, with its false 
 starts, its follies and prejudices, its narrow- 
 ness and confusion, was passed ; of that time 
 we get only a noble echo in his sad remem- 
 brance, amid his seeming failure, of the lofty 
 purpose with which he had entered life, 
 while we see the depth unconfused by the 
 tumult of his soul. In these last years, it is 
 true, the thwarting of his practical instinct 
 was ending in hopelessness ; but if the 
 earthly paradise that was the faith of his 
 youth was now fading away, he was lifting 
 his eyes to the city in the heavens, and had 
 acknowledged the vanity of seeking the ideal 
 he knew, except in the eternal ; he had 
 worked out his salvation. Perhaps after all 
 we do wrong to lament his death ; with that 
 tragedy, in which every thought of Shelley 
 involuntarily concludes, his work as a quick- 
 ener of the spirit was accomplished. More 
 finished works of art he might have given to 
 us ; he could not have left a nobler or more 
 enkindling memory. These letters help in 
 the still necessary labor of clearing away 
 
166 REMARKS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 the misconceptions concerning him. In 
 them one sees him only in the quiet of his 
 soul, and will come to a better knowledge 
 and perhaps a higher truth concerning him 
 than is possible by reading his changeful 
 poems alone. 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS OF 
 OTHELLO, IAGO, AND SHY- 
 LOCK. 
 
 An actor of genius, at the moment of im- 
 personating (either in imagination or in 
 fact) a character of Shakespeare's, is prob- 
 ably nearer to the dramatist's creative mood 
 than any one else can get, except possibly 
 the poet born. He may, to use a phrase of 
 Booth's, in speaking of this mode of coming 
 to an understanding of Shakespeare, " hit 
 it " by the mere force within that bears him 
 naturally on. Or, to take the case in which 
 his sympathy with the role is imperfect, he 
 may perceive wherein he is defective more 
 clearly by his conscious failure than by any 
 analysis. Again, the difficulties that arise 
 from not knowing how Shakespeare put the 
 play on the stage may not be solved rightly, 
 it is true, by the moderns ; but the conclu- 
 sions of the acting fraternity on these mat- 
 ters are much more worthy of weight than 
 those of men unacquainted with the prac- 
 
168 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 tical working of that " business " which is 
 a sort of cement for the scenes. Support 
 could be found from many quarters for what 
 Dr. Furness says in behalf of actors as use- 
 ful critics ; but without further reasoning, 
 one may invite attention to some considera- 
 tions in regard to Othello suggested by quo- 
 tations from memoirs of the profession and 
 other records, and especially from Booth's 
 annotated acting-copy, extracts from which, 
 although not made with any view to publica- 
 tion, may be found in the Variorum edition 
 of the play. 
 
 Mr. White, in his satirical essay upon 
 The Acting of Iago, expresses the opinion 
 that all the modern impersonations are in- 
 adequate, and that the fault springs from 
 a radical misconception of the character. 
 Theatrical companies are made up, every 
 one knows, with an actor for each of the 
 varieties of human nature which are usual 
 in a play ; so far as character is concerned, 
 they enact types. Iago, of course, falls to 
 the lot of the " heavy villain," whose aim, 
 in stage life, is to do his wickedest always, 
 everywhere, and in as many guises as pos- 
 sible ; he is continually pointing to the mark 
 of Cain on his forehead, so that there shall 
 
SOME ACTORS* CRITICISMS. 169 
 
 be no mistake about bis identity. " I tbink," 
 says Booth, — and the criticism holds all 
 the meat of Mr. White's essay in a nutshell, 
 — " the light comedian should play the vil- 
 lain's part, not the ' heavy man ; ' I mean 
 the Shakespearean villains." In consonance 
 with this is his reiterated advice to his Iago 
 to think evil all the time, but not to show- 
 it ; to be the prince of good fellows, inex- 
 haustible in bonhomie, genial, jovial, gentle- 
 manly, — the friend and pleasant companion 
 whom every one liked, whom Desdemona 
 trifled with, and Cassio respected for his 
 soldiership, and Othello trusted as a man as 
 faithful in love as he was wise in the world. 
 " A certain bluffness," Booth says " (which 
 my temperament does not afford), should 
 be added to preserve the military flavor of 
 the character : in this particular I fail ut- 
 terly ; my Iago lacks the soldierly quality." 
 So far, certainly, Booth does not differ from 
 Mr. White in his conception of the bearing, 
 the outward manner and sensible aspect, of 
 the Venetian liar. Let us look at it from 
 Mr. White's point of view : " Edwin Booth's 
 Iago is not externally a mere hardened vil- 
 lain, but a super-subtle Venetian, who works 
 out his devilish plans with a dexterous light- 
 
170 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 ness of touch and smooth sinuosity of move- 
 ment that suggest the transmigration of a 
 serpent into human form. And in his vis- 
 age, and, above all, in his eye, burns the 
 venom of his soul. . . . But even Edwin 
 Booth's Iago, although much finer and more 
 nearly consistent with itself and with the 
 facts of the tragedy than any other that is 
 known to the annals of the stage, is not the 
 Iago that Shakespeare drew." But what is 
 it that is lacking ? Mr. White paints Iago 
 as the popular flatterer, the sympathetic 
 sycophant, the gay, easy-going, pleased, and 
 pleasing fellow ; and, so far as the side 
 shown to the world is concerned, this is 
 Booth's conception, and (allowing for the 
 defect of soldier -like frankness which he 
 feels in himself) it is his impersonation. 
 Why is it not, then, Shakespeare's Iago ? 
 Mr. White is ready with his answer: Be- 
 cause Shakespeare's Iago would do no harm, 
 except to advance his fortunes ; he had no 
 malice ; he was merely selfish, utterly un- 
 scrupulous as to his means of obtaining what 
 he sought, ready to win his gain at any ruin. 
 Now, it is clear that the evil which Mr. 
 White has just said burns in the actor's eye 
 is not mere selfishness, not the cold light of 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 171 
 
 calculation simply, with no more rooted pas- 
 sion ; it is just what Mr. White says Iago 
 did not have, — it is malice. So one gets the 
 hint ; and on searching the remarks of Booth 
 to see what indications there are of his con- 
 ception of the essence of Iago's soul, the 
 spring of his motive, the changing emotions 
 that enveloped his thoughts at their birth, 
 one perceives at once that, while Booth 
 would have Iago outwardly amiable, he has 
 not the least idea of reducing the dye of 
 villainy in which the character has been 
 steeped by those of old time. Inside, Booth 
 has no doubt, Iago was a spirit of hate, and 
 he knows at what moments of anxious in- 
 terest, at what crises of the temptation and 
 the plotting, this will gleam out in the ex- 
 pression of the eye, or in those slight tell- 
 tale changes which are natural to the most 
 self-possessed man, and are significant to us 
 only because we are on the watch for them. 
 By observing, consequently, with what pas- 
 sages he connects this devilish malignancy 
 of nature in Iago, one can judge, as between 
 him and Mr. White, what justification he 
 has for making Iago cruel as well as self- 
 ish, and revengeful as well as ambitious. 
 Mr. White's theory is that Iago wished to 
 
172 SOME ACTOBS' CBITICISMS. 
 
 supplant Cassio, and ruined Desdemona in 
 order to accomplish this end ; that he used 
 his suspicion of Othello's intimacy with his 
 wife almost as an after-thought, to bolster 
 up his purpose with an excuse ; and that, 
 having chosen his method with perfect in- 
 difference to its morality or its humanity, he 
 overreached himself and failed. This view 
 may gain upon one by its plausible and em- 
 phatic setting forth, just as pleas for Judas 
 Iscariot or any other client of a clever devil's 
 advocate may do, but only momentarily ; for 
 when one attempts to adjust the speeches 
 of Iago, word by word and line by line, to 
 this conception, especially with such notes 
 of direction and caution as these of Booth's 
 to the actor, echoing the text, as they do, 
 through all modulations of suspicion, sus- 
 pense, and suppressed passion, the idea of 
 an Iago without malice simply dissolves, and 
 leaves not a rack behind. In reality, this 
 new notion of Mr. White's is only the old 
 story that Iago is motiveless, which has dis- 
 turbed so many critics, and given occasion 
 to such marvelous explanations of his vil- 
 lainy. The disparity between the moral 
 causes and the mortal results, between the 
 errors and the penalties of the victims, has 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 173 
 
 been widely felt ; the attempt is consequently 
 made to ascribe a cause for the catastrophe 
 that shall justify it to the reason; and nat- 
 urally one writer has over-accented and ex- 
 aggerated one element in the play, and a 
 second writer another element, and so on; 
 but Mr. White bears away the palm from 
 all in his assertion that Iago did all the mis- 
 chief just to get on in the world, and that 
 the only reason it was so great was because 
 of the unlimited power for harm in the union 
 of ability to flatter with utter unserupulous- 
 ness in a man's make-up. Shakespeare gives 
 the key-note of the action in the very first 
 words Iago utters, unheard except by his 
 own bosom. What was the first thought on 
 his lips then? "I hate the Moor." And 
 perhaps in that most difficult moment of the 
 role, the climax of Iago's fate, the elder 
 Booth was right in making the expression of 
 this intense enmity dominant in " the Par- 
 thian look which Iago, as he was borne off, 
 wounded and in bonds, gave Othello, — a 
 Gorgon stare, in which hate seemed both 
 petrified and petrifying." In this matter 
 the actors seem to carry it over the editor, 
 who, indeed, was in that essay a better social 
 satirist than Shakespearean scholar ; and, to 
 
174 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 our mind, the conception of Mr. White is 
 too inharmonious, also, with the intellectual 
 power and the delight in its exercise so 
 marked in Shakespeare's and in Booth's 
 Iago. 
 
 There is more scope for different inter- 
 pretations in Othello's case than in Iago's. 
 Othello, it is obvious to any one of the least 
 insight, is a character in whom temperament 
 counts for so much more than anything else 
 as practically to possess the whole man ; his 
 actions proceed directly from his nature; 
 his doubts and suspicions act at once upon 
 his heart, and are converted into emotion of 
 the most simple and primitive type almost 
 instantaneously; his mental agony itself 
 tends to become blind physical suffering ; he 
 does not think, — he feels. It is in the 
 expression of temperament that the actor is 
 left most free by the dramatist, is least 
 shackled by words, and oftenest relies upon 
 other modes of utterance, among which (we 
 too easily forget) language is only one. 
 
 In Othello, consequently, who is the crea- 
 ture of his temperament, the actor influences 
 the character to an unusual degree ; and as 
 the range of feeling is from the lowest notes 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 175 
 
 of tender happiness to the explosions of un- 
 limited despair, the way in which the actor 
 conceives of feeling, his ideas of what makes 
 it noble, and of the manner in which a grand 
 nature would express it, affect the play pro- 
 foundly. A certain bent has been given to 
 the stage interpretation and also to criticism, 
 by the notion that Shakespeare meant to 
 exhibit in Othello a barbaric passion, the 
 boiling up of a savage nature, the Oriental 
 fervor and rashness, the daemon of the Moor- 
 ish race. Yet nothing is plainer in Shake- 
 speare than his utter disregard of historical 
 accuracy ; he never depicted a race type, ex- 
 cept the Jewish. If Theseus is an Athenian, 
 or Coriolanus or Caesar himself a Roman, 
 then Othello may be a Moor ; but it is most 
 conformable to the facts to regard them all 
 as simply ideal men, who take from their 
 circumstances a color of nationality and a 
 place in time, but who are essentially all of 
 one race. The view of those actors who 
 give Othello a ferocity of emotion because 
 he is a Moor, or of those critics who discern 
 in the violence and brute unreason of some 
 players in this part something to praise on 
 the score of Othello's birth under a hot 
 Mauritania!! sun deserves no sympathy. The 
 
176 SOME ACTOBS' CBITICISMS. 
 
 Oriental touch in the impersonation ought 
 not to go beyond such slight signs and 
 tokens as the crescent scimiter, — of which 
 Booth says, " It is harmless," — if we are to 
 keep to Shakespeare's art as something bet- 
 ter than a costumer's. Othello does not ex- 
 hibit one extravagance that requires to be 
 excused by the reflection that it is natural 
 to an alien race, though not to the English. 
 But within the limits of the character con- 
 ceived as merely ideal, there is a fine op- 
 portunity for difference among actors, and 
 they have availed themselves of it. To in- 
 dicate it by a word, Othello's passion seems 
 to have been the cardinal thought of Kean, 
 irresistible, compulsive as "the Pontick Sea," 
 impressive by its main force and elemental 
 sweep ; Fechter, whose conception of noble- 
 ness of nature was a poor one, sank all the 
 heroic in the melodrama to which the situa- 
 tions lent themselves ; and Booth, giving far 
 more distinctness to Othello's suffering, so 
 that his revenge becomes hardly more than 
 an incident in the course of his own soul's 
 torture, reveals the scene of the tragedy at 
 once as in Othello's breast, where the spirit 
 of evil is feeding on a mighty but guileless 
 heart. It is not Desdemona's death that 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 177 
 
 is the climax, — that is mere pity ; but 
 the tragic element finds its conclusion in 
 Othello's last speech and stroke. The in- 
 tensity of Kean or the ideality of Booth, 
 working upon the tragic temperament in 
 each, must produce Othello with a differ- 
 ence : one tempts to excess in ferocity, the 
 other in pathos ; but either is consistent with 
 the text. After all, it is with great actors 
 as with poets, — their creations partake of 
 their own nature, in all heroic and ideal 
 parts ; but if, as is thought, sympathy is the 
 best revealer of the inner meaning of works 
 of the imagination, certainly the disciplined 
 and habitual enacting of great roles by ac- 
 tors of genius ought to be a source of light 
 and knowledge regarding them, notwith- 
 standing the allowance that is to be made 
 for the " personal error " of individuality. 
 
 It is a striking quality in the immortality 
 of The Merchant of Venice that it has sur- 
 vived a change in the public mind in its at- 
 titude toward the Jewish people. To the 
 Elizabethans, and Shakespeare among them, 
 the Jew was hateful. It may well be ques- 
 tioned to what extent Shakespeare himself, 
 with all the tolerance that his understanding 
 
178 SOME ACTORS 1 CRITICISMS. 
 
 of the springs of human nature gave him, 
 felt the pity in the dramatic situation of 
 Shy lock that a modern audience must feel. 
 Booth's conception of Shakespeare's creation 
 is too direct and natural not to justify itself 
 to the student, — " ' an inhuman wretch, in- 
 capable of pity, void and empty from any 
 dram of mercy.' It has been said that he 
 was an affectionate father and a faithful 
 friend. When, where, and how does he 
 manifest the least claim to such commenda- 
 tion ? Tell me that, and unyoke ! 'T was 
 the money value of Leah's ring that he 
 grieved over, not its association with her, 
 else he would have shown some affection for 
 her daughter, which he did not or she would 
 not have called her home i a hell,' robbed 
 and left him. Shakespeare makes her do 
 these un- Hebrew things to intensify the 
 baseness of Shylock's nature. If we side 
 with him in his self-defense, 't is because we 
 have charity, which he had not ; if we pity 
 him under the burden of his merited pun- 
 ishment, 't is because we are human, which 
 he is not, except in shape, and even that, I 
 think, should indicate the crookedness of his 
 nature." Booth goes on to justify this tra- 
 ditional conception by an easy argument 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 179 
 
 against the notion of " the heroic Hebrew," 
 the type of the vengeance of a persecuted 
 race, whose wrongs justify its acts. He re- 
 fers to the " dangerous i bit of business ' " 
 when Shylock whets his knife. " Would 
 the heroic Hebrew have stooped to such a 
 paltry action ? No, never, in the very white- 
 heat of his pursuit of vengeance ! But ven- 
 geance is foreign to Shylock's thought ; 't is 
 revenge he seeks, and he gets just what all 
 who seek it get, — ' sooner or later,' as the 
 saying is." 
 
 This characterization is not too vigorous, 
 nor does it go too far. We may find it not 
 only in Shylock as Shakespeare drew him, 
 but reflected also from Antonio. It is in 
 Antonio personally that the attitude of the 
 mediaeval Christian toward the Jew is found. 
 The unexplained melancholy of Antonio, his 
 fidelity in high-minded friendship, and the 
 dignity of his bearing under the cruelty to 
 which he is exposed have obscured to us the 
 other side of his character as the Rialto 
 merchant. We see more of Bassanio's An- 
 tonio than of Shylock's : the man who had 
 interfered with the usurer in every way and 
 personally maltreated him, and was as like 
 to do the same again ; the proud, hard- 
 
180 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 hearted, and insulting magnifico whom Shy- 
 lock hated for himself. Antonio is every 
 whit as heartless to the Jew in the hour of 
 his triumph as Shylock was to him when the 
 balance leaned the other way. His cruelty 
 is lacking only in the physical element ; it 
 is not bloody, but it goes to the bone and 
 marrow of Shylock's nature none the less. 
 There is no sign that Shakespeare saw any 
 wrong in all this. It was thus that the 
 Christians looked upon the Jews, and they 
 thought such treatment right. Shakespeare 
 differed from others — from Marlowe, for 
 example, in his delineation of the Jew at 
 Malta — in one point only : he was able to 
 take Shylock's point of view, to understand 
 his motives, to assign the reasons with which 
 revenge justified its own motions ; in a word, 
 to represent Shylock's humanity. The 
 speeches he puts into the Jew's mouth are 
 intense and eloquent expressions of the rea- 
 soning of that " lodged hate " in his bosom ; 
 they are true to fact and to nature ; on our 
 ears they come with overwhelming force, 
 and it is impossible to our thoughts that 
 Shakespeare could have written them with- 
 out sympathy for the wrongs that they set 
 forth with such fiery heat. But when from 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 181 
 
 this it is argued that Shakespeare, in writing 
 this play, made a deliberate plea for tolera- 
 tion, and carried it as far as the necessities 
 of his plot and the temper of his times per- 
 mitted, then it is needful to remind ourselves 
 of what Booth calls " the baseness of Shy- 
 lock's nature." Shakespeare did represent 
 him as base, with avarice, cunning, and re- 
 venge for the constituent elements of his 
 character ; he did not hesitate to let the 
 exhibition of these low qualities approach 
 the farcical, as he would never have done 
 had he thought of the Jew as in any sense 
 heroic. Shylock had suffered insult and 
 wrong, but there was nothing in him indi- 
 vidually to excite commiseration. From be- 
 ginning to end he shows no noble quality. 
 Modern sympathy with him, apart from the 
 pity that tragedy necessarily stirs, is social 
 sympathy, not personal ; it is because he is 
 an outcast and belongs to an outcast race, 
 because every man's hand is against him and 
 against all his people, that the audience of 
 this century perceives an injustice inherent 
 in his position itself, antecedent to, and in- 
 dependent of, any of his acts ; and this in- 
 justice is ignored in the play. The feeling 
 which Shylock, as a person, excites, and 
 
182 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 should excite, is nearer that which Lady 
 Martin describes as her experience : "I have 
 always felt in the acting that my desire to 
 find extenuations for Shylock's race and for 
 himself leaves me, and my heart grows al- 
 most as stony as his own. I see his fiendish 
 nature fully revealed. I have seen the knife 
 sharpened to cut quickly through the flesh, 
 the scales brought forward to weigh it ; have 
 watched the cruel, eager eyes, all strained 
 and yearning to see the gushing blood well- 
 ing from the side ' nearest the heart,' and 
 gloating over the fancied agonies and death- 
 pangs of his bitter foe. This man-monster, 
 this pitiless, savage nature, is beyond the 
 pale of humanity ; it must be made power- 
 less to hurt. I have felt that with him the 
 wrongs of his race are really as nothing 
 compared with his own remorseless hate. 
 He is no longer the wronged and suffering 
 man ; and I longed to pour down on his 
 head the ' justice ' he has clamored for, and 
 will exact without pity." Upon this matter 
 Spedding admits of no reply. " The best 
 contribution," he says, " which I can offer 
 to this discussion is the expression of an old 
 man's difficulty in accepting these new dis- 
 coveries of profound moral and political de« 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 183 
 
 signs underlying Shakespeare's choice and 
 treatment of his subjects. I believe he was 
 a man of business, — that his principal busi- 
 ness was to produce plays which would 
 draw. . . . But if, instead of looking about 
 for a story to 4 please ' the Globe audience, 
 he had been in search of a subject under 
 cover of which he might steal into their 
 minds ' a more tolerant feeling toward the 
 Hebrew race,' I cannot think he would have 
 selected for his hero a rich Jewish merchant 
 plotting the murder of a Christian rival by 
 means of a fraudulent contract, which made 
 death the penalty of non-payment at the 
 day, and insisting on the exaction of it. In 
 a modern Christian audience it seems to be 
 possible for a skillful actor to work on the 
 feelings of an audience so far as to make 
 a man engaged in such a business an object 
 of respectful sympathy. But can anybody 
 believe that in times when this would have 
 been much more difficult, Shakespeare would 
 have chosen such a case as a favorable one 
 to suggest toleration to a public prejudiced 
 against Jews ? " 
 
 The omnipresent devil's advocate has sev- 
 eral times come to Shylock's defense with a 
 legal plea. Those who could find something 
 
184 SOME ACTOBS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 to urge in extenuation of Judas Iscariot had 
 an easy task in showing that the Jew of 
 Venice was more sinned against than sin- 
 ning. The decisions of the young doctor 
 who came armed with the recommendation 
 of the learned Bellario have been overruled 
 in every court of appeal. The bond itself 
 is declared invalid, inasmuch as it contained 
 an immoral proviso in the article that sought 
 Antonio's death; the attempt to defeat it, 
 its validity having once been granted, by de- 
 nying the right to draw blood and requiring 
 the exact amount of a pound of flesh to be 
 cut out, is characterized as a wretched quib- 
 ble, and set aside on the ground that a right 
 once allowed carries with it the minor rights 
 to make it effectual ; the denial of the orig- 
 inal debt for the reason that it had been ten- 
 dered and refused in open court is declared 
 a gross error, such tender having no other 
 result than to destroy any claim for interest 
 subsequently. But not to mention all the 
 grave reasons alleged to break down the 
 reputation of the Court of Venice and show 
 the illegality of its judgments, it is clear 
 that on legal grounds the case was very 
 badly managed, and in the event the Jew 
 met with no better fortune than was the lot 
 
SOME ACTORS 1 CRITICISMS. 185 
 
 of his race before an unscrupulous and hos- 
 tile tribunal everywhere. Nevertheless, the 
 disputants upon the other side, who allege the 
 substantial justice of the decisions rendered, 
 do well to remove the discussion out of the 
 plane of legality. There is much that is 
 weighty in their argument. Shylock must 
 be regarded as standing, after the nature of 
 Judaism, for the law as a thing of the letter ; 
 this is the justice which he demands, not 
 real, but literal; and if, by a still more 
 strict interpretation of the letter of the bond 
 than he had thought of, his claim was de- 
 feated, the audience will acknowledge the 
 relevancy of the new point that is made, 
 and will enjoy the spectacle of the Biter 
 Bit, in which there is always an element of 
 comic justice. As to the quibble involved, 
 that belongs to the nature of literal inter- 
 pretation always. Thus the matter is not 
 without defense even on this level. But 
 what really pleases the audience is not the 
 method, but the fact, of the Jew's defeat; 
 and in the fact, however brought about, lies 
 the ethical element, the victory of real over 
 illusory justice, of equity over legality, of 
 the right over the pretense of right. Shake- 
 speare was not expressly philosophical ; but 
 
186 SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 
 
 there is little straining of the facts of the 
 case in the view that in the discomfiture of 
 that "law" which the Jew invoked, in the 
 signal defeat inflicted on the letter of the 
 bond, there is a suggestion of the conflict 
 between Judaism and Christianity, the lit- 
 eral and the spiritual, the law and that jus- 
 tice with its elements of mercy into which 
 the law develops, which is one of the great 
 phases of historical civilization. Whether 
 Shakespeare put it there is immaterial ; but 
 that a modern audience finds it there, and 
 that it was at least dimly present to an 
 Elizabethan audience, is hardly to be ques- 
 tioned. The idea is a simple and ancient 
 one ; and in it is to be found whatever eth- 
 ical meaning the play may have. 
 
 But it ought to be always remembered 
 that the primary endowment of Shakespeare 
 was the artistic temperament : he was a poet 
 first, and everything else afterwards. To 
 say this is the same thing with saying — 
 though it must be stated briefly — that the 
 ethical principle in him was a necessity of 
 the imagination, not of the understanding ; 
 was vision rather than inference ; was a part 
 and not the whole. One can no more im- 
 agine life truly without ethics than he can 
 
SOME ACTORS' CRITICISMS. 187 
 
 imagine mass without cohesion ; a creative 
 genius, consequently, a man of imagination 
 all compact, does not necessarily start from 
 ethics in moulding his works, but it is more 
 likely that the moral principle which his 
 works must contain as a part of their real- 
 ity will be secondary and derivative. Shake- 
 speare is ethical because he imagined life 
 truly ; he did not imagine life truly because 
 he had thought out, in Lord Bacon's man- 
 ner, the general principles of morals. 
 
SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT, COLE- 
 RIDGE, AND WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Sir George Beaumont appears to have 
 been one of the most agreeable of men. 
 He had not merely high breeding, but hu- 
 manity of disposition, delightful compan- 
 ionableness, and the refinement that springs 
 from artistic pursuits. Haydon accuses his 
 manners of a want of moral courage. " What 
 his taste dictated to be right, he would 
 shrink from asserting if it shocked the pre- 
 judices of others or put himself to a mo- 
 ment's inconvenience," was the fault that 
 this critic had in mind ; but this is only to 
 class him with the men who do not think 
 that the truth is always to be spoken in so- 
 ciety, and prefer tact to an aggressive ego- 
 tism. Sir Humphry Davy notices espe- 
 cially that he was a " remarkably sensible 
 man, which I mention because it is some- 
 what remarkable in a painter of genius who 
 is at the same time a man of rank and an 
 exceedingly amusing companion." Southey 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 189 
 
 was struck by the apparent happiness of his 
 life, and the absence of any reference to 
 afflictions or anxieties that he might have 
 experienced, and says that he " had as little 
 liking for country sports as for public busi- 
 ness of any kind," being absorbed by art 
 and nature ; and, to add Scott's kind words 
 of him in his diary, that excellent judge 
 writes, " Sir George Beaumont 's dead ; by 
 far the most sensible and pleasing man I 
 ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, and 
 generous, — gentle in society, and of those 
 mild manners which tend to soften the caus- 
 ticity of the general London tone of persi- 
 flage and personal satire. I am very sorry 
 — as much as it is in my nature to be — for 
 one whom I could see but seldom." This is 
 a concert of praise which it is a pleasure to 
 associate with the name of the man who 
 was, chiefly, the founder of the National 
 Gallery in Trafalgar Square. 
 
 He was a friend of the artists of his time, 
 and a patron of Wilkie and Hay don when 
 they needed aid. In the latter's autobiog- 
 raphy there is a bright account of a fort- 
 night's visit paid by these two to Coleorton, 
 Sir George's country-seat, which brings the 
 interior life there vividly to the eye, though 
 
190 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 it borrows something from the unconscious 
 humor of the narrator, who always fills the 
 scene with himself in the leading part. One 
 pauses to note a characteristic sentence of 
 the incorrigible beggar in which he breaks 
 out with the indignant remark, " All my 
 friends were always advising me what to do 
 instead of advising the Government what to 
 do for me." Sir George, however, had other 
 friends, and most noteworthy of all, Words- 
 worth, of whom he first heard from Cole- 
 ridge. Before meeting him, understanding 
 that the two friends wished to live in the 
 same neighborhood, he bought and presented 
 to Wordsworth the little property of Apple- 
 thwaite near Greta Hall, Coleridge's abode. 
 Wordsworth never used the ground for the 
 purpose for which it was given, but it re- 
 mained in his possession. From this time, 
 1803, a close friendship grew up between 
 his family at Grasmere and the one at Cole- 
 orton, grounded upon common interests and 
 cemented with mutual exchanges of kind- 
 ness and regard, so that it survived until 
 the death of Sir George and Lady Beau- 
 mont, herself an excellent woman, of whom 
 Crabb Robinson wrote, " She is a gentle- 
 woman of great sweetness and dignity, I 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 191 
 
 should think among the most interesting 
 persons in the country." 
 
 Of the two poets Coleridge was at first 
 more intimate with the Beaumonts. This 
 was in 1803, the period of his illness, just 
 previous to the voyage to Malta. The let- 
 ters he wrote are very painful to read. The 
 subject is usually the ego ; and in reading 
 the apologies of the writer for treating of 
 this ever-present theme, and his observa- 
 tions on his own lack of vanity and the 
 danger he is in of undervaluing his powers 
 and works, one can scarcely fail to be struck 
 by the identity in many respects of the ego- 
 tism of the overweening and of the self- 
 depreciating kinds. The aspects are differ- 
 ent, but the weakness has the same root. In 
 Coleridge it was, perhaps, no more than a 
 question of the state of his stomach whether 
 his assiduous interest in himself should re- 
 sult in intellectual pride or in self-abase- 
 ment ; but without giving too severe a touch, 
 it is clear enough that his eye, when fixed 
 on himself, was on the wrong object. 
 
 The letters to the Beaumonts are charac- 
 terized by this complaining and absorbing 
 egotism of the invalid, unfortified by pa- 
 tience, resolution, or even self-respect. The 
 
192 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 ravages of disease in its physical aspects, the 
 laying bare of bodily conditions and symp- 
 toms of decay, would be in themselves intol- 
 erably disagreeable, but it is much worse to 
 be obliged to attend at the sick-bed of the 
 mind ; and in Coleridge's case the internal 
 weakness of the spirit excites the greatest 
 pity, and this feeling nearly passes involun- 
 tarily into disgust. The sensibility of his 
 nervous organization was acute. He speaks 
 of times when, as he was accusing himself 
 of insensibility through incapacity to feel, his 
 " whole frame has gone crash, as it were." 
 Under the excitement of his emotions, he 
 dissolves in weakness ; the spectacle is not 
 a pleasant one ; there is something almost 
 ignoble in such loss of self-control. When 
 Wordsworth recited to him, if one can fancy 
 such a thing, the entire thirteen books on 
 the growth of his own mind, in 1807, Cole- 
 ridge composed a poem, not very coherent or 
 noble, though with personal pathos, in which 
 he says that when he rose from his seat, he 
 " found himself in prayer." It was appar- 
 ently not an unusual termination to the ac- 
 cess of emotion, and it occurred more than 
 once in his relations with the Beaumonts. 
 The mention of it, however, in his corre- 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 193 
 
 spondence with them, offends one, not in it- 
 self, but by the manner of it ; indeed, the 
 manner of his earlier letters is indescriba- 
 ble. Their sentiment is so tremulous and 
 overwrought with fever that they resemble 
 maundering ; they are " sicklied o'er " with 
 mental disease, and belong to the pathology 
 of genius. 
 
 One long epistle, in which he devotes him- 
 self to an analysis of his mental condition 
 at the time when he was what is now known 
 as a Social Democrat, shows by an eminent 
 example in what ways the minds of young 
 men of enthusiasm, who have caught the 
 contagion of new ideas, commonly act, and 
 how their tongues are kept going. Cole- 
 ridge and Southey were rampant young 
 radicals for about ten months, and might 
 many times have been justly thrown into 
 jail for the use of unlawful language and 
 seditiously fomenting the passions of the 
 people. Coleridge ascribes the beginning 
 of his ramblings from the true path of re- 
 spectable politics partly to his intellectual 
 isolation among his relatives and virtuous 
 acquaintances generally, who thought that 
 his " opinions were the drivel of a babe, but 
 the guilt attached to them, — this was the 
 
194 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 gray hair and rigid muscle of inveterate 
 depravity ; " and partly, he declares, it was 
 due to the thirst for kindness planted, in 
 himself, in that " me, who," he says, " from 
 my childhood have had no avarice, no ambi- 
 tion, whose very vanity in my vainest mo- 
 ments was nine tenths of it the desire and 
 delight and necessity of loving and of being 
 beloved," — needs which he found satisfied 
 in the welcome and company of " the Dem- 
 ocrats." So he fell among evil companions. 
 On becoming an agitator upon the platform 
 he succumbed to the temptations of the 
 fluent speaker, gifted "with an ebullient 
 fancy, a flowing utterance, a light and dan- 
 cing heart, and a disposition to catch time 
 by the very rapidity of my own motion, and 
 to speak vehemently from mere verbal asso- 
 ciations ; choosing sentences and sentiments 
 for the very reason which would have made 
 me recoil with a dying away of the heart 
 and unutterable horror from the actions ex- 
 pressed in such sentiments and sentences, 
 namely, because they were wild and original, 
 and vehement and fantastic." Here is a 
 choice specimen of his eloquence, on the oc- 
 casion of a supper by some Lord, to com- 
 memorate an Austrian victory: "This is a 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 195 
 
 true Lord's Supper in the communion of 
 darkness! This is a Eucharist of Hell! a 
 sacrament cf misery ! over each morsel and 
 each drop of which the spirit of some mur- 
 dered innocent cries aloud to God, This is 
 my body ! and this is my blood ! " There is 
 one sin against society, however, which he 
 declined to commit, and he took great credit 
 to himself for his obstinate refusal. He 
 joined no party, club, or any of the radical 
 societies, which he characterizes as " asca- 
 rides in the bowels of the state, subsisting 
 on the weakness and diseasedness, and hav- 
 ing for their final object the death of that 
 state, whose life had been their birth and 
 growth, and continued to be their sole nour- 
 ishment." He remained outside of these 
 entangling alliances, a free-lance speechifier, 
 in the condition of mind of the willing mar- 
 tyr : " The very clank of the chains that 
 were to be put about my limbs would not at 
 that time have deterred me from a strong 
 phrase or striking metaphor, although I had 
 had no other inducement to the use of the 
 same except the wantonness of luxuriant ima- 
 gination, and my aversion to abstain from 
 anything simply because it was dangerous." 
 Such was Coleridge at twenty-four years, — 
 
196 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 the age at which Emmett was executed; 
 whose death called out this long letter of rem- 
 iniscences concerning his own career as an 
 agitator, and of reflections upon the impulses 
 and justification of revolutionary orators, 
 their tempations, errors, and illusions. He 
 understood the fate of Emmett with greater 
 clearness because of this little episode in his 
 own life, and it is noticeable that he has the 
 grace not to think that the young patriot's 
 career bore too much resemblance to his 
 own ; but this confession of his foolishness 
 in general, spread out somewhat magnilo- 
 quently before the eyes of his aristocratic 
 correspondent, is a lesson in human nature 
 well worth a moment's attention from con- 
 servative and orderly people. 
 
 Coleridge's career — if a brief digression 
 may be pardoned here — was only too much 
 in keeping with the temperament of these 
 letters to the Beaumonts. Wherever one 
 comes upon it in the memoirs of the time, 
 the story is the same. Soften it as we may, 
 that career was one of those, too frequent 
 among men of letters, that can never be 
 told, so marred by disease and by moral 
 feebleness, so full of shame and supineness 
 and waste, that it must be kept out of sight. 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 197 
 
 During the years of his maturity he was a 
 broken man, and knew himself to be such ; 
 from the time that, in becoming the victim 
 of opium, he lost what little will-power was 
 originally his, he felt that the spirit of im- 
 agination had left his house of life, and in 
 its place was henceforward 
 
 " Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vail}, 
 And genius given, and knowledge won in vain ; " 
 
 and in this mood of pervading despondency 
 he seems always in fancy to be haunting the 
 grave of his dead self. This consciousness 
 of his loss, though it had more of the stupor 
 of despair than of the sharpness of peni- 
 tence, lends some impressiveness to his 
 story ; but this pain was not searching 
 enough to save him for himself, nor of a 
 kind to make men oblivious of those violent 
 contrasts in his life which offend our sense 
 of Tightness. It is a morally confusing spec- 
 tacle to see genius professing the highest 
 knowledge of the secret things of God, but 
 itself wrecked; and it requires something 
 more than the poet's sorrow at the wither- 
 ing of his wreath to reconcile such an an- 
 tithesis. 
 
 Then, too, although Coleridge's poetic im- 
 agination undoubtedly was quenched at once, 
 
198 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 
 
 or gave out only brief and random flashes 
 in his manhood, it may well be questioned 
 whether the waste of his faculties was not 
 due quite as much to mismanagement of 
 the mind as to the palsying of his powers 
 of effort, purpose, or orderly reduction of 
 thought. He lived in the period of univer- 
 sal philosophers, and in his study of meta- 
 physics and theology in Germany he must 
 have fixed in his mind the habit of includ- 
 ing the omne scihile in his system. This 
 was the more easy for him, as he had in un- 
 usual proportion that false comprehensive- 
 ness which seizes on knowledge, not by all its 
 relations as it stands in the body of science, 
 but by some particular relation which it may 
 seem to bear, truly or untruly, to some pre- 
 conceived idea that has been taken as the 
 organizing principle of the new scheme. It 
 is because of their common participation in 
 this method that poetry and philosophy, in 
 the old sense, approach so much nearer each 
 other than either does to science. It is plain 
 to any one who reads the topics of Cole- 
 ridge's discourses that his mind ranged 
 through a vast circuit of knowledge habitu- 
 ally, but also that it touched the facts only 
 at single points and superficially ; in other 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 199 
 
 words, he displays compass rather than 
 grasp. In dealing with the mass of his 
 learning, he showed no lack of systematiz- 
 ing power, though it may easily be believed 
 that in conversation with chance visitors the 
 fine filaments of logical connection escaped 
 their sight. The trouble was in the original 
 mode of elaborating the system — the old 
 Greek way of philosophizing by subtle ma- 
 nipulation of analogies, convenient facts, 
 half -understood harmonies of this with that, 
 arbitrary constructions, with now and then 
 a dead plunge into the unfathomable. To 
 borrow Coleridge's own distinction, this pro- 
 cedure is to logic what fancy is to the im- 
 agination — a freak of the mind partly out 
 of relation to the truth of things. It is the 
 modern form of scholasticism. 
 
 Coleridge, however, whose speculative pow- 
 ers were thus employed, is believed to have 
 been a great light to those who had eyes to 
 see. What particular truth Maurice and 
 others derived from him is, nevertheless, not 
 evident. He shared the awakening power 
 that idealists possess, generally in propor- 
 tion to their consistency and the intensity of 
 their personal conviction. Idealism, by the 
 very fact that it is an enfranchisement from 
 
200 BEAUMONT, COLEBIDGE, ETC. 
 
 sense, is a tonic to the mind; it quickens 
 the activity of thought and facilitates its 
 processes because it assumes the mastery of 
 the universe, and makes reality pliable to its 
 hand. This may or may not be lawful, but 
 it generates a feeling of command and of 
 liberty highly favorable to spiritual develop- 
 ment. To some men impressionable on that 
 side of their nature Coleridge was the giver 
 of this freedom, and this has been the case 
 especially with members of the clergy who 
 are closely attached to theological dogma. 
 Such persons found in Coleridge's mind the 
 rare and curious coexistence of fixed dogma 
 with incessant speculation : he afforded the 
 sense of untrammeled investigation without 
 once disturbing the certainty of the pre- 
 judged cause. This phantom of liberalism 
 was a very quieting tutelar genius to some 
 educated men, who thus kept up a semblance 
 of thinking; but influence of this sort is 
 necessarily transitory. His Scriptural ren- 
 derings of philosophy give place to those of 
 other theologians, who rationalize on new 
 grounds of scientific knowledge instead of 
 German metaphysics, while the stimulation 
 that was furnished by his idealism may be 
 more simply and directly derived from less 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 201 
 
 involved and abstruse thinkers. His theol- 
 ogy and metaphysics, in pursuit of which 
 he wasted his powers, are already seen to be 
 transient. On the other hand, his criticism 
 has articulated the works of minor authors 
 who have themselves written in a formal 
 style, nor has its influence been harmed by 
 its frequent over - refinement and fanciful- 
 ness ; and his poetry has remained untouched 
 by time. It belongs to the period of his 
 early enthusiasm, before he had become too 
 dulled for the breath of inspiration to kindle 
 him; and fortunately one can read nearly 
 all the best of it without a thought of the 
 dreary after-life of the poet, which has no 
 vital interest to any one except as an illustra- 
 tion of prolonged failure due to many causes, 
 but not less to a lack of mental than of moral 
 self-government. He infiltrated a peculiar 
 intellectual life into the clergy of his time, 
 but in them it came to nothing more tan- 
 gible and permanent than in himself. Will 
 it be long before Carlyle's picture of the 
 Seer at Highgate will be the only supple- 
 ment to The Ancient Mariner, so far as the 
 general knowledge of Coleridge is concerned, 
 and all between nothing but the weariness of 
 the opium-eater's hiding? 
 
202 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 Perhaps the serenity of Wordsworth's 
 home at Grasmere gains by the miserable 
 contrast. Thither Coleridge came for in- 
 vigoration; thither, when he finally sepa- 
 rated from his wife, he brought or sent the 
 children ; and when he could not or would 
 not retire to the hospitality and pleasant 
 companionship of the household where he 
 found the feminine sympathy which he had 
 failed of in his own marriage, Wordsworth 
 would set out to visit him with moral 
 support and cheer. A different interest 
 united Wordsworth and Sir George Beau- 
 mont ; it was the love of nature. Landscape 
 was the subject of their thoughts. Sir 
 George painted it, Wordsworth poetized it ; 
 in the life of both it was a permanent re- 
 source to which they constantly resorted, 
 and they liked to blend their work in this 
 solvent — the pictures of the one becoming 
 a text for the poems of the other, and vice 
 versa. The interest Wordsworth felt in 
 landscape gardening, in modifying wild na- 
 ture, and his ideas regarding the methods 
 and aims of the art, are brought out by the 
 part he had in planning the grounds at Cole- 
 orton. Sir George rebuilt these, and, in 
 laying out the winter garden in particular, 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 203 
 
 he had frequent recourse to the taste of his 
 friend ; and as Wordsworth was that year 
 occupying the old farmhouse on the estate, 
 the business of thinking out and overseeing 
 this work was at once diversion and restful 
 employment amid his poetic labors. He 
 wrote at great length on the subject to Lady 
 Beaumont, and laid before her an elaborate 
 plain full of ivy, holly, juniper, yews, open 
 sunshine glades, flower-borders, an alley, a 
 bower, a spray-fountain, a quarry, a distant 
 spire, a pool with two gold-fish, a vine-clad 
 old cottage, and other things which are arti- 
 ficial enough in the reading, but in reality 
 seem remarkably well fitted to mingle the 
 charm of cultivation with the wildness of 
 the evergreens, and make a sheltering re- 
 treat where the life of nature would linger 
 longest in autumn and revive earliest in the 
 warm sun. 
 
 "Painters and poets," he wrote, "have 
 had the credit of being reckoned the fathers 
 of English gardening," and he felt thus in 
 the line of succession in the art. It is most 
 interesting to observe how he obtains sug- 
 gestions from the poets, and makes their 
 Pegasus plough his field. He was, of course, 
 opposed to undue interference with nature 
 
204 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 and the deformity it occasions, and also to 
 the ostentation of the wealth or station of 
 the owner. " It is a substitution of little 
 things for great when we would put a whole 
 country into a nobleman's livery," he says 
 with spirit, and, declaring that the laying 
 out of grounds is a liberal art not unlike 
 poetry and painting, he goes on to pro* 
 test against the monopoly of nature by the 
 great ones of the earth, upon high aesthetic 
 grounds. " No liberal art," he says, " aims 
 merely at the gratification of an individual 
 or a class ; the painter or poet is degraded 
 in proportion as he does so. . . . If this 
 be so when we are merely putting together 
 words or colors, how much more ought the 
 feeling to prevail when we are in the midst 
 of the realities of things. . . . What, then, 
 shall we say of many great mansions with 
 their unqualified expulsion of human crea- 
 tures from their neighborhood, happy or 
 not — houses which do what is fabled of 
 the upas tree — that they breathe out death 
 and desolation?" These strictures on the 
 aristocratic handling of land he continues 
 for some pages in an interesting advocacy 
 of aesthetic communism — still a suggestive 
 topic. This sense of the beauty and gran< 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 205 
 
 deur of nature as a universal boon, the desire 
 to humanize the landscape without robbing 
 it of its own essential character or of the 
 minor charms of its native wildness, and a 
 great delight in his own practical work of 
 improving rubbish heaps, old walls, and 
 broken ground into a winter retreat of sun- 
 shine and evergreens and red-berried vines, 
 with nooks and views fit for a poet's walk, 
 are the qualities that still give interest to 
 those half dozen letters about planting a 
 waste acre of land. On the other hand, his 
 genius, in which susceptibility to nature was 
 so dominating a principle, seldom finds ex- 
 pression in the prose of his letters with 
 nearly the same clearness and purity as in 
 his poems. There is one extract, however, 
 which must be given, of a city scene from 
 the country poet : — 
 
 " I left Coleridge at seven o'clock on Sun- 
 day morning and walked towards the city 
 in a very thoughtful and melancholy state 
 of mind. I had passed through Temple Bar 
 and by St. Dunstan's, noticing nothing, and 
 entirely occupied with my own thoughts, 
 when, looking up, I saw before me the ave- 
 nue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure 
 white, with a sprinkling of new-fallen snow, 
 
206 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 not a cart or a carriage to obstruct the view, 
 no noise, only a few soundless and dusky 
 foot-passengers here and there. You re- 
 member the elegant line of the curve of 
 Ludgate Hill in which the avenue would 
 terminate, and beyond, and towering above 
 it, was the huge and majestic form of St. 
 Paul's, solemnized by a thin veil of falling 
 snow. I cannot say how much I was aifected 
 at this unthought-of sight in such a place, 
 and what a blessing I felt there is in habits 
 of exalted imagination. My sorrow was con- 
 trolled, and my uneasiness of mind— not 
 quieted and relieved altogether — seemed at 
 once to receive the gift of an anchor of se- 
 curity." 
 
 This is not poetry, but it is from the same 
 pen as the sonnet on Westminster Bridge. 
 
 Besides this taste for landscape, a special 
 interest was taken by both friends in what 
 poetry Wordsworth was composing from 
 time to time. Wordsworth again expati- 
 ates on the " awful truth that there neither 
 is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of po- 
 etry among nineteen out of twenty of those 
 persons who live, or wish to live, in the 
 broad light of the world," that is, in society ; 
 and again defines his aims, " to console the 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 207 
 
 afflicted ; to add sunshine to daylight, by 
 making the happy happier ; to teach the 
 young and the gracious of every age to see, 
 to think, and feel, and therefore become, 
 more actively and securely virtuous," etc. 
 Here, too, are the calm and patient con- 
 fidence in his own immortality, a serene 
 foreknowledge of how the matter would end, 
 though there are some dark spots in his pre- 
 vision, as when he says that "the people 
 would love Peter Bell " if only the critics 
 would let them. It appears, too, that these 
 poets were discreet in their confidential criti- 
 cism of each other, and by no means blind to 
 faults. Wordsworth notices that in South- 
 ey's verse, notwithstanding picturesqueness 
 and romance and a minor touch or two, 
 44 there . is nothing that shows the hand of 
 the great master ; " and Coleridge, with all 
 his adoration for Wordsworth, even when 
 declaring that he regarded the tale of the 
 ruined cottage in the Excursion as " the 
 finest poem in our language, comparing it 
 with any of the same or similar length," 
 could yet put his finger on the very centre 
 of weakness in Wordsworth. " I have some- 
 times fancied," he says, " that, having by the 
 conjoint operation of his own experiences, 
 
208 BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, ETC. 
 
 feelings, and reason M.nself convinced him- 
 self of truths which the generality of peo- 
 ple have either taken for granted from their 
 infancy, or at least adopted in early life, he 
 has attached all their own depth and weight 
 to doctrines and words which come almost 
 as truisms or commonplace to others." 
 
 Wordsworth's last words are a farewell ; 
 they illustrate how the love of nature and 
 enjoyment of it, unlike most of youthful 
 emotions, gain an increasing glow with years, 
 and they express his faith and life in the 
 most elementary terms : " I never had a 
 higher relish for the beauties of nature than 
 during this spring, nor enjoyed myself more. 
 What manifold reason, my dear George, 
 have you and I had to be thankful to Provi- 
 dence ! Theologians may puzzle their heads 
 about dogmas as they will ; the religion of 
 gratitude cannot mislead us. Of that we 
 are sure, and gratitude is the handmaid to 
 hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I 
 look abroad upon nature, I think of the best 
 part of our species, I lean upon my friends, 
 and I meditate upon the Scriptures, espe- 
 cially the Gospel of St. John ; and my creed 
 rises up of itself with the ease of an exhala- 
 tion, yet a fabric of adamant. God bless 
 you, my ever dear friend." 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY 
 
 I. BUNYAN. 
 
 The word genius is often used to conceal 
 a puzzle which the critic, through defects of 
 analytic power or sympathetic insight, is un- 
 able to solve ; but perhaps this short and easy 
 method was never more feebly resorted to 
 than when a writer, with a strong prejudice 
 in favor of sweetness and light, described 
 Bunyan as a " Philistine of genius." In this 
 designation there is much darkness and some 
 acerbity. The wonderful thing about this 
 man was not so much his gifts as the strange 
 combination of them. There must be, of 
 course, something extraordinary in any com- 
 mon man who becomes a leader in the higher 
 life of the race. The history of the Church, 
 however, is starred with the names of the 
 ignorant and the humble who, since the fish- 
 ermen were called from their nets by Gali- 
 lee, have been chosen to be shepherds of the 
 flock and evangelists of the faith. Bunyan 
 was visited with the experience of Protes- 
 
210 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 tant Christendom, of which the successive 
 terms are an outraged conscience, an of- 
 fended God, and a miraculous pardon, and 
 when he came to his peace he spread the 
 glad news, acceptably to the pious, and con- 
 vincingly to the impenitent ; but tens of 
 thousands in Christian lands have passed 
 through that same strait gate, and hundreds 
 of them have discovered that they possessed 
 the gift of tongues. Had Bunyan done no 
 more his sermons would have turned to yel- 
 low dust long ago, and his memory would be 
 treasured only by a sect, for, eloquent as he 
 was, he was not one of the missionaries who 
 are world-famous. He wrote a book; and 
 it turned out that this book of an unedu- 
 cated man was a great literary classic. Had 
 he written an epic it would have seemed less 
 marvelous, because there is a popular super- 
 stition that nature makes poets, but in prose 
 does not enter into competition with the 
 common school. Bunyan wrote verses, it is 
 true, and the man who set the delectable 
 mountains on the rim of earth had the mag- 
 ical sight; but just as surely his doggerel 
 shows that he had not the singing voice. 
 He was a master of prose, and wrote a book 
 that neighbors the Bible in our religious 
 homes. 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 211 
 
 Two things are, of course, indispensable 
 to a boy of genius, — imagination and the 
 gift of expression. Now Bunyan was fond 
 of representing himself as very wicked in 
 youth; and so he was, from his own point 
 of view. The worst he can say for himself 
 is, that he lied and swore, without malice or 
 injury to others, but because he had a talent 
 for tales and oaths. It is not trifling to re- 
 mark that his powers of invention and forci- 
 ble Saxon speech appear to have found their 
 first channel in this sort of mental activity. 
 The possible openings for the development 
 of genius in the tinker's cottage at Bedford 
 were few. It is plain that the mind of the 
 young man was one of intense life, and, in 
 the lack of guidance and knowledge, wan- 
 dered at random or turned to feed upon it- 
 self. The only intellectual or moral ideas 
 that came to him were conveyed from the 
 Bible, mostly through the medium of the 
 parish church in the years of the Puritan 
 ascendency. The commonplace that the Bi- 
 ble affords a good education, especially on 
 the imaginative and moral sides, is true, and 
 the theology that attaches to it has devel- 
 oped strong intellects ; it was, In the end, 
 the total book-culture of Bunyan, — all that 
 
212 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 he knew of that vast and various world. 
 But in the primary classes it is not a simple 
 text-book of life, especially for a boy of ge- 
 nius who is all sense, all spirit. Bunyan in 
 after years did not regret his first lessons ; 
 he preached that children should be taught 
 the terrors of the law. Certainly his own 
 mind laid hold of the easily apprehended 
 images of threatened vengeance, and was 
 filled with vague alarm and driven to a tor- 
 turing scrutiny of his own spirit. The ex- 
 perience of conversion repeats in the indi- 
 vidual the religious history of the race in 
 the same order in which it is developed in 
 the evolution of Biblical thought itself, and 
 Bunyan's case was not substantially differ- 
 ent from that of others, Puritan or Catholic, 
 to whom there is no Calvary without a Sinai. 
 The peculiarity lay in the soil into which 
 this fiery seed was sown. His imagination 
 ceased its childish fabling and became vis- 
 ionary; he saw, as the eye sometimes will, 
 his mind-pictures, and this the more readily 
 because his uneducated mind was accus- 
 tomed to move through concrete ideas, and 
 hence would be characterized by a high vis- 
 ualizing power. That this was a marked 
 trait of his mental habit is shown by the 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 213 
 
 fact that all liis stories about himself are 
 localized in a distinctly remembered place. 
 
 At this stage his mind approached the 
 danger - line of religious madness : his de- 
 scriptions of his moods, of his despairs, and 
 of his struggles with fancies, whose impor- 
 tance to his intellectual life arose from the 
 fewness of his ideas and the limited field of 
 their play, show that he had no power over 
 his thoughts, that he had not learned to use 
 his will in thiuking. This objectivity of his 
 religious experience and his powerlessness 
 before it, which have been recorded of other 
 intense lives likewise, gave him a strong 
 sense of the reality of spiritual things ; and 
 when he at last had laid his doubts and 
 come into the calm, he kept this conviction 
 to such a degree that earthly matters, even 
 when religion was largely interested in poli- 
 tics, seemed of no consequence : this world 
 was the dream, and the next world the truth. 
 To our days the account of this conversion 
 seems to indicate a lack of sanity, a spirit 
 touched with the fever that ends in fanat- 
 icism ; but we may be sure that to his hear- 
 ers there was nothing incredible in it, noth- 
 ing that could not be paralleled out of what 
 they had known in themselves or heard from 
 
214 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 their neighbors. So, early in life, the plot 
 of his career was brought to its crisis. In 
 this faith in the reality of eternal things 
 his mind reached its growth, and afterward 
 knew no change. 
 
 But with this sure hold on the spirit and 
 its high concerns there went a perfect real- 
 ism. Bunyan was the opposite of a mystic. 
 His common sense in his sermons of advice 
 is extraordinarily close -packed and hard, 
 and exhibits acute observation of the ways 
 of human nature in practical life. He wrote 
 once what was almost a novel, a history of 
 one Mr. Badman, which is probably truer 
 to contemporary life than the adventures of 
 Jonathan Wild in the next century. If he 
 did not weaken his eyesight over books, he 
 sharpened, it on men and women. All his 
 volumes abound with anecdotes and inci- 
 dents which he had evidently seen in the 
 town streets or by the roadside, and with 
 phrases and proverbial sayings close to the 
 soil. Not the least agreeable of the signs 
 of this realism, this sight for the bare fact 
 in sense alone, are those descriptions of the 
 country, of the birds, and flowers, and fields, 
 and the simple cheerfulness of them to the 
 country-born boy, which strew his pages from 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 215 
 
 cover to cover. So, when he came to write 
 his great book, he united in a perfectly nat- 
 ural way, and without forethought, the real- 
 ity of a journey on earth with that of the 
 search for heaven. The success with which, 
 in a literary work, truth is fused with fact, 
 is a measure of genius. It is, perhaps, more 
 striking in this case because the work is an 
 allegory, which is usually so drearily pale a 
 kind of composition. The characters and 
 action of the Pilgrim's Progress, on the con- 
 trary, are a transcript of life, so vivid that 
 it cannot wear out. It is not more real- 
 istic, however, than other portions of Bun- 
 yan's voluminous writings, in which one 
 may get an idea of English provincial char- 
 acter of high historical value and human 
 interest. How close, how truthful to his 
 surroundings he was as a literary workman, 
 is brought home with great force, though 
 perhaps unconsciously, by the view which 
 his biography gives of Bedford things and 
 people. 
 
 From it one may reconstruct the religious 
 state of the poor people of the Lincoln dio- 
 cese in Bunyan's time, and bring very near 
 the look of the lowly life which was the orig- 
 inal soil of English dissent and the field 
 
216 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 of the tinker - preacher's labors. In read- 
 ing terse extracts from the old documents — 
 " short and simple annals of the poor," truly 
 — of prayers in the barn and fines in the 
 court-house, of levies on workmen's tools 
 and old women's chattels, of these families 
 of " the meanest sort," as the Bishop's sched- 
 ule calls them, whose petty share of poverty 
 was confiscated for the security of a Stuart 
 throne and an Anglican prayer-book, — in 
 reading of these things, a chapter of the his- 
 tory of the English people comes out which 
 has been too closely written over with the 
 wit and frolic of Charles's court ; and the 
 query as to what became of the Common- 
 wealth when Cromwell died does not seem so 
 wholly unanswerable as the silence of stand- 
 ard history on the point would indicate. 
 
 After all, one is almost inclined to say 
 that no man ever owed more than Bunyan to 
 his limitations. Within his bounds, he used 
 all his spiritual and earthly experience, and, 
 aided by a native gift of imagination and of 
 fluency in the people's speech, blended them, 
 and poured the full fountain of his life 
 through his books. Had his youth included 
 other powerful elements of emotion and 
 knowledge besides his conversion, had theol- 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 217 
 
 ogy, or learning, or wider duties removed 
 him somewhat more from the life of his 
 neighbors and friends and the folk of the 
 diocese, of which he was jestingly called the 
 " bishop," he might have found so complete 
 self-expression a more difficult task. As it 
 was, he told all he had to tell, — told the 
 highest truth in the commonest words and 
 made it current. It is curious to observe 
 that he exhibits no consciousness that he is 
 writing a great work ; he speaks of a rush 
 of thought and fancy, and an attractiveness 
 in the subject, but he does not seem to think 
 that he is doing more than adding another 
 to the two-score publications he has already 
 sent out. It is noticeable, too, that he did 
 not meditate upon it for years beforehand, 
 nor spend more than a few months in its 
 composition. Some passages were added at 
 a later time, but as a whole it was a spon- 
 taneous and rapid composition. The reason 
 is that he was ripe for it. Without know- 
 ing it, he had been working up to this 
 crowning book, both in thought, treatment, 
 and style, through many years of sincere 
 and straightforward, faee-to-face conversa- 
 tion with men and women whom he was en- 
 deavoring to guide in the way which ho 
 
218 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 had traveled. Pilgrim's Progress has been 
 called the last book that was written without 
 the fear of the reviewer ; it is of more conse- 
 quence that it is one of the few works that 
 have been composed without ambition. 
 
 Bunyan's memory is singularly agreeable. 
 Personally he was free from the defects of 
 assumption, dogmatism, and spiritual pride, 
 which entered largely into the religious char- 
 acter of his epoch, and his sensitive con- 
 science seems to have kept him humble after 
 he had won a name. The two great ele- 
 ments of his work — the homely quality and 
 the Christian quality — were deep-seated in 
 his nature, and give him charm. In an age 
 of sectaries he was not a narrow bigot, and 
 did not stickle for meaningless things ; and 
 in a time of political strife, growing out of 
 religious differences, and though himself a 
 sufferer by twelve years' imprisonment in 
 early manhood, he did not confuse heaven 
 with any fantastic monarchy or common- 
 wealth of Christ in London, nor show any 
 rancor or revengeful spirit as a subject. It 
 is worth remembering that out of Puritan- 
 ism, which is regarded as a narrow creed 
 and life, came the only book since the Ref- 
 ormation which has been acceptable to the 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 219 
 
 whole of Christendom, and is still regarded 
 as the substantial truth of the Christian life 
 in all the churches that preach it under any 
 creed of orthodoxy. The life of the man 
 who could evolve such a story must have 
 been very simply typical of the Christian 
 life itself. " A Philistine of genius " — is 
 there no light nor sweetness in this ? 
 
 II. COWPER. 
 
 The career of Cowper, as all the world 
 knows, was one to fill the pessimist with 
 perennial gladness ; and, in fact, if it were 
 possible to look at the natural order of 
 things only as Cowper was affected thereby, 
 it might seem that nothing short of malignity 
 in the overruling powers could account for 
 the fiat that gave up so pure, simple, and 
 cordial a nature to be the prey of the seven 
 devils, and rendered so many delightful 
 traits of character futile to achieve the hap- 
 piness of their unfortunate possessor. In his 
 letters, flowing on in the old, sweet, fresh 
 English, one perceives the rare literary fac- 
 ulty, the shy humor, the discrimination, the 
 sound sense, all the many graces of style 
 and many virtues of intrinsic worth, that 
 have long been familiar to scholars ; and, 
 
220 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 more than that, one gladly recognizes again 
 the companionable, soft-hearted, pathetic man 
 whose pastimes, whether in gardening, or 
 poetry, or caring for his pets, were a refuge 
 from the most poignant anguish ; who played 
 only to escape his terror, and at last failed 
 even in that. The piety of Cowper's life, 
 however, although it contributes to his poetic 
 attractiveness, is only a small part of what 
 must be dealt with by the observer of that 
 life as it appears in his familiar letters. 
 These, as a body, it is needless to say, hold 
 a place from which they are not likely to be 
 dislodged. Nevertheless, letters at the best 
 are not a high form of literature ; even 
 when, as in the present case, their workman- 
 ship entitles them to rank as classics, their 
 interest must finally reside in their being 
 unconscious autobiography rather than in 
 their artistic perfection. Hence, instead of 
 regarding this correspondence as an object 
 of literary virtu, it may be well for once to 
 consider it with a more direct reference to 
 the sober facts it chronicles and the spirit it 
 reveals. 
 
 Few persons experienced in the world 
 would be likely to hold up the routine of 
 Cowper's days as worthy of imitation. So 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 221 
 
 far as earthly matters were involved, it was 
 a life of very small things ; its mundane in- 
 terests were few and trivial, and sprang for 
 the most part out of pursuits that belong 
 usually either to the domain of childhood or 
 of invalidism. This is not said disparag- 
 ingly, but with due regard to the fact that 
 for the larger part of his career Cowper's 
 condition was such that his attention had to 
 be distracted and his mind amused, as is the 
 case with children or invalids. In his later 
 years the composition of verses became one 
 mode of such diversion, and was undertaken 
 practically as a sanitary measure ; and thus 
 his larger interests, involving conceptions of 
 the eternal world and sympathy with his fel- 
 low-men, were extended to his hours of re- 
 creation. These larger interests, as they 
 must be called, were from the first peculiar. 
 When he was not attending to his hares or 
 his vegetables, or versifying, or taking rural 
 walks, he was engaged in devotional exer- 
 cises of one kind or another. In 1766, for 
 example, every day the time from breakfast 
 until eleven o'clock was spent in reading the 
 Bible or sermons, or in religious conversa- 
 tion ; the hour from eleven to twelve was 
 passed in church at service ; in the course of 
 
222 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 the afternoon there was a second period of 
 religious conversation or hymn-singing; at 
 night there was commonly another sermon 
 and more psalms, and after that family 
 prayers. In other words, it appears that 
 Cowper's life, at that time at least (and it 
 is a fair sample of the whole), consisted of 
 an almost monastic religious routine, re- 
 lieved by the diversion of country pursuits 
 on a small scale, and, later, of literary pur- 
 suits in addition. At present, as has been 
 said, few qualified judges would consider this 
 a life of high order, either in the way of 
 wisdom or utility ; but in Cowper's case, the 
 peculiarity of his mental condition and the 
 charm of his nature, revealed at its happy 
 moments in pleasant letters, blind the reader 
 to the monotony and vapidity of this exist- 
 ence, for such were its characteristics, except 
 in so far as the healing influences of natural 
 scenes, to which Cowper was very sensitive, 
 and the kindness of his household friends, 
 gave it variety and substance. 
 
 Now, it is a very striking fact that while 
 Cowper spent the larger part of his time 
 in religions reading and conversation, and 
 besides meditated in private on the same 
 themes, his letters do not show in any degree 
 
THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 223 
 
 that insight into spiritual things which would 
 naturally be looked for from real genius 
 occupied with such subjects. Spirituality 
 should have been his trait if religion was 
 his life, but, in fact, these letters are in this 
 regard barren. The anomalous nature of 
 his poetic life — the fact that he used his 
 powers, not to express his deepest emotions, 
 but to escape from them — may be pleaded 
 in extenuation of what seems at first a sur- 
 prising defect ; but a more likely explana- 
 tion lies in another direction. It was ser- 
 mons that he read, theology that he talked 
 about, a theory of grace and salvation that 
 he meditated upon in secret ; his religion 
 occupied his thoughts rather than his acts, 
 touched his future rather than his present, 
 — in a word, it was a system rather than a 
 life, the source of doubt instead of inspira- 
 tion. To put it in the simplest form, he 
 derived his light, not from his own inner ex- 
 perience, but from the creed. In his case 
 the light was the darkness of insanity ; but 
 his own conviction in the matter is shown 
 in his characterization of Beattie, — u a man 
 whose faculties have now and then a glimpse 
 from Heaven upon them, a man not indeed 
 in possession of much evangelical light, but 
 
224 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 faithful to what he has, and never neglect- 
 ing an opportunity to use it." A poet who 
 identifies " evangelical light " with " the vis- 
 ion and the faculty divine " may write The 
 Castaway, but one is not likely to find in 
 his works those intimate revelations of truth 
 that flash in convincing beauty from the 
 lines of the true spiritualists, such as Words- 
 worth, Shelley, or Emerson. Cowper's mis- 
 fortune, both as a man and a poet, was this 
 substitution of dogma for instinct, which, 
 operating in so sensitive and feeble a nature, 
 made religion, which was his vital interest, 
 not a life but a disease, and gave to the 
 activities of his higher powers the character 
 of mania. It is misleading, therefore, to 
 think of these letters as the fruit of a deeply 
 religious mind ; they are the record of the 
 efforts of a creed-believing mind to get rid 
 of itself, and their virtues — their amiability, 
 their delight in small adventures, their in- 
 terest in literature and humanity — exist not 
 in consequence of but in spite of the reli- 
 gious bent of their author. 
 
 Cowper was deficient, too, aesthetically as 
 well as spiritually, and the character of his 
 limitations was much the same in both re- 
 spects. His sense of beauty was practically 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY, 225 
 
 confined to landscape and small animals. 
 The cramping influences amid which he 
 lived are well indicated by his remarks upon 
 a clergyman who, it should be said, richly 
 deserved censure : — 
 
 "He seems, together with others of our 
 acquaintance, to have suffered considerably 
 in his spiritual character by his attachment 
 to music. The lawfulness of it, when used 
 with moderation, and in its proper place, is 
 unquestionable ; but I believe that wine it- 
 self, though a man be guilty of habitual in- 
 toxication, does not more debauch and befool 
 the natural understanding than music — al- 
 ways music, music in season and out of sea- 
 son — weakens and destroys the spiritual 
 discernment. If it is not used with an un- 
 feigned reference to the worship of God, 
 and with a design to assist the soul in the 
 performance of it, which cannot be the case 
 when it is the only occupation, it degener- 
 ates into a sensual delight, and becomes a 
 most powerful advocate for the admission of 
 other pleasures, grosser, perhaps, in degree, 
 but in their kind the same." 
 
 Whatever truth there may be in this es- 
 timate of the influence of music, the limita- 
 tion of its use to church choirs and organs 
 
226 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 is an expression of Puritan iconoclasm which 
 acquaints the reader at once with Cowper's 
 provincialism. The passage is English to 
 the core, and not only does it suggest the 
 aesthetic deficiencies of the poet and his life, 
 but it also brings up once more the charac- 
 teristic English picture of the family sing- 
 ing psalms and reading sermons, year in, 
 year out, with which the letters begin. This 
 correspondence has made that group of in- 
 terest to the world; but in answer to the 
 question, What was its life and its spirit, 
 can one help feeling that trivial, not to 
 say belittling, occupations, and a narrowing 
 theology, were principal elements ? Cow- 
 per's work, in the main, has only the slug- 
 gish vitality of this life ; in his letters more 
 than in his verses, speaking generally, there 
 is literary grace and personal charm ; but in 
 both they seem a sort of salvage. A vision 
 of quiet green fields, inhabited by respec- 
 table gentlefolk who led an existence of 
 humble routine in a neighborly way, made 
 up Cowper's world ; he lived in it over- 
 shadowed by the ever present fear of dam- 
 nation, and at last, sunk in despair, he died 
 in it. Out of such a world no great poet 
 either of the soul or of nature could come. 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 227 
 
 Cowper's virtue was in his simplicity and 
 genuineness, rare qualities then ; his good 
 fortune was in never belonging to the liter- 
 ary set or bowing to the town taste ; hence 
 in a time the most barren in English litera- 
 ture, he gave us a half dozen fine poems that 
 stand far beyond all contemporary rivalry, 
 and some private letters of the best style 
 and temper. When, however, the question 
 comes as to the intrinsic value of these let- 
 ters, it must be confessed that though they 
 please the taste they do not interest the mind 
 except in a curious and diverting way. They 
 are less the letters of a poet than of a village 
 original, a sort of schoolmaster or clergyman 
 manqiie, of sound sense, tender heart, and 
 humane perception, but the creature of a 
 narrow sphere. 
 
 III. CHANNING. 
 
 Channing was the chief ornament of the 
 American pulpit in his day. Like nearly 
 all men illustrious in the religious life, he 
 has won a kindlier and wider regard by his 
 character than by his opinions, because the 
 moods of devotion are simple and are uni- 
 versal in human nature, while opinion in 
 theology is more variable and eccentric, and 
 
228 THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 in some degree more accidental, than in any- 
 other branch of speculation. The deepest 
 interest of his life lies not so mucn in the 
 fruit of his genius as in the light of his 
 spirit. Indeed, this acknowledgment is 
 wrapped up in the indiscriminate eulogy by 
 which his admirers have injured his fame, 
 for they have presented him as a saint rather 
 than as a thinker, as an example of ideal 
 living rather than as a finder of truth. To 
 put a man in the catalogue of saints is 
 merely to write his epitaph ; his life is the 
 main thing, and Channing, although his 
 biography records no great deeds in the 
 world and no great crises of inner expe- 
 rience, is not alone in being far more inter- 
 esting in his humanity than in his canoniza- 
 tion. A refined and sensitive childhood, 
 shadowed in some partially explained way, 
 so that he never remembered it as a period 
 of joyfulness, was followed by a spirited and 
 dreaming youth, caught by the fervors of 
 French revolutionary ideas and exalted by 
 its own noble motives. In those early years, 
 as well as in his late maturity, he expe- 
 rienced, on the beach at Newport and under 
 the willows at Cambridge, moments of in, 
 sight and impulse which stood out ever after 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 229 
 
 in his memory as new births of the spirit 
 prophetic of the future. His career was es- 
 pecially determined, however, by the twenty- 
 one months which he passed at Richmond 
 as a private tutor, immediately after leaving 
 college. There, in loneliness and poverty, 
 in stoical disregard of health and courting 
 privation, in Christian conscientiousness of 
 motive, led on by glowing reveries in which 
 visionary objects seemed realities within 
 reach, he devoted himself in written words 
 to the service of mankind by the instrumen- 
 talities of religion. It is painful to read the 
 narrative of this intense personal life in the 
 years most susceptible to enthusiasm for re- 
 mote and ideal ends ; there can be no won- 
 der that after such experience he returned 
 home with the seal of the religious life set 
 upon his soul, and with a body inexorably 
 condemned to life-long disease. He entered 
 upon his ministry in the field where he could 
 best do good and find peace in doing it; 
 morally the child of the New England re- 
 ligious spirit, and intellectually the disciple 
 of those ideas of the nature of humanity and 
 the right course of its development which 
 the French Revolution had disseminated. 
 Throughout his life he was governed mainly 
 
230 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 by a deep sense of the dignity of manhood, 
 under whatever form, and by an abiding 
 conviction of the aid which Christianity 
 gives to the imagination and heart in obey- 
 ing the rule of love and obtaining perma- 
 nent peace of mind. 
 
 The most acute criticism ever passed upon 
 Channing's character was by that unnamed 
 critic who said, " He was kept from the 
 highest goodness by his love of rectitude." 
 The love of rectitude was his predominant 
 trait ; he was enslaved by it. He exacted 
 more of himself, however, than of others. 
 Right he must be, at all hazards, in motive, 
 opinion, and action. It is melancholy to 
 read page after page of his self-examination, 
 so minute, intricate, and painful, so fre- 
 quent and long continued. It almost awak- 
 ens a doubt of the value of noble character 
 to find it so unsure of itself, to see its pos- 
 sessor so absorbed in hunting his own shadow 
 within the innermost retreats of thought and 
 feeling. Channing seems to have preached 
 more sermons to himself than to the world. 
 His love of rectitude led him to this exces- 
 sive conscientiousness, but it brought him 
 great good in other directions. It gave him 
 a respect for the opinions of other men as 
 
THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 231 
 
 catholic as it was humble. He did not 
 practice toleration toward them, for that ex- 
 pression implied to his mind a misjiLaced 
 self-confidence ; but he practiced charity, as 
 toward men who felt equally with himself 
 the binding force of the obligation to be 
 right, and who had an equal chance of find- 
 ing truth. His conviction of the universal- 
 ity of this obligation and his perception 
 that it necessitates the independent exercise 
 of individual powers encouraged in him a 
 remarkable admiration for individuality, for 
 the unhampered exercise of thought and un- 
 questioned obedience to motive in which the 
 richness of individual life consists. 
 
 His second great quality, as pervasive and 
 controlling as his desire to be right, was 
 sensibility. It was revealed in the sym- 
 pathies and affections of private life, which 
 are known to the world only by the report 
 of friends ; but it may be seen with equal 
 clearness in the intensity of his delight in 
 nature, and in the ardent feeling by which 
 he realized ideal ends and gave them a liv- 
 ing presence in his own life as objects of 
 continuous effort. His sensitiveness to nat- 
 ural beauty was so keen that in moments of 
 physical weakness it caused pain. "There 
 
232 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 are times," he wrote, " when I have been so 
 feeble that a glance at the natural land- 
 scape, or even the sight of a beautiful flower, 
 gave me a bodily pain from which I shrank." 
 As life drew on to its end, the indestructible 
 loveliness of nature became to him a source 
 of joy and peace ever more prized. " The 
 world grows younger with age ! " he ex- 
 claimed more than once. In emotional sus- 
 ceptibility to ideas he resembled Shelley, 
 and probably it was this likeness of feeling 
 which led him to call Shelley, in ministerial 
 language, but with extraordinary charity for 
 that age, " a seraph gone astray." He re- 
 tained through life the intellectual sympa- 
 thies of his youth, and in his last days still 
 had an inclination toward community of 
 property as the solution of the social prob- 
 lem ; like "Wordsworth and Southey he re- 
 coiled from the excesses of the French, but 
 he never gave up the tricolor for the white 
 cockade. In his generation nearly all men 
 were hopeful of the accomplishment of be- 
 neficent reforms ; but Channing was filled 
 with an enthusiasm of hope which was al- 
 most the fervor of conviction. He was 
 without that practical enthusiasm which is 
 aroused by the presence of great deeds im- 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 233 
 
 mediately to be done ; the objects for which 
 he worked were far in the distance, scarcely 
 discernible except from the mount of vision ; 
 but he was possessed by the enthusiasm 
 which is kindled by the heat of thought 
 and is wrapped in its own solitary flames, 
 and he lived under the bright zenith of 
 that mood of which Carlyle has shown the 
 dark nadir and Teufelsdroch standing in its 
 shadow gazing out over the sleeping city. 
 These three principles — rectitude, sensibil- 
 ity, enthusiasm — were elemental in Chan- 
 ning's nature ; and because they are moral, 
 and not intellectual, he lived a spiritual 
 rather than a mental life; he gained in 
 depth rather than in breadth, and worked 
 out his development by contemplation and 
 prayer rather than by thought and act. 
 
 It appears strange, at first, that a man 
 with these endowments should have been 
 so conservative in opinion, and so little in- 
 clined to force upon the world what ad- 
 vanced opinions he did hold. A lover of 
 truth unwilling to make proselytes, an en- 
 thusiast unwilling to act, seems an anom- 
 aly ; but such was Channing's position. One 
 cause of his aversion to pushing Unitarian- 
 ism to its conclusion is found in the history 
 
234 THBEE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 of his own conversion and in the character 
 of his attachment to the new faith ; he was 
 a revolter of the heart ; he was liberalized 
 by his feelings. " My inquiries," he said, 
 " grew out of the shock given to my moral 
 nature by the popular system of faith." 
 He was moved by sentiment in his rejec- 
 tion of Calvinism, and he was kept by 
 sentiment from giving up the theory of the 
 mysterious character and mission of Christ. 
 The strength of his feelings operated to 
 render him conservative, and the low es- 
 timate he apparently placed upon logical 
 processes contributed to the same end. " It 
 is a good plan," he wrote, " ever and anon 
 to make a clean sweep of that to which we 
 have arrived by logical thought, and take a 
 new view ; for the mind needs the baptism 
 of wonder and hope to keep it vigorous and 
 healthy for intuition." Either this distrust 
 of the understanding working by logical 
 processes, or else a native inaptitude for 
 theological reasoning, prevented him from 
 following out his principles to their conclu- 
 sion. If he had framed a system, he would 
 have held his views with greater certainty ; 
 as it was, he not only allowed the greatest 
 liberty to individual opinion, but he dis- 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 235 
 
 trusted himself. " You young thinkers," he 
 said, " have the advantage of us in coming 
 without superstitious preoccupation to the 
 words of Scripture, and are more likely to 
 get the obvious meaning. We shall walk in 
 shadows to our graves." The strength of in- 
 bred sentiment could not be overpowered by 
 such feeble intellectual conviction. He was a 
 moral, not an intellectual, reformer ; his work 
 was not the destruction of a theology, but the 
 spread of charity. He felt more than he rea- 
 soned, and hence his rationalism was bounded, 
 not by the unknown, but by the mystical. He 
 was satisfied with this, and does not seem to 
 have wished to make a definite statement of 
 his beliefs. The whole matter is summed 
 up by Miss Peabody when she says, " The 
 Christianity which Dr. Channing believed 
 . . . was a spirit, not a form of thought." 
 A spirit of devotion toward the divine, a 
 spirit of love toward the human, Channing 
 preached to the world and illustrated by his 
 life ; but a new form of thought which shows 
 the intellectual advance that alone is fatal 
 to conservatism, — this was no part of his 
 gift to men. 
 
 In the antislavery cause his conservatism 
 appears in a less pleasing light. Here he 
 
236 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 exhibited the scholar's reluctance to initiate 
 reform, the scholar's perplexity before the 
 practical barriers in the way of action. He 
 was displeased by the rude voices about him, 
 and frightened by the violence of determi- 
 nation which the reformers displayed. He 
 looked to find the peace of the pulpit in the 
 arena, and was bewildered by the alarms of 
 the active strife. He did not choose his side 
 until the last moment, and even then he de- 
 layed until he called down the just rebuke of 
 May and the just defense that reformer made 
 for his comrades : " The children of Abra- 
 ham held their peace until at last the very 
 stones have cried out, and you must expect 
 them to cry out like the stones." Then, in- 
 deed, Channing showed that he was a Falk- 
 land on Cromwell's side, not acting without 
 a doubt, but taking his place, nevertheless, 
 openly and manfully beside the friend whom 
 he had left alone too long. Yet he never lost, 
 even in that stirring cause, the timidity of 
 culture. He was of the generation of those 
 cultivated men who earned for Boston the 
 reputation for intellectual preeminence ; but 
 the political future of the country did not 
 belong to him nor to his companions ; it be- 
 longed to Garrison and Lincoln. Here it 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 237 
 
 is that Father Taylor's keen criticism strikes 
 home : " What a beautiful being Dr. Chan- 
 ning is ! If he only had had any educa- 
 tion ! " Channing's education had been of 
 the lamp, and not of the sword ; it seemed 
 to Father Taylor pitifully narrow and palsy- 
 stricken beside his own experience of the 
 world's misery. Channing's life affords one 
 more illustration of the difficulty the culti- 
 vated man finds in understanding and for- 
 warding reform in its beginning; but he 
 deserves the credit of having rid himself of 
 the prejudices and influences that marked 
 the society in which he moved, to a greater 
 degree, perhaps, than any other of his circle. 
 The value of Channing's work in religion 
 and in reform will be differently rated by 
 men, for his service was of a kind which is 
 too apt to be forgotten. The intrinsic worth 
 of his writings remains to be tested by time ; 
 but their historic worth, as a means of lib- 
 eralizing the New England of his day, was 
 great and memorable. He gave his right 
 hand to Emerson and his left hand to Par- 
 ker ; and, although he could not accompany 
 them on the way, he bade them Godspeed. 
 It was, perhaps, mainly through his influ- 
 ence that they found the field prepared for 
 
238 THREE MEN OF PIETY. 
 
 them and the harvest ready, although he 
 would not put his sickle in. It was largely 
 due to him, also, that Boston became the 
 philanthropic centre of the country. Dur- 
 ing his lifetime he won a remarkable respect 
 and admiration. An exaggerated estimate 
 of his eloquence, powers, and influence will 
 continue to be held so long as any remain 
 alive who heard his voice and remember its 
 accents; in later times a truer judgment 
 may be reached. Personally he was amia- 
 ble, kindly, and courteous, notwithstanding 
 the distance at which he seems to have kept 
 all men. Dr. Walker said that conversa- 
 tion was always constrained in his study. 
 In his nephew's narrative, it is said that the 
 interview with him was " solemn as the visit 
 to the shrine of an oracle." He himself 
 told Miss Peabody after their friendship 
 had lasted several years, that she had " the 
 awe of the preacher " upon her. Finally, 
 we read that no man ever freely laid his 
 hand upon Channing's shoulder; and we won- 
 der whether he ever remembered that St. 
 John had " handled the Word made flesh." 
 This self-seclusion, this isolation of sanctity, 
 as it were, did not proceed from any value 
 he set upon himself above his fellows ; it 
 
THREE MEN OF PIETY. 239 
 
 was the natural failing of a man who lived 
 much within himself, and who always medi- 
 tated the loftiest of unworldly themes. He 
 was a faithful and well-beloved friend ; and 
 if in this, as in other directions, he " failed 
 of the highest goodness," there are few in 
 the same walk of life who attain to equal 
 sincerity, charity, and purity, or equal ser- 
 viceableness to the world. 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 There is nothing more useful to observe 
 in the life of Darwin than its simplicity. He 
 was the man of science as Marlborough was 
 the soldier, and he was only that. From 
 boyhood he refused all other ways of life 
 and knowledge as by instinct, and in his 
 maturity the ill health which ends the career 
 of ordinary men only confirmed him in his 
 own ; he was always the collector, the inves- 
 tigator, or the theorizer. A second quality, 
 which is general enough to be constantly at- 
 tracting attention, is the thoroughly English 
 character of his life. The stock from which 
 he sprang was rich in old English qualities 
 of vigor, sense, and originality; the house 
 in which he was reared offers an excellent 
 type of English family life, and was as good 
 a place to be born in as could be desired for 
 any son; his father's strong character, the 
 influences of his older relatives, the ordinary 
 schools he attended, the smallest incidents 
 of his childhood, even the jokes of his play- 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE. 241 
 
 fellows, belong to the nioral climate of the 
 old country ; and it does not need the grouse- 
 shooting, the Cambridge undergraduate sup- 
 pers, and the proposition that he should 
 choose the Church for a profession to tell us 
 where we are. Indeed, Darwin in his youth, 
 spirited, cordial, and overflowing with health, 
 in his early surroundings of English strength 
 and kindness, was quite as attractive as in 
 his quieter, and in some respects narrower, 
 working life. 
 
 He certainly won upon the men whom he 
 met at the outset of his career. " Looking 
 back," he says, " I infer that there must 
 have been something in me a little superior 
 to the common run of youths : otherwise the 
 above-mentioned men, so much older than 
 me and higher in academical position, would 
 never have allowed me to associate with 
 them. Certainly I was not aware of any 
 such superiority; and I remember one of 
 my sporting friends, Turner, who saw me at 
 work with my beetles, saying that I should 
 some day be a Fellow of the Royal Society, 
 and the notion seemed to me preposterous." 
 Of these men Henslow was the most at- 
 tached to him and interested in his success. 
 He had not done much more than work at 
 
242 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 " his beetles," but his scientific taste was al- 
 ready the ruling genius of his life. It is 
 surprising to see how completely he remained 
 untouched by the ordinary influences of a 
 university training ; he thought in later 
 years that his scholastic education had been 
 a waste of time, and he seems justified when 
 one perceives how little good he got from 
 it. His was a mind that belonged to him- 
 self, self-fed, almost self-made ; he lived his 
 own life, and not another's, from the start ; 
 though his taste for collecting was heredi- 
 tary, the persistence with which he gave 
 himself up to following it, the completeness 
 of his surrender to his one predominant tal- 
 ent, was his own. He was, nevertheless, 
 better furnished with intellectual power than 
 he appears to have believed. " From my 
 earliest youth," he writes, " I have had the 
 strongest desire to understand or explain 
 whatever I observed, that is, to group all 
 facts under some general laws." It is true 
 that he started from some specific facts, had 
 a definite, tangible problem to solve ; but he 
 felt the necessity to solve it. He differed 
 from the collector in this, that his curiosity 
 was not exhausted in gathering materials, 
 but he must also order his materials ; or to 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE. 243 
 
 put it exactly, must organize Lis knowledge. 
 This shows the great vitality of his reason- 
 ing faculty, which within its special range 
 was really precocious. The native strength 
 of his mind in this direction is also illus- 
 trated by the great pleasure he derived from 
 reading Paley's Evidences. " The logic of 
 this book," he declares, " and, as I may add, 
 of his Natural Theology, gave me as much 
 delight as did Euclid. The careful study 
 of these works, without attempting to learn 
 any part by rote, was the only part of the 
 academical course which, as I then felt and 
 as I still believe, was of the least use to me 
 in the education of my mind. I did not 
 at that time trouble myself about Paley's 
 premises ; and taking these in trust, I was 
 charmed and convinced by the long line of 
 argumentation." He acknowledges his in- 
 ability in later life to follow trains of ab- 
 stract reasoning, such as make the matter of 
 metaphysics ; but he was quite aware of his 
 aptitude for inductive reasoning, and does 
 not overestimate its influence in the com- 
 position of his great work. " Some of my 
 critics have said, ' Oh, he is a good observer, 
 but he has no power of reasoning ! ' I do 
 not think that this can be true, for the Ori- 
 
244 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 gin of Species is one long argument from 
 the beginning to the end, and it has con- 
 vinced not a few able men." His taste for 
 collecting was a sine qua non, but it was 
 this power of reasoning, however limited in 
 range, that made him great ; and it is as 
 clearly to be seen in operation in his forma- 
 tive years as was the passion for collecting 
 which was to feed it with material to work 
 upon. His vivacity and energy no doubt 
 counted much in winning for him the friend- 
 ship of elder men, and he possessed that in- 
 definable but potent quality of personal at- 
 tractiveness ; but Henslow in the beginning, 
 as Lyell later, must have seen in him that 
 happy conjunction of tastes and faculties 
 which made his genius for science, or at 
 least they must have perceived the promise 
 of it. 
 
 All the circumstances of his life seem to 
 have conspired to favor this special endow- 
 ment. The very fact that the classics did 
 nothing for him helped him : he was relieved 
 from the confusion caused by complex and 
 disturbing elements in a varied education ; 
 he had no difficulty in making his choice ; 
 he was not afterward drawn aside by the 
 existence of other unsatisfied tastes, artifi- 
 
DAB WIN'S LIFE. 245 
 
 cially cultivated ; he had no ambition for 
 that roundness of development which is a 
 fetich of modern times; he did not fritter 
 away his time and energy in directions in 
 which he could not excel. It is not meant 
 to hold up his luck in this respect as exem- 
 plary good fortune, but only to emphasize 
 the way in which it told on his success. He 
 was not less happy in the exterior circum- 
 stances of his life, and in those things which 
 come by a kind of hazard. His appoint- 
 ment to the Beagle was a Napoleonic oppor- 
 tunity, and in looking back he realized its 
 value to the full : " The voyage of the Bea- 
 gle has been by far the most important 
 event in my life, and has determined my 
 whole career; yet it depended on so small 
 a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive 
 me thirty miles to Shrewsbury, which few 
 uncles would have done, and on such a trifle 
 as the shape of my nose." But one ought 
 not to exaggerate the element of chance ; 
 and though Captain Fitz-roy had continued 
 to disapprove of Darwin's nose, and his un- 
 cle had not interfered to overcome the elder 
 Darwin's objection to the voyage on the 
 score that it would be an unbecoming ad- 
 venture for a prospective clergyman, and on 
 
246 DABWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 other equally good or better grounds, yet we 
 might have had our great naturalist. The 
 voyage of the Beagle, nevertheless, was the 
 turning-point of Darwin's life. He obtained 
 in the course of it the first real training of 
 his mind ; it brought before him several de- 
 partments of science in such a way that he 
 approached them with active and original 
 thoughts, and was constantly forced into an 
 inquiring and bold attitude toward the novel 
 material he found; it gave him five years 
 alone with science, and free from any near 
 master to whom he might have formed the 
 habit of deferring. Huxley does not over- 
 state the material advantages that this train- 
 ing brought with it : " In Physical Geogra- 
 phy, in Geology proper, in Geographical 
 Distribution, and in Palaeontology, he had 
 acquired an extensive practical training dur- 
 ing the voyage of the Beagle. He knew of 
 his own knowledge the way in which the 
 raw materials of these branches of science 
 are acquired, and was therefore a most com- 
 petent judge of the speculative strain they 
 would bear. That which he needed, after 
 his return to England, was a corresponding 
 acquaintance with Anatomy and develop- 
 ment, and their relations to Taxonomy, and 
 
DAB WIN'S LIFE. 247 
 
 he acquired this by his Cirripede work." It 
 is to be noticed that during his voyage in 
 the Beagle he became convinced of the 
 "wonderful superiority of Lyell's manner 
 of treating geology" over every other au- 
 thor's. This is an illustration, like that 
 drawn from Paley, of the character of his 
 mind as primarily a reasoning mind; for 
 what he recognized in Lyell was a method. 
 It was on this voyage, too, that he became 
 ambitious ; he began to believe that he might 
 add to the stock of human knowledge, and 
 the stimulation of the welcome his success 
 was meeting in England was evidently 
 keenly felt. He put his whole heart into 
 the work, and few passages are more stir- 
 ring than those which describe his zeal in 
 his first really scientific enthusiasm, after 
 he had given up his gun as of less use than 
 his eye, and had found sport, even with his 
 fond love of it, an inferior pleasure to the 
 pursuit of knowledge ; then, alone in the 
 Andes and the Southern Ocean, he came to 
 his majority. 
 
 Mr. Huxley, in the passage cited, has 
 noted the need Darwin had for further 
 training, particularly as a naturalist. He 
 obtained this by his work on the Cirripedes, 
 
248 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 an eight years' labor. This concluded his 
 education. Of the value of it merely as 
 training and to himself, Sir Joseph Hooker 
 says : " Your father recognized three stages 
 in his career as a biologist : the mere col- 
 lector at Cambridge ; the collector and ob- 
 server in the Beagle, and for some years 
 afterwards ; and the trained naturalist after, 
 and only after, the Cirripede work. That 
 he was a thinker all along is true enough." 
 Huxley says that Darwin never did a wiser 
 thing than when he devoted himself to these 
 years of patient toil. Darwin himself does 
 not indicate that he purposely chose to do 
 this monograph in order to educate himself, 
 and he doubts whether it was worth the 
 time. He seems to have been gradually 
 drawn into it, and to have finished it be- 
 cause he had gone so far. When he had 
 done with it, at any rate, if not before, he 
 was a thoroughly furnished man for such in- 
 vestigation as was to be his title to lasting 
 fame. He had come to be thus equipped 
 by the mere course of his life ; by beetles 
 at Cambridge, and the Beagle, and the Cir- 
 ripedes. Yet if he had planned his educa- 
 tion from the start for the express purpose 
 of dealing in the most masterly way with 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE. 249 
 
 the mass of diversified details out of which 
 the Origin of Species and the other deriva- 
 tive coordinate works grew, it is hard to see 
 in what way his course could have been 
 improved. The ill-health which seized him 
 so soon was almost a blessing in disguise, 
 since it isolated him from the distractions 
 of modern London, made him value his life 
 and his time, and possibly, by the economy 
 of his strength which it necessitated, aided 
 as much as it hindered him. 
 
 One need not follow him through the 
 composition of his books, or even through 
 the elaboration of the theory of natural se- 
 lection, during the many years that it was 
 growing in his laboratory of notes. For 
 him the formulating of that theory was in- 
 evitable : it seems, as one observes him, nat- 
 ural enough to have been foretold of him ; 
 but it followed, not from his position, which 
 another man might have occupied, but from 
 his genius. The qualities of mind which it 
 required were not many, and one under- 
 stands readily why it is so commonly said 
 that all is explained by his power of obser- 
 vation and its vast range ; but it did require 
 one high faculty of the mind, and a rare 
 one, which Darwin had preeminently among 
 
250 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 the men of his time, — the faculty, namely, 
 of discerning the lines of inquiry in a mass 
 of as yet unrelated facts. He somewhere 
 says that he had found it harder, perhaps, 
 to put the question than it was to reach the 
 answer. This power is the great economizer 
 of mental energy, in any branch of investi- 
 gation ; it is, to the man who has it, equiv- 
 alent to a compass; and to Darwin it was 
 the one talent without which his stores of 
 knowledge would have been no more than a 
 heap of unclassified specimens in a museum 
 cellar. Moral and physical qualities he had, 
 besides ; his patience and his practiced vis- 
 ion were invaluable ; but it was the intel- 
 lectual part that penetrated the secrets of 
 nature. This sense of the problem, this eye 
 for the question, was most serviceable to his 
 success. His acuteness in perceiving the 
 importance of the infinitely little, which is 
 often mentioned as one of his distinguishing 
 traits, was only an incident of this larger 
 endowment ; and his power to make other 
 men useful to him, specialists in horticulture 
 or physiology, or even common observing 
 men, was only the knowledge of how to put 
 practical questions. The point is worth em- 
 phasizing, because in this age of the accu- 
 
DAB WIN'S LIFE. 251 
 
 mulation of scientific detail it is too apt to 
 be forgotten that the thinking mind is as 
 rare in science as in other departments, 
 and is, nevertheless, the indispensable thing 
 which makes a man great. 
 
 Here it is worth while to advert to that 
 persistent discussion respecting the nature 
 of a modern education, which Darwin's ex- 
 perience is bound to bring forward with 
 renewed vigor. His testimony, both in the 
 chart of himself which he gave Mr. Galton 
 and in the account he wrote for his children, 
 is unequivocal. He says he was self-taught ; 
 that his training at the university was of no 
 use to him, speaking generally ; and that the 
 classics in particular were barren. He seems 
 to be quite correct in his statement ; the 
 claim that his powers of observation and 
 comparison were really developed by school- 
 boy attention to Latin and Greek termina- 
 tions is purely pedagogical ; nor is there any 
 reason to question that men of genius can 
 be successful, achieve eminent greatness for 
 themselves, and do work of the highest value 
 to society without immediate obligation to 
 those studies usually called the humanities. 
 This is nothing new. Instances of self -edu- 
 cation for special careers are to be found in 
 
252 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 other walks than those of science : in war, 
 in administration, and generally in active 
 life, and not infrequently in literature itself. 
 But it is worth observing what testimony 
 these volumes bear to the wonderful vital- 
 ity of the Greek intelligence. Speaking of 
 the theory of Pangenesis, Darwin writes to 
 a correspondent that the views of Hippoc- 
 rates " seem almost identical with mine, — 
 merely a change of terms, and an applica- 
 tion of them to classes of facts necessarily 
 unknown to the old philosopher." Again, 
 he writes of Aristotle : " From quotations 
 which I had seen I had a high notion of 
 Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most 
 remote notion what a wonderful man he 
 was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my 
 two gods, though in very different ways, but 
 they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle. 
 ... I never realized, before reading your 
 book, to what an enormous consummation 
 of labor we owe even our common know- 
 ledge." A more striking passage is that of 
 Huxley's, where he says : "The oldest of all 
 philosophies, that of evolution, was bound 
 hand and foot and cast into utter darkness 
 during the millennium of theological scho- 
 lasticism. But Darwin poured new life- 
 
DAB WIN'S LIFE. 253 
 
 blood into the ancient frame; the bonds 
 burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 
 Greece has proved itself to be a more ade- 
 quate expression of the universal order of 
 things than anv of the schemes which have 
 been accepted by the credulity and welcomed 
 by the superstition of seventy later genera- 
 tions of men." Rediscovery, however, is 
 not obligation ; and, perhaps, if Darwin had 
 been thoroughly imbued with the Greek 
 mode of looking upon the universe, he would 
 not have been really indebted to it for his 
 own views; for he went upon different 
 grounds in forming his conceptions. The 
 real question is, not whether Darwin suc- 
 ceeded without Greek influences, but whether 
 he lost anything because of his failure to 
 assimilate them. The answer seems plain. 
 It is written all over these pages, and is ex- 
 pressly given by Darwin in more than one 
 passage. 
 
 No words can be too strong to express the 
 lovableness of Darwin's personality, or the 
 moral beauty of his character. In his biog- 
 raphy, it is true, he is presented as the man 
 of science ; but he is seen occasionally in 
 other aspects. He was a dutiful, respect- 
 ful, and affectionate son, at the outset of his 
 
254 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 life. He thought his father was sometimes 
 unjust, but he always spoke of him as " the 
 wisest man he ever knew ; " and there is a 
 touching passage in one of his letters home, 
 when his father had sent him a note : " I al- 
 most cried for pleasure at receiving it ; it 
 was very kind, thinking of writing to me." 
 He was also, in his turn, an admirable fa- 
 ther, considerate, patient, and very tender. 
 One of his sons tells a most significant anec- 
 dote of once having drawn on himself some 
 indignant exclamation, " almost with fury," 
 and the end of it being that " next morning, 
 at seven o'clock or so, he came into my bed- 
 room and sat on my bed, and said he had 
 not been able to sleep, from the thought that 
 he had been so angry with me, and after 
 a few more kind words he left me." His 
 description of his little daughter who died is 
 of itself enough to show the extraordinarily 
 fine quality of his affections ; and in general 
 his relations with his children are almost 
 ideal in gentleness, kindness, and compan- 
 ionableness. He was also a good friend 
 and acquaintance. In a word, in his private 
 social relations he was exemplary, judged 
 by the standard of a high civilization. He 
 was not without a sense, too, of public duty. 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE. 255 
 
 He felt strongly only upon the subject of 
 slavery, and this was largely because of his 
 travels in slave countries. He was inter- 
 ested in philanthropic efforts to some de- 
 gree, and especially in furthering the in- 
 crease of kindness to animals. But he was 
 remote from public affairs, and led even in 
 his sympathies a life somewhat narrowly 
 confined to his own circle and his work in 
 science. In other parts of his character 
 there is nothing to displease. He was mod- 
 est and just, and free from envy, conscien- 
 tious to an extreme, and as ready to give as 
 to receive help in all ways. He was more 
 pleased with his fame than he acknow- 
 ledged; he cared deeply for the success of 
 his theory, and was well aware of its in- 
 fluence on his own reputation as one to be 
 classed with Newton's ; he liked praise and 
 distinction, though he limited his desire to 
 the commendation and respect of natural- 
 ists ; but this is only to wish to be approved 
 by the most competent judges. He was fair 
 to Wallace, and exhibited the best of tem- 
 pers toward him ; but between the lines one 
 reads that he was nettled and annoyed by 
 the incident, and it must be concluded that 
 as he was ambitious in youth, he was de* 
 
256 BAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 sirous of having his due in manhood, and 
 valued fame. 
 
 This was a character which might well 
 spare the humanities. The fact remains that 
 he did spare them. What he lost was cul- 
 ture. The confession that he makes of the 
 gradual atrophy of his aesthetic tastes will 
 be long quoted as one of the most remark- 
 able facts of his life. He began with a sus- 
 ceptibility to music, which by his son's ac- 
 count he did not lose; with a liking for 
 poetry, such that he read The Excursion 
 twice, and he would not have read it except 
 for pleasure; and he used to take Milton 
 with him in his pocket. In art he went 
 but a little way, if, indeed, he ever really 
 had any eye for it. He was religious, as an 
 English boy usually is ; but his interest in 
 belief regarding religious subjects died out, 
 and, what is of more consequence, the emo- 
 tions which were called out by it in early 
 life ceased to be exercised. There was a 
 deadening, in other words, of all his nat- 
 ure, except so far as it was fed by his work, 
 his family, and his friends in its intellect- 
 ual and social parts. So complete was this 
 change that it affected even his appreciation 
 of beautiful scenery, which had evidently 
 
DABWIN'S LIFE. 257 
 
 given him keen delight in his youth and 
 travels. He dates this change from just 
 after his thirtieth year, when he became ab- 
 sorbed in scientific pursuits as his profession. 
 Something, no doubt, and perhaps much, is 
 to be set down to the effect of his ill-health, 
 which left him with diminished energies for 
 any recreation ; his strength was exhausted 
 in his few hours of work. He was himself 
 so convinced that his life had been narrowed 
 in these ways, that he says ' if he had it to 
 live over he would have planned to give a 
 certain time habitually to poetry. 
 
 It would be too much to say that the fail- 
 ure of Darwin to appropriate the humane 
 elements in his university education accounts 
 in any perceptible degree for these defects. 
 In culture, as in science, the self-making 
 power of the man counts heavily ; and there 
 is such inefficiency in those whose duty it is 
 to give youth a liberal education from clas- 
 sical sources, there are such wrong methods 
 and unintelligent aims in the universities, 
 that it might easily prove to be the case that 
 a student with the most cordial tempera- 
 ment toward the humanities would profit 
 only imperfectly by his residence at seats of 
 learning. In spite of these reservations 
 
258 DAB WIN'S LIFE. 
 
 however, the Greek culture is the historical 
 source of what are traditionally the higher 
 elements in our intellectual life, and has 
 been for most cultivated men the practical 
 discipline of their minds. But it is to be 
 further observed that the example of Dar- 
 win, if it should be set up as showing that 
 Greek culture is unnecessaiy in modern 
 days, goes just as directly and completely to 
 prove that all literary education, as well by 
 modern as by ancient authors, is superfluous. 
 It is enough to indicate to what a length the 
 argument must be carried, if it is at all ad- 
 mitted. The important matter is rather the 
 question, How much was Darwin's life in- 
 jured for himself by his loss of culture, in 
 the fact that some of those sources of intel- 
 lectual delight which are reputed the most 
 precious for civilized man were closed to 
 him? 
 
 The blank page in this charming biogra- 
 phy is the page of spiritual life. There is 
 -nothing written there. The entire absence 
 of an element which enters commonly into 
 all men's lives in some degree is a circum- 
 stance as significant as it is astonishing. 
 Never was a man more alive to what is 
 visible and tangible, or in any way matter of 
 
DAB WIN'S LIFE. 259 
 
 sensation ; on the sides of his nature where 
 an appeal could be made, never was a man 
 more responsive ; but there were parts in 
 which he was blind and dull. Just as the 
 boy failed to be interested in many things, 
 the man failed too ; and he disregarded 
 what did not interest him with the same 
 ease at sixty as at twenty. What did in- 
 terest him was the immediately present, and 
 he dealt with it admirably, both in the in- 
 tellectual and the moral world ; but what 
 was remote was as if it were not. The spir- 
 itual element in life is not remote, but it is 
 not matter of sensation, and Darwin lived as 
 if there were no such thing ; it belongs to the 
 region of emotion and imagination, and those 
 perceptions which deal with the nature of 
 man in its contrast with the material world. 
 Poetry, art, music, the emotional influences 
 of nature, the idealizations of moral life, are 
 the means by which men take possession of 
 this inner world of man ; to which, for man 
 at least, nature in all its immensity is sub- 
 sidiary. Darwin's insensibility to the higher 
 life — for so men agree to call it — was 
 partly, if not wholly, induced by his absorp- 
 tion in scientific pursuits in the spirit of ma- 
 terialism. We praise him for his achieve- 
 
260 DARWIN'S LIFE. 
 
 ments, we admire his character, and we feel 
 the full charm of his temperament ; he de- 
 lights us in every active manifestation of his 
 nature. We do not now learn for the first 
 time that a man may be good without being 
 religious, and successful without being liber- 
 ally educated, and worthy of honor without 
 being spiritual ; but a man may be all this 
 and yet be incomplete. Great as Darwin 
 was as a thinker, and winning as he remains 
 as a man, those elements in which he was 
 deficient are the noblest part of our nature. 
 
BYKON'S CENTENAKY. 
 
 The absence of any widespread interest 
 in the centenary of Lord Byron is a mar- 
 velous illustration of the vicissitudes of lit- 
 erary reputation. Only in Greece was pub- 
 lic notice taken of it. The brilliancy with 
 which his fame burst forth, the unexampled 
 rapidity with which it spread through Eu- 
 rope, the powerful influence it continued to 
 exert on the youth of the next age, were to 
 the men who witnessed them sure signs of 
 the magnitude of his future renown. The 
 decadence into which it has fallen would 
 have been incredible to them. It was By- 
 ron's distinction to have been the first man 
 of letters who enjoyed an international rep- 
 utation at once ; and one can hardly credit 
 the fact that he has shrunk so wonderfully. 
 In the month of his death Sir Walter Scott, 
 in a brief article which attracted wide atten- 
 tion, said that it seemed almost as if the sun 
 in heaven had been extinguished ; and when 
 Scott soon followed him, Landor, writing to 
 
262 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 Crabb Robinson, remarked that the death of 
 these two had " put the fashionable world 
 into deep mourning," and drew gloomy pre- 
 dictions, in the well-known manner of con- 
 temporaries, because the great men were 
 leaving no successors. 
 
 Something of the shock of Byron's death 
 and of the exaltation of his genius at the 
 moment was due to the manner in which he 
 met his end ; he had fallen like one of his 
 own heroes, died in a cause, and appealed to 
 the romantic feeling of the age. Even then, 
 however, to admire him was found to be a 
 different thing from approving him. When 
 the thirty-seven guns had been fired at Mis- 
 solonghi, and the Turks had responded with 
 " an exultant volley," and the ship had 
 brought home the remains, the Abbey was 
 refused, and he was buried in the common 
 soil of England. Two incidents of the fu- 
 neral bring him very near to us. Lady Car- 
 oline Lamb met the cortege as she was driv- 
 ing, and, on being told, in answer to her 
 question, that it was Byron's, fainted in her 
 carriage ; and Mary Shelley, as she saw the 
 procession winding down, reflected on the 
 short-sightedness of human life, asking who 
 could have foretold at Lerici such changes 
 as she had witnessed in two little years. 
 
BYBON'S CENTENABY. 263 
 
 Hobhouse, with all his efforts, could raise 
 only a thousand pounds for a memorial, but 
 with this he got Thorwaldsen to make a 
 statue which was sent to England in 1834. 
 The Abbey was again refused, and, to the 
 discredit of the nation, this work was al- 
 lowed to remain stored away in the Custom- 
 house eleven years, because no fit place could 
 be got to put it in. At last, in 1845, Dr. 
 Whewell gave permission to set it up in the 
 Library of Trinity, which it still adorns. 
 Thirty years later came the miserable fiasco 
 of Beaconsfield's Committee, which, far from 
 making Newstead Abbey a national posses- 
 sion and gathering there the relics of Byron, 
 placed in Hamilton Park (other sites being 
 refused) that statue of the poet leaning on 
 the rocks, with his dog Boatswain beside 
 him, which can only be described as popu- 
 lar melodrama in stone, beautiful only for 
 the mass of red marble which the Greek 
 Government gave for its base. It is to be 
 remarked, also, that at this time the Abbey 
 was a third time practically refused, as Dean 
 Stanley, out of respect to the action of his 
 two predecessors, but not apparently for any 
 other reason, precluded application for erect- 
 ing a tablet there by a letter in which he 
 
264 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 said he preferred the subject should not be 
 brought before him. 
 
 The history of monuments, however, is not 
 necessarily proof of fame. Others of Eng- 
 land's greatest do not sleep in the Abbey, 
 and the hero not infrequently waits for his 
 statue a long age. The place of fame is on 
 the lips of men, and Macaulay, when Moore's 
 Life came out, could speak of Byron as " the 
 most celebrated man in Europe." The de- 
 cline of his vogue was nevertheless rapid 
 and unmistakable. We all remember Car- 
 lyle's oracle : " Close thy Byron ; open thy 
 Goethe." This must have been about 1840. 
 But, unfortunately, as one writer observes, 
 to open Goethe is to return to Byron's great- 
 ness. Did not Goethe tell Eckermann that 
 a man of Byron's eminence would not come 
 again, nor such a tragedy as Cain? He 
 thought him greater than Milton — " vast 
 and widely varied," whereas the latter was 
 only simple and stately. Perhaps, as we 
 have been told, Goethe was flattered by 
 Byron's imitation. 
 
 Whatever was the reason, the critical 
 judgment of Goethe is one to be weighed 
 with regard to Byron, and to himself also, 
 for that matter. What part Goethe's praise 
 
BYBON'S CENTENARY. 265 
 
 may have had in making Byron the hero 
 of " Young Germany " we have no means 
 of determining, but his works were vital in 
 the new age there, and still his hold seems 
 greater on the Germans, if we may judge by 
 the test of translations and biography, than 
 it is elsewhere on the Continent. Heine 
 was more than touched by him, though he 
 was far from being his duplicate, and could 
 see the humorous side of those young Pa- 
 risians — Musset the foremost — who were 
 melancholy in the full glow of first man- 
 hood, and went about in despair dining 
 sumptuously every day. One pities Musset, 
 for Byron was, as much as another man can 
 be, the secret of his fate. Lamartine caught 
 only the sentimentality of Byron, but Mus- 
 set assimilated his darker spirit, his reckless- 
 ness, and license, and skepticism, and trans- 
 muted his very coarseness into a Parisian 
 vulgarity. Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve paid 
 tribute to him ; and, to cut the subject short, 
 Mazzini thanked him in the name of Italy, in 
 Spain Espronceda drew his inspiration from 
 him, and Castelar, in the later time, eulo- 
 gized him for his liberating influences in the 
 peninsula with Spanish amplitude of phrase. 
 Karl Elze thinks that the Russian poet, 
 
266 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 Pushkin, was his child ; if it were so, Byron 
 might well be proud of what such an in- 
 fluence was the beginning of in Russia. 
 This rapid survey, with its brilliant names, 
 impresses the mind with the range and 
 dominance of this man, although Landor's 
 sneer, when he hoped that " the mercies 
 which have begun with man's forgetfulness 
 may be crowned with God's forgiveness," 
 does not now seem so absurd as formerly. 
 
 To look at the matter from this point of 
 view, however, is to confuse Byron with By- 
 ronism. There was a European mood, a 
 temperament of the revolutionary time, that 
 fed on Byron, but he was not its creator, 
 and to regard him as more than a single in- 
 fluence of many that moulded the young 
 men of the next generation is to give him 
 vastly more than his due. This is the se- 
 cret of his vogue in Europe, not that he 
 liberated their minds, but that he set the 
 fashion for minds expanding in a new age 
 of intellectual pride and moral irresponsi- 
 bility, helped to form their attitude, and was 
 a rallying name for the faction. He was 
 licentious, but he was neither democratical 
 nor atheistical ; he had no body of opinions 
 properly thought out and correlated with so- 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY. 267 
 
 cial facts, either in politics or religion ; he 
 had no strong convictions even ; but, with 
 prejudices of rank and reminiscences of 
 Scottish theology from which he could not 
 free himself, he was an impulsive and there- 
 fore uneven revolter from the old regime, 
 and never quite at home in the new camp. 
 He preferred, he said, to be beheaded by 
 the King and not by the mob ; and the 
 whole aristocrat spoke in the saying. Shel- 
 ley wrote of him, " The canker of aristoc- 
 racy needs to be cut out ; " and he hits off 
 Byron's inconsequence in religion where he 
 speaks of him under the name of Maddalo, 
 and contrasts him with himself. Maddalo, 
 he says, took a wicked pleasure in drawing 
 out his taunts against religion ; but, he adds, 
 " What Maddalo thinks on these matters is 
 not exactly known." Byron is believed to 
 have talked with Shelley more seriously 
 than with any other man. He did not him- 
 self know what he thought ; and his state 
 of mind was well expressed by his remark 
 to Lady Byron, " The trouble is, I do be- 
 lieve." In substance, therefore, unlike Shel- 
 ley, who was democratical and atheistical 
 on principle, Byron was far from being the 
 ideal of the various " young " nationalities, 
 
268 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, in the 
 principal tenets dear to the age. It was 
 rather his personality, and what they trans- 
 formed him into by their worship, that had 
 power over them in their search for "lib- 
 erty ; " and truly, though his ideas were in- 
 complete and fragmentary, and inextricably 
 blended, even in their formation, with his 
 impulses and the accidents of his position 
 as a pariah of genius, yet there was a con- 
 tagion in his spirit, a dash of energy and of 
 abandon, that told as blood tells more than 
 thought. 
 
 One advantage, too, Byron had with for- 
 eign nations that with his own counts as a 
 defect. He had no form, no art, no finish ; 
 and the poet who failed in these things can 
 be read in our day only by a kind of suffer- 
 ance, and with continual friction with what 
 has come to be our mastering literary taste 
 for perfection in the manner. It has been 
 said that he consequently bore translation 
 better than he otherwise would. His quality 
 is power, not charm ; the mood and the situ- 
 ation and the thought are the elements that 
 count in his poetry, while the words are at 
 the best eloquent or witty, but not " the liv- 
 ing garment of light." The result was, that 
 
BYBON'S CENTENARY. 2G9 
 
 he could be given almost completely in a for- 
 eign language. This consideration may go 
 far to explain the relative estimate of him 
 by foreign writers in comparison with other 
 English poets ; for these others who have 
 the charm that cannot be transfused, the art 
 that will obey no master but its own Pros- 
 pero, are seen, as one may say, without their 
 singing robes ; and their poetry, made prose, 
 loses half its excellence. This, together with 
 the German element in one portion of his 
 work and the strong Italian influence in a 
 larger portion, especially in Don Juan, must 
 be taken into account in any attempt to un- 
 derstand why he was the best known English 
 poet on the Continent, and perhaps, with the 
 exception of Shakespeare, still is. 
 
 In England, Byron's reputation met with 
 rapid decline from natural causes. It is 
 not likely that his misconduct in morals was 
 much against him, and Beaconsfield was 
 wholly on the wrong track when he reminded 
 the Byron meeting that, after half a century, 
 a man's private life scarcely enters into the 
 estimate of his literary genius. It seems 
 rather Byron's lack of orthodoxy that Eng- 
 land most resented. Society put up with 
 much libertinism in those days in high quar- 
 
270 BYBON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 ters ; but Byron had attacked the faith, or 
 at least elements of it, which the Church 
 shared in common with Calvinism, and this 
 was too shocking a matter for a society 
 which found hardly more than matter for 
 gossip in natural sons and daughters. This 
 was the reason which a bishop alleged in 
 the House of Lords in answer to Brougham, 
 in the debate on the second refusal of the 
 Abbey. Byron had attacked Christianity, 
 and he should not be interred " in the Tem- 
 ple of our God." The middle classes have 
 always rejected Byron, in like manner, be- 
 cause he scoffed, though, no doubt, his life 
 and the licentious portions of his poetry also 
 offended them. From the first his skepti- 
 cism was heavily against him, and probably 
 it still remains the strongest objection to his 
 works in the minds of Englishmen gener- 
 ally. In Landor's bitter attack (he had of- 
 fended Landor by rhyming his name with 
 gander) this charge is made the climax, and 
 the passage is brief enough to quote as the 
 best word of Byron's enemies : — 
 
 "Afterwards, whenever he wrote a bad 
 poem, he supported his sinking fame by 
 some signal act of profligacy : an elegy by 
 a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a trag- 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY. 271 
 
 edy by a divorce. On the remark of a 
 learned man that irregularity is no indi- 
 cation of genius, he began to lose ground 
 rapidly, when, on a sudden, he cried out at 
 the Haymarket, There is no God. It was 
 then surmised more generally and more 
 gravely that there was something in him, 
 and he stood upon his legs almost to the 
 last. Say what you will, once whispered 
 a friend of mine, there are things in him 
 strong as poison and original as sin." This, 
 with all its excess, is no inapt character of 
 Byron, as English prejudice drew him. 
 
 On the other hand, much that was in 
 his favor at first was necessarily temporary. 
 The man had a story. He was one of the 
 picturesque characters of the age, and while 
 he lived he was interesting to his time 
 merely for his personal fortunes. It was 
 to his gain, too, that he identified his own 
 romance with that which he early invented, 
 appealing to the adventurous in men and to 
 the pity and admiration of women. His he- 
 roes are strong, and strength succeeds with 
 the sex in fiction as well as in life ; and they 
 are, besides, usually faithful in love, while 
 their crimes are taken out of the moral re- 
 gion of deliberate choice by a kind of emo- 
 
272 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 tional sophistry, and somehow are charged 
 to their circumstances, so that the unwary 
 and innocent reader commiserates their vil- 
 lainies instead of being revolted by them. 
 These tales (and no part of his work was 
 more popular) are hard to read to-day, but 
 we forget too readily what raw and bloody 
 fiction the world had in the first score years 
 of this century; we cannot conceive how 
 London ran after stories of blighted brig- 
 ands and sentimental corsairs, in the very 
 thunder of Waterloo. But so it was, and 
 Byron was more interesting in that he was 
 the unhappy and noble original from which 
 the pirates of his imagination were drawn. 
 If he changed the scene and wandered over 
 Europe as Childe Harold, he gained in sen- 
 timent ; if he wore the mask of Manfred, he 
 gained in tragedy ; and if he sneered in Don 
 Juan, there was the jaded man of the world, 
 perhaps more interesting. He was, more- 
 over, a peer; but a dead peer certainly is 
 no better than a dead lion, and when he 
 died, why, — the fashion in collars changed. 
 Other living personalities occupied the stage ; 
 England grew steadily more sincere in re- 
 ligion, more strict in the standard of pri- 
 vate morals, more exacting of seriousness in 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY. 273 
 
 thought and of perfection in literary form ; 
 and all these influences were adverse to 
 Byron, who made no offsetting gain in his 
 own country from the revolutionary fervor 
 that helped him on the Continent. 
 
 What is there left ? Some stirring pas- 
 sages of adventure, some eloquent descrip- 
 tions of nature, some personal lyrics of true 
 poetic feeling, dramas which, it is to be 
 hoped, have finally damned "the unities," 
 and one great poem of the modern spirit, 
 Don Juan. And what remains of that mel- 
 odramatic Byron of women's fancies ? His 
 character has come out plain, and we are 
 really amazed at it, — proud, sensual, self- 
 ish, and, it must be added, mean. Ignoble 
 he was, in many ways, but, for all that, the 
 energy of his passions, his vitality, his mas- 
 terly egotism, and the splendid force of his 
 genius, made him a commanding name and 
 stamped him upon the succeeding European 
 time. He cannot be neglected by history, 
 but men certainly appear to pass him by. 
 Arnold has endeavored to bring him back 
 by a collection ; but Arnold's critical views 
 on poetry seem to be justifications in age for 
 the tastes he had when he was young, — 
 reasons after the act. A late biographer 
 
274 BYRON'S CENTENARY. 
 
 thinks that the decadence of his fame is due 
 to the conservatism of the last half -cen- 
 tury, and that in the revolutionary age that 
 ought soon to be beginning, he will retrieve 
 himself. But can this be hoped of a " revo- 
 lutionary " poet whom Swinburne has cast 
 aside ? The prediction does not convince us. 
 Byronism has gone by, and the age of the 
 " enlightenment " in Germany and France ; 
 such a mood is not repeated. Goethe out- 
 lived Wertherism, but had Byron such good 
 fortune? In his own character there are 
 such defects as forbid admiration in the 
 light of our moral ideas ; and in his poems, 
 taken apart from their time, there are other 
 defects, both in their substance, and, unques- 
 tionably, in their form, which forbid the sort 
 of approval that would make them in a true 
 sense classic, as a whole, though the quali- 
 ties that make Childe Harold and Don Juan 
 great, and preserve here and there passages 
 in other poems, are those that confer immor- 
 tality. He was a poet ; he was a force, also, 
 that spent itself partly in creating a world- 
 wide affectation, and partly in rousing and 
 reinforcing the impulse of individual liberty 
 on the Continent ; but he is a poet no one 
 can love, and he left a memory that no one 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY. 275 
 
 can admire, and there is none of his works 
 that receives the meed of perfect praise. 
 And, as to the fruits of that vast influence, 
 is it hard to say whether they were more 
 good than evil ? 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 The death of Browning brings one stage 
 nearer the too plainly approaching end of 
 a literary age which will long be full of cu- 
 rious interest to the student of the moods of 
 the mind of man. Time has linked his name 
 with that of Tennyson, and the conjunction 
 gives to England another of those double 
 stars of genius in which her years are rich, 
 and by which the spirit of an age has a two- 
 fold expression. The old opposition, the 
 polarity of mind, by virtue of which the 
 Platonist differs from the Aristotelian, the 
 artist from the thinker, Shakespeare from 
 Jonson, shows its efficacy here, too, in the 
 last modern age, and divides the poets and 
 their admirers by innate preferences. It is 
 needful to remember this contrast, though 
 not to insist upon it unduly, in order to ap- 
 proach the work of Browning rightly, to be 
 just to those who idolize him without of- 
 fense to those who are repelled by him. The 
 analysis of his powers, the charting of his 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 277 
 
 life and work, are not difficult; but the 
 value of his real achievement is more uncer- 
 tain. Interest centres entirely in his poetry, 
 for his career has been without notable inci- 
 dent, and is told when it is said that he has 
 lived the life of a scholar and man of letters 
 in England and Italy amid the social cul- 
 ture of his time. For the world, his career 
 is the succession of books he has put forth, 
 and this is as he would have it ; publicity 
 beyond this he did not seek, but refused 
 with violence and acrimony. 
 
 In his earliest poem, youthful in its self- 
 portraiture, its literary touch, and its fragmen- 
 tary plan, the one striking quality is the flow 
 of language. Here was a writer who would 
 never lack for words ; fluent, as if inexhaus- 
 tible, the merely verbal element in Pauline 
 shows no struggle with the medium of the 
 poet's art. This gift of facility was, as is 
 usual, first to show itself. In Paracelsus 
 the second primary quality of Browning was 
 equally conspicuous, — the power of reason- 
 ing in verse. These two traits have for a 
 poet as much weakness as strength, and they 
 lie at the source of Browning's defects as 
 a master of poetic art. His facility allowed 
 him to be diffuse in language, and his rea- 
 
278 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 soning habit led him often to be diffuse in 
 matter. In Sordello the two produced a 
 monstrosity, both in construction and ex- 
 pression, not to be rivaled in literature. 
 Picturesque detail, intellectual interest, moral 
 meaning, struggle in vain in that tale to 
 make themselves felt and discerned through 
 the tangle of words and the labyrinth of act 
 and reflection. But already in these poems 
 Browning had shown, to himself, if not to 
 the world, that he had come to certain con- 
 clusions, to a conception of human life and 
 a decision as to the use of his art in regard 
 to it, which were to give him substantial 
 power. He defined it by his absorption in 
 Paracelsus with the broad ideas of infinite 
 power and infinite love, which in his last 
 poem still maintain their place in his sys- 
 tem as the highest solvents of experience 
 and speculation ; and in Sordello he stated 
 the end of art, which he continued to seek, 
 in his maxim that little else is worth study 
 except the " history of a soul." His entire 
 poetic work, broadly speaking, is the illus- 
 tration of this short sentence. Such prepos- 
 sessions with the spiritual meaning of life 
 as these poems show made sure the predom- 
 inance in his work of the higher interests of 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 279 
 
 man ; and he won his audience finally by 
 this fact, that he had something to say that 
 was ethical and religious. The develop- 
 ment, however, of both the theory and prac- 
 tice of his mind had to be realized in far 
 more definite and striking forms than the 
 earlier poems before the attention of the 
 world could be secured. 
 
 It would seem natural that a man with 
 such convictions as Browning acknowledged, 
 should be preeminently an idealist, and that 
 his point of weakness should prove to be the 
 tendency to metaphysical and vague matter 
 not easily putting on poetical form. But he 
 was, in fact, a realist, — one who is primarily 
 concerned with things, and uses the method 
 of observation. His sense for actual fact is 
 always keen. In that poem of Paracelsus, 
 which is a discussion in the air if ever 
 a poem was, it is significant to find him 
 emphasizing the circumstance that he had 
 taken very few liberties with his subject, 
 and bringing books to show evidence of his- 
 torical fidelity. But, little of the dramatic 
 spirit as there is in Paracelsus, there was 
 much in Browning when it should come to 
 be released, and it belongs to the dramatist 
 to be interested in the facts of life, the flesh 
 
280 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 and blood reality, in which he may or may 
 not (according to his greatness) find a soul. 
 Browning was thus a realist, and he chose 
 habitually the objective method of art — but 
 to set forth " the history of a soul." Had 
 he been an idealist, his subject would have 
 been " the history of the soul ; " his method 
 might or might not have been different. 
 This change of the particle is a slight one, 
 but it involves that polarity of mind which 
 sets Browning opposite to Tennyson. He 
 deals with individuals, takes in imagination 
 their point of view, assumes for the time be- 
 ing their circumstances and emotions ; and 
 one who does this in our time, with a pre- 
 occupation with the soul in the individual, 
 cannot escape from one overpowering im- 
 pression, repeated from every side of the 
 modern age, — the impression, namely, of 
 the relativity of human life. 
 
 This is the lesson which is spread over 
 Browning's pages, with line on line and pre- 
 cept on precept. By it he comes into har- 
 mony with the very spirit of the century on 
 its intellectual side, and represents it. The 
 " history of a soul " differs very greatly ac- 
 cording to circumstance, native impulses, the 
 needs of life at different stages of growth, 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 281 
 
 the balance of faculties and desires in it, the 
 temperament of its historical period, the 
 access to it of art or music or thought, and 
 in a thousand ways ; and Browning devotes 
 himself oftentimes to the exposition of all 
 this web of circumstance, in order that we 
 may see the soul as it was under its con- 
 ditions, instead of leaping to a conclusion 
 by a hard-and-fast morality based upon the 
 similarity of the soul in all men. The task 
 happily falls in with his fine gift of reason- 
 ing, and increases by practice the supple- 
 ness and subtlety of this faculty of his. One 
 might say, indeed, without close computa- 
 tion, that the larger part of his entire poetic 
 work is occupied with such reasoning upon 
 psychological cases, in the manner of a law- 
 yer who educes a client's justification from 
 the details of his temptation. Many of the 
 longer poems are only instances of special 
 pleading, and have all the faults that belong 
 to that form of thought. The Ring and the 
 Book is such an interminable argument, mar- 
 velous for intellectual resource, for skill in 
 dialectic, for plausibility. Bishop Blougram, 
 Mr. Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, 
 and others, readily occur to mind as being 
 in the same way " apologies ; " and in these 
 
282 ON BBOWNIN&S DEATH. 
 
 one feels that, while it is well to know what 
 the prisoner urges on his own behalf, it is 
 the shabby, the cowardly, the criminal, the 
 base, the detestable, that is masking under 
 a too well - woven cloak of words, and that 
 the special pleader is pursuing his game at 
 the risk of a higher honesty than consists 
 in the mere understanding of the mechan- 
 ism of motive and act. Yet this catholicity, 
 which seems to have for its motto, " Who 
 understands all, forgives all," is a natural 
 consequence in a mind so impressed with 
 the doctrine of the relativity of human life 
 as was Browning's. The tendency of the 
 doctrine is to efface moral judgment, and to 
 substitute for it intellectual comprehension ; 
 and usually this results in a practical fa- 
 talism, acquiesced in if not actively held. 
 Here, too, Browning's mental temperament 
 has another point of contact with the gen- 
 eral spirit of the age, and allows him to 
 take up into his genius the humanitarian 
 instinct so powerful in his contemporaries. 
 For the perception of the excuses for men's 
 action in those of low or morbid or deformed 
 development liberalizes the mind, and the 
 finding of the spark of soul in such indi- 
 viduals does mean to the Christian the find- 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 283 
 
 ing of that immortal part which equalizes all 
 in an equal destiny, however the difference 
 may look between men while the process 
 of life is going on. Browning came very 
 early to this conviction, that in all men, 
 however weak or grossly set this spark may 
 be, it is to be sought for. In this he is 
 consistently philanthropic and democratic, 
 Christian in spirit and practice, comprehen- 
 sive in tolerance, large in charity, intellec- 
 tually (but not emotionally) sympathetic. 
 It is perhaps unnecessary to add that his 
 love of righteousness is not so striking a 
 trait. 
 
 But what in all this view of life is most 
 original in Browning is something that pos- 
 sibly perplexes even his devoted admirers. 
 Life, he says, no matter what it may be in 
 its accidents of time, or place, or action, is 
 the stuff to make the soul of. In the hum- 
 blest as the noblest, in Caliban as in Pros- 
 pero, the life vouchsafed is the means (ade- 
 quate, he seems to say, in all cases) of which 
 the soul makes use to grow in. He thus 
 avoids the deadening conclusions to which 
 his doctrine of relativity might lead, by as- 
 serting the equal and identical opportunity 
 in all to develop the soul. He unites with 
 
284 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 this the original theory — at least one that 
 he ha3 made his own — that whatever the 
 soul seeks it should seek with all its might ; 
 and, pushing to the extreme, he urges that 
 if a man sin, let him sin to the uttermost of 
 his desire. This is the moral of the typical 
 poem of this class, The Statue and the Bust, 
 and he means more by this than that the 
 intention, sinning in thought, is equivalent 
 to sinning in act, — he means that a man 
 should have his will. No doubt this is 
 directly in accord with the great value he 
 places on strength of character, vitality in 
 life, on resolution, courage, and the braving 
 of consequences. But the ignoring of the 
 immense value of restraint as an element in 
 character is complete ; and in the case of 
 many whose choice is slowly and doubtfully 
 made in those younger years when the desire 
 for life in its fullness of experience is strong- 
 est, and the wisdom of knowledge of life in 
 its effects is weakest, the advice to obey im- 
 pulse at all costs, to throw doubt and au- 
 thority to the winds, and u live my life and 
 have my day," is of dubious utility. Over 
 and over again in Browning's poetry one 
 meets with this insistence on the value of 
 moments of high excitement, of intense liv- 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 285 
 
 ing, of full experience of pleasure, even 
 though such moments be of the essence of 
 evil and fruitful in all dark consequences. 
 It is probable that a deep optimism under- 
 lies all this ; that Browning believed that 
 the soul does not perish in its wrong-doing, 
 but that through this experience, too, as 
 through good, it develops finally its im- 
 mortal nature, and that, as in his view the 
 life of the soul is in its energy of action, the 
 man must act even evil if he is to grow 
 at all. Optimism, certainly, of the most 
 thorough-going kind this is ; but Browning 
 is so consistent an optimist in other parts of 
 his philosophy that this defense may be 
 made for him on a point where the common 
 thought and deepest conviction of the race, 
 in its noblest thinkers and purest artists, are 
 opposed to him, refusing to believe that the 
 doing of evil is to be urged in the interest 
 of true manliness. 
 
 The discussion of Browning's attitude to- 
 wards life in the actual world of men has 
 led away from the direct consideration of 
 the work in which he embodied his convic- 
 tions. The important portion of it came in 
 middle life, when he obtained mastery of the 
 form of poetic art known as the dramatic 
 
286 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 monologue. A realist, if he be a poet, must 
 resort to the drama. It was inevitable in 
 Browning's case. Yet the drama, as a form, 
 offered as much unfitness for Browning's 
 genius as it did fitness. The drama requires 
 energy, it is true, and interest in men as in- 
 dividuals ; and these Browning had. It also 
 requires concentration, economy of material, 
 and constructive power ; and these were dif- 
 ficult to Browning. He did not succeed in 
 his attempts to write drama in its perfect 
 form. He could make fragments of intense 
 power in passion ; he could reveal a single 
 character at one critical moment of its ca- 
 reer ; he could sum up a life history in a 
 long soliloquy ; but he could not do more 
 than this and keep the same level of per- 
 formance. Why he failed is a curious ques- 
 tion, and will doubtless be critically debated 
 with a plentiful lack of results. His growth 
 in dramatic faculty, in apprehension of the 
 salient points of character and grasp in pre- 
 senting them, in perception of the value of 
 situation and power to use it to the full, can 
 readily be traced ; but there comes a point 
 where the growth stops. Superior as his 
 mature work is to that of his youth in all 
 these qualities, it falls short of that perfect 
 
ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 287 
 
 and complex design and that informing life 
 which mark the developed dramatist. In 
 the monologues he deals with incidents in 
 a life, with moods of a personality, with the 
 consciousness which a man has of his own 
 character at the end of his career ; but he 
 seizes these singly, and at one moment. His 
 characters do not develop before the eye; 
 he does not catch the soul in the very act ; 
 he does not present life so much as the re- 
 sults of life. He frequently works by the 
 method of retrospect, he tells the story, but 
 does not enact it. In all these he displays 
 the governing motive of his art, which is to 
 reveal the soul ; but if the soul reveals itself 
 in his verses, it is commonly by confession, 
 not presentation. He has, in fact, that 
 malady of thought which interferes with the 
 dramatist's control of his hand ; he is think- 
 ing about his characters, and only indirectly 
 in them, and he is most anxious to convey 
 his reflections upon the psychical phenom- 
 enon which he is attending to. In other 
 words, he is, primarily, a moralist ; he rea- 
 sons, and he is fluent in words and fertile in 
 thoughts, and so he loses the object itself, 
 becomes indirect, full of afterthought and 
 parenthesis, and impairs the dramatic effect. 
 
288 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 These traits may be observed, in different 
 degrees, in many of the poems, even in the 
 best. In the dramas themselves the lack of 
 constructive power is absolute. Pippa Passes 
 is only a succession of dramatic fragments 
 artificially bound together, and in the others 
 the lack of body and interdependent life be- 
 tween the parts is patent to all. In a Bal- 
 cony, certainly one of his finest wrought 
 poems, is only an incident. He is at his 
 best when his field is most narrow — in such 
 a poem as The Laboratory. 
 
 There is a compensation for these defi- 
 ciencies of power in that the preference of 
 his mind for a single passion or mood or 
 crisis at its main moment opens to him the 
 plain and unobstructed way to lyrical ex- 
 pression. His dramatic feeling of the pas- 
 sion and the situation supplies an intensity 
 which finds its natural course in lyrical ex- 
 altation. It may well be thought, if it were 
 deemed necessary to decide upon the best 
 in Browning's work, that his genius is most 
 nobly manifest in those lyrics and romances 
 which he called dramatic. The scale rises 
 from his argumentative and moralizing verse, 
 however employed, through those monologues 
 which obey the necessity for greater concen- 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 289 
 
 tration as the dramatic element enters into 
 them, up to those most powerful and direct 
 poems in which the intensity of feeling en- 
 forces a lyrical movement and lift ; and 
 akin to these last are the songs of love or he- 
 roism into which the dramatic element does 
 not enter. Indeed, Browning's lyrical gift 
 was more perfect than his dramatic gift ; 
 he knew the secret of a music which has 
 witchery in it independent of what the words 
 may say, and when his hand fell on that 
 chord, he mastered the heart with real poetic 
 charm. It was seldom, however, that this 
 happy moment came to him, ennobling his 
 language and giving wing to his emotion ; 
 and, such poems being rare, it remains true 
 that the best of his work is to be sought in 
 those pieces, comprehending more of life, 
 where his dramatic power takes on a lyrical 
 measure. Such work became more infre- 
 quent as years went on, and he declined 
 again into that earlier style of wordy ratioci- 
 nation, of tedious pleading as of a lawsuit, 
 of mere intellectuality as of the old hair- 
 splitting schoolmen, though he retained the 
 strength and definiteness of mind which mere 
 growth had brought to him, and he occasion- 
 ally produced a poem which was only less 
 
290 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 good than the best of his middle age. The 
 translations from the Greek with which he 
 employed his age stand in a different class 
 from his original poems, and were a fortunate 
 resort for his vigorous but now feebly crea- 
 tive mind. At the end he still applied him- 
 self to the interpretation of individual lives, 
 but in choosing them he was attracted even 
 more uniformly by something exceptional, 
 often grotesque, in them, and hence they are 
 more curious and less instructive than the 
 earlier work of the same kind. 
 
 The mass of Browning's writings which 
 has been glanced at as the expression of the 
 reasoning, the dramatic, or the lyrical im- 
 pulse in his genius has attracted attention 
 as wide as the English language, and it has 
 been intimated that this success has been 
 won in some degree on other than poetic 
 grounds. It is fair to say, in view of the 
 facts, that many who have felt his appeal to 
 them have found a teacher rather than a 
 poet. Two points in which he reflects his 
 age have been mentioned, but there is a 
 third point which has perhaps been more 
 efficacious than his sense of the relativity of 
 human life or his conviction of the worth of 
 every human soul : he adds to these cardinal 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 291 
 
 doctrines a firm and loudly asseverated re- 
 ligious belief. It is the more noteworthy 
 because his reasoning faculty might in his 
 time have led him almost anywhere rather 
 than to the supreme validity of truth arrived 
 at by intuition. This makes his character 
 the more interesting, for the rationalizing 
 mind which submits itself to intuitive faith 
 exactly parallels in Browning the realist 
 with a predominating interest in the soul. 
 There is no true contradiction in this, no in- 
 consistency ; but the combination is unusual. 
 It is natural that, in a time of decreasing 
 authority in formal religion, a poet in Brown- 
 ing's position should wield an immense at- 
 traction, and owe something, as Carlyle did, 
 to the wish of his audience to be reassured 
 in their religious faith. Browning had be- 
 gun with that resolution of the universe into 
 infinite power and infinite love of which 
 something has already been said, and he 
 continued to teach that through nature we 
 arrive at the conception of omnipotence, and 
 through the soul at the conception of love, 
 and he apparently finds the act of faith in 
 the belief that infinite power will finally be 
 discerned as the instrument and expression 
 of infinite love. This is pure optimism ; and 
 
292 ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 in accordance with it he preaches his gospel, 
 which is that each soul should grow to its 
 utmost in power and in love, and in the face 
 of difficulties — of mysteries in experience 
 or thought — should repose with entire trust 
 on the doctrine that God has ordered life 
 beneficently, and that we who live should 
 wait with patience, even in the wreck of our 
 own or others' lives, for the disclosure here- 
 after which shall reconcile to our eyes and 
 hearts the jar with justice and goodness of 
 all that has gone before. This is a system 
 simple enough and complete enough to live 
 by, if it be truly accepted. It is probable, 
 however, that Browning wins less by these 
 doctrines, which are old and commonplace, 
 than by the vigor with which he dogmatizes 
 upon them; the certainty with which he 
 speaks of such high matters ; the fervor, and 
 sometimes the eloquence, with which, touch- 
 ing on the deepest and most secret chords of 
 the heart's desire, he strikes out the notes of 
 courage, of hope and vision, and of the fore- 
 tasted triumph. The energy of his own faith 
 carries others along with it ; the manliness 
 of his own soul infects others with its cheer 
 and its delight in the struggle of spiritual 
 life on earth ; and all this the more because 
 
ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 293 
 
 he is learned in the wisdom of the Rabbis, 
 is conversant with modern life and know- 
 ledge in all its range, is gifted with intel- 
 lectual genius, and yet displays a faith the 
 more robust because it is not cloistered, the 
 more credible because it is not professional. 
 The character of Browning's genius, his 
 individual traits, the general substance of 
 his thought, do not admit of material mis- 
 conception. It is when the question is raised 
 upon the permanent value of his work that 
 the opportunity for wide divergence arises. 
 That there are dreary wastes in it cannot be 
 gainsaid. Much is now unreadable that 
 was excused in a contemporary book ; much 
 never was readable at all ; and of the re- 
 mainder how much will the next age in its 
 turn cast aside ? Its serious claim to our 
 attention on ethical, religious, or intellectual 
 grounds may be admitted, without pledging 
 the twentieth century, which will have its 
 own special phases of thought, and thinkers 
 to illustrate them. Browning must live, as 
 the other immortals do, by the poetry in 
 him. It is true he has enlarged the field of 
 poetry by annexing the experience that be- 
 longs to the artist and the musician, and has 
 made some of his finest and most original 
 
294 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 poems out of such motives ; and his wide 
 knowledge has served him in other ways, 
 though it has stiffened many a page with 
 pedantry and antiquarianism. It is true 
 that there is a grotesque quality in some of 
 his work, but his humor in this kind is really 
 a pretense ; no one laughs at it ; it arouses 
 only an amazed wonder, like the stone masks 
 of some mediaeval church. In all that he 
 derived from learning and scholarship there 
 is the alloy of mortality ; in all his moraliz- 
 ing and special pleading and superfine rea- 
 soning there enters the chance that the world 
 may lose interest in his treatment of' the 
 subject ; in all, except where he sings from 
 the heart itself or pictures life directly and 
 without comment save of the briefest, there 
 is some opportunity for time to breed decay. 
 The faith he preached was the poetical com- 
 plement of Carlyle's prose, and proceeded 
 from much the same grounds and by the 
 same steps : believe in God, and act like a 
 man — that was the substance of it. But 
 Carlyle himself already grows old and harsh. 
 The class of mind to which Browning be- 
 longs depends on its matter for its life ; un- 
 less he has transformed it into poetry, time 
 will deal hardly with it. 
 
ON BBOWNING'S DEATH. 295 
 
 To come to the question which cannot be 
 honestly set aside, although it is no longer 
 profitable to discuss it, Browning has not 
 cared for that poetic form which bestows 
 perennial charm, or else he was incapable of 
 it. He fails in beauty, in concentration of 
 interest, in economy of language, in selec- 
 tion of the best from the common treasure 
 of experience. In those works where he has 
 been most indifferent, as in the Red Cotton 
 Night -Cap Country, he has been merely 
 whimsical and dull ; in those works where 
 the genius he possessed is most felt, as in 
 Saul, A Toccata of Galuppi's, Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra, The Flight of the Duchess, The 
 Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's 
 Church, Herve Riel, Cavalier Tunes, Time's 
 Revenges, and many more, he achieves 
 beauty or nobility or fitness of phrase such 
 as only a poet is capable of. It is in these 
 last pieces and their like that his fame lies 
 for the future. It was his lot to be strong 
 as the thinker, the moralist with "the ac- 
 complishment of verse," the scholar inter- 
 ested to rebuild the past of experience, the 
 teacher with an explicit dogma to enforce 
 in an intellectual form with examples from 
 life, the anatomist of human passions, in- 
 
296 ON BROWNING'S DEATH. 
 
 stincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the 
 commentator on his own age ; he was weak 
 as the artist, and indulged, often unneces- 
 sarily and by choice, in the repulsive form 
 — in the awkward, the obscure, the ugly. 
 He belongs with Jonson, with Dry den, with 
 the heirs of the masculine intellect, the men 
 of power not unvisited by grace, but in 
 whom mind is predominant. Upon the 
 work of such poets time hesitates, conscious 
 of their mental greatness, but also of their 
 imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; 
 at last the good is sifted from that whence 
 worth has departed. 
 
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