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THE FIRST EDITION OF THIS WORK WAS PUBLISHED
IN MAY 1858.
ESSAYS.

ESSAYS ––
BY THE LATE
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GEORGE BRIMILEY, M.A.
LIBRARIAN OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. * .
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EDITED BY
WILLIAM GEORGE CLARK, M.A.
UNIVERSITY OF CAM BRIDG 1.
TIII RD EDITION.
*Tombon :
M A C M I L I, A N A N I) ( ().
1868.
[The Riº/ of Translation is Reserve/.] ºf

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TO THE REW.
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A.
THE EDITOR INSCRIBES
TEIIS MEMORIAL OF THEIR COMMON FRIEND.
PREFACE BY THE EDITOR.
GEORGE BRIMILEY was born at Cambridge, De-
cember 29, 1819.
From the age of eleven to sixteen he was at
School at Totteridge. In October, 1838, he com-
menced residence as an undergraduate of Trinity
College, Cambridge, where, in the year 1841, he was
elected scholar. Even thus early his health began
to fail. The cruel malady which ultimately proved
fatal, had already fastened upon him. Hence he
was compelled to relinquish his purpose of becoming
a candidate for University Honours; hence also he
failed in obtaining a College Fellowship. The
Master and Seniors, however, showed their sense of
his merits by conferring upon him the honourable
office of Librarian. From this time he continued to
X PREFACE.
reside within the walls of the College, where, with
ample leisure and opportunities for study, with the
society of tried friends and in the neighbourhood of
home, his life was made as happy as life can be
without health.
For the last six years he contributed articles
regularly to the Spectator, and occasionally also to
Fraser's Magazine; an employment which suited
him under the circumstances better than any other,
as his bodily feebleness forbade him to attempt
any work of Scope and difficulty corresponding to
his mental powers. To this, his appointed task, he
devoted himself with conscientious diligence. Papers
found after his decease show the pains he took
to qualify himself for the responsible duty of a
literary judge by careful study and elaborate analysis
of the books he was about to criticise. Undertaken
in this spirit, his work interested and amused him,
while at the same time he was cheered and gratified
by the attention and admiration which his articles
received. In this way also he came to reckon
among the number of his friends some of the most
eminent literary men of their time. He made no
PREFACE. Xi
enemies, because, though he never hesitated to state
what he believed to be right, his own sensitive and
affectionate nature guarded him from the wanton
infliction of pain upon others. Seldom indeed did
a petulant sarcasm or an inconsiderate jest fall
from his pen. Belonging to no party and to no
clique, he was eminently impartial.
With one exception—the paper on Tennyson's
Poems which appeared in the Cambridge Essays for
1855—all Mr. Brimley's writings had been published
anonymously, and after his decease his near re-
latives and intimate friends were unanimous in re-
gretting that one who had devoted his whole life
and his best gifts to literature should have left no
adequate memorial of himself. Such a memorial
we trust the present volume will be. This is the
primary object of its publication. The editors and
proprietors” of the periodicals above mentioned have
given to the scheme not merely their ready Sanction,
but also hearty sympathy and most kind assistance.
* One of these, a faithful and much loved friend, R. S.
Rintoul, Esq., has just been called away beyond the reach of
our thanks.
xii . PREFACE.
It was not without due deliberation that we
determined upon the undertaking. We know that
such republications are rarely successful even when
the contents have received—as these of course have
not received—the final corrections of their author.
Many an article, which on its first appearance all
have agreed to call ‘original’ and ‘brilliant,’ seems
flat and unprofitable when time has robbed its
theories of their novelty and its illustrations of their
piquancy. I have endeavoured to guard against
such a result in the present case by selecting from
the copious materials placed in my hands such papers
as have a permanent and still present interest. For
my own part a reperusal of them has raised, instead
of diminishing, my previously high opinion of their
merit. It may indeed be that many a passage re-
calling pleasant conversations and happy social hours
acquires an additional interest in our eyes now that
we shall talk with the writer no more—an interest
which no stranger can share ; but, after all allow-
ance is made on this score, I am confident that
the intrinsic merit of the volume will commend it
PREFACE. xiii
to thinking readers, and acquit us, in their eyes, of
undue partiality.
George Brimley’s character is thus briefly de-
scribed in a letter written soon after his death by
one whom he was proud to call ‘friend’:
“I believe he was an unusually good man, whose
goodness was not always prominent to the ordinary
observer, but who was, intrinsically, faithful, true,
brave, and affectionate. . . . . . . . His death is really
a loss to literature. He was certainly, as it appeared
to me, one of the finest critics of the present day.
We shall not soon meet with his like again. A. H.”
He died on the 29th of May, 1857.
He is buried in the new Cemetery at Cambridge.
On the foot of the Cross that marks his resting-
place is inscribed a text, of which the especial ap-
propriateness and significance are known only to
those who watched by his death-bod: Mercy and
Truth are met together.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
April 22, 1858.
CONTIENTS.
Page
TENNYSON'S POEMS ...... ...... ...... ...... I
WORDSWORTET’S POEMS ...... ...... ...... .... ... 102
PÖETRY AND CRITICISM ...... ...... ....... ...... 184
THE ANGEL IN THE EIOUSE ...... ...... ...... 204
CARTYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING ...... ...... ...... 239
“ESMOND” ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... 252
“MY NOWEL” ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... 268
** BLEAK EIOUSE’’ 4 s e s d e º e s e s e s e º a s e e º 'º e º e 281
‘‘WESTWARD EIO !” ...... ..... * * * * * * * * * * ... 294
WILSON'S “NOCTES AMBROSIANAE?” ...... ...... 303
COMTE'S “POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY?” © & © tº e ºs ...... 309
ESSAYS.
TENNYSON'S POEMS.
AN essay upon a poet's writings may take one of two
forms. It may either confine itself to an analysis of
those writings with a view to discover the source of
their power over the sympathies of men, or it may
treat of the place the poet occupies in the literature
of his time and country. The latter plan requires not
only more knowledge and greater power of compre-
hensive survey on the part of the writer, but readers
who are thoroughly acquainted both with the poet
under review and all those with whom he is brought
into comparison. This volume might doubtless find
a sufficient number of readers thus qualified, among
the class to which it is particularly addressed; and
a comparison of Mr. Tennyson’s genius and produc-
B
2 JESSAYS.
tions with those of Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats, and
Wordsworth, would have abundant interest if it were
executed with ability and judgment. The motives
which, in spite of these reasons, have induced a pre-
ference for the former and easier plan, are twofold.
In the first place, the writer has no confidence in his
own ability for a philosophical estimate of the essen-
tial characteristics of the poetry of the first and second
quarters of the present century; he fears running
into vague generalities and dogmatical assertions,
where there is not space for testing his opinions by
quotation and analysis of detail and construction.
In the second place, his own experience leads him
to think that analytical criticism of Mr. Tennyson's
poems is likely to be interesting and serviceable to
a large class of readers, though, of course, it can
have little charm for persons who by talent and
study are better qualified than he is to write such
a criticism themselves. It has often happened to
him to meet with persons of unquestioned talent and
good taste, who profess themselves unable to under-
stand why Mr. Tennyson is placed so high among
poets as his admirers are inclined to place him ; who
say they find him obscure and affected,—the writor
for a class rather than for a people. The object of
this paper is to shew that we, who do admire him,
have a reason for our faith; that We are not actu-
TENNYSONPS POEMS. 3
ated by blind preference for the man who echoes
merely our own class feelings and opinions in forms
that suit our particular tastes and modes of thought,
—but that Mr. Tennyson is a poet of large compass,
of profound insight, of finished skill. We find him
possessing the clearest insight into our modern life,
one who discerns its rich poetical resources, who
tells us what we are and may be; how we can live
frce, joyous, and harmonious lives; what grand
elements of thought, feeling, and action lie around
us; what a field there is for the various activitics
fermenting within us. We do not call him a Shak-
speare, or even a Chaucer; but what Shakspeare
and Chaucer did for the ages they lived in, Mr.
Tennyson is doing for Our age, after his measure.
He is shewing it to us as an age in which an
Englishman may live a man's life, and be neither
a more man of business, nor a mere man of pleasure,
but may find in his affections, studies, business, and
relaxations scope for his spiritual faculties.
The main difficulty of the task has lain in the fact
that the poems of Mr. Tennyson are never repetitions,
in the great variety both of form and matter they
exhibit. It has been impossible to do without special
mention of a great number of pocms, and the result
is necessarily somewhat fragmentary and discursive.
It turns out rather a commentary than an essay;
B 2
4 JESSAYS.
but its object will be answered, and the expectations
of the writer amply satisfied, if it helps only a few
persons to enjoy Tennyson more than they have
hitherto done, and to understand better the ground
of the claim that is made for him of belonging to
the great poets. Little more has been attempted
with the three longest poems, The Princess, In,
Memoriam, and Maud, than to place the reader in the
true point of view, and examine certain prejudices
against them which have obtained currency among
us. Indeed, that was all that was absolutely neces-
sary, as the hostile opinions have seldom been ex-
pressed unaccompanied by admiration of the beauties
of detail in which these poems abound.
Mr. Tennyson published his first volume of poems
in 1830,” when he was an undergraduate of Trinity
College, Cambridge. It must always possess con-
siderable interest for those who road and admire his
maturer productions; but, with few exceptions, the
poems it contains owe their main attraction to the
fact that they are the earliest efforts of one who has
gained a position of which they afforded no certain
promise. Many of them are exquisitely musical—
* There is, we believe, an earlier volume of poems pub-
lished by Alfred and Charles Tennyson, but we have never
seen a copy; and the volume of 1830 is sufficiently juvenile
for a starting-point.
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 5
great command of the resources of metre is manifest
—and a richness of phraseology everywhere abounds.
But Substantial interest they certainly want, because
they present no phenomena of nature or of human
life with force and distinctness, tell no story, express
no passion or clear thought, depict no person, thing,
or scene that the mind can recognise for a reality.
They are as far as possible from what might be ex-
pected of one who describes the poet as
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love,
and assigns to him the ministry of WISDOM, of whom
he writes—
No Sword
Of wrath her right arm hurled,
But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word
She shook the world.
So far from shaking the world, they are incapable
of raising emotions in a solitary heart; so far from
being instruments of wisdom, they scarcely reach the
altitudes of ordinary sense. Take the first poem of
the series, for example, Claribel. It is not quite
certain what the precise feeling of the melody is,
whether it expresses a grief that, finding no consola-
tion in its memories or hopes, is deepened by the
sweet sights and Sounds of the quiet churchyard; or
a grief that finds in these a soothing influence.
6 FSSAYS,
Taking, however, the latter as the more probable
theory, though no poem ought to admit of such a
doubt, how singularly this treatment of the Subject
eliminates all that is most striking and affecting in
it. If we mourn the early removal of one who was
dear and lovely in her life, and whose memory lends
a softening charm to the spot where her body lies, it
is on her gentle and affectionate nature, on her grace
and beauty, that the mind loves to linger in visiting
her grave; it is these that make the place interest-
ing, the recollection of these that consoles us who
are deprived of her sweet presence. Or if the mind
takes a loftier flight, it looks away from the past,
and from the grave, to that bright world of spirits,
in which the beauty and excellence that were so
soon blighted here reach their consummate flower,
and bloom through eternity in the still garden of
souls. But Mr. Tennyson says nothing of all this;
his memory of the dead forms only a modium
through which the living sights and sounds of
nature round the grave are harmonized in tone with
his own Sadness, while the stillness and sweetness
of the Scene Soothe his sorrow into a calm repose;
the quiet beauty of the churchyard blends with the
image of the lost one, and he thinks of her hereafter
in unutterable peace, amid the songs of birds, the
Voice of the Solemn oak-tree, the slow regular changes
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 7
from morn to noon, from noon to midnight. This is
to treat human life from its least impressive point of
view, to feel its sorrows and consolations in their
least substantial and abiding power. It is, however,
a real point of view ; and both sorrow and consola-
tion will sometimes assume this form spontaneously,
though seldom so completely to the exclusion of more
direct and powerful considerations, as in the poem of
Clarºbel.
The poems inscribed with the names of women
would furnish other examples of this perverse, unreal
treatment of subjects capable of interesting the sym-
pathies. There is in none of them any presentation
of those distinct traits by which we recognize human
beings, no action or speech, no description of mind,
person, or history, but a series of epithets and similes
which convey nothing, because we have not the
image of the thing which they are intended to illus-
trate. Other poems are uninteresting from their Sub-
jects, such as The Merman and Mermaid, The Sea
JFairies, The Kraken, The Dying Swan, &c. No
music of verse, no pictorial power, will enable a
reader to care for such creatures of the fancy; other-
wise, both music and pictorial power are there. How
clear the painting is here—
Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw
Between the green brink and the running foam,
8 JESSAYS.
White limbs unrobed in a crystal air,
Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest
To little harps of gold.
How musical and vivid—
There would be neither moon nor star,
But the wave would make music above us afar;
Low thunder and light, in the magic night,
Neither moon nor star.
Though such subjects would secm wilfully chosen
to avoid reality and human interest, they shew through-
out great power of painting scenery, and of associ-
ating it with the feelings of animated beings; and are
in fact pictures of peculiar character, in which the
objects grouped and the qualities attributed to them
are viewed through the medium of the beings associ-
ated with the scene. Thus they become dramatically
descriptive, and display the germ of a principle of
landscape painting which Mr. Tennyson has in his
later poems brought to great perfection, and largely
employed. The principle consists in a combination
of landscape and figures in which the landscape is
not merely background to the figures, or the figures
animated objects in the landscape, but the two are
dynamically related, so that the landscape is do-
scribed as seen and felt by the persons of the scene,
under the influence of some emotion which selects
objects congenial to its own moods, and modifies their
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 9
generic appearances, if the word generic may be
used to express the appearance objects present to
a mind in its ordinary, unexcited state. And thus
we get a landscape which is at once ideal and real
—a collection of actual images of external nature,
grouped and coloured by a dominant idea; and the
whole composition derives from this principle a har-
mony and a force of expression which, whether the
principal aim be landscape-painting or the delinea-
tion of human emotion, produce that dramatic unity
demanded in works of art. Employed as the prin-
ciple is in this early volume upon scenery that is
strange and upon emotions that are not human, it yet
shews its power of producing a picture throughout
harmoniously conceived, and evidences a capacity for
concentration that only needs substantially interest-
ing material to work upon.
The poem which, better than any other in the first
Series, exhibits the power of concentrating the imagi-
nation upon the subject, to the exclusion of an ex-
traneous and discordant train of thought, and at the
Same time furnishes an admirable instance of dramatic
landscape-painting, or passion reflecting itself on land-
Scape, is Mariana. As the physiologists tell us that
the organs of the higher animals are found in an un-
developed state in those of lower type, we may look
upon this poem as a foreshadowing of a kind of poetry
10 ESSAYS,
that, in the later volumes, will be found in full per-
fection. In Mariana, the landscape details are pre-
sented with the minute distinctness with which they
would strike upon the morbid sensibility of a woman
abandoned to lonely misery, whose attention is dis-
tracted by no cares, pleasures, or satisfied affections.
To the painter in search of the picturesque, or a happy
observer, seeing the sunny side of everything, or
a utilitarian looking for the productive resources of
the scene, the whole aspect of the fen-Scenery would
be totally different. But selected, grouped, and quali-
fied by epithets, as the natural objects of the landscape
are in the poem, they tell of the years of pain and
weariness associated with them in the mind of the
wretched Mariana, and produce an intense impression
of hopeless suffering, which no other treatment of
the single figure could have produced. The minute
enumeration of detail would be a fault in a mere land-
scape-artist, whose object was to describe a natural
Scene. It is an excellence here, because no other
means could so forcibly mark the isolation, the morbid
sensitiveness, and the mind vacant of all but misery;
because, used thus, it becomes eminently dramatic,-
the landscape expresses the passion of the mind
which contemplates it, and the passion gives unity
and moral interest to the landscape. There is not,
throughout the poem, a single epithet which belongs
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 11
to the objects irrespective of the story with which
the scene is associated, or a single detail introduced
which does not aid the general impression of the
poem. They mark either the pain with which
Mariana looks at things, or the long neglect to
which she has been abandoned, or some peculiarity
of time and place which marks the morbid minute-
ness of her attention to objects. If the moss is
blackened, the flower-pots thickly crusted, the nails
rusted, the sheds broken, the latch clinking, the
thatch weeded and worn, not one of those epithets
but tells of long neglect, and prolongs the key-note
of Sad and strange loneliness. If
She could not look on the Sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide;—
this epithet, startling at first from its apparent in-
trusion of the frame of mind in which the heaven is
Sweet, heightens the impression of that tear-blinded
misery to which the light in its softest mildness is
intolerable. Even at night, when the sky is en-
veloped in ‘thickest dark,' when the flats are
“glooming,’
she can only glance across the casement
window. Her sleep is broken by sounds that pain-
fully recal the desolate scene of daylight; her dreams
are forlorn, and stamped with the hopeless monotony
of her lot; and she wakes to shudder in a cold,
windy, cheerless morn. The moat that surrounds
12 JESSAYS.
her prison is no bright sparkling stream; clustered
marsh mosses Creep over its blackened and sleeping
waters, stifling with their loathsome death in life
the most active and joyous of nature's visible powers,
and giving to the captive a striking emblem of her
own choked and stagnant existence. The poplar
hard by is never in repose, shaking like a sick man
in a fever; for leagues round spreads the “level
waste, the rounding grey,’ with no object, no variety,
to interest the attention. . What moves, moves
always, harassing the nerves, what is at rest seems
dead, striking cold the heart. It is needless to
pursue this analysis throughout a poem so familiar.
The effect is felt by the reader with hardly a con-
sciousness of the skill of the writer, or of the intense
dramatic concentration implied in such employment
of language. If expression were the highest aim
of poetry, Mariana in the Moated Grange must be
counted among the most perfect of poems, in spite
of an occasional weakness of phrase. But almost
perfect as the execution is, the subject is presented
too purely as a picture of hopeless, unrelieved suf-
fering, to deserve the name of a great poem. The
suffering is, so to speak, distinct and individual, but
the woman who suffers is vague and indistinct; we
have no interest in her, because we know nothing
about her story or herself in detail; she is not a
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 13
wronged and deserted woman, but an abstract
generalization of wronged and deserted womanhood;
all the individuality is bestowed upon the landscape
in which she is placed. This again, as was said of
Clarībel, is to view human life from its least affect-
ing and impressive side.
The task that lies before us will not allow us to
dwell longer on the poems of the first volume, Taken
as a whole, they indicate that Mr. Tennyson set out
with the determination to be no copyist, and to ab-
stain from Setting to verse the mere personal emo-
tions of his own actual life. Even the few poems
that did express personal emotion he has excluded
from his collected edition.
To hold converse with all forms
Of the manysided mind,-
to present not feelings, but the objects which excite
feelings, must have been very distinctly his aim at
this period. And it is worth noticing, that though
he lived at this time in the centre of the most dis-
tinguished young men of his University, his poems
present but faint evidence of this. He seems to
have deliberately abstained from any attempt to paint
the actual human life about him, or to give a poetical
form to such impressions of real life as he might
have obtained from reading. No one who knows
the men with whom he lived, or who has read his
14 JESSAYS.
later poems, can doubt that the sympathics with
human emotion, the noblo views of human character
and destiny, that distinguish his maturo pooms, must
have then oxisted in the man; and wo must there-
fore inſer that he did not ſocl his mastory over tho
instruments of his art sufficient to justify him in
delineating human life. His knowledge of the modes
in which emotion and character manifest themselves,
must havo appeared to him too imporſect to attempt
their exhibition in rhythmical forms—those forms
being no more conventional arrangement of words to
plcase the ear, but the expression of the delight of
the poet at the beauty and completon.css of the
pictures vividly prescht to his imagination; and in
their highest symbolic value, representing the poet's
insight into the moral meaning of life, and his vision
of a perfect order and harmony in the universe, of
the triumph of good over evil. To attain skill in
the employment of rhythmical forms, to sing nobly
and maturally, to form a style capable of musically
expressing his ideas, as ripening intellect and en-
larged experience should supply him with ideas
demanding musical Cxpression, may be set down as
the aim, more or less conscious, of this first poetical
Series. Probably to the avoidance of subjects beyond
his powers, to the careful claboration of his style,
the world may be indebted for the perſection of his
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 15
lator poems. Had he begun with Balder or Festus,
ho would not have afterwards produced The Morte
d' Arthur, The Gardener's Daughter, Locksley Hall,
and In Memoriam. Mariana in the Moated Grange
marks the highest point of the first flight, and in
that the power of the artist is shewn, in the com-
ploto presentation of a limited and peculiar vicy of
the Subject, rathor than in the cthical or poetical
value of the conception.
Mr. Tonnyson's second volume boars the date of
1833. It contains some pooms which their author
has not thought worthy of proscrwation, and some
othors which take their place among his collected
poems, considerably altered. But charactorised as
a whole, in comparison with the first volume, it
marks a surprising advance, both in conception and
oxocution. Mariana, and pCrhaps Recollections of the
Arabian Nights, aro the only pooms of the first series
that would have had a chance of being rememberod
for their own merits, and they are both admirably
cxocuted, rathor than interosting. But in the SCCond
volume, The Miller's Daughter, Ænone, The Palace
of Art, The May Queen, and The Lotus Eaters would,
even in their original forms, have been cmduring
momorials of a rare pootic ſaculty. In The Miller's
Daughter and The May Queen the affections of our
overy-day life, and the Sconcry with which they
16 ESSAYS.
associate themselves, become for the first time the
subject of Mr. Tennyson's art; and we appreciate
the important principle of treating landscape as
dynamically related to emotion when we see it ap-
plied to feelings which powerfully affect us, and with
whose action we are sufficiently familiar to sympa-
thize. In the two Marianas this principle is carried
thoroughly out, but under conditions which interfere
with our hearty enjoyment of the poems. Partly,
no doubt, the contemplation of unmixed pain that
serves no disciplinal aim is painful, however ex-
quisitely it may be delineated, and hardly consistent
with the delight we expect from overy work of
art; but the absence from both the Marianas of any
but the faintest traces of the previous story, and
of any traits of individual character, has more to do
with this want of popular interest. They are, as was
Said before, not women whose history and character
we can realize sufficiently to care about them, but
abstract types; and the consequence of this is, that
the landscape element predominates too much. In-
stead of serving simply to reflect and render legible
the misery of the women, it becomes itself the prin-
cipal object, and the women are lost in its details.
Besides, we feel that no human life could possibly
endure a loneliness and wretchedness so unmixed
as are depicted, and that these pictures are not true
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 17
because they leave out elements essential to the real
drama, which they present in part. But in The
Miller's Daughter there is a story which tells the
leading incidents of a life, L-there are real persons
presented, with their distinguishing traits; and the
scencry, though intimately blended with the life,
and entering as an indispensable element in the
story, because indissolubly connected with the me-
mories of the speaker, becomes subordinate, and no
longer overrides the human interest. And it is only
in this way, when emotion is presented in connec-
tion with the incidents out Qf which it rises, and
with the persons who experience it, and when the
scenery is made to reflect, not simple emotion, but
the emotion of distinct persons, that an interesting
poem can be written, and the affections of the reader
sincerely touched. So long as the emotion is pre-
sented without a distinct conception of the person
experiencing it, and the cause why, and the scenery
is presented through the medium of this abstract
emotion, as it may be called, the skill of the artist
may be admired, but he will not be a popular poet;
and a poet who does not write at the heart of a
people is no poet at all. The Miller's Daughter
and The May Queen at Once established Mr. Ten-
nyson’s capacity for becoming a popular poet, and
made him one within a limited circle. Their charm
C
18 ESSAYS.
consists in the real interest of lives moved by the
simplest affections and the simplest enjoyments, and
in the skill with which these lives are presented as
complete dramas, though each poem is extended in
time only through an ordinary conversation. It is
in each case a life reviewed by the speaker under
the emotion that belongs to a particular moment;
and the golden calm that rests upon the one, and
the sweet innocence that shines through the other,
belong naturally to the circumstances under which
the reminiscences are uttered. Nothing of truth is
sacrificed to ideality, but such ideality as gives both
unity of colouring throughout, and guides the selec-
tion of details, is the true result of the emotion
of each speaker. Thus the charm of completeness,
which is the aim of narrative, is united with the
power over the sympathies possessed by the spon-
taneous outpouring of feeling; and a lyrical flow of
emotion is made to hold in solution, as it were, the
constituents of a drama or a novel.
But it must not be supposed, because these two
poems have been contrasted with the Marianas and
shewn to have more power over the affections, more
of the elements necessary to popularity, that the
Marianas are failures of the poet to work out his
own intentions. Neither Mariana professes to be a
tale of human passion, with its alternations of joy
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 19
and sorrow. Had the excitement of pity, or any
mere emotion, been the object of the poet, we must
think him obtuse not to know that his mode of pre-
senting the tale would but feebly answer his purpose.
We see by The Miller's Daughter and the May Queen
that he can move us to tears, or fill us with Serene
delight, if such were his object. But if we revert
to the second Mariana, transported to an Italian
landscape, we see her as in a picture, lovely in her
lonely wretchedness; we see the landscape round
her ministering torture to her heart and senses, that
long for quiet sound and shadow. We go with her
in her dream to her breezy mountain home, we
wake with her to the torturing glare of the blinding
noon-day heat, we breathe with her as she leans
at evening on her balcony, while Hesper sheds divine
Solace on her soul, and coolness and soft distant
Sounds bring a semblance of repose. In that dream
of home and of the past, in the recurrence of a kind
of comfort in the cool evening, in her prayer to the
Madonna, and even in the distinct picture of her
beauty, we recognise the Superiority to the first
Mariana, and the growth of Mr. Tennyson’s genius.
But one touch of grief that should connect itself
with a definite incident, or a person brought clearly
before the mind, would excite more pity, more affec-
tion to her, and more indignation against her false
C 2
20 FSSAYS.
lover. She would walk out of her frame, and be-
come a woman with a history and with relations
to the common world, and our emotional sympathies
would at once flow forth towards hor. At present
it is the perceptive faculties that are occupied with
her, which are thronged with images making up
a picture. No doubt the picture is intelligible
enough for the imagination of the reader to supply
the history without difficulty in its gencral character,
but the mind has no strong grasp of what is appre-
hended only in its general character; and the poem,
as it stands before us, remains a beautiful picture,
rather than an affecting love story, and this though
it is the crisis of a thousand affecting love stories.
If Mr. Tennyson had chosen to stamp that indivi-
duality of character and incident which gives its
charm to life, and to the fictioh which aims at pro-
senting real life, we have ovidence that he could,
at this time, have done it. Instead of that he tells
us no more of his Italian Mariana than if she were
painted for us in a picture by Millais, oxcept that
the poem gives us changes of time and scenery as
a compensation for that vividness of presentation
denied to words. It is the development from the
painter to the poet, from the man who can make
beautiful pictures to the man who can present human
life, with all its activities of noble thought alid pure
TENNYSON'S PO EMS. 21
affection, and, in presenting it, can justify its being
to the hcart and reason, that marks Mr. Tennyson's
poetic course.
But through the greater portion of the second
volume the painter predominates. We have no poems
to place by the side of The Miller's Daughter and
The May Queen. The Lady of Shalott, founded on
an incident in King Arthur, is so treated as to
eliminate all the human interest of the original story,
and the process gives us a being whose existence
passes without emotion, without changes, without
intelligible motive for living on, without hope or
fear here or hereafter. Nothing remains but the faint
shadow of humanity, from which life, and motion,
and substance have departed. All this price to gain
perfect serenity, and some new phase of being for
the reflective faculty to make what it can of per-
haps to cause our human heart to beat the stronger
for reaction | Considered merely as a picture, The
Lady of Shalott has a serene beauty, and clear land-
scape features, that only make one more angry that
so much skill in presenting objects should be em-
ployed upon a subject that can only amuse the
imagination.
The poem to which, in subsequent editions, the
name of Fatima is given, cannot be charged with
want of passion; but, like the Marianas, it leaves
22 JESSAYS.
the reader too much to supply in the way of story
and person. It would be doing it injustice to call
it the concentrated essence of Byron's Gulnares,
Zuleikas, et id genus omne ; for Byron never reached
any point near this ‘withering might' of love. But
as it stands, it is too fragmentary, -a mere study,
though so finished as to make One long for the poem
which should have developed it. One would think
that Mr. Tennyson must have been smitten with
a determinate aversion to popularity, and, at the same
time, have resolved to shew what a power of intense
passionate expression he was master of, when he
left such a poem without beginning, middle, or end.
Perhaps, however, in his opinion, this overmaster-
ing Eastern passion, that, like a fever, dries up and
exhausts mind and body, has no phases capable of
forming into a story or drama. It may be the very
essence of this type of love that it should not rise
by degrees, by half-confidences, by all the pleasant
stages of Western love, but burst forth at once into
full consciousness, and know no changes but the
fiercest extremes of tenderness and exhaustion. In
that case, its true poetic expression would be given
in the passionate utterance of desire strained to agony;
and, be that as it may, the effect of such passion,
in morbidly heightening the nervous sensibility, and
giving a painful intensity to all impressions on the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 23
senses, is indicated with marvellous force of ima-
gination, and rendered into language and rhythm
which pour forth like a flood of lava from a volcano
in eruption.
The pre-eminence of the painter reappears in
Aºnone. If the poet's object had been to tell a
moving story of love, and wrong, and grief, he would
not have chosen for his heroine a mythological
nymph, nor have thrown his incidents back to the
siege of Troy, and among beings whose existence
is no longer believed in. As little is his purpose,'
in treating Greek mythology, akin to Shelley's, who
clothes in its forms a sentimental nature-philosophy,
and a pantheistical worship. A none is more akin
in spirit to Endymion and Hyperion ; but its verse
is more majestic, and its luxuriant pictorial richness
more controlled by definite conception, more articu-
lated by fine drawing, than even the latter and
greater of Keats's two poems. Gorgeous mountain
and figure painting stand here as the predominant
aim as clearly as in any picture by Titian or Turner;
only poetry will not lose her prerogative of speech,
and will paint her mountains and her figures in a
medium of passion to which the artist upon canvas
vainly aspires. Round Ida and its valleys, round
Troas and its windy citadel, AEnone can pour the
enchantment of her memories of love and grief. To
2 { JESSAYS.
her can the naked goddesses—painted as Rubens
could not paint them,-life, motion, and floating
lights—utter celestial music, and grand thoughts ally
themselves with splendid pictures. If the wish will
force its way, that Greck mythology might be left
at peace in its tomb, and that a harp so strung to
passion and to thought should pour the spell of its
music upon a theme in which the imagination should
harmonize and interpret the life of the men and
women about us, we can but answer, that the deeper
music will yet beat itself out,--that this is but pro-
lude, shewing the artist's power and perfecting his
hand. f
The Lotos Eaters carries Tennyson's tendency to
pure aestheticism to an extreme point. It is picture
and music, and nothing more. The writer did not
suppose he was writing Hamlet, or solving “the
riddle of the painful earth.” Nor must wo go to
the work with that demand upon it. If music and
picture—the feelings of imaginary beings, in a pure
region of imagination, perfectly presented in rhyth-
mical language that takes the formative impulse of
the feeling, as falling water docs of the forces that
draw it into a flashing curve—have no charm for
any mind, that mind can find no interest in The
Jotos Eaters. To attempt to treat it as an allegory,
which figures forth the tendency to abandon the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 25
battle of life, to retire from a fruitless, ever-renewed
struggle, to read it as we should read The Pilgrim's
Progress, and look out for facts of actual experience
which answer to its images, is as monstrous and
perverse as it would be to test a proposition of geo-
metry by its rhythm and imagery. A mood of
feeling, of course, it represents, and feeling depen-
dent on, and directed to distinct objects, in this
latter respect, alone, differing from music. We may,
of course, too, apply the mood of feeling thus de-
picted to the real events of life, and translate it into
the actual language of men under the influence of
‘mild-eyed melancholy.” So we might with a Sonata
of Beethoven's, but the application is ours, and
not the composer's; and if we attempt to limit the
composer to our interpretation, rather than give our-
Selves up to his free inspiration from a purely musical
impulse, all we get by it is, generally, a very poor
verbal poem, instead of a noble work that does not,
however, belong to the region of articulate speech.
It is, perhaps, because the companion poem of the
JHesperides does not even represent a mood of feel-
ing, as well as because it is far less perfect in
execution, that it has been left out of succeeding
editions.
It may be suggested that The Palace of Art
contradicts what has been said of Mr. Tennyson's
26 JESSAYS.
tendency to paint pictures rather than to dramatize
life and its emotions. And had the conception of
the poem been adequately worked out, it would have
reached the highest point of view from which life
can be surveyed. The poet himself declares it to
be an allegory, and, therefore, to have an interest
mainly ethical, to which, by the nature of the case,
all mere pictorial or musical beauty is to be subor-
dinate. But how has the conception been carried
out Has the poet’s intention been adequately rea-
lized, or has the fully developed pictorial and rhyth-
mical talent been too much for his less highly
developed dramatic and philosophic power? No one
can read the poem and fail to see that only half his
intention has been completed; and that, in spite of
himself, the pictorial and musical element has pre-
vailed over the moral and philosophic aim. With
the site, construction, and furniture of The Soul's
JPalace, he must be a fastidious critic who would
not be highly delighted,—the finest ideal Strawberry
IHill that ever poet's brain conceived. With the
truth of the lesson, too, no moralist can quarrel. It
is profoundly true that a mere artistic enjoyment
of the universe will make no great soul permanently
happy. To make the poem perfect, the process of
the soul's growing discontent with, and final disgust
at, the beautiful objects with which it has surrounded
TENNYSONPS POEMS. ' - 27
itself, should have been displayed and accounted
for, since, as mere statement, it is a truism. If a
real man has come to the conclusion that his happi-
ness consists in perfect isolation from his fellow-
creatures in act and sympathy, in letting the world
and his fellow-men enter his thoughts solely as
pictures to be enjoyed for their variety, one of two
things happens to him, either that his pictures cease
to amuse him when his appetite for novelty is worn
out, or arouse his sympathies for the men and women
whose lives and thoughts they shadow forth, his
awe and adoration of the source of all this wondrous
activity, his desire to understand the meaning and
purpose of it all. Mere variety, that does not suc-
ceed in exciting these feelings, soon wearies; for the
infinite element in life is not the variety of things
by which we are acted on, but the unfathomable
personality of our own being; and it is just this
personality which the soul in the poem is doing all
he can to quench in himself. He is trying to live
by the outward things about him, and by the enjoy-
ment they afford to his intellect; while he ignores
that relation to God and to his fellow-beings, in the
consciousness and acknowledgment of which spiritual
life consists. When, then, his beautiful objects pall
upon him, as his intellectual and perceptive craving
is wearied, they become dead things, and loathsome
28 JESSAYS.
in his eyes—a disgust at his life seizes him,--while
he shrinks in horror from the prospective isolation of
death. The soul that has not exercised itself in
feelings which grow by what they feed on must ex-
perience inconceivable horror at the decay of its
intellectual and perceptive activities, unless it con-
templates annihilation. But the soul in The Palace
has reasoned itself into a conviction of immortality,
and the pride which in its case lay at the bottom of
that conviction, becomes its own scourge. For im-
mortality becomes blank endless isolation, not merely
from sympathies, but from objects of interest,-one
never-ceasing death in life. Scorn of himself is
born of this gloom and misery—Vain attempts to
rally by recalling memories of past strength and en-
joyment soon give way to fixed despair. Feeling
himself wretched, the desire of pity comes upon him,
and the fellow-feeling comes with the sense of the
need of fellow-feeling. He sees that the wretched
people whom he had despised were necessary to him,
—he casts away his proud seclusion, abandons his
life of intellect and enjoyment to mourn and work
with the herd, if so be he may obtain pardon for his
inhuman sin.
Something of this process is no doubt described
in the poem, but not with sufficient fulness or clear-
ness. As the mere statement of the law that the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. e 29
soul cannot live in isolation is a truism, the chief
interest of the poem should have been thrown upon
the development of the law in operation; the reader
should have been made to go along with the Soul in
its exultation, in its first start of doubtful suspicion,
in its gradual perception of the horrors of its con-
dition, in its slow but sure realization of its own
wretchedness, in its prostration of self-abhorrence
and remorse. A nobler allegory could not be con-
ceived, or one more fitted to the age, and to the
highest intellects of all ages. But it fails just where
it ought to have been strongest; and what we have
is a series of magnificent pictures in magnificent
verse, followed, indeed, by a statement of the moral
in very noble stanzas, but by no adequate dramatic
presentation of the mode in which the great law of
humanity works out its processes in the soul. What
is subordinate in object not only fills more space—
that were unimportant, but in force of treatment,
in interest, the furniture of The Palace quite sur-
passes the windication of the moral law. Indeed, it
has been profanely remarked that the poem resembles
a catalogue raisonnée, richly illuminated, of the effects
of a soul compelled for a time to quit its mansion,
and wishing to dispose of its furniture by auction.
Perhaps it would have been impossible adequately
to impress the moral without descending altogether
30 FSSAYS.
from the heights of allegory, and presenting a drama
of actual human experience. The universal law
would have been best shewn in a particular case,
and in connexion with an intelligible human life.
But even under the conditions of the allegory more
emphasis might and ought to have been given to
the main end and purpose of the poem, and less,
comparatively, to its machinery. Though many
alterations have been made in subsequent editions,
this main defect of structure has never been remedied.
With the publication of the Third Series, in 1842,
Mr. Tennyson appears distinctly as the poet of his
own age. His apprenticeship is over, his mastery
over the instruments of his art is complete, and he
employs it in either presenting the life of his con-
temporaries, the thoughts, incidents, and emotions
of the nineteenth century in England, or in treating
legend and history with reference to the moral and
intellectual sympathies now active amongst us. In
other words, he no longer writes poems for us that
charm by their pictorial and rhythmical beauty, but,
presenting modes of existence and feeling which are
either altogether inhuman or imperfectly human,
excite none of the interest that belongs to what re-
flects and interprets our own lives. Mermen, mer-
maids, Sea fairies, Ladies of Shalott, Lotos Eaters,
disappear from the scene; Adelines, Margarets, Elea-
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 31
nores, no longer come as abstract types of character
without speech, story, or personal relations, figured
forth in abundance of similes but with none of the
traits by which the mind apprehends individual men
and women; Grecian nymphs no longer pour out
their loves and griefs to their mother earth, and
Grecian goddesses no longer interfere in the affairs
of mortals, and shed the lustre of celestial presences
on the mountain side. That in which we cannot
believe, either ceases to be treated at all, or is treated
as symbol and picture of what we know to be pro-
foundly real. So far is this change from necessitating
any narrowing of the poet's range of subjects, that
legendary history, fairy fiction, Greek poetry, and
trees endowed with human speech, blend in the pro-
cession with Egyptian famatics, rapt nuns, English
ladies, peasant girls, artists, lawyers, farmers, in
fact, a tolerably complete representation of the mis-
cellaneous public of the present day; while the forms
vary from epic fragments to the homeliest dialogue,
—from the simplest utterance of emotion in a song
to the highest lyrical allegory of a terrible and pro-
found law of life. The poet looks upon a larger field
than before, and what he looked on before he now
sees with a more penetrating eye, a mind that appre-
hends wider and deeper relations. He paints more
brilliantly and forcibly than ever, but his pictures
32 JESSAYS.
f
speak to the heart and spirit as well as to the eye;
his music is even richer and more charming in its
melody, but it moves henceforth fraught with the
feelings and ideas by which men and nations work
out the divine purposes of their being. In some
poems the artistic beauty seems given more for its
own sake than for any moral that lies in the story,
any ulterior meaning which it unfolds; but the noble
pictures which the actions and persons of human
beings furnish are themselves Moral and Interpret-
ation; and in no poems more than in those which
simply present the splendour and beauty of humanity,
and of the material universe in which humanity works
its work, does the poet fulfil his highest function.
The first poem in the Third Series is called The
Epic, and contains a fragment on the death of King
Arthur, read to the party assembled in a country-
house at Christmas. Set thus amidst the fireside
talk of Christmas Eve, Morte d’Arthur ceases to be
a fragment of animated and picturesque epic story,
and becomes the answer of a Christian poet to the
querulous lamentation of the Christian ritualist and
dogmatist over the decay of faith. The noble
humanity and piety that shone in chivalry are not
dead, he tells us, with King Arthur, though
The sequel of to-day unsolders all
The goodliest fellowship of famous knights
Whereof this world holds record.
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 33
Excalibur, the mystic sword which Arthur wielded
so long and so well, vanishes with him from the
world, but the heavenly weapons wherewith men
fight the good fight are still bestowed upon the
heroes of the successive ages, differing in form and
temper, but effective for the various work, and fitted
to the hands that are to wield them. Not only has
each age its new work to do, its new instruments
and new men to do it, as matter of historical fact,
but it must be so,
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
The Arthur of the round-table is gone to fable-
land; but the desire and hope that gave birth to the
legends of chivalry yet live, the dim prophecy that
he will one day return and rule over Britain is ever
accomplishing itself. What mean those Christmas
bells that tell us yearly Christ is born ? Do they
lie 2 No! they blend with all noble legends that
speak of man’s great deeds, of his waster aspirations,
of his yet unaccomplished hopes. They remind us
of the prophecy to which fact is tending, of the
ideal after which the real is striving. To him
whose heart is hopeful and brave, who will not be
the slave of formulas, ‘Arthur is come again, and
cannot die,” is the burden of the world’s song; ‘Come
D
34 ESSAYS.
again, and thrice as fair,’ is heard in every change
by which the thoughts of men are widened and
their hearts enlarged; “Come with all good things,
and war shall be no more,” the strain that echoes
clear in the distance, and most clear when the
church bells ring in the Christmas morn. Morte
d' Arthur is no mere story out of an old book, re-
furbished with modern ornaments, but a song of
hope, a prophecy of the final triumph of good. Mr.
Tennyson has, indeed, lavished upon the story all
the resources of a genius eminently pictorial, and
trained to complete mastery over language and metre.
He might unquestionably have silenced the parson
in a more simple and direct fashion, by which he
would not only have deprived us of a noble piece
of painting, but have missed a poetic and profoundly
true method of looking at national legends. The
poem justifies itself, by its finished excellence, as a
work of art, but it is spiritualized and raised above
merely pictorial aud dramatic beauty by its setting,
and the poet's nineteenth-century point of view.
Mr. Tennyson makes the Supposed author, Everard -
Ball, talk of his fragment as
Faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth,
Mere chaff and draft, much better burnt.
They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes;
elaborate and stately, not naïve and eager to tell
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 35
their story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied;
conscious of their own art; more anxious for beauty
of workmanship than interest of action. But since
John Dryden died, no English poet has written
verse so noble, so Sonorous, of such sustained majesty
and might; no English poet has brought pictures
so clear and splendid before the eye by the power
of single epithets and phrases; and Dryden himself
never wrote a poem so free from careless lines, un-
meaning words, and conventional epithets. The
fragment bursts upon us like the blended blast and
wail of the trumpets of pursuing and retreating
hosts: a whole day’s alternate victory and defeat,
a series of single combats, the death of the leaders
one by one, the drawing off of the armies at Sunset,
Ring Arthur alone and wounded on the field, the
coming on of night and the rising of the moon, the
approach of King Arthur's last captain to bear him
to a place of shelter, are pictured to the imagination
in the few vigorous lines that commence the poem.
So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea;
TJntil King Arthur's table, man by man,
IIad fall’n in Lyonness about their Lord,
Ring Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bodivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
D 2
36 t JESSAYS.
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the ocean, and on One
Lay a great water, and the moon was full.
That phrase, ‘a great water,’ has probably often
been ridiculed as affected phraseology for ‘a great
lake'; but it is an instance of the intense presen-
tative power of Mr. Tennyson's genius. It precisely
marks the appearance of a large lake outspread and
taken in at one glance from a high ground. Had
“a great lake' been substituted for it, the phrase
would have needed to be translated by the mind
into water of a certain shape and size, before the
picture was realized by the imagination. “A great
lake' is, in fact, one degree removed from the sen-
suous to the logical,—from the individual appearance
to the generic name, and is therefore less poetic and
pictorial.
With what distinctness, with what force and
conciseness of language, is the whole scene of the
churchyard, with its associations, brought before the
mind: its ancestral relics, the ruins of the chapel,
the piercing cold of the night-wind edged with sea-
salt, the sharp rocks down which the path to the
lake descends:—
So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept,
And in the moon athwart the place of tombs,
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 37
Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men,
Old knights, and over them the sea-wind Sang
Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down,
By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock,
Came on the shining levels of the lake.
The classical aquora may have suggested the “shin-
ing levels'; but there is a deeper reason for the
change of phrase, for the “great water,’ as seen from
the high ground, becomes a series of flashing surfaces
when Sir Bedivere looks along it from its margin.
This pictorial reality is kept up through the poem.
Excalibur does not merely sparkle in the moonlight
with its jewelled hilt, but
The winter moon,
Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth
And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt.
Sir Bedivere does not doubt whether he shall throw
the sword, but stands
This way and that, dividing the swift mind,
In act to throw.
None the worse a phrase for recalling the Virgilian
‘Atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit
illuc.’ The ‘many-knotted waterflags’ are not
brought in simply to hide Excalibur, they must add
their life to the picture, and
Whistle stiff and dry about the margo.
Everywhere the phenomenon is presented with the
utmost vividness and truth of appearance, with the
38 ESSAYS.
utmost fulness of sense-impressing qualities; sen-
suous concrete language takes the place of our com-
mon speech, abounding in logical generalizations
and names of classes. The mind is kept awake and
in full activity by the pesence of those realities
which are smothered and hidden by the conventional
symbols through which ordinary narrative is carried
on. The most delicate distinctions of phenomena
are noted that serve as an aid to our complete reali-
zation of the scene. Sir Bedivere hears
The ripple washing in the reeds,
and
The wild water lapping on the crags;
the two phrases marking exactly the difference of
Sound produced by water swelling up against a per-
meable or impermeable barrier.
How thoroughly Shakspearian is King Arthur's
lament,
Woe is me !
Authority forgets a dying king,
Laid widowed of the power in his eye
That bowed the will,
where the personification assists the imagination
without distressing the understanding, as when dwelt
upon, and expanded in detail; deepening the im-
pressiveness of the sentiment by giving along with
a true thought a grand picture, just such a passing
flash of impassioned rhetoric as would become the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 39
highest oratory, and thrill through the hearts of a
great assembly.
In the description of Sir Bedivere's last and
successful attempt to throw the Sword into the lake,
every word tells of rapid, agitated, derermined action,
refusing to dally with the temptation that had twice
overcome him :—
Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutch'd the sword,
And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,
And flashing round and round, and whirl’d in an arch,
Shot like a streamer of the northern morn
Seen where the moving isles of winter shock
By night, with noises of the northern sea.
So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur.
A series of brilliant effects is hit off in those two
words, “made lightnings.’ “Whirl’d in an arch,”
is a splendid instance of Sound answering to sense,
which the older critics made so much of; the addi-
tional syllable which breaks the measure, and neces-
sitates an increased rapidity of utterance, seeming
to express to the ear the rush of the sword up its
parabolic curve. And with what lavish richness of
presentative power is the boreal aurora, the collision,
the crash, and the thunder of the meeting icebergs,
brought before the eye. An inferior artist would
‘ 40 JESSAYS.
have shouted through a page, and emptied a whole
pallet of colour, without any result but interrupting
his narrative, where Tennyson in three lines strik-
ingly illustrates the fact he has to tell,—associates
it impressively with one of nature’s grandest phe-
nomena, and gives a complete picture of this phe-
nomenon besides.
How dramatic and striking is King Arthur's
sudden exclamation on Sir Bedivere's return :
Now see I by thine eyes that this is done;
how wonderfully true of a dying man, the
Looking wistfully, with wide blue eye,
As in a picture;
how pictorial and minutely attentive to the facts of
appearance,—
But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge,
Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walked
Larger than human on the frozen hills;
how rapid and eager the haste of movement in reply
to the King’s ‘Quick, quick P-
IIe heard the deep behind him, and a cry
Before. His own thought drove him like a goad.
Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves
And barren chasms, and all to left and right
The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery Crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels;
f
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 41
do we not seem to burst from the narrow steep path
down the ravine, whose tall precipitous sides hide
the sky and the broad landscape from sight, and
come out in a moment upon
The level lake
And the long glories of the winter moon
In some over-fastidious moods, one might be inclined
to charge
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars,
with a touch of that exaggeration which belongs to
the ‘spasmodic school’; but the cry comes from a
company of spirits, amid mountains whose natural
power of echo is heightened by the silence of night,
the clearness of the winter air, and the hardening
effect of frost. Such a cry at such a time, and in
such a place, would thrill from rock to rock, from
summit to summit, till it seemed to pierce the sky in
a hurtling storm of multitudinous arrowy sounds,
and die away in infinitely distant pulsations among
the stars. In the following lines, where the agony
of lamentation is compared to
A wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world,—
the passage italicised may seem at first to add nothing
to the force of the comparison, as the shrillness of
the wind would not be greater in an uninhabited
42 JESSAYS,
place than anywhere else in open ground. But the
mournfulness of the feeling a man would experience
in such a place, from the sense of utter isolation and
sterility, is blended with the naturally sad wail of
the wind over a wide waste, and the addition thus
becomes no mere completion of a thought of which
only part is wanted for the illustration—though
that were allowable enough, according to ordinary
poetic usage, but gives a heightening of Sentiment
without which the illustration itself would be in-
complete and less impressive.
Magnificent similes do not make poetry, but they
are among its most effective means of filling the
mind of the reader with the actual grandeur and
pathos of the particular scene presented. Where
the poet seizes not upon some mere superficial re-
semblance that draws the fancy between two objects
essentially different in the general feeling they excite,
but brings in a phenomenon of nature which excites
feelings analogous to those belonging to the event
or Scene he is narrating, the use of simile and figure
not only enables him to avoid encumbering his
narrative by detail, and epithet, and general terms
otherwise necessary to bring his object before the
mind, but associates that object at once and spon-
taneously with the feelings belonging to the illus-
trating phenomenon—an effect which could not be
*
TENNYSONPS POEMS. 43
produced apart from this device except by long
drawn-out reflections. Simile and figure may be
regarded as a natural short-hand, which substitutes
well-known things for the unknown qualities of
whatever has to be described, and which therefore
gives the general effect of the things to be described
without necessitating the task of minute description.
This is exactly the reverse of the use made of these
forms of speech by the man of wit, who intentionally
Selects for his illustration some merely accidental
and often merely verbal resemblance between two
things essentially different in themselves and in the
feelings they excite. But the poet, in his impas-
Sioned or serious moods, seizes not on resemblances
but true analogies; and they at once adorn his
poetry with impressive pictures, and convey his
meaning with force and brevity. The passage in
which Arthur is described as dying in the arms of
the mourning queen, is a fine instance of a poetical
use of simile and figure. The moon fading in the
early morning, the dazzling brightness of the rising
Sun, the shattered column, the glancing flight of a
shooting star, bring before the mind not only the
dying king, pale and bleeding, but the contrast
between his present weakness and the glory and
triumphs of his chivalrous and brilliant life. In
a few lines his whole story is told: it is not
44 ESSAYS.
merely a dying warrior who lies before us, but the
strength, the state, the splendour, and enjoyment of
his past life, flash before the imagination, and deepen
the sadness and humiliation of his defeat and
death.
For all his face was white
And colourless, and like the wither'd moon
Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east;
And all his greaves and cuisses dash’d with drops
Of onset; and the light and lustrous curls—
That made his forehead like a rising sun
Eigh from the dais-throne—were parch'd with dust;
Or, clotted into points and hanging loose,
Mix’d with the knightly growth that fringed his lips.
So like a shattered column lay the king;
Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest,
From spur to plume a star of tournament,
Shot through the lists at camelot, and charged
Before the eyes of ladies and of kings.
Let not the purpose of this analysis of detail be
misunderstood. Fine phrases and fine passages do
not make a fine poem; but they do show that un-
flagging activity of imagination, which, operating on
a finely-constructed whole, change a well-propor-
tioned framework into a temple of carved stones,
every one of which is instinct with life and thought,
—where not only the coup d'aºil strikes, but the
closest and most minute examination only opens
fresh sources of wonder and enjoyment. In many
TENNYSON'S PO EMS. 45
poems that possess merit equal to Morte d'Arthur,
it would be impossible to pick out single passages or
lines that would be beautiful or striking, when taken
from their context. Dora is an instance. But this
examination of details proves that where Mr. Tenny-
son is employed upon a poem which consists of a
series of actions admitting of splendid pictorial
presentment, being in their own nature pictorially
splendid, his pictures are drawn with a vigorous
hand, and coloured to the life; and that no stroke
of his brush is without meaning. And this has been
done, not because it is supposed that professed
admirers of Mr. Tennyson's poetry needed help to
point out the just grounds of their admiration, but
because many persons say they cannot see why
others do so highly admire Mr. Tennyson; and to
show them that a hasty, careless glance over his
verses—such as they give to a leader in a newspaper,
or even less attentive and interested,—is not precisely
the way to arrive at the enjoyment of a poet in
whom every word is the result of intense activity
and concentration of the imagination, controlled by
cultivated taste, and trained to a rare mastery over
language and metre.
The group of poems founded on legendary history,
of which Morte d'Arthur is the most important,
consists, besides, of Godiva, St. Simeon Stylites,
46 ESSAYS.
Ulysses, St. Agnes, and Sir Galahad. Godiva
would have yielded to analysis results similar to
those we have obtained from Morte d' Arthur, re-
sembling that poem in pictorial beauty and vivid
dramatic presentation. A virginal purity, a spirit
of chivalrous reverence for womanhood and self-
sacrifice, veils and softens as with a halo of glory
the figure of the ‘woman of a thousand summers
back,” as ‘she rode forth clothed on with chastity.’
Though compelled to pass the poem without notice
of its details, we cannot but direct the attention of
our readers to the intense imaginative reality of that
passage in which the feelings of Godiva, as she rides
through the streets, are transferred to the material
objects by which she is surrounded:—
The deep air listened round her as she rode,
And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
The little wide-mouthed heads upon the spout
Had cunning eyes to see, &c.
And again in the same spirit, Subordinating the truth
of literal fact to the higher dramatic truth of passion:
And all at Once,
With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless moon
Was clash'd and hammer'd from a hundred towers,
One after one.
The other four poems of the group aim at pre-
senting types of character, and not at narrative of
action. They take the form of speeches uttered on
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 47
occasions which adequately represent the essential
characteristics of the life of the speaker. The
habitual selection of this form by Mr. Tennyson is
one among many indications of the intensity of his
imagination. It enables him to present in the
shortest compass the essentials of his subject without
the intervention of any commonplace machinery, but
it makes a demand upon the imaginative resources
of his readers, which goes some way to explain why
many persons who enjoy certain kinds of poetry are
utterly unable to appreciate his. Each of these four
poems contains implicitly the story of a life and the
exhibition of a well-marked type of character. We
cannot pause to dwell upon the force and truth of
the drawing in each case, but the group is important,
as indicating the versatility of Mr. Tennyson’s genius,
his catholicity of imaginative apprehension, and his
command over the elements of the most widely
differing characters. St. Simeon Stylites proves that
it is from no want of power to paint the horrible
and the grotesque that Mr. Tennyson abstains as
a rule from such subjects. And St. Agnes is the
more remarkable as showing a hearty appreciation
of the purer form of asceticism in a poet whose cha-
racteristic excellence lies in the portrayal of tender
sentiment and voluptuous passion, upheld and re-
fined by a stainless purity.
48 FSSAYS.
We pass on to the love-poems, and in them we
find the same variety of treatment, the same avoid-
ance of repetition, just noticed in the legendary
group.
The Gardener's Daughter, with its rich luxuriance
of imagery, its warmth of passion, its magnificence
of phrase, its abandon of sentiment, is not more es-
sentially different from the severely dramatic simpli-
city and pathos of Dora, than the calm retrospect
and peaceful affection of The Miller's Daughter is
from the stormy, current of slighted passion and
fierce scorn that rushes wildly on through Locksley
Hall, to find its haven in grand visions of progress
and the excitement of enterprise. The playful fancy
of The Talking Oak touches the airy treble of a
scale of which Love and Duty sound the deepest and
most solemn chords. The rustic grace and Sweetness
of The May Queen contrast sharply with the rude
force and indignant sarcasm of Lady Clara Vere de
Vere; while the conversational idylls blend with
the level tones of ordinary conversation touches of
natural beauty and flashes of elevated thought,
which raise them to the rank of poems, and recal
what are among the happier hours of our modern
life, those hours with cultivated and genial friends,
in which the cares of the world are shaken off, and
the best momories of the past, the noblest aspirations,
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 49
the gentlest feelings, revive amid mountain and lake,
for the votaries of ambition, science, or business.
Then, as to form, we find narrative, dialogue,
soliloquy, and direct address. We have blank verse
that ranges through all the scale of feeling, from the
exquisitely rhythmical, full, majestic, down to the
just accented strain, that may fairly represent genial
and animated conversation; we have lyric measures
that flow softly on like a quiet streamlet, as in
The Miller's Daughter; go straight and fierce to
their mark like arrows of scorn, as in Lady Clara
Vere de Vere; float gaily or sadly on in Sweet calm
to the music of a young girl’s life and early death,
as in the three strains of The May Queen ; dash on
in thunder and in storm, Sweeping vast spaces,
gathering in lurid gloom, or clearing in sudden
flashes, impetuous hurricane of thick clouds, or
dazzling brightness of tropic Summer, as in Locksley
Pſall. No poet but Goethe has, in our day, swept
a lyre of such varied range, with so perfect a com-
mand of every key. Moreover, none of these poems
belong to the class called ‘occasional.’ They all have
a construction which tells a complete story—often
the story of a life. Some touch, frequently slight,
lets us into the previous stages of the personal
history, and throws forward a clear light upon the
future career. The passions are treated, not merely
IE
50 FSSAYS.
as giving rise to striking incidents, but as exercising
a permanent influence on the character and destiny.
Though for the most part lyrical in form, the poems
rise, thus, to the full significance of dramas, as has
been explained in respect to The Miller's Daughter;
and similar remarks might be truly applied to all
the principal poems. These qualities of variety and
completeness give Mr. Tennyson a claim to a place
among great poets, which the form and length of
his compositions somewhat interfere with in the
first rough estimate of a public inclined to set ‘the
how much before the how.” We can only indicate
them by selected instances; but the careful analysis
of any one of his poems would lead to the same
conclusions.
2. The love story to which The Gardener's Daughter
supplies a title and a central figure, takes the form
of a narrative from the lips of the man who wooed
and won the maiden for a wife. By this selection
of a speaker, who is made to dwell on the blissful
recollections of early love, the dramatic colouring
throughout is maintained at a glowing tone, without
being exposed to the charge of exaggeration. The
minutest incidents, the changing lights and shades
of feeling, belonging to such a period, are stamped
indelibly in the memory, and never lose their first
fresh charm and interest. To raise the colouring
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 51
still higher, and justify a more elaborately pictu-
resque treatment, a fonder dwelling upon every
detail of natural beauty then noted with the seeing
eye of a loving heart, the speaker is not only a
lover, but a painter. The motive is thus admirably
chosen for treatment at once impassioned and pic-
torial, for the minutest detail of feeling and circum-
stance, for the freest play of an imaginative sympathy
with nature, and the rich hues that inward joy sheds
over the outward world. But Mr. Tennyson is the
last man to forget that law of reserve which binds
the lover—the law which a recent writer has so
well expressed, when he says—
Not to unveil before the gaze
Of an imperfect sympathy,
In aught we are, is the sweet praise
And the main sum of modesty.
Love blabbed of is a great decline;
A careless world unsanctions sense;
But he who casts heaven’s truth to swine
Consummates all incontinence.*
Therapture delineated in The Gardener's Daughter
is the rapture of hope when the eyes and heart first
feel the loveliness of a woman, and all nature shines
in the wedding-garment, which is but the reflection
of the lover's inward life. No babbling of lover's
* The Angel in the House.
E 2
52 FSSAYS.
secrets is here; no laying bare to a third person of
what is perfectly befitting, graceful, beautiful, and
pure when done and said at love's instinctive bidding,
but becomes the contrary of these when spoken of
to others, or dwelt on in cool, reflective moments.
The highest emotion is sacred, only revealed to the
most perfect sympathy—that of the person who
excites and shares it; and even that revelation must
be inarticulate, of act, of look—not of speech.
There is profound beauty and truth in the allegory
that represents love as a blind child; he knows no
wrong, is unconscious of what he does,—trusting to
a divine instinct. The speaker in The Gardener's
Daughter holds fast to this law. He paints the
courtship, not the marriage; Speaks of his heart's
idol as the star that shone upon his course, the Sun
that lighted his day; as the goddess, ere yet she
stepped from her ambrosial cloud-pedestal, and blessed
his life with joys too sacred for the common ear. It
is the beauty that he wooed, not the wife that he
won, that he unveils for the listener to his tale.
And as if even this were too much,--as if it were
a kind of profanation to utter even these preludes of
a life-blessedness to one who might, the moment
after, look upon the actual woman who was their
object, the speaker tells us that she has passed from
arth and mortal taint,--that no second love has
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 53
confused her image; but long years of lonely
widowhood have only softened and hallowed it in
his heart. As he speaks, he is standing before her
veiled portrait, and, raising the veil, he says—
Pehold her there,
As I beheld her ere she knew my heart,
My first, last love; the idol of my youth,
The darling of my manhood, and alas !
Now the most blessed memory of mine age.
And thus, by this slight touch, what would have
been merely a charmingly told love story, becomes,
in fact, a story of a life sustained by love to the end,
as it was in its youth brightened and enriched by
love. The single phase of passion and of fortune
is not only worked out to its crisis, so as to satisfy
the artistic sense of completeness, but the value and
influence of that single phase is shown as spreading
through to the end of life, and the feeling that
demands an eternal meaning and purpose in each
stage of life is fully satisfied.
It would be impossible in any notice of Mr.
Tennyson to be satisfied with a survey of the plan
of what may fairly be called his most popular poem.
He, indeed, constructs his poems poetically, and
certainly cannot be ranked with the mere exquisite
worker of detail; but all his detail is so exquisite .
in his finer poems, that it would be as hopeless to
54 I'SSAYS.
attempt to convey a true impression of them without
exhibiting this detail in characteristic passages, as
it would be to make a person feel all the subtle
and penetrating grace and sweetness of a Raffaelle
Madonna by description, or to transfuse into words
the glory and power of Titian's colours. After all
that philosophical critics have talked of organic
unity, and such-like hard phrases, since Coleridge
influenced English criticism, and allowing all the
importance that belongs to the facts expressed, or
intended to be expressed, by the phrases, it must be
admitted that the finest construction would produce
little effect in poetry without fine details; and that
where the genius for producing these exists, the art
or instinct which combines them will seldom be
wanting when the poet is mature. The real truth
is, that what is often called fine detail is nothing
but tawdry ornament, the feeble or vehement effort
to say fine things without having fine thoughts,
—to utter raptures that are insincero and unreal,
inasmuch as the imaginative power to summon up
the beautiful objects supposed to justify the rapture
is wanting, and the would-be poet has before him
merely the general conceptións of beautiful objects,
to which he applies, consequently, mere general con-
ventional phrases. Mr. Tennyson's phrases, on the
contrary, are pictures; and his rhythm the natural
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 55
music of a mind rejoicing in the beauty of the
pictures that flow in ordered continuity and fulness
before him. The unflagging activity of this pictorial
power is manifested frequently in Mr. Tennyson's
poems, by the slightest change from the Ordinary
phrase, as has been noticed in Morte d' Arthur.
Here, again, in The Gardener's Daughter,
My Eustace might have sat for Hercules—
So muscular he spread, so broad of breast,-
where the spread gives not the mere statement of a
fact, but its actual appearance; the space fills before
the eye with the bulky frame of the man, as we
look.
In describing the locality of the garden, Mr.
Tennyson fills the mind with the realities of the
place. We know the distance from the city by
hearing the funeral and marriage bells and the clang-
ing of the minster clock, borne upon the wind; by
looking out along a league of grass. The nature of
the country and the time of year are given in the
slow, broad stream, with its floating lilies, its plea-
suro skiffs, and its barges; in the rich grass meadows
with their pasturing cattle, and their low-hanging
lime-trees in flower, humming with Winged life.
And to complete the picture thus presented, the ex-
treme distance is filled by the three-arched bridge,
with the minster-towers rising above it—
66 ESSAYS.
Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love.
News from the humming city comes to it
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells;
And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear
The windy clanging of the minster clock;
Although between it and the garden lies
A league of grass, wash’d by a slow broad stream,
That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar,
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on,
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge
Crown'd with the minster-towers.
The fields between
Are dewy-fresh, brows'd by deep-udder'd kine,
And all about the large lime feathers low,
The lime a summer home of murmurous wings.
A landscape by Constable or De Wint would not
bring the scene more clearly before the eye, or with
more of the quiet truth of happy, but unimpassioned
observation. But it is the high prerogative of poetry
that she can throw over nature the ‘wedding-garment
or the shroud,’ and exhibit landscape as it is coloured
by emotion. It would be rash to assert perfection
of anything human; but the following description
of a country walk on a May morning, under the in-
fluence of the premonition of a first passion, before
the subjective excitement is determined to and con-
centrated upon its proper object, approaches that
limit. Since
Adam first
Embraced his Eve, in happy hour,
TENNYSONPS POEMS. 57
love was ever the great ideal artist, at whose touch
Every bird of Eden burst
In carol, every bud in flower;
but he never painted a more glowing picture of a
mind full of the bliss that is half-sister to desire, or
of a nature reflecting the bliss in a thousand beautiful
sights and Sounds, than this:—
And sure this orbit of the memory folds
For ever in itself the day we went
To see her. All the land in flowery squares,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind,
Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud
Drew downward: but all else of Heaven was pure
Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge,
And May with me from head to heel. And now,
As though 'twere yesterday, as though it were
The hour just flown, that morn with all its sound,
(For those old Mays had thrice the life of these,)
Rings in mine ears. The steer forgot to graze,
And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood,
Leaning his horns into the neighbour field,
And lowing to his fellows. From the woods
Came voices of the well-contented doves,
The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy,
But shook his song together as he near'd
Iſis happy home, the ground. To left and right,
The cuckoo told his name to all the hills;
The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm;
The redcap whistled; and the nightingale
Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day.
58 ESSAYS.
We have minute touches, bringing out common
objects with a passing glory that catches without
chaining the attention, as well as those finished pic-
tures upon which the mind dwells with a fixed
delight of contemplation; touches that charm us with
their truth, and help to mark the whole scene in its
distinction of season and weather. Here are two
from a crowd of such. From the lilac in crowded
bloom
One warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew
Beyond us, as we entered in the cool.
$ $ $ $ #
In the midst
A cedar spread his dark-green layer of shade.
The garden glasses shone, and momently
The twinkling laurels scattered silver lights;
where the epithet silver admirably expresses the me-
tallic glitter of the laurel leaves in the sun, compared
with the deader green of ordinary foliage.
‘The last might's gale,’ which had blown the
rose-tree across the walk, may have been introduced
mainly to give Rose a graceful occupation, and to
justify a charming picture. But even if that were
its main purpose, it no less contributes a fact which
accounts for the marvellous transparency of the May
morning, the clearness of the atmosphere shedding
rapture through the veins and hearts of all living
things. Applied to most poets, such an observation
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 59
would savour of over-refining, but Tennyson's never-
aimless minuteness justifies it.
In the picture of Rose which follows, Mr. Tenny-
son has, with the true instinct of genius, avoided at-
tempting to paint in words a beautiful human face,
while he preserves dramatic propriety in not making
a lover at the first glance master the expression of
the countenance he afterwards knows in all its
meanings. The painter-lover would be at once at-
tracted to the picturesque attitude, general effect of
dress, light and shade, the contour of the figure, and
the bright points of colour—
One arm aloft,
Gown'd in pure white, that fitted to the shape—
Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.
A single stream of all her soft brown hair
Poured on one side : the shadow of the flowers
Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering
Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist—
Ah, happy shade—and still went wavering down,
JBut, ere it touch'd a foot, that might have danced
The greensward into greener circles, dipt,
And mix’d with shadows of the common ground !
But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn’d
Her violet eyes, and all her Elebe-bloom,
And doubled his own warmth against her lips,
And on the bounteous wave of such a breast
As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade,
She stood, a sight to make an old man young.
With what exquisite feeling is the progress of
60 ESSAYS.
the love associated with the imagery of the garden
in which the loved one ‘hoarded in herself, grew,
Seldom seen,”
The daughters of the year,
One after one, thro’ that still garden passed:
Each garlanded with her peculiar flower
Danced into light, and died into the shade;
And each in passing touch'd with some new grace
Or seem'd to touch her, so that day by day,
Like one that never can be wholly known,
IHer beauty grew;
and in that line, ‘like one that never can be wholly
known,’ is revealed one exhaustless charm in all our
true personal relations. Things, as things, soon
weary us, because we soon know all we can ever,
know about them ; persons are ever new, ever un-
folding to us something unexpected, as they become
dearer to us, and we look at them with eyes opened
by sympathy and affection. Only the view of the
universe, as a revelation of a personal being, supplies
to outward objects exhaustless variety and interest.
The law of reserve which rules this poem has
been already alluded to. It requires neither art nor
genius to raise emotion of a low kind in a reader,
if a writer has no reserve. The mind is sufficiently
awake in all of us to realize pictures that appeal
to the Sensual passions; and a Writer has no more
difficulty in being powerful, if he give himself the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 61
licence of some poetry, than he has in being witty,
if he copy Swift's unbridled profanity and beastliness.
Mr. Tennyson's glory is to have portrayed passion
with a feminine purity,+to have spiritualized the
voluptuousness of the senses and the imagination by
a manly reverence for woman’s worth, and a clear
intuition of ‘the perfect law of liberty’ through
which the true humanity develops itself in the form
and condition of an animal nature. He religiously
observes the Sanctities of love, and in graceful pic-
tures lays down the law which he respects:—
Would you learn at full
How passion rose thro’ circumstantial grades
Beyond all grades develop'd? and indeed
I had not staid so long to tell you all,
Rut while I mused came Memory with sad eyes,
Holding the folded annals of my youth;
And while I mused, Love with knit brows went by,
And with a flying finger swept my lips,
And spake, ‘Be wise: not easily forgiven
Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar
The secret bridal chambers of the heart,
Let in the day.” Here, then, my words have end.
And here must end our remarks upon The Gar-
dener's Daughter. We can remember no love story
that can be placed beside it in all its harmonious
combination of excellences. Passion may have been
dramatised more intensely; a subtle grace of senti-
ment, a charm of evanescent fragrance, may be felt
62 ESSAYS.
more in some of Shelley's lyrics, and in some of Mr.
Tennyson’s own; character may certainly be given
with more force of individuality; and unquestionably
a story more exciting in its incidents has often been
told by novelist and poet: but for its delineation of
the first and last love of a happy man, whose moral
nature has known nothing of conflicts with itself,
and whose mind has been kept healthy by the de-
lightful occupation of the painter; for its vivid de-
scriptions of nature in some of her loveliest aspects;
for the sense of perfect enjoyment that makes the
verse flow on as a full stream through a rich meadow-
land, and for the touching softening of the tone as
the speaker tells of the present as a calm resting-
place between a blessed memory and a blessed hope,
it stands unrivalled in English literature. And yet
it never deviates from the familiar path of our Eng-
lish daily life, and is just a simple picture of that
life as a joyous heart and Warm affection may make
it for any of us.
The forms of poetry which Mr. Tennyson adopts
are not capable of interpreting the more complex
moral phenomena. To shew that evil natures and
evil actions have their appointed work in the world,
That somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt and taints of blood,
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 63
will, in most cases, require a more complex ma-
chinery of interacting events and characters than he
puts in operation. Beautiful actions and beautiful
characters are their own interpretation. We need
ask no questions as to the motive and ground of
their existence, as to the part they bear in the har-
monies of the universe. But to throw the faintest
light of hope upon the lives and destinies of men
and women who seem to be born only to cause
suffering to themselves and others, to grow worse as
they grow older, and to harden under the discipline
of the moral laws of the universe, the mind must
look far back into the determining causes of character
and action, far forward into their remote results,
and far round upon the Society in which they de-
velop themselves, and upon which they are exerting
a constant modifying power, through its interests
and sympathies. Even the widest glance forward,
backward, and around, will fail often to detect one
clue to the mystery of evil; and faith can only
throw herself
Upon the great world's altar stairs
That slope throngh darkness up to God.
So far, however, as the problem can be solved
poetically—by exhibiting, that is, the real relations
of good and evil in particular cases, and their actual
Connexion with each other as cause and effect, so
64 ESSAYS.
as to vindicate at once the eternal law of right and
the goodness of God with sufficient clearness to justify
the expression of the poet's view of the world in
a rhythmical form, the drama or the epic will alone
satisfy the necessities of the case. The lyric poet
may indeed assert in glowing strains his own con-
viction of the ultimate solution as a general truth, or
he may present his view of the working of any
great, moral laws in lyric allegories, like The Palace
of Art or The Vision of Sin : but no machinery short
of the drama or epic will enable him to solve practi-
cally, and to the conviction of his readers, the darker
problems of human life. And Mr. Tennyson ab-
stains, as a rule, from touching any actions of
human beings that are not, so to speak, their own
vindication, and which do not at once commend
themselves to the sympathy and conscience by their
own gracefulness, beauty, or nobility, the happiness,
the gentleness, the vitality of mind and heart, the
strength and courage of will they exhibit.
This, however, in a world where suffering and
sorrow are among the appointed means of discipline
for the good as well as among the punishments of
the bad, leaves still scope enough for poetry of
a severer character than the exquisite and happy
love story we have been commenting upon. In
Dora and Love and Duty the problem the poet
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 65
attempts to solve is not to show how the eternal law
of right vindicates itself against man’s self-will and
self-indulgence, but how the goodness of God windi-
cates itself against man’s self-sacrifice in behalf of
the right. If such vindication were impossible in
the typical instances selected, the subjects would be
unfit for poetic treatment. Suffering, unredeemed
by its effects, may be a proper subject for the awe-
struck meditations of any man; but to represent it
under rhythmical forms which are symbolical of
emotion flowing musically forth from a heart rejoicing
in its own thoughts about the objects present to it,
would be just mockery. It is only Nero that fiddles
when Rome is burning. The true poet must have
seen the final issue in good of the struggle he por-
trays, even though but in a faint and hazy glimpse.
And Mr. Tennyson habitually observes this law.
Even poor, perverted Simeon Stylites has glimpses
of his mistake; his wretched, addled brain is clouded,
but the poem closes with a breaking up of the clouds.
And scarcely any other of Mr. Tennyson's poems is
open to the faintest suspicion of portraying emotion
merely for its dramatic interest. In Dora and Love
and Duty the suffering is felt through every nerve.
The simple unconscious pathos of the one, and the
high-wrought reflective passion of the other, meet
in this expression of a genuine grief. A three-volume
F
66 ISSAYS.
novel could not impress the essential characteristics
of each tale with more vividness than the brief poems,
in which the incidents are boldly sketched in outline,
and the crisis of the passion struck off with a rapid
and masterly force of hand. But in both poems,
when the battle has been fought, the sharp agony
passed, and all pretence of conventional consolation
abandoned, the peace that comes of victory over self
shines clearly down upon the hearts of the victims,
and the striking drama, the pathetic tale, points
forward to a life purified, strengthened, and even
softened by the conflict. As a mere tale, Dora might
have ended with the reconciliation; it is the higher
instinct of the moral teacher that leads Mr. Tennyson
to add—
So those four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate;
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.
And it is not the love that
Sits brooding on the ruins of a life,
Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself,
that prompts the speaker in Love and Duty to close
his passionate recollections with a strain of exquisite
sensibility to external beauty and softened visions of
the future of his lost mistress:–
Live—yet live,
Shall sharpest pathos blight us, knowing all
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 67
Life needs for life is possible to will—
Live happy! tend thy flowers: be tended by
My blessing ! should my shadow cross thy thoughts
Too Sadly for their peace, so put it back
Por calmer hours in memory’s darkest hold;
If unforgotten should it cross thy dreams,
So might it come like one that looks content,
With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth,
And point thee forward to a distant light,
Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart
And leave thee freðr, till thou wake refresh'd,
Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown
Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl
Far furrowing into light the mounded rack,
Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea.
In Locksley Hall we pass to a poem of a widely
different strain. It is against the fickleness of a
woman, not against circumstances which leave her
image pure and beautiful in the memory, that the
speaker in Docksley Hall has to find a resource.
And he finds it in the excitement of enterprise and
action, in glowing anticipations of progress for the
human race. He not merely recovers his sympathy
with his fellow-men, and his interest in life, which
had been paralysed by the unworthiness of her who
represented for him all that was beautiful and good
in life, but he recovers it on higher and firmer
ground. What he lost was a world that reflected
his own unclouded enjoyment, his buoyant ardour
and high spirits; a world appreciated mainly in its
F 2
68 e JESSAYS. &
capacity for affording variety to his perceptive activity
and scope for his unflagging energies; a world of
which he himself, with his pleasures and his am-
bitions, was the centre. What he gains is a world
that is fulfilling a divine purpose, beside which his
personal enjoyments are infinitely unimportant, but
in aiding and apprehending which his true blessed-
ness is purified and deepened; a world in which he
is infinitely small and insignificant, but greater in
his brotherhood with the race which is evolving ‘the
idea of humanity’ than in any possible grandeur of
his own. The poem has been called “morbid,” a
phrase that has acquired a perfectly new meaning of
late years, and is made to include all works of art,
and all views of life that are coloured by other than
comfortable feelings. If Locksley Hall, as a whole,
is morbid, then it is morbid to represent a young
man rising above an early disappointment in love,
and coming out from it stronger, less sensitive, more
sinewed for action.
..What has led certain critics to call the poem
morbid is, of course, that the speaker's judgment of
his age, in the earlier part, is coloured by his private
wrong and grief. But it is not morbid, on the con-
trary, it is perfectly natural and right that outrages
on the affections should disturb the calmness of the
judgment, that acts of treacherous weakness should
TENNYSON'S PO EMS. 69
excite indignation and scorn; and the view of the
world natural to this state of mind is quite as true
as that current upon the Stock Exchange, and not
at all more partial or prejudiced. It is not, indeed,
the highest, any more than it is a complete view,
but it is higher and truer than the Serene contem-
plation of a comfortable Epicurean or passionless
thinker. There is no cynicism in the ‘fine curses’
of Locksley Hall; they are not the poisonous exhala-
tions of a corrupted nature, but the thunder and
lightning that clear the air of what is foul, the forces
by which a loving and poetical mind, not yet calmed
and strengthened by experience and general prin-
ciples, repels unaccustomed outrage and wrong. With
what a rich emotion he recals his early recollections!
Sea, Sandy shore and sky have been for him a per-
petual fountain of beauty and of joy, his youth a
perpetualfeast of imaginative knowledge and pictorial
glory.
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, cre I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.
IHere about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of Science, and the long result of Time.
With what a touching air of tenderness and protec-
tion he watches the young girl whom he loves in
70 ESSAYS.
Secrét, and whose paleness and thinness excite his
pity as well as his hope. How rapturously, when
she avows her love, he soars up in his joy with a
flight that would be tumultuous but for the swiftness
of the motion,-unsteady but for the substantial
massiveness of thought, and the grand poising sweep
of the lyric power that sustains it :—
Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing
hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Love took up the harp of Life, and Smote on all the chords
with might;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out
of sight.
Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring,
And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the
Spring.
Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships,
And our spirits rush’d together at the touching of the lips.
Then how pathetic the sudden fall, the modulation
by which he passes from the key of rapture to that
of despair :—
O my cousin, shallow-hearted O my Amy, mine no more
° 0 the dreary, dreary moorland 0 the barren, barren shore
And here and there, through all that storm of anger,
sarcasm, contempt, denunciation that follows, there
sounds a note of unutterable tenderness which gives
to the whole movement a prevailing character of pain
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 71
and anguish, of moral desolation, rather than of
wrath and vengeance. Not till this mood exhausts
itself, and the mind of the speaker turns to action
as a resource against despair, does he realise all that
he has lost. Not only is his love uprooted,—his
hope, his faith in the world have perished in that
lightning flash; and he turns again to his glorious
youth, but now Only to sound the gulf that separates
him from it. The noble aspirations, the ardent
hopes, the Sanguine prophecies of earlier years roll
in rich pomp of music and of picture before us; but
it is the cloud-pageantry of the boy's day-dream
which breaks up to reveal the world as it appears
now to the ‘palsied heart’ and “jaundiced eye' of
the man. Yet, in the midst of this distempered
vision are seen glimpses of a deeper truth. The
eternal law of progress is not broken because the in-
dividual man is shipwrecked. It is but a momentary
glimpse, and offers no firm footing. His personal
happiness, after all, is what concerns each person.
Ełere, at least, in this convention-ridden, Mammon-
worshipping Europe, where the passions are cramped,
and action that would give scope to passionate energy
impossible, the individual has no chance. But in
Some less advanced civilization, where the individual
is freer if the race be less forward, there may be
hope. And a picture of the tropics rises before the
72 , ESSAYS.
imagination, dashed off in a few strokes of marvellous
breadth and richness of colour:—
There to wander far away,
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day.
Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies,
Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise.
Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag,
Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from
the crag ;
Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited
tree—
Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea.
But the deeper nature of the man controls the delu-
sion of the fancy; his heart, reason, and conscience
revolt against the escape into a mere Savage freedom;
they will not allow him to drop out of the van of the .
advancing host; and manly courage comes with the
great thought of a society that is rapidly fulfilling
the idea of humanity; the personal unhappiness, the
private wrong, the bitterness of outraged affection,
give way before the upswelling sympathy with the
triumph of the race to which he belongs. The
passion has passed in the rush of words that gave
it expression, and life shines clear again, no longer
on the tender-hearted, imaginative boy, but on the
Iſla II
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 73
There is no poem of Tennyson's more strikingly
dramatic throughout than this, and none in which
an age weakened by sentimental indulgence may find
thoughts more suggestive of its recovery to manly
vigour and endurance. And if, in works of art,
artistic beauty alone be looked for, no poem can be
more rich in colour, more rapid in movement, more
abundant in exquisite beauties of detail. The verse
is a marvel of force and grace,—full, majestic, im-
petuous, thundering on like the downrush of a
mighty cataract, with its infinite pulsations of light,
its dazzling interradiation of changing forms and
colours—the dumptôuov (Yexaapua translated into
sound. Its grand music, poured, full of grief and
indignation, to the long swell of the waves upon the
flat sandy shore, recals the Homeric
Bn 3’ &ceav trapa 6iva troAvºpxoto:80to 6a Aao'ams:
IIoWAa 5’ Tett’ &travev6e clay #paff 6 yepatos—
no less by its majesty of rhythm than by the likeness
of the locality.
The four principal poems in the third series of
Mr. Tennyson's works which depict love in its
various influences upon different characters and under
differing circumstances have been now more or less
fully touched on; and their general characteristic is,
that the passion there shown in operation is a purify-
ing, strengthening, Sustaining power; that it allies
74 ESSAYS.
itself with conscience and reason, and braces instead
of debilitating the will. The small poem called
Fatima is the only instance in which Mr. Tennyson
has expended his powers in portraying any love that
incapacitates for the common duties of life, unless the
two Marianas be regarded in this light, which would
be a perverse misconception of their main purpose.
In Locksley Hall the ghost of a murdered love is
fairly laid, and the man comes out of his conflict the
stronger and the clearer for his experience. Nothing
that can with any propriety be called morbid or un-
healthy belongs to any of the great love poems in
the collection; and surely the view of the relation
of the sexes in the Princess is as sound a basis for
a noble life as was ever propounded. It would be
singular if, with such antecedents, Mr. Tennyson
should, in the maturity of his intellect and expe-
rience, have descended to exhibit the influence of
love upon a weak and worthless character, and have
chosen for that purpose a melodramatic story of
suicide, murder, and madness, dished up for popular
applause with vehement invective on the vices of
the English nation, and claptrap appeals to the war-
feeling of the day. This, however, is what we are
asked to believe of Mr. Tennyson's latest production,
Maud, by the loudest professional critics of the
journals and magazines. The critics give us some
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 75
gauge of their opinion by tracing Mr. Tennyson's
gradual degradation through the Princess, lower still
in In Memoriam, to its climax of weakness and ab-
surdity in Maud; and it is but justice to say that
these opinions are not now for the first time put
forth on the provocation of the last-named poem, but
appear to be the deliberate convictions of the writers.
We believe that both the Princess and In Memoriam
are in their sixth edition, which, apart from private
experience, necessarily limited, of the impression the
works have produced, leads to the conclusion that
these writers do not in this case fairly represent the
opinion of the English public. Whether they re-
present it any better in respect to Maud remains to
be seen. Meanwhile it is well not to be frightened
out of the enjoyment of fine poetry, and out of the
instruction to be gained from a great poet's views of
life, as exhibited dramatically in the destiny of a
particular sort of character subjected to a particular
set of influences, by such epithets as “morbid,’ ‘hys-
terical,’ ‘spasmodic,’ which may mean one thing or
another, according to the sense, discrimination, and
sympathy of the man who applies them.
There is little question as to the artistic merits of
Maud. It is only the aim of the poet that has been
assailed; his execution is generally admitted to be
Successful. It may be at once conceded that the
76 JESSAYS.
writer of the fragments of a life which tell the story
of Maud, is not in a comfortable state of mind when
he begins his record; and that if a gentleman were
to utter such sentiments at a board of railway di-
rectors, or at a marriage breakfast, he might not
improperly be called hysterical. Like the hero of
Locksley Hall, his view of the life around him, of
the World in which his lot is cast, has been coloured
by a grievous personal calamity; and the character
of the man is originally one in which the sensibilities
are keen and delicate, the speculative element strong,
the practical judgment unsteady, the will and active
energies comparatively feeble. A Shelley or a Keats
may stand for example of his type; not perfect men,
certainly, but scarcely so contemptible as not to
possess both dramatic interest and some claim to
human sympathy. Chatterton, a much lower type
than either, has been thought a subject of psycho-
logical and moral interest, in spite or in consequence
of the vulgar, petulant, weak melodrama of his life
and death. You see, God makes these morbid,
hysterical, spasmodic individuals occasionally, and
they have various fates; some die without a sign;
others try the world, and dash themselves dead
against its bars; some few utter their passionate
desires, their weak complaints, their ectastic raptures
in Snatches of song that make the World delirious
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 77
with delight-and somehow, for their sake the class
becomes interesting, and we are at times inclined to
measure the spiritual capacity of an age by its treat-
ment of these weak souls, by the fact, whether the
general constitution of Society cherishes such souls
into divine lovers and singers of the beautiful, or
lashes and starves and changes them into moping
idiots and howling madmen. The autobiographer of
Maud belongs to this class by temperament, as any-
one may understand from the turn of his angry
thoughts to those social evils which must and ought
to excite indignation and scorn in gentle and loving
natures that are at the same time inspired with
generous and lofty ideas; from the speculative enig-
mas he torments himself with at the prevalence of
rapine and pain in Creation, at the insignificance of
man in a boundless universe, Subject to iron laws;
from the penetrating tenderness, the rich fancy, the
childlike naïveté of his love for the young girl who
saves him from himself and his dark dreams. There
lies in such a character, from the beginning, the
capacity for weakness and misery, for crime and
madness. That capacity is inseparable from keen
sensibility, powerful emotions, and active imagina-
tion; and if events happen which paralyze the will
already feeble, turn the flow of feeling into a stream
of bitterness, and present to the imagination a world
78 ESSAYS.
of wrong and suffering, the capacity fulfils itself ac-
cording to the force and direction of the events. In
Maud the tendency meets with events that carry it
on through these stages; and the question is whether
any one of these events is impossible or improbable,
whether English society is misrepresented when it
is made capable of furnishing the unwholesome nu-
triment for such a character. It would rather seem
as if the only improbable incident in the whole story
were that which redeems society from a wholesome
charge ; as if the daughter of the millionnaire, the
sister of ‘the dandy-despot, the oiled and curled
Assyrian bull,’ were the least likely character of the
whole group. God be thanked, however, there are
such girls; and many a noble woman—like the
Princess Ida—has given her heart out of pity to
a man whose energy and hope she saw crushed for
want of sympathy, and would endorse these lines:
Perhaps the smile and tender tone
Came out of her pitying womanhood,
For am I not, am I not, here alone
So many a summer since she died,
My mother, who was so gentle and good?
And many a man who seems to himself to be living
on without motive, ‘a death in life,' could say,
Ah! what shall I be at fifty,
Should Nature keep me alive,
TENNYSONPS POEMS. 79
If I find the world so bitter
When I am but twenty-five 2
Yet, if she were not a cheat,
If Maud were all that she seem’d,
And her smile were all that I dream’d,
Then the World were not so bitter
But a smile could make it sweet.
No doubt it is only weak characters who are
affected in this way. To strong men the world is
not made bitter by a father's ruin and suicide, by
the prevalence of meanness and cruelty, by con-
temptuous neglect, and general absence of sympathy.
Nor would a girl’s smile atone to them for such
calamities as do affect them. So weakness has its
compensation.
IBut then, some one will say, if the poet's in-
tention were to exhibit the restorative power of love
over a delicate and beautiful mind overthrown by
circumstances,
Like Sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh,
and if, in respect to this intention, we allow the ex-
hibition of the disease in order to feel the full force
of the restoring influence, and of course are prepared
that the love should be of a kind corresponding to
the character,-rapturous, fanciful, childish, fitted
more for a Southern woman like Juliet, as one of
the best critics of Maud has remarked, than for an
80 FSSAYS,
Englishman,—why does not the poet carry out his
intention, and conduct his story to a happy close?
Why, good sir or madam, does not Shakspeare let
Juliet and her Romeo adorn Verona with troops of
little Juliets and Romeos, to do as their papa and
mamma did before them 2 Why does not Cordelia
live to comfort Lear in his old age, restored to true
appreciation of his daughters? Why does Ophelia
drown in a ditch; and Hamlet, after murdering
Polonius, die by chance medley P Why are not
Othello's eyes opened before, instead of after his
fatal deed, and he and Desdemona allowed to spend
the rest of their days in peace and mutual trust?
Is it, think you, because Shakspeare belongs to the
hysterical, morbid, spasmodic school, and likes the
violent excitement of melodramatic incident 2 We
should be sorry to stake much upon the reception
any of these poetic issues would meet with from
certain critics, if they now for the first time came
up for judgment. Perhaps in all these cases he had
some vague design of moving certain passions which
the older critics knew by the name of pity and terror,
and to which one who was himself something of a
poet—the author of Samson Agonistes—refers ap-
provingly, on the authority of Aristotle, as the
justifying motive of tragedy. Perhaps, too, he might
think it his business, in delineating particular cha-
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 81
racters, to express in their destiny, his view of the
general condition of Society, as tested by the fate
and fortunes of such characters. And possibly Mr.
Tennyson may think himself justified in presenting
a story that does not end happily, for both these
reasons. It may appear to him that ‘ the course of
true love would be unlikely to “run smooth’ under
the circumstances of Maud and her lover, combined
with the conditions of English modern life; that the
man had not the coolness and Self-control to master
the circumstances; and that there was not in society
the generosity and disregard of rank and money
necessary to allow the restorative influence of Maud's
affection to work out its cure. Divest the story for
a moment of its lyric elevation, and compare it with
our greatest novelist's treatment of a somewhat kin-
dred case. Suppose Mr. Barnes Newcome had not
been a coward as well as a brute, and had found his
sister Ethel holding a tête-d-téte in the garden with
her cousin Clive, after an evening party to which the
Most Noble the Marquis of Farintosh had been in-
vited expressly to conclude his courtship, is it not
possible that Mr. Barnes and his cousin might have
enacted the scene between the “Assyrian bull' and
Maud's lover ? The physical courage of the Assyrian
bull is quite as true, to say the least, to the real
types of his class as the physical cowardice of Barnes
G. g
'82 ESSAYS.
Newcome. But the object of the novelist not being
to excite pity and terror, he develops the selfishness
and Mammon-worship of English rich people to other
consequences and in another direction. The poet
takes his course, too, with equal effect towards carry-
ing out his design, and without violating, so far as
we see, the essential contemporary truth of his story;
while he is thus enabled to exhibit some of the eternal
elements of tragedy still in operation among us.
We need say nothing of the skill and beauty
with which the remorse of the murderer is painted.
The wonderful power of the strains in which the
successive stages of this feeling are represented, is
admitted on all hands. English literature has nothing
more dramatically expressive of a mind on the verge
of overthrow, than the verses in which the shell on
the Brittany coast serves as text; nothing that
presents the incipient stage of madness, springing
from the wrecked affections, with more of reality
and pathos than the poem, ‘Oh! that 'twere possible,”
now recovered from the pages of a long-forgotten
miscellany, and set as a jewel amid jewels; nothing
that surpasses in truth and terrible force the mad-
house soliloquy, ‘Dead, long dead!" If the poem
had ended there, ‘the strangest anti-climax that we
ever remember to have read’ would not have offended
a recent critic. We fear that in that case, true
TENNYSON'S PO EMS. 83
enough to nature as it might have been, the climax
would have come in for blame of the opposite cha-
racter, and the poet have been found fault with for
leaving his readers to dwell upon horrible impressions
without relief. We are sure that no poet deserving
the name would choose such an ending where any
other was possible. But men do recover from mad-
ness, and can—though with an awe-struck Sense of
their own unfitness for life, a nervous apprehension
that paralyzes energy and action,-be raised to in-
terest themselves in something out of themselves and
their miseries. And Mr. Tennyson, who introduces
his hero breathing scorn and indignation on the
meanness and littleness of a society, where the vices
of individuals are not obscured and compensated by
any conscious noble aim of the commonwealth, dis-
misses him, cheered and strengthened by knowing
that the British nation has risen for a time to a
consciousness of a great purpose, Lhas awaked out
of its commercial epicureanism, and roused itself to
fight a battle for the right and the good. In sym-
pathy with a grand purpose and a high resolve ani-
mating his countrymen, the dreary phantom that had
haunted him departs; he knows that his love has
forgiven him the injury that his passionate heart
caused hor; and he can wait, calm and hopeful, till
death re-unites them.
G 2
84 ESSAYS.
The fact is, that Mr. Tennyson, without aban-
doming his lyric forms, has in Maud written a
tragedy—a work, that is, which demands to be
judged, not by the intrinsic goodness and beauty
of the actions and emotions dopicted, but by their
relation to character; that charactor, again, being not
only an interesting study in itself and moving our
sympathy, but being related dynamically to the
society of the time which serves as the background
of the picture, and thus displaying the charactoristics
of the society by showing its influence, under par-
ticular circumstances, upon the character selected.
Mr. Tennyson's critics have for the most part road
the poem as if its purpose wore to hold up an ox-
ample for our imitation, and have condomnod it
because, viewed in this light, it offers nothing but
a nature of over-excitable sensibilitics, first rendorod
moody by misfortune, then driven mad by its own
crime, and finally recovercd to a weak exultation in
a noblo Cnterprise it has not the manliness to share.
But no one focls that Shakspeare is immoral in
making Othello kill himself; no one attributes the
cynicism of Mephistopheles to Goothe.
Why then should the author of The Gardener’s
Laughter be Sct down as morbid?—ſho author of
Locksley IIall as one who secs no worth in action?—
the author of Dora as a selfish drcamor, who knows
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 85
nothing of duty P Let us try and be as just to the
great men that live amongst us, as to those who are
beyond our praise or blame. Let us not stone our
own prophets, while we build the tombs of the men
who prophesied to our forefathers.
It is a step back in respect of date, to speak of
The Princess after Maud ; but while the latter is the
deepest and most tragical exhibition of the action of
love upon the character and destiny of an individual
that Mr. Tennyson has given to the world, the
former treats the sexual relations in their most com-
prehensive form, and may so be considered as con-
taining implicitly all individual love-poems, as the
poetical statement of the law which they all exhibit
in particular instances. In its philosophical aim,
therefore, The Princess belongs to the same class of
poems as The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sîn,
in both of which a law of life is presented, not as
modified by the peculiar nature and circumstances of
an individual, but in its absolute universality as a
law for the human race. It is natural enough that
in an age when absolute and universal Solutions are
sought not only for physical phenomena, but also for
mental and social,—when not only the movements
of the heavenly bodies and the complex relations of
the constituent elements of Organic matter, but the
course of thought—the growth, decay, and character
86 - ESSAYS.
of states, in a word, the whole life of the individual,
and the collective life of humanity, are supposed to
be traceable to the orderly operation of fixed prin-
ciples,—it is natural that, fascinated by the grandeur
of speculations of this immensity, the poet, too,
should attempt to rise above the portraiture of indi-
vidual life to the exhibition, in an absolute form,
of the principles that determine individual life. Al-
ways, indeed, it has been held that the highest
poetry gave the law as well as the special instance;
interpreted humanity as well as some individual life;
and became highest by blending, as they say, the
universal with the particular. This, however, simply
means that true portraiture of individual life neces-
Sarily involves generic and specific, as well as in-
dividual truth; that John or Mary must be man
and woman—English man and English woman—to
be a pair of real human beings, under the influence
of any particular feelings. Such poems as those
mentioned above drop the individual and the special
altogether, and attempt to present a law of human
nature in operation upon beings who are human
without being particular men or women. Now, it
is the very essence of poetry to present, not abstract
propositions to the intellect, but concrete real truth
to the Senses, the affections,—to the whole man,
in short; and this can be done only by presenting
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 87
objects as they exist and act upon one another, and
upon our minds, in the real world,—not logical
objects formed by the action of our analytic faculty,
and abstracted from reality. Such universality as
poetry has is derived from the fact, that the indi-
vidual contains the genus and the species, and that
the pure universal of the intellect has no counterpart
in nature, and is therefore not a truth in the sense
in which poetry concerns itself with truth. And
poets who attempt to get beyond individual truth,
implicitly containing generic and specific truth, fall
into one of two mistakes: they either present the
truth as abstract statement, dressed up in rhetorical
ornament, and so fail to fulfil the true function of
their genius, or, fecling the necessity of avoiding
this, they invent a fictitious allegorical machinery,
with which they obscure the statement, and are, in
fact, treating a special instance, with this difference,
—that the individual traits are fanciful and arbitrary,
instead of being those of actual experience. The
result, in the latter case, is that the reader makes
the universality by his abstraction of details, getting,
at last, back to a mere abstract statement, and so
losos all the force of truc poetic teaching; while, as
the only compensation, his imagination is amused by
the ingenuity and beauty of the machinery. And,
in both cases, by aiming at an universality which
88 ESSAYS.
belongs to Science, poetry loses her true prerogative;
and no longer commanding the sympathies, fails to
teach,--becoming at once less useful and less de-
lightful. The Palace of Art and The Vision of Sin
are instances of the one mode of treatment; The
Thoo Voices may partly serve to illustrate the other.
All three contain exquisite detail, but the whole fails
of its effect. And were we compelled to regard The
Princess solely as an attempt to exhibit the action
Tänd justification of sexual love as an universal law
of human life, as an allegory, aiming at Scientific
generality, a similar failure would certainly have to
be recorded. The machinery would, in that case,
be overdone—would attract the attention to detail
quite as much as if a merely common love-story were
being told, without giving the force of reality, and
would, by the preponderance of detail and traits of
individuality and special circumstance, derogate from
the pure universality of the problem. But, in fact,
The Princess is “earnest wed with sport,’—the attempt
of a mind, whose feeling for the beautiful and the
true is stronger than its humour and fun, to treat
certain modern mistakes about the true relation of
man and woman with good-humoured satire, and in
spite of this intention impelled to a strain of serious
thought and impassioned feeling. It is a laugh. Sub-
siding into a loving smile, playful irony surprised
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 89
into tenderness and tears. But because the com-
mencement is mock-heroic, and the machinery highly
fanciful—though not so removed from possibility as
to baffle belief and distress the judgment, the earnest
close seems rather the poet's own utterance of his
views of the relations of the sexes, than the inherent
moral of the story. And admiring, as all must, the
Sweet tenderness and noble thought of the dialogue
that ends the poem,-the magnificence, at Once so
rich and tasteful, of the description of the woman’s
college, and of the scenery about it, the exquisite
sentiment and finish of the interspersed songs and
idylls, the movement and dramatic life of the
whole poem,-One cannot help regretting that the
longest, and in some respects the finest, of Mr. .
Tennyson’s productions should have been fairly cha-
racterized by him as ‘A Medley,’ and that he should
have been obliged at last to say,+
Then rose a little feud betwixt the two—
Betwixt the mockers and the realists:
And I, betwixt them both, to please them both,
And yet to give the story as it rose,
I moved as in a strange diagonal,
And maybe neither pleased myself nor them.
BIowever, the incongruity is there, and we must
make the best of it. It interferes, somewhat, with
our interest in the loves of the Prince and Princess
90 JESSAYS.
as actual human beings, and deprives the grand
philosophic sentiment at the close of the impressive-
ness that belongs to the moral of an actual human
story. On the other hand, the impulse towards an
earnest treatment of the subj ect, struggling through
and finally overcoming the mock-heroic, gives the
advantage of a contrast, and we pass from the one to
the other with a heightened Zest and relish. Al-
together, if we give ourselves up to the poet—not
Setting rules for him, but letting him take us along
as he will, and accepting his account of the origin
and motives of his poem,--we shall find nothing
wanting to a complete work of art, which may not
be the most profound or affecting treatment of a
great truth, but which, flowering thick with beauties
of detail, is graceful and noble throughout, and rises
to a close in which lofty thought and passionate
feeling blend, typifying the union of man and
woman, in one full, rich stream of poetry,<
The two-celled heart beating with one full stroke,
Life.
We have not spoken of Mr. Tennyson as a song
writer; yet, had he written nothing but half-a-dozen
of his best songs, his place among English poets
would have been incontestably high. Flow down
cold Rivulet to the Sea—Break, break—The Bugle
Song—Tears, idle Tears—Come down, 0 Maid, from
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 91
gonder Mountain Height, and the lyric that sparkles
through The Brook, would by themselves found
a reputation as lasting as the English language.
One might almost as well attempt to define the
simple sensations or to explain why a melody in
music charms the ear, as to convey in words the
impression any of these songs makes upon the reader.
One may analyse them, and put down the separate
feelings and images of which they consist; but the
effort to reflect upon them substitutes, thoughts for
sentiments, as some of the most delicate perfumes of
flowers refuse to yield themselves to an effort, and
only affect us as we catch their evanescent fragrance
in fitful wafts. Take, for instance, Tears, idle Tears,
to which the title of Regret might be affixed. No
doubt its charm partly depends on the pathetic cha-
racter of the separate images collected from human
life by the dominant feeling, and on the skill with
which these rise gradually to a climax. The Sad
pleasure excited by the waning fields in autumn—
one of the lightest and most evanescent of regrets,
deepens into the feelings with which the return and
the departure of friends whose dwelling is beyond
the ocean is regarded. It passes, by a most natural
and touching gradation, to that last parting from all
that is dear upon earth, when the Sweetness of the
least objects that have blended with happy lives is
92 ISSAYS.
solemnized and saddened by the thought that it is
felt for the last time by the departing spirit; and
that solemn sweetness passes again to a climax in the
passion of tenderness and regret which makes the
memory of the dead dearer than the presence of the
living, the passion of tenderness and despair which
gives an agonizing rapture to the dreams of hopeless
love.
IBut the power of the song over our feelings is far
greater than can be attributed to any succession of
pathetic recollections of human life presented dis-
tinctly as objects of thought. It awakes all the
fountains of bitter-sweet memory, sets us dreaming
like a half audible strain of music in the distance,
without fixing the mind to definite objects, suspends
reflection and will, and brings up all the delicious
sweetness of the past with the sadness that it is past,
—all the brightness of our brightest moments with the
cloud that so soon passes over them,-the meetings
and the partings, the eternal change and flow, that
make up human life. It is in its infinite suggestive-
ness that its charm lies; in its power, not to bring
this or that pathetic remembrance before the mind,
but to set the mind at the tone of delicious day-
dreaming, and to give a half-blissful, half-regretful
key-note to the day-dreams. And this subtle power
of suggestiveness belongs more or less to all Mr.
TENNYSOW’S POEMS. 93
Tennyson's songs; they all seem to touch chords
that lie deeper down than the region of clear intel-
lectual consciousness; they present definite ideas, but
they present them with such delicacy of touch as to
leave the mind only half conscious of their presence,
—just sufficiently conscious to be set off dreaming
about them, to feel their influence without being
drawn out of itself to them, while the melody of
the strain keeps up the creative power of dreaming
at its highest activity.
Scarcely one of the more elaborate poems of which
we have spoken, though its main object is to present
the passion of love in its influence upon various cha-
racters under various circumstances, fails to supply
abundant-evidence of Mr. Tennyson’s interest in
other phases of life than those coloured by high
emotion, and of his power to present them with new
force and meaning. A fine sense of natural beauty
and a marvellous faculty of word-painting adorn his
love-poems with landscape pictures which need fear
comparison with those of no English poet. Locksley
JHall is a grand hymn of human progress, in which
the discoveries of science, the inventions of art, the
order and movement of Society, the Sublime hopes
and beliefs of religion, blend in a magnificent vision
of the age, and are sung with the rapture of a prophet
to the noblest music. In Maud the commonest news-
94 JESSAYS.
paper details of themeanness, the cheating, the cruelty,
the crime and misery, Sorife among us, supply food to
the sava indignatio of the man whose temperament
and circumstances make him look on the darker
aspects of the time; and the same man finds in the
latest topic of the day—which is also one of the
grandest spectacles of our age—the comfort and the
hope that restore him to Sanity and peace with himself
and the world. In The Princess, history, science,
and metaphysics are touched with a light of pene-
trating intellect as well as a grace of poetry; the
amusements of a Mechanics' Institute and the genial
pleasantry of a gay picnic party contrast with the
profoundest reflections on the Continental Revolu-
tions of '48 and the most hopeful interpretations of
the last new socialist theories. It is this wide range
of thought, ever active in every direction to supply
material for the imaginative faculty of the artist,-
this catholic sympathy with modern life in all its
characteristic phases, that is Mr. Tennyson's distin-
guishing quality, and that, in combination with his
formal poetic skill, renders him the favourite poet of
the cultivated classes. And it is in the development
of this wide range of thought and sympathy in his
poems published since 1833 that the growth and
maturity of his genius mainly manifests itself. It is
because he has grown and ripened as a man that his
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 95
art has seemed to become more perfect with every
production.
Although, however, these qualities are abundantly
evidenced by the poems hitherto treated, it would
leave this survey incomplete were we not to allude
to the poems which are devoted expressly to the de-
lineation of other phases of modern life than those
mainly dependent on the passion of Sexual love. If
there were no other motive, the necessity of indica-
ting Mr. Tennyson's power of writing in a homelier,
a less ornate and elaborate style than he generally
adopts as the proper dramatic expression of the cha-
racters and moods of passion he is presenting, would
be motive enough. But in fact The Brook, Edwin
Morris, and The Golden Year, are among his most
pleasing productions. The Day Dream, really a
love-poem within a love-poem, exquisitely blends
sport with earnest, and might be taken in its growth
from The Sleeping Beauty to its present elaborate
form as a type of the development of Mr. Tennyson's
genius from Sensuous beauty and rhythmical music
to the deep heart and wise intellect of his later poems.
Audley Court contains a charming song and a de-
licious moonlight landscape, besides a transcendant
description of a game-pie. Walking to the Mail is
a shrewd conversation on the causes that develope
character and determine political opinion; not in
96 ESSAYS."
our opinion particularly worthy of blank verse or its
place in the collection. Then there are the expressly
political lyrics, one of which, at least, Love thou thy
Land, is only to be compared with an essay of Lord
Bacon's for its compressed energy and imaginative
reality of phrase, for its fulness and wisdom of senti-
ment; and far above any essay of Lord Bacon's for
its ardent patriotism, its noble sense of right and
truth, its grand faith in human destiny, its pru-
dence, and its courage. An obscure stanza or two
scarcely make themselves felt in the recollection of
its general effect.
IBut we must speak briefly of In Memoriam.
What survey of Mr. Tennyson's poetry could be
satisfactory without it 2 Certainly not ours, who do
not believe all feelings to be morbid and unhealthy
which are not joyous or comfortable, and who do
believe that Sorrow, and doubt, and meditation have
their appointed beneficent influence upon human
character, and are no less part of human training for
a nobler and more blessed existence than mirth, and
demonstrative certainty, and vigorous action. We
should be guilty of treason against our deepest con-
victions were we to pass without a protest the notion
that In Memoriam is a morbid mistake, the un-
healthy product of a man of genius in an unhealthy
mood, degrading his genius by employing it in the
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 97
delineation of a sorrow that is unmanly and exagge-
rated,—a spasmodic utterance of a weak mind, that
can only affect other weak minds with hysterical
emotion, and incapacitate all who subject themselves
to its influence for their duties to their fellow men
and their reliance upon the goodness of God. Even
if we regarded In Memoriam as simply the record of
a personal sorrow, a poetical monument to a personal
friend, we should be cautious of calling it exagge-
rated, till we were quite cortain that there was any-
thing unworthy and unmanly in binding up our
hearts with the liſe of another, and in feeling them
quiver with agony when that other life was torn
from us. It is easy to understand, when Social inter-
course goes no deeper than liking and disliking,
being amused and bored; when personal relations
have dwindled down to club intimacies, and a friend
is the man with whom we dine and play whist; that
such a tender and rooted affection as is rocorded
through. In Memoriam should appear exaggerated.
The question is whother the Pall-Mall standard of
human nature be the highest, whether a profound
personal affection be really a weakness, or whether
on the Pall-Mall theory the world would not rápidly
become a pigstye or a slaughterhouse. Compare the
tone in which Shakspeare addresses the male friend
to whom the greater number of the Sonncts apply,
IBI
98 FSSAYS.
with Tennyson’s tone in speaking of Arthur Hallam.
If the one is supposed to do no discredit to the
soundest-hearted as well as the largest-minded man
of modern Europe, why is the other to be called
morbid and exaggerated 2 The critics need not take
so much trouble to let the world know that they are
not Shakspeares and Tennysons in heart any more
than in intellect. No one who knows the class
would be in danger of So erroneous a supposition.
But there are thousands of men and women whose
affections are akin to those of these great poets, and
who are grateful for the power of reading in beautiful
poetry an adequate expression of their own deepest
feelings. We know that such persons find in In
Memoriam the sort of consolation and strength they
find in the Psalms of David. The suspºria de pro-
fundis of great minds give articulate expression to,
and interpret the sorrows of lesser minds, which else
would darken life with ‘clouds of nameless trouble,”
and perhaps never find a peaceful solution.
But the personal motive of In Memoriam is quite
inadequate as the standing-point for criticism of the
poem.
The imaginative woe
That loves to handle spiritual strife
is operative throughout ; and, as Coleridge says of
love,
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 99
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
Are all but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame—
so, In, Memoriam traverses the widest circuit of
thought and feeling in search of nutriment to its
mood, and represents the night-side of the Soul as
rich in objects and as various in hues, as the side
illuminated by love and joy, but all in Sad greys and
browns, or shining with the tender grace of the
moonlight or starlight which the brilliance of the
full day conceals. There is as much variety and
beauty in this aspect of life, as in the other; and as
God has created us with large capacities for Sorrow,
and has placed us in circumstances which give those
capacities ample employment, it is, perhaps, quite as
sensible to enquire what possible meaning lies in
this arrangement, as to ignore the fact altogether;
and quite as religious to presume that it has some
beneficent meaning, and is not without a gracious
design in training men to virtue and blossedness, as
to attempt to baffle the arrangement by drowning the
voice of nature in pleasure or in action. If all life
but enjoyment and action is morbid and unhealthy,
the world has been strangely misconstructed. The
mere comfort and Serenity of the human race seem
not to have been leading objects in its design. Had
H 2
I00 IFSSAYS.
the Epicureans been consulted at the creation, they
could, no doubt, have suggested several improve-
ments. As a late eminent judge remarked, they
would have had it rain only during the night; and,
with Porson, when Parr, ‘the schoolmaster run to
seed,” pompously asked him, ‘Mr. Professor, what
do you think of the existence of physical and moral
evil?” they would reply, ‘Why, Doctor, I think we
could have done very well without either.’ Un-
fortunately, neither Epicurean, nor stoic, nor egotist
of any school or sect, was taken into counsel when
the foundations of the universe were laid. And Mr.
Tennyson, finding himself in a world where sorrow
alternates with joy, and in a nation whose humour,
even, has been supposed to have a serious and Sa-
turnine cast,-having heard, too, we may presume,
of a text in a certain book which says, “Blessed
are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,’—
and having himself lost a friend who was as the light
of his eyes and the joy of his heart, has not thought
it an unworthy employment of his poetic gifts to
bestow them in erecting a monument to his friend,
upon which he has carved bas-reliefs of exceeding
grace and beauty, and has worked delicate flowers
into the cornices, and adorned the capitals of the
columns with emblematic devices; and upon the
summit he has set the statue of his friend, and about
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 101
the base run the sweetest words of love with the
mournfullest accents of grief—the darkest doubts
with the sublimest hopes. The groans of despair
are there, with the triumphant songs of faith, and
over all, in letters of gold, surmounting the mingled
posies which tell of all the moods of the human mind
through its years of mourning, is the scroll on which
one reads from afar, ‘ I am the resurrection and the
life.’ ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.' '
Cambridge Fssays, 1855.
102 JESSAYS,
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS.
WILLIAM WoRDsworth is generally allowed to have
exercised a deeper and more permanent influence
upon the literature and modes of thinking of our
age, than any of the great poets who lived and wrote
during the first quarter of the present century. In
proportion as his fame was of slower growth, and
his poems were longer in making their way to the
understanding and affections of his countrymen, so
their roots seem to have struck deeper down, and
the crown of glory that encircles his memory is of
gold that has been purified and brightened by the
fiery ordeal through which it has passed. Tennyson
says of the laureate wreath which he so deservedly
wears, that it is
Greener from the brows
Of him who uttered nothing base.
And this, which seems at first sight negative praise,
is, in reality, a proof of exquisite discernment; for
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 103
it is just that which constitutes the marked distinction
between Wordsworth and the other really original
poets who are likely to share with him the honour
of representing poetically to posterity the early part
of the nineteenth century. In their crowns there is
alloy, both moral and intellectual. His may not be
of so imperial a fashion; the gems that stud it may
be less dazzling, but the gold is of ethereal temper,
and there is no taint upon his robe. Weakness, in-
completeness, imperfection, he had, for he was a
mortal man of limited faculties, but spotless purity
is not to be denied him—he uttered nothing base.
Our readers will anticipate us in ranking with him, k
as the representative poets of their age, Byron, Scott,
and Shelley. Of each of these we would say a few
words, especially in this representative character.
Lord Byron's poems are the actual life-experience
of a man whose birth and fortune enabled him to
mix with the highest Society, and whose character
led him to select for his choice that portion of it
which pursued pleasure as the main, if not the sole
object of existence. Under a thin disguise of name,
country, and outward incident, they present us with
the desires which actuated, the passions which agi-
tated, and the characters which were the ideals of
the fashionable men and women of the earlier part
of this century. Limited and monotonous as they
104. ESSAYS.
are in their essential nature, ringing perpetual changes
upon one passion and One phase of passion, the bril-
|liance of their diction, the voluptuous melody of
their verse, the picturesque beauty of their scenery,
well enough represent that life of the richer classes,
which chases with outstretched arms all the Protean
forms of pleasure, only to find the subtle essence
escape as soon as grasped, leaving behind in its place
weariness, disappointment, and joyless stagnation.
(The loftiest joys they paint are the thrillings of the
sense, the raptures of a fine nervous organization;
their pathos is the regret, and their wisdom the lan-
guor and the Satiety of the jaded voluptuary. These
form the staple, the woofof Lord Byron's poetry, and
with it is enwoven all that which gives outward
variety and incessant stimulating novelty to the
pursuits of an Englishman of fashion. These pursuits
are as numerous, as absorbing, and demand as much
activity of a kind as those of the student or the man
of business. Among them will be found those upon
which the student and the man of business are em-
ployed, though in a different spirit, and with a differ-
ent aim. Thus we frequently see among the votaries
of pleasure men who are fond of literature, of art, of
politics, of foreign travel, of all manly and active en-
terprise; but all these will be pursued, not as duties
to be done, in an earnest, hopeful, self-sacrificing
TVORIDS WORTH2S POEMS. 105
*
spirit, “that scorns delights and lives laborious days,’
but for amusement, for immediate pleasure to be
reaped, as a resource against ennui and vacuity, to
which none but the weakest and most effeminate
nature will succumb. This difference of object and
of motive necessitates a difference in the value of the
results. The soil, which is ploughed superficially,
and for a quick return, will bear but frail and fading
flowers; the planter of oaks must toil in faith and
patience and Sublime confidence in the future. And
So, into whatever field the wide and restless energies
of men like Lord Byron carry them, they bring home
no treasures that will endure—no marble of which
world-lasting statue or palace may be hewn or built
—no iron, of which world-Subduing machines may
be wrought. Poems, pictures, history, science, the
magnificence and loveliness of Nature, cities of old
renown, adventures of desperate excitement, new
manners, languages, and characters, supply them
with an ever-fresh flow of sensation and emotion,
keep the senses and the faculties cognate with sense
in a pleasant activity, but no well-based generaliza-
tion is gained for the understanding; facts are not
even carefully observed and honestly studied; pleasant
Sensation was the object, and that once obtained,
there is no more worth in that which produced it,
though in it may lie a law of God’s manifestation,
106 ESSAYS.
one of those spiritual facts to know and obey which
would seem the chief purpose of man's existence, to
discover and make them known, the noblest glory
and highest function of genius. It is in this spirit
that Lord Byron has questioned Life: “Oh ! where
can pleasure be found?' and Life, echo-like, would
only answer, “Where !' It is because he put that
question more earnestly, lived up to its spirit more
fearlessly, and more faithfully and experimentally
reported the answer, that he is so eminently a repre-
sentative poet—a representative of what a large and
important class in every country actually is, of what
a far larger class aspires to be. It is in his fearless
attempt at solving the problem of life in his own
way, his complete discomfiture, and his unshrinking
exhibition of that discomfiture, that the absolute and
permanent value of his social teaching consists. For
he was endowed with such gifts of nature and of
fortune, so highly placed, so made to attract and
fascinate, adorned with such beauty and grace, with
such splendour of talents, with such quick suscepti-
bility to impressions, with such healthy activity of
mind, with such rich flow of speech, with such vast
capacity of enjoyment, that no one is likely to make
the experiment he made from a higher vantage ground,
with more chances of success. And the result of his
experience he has given to the World, and has thrown
WORDSWORTH's POEMS. 107
over the whole the charm of a clear, vigorous, ani-
mated style, at once masculine, and easy, and pol-
ished, sparkling with beauty, instinct with life,
movement, and variety; by turns calm, voluptuous,
impassioned, enthusiastic, terse, and witty, and al-
ways most prominent that unstudied grace, that
Rubens-like facility of touch, which irresistibly im-
presses the reader with a sense of power, of strength
not put fully forth, of resources carelessly flowing
out with exhaustless prodigality, not husbanded with
timid anxiety and exhibited with pompous ostentation.
It is the combination of these qualities of the artist,
with his peculiar fearlessness and honesty of avowal
—his plain, unvarnished expression of what he found
pleasant, and chose for his good, that will ever give
him a high, if not almost the highest place among
the poets of the nineteenth century, even with those
readers who perceive and lament the worthlessness
of his matter, the superficiality and scantiness of his
knowledge, the want of purity and elevation in his
life and character. Those will best appreciate his
wonderful talents who are acquainted with the works
of his countless imitators, who have admirably suc-
ceeded in reproducing his bad morality, his super-
ficial thoughts, and his characterless portraits, with-
out the fervour of his feeling, the keenness of his
Sensations, the ease and vigour of his language, the
108 JESSAYS.
flash of his wit, or the knowledge of the world, and
the manly common-sense which redeemed and gave
value to what else had been entirely worthless.
If the name of Lord Byron maturally links itself
with the fashionable life of great cities; with circles
where men and women live mutually to attract and
please each other; where the passions are cherished
as stimulants and resources against ennui, are fostered
by luxurious idleness, and heightened by all the aids
that an old and elaborate material civilization can
add to the charms of beauty, and the excitements of
brilliant assemblies; where art and literature are de-
graded into handmaids and bondslaves of sensuality;
where the vanity of social distinction fires the tongue
of the eloquent speaker, wakens the harp of the poet,
colours the canvass of the painter, moulds the manners
and sways the actions, directs even the loves and
the hatreds of all; no less naturally does the name
of Sir Walter Scott stand as the symbol and repre-
sentative of the life and tastes of the country aris-
tocracy, who bear the titles and hold the lands of
the feudal barons, and of the country gentlemen
whose habits and manners are in such perfect con-
trast to those of the Squire Westerns to whose places
they have succeeded. Possessing in a high degree
the active and athletic frame, the robust health, the
hardy training, the vigorous nerve, the bold spirit,
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 109
the frank bearing, and the genial kindness of the
gentlemen of the olden time, he could heartily appre-
ciate and unhesitatingly approve all that time and
revolution had spared of feudal dominion and terri-
torial grandeur. The ancient loyalty, so happily
tempering the firmness of a principle with the fervour
of a feeling, never beat higher in the heart of a
cavalier of , the seventeenth than in that of the
Scottish Advocate of the nineteenth century. Every
one will remember that he refused to write a life of
Mary Queen of Scots, because in reference to her
conduct, his feelings were at variance with his judg-
ment. And in painting those old times in which his
imagination delighted to revel, all that would most
have revolted our modern mildness of manners, and
shocked our modern sense of justice, was softened
down or dropped out of sight, and the nobler features
of those ages, their courage, their devotion, their
strength and clearness of purpose, their marked
individuality of character, their impulses of heroism
and delicacy, their manly enterprise, their pictu-
resque costumes and manners of life, were all brought
into bold relief, and placed before the reader with
such fulness of detail, in Such grandeur of outline, in
such bright and vivid colouring, as gave even to the
unimaginative a more distinct conception of, and
a more lively sympathy with, the past than they
110 ESSAYS.
could gain for themselves of the present, as it was
whirling and roaring round them, confusing them
with its shifting of hues and forms, and stunning
them with its hurricane of noises. And apart from
the fascination which History, so presented, must
Shave for the descendants of men and classes of
historical renown, for the hereditary rulers and the
privileged families of a great country, and though
probably the creator of the splendid pageantry was
definitely conscious of no such purpose, yet there
must have mingled with this fascination, and have
infused into it a deeper and more personal feeling,
the regretful sense that the state of society so glow-
ingly depicted had passed away,+a foreboding that
even its last vestiges were fast disappearing before
the wave of democratic equality, and the uprising of
a new aristocracy of wealth and intellect. If at the
time those famous verse and prose romances came
upon the world in a marvellously rapid succession, all
that the public were conscious of was a blind pleasure
and unreflecting delight, it is no less true that in an
age of revolution they raised up before it in a trans-
formed and glorified life the characters, the institu-
tions, the Sentiments and manners of an age of absolute
government by the strong arm or by divine right—
of an age of implicit belief, inspiring heroic action,
Sanctioning romantic tenderness, harmonizing and
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 111
actuating all the virtues that adorn and elevate
fallen humanity; and that since then there has arisen
in our country a thoughtful reverence and love for
the past—a sense of the livingness and value of our
history—a desire and a determination to appreciate
and comprehend, and so not forfeit, the inheritance
of wisdom, forethought, brave action, and noble self-
denial, which our ancestors have bequeathed to us.
Bow many false and puerile forms this feeling has
taken it does not fall within our present scope to
notice. In spite of white-waistcoat politics and
Pugin pedantries, the feeling is a wise and a noble
one—one which is the Surety and the Safeguard of
progress; and that much of it is owing to the interest
excited so widely and so deeply by Sir Walter Scott's
writings, those will be least disposed to deny who
have thought most on the causes which mould a
nation’s character, and the influences which work
out a nation's destiny.
It is no fanciful or arbitrary spirit of system that,
while we assign to Byron the empire over the world
of fashion and of pleasure, and seek the mainspring
of Scott's popularity in the Sway of old historical
traditions over a landed aristocracy, and the longing
regret with which they look back to a state of
society passed or rapidly passing away, we should
regard Shelley as the poetical representative of those
112 JESSAYS.
whose hopes and aspirations and affections rush
forward to embrace the great. Hereafter, and dwell
in rapturous anticipation on the coming of the golden
year, the reign of universal freedom, and the estab- -
lishment of universal brotherhood. By nature and
by circumstance he was marvellously fitted for his
task,-gentle, sensitive, and fervid, he shrank from *
the least touch of wrong, and hated injustice with
the zeal and passion of a martyr; while, as if to
point him unmistakeably to his mission, and conse-
crate him by the divine ordination of facts, he was
subjected at his first entrance into life to treatment,
both from constituted authority and family con-
nexion, so unnecessarily harsh, so stupidly cruel, as
would have driven a worse man into reckless dissipa-
tion, a weaker man into silent despair. “Most men,”
he says himself, |
Are cradled into poctry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Whether this be the best or most usual training for
the poet may well be doubted, but it is quite indu-
bitable that such discipline will soonest open a man’s
eyes to the evils of existing institutions, and the
vices of old societies; and will lend to his invectives
that passion which raises them above Satire—to his
schemes, that enthusiasm which redeems them from
being crotchets; will turn his abstract abhorrence of
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 113
oppression into hatred against the oppressors—his
loathing of corruption into a withering scorn and
contempt for tyrants and their tools, the knaves and
hypocrites who use holy names and noble offices to
promote their selfish ends, and to fetter and enslave
their brother men. And so it happened with Shelley.
The feelings of poignant anguish and bitter indig-
nation, which had been roused in him by cruelty and
injustice towards himself, coloured all his views of
Society, and at once sharpened his hostility to the
civil and religious institutions of his country, and
lent more glowing colours to the rainbow of promise
that beamed upon him from the distance, through
the storm of bloodshed and revolution. Add to this,
that his mind was ill-trained, and not well furnished
with facts; that he could draw from form, colour,
and sound, a voluptuous enjoyment, keener and more
intense than the grosser animal sensations of Ordinary
men; that his intellect hungered and thirsted after
absolute truth, after central being, after a living
personal unity of all things. Thus he united in
himself many of the mightiest tendencies of our time
—its democratic, its Sceptical, its pantheistic, its
socialistic spirit; and thus he has become the darling
and the watchword of those who aim at reconstruct-
ing society, in its forms, in its principles, and in its
beliefs, who regard the past as an unmitigated
I
114 JESSAYS.
failure, as an entire mistake, who would welcome
the deluge for the sake of the new world that would
rise after the subsidence of the waters. Nor has their
affectionate admiration been ill bestowed. With one
exception, a more glorious poet has not been given
to the English nation; and if we make One exception,
it is because Shakspeare was a man of profounder
insight, of calmer temperament, of wider experience,
of more extensive knowledge; a greater philosopher,
in fact, and a wiser man; not because he possessed
more vital heat, more fusing, shaping power of im-
agination, or a more genuine poetic impulse and
inspiration. After the passions and the theories,
which supplied Shelley with the subject-matter of his
poems have died away and become mere matters of
history, there will still remain a song, such as mortal
man never sung before, of imarticulate rapture and of
freezing pain,_of a blinding light of truth and a
dazzling weight of glory, translated into English
speech, as coloured as a painted window, as Sug-
gestive, as penetrating, as intense as music.
We have assigned to three great poets of our age
the function of representing three classes, distinct in
character, position, and taste. But as these classes
intermingle and become confused in life, so that
individuals may partake of the elements of all three,
and, in fact, no one individual can be exactly defined
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 115
by his class type, so the poets that represent them
have, of course, an influence and a popularity that
extend far beyond the classes to whose peculiar
characteristics and predominant tastes we have as-
sumed them to have given form and expression. Men
read for amusement, to enlarge the range of their
ideas and sympathies, to stimulate the emotions that
are sluggish or wearied out; and thus the poet is not
only the interpreter of men and of classes to them-
selves, but represents to men characters, modes of
life, and social phenomena with which they are before
unacquainted, excites interest, and arouses sympathy,
and becomes, the reconciler, by causing misunder-
standings to Vanish, as each man and each class com-
prehends more fully the common humanity that lies
under the special manifestation, the same elemental
passions and affections, the same wants, the same
desires, the same hopes, the same beliefs, the same
duties. It is thus especially that poets are teachers,
that they aid in strengthening and civilizing nations,
in drawing closer the bonds of brotherhood.
IHe of whom it is our especial purpose in this
article to speak, has said of himself, ‘The poet is
a teacher. I wish to be considered as a teacher, or
as nothing.” If we are asked wherein lay the value
of his teaching, we reply, that it lay mainly in the
power that was given him of unfolding the glory and
I 2
116 JESSAYS.
the beauty of the material world, and in bringing
consciously before the minds of men the high moral
function that belonged in the human economy to the
imagination, and in thereby redeeming the faculties
of sense from the comparatively low and servile office
of ministering merely to the animal pleasures, or
what Mr. Carlyle has called ‘the beaver inventions.”
That beside, and in connexion with this, he has
shown the possibility of combining a state of vivid
enjoyment, even of intense passion, with the activity
of thought, and the repose of contemplation. He
has, moreover, done more than any poet of his age
to break down and obliterate the conventional barriers
that, in our disordered social state, divide rich and
poor into two hostile nations; and he has done this,
not by bitter and passionate declamations on the in-
justice and vices of the rich, and on the wrongs and
virtues of the poor, but by fixing his imagination on
the elemental feelings, which are the same in all
classes, and drawing out the beauty that lies in all
that is truly natural in human life. Dirt, squalor,
disease, vice, and hard-heartedness, are not natural
to any grade of life; where they are found, they are
man's work, not God's; and the poet's business is
not with the misery of man’s making, but with the
escape from that misery revealed to those that have
eyes to see, and ears to hear, we mean, that no
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 117
true poet will be merely a painter of that which is
low, deformed, essentially inhuman, as his ultimate
and highest aim, though, as means, he may, as the
greatest poets have done, use them to move and rouse
the sleeping soul. This, we say, in answer to those
that asserted that Wordsworth was not a true painter
of manners and characters from humble life : we say
he was, for that he painted, as minutely as served
his aim, that which was essential to its occupations
and its general outward condition—that which it
must be, if Christian men are to look upon the in-
equalities of wealth and station as a permanent ele-
ment in Society. And all this which he taught in
his writings, he taught equally by his life. And -
furthermore, he manifested a deep sense of the sacred-
ness of the gift of genius, and refused to barter its
free exercise for aught that the world could hold out
to him, either to terrify or to seduce; and he lived
to prove, not only that the free exercise of poetic
genius is its own exceeding great reward, bringing a
rich harvest of joy and peace, and the Sweet conscious-
ness of duty well discharged, and God’s work done;
but, what was quite as much needed in our time, he
showed that for the support and nourishment of
poetic inspiration, no stimulants of Social vanity,
vicious sensuality, or extravagant excitement, were
requisite, and that it could flourish in the highest
118 JESSAYS.
vigour on the simple influence of external nature,
and the active exercise of the family affections.
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth,
in Cumberland, on April 7th, 1770, the second son
of John Wordsworth, attorney and law agent to Sir
James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale. His
mother was a Miss Cookson, of Penrith, and both
parents belonged to families of high antiquity and
great respectability—a fact which may not have been
without its influence on the poet's feelings and opin-
ions. Mrs. Wordsworth died when her son was
nearly eight years old, but not too early to have
discerned in him qualities which made her anxious
about his future life, and to impress her with the
presentiment that he would be remarkable for good
or evil. He himself attributes this feeling of hers
to his “stiff, moody, and violent temper.’
If however it be true that the child is father to
the man, Mrs. Wordsworth had probably better
reason for anticipating a remarkable career for her
son than was given by any excess of mere boyish
obstinacy and self-will. In the fifth book of the
Prelude he describes her mode of education as based
upon a
Wirtual faith that He
Who fills the mother's breast with innocent milk,
T]oth also for our nobler part provide,
TVORDS WORTET’S POEMS. 119
Under His great correction and control,
As innocent instincts and as innocent food.
This was her creed, and therefore she was pure
From anxious fear of error or mishap,
And evil, overweeningly so called,
Was not puffed up by false unnatural hopes,
Nor selfish with unnecessary care;
Nor with impatience from the season asked
More than its timely produce; rather loved
The hours for what they are, than from regard
Glanced on their promises in restless pride.
Such was she-not from faculties more strong
Than others have, but from the times, perhaps,
And spot in which she lived, and through a grace
Of modest meekness, simple-mindedness,
A heart that found benignity and hope,
Being itself benign.
And so the first peril of childhood was escaped,
and that a peril of no small moment, when the child
is a genius, and the mother knows it, and ponders it
in her heart; the peril of overstimulation of faculties
already precociously developed, bringing with it, as
its sure result, prodigious Vanity and premature ex-
haustion. Nor were other influences besides those
of a wise mother's loving care wanting to train the
future poet. The picturesque Derwent, blending
with his nurse's song, flowed murmuring along his
infant dreams, and composed to more than infant
softness his earliest thoughts and sensations. A few
120 ESSAYS.
years later, the same river was his “tempting play-
mate.’ He would, when five years old, “make one
long bathing of a Summer's day,’ ‘bask in the Sun,
and plunge, and bask again, alternate.’ Happy
child ! the seed-time of whose soul can thus be em-
trusted to God and Nature. Wise mother who
knows how to aid, without Superseding natural in-
fluences and instinctive tendencies—to let the child
grow at its natural pace, and in its natural direction
—not to raise it upon stilts, or straiten it in stays.
How much wiser would the manhood of many of us
be, if our childhood had been more joyous and less
trammelled, less made to bend to the whims, systems,
or caprices of the elderly pedants about us. We of
course know that children are not diminutive angels,
and need both instruction and correction; but we
believe every sensible mother in the three kingdoms
will go with us in an avowal of a decided preference
for troublesome, ill-behaved children, over the good
little boys and girls, who know the elements of all
the ologies, and can define many of the isms—who
never dirty their pinafores, and decline eating their
dinners till grace has been said. To return to
William Wordsworth. Another influence, that was
to endure, and colour his whole life, had already
begun to act upon him. His sister Dorothy was two
years younger than himself; the part she played in
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 121
the formation of his character he exquisitely describes
in his poem to the “Sparrow's Nest':—
The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of Sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.
Dut one blow carried off the mother and separated
brother and sister—the latter went to reside with
her maternal relations: the former was sent to School
at Hawkeshead, near the lake of Esthwaite. He
had already been instructed in the rudiments of
learning at Cockermouth by the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks;
and his father, who is said to have been a person of
considerable mental vigour and eloquence, had con-
tributed to his education, by setting him very early
to learn passages from the best English poets by
heart, so that he could repeat large portions of Shak-
speare, Milton, and Spenser. It was probably no
great misfortune for Wordsworth that the north-
country schools did not pay that attention to classical
composition which enables Eton, Rugby, Shrewsbury,
and our other great public Schools, to send up men
to the Universities who can write Greek with the
purity of Xenophon, and Latin with the elegance of
Cicero. At any rate, such was the case; and the
122 JESSAYS.
only learning he seems to have acquired at Hawkes-
head was a fair knowledge of Latin, and an acquaint-
ance with the elements of mathematics. But he
tells us that his school days were very happy, chiefly
because then, and in the vacations, he was left at
liberty to read whatever books he liked. He in-
stances Fielding, Cervantes, Le Sage, and Swift; and
particularizes Gulliver's Travels and the Tale of a
Tub as being much to his taste. The readers of the
Jºrelude need not be told that his real education at ,
school lay neither in the study of Latin, nor in the
perusal of the works of the humorists, which ex-
ercised little apparent influence upon the formation
of his tastes, or the character of his subsequent
writings. Already that strong individuality had
displayed itself, which was to issue in the conquest
of new fields for the creative energy of the poet, of
a new poetical philosophy for the analysis of the
critic. Already in the pursuit of his boyish amuse-
ments—in springing woodcocks in autumn, in taking
nests in spring, in skating on the frozen lake of
Esthwaite, or rowing on bright half-holidays with
his companions along ‘the plaim of Windermere,” he
had begun to feel the presence of Nature in the sky
and on the earth; already had he become a worship- .
per in that shrine, of which he afterwards was the
acknowledged high-priest.
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 128
It would be as sacrilegious, as it is unnecessary,
to translate into bald prose those high-coloured and
nobly musical passages of the Prelude, in which he
traces the influence of the grand and beautiful scenery
amid which his school-days were fortunately passed,
in awakening his sensibility, in associating his animal
sensations with outward objects, that were magnifi-
cent, and lovely, and so ministering to genial and
happy moods of mind, by the constant supply of pure
and ennobling pleasures. As pleasurable excitement
is almost the necessary condition of poetical activity,
too much importance can hardly be attributed to the
circumstances which secured to Wordsworth, in his
most plastic time of life, an unfailing flow of joyous
spirits from purely elevating sources, and preserved
him, while reason was yet undeveloped, and self-
command had not yet become a habit, from those
temptations to coarse pleasures, and even gross vices,
which form so weighty a counterpoise to the scholar-
ship and manly training of our great public Schools.
Nor was this awakening passion for nature less effi-
cacious or important in thus early laying the found-
ation of those habits of observation and reflection
which not only supplied him through life with his
matter for poetical composition, but freed him from
that necessity for companionship and conversation
which weakens the character, and fritters away the
124 v ESSAYS.
strength of so many men of genius. Wordsworth,
even as a boy, was self-sufficing and independent;
Solitude to him was blithe Society, though no one
took more interest in boyish sports, or speaks with
more affectionate remembrance of boyish friendships.
What helped to this was the usual degree in which
a genuine poetic activity was conjoined with, and
awakened by, his receptive sensibility. “A plastic
power,’ he tells us, 4.
Abode with me; a forming hand, at times
Rebellious, acting in a devious mood;
A local spirit of his own, at war
With general tendency; but, for the most,
Subservient strictly to external things,
With which it communed. An auxiliar light
Came from my mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour; the melodious birds,
The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on
Murmuring so sweetly in themselves, obeyed
A like dominion; and the midnight storm
Grew darker in the presence of my eye.
The prominence which is given in Wordsworth’s
poetry to this reciprocal action of external nature
and the mind of man, is that which mainly dis-
tinguishes him from, and raises him above, merely
descriptive or merely didactic poets. Nature to him
was not a canvas variously coloured, from which he
was to select what soothed or excited the sense, and
paint in words what was given to him from without;
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 125
nor was man an incarnate intellect whose senses
were merely channels of communication between his
animal wants and the material objects which supplied
them, or, at best, purveyors for the fancy in her airy
dreams and unreal analogies; but the one was re-
lated to the other by a vital and organic union, which
admitted of no severance, but to the detriment, if
not the destruction of moral and spiritual life. Nature
was to him a mystic book, written by the finger of
God, whose characters were indeed discernible by
the senses, but whose meaning was only to be de-
ciphered by the imagination—
By observation of affinities
In objects where no brotherhood exists
To passive minds.
The book of Nature and the world of imagination
are phrases, indeed, that have long been favourites
with men of sensibility and men of Science; but the
truths that have been read in the one have usually
been generalizations of the analytic understanding,
or the facts upon which such generalizations are
founded, while the other has been soothed upon as
peopled only by chimeras, and given up to the
visionary and the dreamer. Mr. Wordsworth's ori-
ginality in this matter consists in his assertion of
a science of appearances, speaking through the Senses
to the heart and soul, acting on and acted upon by
126 FSSAYS.
the imagination, in accordance with laws, which it
is the poet's business to discover and obey; and not
simply in this assertion of a philosophy of aesthetic,
which would justify such expressions as the ‘sensuous
false and true,” in opposition to the pure idealist
theory of the falseness of all sensuous perception;
but furthermore and mainly in the importance he
attaches to a right understanding of this science for
the production of genuine poetry, and a practical
obedience to it for the building up of the moral being
of the individual man. Whether his conclusions on
this point are the result of what he possessed in
common with all men, or of the exceptional pre-
dominance of the imaginative activity in him, may
perhaps admit of discussion. Certain it is, that more
than almost any poet, he was from childhood ‘of
imagination all compact,’ and equally certain is it
that, unless Social arrangements can be totally al-
tered, it is hard to see how the bulk of our population
can be placed in circumstances at all admitting, not
to say favourable to, the cultivation of the imagina-
tive power; while to suppose them for this reason
debarred from attaining moral and religious excel-
lence, would indeed sadden our prospects for the
future, change all our boasted civilization to a diabolic
delusion, and justify any schemes, however extrava-
gant, that promised to relieve our upper classes from
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 127
so heinous a crime, and our lower classes of towns
and cities, and in spite of Mr. Wordsworth, the ma-
jority of our peasants, from so dire a destruction.
This theory of the function of imagination in the
human economy, and of the function of external
nature in awakening and evoking its power, is so
prominent in all Mr. Wordsworth's higher poetry—
is so much the key-note to what his earlier critics
called his mysticism and affected raptures, that we
have felt it necessary to allude to it somewhat at
length, though to handle it at all adequately would
require a philosophical treatise, which has never
yet been written, though often talked about. As
originating in his own boyish experiences, it properly
belonged to this part of our subject, and may further
be taken as an instance of the limitation which is
necessary in applying any of Mr. Wordsworth’s
theories of society. They are all personal experiences
thrown into the form of general truths, with that
strength of phrase and colour of passion which belong
to an essentially subjective view.
We may conclude these records of Wordsworth’s
schoolboy experience by mentioning that he was al-
ready a poet actual as well as potential, and that
a copy of verses in heroic metre, written by him in
his fourteenth or fifteenth year (it is rather doubtful
which), on the second centenary from the foundation
128 ESSAYS,
t
of the school by Archbishop Sandys, is preserved; of
which, though the poet himself speaks slightingly,
as a tame imitation of Pope's versification, and a
little in his style, it is not too much to say that very
few boys of that age could have possibly written
them.
His father had died while William was yet a
schoolboy, in the year 1783. Lord Lonsdale, whose
agent he was, refused to settle his accounts, and
the sum of which the children, four sons and one
daughter, were thus deprived, was the bulk of their
fortune. It was afterwards paid in 1802, with in-
terest, by the second Earl of Lonsdale; but mean-
while, the family of the Wordsworths were dependent
upon their relations, and William was sent by his
uncles, Richard Wordsworth and Christopher Cracken-
thorpe, in the year 1787, to St. John's College, Cam-
bridge. $.
From what has been stated of William Words-
worth’s studies, attainments, character, and tastes,
while he was at Hawkeshead, no reasonable surprise
can be entertained that the pursuits, the honours,
and the emoluments of Cambridge failed to excite
his industry or stimulate his ambition. The excel-
lence to which the University at that time confined
her rewards and distinctions was limited within the
range of mathematics, pure and applied, and that
IPORDS WORTH S POEMS. 129
highly valuable, but by no means comprehensive
scholarship, which is expressed by the phrase, a
knowledge of Latin and Greek; what is excluded
being simply the literature, the philosophy, and the
history of the two great model nations, and what is
included being the power of translating correctly at
sight, and of composing in prose and verse. We say
at that time, because, though very little extension
has actually taken place, yet a new and enlarged
system has just come into operation, from which the
most beneficial results on national education are to
be expected. Moreover, Wordsworth went to a
college which is now especially, and was, we believe,
exclusively devoted to the study of mathematics. It
is more than possible that those men in whom taste
and imagination are predominant are, as the learned
Master of Trinity would maintain, the very men
who would profit most by the rigid processes and
absolute results of mathematics; poets have them-
selves been famous for Saying and Writing fine things
about the beauty of mathematical demonstrations,
and the winning charms of pure truth; Wordsworth
has made Euclid's Elements the subject of an ex-
quisite episode in his autobiographical poem; but
equally certain it is that either in cautious self-
denial, fearing to be hooked for life by the too sedu-
cing bait of the Lady of lincs and angles, or that the
IC
130 ESSAYS.
brightness of her heavenly glory should dazzle them
into blindness, or Scorch them into annihilation, or
from Some other cause equally powerful, poets gene-
rally content themselves with singing the praises of
the sublime and starry Science, and leave to others
the profit and the praise of worshipping in her temple,
and assuming the robes and crown of her hierophants.
Wordsworth was no exception,-no trace of his
mathematical studies appears in the records of his
college life, no result beyond that of an ordinary
B.A. degree appears to have attended them. The
only positive result of his Cambridge reading seems
to be the acquisition of Italian. We are not aware
that he ever regretted his neglect of University
studies, though his nephew implies as much, founding
his belief on an exhortation addressed, we presume,
to himself by his uncle, on the importance of master-
ing the classical writers before coming to the modern;
and in a letter addressed to the Son of a friend, re-
gretting that he had given up reading for honours.
We would suggest to Dr. Christopher Wordsworth
that his uncle might see good reason for advising
him to confine his attention to that which constituted
his path to distinction, without at all regretting the
deliberate choice of his own life, or implying the
general advisability of the course he recommended
to one young man of singularly academic mind and
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. I31
character. But this is only a specimen of the way
in which the nephew has reflected his own likeness
upon the canvas prepared for his uncle. But to
return to the poet. Cambridge seems to have done
nothing for him; not only were the studies of the
place distasteful to him, but the country was emi-
nently disqualified for exciting, or even sustaining,
the poetic susceptibility of one who had been, up to
that time, a free wanderer among the hills and vales
and lakes of lovely, romantic Westmoreland. Even
Wordsworth, with his creative gift, failed to gain an
insight into what there is in that flat, fenny district
capable of conversion into exquisite poetry. That
conquest has been achieved by a younger poet; and
now and henceforth, “Mariana in the Moated Grange,’
and the ‘Dying Swan,’ stand to give the lie to any
one who dares to call Cambridge and Lincoln utterly
barren of nourishment for minds which Crave external
beauty, or languish and sicken from starvation. We
may add, from personal acquaintance, that these flat
counties are famous for their glorious Sunsets. But
Wordsworth’s heart was all the time among his
mountains and his waterfalls; the Cam to him was
specifically the silent Cam; and but for his vacations,
the poetic spirit would have been imperilled. By
these, his love and intense enjoyment of nature were
Sustained, enhanced by months of absence and long-
K 2
132 JESSAYS.
ing and regret; and with them began now to appear
another range of faculties, called into exercise by the
varieties of character his Cambridge life presented to
him, and the contrast it afforded to the life he had
left behind him. He began now to take that interest
in observing the passions, characters, and actions of
the men and women around him, which, Supplying
him with the incidents, the feelings, and, to some
extent, with the very language of his most original
minor poems, finally enabled him to rear the noblest
edifice of modern Song, where, uniting in himself the
philosophical breadth of Coleridge with the minute
touches and more than the homely pathos of Crabbe,
he forms into one organic whole the profoundest
speculations on Society with the simplest annals of
the poor. It is only a proof of the exceeding pu-
rity and elevation of his character, that he finds
ground for mild self-reproach in the innocent enjoy-
ment of rustic balls and innocent flirtations—‘love-
likings,’ as he prettily calls them—with rustic belles,
which seem to have partially occupied his first long
vacation. Truth to say, we wish he had taken a
more lively interest in such matters. The absence
of this side of human nature from Wordsworth’s
poetry imparts to it a heaviness, a monotony, which
repels the young and the worldly, to whose minds
his lofty wisdom and his noble seriousness might
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 133
perchance find admission and welcome. But great
men are not to be fashioned after our will, but ac-
cording to the ordering of Him who sends them to
do His work in the world; and special work demands
a special training. It is only this consideration that
prevents us from seriously regretting that Words-
worth did not, as a young man, join more heartily
in what are commonly called the pleasures of the
world. There can be no doubt that, had he done so,
he would have exerted an earlier and a wider in-
fluence on society; he would have understood better
the pursuits and the pleasures of the men and women
of cities; he would have sympathized more with the
life of the burgher classes. On the other hand, it
must not be forgotten that, in that case, he would
scarcely have so fascinated and controlled the ‘fit
audience, though few,' whom no one ever asked for
more sincerely or more successfully; his poetical
creed would scarcely, in that case, have had its
apostles, its martyrs, its confessors; it would not
have been so fiercely combated, and would not there-
fore have exhibited such a marked triumph of truth,
have been rooted so deeply in the conviction of its
votaries. Had his genius, again, played more upon
the surface of society, dealt more with the passions
and the Vanities of men congregated together, it
might have lost something of that depth, of that
134 ESSAYS.
permanent and elemental character that now renders
his reflections and speculations so valuable and in-
teresting to minds at all kindred to his own. Nor is
it easy to conceive the simplicity and calm of Words-
worth's life and character failing to unfit him for
fairly estimating English middle-class life and people,
with their multiform bustle, their eager pursuit of
wealth, their love and need of outward excitement.
With all his greatness, he was neither Shakspeare
nor Goethe; and probably had he striven for many-
sidedness, he would have been less than he was,
And so, recalling our half-formed expression of regret,
we may accept the fact, in all thankfulness and
humility, that he soon gave up the chase of trivial
pleasures, and returned to where his deeper passion
lay; though, as we have hinted above, these trivial
pleasures of his Cambridge and vacation life were, in
all probability, the appointed means of evoking that
meditative observation of men and character, which
makes his poetry no less rich in wisdom than in
beauty and feeling. One special occasion he notes,
when, after being all night at a country ball, his
whole being was stirred within him, as-
Magnificent
The morning rose in memorable pomp ;
and there came upon him one of those crises, so
marked in the history of great minds, which colour
TVORIDS WOR THI’S POEMS. 135
the whole after-course of existence. ‘To the brim,”
he says,
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives,
And to this consecration, the silent influences of the
morning, poured upon his head by the invisible hand,
he remained faithful as few priests have ever been
to their calling. What the world has gained by his
loyalty is to be seen in his works; what he might
otherwise have become, may be gathered from those
parts of the Prelude in which he records his Cam-
bridge and London experience, especially from that
magnificent passage where, describing his general
impression of University life, he clothes the stern
denunciation of a Juvenal in language as strong as
Dryden's, as rich, Sensuous, and full of meaning as
Shakspeare's:–
All degrees
And shapes of spurious fame and short-lived praise
IHere sate in state, and fed with daily alms
IRetainers won away from Solid good;
And here was Labour, his own bond-slave; Hope,
That nover set tho pain against the prize;
Idlencss, halting with his weary clog,
And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear,
And simple Pleasure, foraging for Death;
136 JESSAYS.
Eſonour misplaced, and Dignity astray;
Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, and guile,
Murmuring Submission, and bald government
(The idol weak as the idolater),
And Decency and Custom starving Truth,
And blind Authority beating with his staff
The child that might have led him; Emptiness
Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth,
Left to herself, unheard of and unknown.
In connection with this noble passage, showing
what Wordsworth could have done had he chosen to
cultivate the higher form of satire, it is interesting to
find him afterwards declining to allow the publication
of some imitations of Juvenal, executed as a young
man, though solicited by his friend Archdeacon
Wrangham, and basing his refusal on moral objec-
tions to the lowering influence of this species of
composition.
Wordsworth’s last long vacation was spent in
travelling abroad with his friend Mr. Jones. The
tourists landed at Calais on July 13th, 1790, the
eve of the day when Louis XVI. took the oath of
fidelity to the new constitution; proceeded princi-
pally on foot through France, Savoy, Piedmont,
North Italy, Switzerland, and up the Rhine, re-
turning in time for the Cambridge October term.
The poem entitled ‘Descriptive Sketches,’ is the
record of this continental tour. A more important
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 137
result of it was the warmer sympathy it excited in
young Wordsworth with the then fair promise and
exulting hopes of the French revolution. In a letter
to his sister Dorothy, from the Lake of Constance,
he speaks in enthusiastic terms of the French as
compared with the Swiss, adding, “But I must
remind you that we crossed at the time when the
whole nation was mad with joy, in consequence of
the revolution. It was a most interesting period
to be in France; and we had many delightful
scenes where the interest of the picture was owing
solely to this cause.’ It is more than ever super-
fluous for us, who have since that time been witness
to two French revolutions, and the enthusiastic hope
they excited, with the miserable disappointment
that has in each case ensued, to go far in search of
reasons to justify or explain the sympathy which
Wordsworth, in common with all the generous-
hearted young men of his day, felt and expressed
with the first and greatest of the democratic con-
vulsions which have since been constantly working
to upheave and alter the surface of European society.
The man who at that time had not so sympathized
must have been duller than an owl, or wiser than an
angel. It is sufficient here to observe that when
the French revolution departed from its first love
and its first faith, and developed into that hybrid
138 ESSAYS.
monster, of cruelty, tyranny, and licentiousness,
which made the despotism of the Empire a welcome
refuge, Wordsworth was not misled by the vanity of
consistency, or dazzled by the splendour of military
achievement, to tolerate its excesses and palliate its
crimes. Meanwhile, till that period arrived, he
welcomed the advent of the people's triumphs with
enthusiastic faith and joy.
Dliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven
He took his degree in January 1791, and in
November of the same year we find him returning
to France, which he did not again quit till the close
of the following year. A considerable portion of
this period he spent at Orleans and Blois. His most
intimate friend was General Beaupuis, whose cha-
racter as philosopher, patriot, and soldier, was emi-
nently calculated to attract the admiration of a
young and ardent poetic mind. How deep was the
impression made upon him during these eventful
months, and how keenly he sympathized with each
new phase of the popular movement, is stamped
alike upon his earlier and later poems; and manifests
itself equally in the glowing passion of his hopes,
and in the indignant bitterness of his disappointment.
A purer passion never warmed the heart of patriot
or poet.
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 139
It was probably fortunate for him that circum-
stances—we presume the want of money—compelled
him to return to England at the close of the year, as
he was intimately connected with the Brissotins, and
might have shared their destruction, had he stayed
till the following May. “William,’ says his sister,
in a letter of the 22nd December, 1792, “is in
London; he writes to me regularly, and is a most
affectionate brother.’
The extent to which his political opinions were
at this time identified with the principles of the
French revolution, may be gathered from an un-
published pamphlet, entitled, “A Letter to the
IBishop of Llandaff on the political principles con-
tained in an appendix to one of his lordship's recent
sermons,’ and from a letter to a friend named
Matthews. He disapproves of hereditary monarchy,
hereditary distinctions and privileged orders of every
species, as necessarily counteracting the progress of
human improvement; and holds that even social
privileges and distinctions should be conferred by
the elective voice of the people. He emphatically
declares himself not an admirer of the British con-
stitution. ‘Yet,” he adds—
In my ardour to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature
of the ground where the race is to be run. The destruction
of those institutions which I condemn, appears to me to be
140 JESSAYS.
hastening on too rapidly. I recoil from the very idea of a
revolution. I am a determined enemy to every species of
violence. I see no connexion, but what the obstinacy of
pride and ignorance renders necessary, between justice and
the sword, between reason and bonds. I deplore the miser-
able condition of the French, and think that we can only be
guarded from the same scourge by the undaunted cfforts of
good men...... I severely condemn all inflammatory addresses
to the passions of men. I know that the multitude walk in
darkness. I would put into each man's hand a lanterm, to
guide him ; and not have him to set out upon his journey
depending for illumination on abortive flashes of lightning, or
the coruscations of transitory meteors.
With principles so decidedly republican, and
Sentiments so opposed to violence, physical force,
or even inflammatory agitation; with Such a clear
consciousness of the necessity of knowledge and
virtue, as the only basis and safeguard of popular
Hiberties, a clear-sighted observer might even thus
early have anticipated the course of Wordsworth's
opinions on the French revolution, and on politics,
practical and speculative, in general. The im-
mediate effect of his disappointment was to cloud
his hopes and weaken his faith in human nature;
and his painful feelings were still farther embittered,
and clashing sympathies jarred the more harshly
within him, when, in consequence of the execution
of Louis XVI., this country declared war against
France. During the year 1793, he published the
WORDS WORTET’S POEMS. 141
poems entitled, “The Evening Walk,” and ‘Descrip-
tive Sketches,’ the latter of which he had composed
principally in his walks along the banks of the
Loire the preceding Summer. Interesting as these
poems are in themselves, as the first-fruits of an
original genius, they are more important as having
in the following year attracted the attention of
Coleridge, then an undergraduate at Cambridge, and
having thus laid the foundations of an intimacy
which exercised a powerful influence upon these two
great men, and contributed to enrich and expand
their minds, no less than it ministered to the enjoy-
ments of both. -“Seldom, if ever,’ says Coleridge
in the Biographia Literaria, ‘was the emergence of
an original poetic genius above the literary horizon
more evidently announced.” But poetry can never
be counted on as a means of Support; and hitherto
Wordsworth had been almost wholly dependent on
his relations, the debt to his father's estate from
Lord Lonsdale not having been yet recovered. He
was therefore urged to make choice of a profession;
or rather, the Church was pointed out as the only
One open to him. In spite, however, of remonstrating
relatives and an empty purse, he resolved not to
take orders. The consequence naturally was, that
relatives from remonstrance turned to indignation
and coldness, and the purse was not likely to fill
142 ESSAYS.
itself. As a means of accomplishing this desirable
object, he proposed to his friend Matthews, then
engaged on a London newspaper, to join him in
a monthly periodical, to be called the Philanthropist,
the principles of which were to be republican, but
not revolutionary. He was himself to contribute
to it criticisms. On poetry, painting, gardening, &c.,
besides essays on morals and politics. The scheme,
however, came to nothing, and his next attempt was
to Secure employment on a London paper, only con-
ditioning that it should be an opposition paper; ‘for,”
Says he, ‘I cannot abet, in the smallest degree, the
measures pursued by the present ministry;' adding,
at the same time, ‘I know that many good men are
persuaded of the expediency of the present war.’
He was at this time engaged in attendance on the
sick-bed of a young friend, Raisley Calvert, who was
dying of consumption. Before the newspaper en-
gagement was actually concluded, this young man
(who was wise enough to discern Wordsworth’s
genius, and was impressed with the persuasion that,
if not impeded by the necessity of other occupations,
he would benefit mankind by his writings) died, and
left to his friend the sum of nine hundred pounds.
Thus relieved from all immediate care, he gave
himself entirely to his poetic impulse, and devoted
himself with unswerving aim and untiring energy
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 143
to what he felt to be his appointed task. This bold
step was justified, not only by the clearness of
purpose and consciousness of power which prompted
it, but by the abstemious habits and simple tastes
which are so often wanting in poets. Writing some
time afterwards to Sir George Beaumont, he says,
“Upon the interest of the £900, £400 being laid out
in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal,
and £100 legacy to my sister, and a £100 more
which the Lyrical Ballads have brought me, my
sister and I contrived to live seven years—nearly
eight.” People who can so live may follow the
promptings of genius without the imputation of
folly, rashness, or vain self-confidence. The legacy
came to Wordsworth in the early part of 1795,
and in the autumn of that year, he and his sister,
who thenceforth was his constant companion, were
settled at Racedown Todge, near Crewkerne, in
Dorsetshire. It was here, that he composed the
imitations of Juvenal, alluded to before, and the
tragedy of the Borderers, which, after being offered
to Mr. Harris, the manager of Covent Garden, and
by him declined, remained in MS. till the year
1842. Wordsworth assigns it to his sister's benign
influence upon him during this period, that he was
Saved from lasting despondency, consequent upon
the failure of his political hopes. Depressed in
144 JESSAYS.
heart, bewildered in intellect, in danger even of
letting slip the great saving truths of Reason, and
taking refuge in abstract Science from the scoffing
Spirit by which a man revenges himself on his own
delusions, he thanks
The bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister in whose sight
Those days were passed # $
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self + Šć %
She, in the midst of all, preserved me still
A poet, made me seek beneath that name,
And that alone, my office upon earth.
How complete was the recovery of the poet under
the humanizing and tranquillizing influence of this
lowing and beloved sister, is seen from an interesting
passage in the Biographia Literaria. Speaking of
his residence at Stowey, Coleridge says, “I was so
fortunate as to acquire, shortly after my settlement
there, an invaluable blessing in the Society and
neighbourhood of one, to whom I could look up
with equal reverence, whether I regarded him as
a poet, a philosopher, or a man. His conversation
extended to almost all subj ects, except physics and
politics; with the latter he never troubled himself.”
A short time previous to the removal of Wordsworth
TWORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 145
and his sister to Alfoxden, in the neighbourhood of
Stowey, mentioned in the above passage, Coleridge
had paid them a visit at Racedown; and in a letter
from that place to Cottle, he says of Wordsworth,
—‘I speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel
a little man by his side.’ Miss Wordsworth he
describes to the same friend in terms of warm and
eloquent admiration :
She is a woman indeed, in mind, I mean, and in heart;
for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty
woman, you would think her ordinary ; if you expected to see
an ordinary woman you would think her pretty, but her
manners are simple, ardent, impressive. In every motion her
innocent soul out-beams so brightly, that who saw her would
say, ‘Guilt was a thing impossible with her.' Her informa-
tion various; her eye watchful in minutest observation of
Nature; and her taste a perfect electrometer.
On the side of the Wordsworths the impression
made by Coleridge was equally favourable, and their
removal to Alfoxden was mainly induced by their
desire to enjoy his society. The residence at
Alfoxden commenced in July 1797, and the twelve-
month that he passed there he describes as “a very
pleasant and productive time of his life.” Indeed,
in that year, with the exception of the “Female
Vagrant,’ all the poems contained in the first edition
of the Lyrical Ballads were composed. To the same
L
146 ESSAYS.
period “ Peter Bell’ is due, though it was not pub-
lished till 1819. How the Lyrical Ballads were
a joint projection of Wordsworth and Coleridge—
the aim with which they were written—the principles
which dictated their choice of subjects and style of
diction—and how Coleridge was not so industrious
as his coadjutor—and that the book was finally
published by Cottle of Bristol, in the summer of
1798, in a duodecimo Volume—moreover, that the
reviews were terribly severe, and that of five hundred
copies the greater number were sold as remainder
at a loss, are all stale topics to the readers of the
Biographia Literaria and Cottle's Reminiscences.
Wordsworth received thirty guineas for his share of
the copyright, which was, with Mr. Cottle's other
literary property, Subsequently transferred to Messrs.
Longman, who estimating this particular article at
nil, returned it, at Mr. Cottle's request, and it was
by him presented to the authors. This, it must be
confessed, was a singular reception for a volume
which, however the public taste was repelled by some
of its contents, yet gave to the light Coleridge's
‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Nightingale,” with Words-
worth’s ‘Lines left upon a Yew-tree seat' and ‘Tintern
Abbey,’ four poems, of which it is not too much to
Say, that since Milton's voice had ceased, such noble
strains had not been uttered in English speech. The
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 147
famous Preface, to which Coleridge justly, we think,
attributes much of the acrimony with which the
Lake-school of poetry, as it came afterwards to be
called, was assailed, was not published till the Lyrical
Ballads reached a second edition, and were augmented
by an additional volume; so that the public neglect
and the severity of the critics must be explained by
the poems themselves, and not by revolutionary
views of poetic composition, systematically and, it
must be owned, somewhat dogmatically announced.
These views, and the productions which were the
result of them, have been the subject of controversy
and discussion from that time to this; the ablest
critics and the greatest poets have borne part in it.
The issue may, we think, be fairly stated to be, that
the theory, considered as polemic in reference to the
style of poetry of which Pope's translation of Homer
is the type and highest example, is perfectly suc-
cessful and generally received; that the agitation to
which it gave rise has had great influence in winning
men back to perceive the material that lies ready for
the poet's use in our actual daily life, and, as a neces-
Sary consequence, to bring poetic language nearer to
the actual phraseology of human beings in a state
of passion or vivid emotion; but that, on the other
hand, the theory was wanting both in compre-
hensiveness of knowledge, in subtlety of analysis
L 2
148 ESSAYS.
and catholicity of taste—that, in a word, it was little
more than polemic ; while the poems composed ex-
pressly to support, or at least under the definite and
conscious influence of the theory, are just those in
which Wordsworth falls farthest below himself, and
which, even now that his name is honoured by the
wise and good, and his seat is among the immortals,
are regarded by all but a very few, and those for the
most part persons who were in some way connected
with him, as experiments which, though they in no
wise detract from his fame, have added no laurel to
his wreath. In fact, the best refutation of Mr.
Wordsworth's theory, considered as anything more
than a corrective of an excess in the opposite
direction, is furnished by those poems of his own,
in which he follows the natural bent of his genius,
unwarped by system—that is, in at least nine-tenths
of his published works. And there, whether it
be the play of the fancy, the overflow of affection,
the visionary power of imagination, or the reason's
rapture of intuition, that colours his mental activity
and stirs his heart and tongue, the matter is the
life-stuff of a great original genius, and the language
and versification such as speak the faculty and
the education of an artist. Mr. Coleridge puts the
mattor in its simplest form, when he says of ‘Alice
Fell’ and other kindred poems, ‘Notwithstanding
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 149
the beauties which are to be found in each of them
where the poet interposes the music of his own
thoughts, they would have been more delightful to
me in prose, told and managed as by Mr. Words-
worth they would have been, in a moral essay or
pedestrian tour.” These last words were penned
doubtless in the vivid recollection of many pedestrian
tours, in which the two poets were accompanied by
the beloved sister, who was almost equally dear to
them both; and who, in addition to her charms of
mind and heart, was
Fleet and strong;
And down the rocks could leap along,
Like rivulets in May.
No one can doubt that the exquisite poem from
which these lines are taken, and which the doctor-
lawyer-coroner-editor Pangloss, who does not re-
present Finsbury, secured himself from wholesome
oblivion by ridiculing in the House of Commons,
is a portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth. The brother's
description may help us to feel what a pedestrian
tour with such a companion must have been.
And she hath Smiles to earth unknown;
Smiles, that with motion of their own
Do spread, and sink, and rise;
That come and go with endless play,
And ever as they pass away
Are hidden in her eyes.
150 ESSAYS.
Well, the Lyrical Ballads were published in
July 1798; and a superfluity of cash being thus
obtained, the trio started in September following for
Germany, but separated at Hamburg, Coleridge
proceeding in one direction by himself, and the
brother and sister taking up their residence at Goslar.
The only person of eminence whom the Wordsworths
seem to have been introduced to was Klopstock,
that ‘very German Milton’ who is recorded as
talking like an ‘Erz-Philister’; the substance of the
conversation is published in that portion of the Bio-
graphia Literaria called ‘Satyrane's Letters.’ They
spent some months at Goslar, but from one cause or
other, partly Wordsworth's dislike of smoke, partly
that the presence of his sister would, according to
the notions of the place, have bound him to enter- {
tain company if he accepted invitations, which his
finances prevented him from doing—from these or
other causes, they failed to see much of German
Society, and spent their time in learning the language
by reading and casual conversation. Upon the whole,
we can point to no specific fruits of this residence
abroad in Wordsworth’s writings; while, on the
other hand, Coleridge derived from it a knowledge
of German philosophy and literature which coloured
the whole of his after-life, and mainly, though not
entirely, in consequence of which he is looked on by
WORDS WORTH S POEMS. 151
many as the angel who has come down and troubled
the waters of English speculative science, so that
they who bathe therein derive from them healing
and strength. But even while he was in Germany,
Wordsworth's heart was in England; and it was
to English scenes and home recollections that his
poems of this period refer; except one lamentably
heavy attempt at being funny. “Nutting,’ well
worthy of being considered a pendant to “Tintern
Abbey,’ the two noble poems afterwards incorporated
with the Prelude, ‘Wisdom and Spirit of the Uni-
verse,” and “There was a boy, ye knew him well,
ye cliffs,'—the stanzas to Lucy, “She dwelt amid
the untrodden ways,’ so tender and graceful, Sad,
holy, and beautiful as a Madonna,-those others,
‘Three years she grew in Sun and shower,’ the most
exquisite description ever written of an English
country girl, half child, half woman, with the
wildness and witchery of a sylphide, the grace of
a duchess, and the purity of an angel,-the poet's
Ipitaph, containing those lines, so often applied to
himself-
Eſe is retired as moon-tide dow,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
IHe will seem worthy of your love;—
these and others of his poems less popular, he com-
152 JESSAYS.
posed during that winter at Goslar, the severest, it
is said, of the whole century. But they might have
been composed just as well anywhere else; and
neither in the records of this winter, nor in the
poems themselves, nor in any after results, is the
influence of this Goslar residence apparent. It was
as he left Goslar, that “he poured forth the im-
passioned strain which forms the commencement of
the Prelude.” This was on the 10th February, 1799;
and of the fourteen books, six only had been written
in 1805, and the seventh begun in the spring of that
year opens thus:
Six changeful years have vanished, since I first
Poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze
Which met me issuing from the city's walls)
A glad preamble to this verse.
He writes to Cottle on his return, ‘We have spent
our time pleasantly enough in Germany, but we are
right glad to find ourselves in England, for we have
learnt to know its value.’
Wordsworth had now reached his thirtieth year,
when his training may be presumed complete. His
tastes, his pursuits, and his character, were fully
determined, and the remainder of his life, extending
over a space of fifty years, was but the progressive
manifestation of the powers cultivated, and the prin-
ciples formed, during the stages of which we have
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 153
been hitherto speaking. In the latter part of 1799
he took up his residence with his sister, in a cottage
at Grasmere; and here, or at a house called Allan
Bank, and subsequently at Rydal Mount, he passed
his long, peaceful, and happy existence in a round
of domestic charities and poetic activity.
The following extracts from Miss Wordsworth’s
journal we quote, as the best account we can give
of the daily life of the writer and her brother:—
Wednesday, April 28.—Copied the Prioress' Tale. W. in
the orchard—tired. I happened to say that when a child I
would not have pulled a strawberry blossom : left him, and
wrote out the Manciple's tale. At dinner he came in with the
poem on children gathering flowers. *
April 30.—We went into the orchard after breakfast, and
sat there. The lake calm, sky cloudy. W. began poem on
the Celandine.
May 1.—Sowed flower seeds: W. helped me. We sat in
the orchard. W. wrote the Celandine. Planned an arbour:
the sun too hot for us. *
May 7.—W. wrote the Leech-Gatherer.
May 21.—W. wrote two sonnets on Buonaparte, after I
had read Milton’s Sonnets to him.
May 29.-W. wrote his Poem on going to M. H. I wrote
it out.
June 8–W. wrote the poem ‘The sun has long been set.’
June 17.—W. added to the Odef he is writing.
* The poem entitled ‘Foresight,’ vol. i. p. 149.
f ‘On Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Childhood,’ vol. v. p. 148.
154 JESSAYS,
June 19.-Read Churchill’s Rosciad.
July 9.—W. and I set forth to Keswick on our road to
Gallow Hill (to the Hutchinsons, near Malton, York). On
Monday, 11th, went to Eusemere (the Clarksons). 13th,
walked to Emont Bridge, thence by Greta Bridge. The sun
shone cheerfully, and a glorious ride we had over the moors;
overy building bathed in golden light: we saw round us miles
beyond miles, Darlington spire, &c. Thence to Thirsk; on
foot to the Hambledon Hills—Rivaulx. I went down to look
at the ruins: thrushes singing, cattle feeding among the ruins
of the Abbey; green hillocks about the ruins; those hillocks
scattered over with grovelets of wild roses, and covered with
wild flowers. I could have stayed in this solemn quict spot
till ovening without a thought of moving, but W. was waiting
for me.
July 30.—Loſt London between five and six o'clock of the ,
morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The
city, St. Paul’s, with the river—a multitude of little boats,
made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge ; *
the houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were.
spread out endlessly; yet the sun shone so brightly, with such
a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one
of Nature's own grand spectacles...... Arrived at Calais at four
in the morning of July 31st.
Delightful walks in the evenings: soeing far off in the
west the coast of England, like a cloud, crested with Dover
Castle, the Cvening star, and the glory of the sky: tho reflec-
tions in the water were more beautiful than the sky itself;
purple waves brighter than procious stones for ever molting
away upon the sands.
$ 2}: % $ % %
* The Sonnet on Westminster Bridge was then written on
the roof of the Dover coach (vol. ii. p. 296).
WORDS WORTET’S POEMS. 155
On Monday, Oct. 4, 1802, W. was married at Brompton
Church, to Mary Hutchinson. . . . . . We arrived at Grasmere
at six in the evening on Oct. 6, 1802.
Mary Hutchinson was Wordsworth’s cousin, and
they had been intimate from childhood, having been
at the same dame's school together, whenever the
poet, during his earliest years, was on a visit to his
maternal relations at Penrith. How calm and beau-
tiful their wedded life was ; how full of mutual sup-
port and happiness; how rich in thoughtful affection,
esteem, and purifying influence, may be traced in the
poems with which Mrs. Wordsworth's name will ever
be more directly associated, forming a series to which
the Sameness of Subject, and the progressive develop-
ment of feeling, give a unity which shapes them into
an organic whole, one sweet and holy poem of wedded
love, reflecting the vicissitudes of earthly life, as the
mountain-circled lake reflects the changing face of an
April sky, bright or overcast, as clouds or Sunshine
prevail above; but whether in brightness or in gloom,
calm in its still depths, however the breeze may ruffle
and perplex the mirror of its surface. -
We are indebted to Mr. de Quincey for portraits
of Wordsworth and his wife, which, in the absence
of anything of the sort in Dr. Christopher Words-
worth’s volumes, we will take the liberty to present
in an abridged form ; though whatever Mr. de
156 ESSAYS.
Quincey writes is so admirable, that no abridgment
can fail to do it injustice. He describes Mrs. Words-
worth, a few years after her marriage, as a tall
young woman, with the most winning expression of
benignity upon her features that he had ever beheld,
and with such a frank air, and native goodness of
manner, as at once to put a stranger at his ease with
her. Her figure was good, though rather slender;
her complexion fair, and blooming with an animated
expression of health. Her eyes, as her husband
paints her,
Like stars of twilight fair;
Like twilights, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn.
Mr. de Quincey adds to this portrait that, in these
eyes of vesper gentleness, there was more than that
slight obliquity of vision which is often supposed
to be an attractive foible of the countenance; and
yet, though it ought to have been displeasing or
repulsive, in fact it was not. ‘Indeed, all faults,
had they been ten times more and greater, would
have been Swallowed up, or neutralized, by that
supreme expression of her features, to the intense
unity of which every lineament in the fixed parts,
and every undulation in the moving parts, or play of
her countenance, concurred—viz., a sunny benignity,
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 157
a radiant gracefulness, such as in this world I never
saw equalled or approached.’ He tells us that,
‘ though generally pronounced very plain, she ex-
ercised all the practical power and fascination of
beauty, through the mere compensating charms of
sweetness all but angelic; of simplicity the most
entire; womanly self-respect, and purity of heart
speaking through all their looks, acts, and move-
ments.” She talked so little, that Clarkson used
to say of her, that she could only say, ‘God bless
you !’ *
A masterly portrait is completed by a description
of the intellectual character as not being of an active
order; though, “in a quiescent, reposing, medita-
tive way, she appeared always to have a genial
enjoyment from her own thoughts.” The acknow-
ledged pique which colours all Mr. de Quincey's
picture of the Wordsworths may have had something
to do with this last touch. Our readers will scarcely
be disposed to agree with any depreciation of that
woman's intellect who wrote the two most beau-
tiful and thoughtful lines in one of Wordsworth’s
most charming minor poems. It is to Mrs. Words-
worth that the poem called ‘Daffodils’ owes the
lines—
They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.
,158 JESSAYS.
Such was the woman who for nearly fifty years
shared the home and heart of the poet with the
beloved sister. And what was he like himself?
Let us take a crayon sketch from the full-length.
carefully coloured portrait, by the same skilful hand.
|He was five feet ten inches in height, and of moderate
stoutness, but his legs were bad, and his bust worse,
from a narrowness of chest, and a droop about the
shoulders. These defects of figure were more con-
spicuous when he was in motion, and were increased
by a habit he had of walking with his arm in his
unbuttoned waistcoat, which caused him to advance
with a twisting motion, so that he would gradually
edge off any one he was with, from the middle to
the side of the road, and the country people used to
say he walked ‘like a cade,’ some sort of insect with
an oblique motion. He had originally a fine sombre
complexion, like that of a Venetian Senator, or a
Spanish monk; but constant exposure to weather
soon spoilt his tint, and gave a coarse texture to his
face, and grizzled hair came early to displace the
original brown. His countenance, however, made
amends for figure and complexion; “it was,’ says
the artist we are copying, ‘the noblest for intel-
lectual effects that I have ever been led to notice.’
It had the character of a portrait of Titian, or
Vandyke, of the great age of Elizabeth and the
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 159
Stuarts. Haydon has painted Wordsworth as a
disciple, in his picture of ‘Christ's Entry into Jeru-
salem.” The head was well filled out; the forehead
not very lofty, but remarkable for its breadth and
expansive development. The eyes were rather small,
and never lustrous or piercing, but at times, especially
after long walks, “assumed an appearance the most
Solemn and spiritual that it is possible for the human
eye to wear.’ The light that resided in them, though
never Superficial, seemed at times ‘to come from
depths below all depths,’ ‘the light that never was
on land or Sea.” The nose was a little arched and
large. But the most marked feature in the whole
face was the mouth; the swell and protrusion of the
parts above and around it were not only noticeable in
themselves, but gave the face a striking resemblance
to the portrait of Milton, engraved in Richardson
the painter's notes on Paradise Lost, which was the
only one acknowledged by Milton's last surviving
daughter to be a strong likeness of her father. Every
member of Wordsworth’s family was as much im-
pressed as Mr. de Quincey with the striking resem-
blance. The points of difference were, that Milton's
face was shorter and broader, and his eyes larger.
The only portrait of Wordsworth which Mr. de
Quincey thinks is to be at all compared for likeness
with this Richardson-portrait of Milton, is that by
160 ESSAYS.
Caruthers, with one of the Rydal waterfalls for a
background. The objection to the later portraits
is, that Wordsworth, from the fervour of his tem-
perament, and the self-consuming energy of his brain,
prematurely displayed the appearance of age,
We make no apology for the length to which these
descriptions have run; rather, we heartily recommend
our readers to study the originals, not less for
Wordsworth's sake, than as admirable specimens of
one of the greatest prose writers whom our century
has produced. They will be found in Tait's Maga-
zºne, among the ‘Lake Reminiscences,’ by the Eng-
lish Opium-Eater. -
In the year 1800, an edition of the Lyrical
JBallads, with an additional volume, and the famous
Preface, had been published. Fresh editions were
called for in the years 1802 and 1805, proof sufficient
that the fit audience was already gathering strength,
and that the reviewers were not the public. Still
the returns scarcely did more than pay the expence
of publication. This, however, was now of less im-
portance. In 1802, on the death of the first Lord
Lonsdale, his successor had paid the debt due to
Wordsworth's family with interest, and the sum that
fell to each member was about £1800, Mr. de
Quincey, with something of good-humoured banter,
and a half-serious latent reference to his own different
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 161
fate, speaks of Wordsworth, in reference to pecuniary
matters, as the most fortunate man in existence; and
tells us that a regular succession of god-sends fell in
to sustain his expenditure with the growing claims
upon his purse. We have mentioned the legacy
from Raisley Calvert, which saved him from news-
paper writing, and (though his nephew seems to
know nothing about it) from the equally unsuitable
employment of taking pupils. Next came Lord
Lonsdale's repayment, which enabled him to marry;
for with his simple habits, what would have been
poverty to most men of education, was a competence
for him. Miss Hutchinson brought him some fortune,
which was afterwards increased by a legacy from an
uncle, expressed in thousands of pounds. In 1813,
just as his family were becoming expensive, he was
made stamp-distributor for Westmoreland, with an
income of above £500. per annum—not to mention
the subsequent addition to this source of income
from the increase of his district, which Mr. de Quincey
estimates at £400. more ; and finally (since Mr. de
Quincey wrote), on resigning this office in 1842, it
was bestowed upon his younger Son, and he was
himself put down upon the civil list for £300. a-year,
and, to crown all, made Poet Laureate;” so that,
* Dr. Wordsworth is not quite correct in leading his
readers to suppose that his uncle’s laureateship was a complete
IM
162 ESSAYS.
by a singular felicity, this man, unpossessed of any
marketable talent, was enabled, from the age of
three-and-twenty, to devote himself, without care or
anxiety for the future, to the cultivation of his
genius, and was secured in that free enjoyment of
nature and domestic happiness, which was an es-
sential condition of his poetic activity. To Raisley
Calvert, who laid the first stone, and to Lord Lons-
dale, who first, by a prompt and liberal act of justice,
and afterwards, by a kind and discerning act of
patronage, built upon this foundation the solid edifice
of the poet's prosperity, be all honour paid. The
name and virtues of both are embalmed for immor-
tality in those pages, which owe so much to the
leisure their liberality and discernment fortified; but
England owes them a debt of gratitude, which she
will pay, in proportion as her people feel ‘what a
glorious gift God bestows on a nation when he gives
them a poet.” It would be unfair to Sir George
Beaumont not to associate his name with Words-
worth’s benefactors. Before he had seen Wordsworth,
sinecure. On Prince Albert's installation as Chancellor of the
University of Cambridge, he wrote the words of the Ode,
which was composed by the popular and accomplished professor
of music, Dr. Walmisley, and performed in the Senate House.
* Dedication of second edition of Guesses at Thºth to W.
Wordsworth,
WORDS WORTH S POEMS. 163
solely from the impression made upon him by his
writings, he, in 1803, purchased a beautiful spot at
Applethwaite, near Keswick, and presented it to the
poet, in order that he and Coleridge, who was then
residing at Greta-hall, might be permanent neigh-
bours. Coleridge's failure of health compelled him
to leave England, and the plan was never carried
out; but the friendship that sprang from this be-
ginning, ripened into a close intimacy and a frequent
interchange of letters and visits. Some of the happiest
efforts of the titled painter are illustrations of the
poems of his friend; and in many of those poems
their names will go down to posterity, linked to-
gether by the purest ties of friendship and mutual
admiration. Sir George died in 1827, and bequeathed
to Mr. Wordsworth an annuity of £100. to defray
the expenses of an annual tour. There had been
a period in Wordsworth's life, when fear of poverty
and distress had clouded his prospects. Mr. de
Quincey informs us, on Miss Wordsworth's authority,
that her brother at one time became subject to a
nervous affection to such an extent, that his friends,
as a means of beguiling his distress, played cards
with him every night.
Again we say, honour and gratitude to Raisley
Calvert and Lord Lonsdale, and the few men who,
like Sir George Beaumont, cheered and supported
M 2
164 JESSAYS.
the poet in his struggle with hostile criticism and
public apathy. To these three men his works
and his correspondence bear ample testimony. We
cannot however, in justice, avoid a passing allusion
to the absence of any acknowledgment, or of eyen
any feeling of thankfulness, for sympathy of a less
substantial but no less necessary kind, from those few
men of letters who early discerned and expressed their
sense of Wordsworth’s profoundly original genius.
If the poet's own extreme dislike of writing pre-
vented such acknowledgments in the shape in which
they form so pleasing a portion of the biographies of
other poets, at least we should like to have had some
record of spoken feelings, which would have shown
that the homage of such men as Wilson and De
Quincey, and later in his career, of Thomas Arnold,
of Julius Hare, and of Henry Taylor, was not paid
to an idol of stone. The biographer's want of sym-
pathy with any form of goodness or talent which
does not run submissively within the channels of
Church-of-England orthodoxy according to the West-
minster Canon, may partly account for this. Still
something of it must, we fear, be attributed to a
hardness in Wordsworth's nature towards the human
world outside his own family circle, to an indepen-
dence of the sympathy of men, which was indeed
a means of preserving him from much discomfort
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 165
and annoyance, assailed and ridiculed as he was,
but which, at the same time, was grievously dis-
couraging to such worshippers as felt the worth of
their worship, and required some return of affection,
sympathy, and esteem. With men of letters es-
pecially, the “limitation of his literary sensibilities'
prevented him from forming, or at least Sustaining,
a mutual friendship. Even to Coleridge, who so
dearly loved him, who so generously and so ably
vindicated his claims to be called a great poet, whose
profound and elaborate criticism in the Biographia
Literaria remains to this day the most satisfactory
defence and the best exposition of his friend's poetry,
how small the return of affectionate, admiring ap-
preciation—how dim and faint the sympathy during
all that period of Coleridge's life, when clouds and
darkness beset his path, and he was walking through
the valley of the shadow of death ! The fact is, he
did not value all this sympathy, because he did not
need it. He could never have written to Coleridge
as Coleridge wrote to him in Germany—
William, my head and my heart dear William and dear
Dorothea
You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you !
This last line, too, gives a more amiable reason
for Wordsworth’s indifference to his friends and ad-
I66 ESSAYS.
mirers. His heart was wrapped up in his wife and
sister, and afterwards in his children, especially in
her who recalled his sister’s childhood—his beloved
Dora. The name recals us from our discursion to
speak of one in whom so much of the poet's deepest,
fondest affection was centered, and to whom his bio-
grapher has paid the honour of joining her portrait
with her father's as the frontispieces to his two
volumes. Wordsworth had in all five children:—
John, born 18th June, 1803.
T)orothy, called and generally known as Dora,
born 16 August, 1804.
Thomas, born 16 June, 1806.
Catharine, born 6th Sept. 1808.
William, born 12th May, 1810.
Of these, Thomas and Catharine died in early
childhood; John and William survive their father;
the former is a clergyman, the latter succeeded upon
his father's resignation to the distributorship of
stamps. Nothing remarkable is recorded of any of
the four by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth; but to
those for whom curious psychological facts have
interest, the name of Catharine Wordsworth (who
died before she was four years old; “loving she is,
and tractable, though wild,’ is addressed to her) will
always be memorable as the cause and object of that
strange nympholepsy, the agonies of which Mr. de
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 167
Quincey has so graphically and powerfully described
in those Lake Remºscences, to which the absence of
what is interesting or characteristic in the volumes
we are reviewing has led us so often to refer. Dora
Wordsworth will always form a conspicuous object
in any artistically conceived biography of her father.
When she was a month old, he addressed to her
that thoughtful poem, beginning,-
Hast thou, then, survived,
Mild offspring of infirm humanity ?
Not many weeks after, she inspired that most
exquisite of all her father's sportive compositions,
“The Kitten and the Falling Leaves.’ To her is
addressed ‘The Longest Day’; and when, threatened
with blindness, he anticipates the time that he should
need a guiding hand, it is to his ‘own Dora, his
beloved child,’ that he would, like another QEdipus,
entrust his dark steps. And who can forget that
later group, in which the noblest art, warmed by
pure affection, has blended together in indissoluble
beauty, Dora Wordsworth, Edith Southey, and Sara
Coleridge? She married at a mature age Edward
Quilliman, Esq.,” to whose children, left to her charge
* We regret to be compelled to add that, since this article
was written, the newspapers have announced the death of this
gentleman, himself the author of works which prove him to
have been worthy of his charming and gifted wife.
168 - ESSAYS.
by a beloved friend, she had performed the duties of
a mother. But her health rapidly failed, and after an
unavailing journey to Portugal, of which she has left
a published record that proves her to have inherited
no little of the genius of her father and her aunt,
she died of consumption in July 1847, about three
years before her father. From the poems addressed
to her, and those previously alluded to, referring to
Mrs. Wordsworth, with the scattered allusions
throughout his works to his sister, the reader may
have insight into Wordsworth's life, so far as women
influenced either his happiness or the development
of his genius. His ‘Lucy’ poems, which seem to
allude to some early love prematurely removed, either
belong to the region of pure imagination, or all re-
cords of the fact have been obliterated. But the
sister, the wife, and the daughter remain for us as
prominent portraits, scarcely idealized by the poet's
2 pencil, as fellow-workers co-operating in the pro-
duction of the poems, and above all, as personal
powers, sustaining, nourishing, purifying, and in-
vigorating the poetic temperament by the Sweet and
holy influences of affection, and the quiet, unobtrusive
action of the domestic charities. The history of
literature furnishes no group upon which the heart
can rest more delighted and satisfied.
We have noticed Wordsworth's successive publi-
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 169
cations up to 1805. In 1807 appeared two volumes
of Miscellaneous Poems, which drew down upon
him the wrath and ridicule of Mr. Jeffrey. The
great oracle of the North had before this given vent
to Sundry manifestations of indignant contempt, but
our poet had hitherto stood the brunt of the critic's
charge, in company with Southey, Lamb, and the
rest of the so-called Lakers. But now on his single
head was discharged the pitiless pelting of the storm;
and while the majority of the world were shaking
with laughter, and a few trembling with indig-
Ination, the unhappy victim himself maintained an
unbroken serenity, and held on his way with cheer-
ful heart and hope unabated. God has given to
Some men love, humility, and genuine appreciation
of the beautiful and the good in nature and in art;
to others, the gift of saying witty things and being
ill-natured. What could such a critic, with all his
brilliant faculties, permanently effect against a man
who writes with the views and expectations expressed
in the following passage from a letter, dated 1807,
to Lady Beaumont:— ^
At present let me confine myself to my object, which is to
make you, my dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with re-
spect to these poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present
reception; of what moment is that compared with what I
trust is their destiny?—to console the afflicted; to add sun-
shine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the
170 ESSAYS.
young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel,
and, therefore, to become more actively and securely virtuous;
this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform,
long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered
in our graves.
Still, the critic did something: he supplied wit-
º lings with epigrammatic bon-bons, caused the poems
to be an unremunerative article of commerce, and
retarded the nation in their general acknowledgment
of a great poet; and they now stand side by side,
critic and poet, and the age has already approximated
to a just appreciation of each. Again, on the publi-
cation of the ‘Excursion,’ in 1814, the same hand
shot another and a more sulphurous bolt; he even
boasted, in his self-complacent blindness, that he had
crushed the ‘Excursion,’ ‘He crush the ‘Excursion’?”
cried Southey ; “tell him he might as well hope to
crush Skiddaw l’ But this time, whether from mere
opposition, or from a gleam of genuine insight, the
Quarterly Review—established, a few years pre-
viously, as a counterblast to the great Whig Bellows
—issued a mild whiff of qualified approval. This,
however, was going too far; and next year, in a
notice of the ‘White Doe of Rylstone,’ ‘Wordsworth
stood at the bar of the Tory journal, arraigned and
convicted of poetical heterodoxy and literary felo-de-
Se.' Nor—in spite of Southey's intimate connexion
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 171
g
with the Quarterly, and his invaluable assistance to
it—was the Verdict reversed till, in 1834, the author
of Philip Van Artevelde contributed to its pages the
abiest estimate and the fullest acknowledgment of
Wordsworth's genius and poetry that has appeared
since the publication of the Biographia Literaria.
That still remains, and is likely, we fear, long to
remain, unapproached and unapproachable, as a
specimen of philosophical criticism, and a generous
testimony of personal admiration.
Instructive as are these facts, as warnings against
putting faith in critics, and against that self-conceit
and laziness which presume to judge a writer who
gives ample proof of Original genius, without an
attempt to submit to his influence, or to seize his
point of view, and so feel with his feelings and see
with his eyes, we should not think them worth
mentioning here, but for the serene equanimity with
which Wordsworth endured, not only the lash of his
critics, but, what is far more galling, the neglect of
the world of letters. ‘Let the age,’ he writes to
Southey, ‘continue to love its own darkness; I shall
continue to write with, I trust, the light of Heaven
upon me.” With more epigrammatic point than is
usual with him, he Says of one of his principal
assailants, “he has taken a perpetual retainer from
his own incapacity to plead against my claims to
172 ISSAYS.
public approbation.’ So again, in writing to Bernard
Barton : ‘It pleases, though it does not surprise me,
to learn that, having been affected early in life by
my verses, you have returned again to your old loves,
after some little infidelities, which you were shamed
into by commerce with the scribbling and chattering
part of the world. I have heard of many who, upon
their first acquaintance with my poetry, have had
much to get over before they could thoroughly relish
it; but never of one who, having once learned to
enjoy it, had ceased to value it, or survived his
admiration. This is as good an external assurance
as I can desire, that my inspiration is from a pure
Source, and that my principles of composition are
trustworthy.’
It was this rooted conviction of the genuineness
of his inspiration and the truth of his principles,
combined with a deep sense that the question involved
was not a merely personal one to himself, but con-
cerned the best interests of humanity, that Sustained
his patience and cheerfulness. But subordinate to
this moral cause, we have no doubt that his active
habits and out-of-door life materially aided this
effect. ‘Nine-tenths of my verses,’ he says, “have
been murmured in the open air.’ ‘There,’ said his
servant to some strangers, who were being shown
over Rydal Mount, ‘is my master's library, where
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 173
he keeps his books, but his study is out of doors.”
And on his return after a long absence from home,
his cottage neighbours have been heard to say,
‘Well, there he is; we are glad to hear him booing
about again.” His pedestrian tours have been already
mentioned; and, indeed, his tours seem to have been
most of them mainly pedestrian; it is not from
carriage-windows that such impressions as form the
stuff of his numerous poetic memorials of his journeys
to Scotland and elsewhere are received. How much
his happiness was subserved by this habit, may be
judged from an anecdote, showing the extreme
irritability of his constitution, which was further
manifested in frequently recurring attacks of inflam-
mation of the eyes. He received a wound in his
foot while walking about composing the ‘White
T}oe,’ and though he desisted from walking, he found
the irritation of the wounded part was kept up by
the act of composition. Upon taking a mental
holiday, a rapid cure was the consequence. He adds,
“Poetic excitement, when accompanied by protracted
labour in composition, has throughout my life brought
On more or less bodily derangement. Nevertheless,
I am, at the close of my seventy-third year, in what
may be called excellent health. But I ought to
add, that my intellectual labour has been generally
carried on out of doors.” Not that his poems were
174 FSSAYS.
given to the public as extempore effusions; no writer
of his time was more impressed with the necessity
of labour for the perfect poet. He thus writes to
a friend who seemed destined to tread the path of
science with honour and usefulness, and was in
danger of weakening himself by indulgence in the
composition of verses.
Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of
verse is infinitely more of an art than mcm are prepared to
believe; and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable
minutiae, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire
a knowledge of Milton talks of ‘pouring easy his unpre-
meditated verse.’ It would be harsh, untrue, and odious, to
say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to
the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point out to you five
hundred passages in Milton upon which labour has been
bestowed, and twice five hundred more to which additional
labour would have been scrviceable.
Mr. de Quincey calculated many years ago, that
Wordsworth’s legs must have carried him then
nearly 200,000 miles; and an old friend of ours
is fond of telling that as he was riding one summer
afternoon on a coach along Grasmere, the coach
met Mr. Wordsworth and stopped; and a young
lady inside who was going on a visit to the poet,
put her head out to speak to him. ‘IIow d'ye do?’
said he, ‘how d'ye do? Mrs. Wordsworth will be
delighted to see you. I shall be back in the evening.
WORDS WORTH2S POEMS. 175
I’m only going to tea with Southey.’ Southey lived
not less than fifteen miles off—hardly a yard of
level ground all the way. Another anecdote we
must tell, partly illustrating this peripatetic tendency,
and partly as giving a glimpse of that practical
humour, which Wordsworth was not deficient in,
though these volumes furnish but this solitary one—
and that is owing to Mr. Justice Coleridge.
As we walked, I was admiring the nover-ceasing sound of
water, so remarkable in this country. “I was walking,” he
said, “on the mountains, with — the Eastern traveller; it
was after rain, and the torrents were full. I said, ‘I hope
you like your companions—those bounding, joyous, foaming
streams.’ ‘No,' said the traveller, pompously, ‘I think they
are not to be compared in delightful effect with the silent
solitude of the Arabian Desert.’ My mountain blood was up.
I quickly observed that he had boots and a stout great-coat
on, and said, ‘I am sorry you don’t like this; perhaps I can
show you what will please you more.’ I strode away, and
led him from crag to crag, hill to vale, and vale to hill, for
about six hours; till I thought I should have had to bring
him home, he was so tired.”
This prodigious habit of walking, and that other
of lying in luxurious dreamy meditation on Sunny
bank, or under the shade of trees, account for the
very scanty records of study or even desultory reading
which these volumes afford. Wordsworth was fairly,
though by no means deeply or curiously read in
English poetry; Mr. de Quincey adds, in ancient
176 JESSAYS.
g history; but of this there appears no proof in these
volumes, nor the faintest indication in his writings.
The only foreign literature for which he seems to
have had any taste was Italian, though he could
speak French fluently, and had a fair knowledge of
German: of the Greek poets he talks, but with the
Latin poets he had that familiar acquaintance which
was so much more common with our fathers and
grandfathers than among ourselves; he even trans-
lated into rhymed heroic verse several books of the
Afºneid. With philosophical writers and philosophical
systems he shows no acquaintance, and of physical
Science he had no special knowledge. In fact, his
range of reading was extremely limited, and neither
his letters nor his recorded conversations would lead
us to suppose that within this range his knowledge
was profound or his observation keen. We cannot
cull from these two volumes a single critical remark
that betrays extraordinary sagacity or profound com-
prehension of an aesthetic law. He had, or fancied
that he had, a taste for old books. ‘The only
modern books that I read,” he writes to Archdeacon
Wrangham, “are those of travels, or such as relate
to matters of fact—and the only modern books that
I care for; but as to old ones, I am like yourself—
scarcely anything comes amiss to me.' We question
whether this taste for old books was much more than
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 177
a liking for the thoughtful poets of the Stuart period,
such as Daniel and Herbert; stimulated perhaps by
very genuine indifference towards, if not contempt
for, all contemporary literature. Even the great
luminaries of our literature only beamed on him from
one side of their sphered brightness. Chaucer's
descriptions, sparkling with the dews of morning, and
his gentle piety of heart; the long-drawn sweetness
of Spenser's verse, and the elevated purity of his
moral; Milton's austere grandeur of thought and
stately pomp of imagination—all these were Words-
worth's own, and he listened to them with rapt
attention as to the voice of his own soul. But of
a greater than any or all of these, we can only recal
one trace :
The gentle Lady married to the Moor.
And here it is not the agony of passion, nor the
subtle working of the insidious poison, nor the
diabolic revelation of concentrated coiled malignity,
that he dwells on, as characteristic excellencies of
the play, but the gentleness of the victim attracts
and fascinates him. In all that mighty Symphony of
maidenly admiration, of manly love, of stately age,
of vigorous youth, of calm domestic peace, of ‘the
pride, pomp, eircumstance of glorious war,’ of bound-
less faith, of agonizing jealousy, of Wrath, hate, fond-
N
178 ESSAYS.
ness, and despair, all blending into one complex
devouring passion, he hears but the simple melody
of the flute. In that woof of death shot over with
all the glorious and changing hues of life, he sees
but one simple flower blooming by a grass-green
grave. That marvellous and many-sided life-picture
is to him only ‘patience sitting on a monument,
smiling at grief.’ Let us not be misunderstood;
of course Wordsworth was acquainted with Shak-
speare's works; and of course, with all the world,
he placed him with Homer, at the head of the first
class of poets, while he knew that Spenser and
Milton only belonged to the second. But it is the
of course that marks the point at which his appre-
ciation stopped. There come from his lips none of
those penetrating flashes of light which broke from
Coleridge amid lustrous clouds and radiant darkness,
whenever he spoke of the great masters of the Epos
and the Drama, communicating to others his own
illuminating insight, the result at Once of profound
study and profound affection. In fact, we doubt
whether Wordsworth read to enlarge the range of
his conception or sympathies. In the language of
modern criticism, he kept his own centre, and thence
surveyed men and books; never attempted to gain
their centre. De Quincey admirably points out how
little needful books were to a man who drew such
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 179
an ‘enormity of pleasure’ from the everlasting
variety of nature's common appearances, who could
derive
Even from the meanest flower that blows
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,
who felt that
One impulse from the vernal wood
Could teach him more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can.
One story, thoroughly characteristic of Words-
worth’s indifference to every production of modern
growth but his own poetry, we recently heard from
a friend. Possibly it may be in print, but we have
not seen it. When Rob Roy was published, some of
Mr. Wordsworth’s friends made a pic-nic, and the
amusement of the day was to be the new novel. He
accompanied them to the selected spot, joined them
at luncheon, and then said—“Now, before you begin,
I will read you a poem of my own on Rob Roy. It
will increase your pleasure in the new book.” Of
course, every one was delighted, and he recited the
well-known verses; and the moment he had finished,
said, ‘Well, now I hope you will enjoy your book;’
and walked quietly off, and was seen no more all the
afternoon. t
The very rough mode in which he handled books
N 2 f
180 JESSAYS,
showed how little he cared for them. Southey said,
to let him into a fine library was like turning a
bear into a tulip garden; and De Quincey tells of
his cutting open a ‘pracht-edition’ of Burke with
a knife he had just used to butter toast. What
a contrast his pious remorse at the ravage of the
nut-bough—
I felt a sense of pain when I beheld
The silent trees, and the intruding sky; —
and the earnest reverence of the exhortation that
follows:—
Then, dearest maiden move along these shades
In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand
Touch—for there is a spirit in the woods.
We have left ourselves no space to speak of the
poet's later political opinions. It is well known
that they were of what is called a high Tory com-
plexion—especially that he looked with no favourable
eye on the sort of education that has been latterly
spreading among the poor; that he extremely disliked
dissent, and disapproved of modern concession to it;
that he anticipated the most disastrous consequences
from the Catholic Emancipation and Reform Bills.
He passed, in fact, apparently from one pole to the
other of the political sphere, just as his friends
Southey and Coleridge did, and under the influence
of like causes, the chief of which was undoubtedly
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 181
the strong national feeling that was roused in them
all by Napoleon’s strides of conquest, and the danger
that at one time seemed to threaten England. The
violence and crimes of the Jacobins had before this
alienated their sympathies from the French Revo-
lution. They, men of thought and feeling, not men
of experience and action, had dreamt of a rose-
water revolution, and sickened at blood. At first,
they merely stood aloof, displeased equally at the
proceedings of the French and at our declaration of
war. But when danger came near ‘the inviolate
island of the brave and free,’ they not only felt as
|Fnglishmen and as patriots, but looked upon their
country as the last citadel and stronghold of liberty;
and henceforth war to the knife with France was
identical with devotion to freedom and virtue.
During the whole war with Napoleon, the Whigs
did what they dared to thwart its continuance, and
to annoy those who carried it on, and so became to
a degree identified with the enemies of the country.
This is the feeling that lay originally at the bottom
of Wordsworth's dislike of them. Then, again, he
never was at heart a democrat. Like Milton, he
would have had an aristocracy of intellect and virtue.
There is not a trace of the feeling, that numbers
should outweigh worth from beginning to end of his
writings. He had, besides, a strong distaste for city
182 JESSAYS.
life, for its endless bustle, and its dull routine, ani-
mated as he thought by Vanity and the desire of
wealth. Commerce, trade, and manufactures were
not, in his estimation, the sources of a nation’s
greatness; but on country life, its occupations, its
traditions, and its customs he looked with a fond
affection, especially on that national church which so
associates itself to the senses, the imagination, and
the understanding with a country life. The village
spire and the squire's mansion are the centres of this
life, and Wordsworth's passion for nature could
scarcely have failed to throw something of a poetic
lustre, in addition to the value his reason and his
heart attached to them, over the institutions of which
both were symbols. His early association with
Coleridge, too, tended to open to him the deep
foundations on which our national institutions rest,
and to inspire him with a reverence for them, and
a cautious fear of weakening them by attempts at
improvement. If, however, any person is inclined to
call him reactionist and bigot, we would only remark
that there are three classes of politicians,—those who
under the pressure of an existing evil seek for change,
without the faculty of discerning to what that change
will inevitably lead; ignorant, in fact, of the law of
development which links together political events
and gives unity to History;-those who, with con-
WORDS WORTH'S POEMS. 183
scious and definite aim, plant the great hereafter
in the now, and are not consequently liable to be
startled and terrified, and driven into reaction by the
results of their own actions;–and thirdly, those who
with clear eye discern the dependence of the hereafter
upon the now, and because they shrink from the
hereafter, refuse to take the step which renders it
inevitably certain. To the last class belonged
William Wordsworth.
Praser's Magazine,
July and August, 1851.
184 ESSAYS.
POETRY AND CRITICISM.
DR. JoHNSON, in more than a century and a half
of English literary history, beginning with Cowley
and ending with Gray, found less than threescore
writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of a place
in his biographical collection. Though, in his own
line, and in cases where partiality did not disturb
his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter of literary
reputation, the Doctor would find hard work to
persuade any well-read person of the present day,
that more than half the verse-writers whose lives
he has composed have any claim to be called poets,
or even men of distinguished talents. Perhaps the
account might be balanced by the addition to his
list of as many names as a modern judgment of the
literary celebrities of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries would erase from it. We have learned to
look for other qualities in those we honour with
POETRY AND CRITICISM, 185
the name of poets than such as pleased the critics
of Johnson's age; or, at least, we have learned
a different relative estimate of poetical gifts, and
are used to flatter ourselves that ours is a truer and
deeper view than the one held by our grandmothers.
The result is that reputations have since that time
both sunk and risen, forgotten writers have been
dug up from the dust of oblivion, and others who
lived then per ora virám, in the gossip of Mrs.
Thrale's tea-table, and in the pages of the oracular
Doctor, are buried out of sight and hearing, and
silence covers them. But taking all such changes
of opinion into account, the century and a-half over
which Johnson's immortal work extends—for im-
mortal it must be called, though, in reverence be
it spoken, it is a collection of lives which is lament-
ably wanting in many qualities of first-rate biography
—can on no mode of forming the list be made to
include a hundred writers in verse who attaimed
even moderate excellence. This gives one for every
year and a-half at a rough calculation. Of these,
our ten fingers amply suffice for the calculation
required to number those whose present reputation
could be an object of ambition to a reasonable man;
and how poorly the denial of lasting fame was
compensated to the rest by any Esau’s chance of
discounting immortality for pottage, ‘the Grub-street
186 JESSAYS.
tradition,’ which belongs to a considerable portion of
this period, and the details known of so many of the
lives, leave no doubt.
This familiar fact of our literary history may
serve, with change of time and place, for a certainly
not exaggerated statement of what is true of any
equal range of years in the literary history of the
world. And it would seem to prove that, however
common a certain degree of poetical faculty may be
among men—and that it is common, the almost uni-
versal liking for poetry indicates—the possession of
this faculty in such perfection and strength as to
enable the possessor to produce genuine poems is
exceedingly rare. Why this is so, and whether the
defect be one of nature or of training, an original
vigour denied, or a due cultivation neglected, is
a most interesting question; but one which would
require us to diverge from our immediate route into
psychology and the science of education. We merely
point to the fact that poetical genius, capable of artis-
tically manifesting itself, is, as a matter of experience,
extremely rare. Yet, at this moment, we have ranged
before us in “glittering row,” a set of volumes in verse
by not fewer than half as many authors as Johnson
found poets in one hundred and fifty years, and these
form but a fraction of those published in England
within the last year. Not one of these volumes was
2OETRY AND CRITICISM. 187
published without a belief on the writer's part that
he was an exception to the general rule of poetical
incapacity. For, draw as we may upon our candour,
we cannot suppose that any but a lunatic at large
would go to considerable expense to give the world
testimony that he or she was that most despised of
drudges—a verse-writer without poetical genius.
Still less can we suppose that in many of these cases
any but the writer has been at the charge of publi-
cation. Sint Macenates, non deerunt Marones, has
long ceased to be the limiting condition with authors.
The general diffusion of books and wealth produces
a capacity for writing verses in numerous persons
rich enough to be each his own Maecenas. And so
we are obliged to conclude that, in a single year,
there are among us as many persons of comfortable
means living under a conviction that they are poets,
as there have been writers worthy really of the name,
even in the most liberal interpretation of its meaning,
since Chaucer five hundred years ago first set our
English life to English music. And this goes on
every year, so that, by a moderate computation,
there cannot be in England at this moment less than
a thousand persons, men, women, and adolescents,
eating, drinking, sleeping, walking about, and in:
Some cases probably talking rationally and entrusted
with important duties, who have committed overt
188 FSSAYS.
acts based upon a supposition so extravagant, so
contrary to all deductions of experience, so certainly
and entirely fanciful in nine hundred and ninety of
the thousand cases as fully, so far as the example
extends, to justify the cynical observation, that ‘half
the world is mad, and the other half does not know
it.’ Indeed, were we disposed to treat as anything
more than one of those amusing delusions incident
to the various forms of monomania, the assertion so
frequently met with in the preface to published
volumes of verse, that the publication has been urged
upon the author by admiring friends, we must assume
for every monomaniacal verse-publisher a circle of
friends afflicted with a still more unaccountable form
of monomania, if somewhat more amiable in its
symptoms. For the frenzy of the verse-writer may
be partially assigned to vanity and the pleasure of
composition; that of the admiring friends would be
pure Bedlamite distraction. But in fact the friends
have ever this singularity, that they rejoice in the
name of Harris, and neither post-office, police, nor
tax-collector, knows of their local habitation.
Perhaps we may be suspected of having gone to
that expense in educating ourselves for the functions
of the critic, which Swift asserts to be indispensable
for the true performance of the character, in oppo-
sition to those defamers who could make out ‘that
POETRY AND CRITICISM, 189
a true critic is a sort of mechanic set up with a stock
and tools for his trade, at as little expense as a tailor.”
Swift denies this position, and says, “On the con-
trary, nothing is more certain than that it requires
greater layings out to be free of the critic's company,
than that of any other you can name. For, as to be
a true beggar, it will cost the richest candidate every
groat he is worth; so, before one can commence
a true critic, it will cost a man all the good qualities
of his mind.” We may be suspected, we say, of
having got rid of all good-nature, faculty of being
pleased, &c., and of laying our indigestion to the
charge of wholesome nutriment. The poetry may
be good, but we may have no stomach for it. When
we have ceased to admire, enjoy, and thrive upon
the various banquets which true poets have set before
us, rich with the spoils of time, and like the widow’s
Cruse, undiminished by consumption, where appetite
but grows by what it feeds on, and fulness is not
Satiety, nor repetition weariness—when we no longer
catch in the poets' strains fragments of that eternal
Symphony of which they are at once memorial and
prophecy; when heart, intellect, and Scmse cease to
find in those strains, broken and imperfect as they
are at best, hints of that perfect and harmonious
fulness of satisfaction which is the longing desire
and anticipated fruition of all faithful souls—then
190 JESSAYS.
we may accept our own deadness of heart and blind-
ness of sight, as a probable reason why we look
upon the several hundreds of gentlemen and ladies,
now living in the land, and convicted of having
published volumes of verse, much with the same
feelings as a man born deaf must contemplate the
whirling mazes of the waltz. Nor can we accuse
ourselves of setting up a fanciful standard of poetic
excellence, and cultivating a morbid fastidiousness
which admits of no excellence that is not perfect.
We are too cognizant of the infinite variety of ima-
ginative power, of the admirable effects of this
variety, to indulge a narrow taste in poetry; and
too well aware of the difficulties that hamper its
exercise, and render perfect works of art, or even
perfect parts of works of art, the rarest accomplish-
ments of human skill, to be unhealthily fastidious.
but with the most catholic aspirations, with the
wish to be as large in sympathy, and as liberal
of admiration, as is consistent with any high en-
joyment of true excellence, we must draw distinct-
ions between things different in kind; we cannot
call Euclid's Elements, on the one hand, poetry;
nor can we any more give that honoured title, and
the emotions that belong to it, to compositions that
have nothing but rhyme and measure—and those
Seldom good—to separate them from the ordinary
POETRY AND CRITICISM. 191
talk of vaguely-perceiving, coldly-feeling, and inar-
ticulately-speaking men and women. . In the one
case, we call the geometry, perfect as it is, not
poetry, but science—a body of abstract truths of
space; in the other, we call the producing state of
mind stupidity, dulness, weakness, or some other
constituent mark of the non-apprehensive; and what
is produced we call stuff, nonsense, imarticulate
gibberish, or any other term which may seem ade-
quately to present some mark of the non-apprehended.
Let us see if, by following up the antithesis thus
Suggested between poetry and science, we cannot
gain some tolerably clear notions on the essential
characteristics of poetry, both as mental process and
product—on the nature of poetic insight and of
poems. As things in general, whether sensible
objects, actions, emotions, and thoughts, are the
matter upon which the understanding operates in its
search after the body of truth, the knowledge of
which we call science; so the same objects furnish
to the imagination the subject-matter of that peculiar
mode of apprehension which we call poetic, and of
that peculiar form of language which we call poetry
in the mass, and poems in particular examples. The
difference is not in the objects, but in the faculty
which apprehends and operates upon the objects.
The understanding takes any object presented through
192 FSSAYS.
the consciousness, and proceeds to analyse it into
separate qualities, to name it and refer it to a class
of objects with which it possesses certain of its
qualities in common. Henceforward, when it asks
itself what the thing is, the understanding can answer
that it is this thing or that, giving Some name ex-
pressive of those common qualities which it has
along with all members of its class. The properties
which it has to distinguish it from another member
of its class are nothing to Science, and the under-
standing pro hde vice takes no thought about them.
Of all science viewed in its statical aspect, apart from
the experience of change and the idea of cause, this
classification, naming, and definition are the ultimate
processes. And if we examine the higher branch of
dynamical science, what is it we seek to know about
the successive states of the object we investigate?
Is it not again an analysis of the concrete phenomena
presented to us by experience at successive times
that we have to perform * We want to find what
is the phenomenon invariably antecedent to some
given phenomenon; and we call obtain the know-
ledge only by analysing a complex coil of phenomena,
and after many experiments, much expenditure of
hypothesis, we succeed in getting at the invariable
antecedent. We have then established the sequence
wanted, and all the attendant phenomena are so
POETRY AND CRITICISM. 193
much refuse. The process throughout is analytical
in its object, and may be described as an endeavour
to detect such identities among objects coexisting in
space, as will enable the mind to classify, define, and
name them, and such connexion between objects
successively existing in time, as renders the separate
Currents of that mighty Ocean of intermingling, inter-
acting vortices distinguishable, methodical, intelli-
gible. A scientific apprehension of the universe
would be a knowledge of all the classes into which
things can at any moment be divided, and of the
corresponding classes into which their immediate
antecedents would have been divisible. Its lowest
concept would be classes cleared of individuals, its
most concrete words names of species, its apotheosis
would be when, having unravelled the infinite web
of creation, it could pass from the outermost edge of
its circumference along a single thread to the centre
and the source of all, and its language would then
have attained its highest stage of generalisation, and
would consist of two words, cause and effect.
Imagination takes the same object that we sup-
posed before presented to the understanding. As by
chemical attraction it lays hold on precisely that
part of the phenomenon which the understanding
rejects, passing lightly over and taking little heed
of that which the understanding was in quest of.
O
194 ESSAYS.
What the object has in common with the class to
which its name and its definition refer it, the imagin-
ation neglects as not characteristic, and seizes eagerly
on that which constitutes it an individual. It may
or may not happen that science has, in the various
systems of classification necessary for its purposes,
taken separately and at different times, all the quali-
ties of the object which strike the imagination ; but
it never happens that it has taken them simultane-
ously and all together. And we are, therefore, fully
justified in Saying that imagination neglects, com-
paratively, the single, separate qualities of an object,
on which the understanding is at any one time en-
gaged, and fixes on the complex residue of qualities.
of which the understanding only takes heed to throw
them aside as nothing to the purpose. Where the
understanding is looking for such qualities as will
enable it to give the object a name common to as
many other objects as possible, and therefore includ-
ing as little content (as the logicians call it) as pos-
sible, the imagination is looking for those qualities
which fill the senses, stir the emotions, and form a
concrete whole as crowded with content as is con-
sistent with unity. And if a scientific concept of
the universe be, as we have said, a concept of classes
tending upwards to unity as cause; a poetical view
of the universe is an exhaustive presentation of all
POETRY AND CRITICISM, 195
phenomena, as individual phenomenal wholes of as-
cending orders of complexity, whose earliest stage is
the organization of single co-existing phenomena into
concrete individuals, and its apotheosis the marvellous
picture of the dumptôuov yewaapa of the Infinite
Life, no longer conceived as the oceanic pulsation
which the understanding called cause and effect, but
seen as unutterable splendour, heard as awful rhythm
of far-sounding harmonies, and comprehended as the
Time and Space-vesture of Him who in His own
absolute being is incomprehensible.
If any of the writers who may feel aggrieved by
our remarks upon their works think fit to revenge
themselves by pronouncing this to be sheer nonsense,
we shall not take pains to turn the point of the
retort. We do not think it so, or we should not
allow it to stand; but any extremely abstract and
general statement which includes a very large and
multifarious class of mental processes and products
is sure to be distasteful and unintelligible to most
readers, so we shall not weary their patience with
what they will probably call metaphysical jargon.
Dut we venture to state as a practical conclusion—
not dependent upon the preceding remarks, though
involved in them—that whatever objects poetry deals
with must be presented to the mind of the poet as
concretions of diverse phenomena organized into
O 2
196 ESSAYS.
phenomenal unity by the pervading vital influence
of a subjective idea. And this gives us the funda-
mental condition of poetic activity as well as of the
products of such activity, that such presentations
must be made to the mind of the poet, and by him
given to the reader, as include and contain at least
all the qualities or properties of an object necessary
to constitute it a possible phenomenal objective
whole. If it be a flower of which the poet wishes
to raise the image, it must be a particular flower,
and have the form and colour of some particular
possible, though not necessarily actual, flower. If
his language fails to express these two qualities at
least, it fails by so much of being poetic. If it be
a human action, it must be presented at least with
such characteristics as distinguish one human action
from another. If it be a natural scene, the pre-
sentation must embrace such objects made out with
such detail, as are necessary to distinguish the scene
for the purpose in hand from another similar scene.
But we need not pursue the illustration. It is
evident that poetry attains its aim just in proportion
as it creates individual and not general presentations,
just in proportion, that is, as it is distinguished from
and antithetical to the representations of Science.
Let not any one run away with the hasty notion
that this amounts to asserting that poetical presenta-
POETRY AND CRITICISM. 197
tion consists in enumeration of detail. The fact is
just the opposite. It consists in the presentation of
a whole, which arranges and subordinates all detail.
How much detail is requisite in each case depends
upon the nature of the whole contemplated; but in
no case is detail enumerated—introduced for its own
Sake—but organized. There must be parts, but no
simple additions of parts will make the whole; on
the contrary, they are not parts till the whole is
completed, or except in reference to the idea of the
whole.
Such, then, are the fundamental properties of
poetry, that, as the antithesis of Science, it indi-
vidualises instead of classifying, presents organic
wholes instead of severed parts; things actual or
possible, instead of abstract general names. When-
ever the mind is thus engaged it is making poetry.
Language bears testimony to the multifarious and
incessant exercise of this power among men from the
earliest infancy of our race, and as M. Jourdain
talked prose all his life without knowing it, the
dullest proser among us would be astonished, and
perhaps disgusted, if he were conscious of the vast
amount and the high quality of the poetry he utters,
between getting up and going to bed, every day of
the year. But we live upon the past and inherit
other men's labours. We are not poets because we
198 ESSAYS.
are the heirs of the poets; and, as a Senseless spend-
thrift squanders untold wealth without any sense of
its value, or any adequate return of pleasure or
profit, we may squander all the poetry of our current
language without any thought of the preciousness of
its material, and find in that which might be ever
giving us glimpses of the glory and splendour of the
universe, only the means of satisfying the wants of
our logical or practical understanding. The language
which bears the stamp of imagination may by use
and insensibility become to us only a circulating
medium of conventional signs, and we may apply
words and phrases alive with presentative signifi-
cance, without assigning to them anything more
than the representative or symbolical relation to
objects which the coinage of the understanding ori-
ginally expresses.
Now, some one will say, a great deal has been
said about poetry, and not a word about verse; and
a position has been taken up which assigns to the
poetical faculty or faculties an important part in the
formation of language, as if rhythm, verse, stanza,
rhyme, were no elements of poetry at all, but only
accidental graces. We believe them to be no ac-
cidental graces, if accidental mean fortuitous; but
accidental they certainly are in the logical sense of
the word, as not essential to the definition of poetry,
POETRY AND CRITICISM. 199
nor conditional of its production. They belong to
the poetry of man, because he is an emotional as well
as a perceptive being, and arise from the fact that
objects presented to the mind with living fulness
and power, are by the constitution of our nature
adapted to excite an emotion of pleasure, apart from
our practical concern with them. Whatever the
presentation be in itself, whether the object presented
be such as we should like or dislike in its actual
manifestation to our senses, or in its effects upon our
actual interests, we delight in the satisfaction it gives
to our perceptive or speculative faculties. In minds
of peculiar sensibility this pleasure is heightened in
proportion to the keenness of these faculties, and the
attractions of the objects presented, till the emotion
excited seeks relief spontaneously by rhythmical ex-
pression. We cannot now discuss the law by which
all emotion, that is not mere pain, is impelled in its
highest degrees to rhythmical expression, nor are we
prepared to make any assertion as to the universality
of this law, or its limitation to individuals of peculiar
organization. But we think no one will deny that
poetry, and music, and dancing, all rhythmical art
in fact, did begin, and must have begun, as we have
suggested. We believe that, like the fundamental
poetic faculty, whose function is to organize diverse
phenomena into unities, so this attendant faculty of
200 _ESSAYS.
singing from the emotions of pleasure caused by the
perceptive presentations so made, must be in a
degree common to all men and women who can enjoy
song. But we are not prepared to maintain this as
certain. This, however, we have no doubt about,
that the rhythm of poems expresses the emotion of
the singer, just as the words of Song express the
presentations of his imaginative faculty; and that
the various forms of metre, its recurrent emphasis,
its various pauses, its divisions into stanza and
verse, and its modern emphatic identities of termi-
nating sound, are all originally expressive of the
varieties of kind and degree of emotion. Upon this
point all philosophy of metre, all criticism of the
form of poetry, is to be based.
True it is, as we said in reference to poetic lan-
guage, that use, and the indifference that comes of
use, may degrade forms which were originally the
spontaneous expression of plastic emotion into stereo-
typed moulds which any dullard, blind and crippled,
can fill with his clay. The very cause why genuine
poetry is, perhaps, a rarer accomplishment in ages
of high, Or, at least, general culture, than in earlier
and ruder ages, is precisely the reason why we have
so many writers of Smooth verse who cannot un-
derstand why critics will refuse them the title of
poets. Poetical language has become so common,
POETRY AND CRITICISM. 201
that while it is within anybody's capacity, the diffi-
culty becomes greater either to select words not
hackneyed that express poetical ideas so well as the
current words and phrases, or to make these phrases
do their original work of presenting real living ob-
jects, and not merely abstract names and conventional
signs. And the metrical forms have done duty so
often, and the ear has become so habituated to their
music, and at the same time so dull to their charms,
that it requires at once a higher inspiration than
ever to write verse from a spontaneous impulse, as
distinguished from a mechanical knack, and finer
art than ever to cause the reader by means of verse
to share that rhythmical condition of emotion which
alone justifies to him what is, otherwise, a senseless
artifice, and a simple hindrance to clearness of thought
and expression.
We have thus briefly sketched the outline of our
own theory of poetry in the general—the theory on
which, in our opinion, Sound criticism must be based
—and on which, therefore, we profess to base our
own criticism. The principles we have enunciated
may be thus Summed up. A poem must present
its subject as an organic whole, which, though made
up of parts common, it may be, to an infinite variety
of other wholes, is itself distinct from every other
whole, and is recognisable at Once for what it is, an
202 JESSAYS.
individual not identical with any other individual of
the same general character. Any presentation of a
subject that falls short of this tends either towards
scientific abstraction or towards the utterly inarti-
culate, that which neither intellect nor imagination
have firmly grasped or clearly apprehended. This
is the principle we shall apply to the compositions
we are called to judge, in deciding on their ima-
ginative power. As to questions of form, we have
already stated that rhythm, metre, and all that con-
stitutes the mode of expression rather than the Sub-
stance—though in art it is hazardous to draw hard
lines of distinction between form and Substance, where
form is not conventional—are spontaneous natural
signs of the singer's emotion, and, as regards the
reader, at once an index to the singer's intensity of
poetic temperature—a kind of metronome—and the
medium through which the same heat of emotion is
kindled in the reader, and he is infused with the
passion as well as the imaginative perception of the
subject. All, then, we have to ask ourselves in re-
ference to the form of any particular poem is, whether
it does so express the emotion of the Writer, and what
quality and degree of emotion it expresses—that of
a great soul raised to the height of its subject, or of
a little soul vainly striving to warm its thin blood,
but puny, starved, and shivering, even in presence
POETRY AND CRITICISM, 203
of the central fires of the universe. To any poem
which will stand the test of the application of these
principles the tribute of our hearty admiration is
due, and will be joyfully paid. What will not
stand this test is not poetry at all; and in masquer-
ading under the poetical costume, it is tolerably sure
to lose any worth or attractiveness of sincere human
speech, as the voice we may delight to hearin its own
natural tones of conversation ceases to charm and
becomes painfully ridiculous in attempting the ac-
complishment of singing, for which nature has not
adapted its organization.
Fraser's Magazine,
Peb. 1855.
204 FSSAYS.
THE ANG ED. IN THE HOUSE.
A PERSON of cynical temper is likely to note with
emphasis, and with the grim pleasure that testifies
his perception of a fact his humour can assimilate
and grow by, a peculiarity in the mode which poets
have almost uniformly adopted in their treatment of
love. These interpreters of life would by no means
support the cynic in his estimate of that passion;
they have, on the contrary, exhausted heaven and
earth for similitudes by which to express their sense
of the beauty and worth of women, of the woes of
slighted and the raptures of successful lovers, of the
agonies and ecstacies, the torments and the blisses,
which women are capable of exciting in the hearts
of men, and of the comparative poverty and worth-
lessness of all the delights of life weighed against
one hour of the transports of requitcd passion, or
the calm of satisfied affection. They may, morcover,
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 205
be credited with a degree of sincerity in this appre-
ciation, which it would be difficult to accord to their
tuneful raptures on many of the other emotional
elements of human life. Poets are unquestionably
born with fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters
occasionally, and by chance aunts and uncles; but
except the AFneid, King Lear, and Antigone, we
remember no great poem in which the natural af-
fections of kindred have been among the leading
motives. Poets, too, have countries, with institutions
and beliefs, unless Schiller's theory be true, which
assigns them the clouds for dwelling-place and
domain; but those who have tuned their harps to
great national themes, to the foundation of empires,
the formation of civil society, the triumphs of liberty
and Order, the origin of Supernatural beliefs, and the
growth of religious worship, belong, so far as they
have been successful, to a remote past, and are the
study of scholars rather than the delight of the
people, while their modern imitators have made the
very name of epic a bugbear to all moderately
sensible and candid minds. In fact, success in the
treatment of subjects disconnected with love has been
most exceptional; and even the greatest poets, who
have looked abroad upon human life, and have found
it poetical throughout its whole extent and under
every variety of circumstance, have felt the attraction
206 JESSAYS.
of love so irresistible, that they have shot its golden
threads to illumine the darkest and enliven the
dullest parts of their microcosmic web, and to bring
down upon the whole surface the sheen of heaven's
light; while this universal passion has alone by itself
sufficed to make common men poets for the moment,
to raise minor poets to unwonted richness of thought
and imagery, and has brightened the faces of the
great masters of Song. By its light, when poetry
and the world were young, blind Homer read the
tale of Troy; and through a vista of three thousand
years, amid myriads of armed warriors, the eye still
follows Briseis as she leaves with reluctant feet and
reverting gaze the tent where captivity had found
a Solace, and the stern master was softened into the
lover; still above the din of battle, above the grave
turmoil of debate, we listen to the fierce Achilles
moaning for his lost mistress; the charms of Helen
are more to us than the wisdom of Athene and
the counsels of Nestor; and the sympathies of all
but a few extremely right-minded people are through-
out with the Trojans, and would be with Paris,
but that he is a downright coward, and the world
instinctively adopts the maxim,-
None but the brave
Deserve the fair.
Society—and poetry with it—had degenerated be-
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE. 207
tween the birth of the epic full-grown and full-armed,
like its own Athene, from the head of Homer, and
the time when Æschylus slaughtered Persians at
Salamis, and exhibited their ghosts upon the stage
at Athens. The forte of the Athenian drama cer-
tainly does not lie in the representation of love. But
then it must be remembered that the Attic stage was
eminently the domain of stateliness and convention-
ality, that waxen masks frozen into one unchanging
no-expression, to which even Charles Kean can only
feebly approach, would have been an inadequate
instrument for rendering so eminently versatile and
variable a passion as love, even reflected in the
countenance of an ancient philosopher or a modern
mathematician. Besides, the construction of the
mouthpiece of these masks, to serve for a speaking-
trumpet, could only have illustrated one rather curious
Scene, belonging more to comedy than tragedy—a
gentleman proposing to a lady who is stone-deaf.
Fancy Romeo, major humano by ten inches of cork
sole, sweeping along the stage with a drawing-room
train of dowager dimensions, and bawling, ‘I would
I were a glove upon that hand,’ through the sort of
instrument with which the captain of the Bellerophon
speaks the Arrogant half a mile off. Or, still worse,
Juliet sighing through the same instrument, ‘O,
Romeo | 0, gentle Romeo!’ and all that wondrous
208 FSSAYS.
play of passion not once flushing up in the cheek or
kindling in the eye. But the ugliest old hag that
ever rode a broomstick would be less repellent of the
gentler emotions than an automaton Venus, made to
speak through a v03, humama organ pipe. In short,
without insisting upon the Social circumstances of
Athenian women, and the peculiar notions that
regulated Athenian tragedy, these mere mechanical
conditions under which the tragedians wrote, are
sufficient to account for the insignificant part assigned
to love in their compositions, though their chorusses
abound in passages of the highest lyrical beauty and
fervour, which indicate that the passion was still as
powerful as ever to sway the feelińgs and excite the
imagination. When the stage became again a mirror
of actual contemporaneous life without disguise, as in
the later comedy of Memander and his Latin imitator
Terence, we find that even the mechanical obstacles
before mentioned were not so insuperable but that
women play an important part in these dramas, and
love becomes a prominent motive and a principal
attraction. Pindar unfortunately gave himself up to
the turf, the prize-ring, and a curious kind of Pagan
high-church hagiology, much as if the editor of
Bell's Life, the author of Bowiana, and the poet of
the Christian Year, were all three gentlemen in one.
The universal human vein shows itself, however,
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE, 209
here and there, with a strange gleam of tenderness,
in stray biographical allusions and moral reflections,
interspersed with the main subject in hand, which is
always to celebrate some Derby event of that old
time, or to trace up the lineage of Hellenic game-
chickens and White-headed Bobs to Hercules. In
Theocritus, again, love is ‘the main haunt and
region’ of the song, and that song about the Sweetest
whose echo still sounds over the waters of Time from
the dim shore of ancient Hellas. Then if we come
somewhat nearer to our own times, and to poets who
have influenced modern literature—at least, up to a
very recent period—more than their greater Hellenic
brethren have done, the names of Ovid and Horace
suffice to carry on the succession. Horace certainly
wrote plenty of good moral sentiment and patriotism
of the sort possible under a despotism of the modern
French type; but he will always be for us the little
fat man who loved and lived with various Lalages,
and made them, we feel perfectly assured, of more
account in his existence than the great ‘ nephew of
his uncle,’ his prime minister Maecenas, or even,
we fear, than the Palatine Apollo himself, and that
Jupiter Optimus Maximus who half frightened the
little sceptic with summer thunder. Even the
grandiloquent Virgil cannot get through his epic
without a strong spice of love, and pious AEneas
P
210 JESSAYS.
vindicates for himself the English as well as the
Latin force of the stereotyped epithet by behaving
like a scoundrel to a woman, and Sneaking off without
even saying good-bye, or leaving a christening-cup
for the possible Tyrian Tulus. That episode has
saved the Æneid from becoming a mere scholar's
poem, in spite of its magnificent versification. And
when a greater than Virgil took up his mantle, was
it not—by permission of the allegorists, be it spoken
—by the woman whom he loved that Dante was
guided to the Heaven of Heavens—to the presence
of the Ineffable? Nay, was it not in reality under
her guidance,
Donna beata e bella
Tal che di comandare io la richiesi,
as her messenger Says of her, that the poet ventured
all through that mystic Voyage? by her goodness,
Sweetness, and beauty alone that his heart was sus-
tained amid the wrongs, the torments, the purgatorial
discipline of life? by the light of love alone that life
became to him tolerable and intelligible? And in
spite of his stern theology, with its
Lasciate ognisperanza voi ch' entrate,
is it not just amid hell’s fiercest torments that love—
the most passionate, the most sensuous love of man
and woman—shows itself to him mightier than the
THE ANG ED. IN THE HOUSE, 211
torment, outbraving despair, and stronger in its own
simple strength than Hell and Fate, and that terrible
foreknowledge of an eternity without hope P It is
needless to pursue a topic so familiar through the
great names of modern poetry. Only conceive this
passion of love blotted out from the pages of our own
first-class poets, from Chaucer, from Spenser, from
Shakspeare, from Milton—what a sky without its sun
would remain what an earth without its verdure, its
streams, and its flowers! Something, no doubt, there
would be still to attract us in the manner-painting,
the grand thoughts, the vivid natural descriptions;
but even these would have lost a charm that now
often insensibly mingles with them and enhances
them. And the poor minors! where would they be?
All of them in the same category that Drayton's
Polyolbion, Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, Dave-
nant's Gondibert, were in before Southey and Co.
fanned a small flame of antiquarian poetic enthu-
siasm, and are in again now that Small flame has
gone out. Here and there some lyric, short and
tersely expressed, would survive in popular esteem,
especially if married to fine music; but the bulk
would float in undistinguished heaps by Lethe's
wharf, and scientific cultivators of literature would
resort to them, as agriculturists do to the guano
stores, to fertilize dry brains, and astonish the world
P 2
212 * JESSAYS.
with spasmodic crops of lectures on historical de-
velopment of poetry, and so forth. If we go on
to English poetry since the Revolution, we find the
same, or even greater, predominance of this single
element of emotion. With the exception of a few
reflective and satirical poems—that is, with the
exception of versified sermons and essays borrowing
some of the ornaments of poetry proper—where is the
really popular poem that does not depend for its main
charm on its pictures of love? What would even
Walter Scott himself be without it? Cowper indeed
is a real exception, so far as his poetry does not
come under the head of reflective or satirical, as
most of it does; but Cowper was no less exceptional
as a man than as a poet; he fell early in life into
hypochondria and confirmed valetudinarianism, and
was anything but a normal specimen of the warm-
blooded male mammal whose differentia is poetry-
writing. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, have
written the finest poetry of passion since the Eliza-
bethans; Moore wrote little else than sentimental love
poetry; Campbell's Gertrude stands highest of his
long poems; and if Wordsworth thought to wield a
poet's influence while he regarded the poet's mightiest
Spell as a Circean drug, has not the result been that
he is more respected than loved, almost universally
acknowledged to be a great teacher, but a heavy
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 213
writer, and that the poems and passages of his which
are the greatest favourites are precisely those, like
Laodamia, Ruth, She was a Phantom, &c., in which
he has mingled this spell, or composed his enchant-
ment entirely of it? We will not say a word here
of Mr. Tennyson, for his name alone at once brings
to the mind some of the most delicious love poetry
in the English language, however much noble poetry
of another kind it may also recal. *
The cynic, then, with whom we started, has cer-
tainly no great reason to pique himself upon the
support his opinions obtain from the poets, so far
as his and their estimate of love are brought into
direct comparison. But the fact that he would not
fail to notice as characteristic in the poetical estimate,
and supporting his own opinion rather than theirs
of the worth of women and of the influence of love
upon human happiness, is that, with a very few
exceptions, the poets expend their raptures upon the
period of courtship rather than of marriage, upon
the pursuit rather than the attainment, as if a woman
were like a fox, precious only for the excitement
of the chase, worthless when won. Or if they
venture at all beyond the wedding-day, it is too
often to treat marriage—according to that terrible
mot of Sophie Arnauld—as the Sacrament of adultery.
A vast quantity of literature turning on this crime
214 JESSAYS.
is written indeed in the spirit of that typical young
Parisian who, seeing an injured husband on the stage
shoot his wife's seducer, was heard to mutter to
himself, cochon de mari / And our cynical friend
might go over nearly the same range of poetry that
we have taken, and would show us that Briseis
was not the wife, but the mistress, of Achilles; that
EHelen's husband was not Paris, but Menelaus. He
would add that Odysseus only sighed for Penelope
while he was away from her, enduring moil and
toil in the trenches before Troy, and remembering
the substantial comforts of his island home, as well
as its sentimental attractions; moreover, that as soon
as he returned he was tired of his wife, and finally
could not stand domestic felicity any longer, but
proceeded on a voyage with an extremely vague
destination, from which he took good care never to
return. The Greek tragedians, too, would furnish
our friend with ample materials for his humour.
Though there is little enough in their plays of that
love which is the flower of life, making youth
glorious, manhood calm and strong, and age peaceful
and serene, there is enough and to spare of all
the foul and terrible results that belong to the cor-
ruption of this consummate excellence. We should
hear of Clytemnestra and Phaedra, of Deianira and
Medea; be told probably that the Furies were
THE ANG. E.I., IN THE HOUSE. 215
represented as women; that mythology, the mother
of poetry, began and continued in this key, having
little to say of faithful wives and constant lovers,
but delighting in vagrant loves, in ladies celestial
and semi-celestial, all acting with the largest liber-
ality. We fear, too, that the lovers in the Pastorals
of Theocritus had not been to the register's office;
and Queen Dido could no more have been received
at Queen Victoria's court than Queen Isabella the
Second. The loves of Ovid and Horace were little
better, it is to be feared, than that poor Violetta
at whom the great Times has been letting off such
tremendously overcharged artillery. Dante, too,
unfortunately had a wife and children at home all
the time he was taking that mystic journey under
the protection of the donna beata e bella; and Pe-
trarch's Laura, par eacellence, the type of a poet's
mistress, was another man’s wife. The ladies of
the present day would scarcely thank Chaucer for
his portraiture of Griselda; and the Wife of Bath,
which, it is said, Dr. Doddridge used to read aloud
to the young misses of his pious circle, cannot be
considered on the whole complimentary to the fairer
half of mankind. The only thoroughly charming wife
whom Shakspeare represents, was married to a black
man, and throttled by him in the honeymoon or
shortly after. Spenser's idolatry was paid to a maiden
216 ESSAYS.
queen, on the very ground of her maidenhood.
Milton's Eve—no less, the cynic would say, from
the poet's personal experience of married life than
from the historical necessity—ruined her husband,
and brought upon the whole world sin, woe, and
death. Our ‘Augustan’ poets were not, as a class,
sentimental men. Swift, Pope, and Addison are
three persons as thoroughly desillusionnés as M. de
Rochefoucauld himself; and Matthew Prior turned
for such feminine consolations as he needed to the
Lalages of Drury Lane. Byron, Scott, Shelley,
Yeats, all paint courtship, not marriage; if Burns
wrote John Anderson my Jo, John, and The Cotter's
Saturday Night, he wrote Amang the Rigs of Barley
with quite as much gusto, and modulated into that
key a great deal oftener than into any other. Mr.
Tennyson has indeed written the Miller's Daughter,
and the close of the Princess; but we should be
reminded that the latter is merely a lover's antici-
pation, his ideal picture of what married life should
be, and that the miller's daughter's husband is not
a strikingly interesting person, if he be not to be
called decidedly imbecile, in spite of the two
charming songs of which he claims the authorship.
The cynic has unquestionably a strong prima
facie case. It is a remarkable fact, that wedded
love has been almost uniformly rejected, as offering
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE. 217
no available material for high poetry, except in its
corruption, as a theme for tragedy; while, on the
other hand, satirical and comic writers have ex-
hausted ridicule and malignity in depicting the vices,
the absurdities, and the mean miseries, of people who
are ill-matched in marriage. As we believe that
the elements of high poetry exist wherever human
hearts beat with true vital heat; and as we further-
more believe that the emotional and truly human
life of a man and woman, so far from being over
when, from lowers, they become husband and wife,
then only begins to attain its full growth and ca-
pacity of bearing fruit and flower of perennial beauty
and fragrance, we are tempted to inquire into some
of the causes of this onesidedness which we have
charged the poets with, and to indicate briefly some
of the real poetical capabilities of wedded love, and
the sort of treatment they require in being wrought
into actual poems.
The first and most obvious temptation to limit
the poetical representation of love to the period before
marriage, lies in the fact that this period seems spon-
taneously to supply that beginning, middle, and end
which narrative or dramatic poems are truly enough
Supposed to require. Courtship, in ordinary cases,
divides itself into two phases, the termination of each
of which is a point of definite interest, towards which
218 ESSAYS.
all the incidents, all the talk, all the surprises, sus-
pensions, difficulties, and triumphs, which make up
the plot of a love-story, are directly subordinated.
A man falls in love with a woman, and has to win
his way by degrees more or less rapid and eventful,
to her affection; this is the first phase, rich, as ex-
perience proves, in elements of poetical pleasure,
which all men and women are capable of enjoying
without effort. Then follows the period, richer still
in all the materials for varied incident, in which
the social arrangements come in to interpose obstacles
between the lover and his mistress, and to keep the
interest of the reader or spectator always on the
stretch. The advantage is beyond all computation
which this natural framework, made ready to his
hand, confers upon the poet who seeks mainly to
amuse his audience by a series of connected occur-
rences, in each of which the least cultivated, the least
thoughtful, the least generous, can take an interest
that demands no strain, scarcely any activity, of the
imagination, the heart, or the reason. And the free,
vigorous exercise of the imagination is so rare among
mankind, that it is little wonder that poets have
been content with making their appeals to sympathies
that are sure to have been familiar to the hearts of
their audience at some time or other in the actual
experience of life, and need but the faintest outline
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE. 219
of reality in the representation to awaken them again.
But though it must be allowed that the love of
husband and wife offers no such obvious and facile
series of connected incidents, with well-marked divi-
Sions, and all tending, by due gradations of interest,
to one event; and though in proportion as the interest
of poetry is made to turn less on striking outward
circumstances, a heavier demand is made upon the
imagination of both writer and reader, and a mere
passive reception of familiar thoughts and feelings
becomes no longer sufficient for the enjoyment of the
poem; yet this only amounts to saying that poetry
has some higher function than to amuse idle people,
Some nobler office in cultivating the heart, and en-
larging the range of the inner life, than can be attri-
buted to it so long as it merely strikes one chord of
feeling, or at best plays over and over again, from
the beginning of time to its close, the same old tune
in different keys and on different instruments. It
is, indeed, quite true that it would be impossible to
mark the commencement of any poem, which should
deal with ordinary wedded love as its main subject,
by an event as definite as the first meeting of a man
with his future mistress, or a feeling as definite, as
distinct from his previous state of mind, as the first
awakening of the passion that is to rule his life
henceforward through the story. The same remark
220 JESSAYS.
applies as forcibly to the want of any event equally
definite with marriage to serve for a termination,
unless all such poems wore to have a mournful close,
and end with a deathbed, or fall into the old tragic
vein of seduction, adultory, and murder. We must
candidly consent to give up that source of interest
which lics in the changes produced upon the outward
relation, upon the union or separation of outward
existence between the two persons whose inner re-
lations, whose mutual influence upon each other, and
affection towards cach other, are by supposition the
subject of the poem. Instead of watching the for-
mation of a double star, and having all our interest
concontrated upon the critical moment when the at-
traction of one for the other finally draws them
within the inovitable vortex in which they are hence-
forth eternally to revolve, we have to explore the
laws and witness the phenomena of their mutual
action, henceforward bound by a limit in the pre-
servation of which consists the whole peculiarity, the
whole interest, of this class of objects. Or, if we
may be allowed another illustration from physical
science, instead of having to deal with a problem
mainly dynamical, we advance into the higher because
more complex and mysterious region of chemistry,
and are dealing, not with the mutual action of dis-
tinct bodies, but with the composition of bodies, with
*}
THE ANGED IN TETE HOUSE, 221
the changes their constituent atoms undergo by com-
bination, and by the action of the subtle elements—
heat, light, electricity, and so forth. Will any one
deny that the analogy is a true analogy? And if it
be so, is it not mere sloth and dulness, mere want of
subtle imagination, of delicate Sensibility, that can
complain of want of incident, and consequent want
of interest, in the drama of wedded love 2 There
can be no want of incident so long as character in-
fluences fortune, and fortune character; so long as
the destinies of human beings in this world are
carved out by their virtues and their vices; so long
as wisdom and goodness sweeten the bitterest cup of
adversity; so long as folly and wickedness infuse
gall into the bowl of nectar which fortune hands her
favourites in jewelled gold. It is the stupidity of
poets which can see no incident in married life so
long as the marriage vow is kept to the letter in the
grossest interpretation of that letter; and which has
for the most part induced them, when they have in-
troduced marricó people at all, to use marriage to
give a spicier piquancy to intrigue, or a darker glow
to hatred and revenge.
but this notion of want of incident unfitting
married love to be a subject for poetry is closely
connected with another notion stillmore false, vulgar,
and immoral. The romance of life is over, it is said,
222 FSSAYS.
with marriage; nothing like marriage, is the con-
genial reply, for destroying illusions and nonsense.
In which notable specimens of ‘the wisdom of many
men expressed in the wit of one,’ there are two re-
markable assertions involved. The first is that love
is an illusion; the Second, that marriage destroys it.
We may concede to the wisdom of the market-place
thus much of truth, that the love which marriage
destroys is unquestionably an illusion. We may
also concede to it this further truth, that the love of
husband and wife is no more the love of the man
and woman in the days of their courtship, than the
blossom of the peach is the peach, or the green
shoots of corn that peep above the snows of February
are the harvest that waves its broad billows of red
and gold in the autumn sun. If indeed there are
persons so silly as to dream, in their days of court-
ship, that life can be an Arcadian paradise, where
caution, self-restraint, and self-denial are needless;
where inexhaustible blisses fall like dew on human
lilies that have only to be lovely; a world from the
conception of which pain and imperfection, sin,
discipline, and moral growth are excluded, marriage
undoubtedly does destroy this illusion, as life would
destroy it were marriage out of the question. If,
too, attracted originally to each other by some slight
and indefinable charm, by some chord of sympathy
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 223
vibrating in harmony at a moment's accidental touch,
often by the mere force of the tendency at a particular
age to what the great Florentine calls—
Amor che alcor gentil ratto s'apprende,
Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona,
two young persons fancy that this subtle charm, this
mysterious attraction, is endowed with eternalstrength
to stand the shocks of time, the temptations of fresh
attractions, the more fatal because more continual sap
of unresting egotism, ever active to throw down the
outworks and undermine the citadel of love; and
trusting to it alone, think that wedded happiness can
be maintained without self-discipline, mutual esteem
and forbearance; without the charity which covers
the defects it silently studies to remove; without the
wisdom and the mutual understanding of character
to which profound and patient love can alone attain
—this is another illusion which marriage will destroy.
What is, however, generally meant by the sayings
we have quoted, is, that there is nothing like marriage
for taking the passion out of people, for taking out
of them all disinterested aspirations, all noble hopes
and fears, all delicacy of Sentiment, all purity of
mind, all warmth of heart—nothing like marriage
for making them see, in respectable money-making,
in respectable dinners, respectable furniture, carriages,
224 ESSAYS.
and so forth, the be-all and the end-all of human
existence. So far as marriage in our actual world
realizes these noble predications;–and, so far as it
does, the result is mainly owing to the miserable
views of life and its purposes which society instils
into its youth of both sexes; being still, as in Plato's
time, the Sóphist par eaccellence, of which all indi-
vidual talking and writing sophists are but feeble
copies—just so far is married love, if the phrase is
to be so outrageously perverted, utterly unfit for any
high poetry, except a great master of tragedy should
take in hand to render into language the too common
tragi-comedy of a human soul metamorphosing itself
into a muckworm. But Surely every one can look
round among his acquaintance, and find marriages
that are not after this type, marriages which
“have wrought
Two spirits to one equal mind,
With blessings beyond hope or thought,
With blessings which no words can find.”
The romance of life gone! when with the humblest
and most sordid cares of life are intimately associated
the calm delights, the settled bliss of home; when
upon duties, in themselves perhaps often wearisome
and uninteresting, hang the prosperity and the
happiness of wife and children; when there is no
THE ANGET, IN THE HOUSE, 225
mean hope, because there is no hope in which regard
for others does not largely mingle—no base fear, be-
cause suffering and distress cannot affect self alone;
when the selfishness which turns honest industry to
greed and noble ambition to egotistical lust of power
is exorcised; when life becomes a perpetual exercise
of duties which are delights, and delights which are
duties. Once romance meant chivalry; and the hero
of romance was the man who did his knightly devoirs,
and was true and loyal to God and his lady-love.
If with us it has come to mean the sensual fancies
of nerveless boys, and the sickly reveries of girls
for whose higher faculties society can find no em-
ployment, it is only another instance in which the
present is not so much wiser and grander than the
past, as its flatterers are fond of imagining. To us
it appears that where the capacity for generous de-
votion, for manly courage, for stedfast faith and
love, exists, there exists the main element of romance;
and that where the circumstances of life are most
favourable for the development of these qualities in
action, they are romantic circumstances, whether the
person displaying them be, like Alton Locke, a tailor,
or, like King Arthur, a man of stalwart arm and
lordly presence. Nor do we see that the giants,
dragons, and other monsters of the old romance, are
in themselves one whit more interesting than the
Q.
226 - IESSAYS,
obstacles that beset the true modern knight in his
struggles to perform manfully the duties of his life,
and to carry out the noble spirit of that vow which
he has solemnly taken at the altar, to love, comfort,
honour, and keep in sickness and in health, the
woman who has put her youth, her beauty, her
life, and happiness into his hands.
It may, however, be said that married life, when
it is not utterly corrupted into crime and wretched-
ness; when, that is, it in any degree answers to its
ideal—is necessarily monotonous; and that, though
to the husband and wife it may be a perpetual source
of discipline and delight, it offers no scope to the
poet, whose story must march, his characters de-
velope, and their passions and affections exhibit
change, gradation, and culmination. We have al-
ready admitted so much of this objection, as to con-
cede to the period before marriage greater facilities
for marked gradations of interest depending onchanges
in the outward relations of the persons whose fortunes
and feelings are being narrated. We have said that
those outward relations once fixed by marriage, the
action of the poem which is to depict married love
must lie within narrow limits, and that its interest
must depend on more subtle delineation of shades of
character and feeling, on a perception, in a word, of
those effects which spring from the conduct of the
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 227
affections in married life, and those influences which
circumstance and character combine to work in the
affections, and which, slight and commonplace as
Some persons may choose to think them, are important
enough to make human beings happy or miserable,
and varied enough to account for all the differences
that an observant eye can find in modern family life.
And the fact, which few persons will dispute, that in
our actual family life there is found, quite irrespective
of distinctions of class and differences of wealth,
every possible gradation of happiness and misery, of
vulgarity and refinement, of folly and wisdom, of
genial sense and fantastic absurdity, is a sufficient
answer to those who talk of the monotony of married
life as an objection to its fitness for yielding materials
for poetry. In real truth, there is much more mono-
tony in courtship than in marriage. A sort of Spas-
modic and, to spectators well acquainted with the
parties, a somewhat comical amiability is the general
mask under which the genuine features of the cha-
racter are hidden. Moreover, the Ordinary interests
of life become throughout that period comparatively
insipid; and lovers are proverbially stupid and tire-
Some to every one but themselves. No doubt this
has its compensating advantage for the poet, who
transforms his readers into the lovers for the time
being; but it certainly gives monotony to all mani-
Q 2
228 ESSAYS.
festations of the passion in this its spring-time, which
is not found in the same passion when the character
has recovered from the first shock, and life, with all
its interests, again enters into the heart, but invested
with new charms and higher responsibilities, and
with the deeper, fuller affections swelling in a steady
current through the pulses.
So much for those more obvious objections that
may in great measure account for the almost uni-
versal rejection of married love as a theme for poetry.
We do not care to argue against any one who says,
much less any one who thinks, that it is only young
men and women who are interesting. Even with
respect to mere sensuous beauty, it is a great ab-
surdity to suppose that its splendour and charm are
confined to two or three years of early womanhood.
‘Beaucoup de femmes de trente ans,’ says a shrewd
French Writer, after enumerating the supposed at-
tractions of youth in women, ‘ont conservé ces
avantages; beaucoup de femmes de dix-huit ans ne
les ont plus ou ne les ont jamais eu.” Certainly
no Englishman who uses his eyes needs this as-
surance; and no one who delights in the society of
women can doubt that they continue to grow in all
that charms the heart and intellect, in all the mate-
rials of poetry, after they become wives and mothers.
There is, however, one solid objection to the
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE. 229
tenor of our remarks to which we are inclined to
give great weight. We can fancy many persons,
for whose opinions we have the highest respect,
protesting against the intrusion of the poet into the
recesses of married life, against the analysis of feel-
ings that were not given us to amuse ourselves with,
against
“Those who, setting wide the doors that bar
The secret bridal chambers of the heart,
Let in the day.”
Literature was made for man, and not man for
literature. There are, unquestionably, scenes which
the imagination had better leave alone, thoughts
which should find no utterance in printed speech,
feelings upon which the light and air cannot dwell
without tainting them. But without in the slightest
dregree trenching upon ground that should be sacred
to silence, we conceive married life, as one of the
most powerful influences at work upon the character
and happiness of individuals and of nations, to present
capabilities of noble and beautiful poetry, that, so
far from weakening the strength or vulgarizing the
delicacy of domestic affection, would exalt and refine
it. We see no reason for supposing that the conjugal
relation would suffer in purity or spontaneous power
by being passed through the alembic of a great poet's
imagination. If it became the subject of morbid
230 FSSAYS.
poetry or of weak maudlin poetry—Supposing Such
a combination of terms allowable—the same result
would follow as from the morbid or weak treatment
of any other powerful human emotion—the poet
would influence only weak and morbid people. Nor
do we see that the danger is really so great of getting
morbid, trashy, unhealthy poetry on this subject as
on the more familiar subject of love before marriage.
It would demand qualities of genius which in them-
selves are a strong guarantee—the power and the
taste of delineating subtle shades of character and
feeling, a perception of the action of character upon
fortune, an insight into the working of practical life
upon the affections, and their reaction upon it. Such
topics are not to the taste, or within the capacity, of
melodramatic or sensualized minds; and whatever
good poetry was produced on the subject would, as
all good poetry does, abide and work upon the highest
class of minds, and go on ever spreading its whole-
some influence, and giving the tares less and less
room to grow. Our domestic life is not so uniformly
beautiful as that it may not be profited by having its
faults, its short-comings, its miseries brought into
the full light of consciousness, as only poets can
bring them; and bright pictures of what that life
might be, what it sometimes is in actual experience,
may surely do good as well as give pleasure. But
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE. 231
we are not so much concerned to windicate a large
field of strictly ethical teaching for poetry as to open
to her almost untried and certainly unhacknied regions
of beauty, pathos, and varied human interest; to bid
her cease to stop at the threshold, and boldly, fear-
lessly, and reverently penetrate into the inner shrine
of love—cease to sing for ever of the spring-green
and the promise, and remember that love has its
flush of Summer, and its glow of autumn, and its
winter's lonely desolation. Happily, we have not
to advocate a theory without being able to produce
recent cases of successful practice. Mr. Kingsley's
Saint’s Tragedy, those poems by Mr. Tennyson of
which we have already spoken, and some of the most
beautiful of Mr. Browning's lyrical poems, as well as
his narrative poem of The Flight of the Duchess, and
such a character-piece as his Andrea del Sarto, will
indicate sufficiently how rich a field lies waiting for
observation and delineation in poetry of the highest
order. Some of the pieces introduced upon our stage,
within the last few years, principally of French origin
—such as, for instance, Still Waters Run Deep—in
spite of the coarse tendency to make adultery too
constant a feature of the action, point to the capa-
bilities of the subject for lighter treatment.
One word before we close upon two special ad-
vantages to be anticipated from the habitual exten-
232 JESSAYS.
sion of poetical representation to married love. The
Subject, in the first place, interests mature men and
women, who must feel, at the perpetual iteration of
the first stage of passion in literature, much as if
their bodily diet were confined to syllabub and
Sweetmeats. Poetry is comparatively little read by
grown people who do not pretend to cultivate liter-
ature as a special study—mainly, we apprehend,
because it confines itself to repeating, with a variety
of circumstance, oxperiences which they have passed
through, and of the partial and onesided truth of
which they have long ago been convinced by their
more mature oxperience. A poetry which interpreted
to them their own lives, which made them see in
thoso lives eloments of beauty and greatness, of
pathos and poril, would win their attention, stimulate
their interest, and refine their feelings, just as much
as the Samo effects are produced by ordinary love-
poetry on tho young. We shall not arguo the ques-
tion whother tho lattor offect has boen upon the
whole for good or not; such an assumption lies
at the root of all discussions upon particular exten-
sions of the poetic range. To us it appears indispu-
table that, along with Somo perils, the representation
of any phase of human life by a man of genuine
poetic power is a step towards improving that phase
practically, as well as an enlargement of the range of
THE ANGEL IN THE EIOUSE. 233
that life which forms so important a part of a modern
man's cultivation, the life he partakes by imaginative
sympathy.
A second advantage which we should anticipate
from the proposed oxtension would be the creation
of a literature which would, in some important
respocts, rival and outweigh any real attraction
which the proporly styled ‘literature of prostitution’
may have for any but mauvais Sujets. It may shock
Some good and innocent people to be told that such
literature is attractive to any but abandoned men
and women. A statistical account of the perusal
of the worst class of French novels by the educated
classes of this Christian and highly moral country
would probably be a startling rovelation. One can
only Say off-hand, that a familiar acquaintance with
this class of works is commonly displayed in Society;
and the reasons are not very recondite. Thoso novels
depict a cortain kind of real lifo without roserve;
there is flesh and blood in them; and though some
of the attraction is duo to tho more fact that they
tronch on forbiddon ground, Some to the fact that
they stimulate tendencies strong enough in most men,
and Some to their revelations of scenos invostod with
tho charm of a licence happily not familiar to the
actual experiences of the majority of their readers,
thore can be little qucstion that one strong attrac-
234 JESSAYS,
tion they possess is due to their being neither
simply sentimental nor simply ascetic. In accord-
ance with an established maxim, which tells us
that, corruptio optimi pessima est, these books are
almost inconceivably worthless, even from an artistic
point of view, but the passions of these novels are
those of grown people, and not of babies or cherubim.
We can conceive a pure poetry which should deal
with the men and women of Society in as fearless
and unabashed a spirit, and which should beat
this demon of the stews at his own magic,+should
Snatch the wand from the hand of Comus, and
reverse all his mightiest spells; though, doubtless,
this task belongs more to prose fiction, as the objec-
tionable works are themselves prose fictions. In the
poems we have already mentioned, this has been
done. There is no reason why literature, or poetry
in particular, should be dedicated virginibus puer-
7sque; men and women want men's and women’s
poetry; the affections and the passions make up the
poetical element of life, and no poetry will commend
itself to men and women so strongly as that which
deals with their own passions and affections. Again
we say, we are not careful to guard our language
against wilful misconstruction. .
The volume published last year, with the title of
The Angel in the House, Part I., inspired us with
THE ANGEL, IN THE HOUSE, 235
the hope that a poet of no ordinary promise was
about to lay down the leading lines of this great
subject, in a composition half narrative and half
reflective, which should at least shew, as in a chart,
what its rich capabilities were, and give some indi-
cation of the treasures that future workers in the
Same mine might have gathered in, one by one. But
two Parts have been already published, and he has
only got as far as the threshold of his subject; while
the age is no longer able to bear poems of epic length,
even with, and much less without, epic action. He
has encumbered himself besides with the most awk-
ward plan that the brain of poet ever conceived.
The narrative is carried on by short cantos—idyls he
calls them—in which, however, the reflective element
largely prevails; and between each of these are in-
troduced, first, a poem wholly reflective, and as long
as the corresponding narrative canto, upon some
phase of passion not very strictly connected with the
narrative, and then a set of independent aphorisms,
which are often striking in sentiment and sense, and
frequently expressed with admirable terseness and
force, but which convey the impression that the
writer is resolved not to lose any of his fine things,
whether he can find an appropriate place for them or
not. We doubt whether any excellence of execution
would have won great success for a poem written on
236 JESSAYS.
such a plan, and threatening to extend to such a
formidable length. But had the writer really set
about singing his professed theme, and not wasted
his strength and the patience of his readers in
this twofold introduction, he possesses many of the
qualities requisite for success. His conception of
feminine character is that of a high-minded, pure-
hearted, and impassioned man, who worships and
respects as well as loves a woman. His delineation
of the growth of love in the woman's heart is delicate
and subtile, and the lofty aspirations and unselfish
enthusiasm he associates with the passion of his hero
no less true to the type he has chosen. And as we
conceive him not so much to intend to relate the
story of any individual man and woman, as to
embody in a narrative form a typical representation
of what love between man and woman should be, he
cannot be censured for selecting two persons of a
nature higher-toned and circumstances richer in
happy influences than fall to the lot of most of us in
this world. Had it been the purpose of our paper to
review. The Angel in the House, we could have found
many admirable passages in which sentiments of
sterling worth and beauty are expressed with great
force and felicity of language. Perhaps the only
very prominent fault of execution lies in the writer's
tendency to run into logical puzzles by way of
THE ANG ED. IN THE HOUSE. 237
expounding the paradoxical character of love, which,
like wisdom, is yet justified of her children. This
tendency betrays him not only into prosaic and
even scholastic phraseology, that gives frequently
a ludicrous turn to his sentiments, but tempts him
too often into the Smartness of epigram, varied by
the obscurity of transcendental metaphysics. To the ,
same feature of his mind, as shewn in the fondness
for this way of expressing his subject, we are in-
clined to attribute the jerkiness of the verse, which
often reads like a bit of Hudibras slightly altered,
and is very dissonant from the innermost spirit of
the poem. If we might venture to offer a bit of
advice by way of conclusion, we should say to him,
forget what you have done; treat these two parts
as an experiment that has partially failed; begin
at the real subject—married love—on a different
plan and in a different key. Let the narrative,
the drama, Occupy a more prominent position;
reject every phrase, every turn of thought, that
appears to you to be particularly Smart and clever,
and adopt a measure that cannot run into jingle,
but will flow with a calm delicious melody through
the pleasant lands along which its course will lie.
And if we add one exhortation more, it will be to
guard against over-refinement; not to be afraid of
238 ESSAYS.
the warm blood and beating pulse of humanity;
to remember that the angel in the house is, as the
least sensuous of poets reminds us—
“An angel, but a woman too.”
Fraser's Magazine,
October, 1856.
CARI, YLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 239
CART, YLE'S LIFE OF STER LIWG.
THE domain of political economy is not unlimited;
the laws of supply and demand are not the only or
the strongest forces at work in mature. Here is a
man whom the World would have been Well content
to leave quiet in his early grave by the sea-shore in
the Sweetest of English islands; to leave him there
to the soft melodies of the warm wind and the gentle
rain, and the pious visits now and them of those who
knew and loved him when his eye was bright and
his voice eloquent with sparkling thoughts and warm
affections. He had done nothing that the public
cared for; had left no traces on the sands of Time
that the next tide would not have effaced. But he
lived amongst men who write books, amongst some
of the very best of such ; and two of the foremost of
them loved him so well that they could not let his
memory die,—thought that the positive actual results
240 ESSAYS.
of his life made known to the public were but faint
indications of the power that lay in him though sorely
foiled and baffled, and that he in his individual
spiritual progress typified better than most the
struggle that the age is passing through, its processes
and its results. But the two men, though united in
affection for Sterling, were so different in other re-
spects, that the memorial raised by the one could
scarcely fail to be unsatisfactory to the other. Arch-
deacon Hare, the author of the earlier biography, is
a man of encyclopaedic knowledge, a profound clas-
sical scholar, the most learned and philosophical of
modern English theologians, at Once accurate and
wide in his acquaintance with European history and
literature. And this large survey of the forms under
which the men of the past have thought and acted
has not led in him to an indifference to all forms,
but rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality
of forms, especially of national institutions, whether
civil or ecclesiastical polities, states or churches.
Moreover, apart from this general characteristic,
which would lead to an intellectual and practical
reverence for the institutions of his own land, and
a hesitating caution in the introduction of consti-
tutional changes, Mr. Hare is an English churchman
of no ordinary cast. He has passed from the region
of traditional belief, has skirted the bogs and quick-
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 241
sands of doubt and disbelief, and has found firm
footing where alone it seems possible, in a revelation
whose letter is coloured by the human media through
which it has passed, and in a faith whose highest
mysteries are not only harmonious with but necessary
complements to the truths of reason. The English
Church is to him the purest embodiment of his
religious idea, as the English constitution was to
him, in common with Niebuhr, Coleridge, and other
great thinkers, of the idea of a state. Such a man
could not write a life like Sterling's without feeling
that his relation to Christianity and the Church
was the great fact for him as for all of us; and that
the change in him, from hearty acceptance of
Christian doctrine and church organization to a
rejection of the former and something very like
contempt for the latter, needed explanation. That
explanation he has sought in the overthrow of the
balance of Sterling's life through repeated attacks
of illness, which shut him out from practical duties,
and threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby
disproportionately developing the negative side of
him, already too strong from early defects of edu-
cation : and few persons will, we should think, be
found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that the
pursuit of speculative philosophy as the business
of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we should
B.
242 JESSAYS.
have supposed, least of all men. But a special
cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of
the principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity
as understood commonly, perhaps everywhere except,
it may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church
formulas certainly as understood everywhere, he is
in the habit of classing under a category which in
his hands has become an extensive one—that of
shams. He calls them by various forcible but ugly
names, as ‘old clothes,’ ‘spectral inanities,’ ‘gib-
bering phantoms,” Or, with plainer meaning, ‘huge
unveracities and unrealities.’ That Sterling at any
time of his life accepted these for “eternal verities’
he cannot consider a step from the ‘no’ to the ‘yes,”
nor their repudiation as a step backwards from the
‘yes’ to the ‘no.” Let him speak for himself. He
is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders as
Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux.
Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in
the old Church, and despcratcly grasp the hcm of her garmen
in such manner, there will at present be many opinions; and
mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere
pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise, and un-
permitted step. Nay, among the cvil lessons of his Time to
poor Sterling I cannot but account this the worst; properly
indecd, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and
consecration, of all the evil lossons that were in it to him.
Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God’s
Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures
CARI, YLE S LIFE OF STERLING. 243
never did before, should we, durst we in our most audacious
moments, think of wedding it to the world's Untruth, which
is also, like all untruths, the Devil's Only in the world's
last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and
pious ! Fools “Do you think the Living God is a buzzard
idol, sternly asks Milton, that you dare address Him in this
manner —Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice
and oblivious baseness, have accCumulated on us; thickening
as if towards the eternal sleep! It is not now known, what
nover needed proof or statement before, that Religion is not a
doubt; that it is a certainty,+Or else a mockory and horror,
That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about,
and necd to have demonstrated and rendered probable, can by
any alchemy be made a “Religion’ for us; but are and must
continue a baleful, quiet or unquiet, Hypocrisy for us; and
bring—salvation, do we fancy I think, it is another thing
they will bring ; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this
good while ! g
Herein consists the whole difference between
Hare and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's career.
They look at it from such opposite points that what
is the zenith to one is the nadir to the other. What
Sterling himself thought of it, was strikingly ex-
pressed to his brother, Captain Anthony Sterling, by
a comparison of his case ‘to that of a young lady
who has tragically lost her lover, and is willing to
be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or in any noble
or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which
has become intolerable.’ The truth seems to be,
that Sterling went into Orders under the combined
R 2
244 JºSSAYS.
influence of remorse for the share he had inadvertently
had in causing the disastrous fate of a near relative,
(Mr. Boyd, who was shot with Torrijos in Spain,)
and of a gradual disenchantment from trust in mere
political schemes for the regeneration of mankind,-
a disease more common to the genial young men of
his time than of ours. That while in the exercise of
his duties as a parish-priest he was energetic, useful,
and happy, the evidence in Mr. Hare's book is fully
sufficient to show. It is impossible to say whether
his scepticism would have come upon him had he
continued in that active career; but it is certainly
a gratuitous supposition of Mr. Carlyle that the ill-
health which put an end to it was only the outward
and ostensible cause of its termination, and does not
appear to be borne out by a single letter or expression
of Sterling's own. Indeed, for years after he left
Hurstmonceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his
attachment to Christianity as when he was there;
though, on the other hand, it may well be doubted
whether a man of Sterling's intellect, who would
Surrender his beliefs to Strauss's Leben Jesu, is likely
in the present day to keep them under any con-
ceivable circumstances. We think that Mr. Bare
on the One hand has attributed too exclusive an in-
fluence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr.
Carlyle has certainly not taken it sufficiently into
account as a determining cause of his Scepticism.
CARI, YLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 245
But whatever subject Mr. Carlyle takes up, and
whether he be right or wrong in his opinions, he is
sure to write an interesting book. He is never
wearisome, and whether his tale have been twice
told or not, he clothes it by his original treatment
with an attractive charm that few writers can lend
even to an entirely new subject. The maxim of the
author of Modern Antiquity, that
True genius is the ray that flings
A novel light o'er common things,
has seldom been better illustrated than by this life of
Sterling. The facts are most of them neither new
nor of a nature in themselves to excite any very
strong interest, but the details of the life are told
with such simplicity, and yet with such constant
reference to the grand educational process which they
collectively make up, that one seems listening to a
narrative by Sterling's guardian angel, loving enough
to sympathize in the Smallest minutiae, and wise
enough to see in each of them the greatness of the
crowning result. Nor is this impression in the least
impaired by the insignificance of the sum total of
Sterling's actual achievements. For had they been
tenfold greater than they were, they would have
been as nothing in the presence of that which Mr.
Carlyle looks to as the Soul's great achievement—
246 FSSAYS.
heroic nobleness of struggle and a calm abiding of
the issue. After noticing the purity of Sterling's
character, and his conformity to ‘the so-called mo-
ralities,’ his biographer goes on to Say—
In clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found, in
childlike and soldierlike, pious and valiant loyalty to the
Highest, and what of good and evil that might send him, he
excelled among good men. The joys and the sorrows of his
lot he took with true simplicity and acquiescence. Like a
true son, not like a miscrable mutinous rebel, he comported
himself in this Universe. Extremity of distress, and surely
his fervid temper had enough of contradiction in this world,—
could not tempt him into impatience at any time. By no
chance did you ever hear from him a whisper of those moan
repinings, miserable arraignings and questionings of the Etcrnal
Power, such as weak souls even well disposed will sometimes
give way to in the pressure of their despair; to the like of this
he never yielded, or showcd the least tendency to yield;—
which surely was well on his part. For the Eternal Power,
I still remark, will not answer tho like of this, but silently
and terribly accounts it impious, blasphemous, and damnablo,
and now as heretoforo will visit it as such. Not a rebel but
a son, I said; willing to suffer when Heaven said, Thou shalt;
—and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a combination,
willing to rejoice also, and right checrily taking the good that
was sent, whensoover or in whatever form it came.
A pious soul we may justly call him; devoutly submissivo
to the will of the Supreme in all things: the highest and sole
essential form which Religion can assume in man, and without
which all forms of religion are a mockcry and a delusion in
Ill&D.
Every one not personally acquainted with Sterling
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING, 2.47
will feel, that the great interest of the book is in the
light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own belief. For
good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country;
and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times
have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would
have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all
haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us—state,
church, and sacred property—down along with it.
But whither would he have us fly? Is there firm
land, be it ever so, distant P or is the wild waste of
waters, seething, warring round as far as eye can
reach, our only hope P-the pilot-stars, shining fitfully
through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only
guidance? There are hearts in this land almost
broken, whose old traditional beliefs, Serving them at
least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers like
him have undermined. Some betake themselves to
literature, as Sterling did; some fill up the void with
the excitement of politics; others feebly bemoan their
irreparable loss, and wear an outward seeming of
universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no
right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy
a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a
loftier. We have no hesitation in saying, that the
language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of em-
ploying towards the religion of England and of
Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have said
248 JESSAYS.
nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps
of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however
brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor com-
pensation for the slightest obscuring of “the hope of
immortality brought to light by the gospel,” and by
it conveyed to the hut of the poorest man, to awaken
his crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his
misery. Mr. Carlyle slights, after his contemptuous
fashion, the poetry of his contemporaries: one of them
has uttered in Song some practical wisdom which he
would do well to heed:
O thou that after toil and storm
May'st seem to have reached a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form, -
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
IIer faith through form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good.
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine !
See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And even for want of such a type.
This life of Sterling will be useful to the class
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 249
whose beliefs have given way before Mr. Carlyle's
destroying energies; because it furnishes hints, not
to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the extent
to which they must be prepared to go if they would
really be his disciples. If the path has in its very
dangers an attraction for Some, while others are
shudderingly repelled, in either case the result is
desirable, as it is the absence of certainty which
causes the pain and paralyzes the power of action.
At any rate, the doctrines of this teacher must be so
much more intelligible to the mass when applied, as
they are here, in commentary upon a life all whose
details are familiar, because it is the life of a contem-
porary and a countryman, that all who read must
inevitably be impressed with that great lesson of the
philosophic poet—
The intellectual power through words and things
Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way.
Though John Sterling is of course the principal
figure in the composition, and Mr. Carlyle's treatment
the great attraction of the book, yet the figures in the
background will be those to make most impression
on the general reader. Coleridge stands there in
striking but caricatured likeness; and even his most
devoted admirers will not be sorry to See a portrait
of their master by such a hand: and all will curiously
250 JESSAYS.
observe the contrast between the sarcastic bitterness
which colours the drawing of the philosophic Chris-
tian, and the kindly allowance through which the
character of John Sterling's father, the famous
‘Thunderer' of the Times, is delineated. We half
suspect that Coleridge would have appeared to Mr.
Carlyle a much greater man, if he had allowed him
to declaim—‘Harpocrates-Stentor,’ as Sterling calls
him—with trumpet voice and for time unlimited on
the divine virtues of Silence. There are besides, as
in all Mr. Carlyle's works, passages of wise thought
expressed in most felicitous language : of which not
the least important is this advice given to Sterling
in reference to his poetic aspirations.
You can speak with supreme excellence; sing with con-
siderable excellence you never can. And the Age itself, does
it not, beyond most ages, demand and require clear speech; an
Age incapable of being Sung to, in any but a trivial manner,
till these convulsive agonics and wild revolutionary overturn-
ings readjust themselves? Intelligible word of command, not
musical psalmody and fiddling, is possible in this fell storm of
battle. Beyond all ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever
thinking or writing man it has : Oh speak to me, some wise
intelligible speech; your wise meaning, in the shortest and
clearest way; behold, I am dying for want of wise meaning,
and insight into the devouring fact: speak, if you have any
wisdom . As to song so-called, and your fiddling talent,
even if you have one, much more if you have none,—we will
talk of that a couple of centuries hence, when things are calmer
again. Homer shall be thrice welcome; but only when Troy
CARI, YLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 251
is taken : alas, while the siege lasts, and battle's fury rages
everywhere, what can I do with the Homer ? I want Achil-
leus and Odysseus, and am enraged to see them trying to be
Homers —
These bricks from Babylon convey but scanty in-
timation of the varied interest of the book. However
the readers of it may differ from its opinions, they
cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle's misjudgments
and prejudices, ample matter for serious reflection:
for if he misjudges, it is generally because he is look-
ing too intently at a single truth, or a single side of
a truth; and such misjudgments are more suggestive
than the completest propositions of a less earnest,
keen-sighted, and impassioned thinker. He is indeed
more a prophet than a logician or a man of Science.
And one lesson we may all learn from this, as from
everything he writes, and it is a lesson that inter-
feres with no creed,—that honesty of purpose, and
resoluteness to do and to say the thing we believe to
be the true thing, will give heart to a man's life,
when all ordinary motives to action and all ordinary
supports of energy have failed like a rotten reed.
252 FSSAYS.
“ ESMOND.”
Jºsmond is an autobiographical memoir of the first
five-and-thirty years of the life of an English gentle-
man of family, written in his old age after his retire-
ment to Virginia; and edited with an introduction
by his daughter, for the instruction and amusement
of her children and descendants, and to give them
a lively portrait of the noble gentleman her father.
It is historical, inasmuch as political events enter
both as motives to the actors and as facts influencing
their fortumes, and because historical personages are
brought upon the scene: both are necessary elements
in the career of a gentleman and a soldier, but neither
forms the staple or the main object of the book,-
which concerns itself with the characters and fortunes
of the noble family of Castlewood, of which Henry
Esmond is a member. The period embraced is from
the accession of James the Second to the death of
Queen Anne, and the manners depicted are those of
“JESMOND.” 253
the English aristocracy. Archæology is not a special
object with the author; though both costume, in its
more limited sense, and manners, are, we believe,
accurately preserved. But Wardour Street and the
Royal Academy need fear no competitor in Mr.
Thackeray. His business lies mainly with men and
women, not with high-heeled shoes and hoops and
patches, and old china and carved high-backed chairs.
Nor have Mr. Macaulay's forthcoming volumes been
anticipated, except in one instance, where the Che-
valier St. George is brought to England, has an
interview with his sister at Kensington just before
her death, is absolutely present in London at the
proclamation of George the First, and indeed only
misses being James the Third, King of Great Britain
and Ireland, by grace of his own exceeding baseness
and folly. Scott, who had a reverence for the Stuarts
impossible to Mr. Thackeray with his habit of looking
at the actors in life from the side-scenes and in the
green-room rather than from before the foot-lights,
has not scrupled to take a similar liberty with his
Chevalier in Redgauntlet, merely to arrange a striking
tableau at the fall of the curtain. But these viola-
tions of received tradition with respect to such well-
known historical personages, force upon the reader
unnecessarily the fictitious character of the narrative,
and are therefore better avoided.
254 JESSAYS.
There is abundance of incident in the book, but
not much more plot than in one of Defoe's novels:
neither is there, generally speaking, a plot in man’s
life, though there may be and often is in sections of
it. Unity is given not by a consecutive and self-
developing story, but by the ordinary events of life
blended with those peculiar to a stirring time acting
on a family group, and bringing out and ripening
their qualities; these again controlling the subsequent
events, just as happens in life. The book has the
great charm of reality. The framework is, as we
have said, historical : men with well-known names,
political, literary, military, pass and repass; their
sayings and doings are interwoven with the sayings
and doings of the fictitious characters; and all reads
like a genuine memoir of the time. The rock ahead
of historical novelists is the danger of reproducing
too much of their raw material; making the art
visible by which they construct their image of a by-
gone time; painting its manners and the outside of
its life with the sense of contrast with which men
of the present maturally view them, or looking at its
parties and its politics in the light of modernquestions:
the rock ahead of Mr. Thackeray, in particular, was
the temptation merely to dramatize his lectures: but
he has triumphed over these difficulties, and Queen
Anne's Colonel writes his life, and a very interest-
“ ESMOND.” 255
ing life it is, just as such a Queen Anne's Colonel
might be supposed to have written it. We shall
give no epitome of the story, because the merit of
the book does not lie there, and what story there is
readers like to find out for themselves.
Mr. Thackeray's humour does not mainly consist
in the creation of oddities of manner, habit, or feel-
ing; but in so representing actual men and women
as to excite a Sense of incongruity in the reader's
mind—a feeling that the follies and vices described
are deviations from an ideal of humanity always
present to the writer. The real is described vividly,
with that perception of individuality which con-
stitutes the artist; but the description implies and
suggests a standard higher than itself, not by any
direct assertion of such a standard, but by an un-
mistakeable irony. The moral antithesis of actual
and ideal is the root from which springs the peculiar
charm of Mr. Thackeray's writings; that mixture of
gaiety and seriousness, of Sarcasm and tenderness, of
enjoyment and cynicism, which reflects so well the
contradictory consciousness of man as a being with
senses and passions and limited knowledge, yet with
a'conscience and a reason speaking to him of eternal
laws and a moral order of the universe. It is this
that makes Mr. Thackeray a profound moralist, just
as Hogarth showed his knowledge of perspective by
256 JESSAYS.
drawing a landscape throughout in violation of its
rules. So, in Mr. Thackeray's picture of Society
as it is, society as it ought to be is implied. He
could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless
Eden had been shining brightly in his inner eyes.
The historian of ‘snobs’ indicates in every touch his
fine sense of a gentleman or a lady. No one could
be simply amused with Mr. Thackeray's descriptions
or his dialogues. A shame at One's own defects, at
the defects of the world in which one was living,
was irresistibly aroused along with the reception of
the particular portraiture. But while he was dealing
with his own age, his keen perceptive faculty pre-
vailed, and the actual predominates in his pictures
of modern Society. His fine appreciation of high
character has hitherto been chiefly shown (though
with bright exceptions) by his definition of its con-
trary. But, getting quite out of the region of his
personal experiences, he has shown his true nature
without this mask of satire and irony. The ideal is
no longer implied, but realized, in the two leading
characters of Esmond. The medal is reversed, and
what appeared as scorn of baseness is revealed as
love of goodness and nobleness—what appeared as
cynicism is presented as a heart-worship of what is
pure, affectionate, and unselfish. He has selected
for his hero a very noble type of the Cavalier soften-
“ ESMOND.” 257
ing into the man of the eighteenth century, and for
his heroine one of the Sweetest women that ever
breathed from canvas or from book since Raffaelle
painted Maries and Shakspeare created a new and
higher consciousness of woman in the mind of
Germanic Europe. Colonel Esmond is indeed a
fine gentleman,—the accomplished man, the gallant
soldier, the loyal heart, and the passionate lover,
whose richly contrasted but harmonious character
Clarendon would have delighted to describe; while
Falkland and Richard Lovelace would have worn him
in their heart’s core. Lucy Hutchinson’s husband
might have stood for his model in all but politics,
and his Toryism has in it more than a Smack of
English freedom very much akin to that noble pa-
triot's Republicanism. Especially does he recal
Colonel Hutchinson in his lofty principle, his un-
swerving devotion to it, a certain Sweet Seriousness
which comes in happily to temper a penetrating
intellect, and a faculty of Seeing things and persons
as they are, to which we owe passage after passage
in the book, that it requires no effort to imagine
Thackeray uttering himself in those famous lectures
of his, and looking up with his kind glance to catch
the delighted Smile of his audience at his best points.
Nor is there anything unartistic in this reminder of
the author; for this quality of clear insight into men
S
258 JESSAYS.
and things united with a kindly nature and a large
capacity for loving is not limited to any particular
time or age, and combines with Colonel Esmond’s
other qualities so as to give no impression of incon-
gruity. But besides the harmonizing effect of this
sweetly serious temperament, the record of Colonel
Esmond’s life is throughout a record of his attach-
ment to one woman, towards whom his childish
gratitude for protection grows with his growth into
a complex feeling, in which filial affection and an
unconscious passion are curiously blended. So un-
conscious, indeed, is the passion, that, though the
reader has no difficulty in interpreting it, Esmond
himself is for years the avowed and persevering
though hopeless lover of this very lady's daughter.
The relation between Esmond and Rachel Wiscountess
Castlewood is of that sort that nothing short of
consummate skill could have saved it from becoming
ridiculous or offensive, or both. In Mr. Thackeray's
hands, the difficulty has become a triumph, and has
given rise to beauties which a safer ambition would
have not dared to attempt. The triumph is attained
by the conception of Lady Castlewood's character.
She is one of those women who never grow old,
because their lives are in the affections, and the
suffering that comes upon such lives only brings out
strength and beauty unperceived before. The graces
“ ESMOND,” 259
of the girl never pass away, but maturer loveliness
is added to them, and spring, Summer, autumn, all
bloom on their faces and in their hearts at once.
A faint foreshadowing of this character we have had
before in Helen Pendennis : but she had been de-
pressed and crushed in early life, had married for
a home, certainly without passion; and her nature
was chilled and despondent. Lady Castlewood has
the development that a happy girlhood, and a
marriage with the man she devoutly loves, can give
to a woman; and her high spirit has time to grow
for her support when it is needed. Even the weak-
nesses of her character are but as dimples on a lovely
face, and make us like her the better for them,
because they give individuality to what might else
be felt as too ideal. Nothing can be more true or
touching than the way this lady demeans herself
when she finds her husband’s affection waning from
her; and Mr. Thackeray is eminently Mr. Thackeray
in his delineation of that waning love on the one side,
and the strength and dignity which the neglected
wife gradually draws from her own hitherto untried
resources, when she ceases to lean on the arm that
was withdrawn, and discovers that the heart she
had worshipped was no worthy idol. But to those
who would think the mother “slow' we can have
Ino hesitation in recommending the daughter. Miss
s 2
260 JESSAYS.
Beatrix Esmond—familiarly and correctly termed
‘Trix' by her friends—is one of those dangerous
young ladies who fascinate every one, man or woman,
that they choose to fascinate, but care for nobody but
themselves; and their care for themselves simply
extends to the continual gratification of a boundless
love of admiration, and the kind of power which
results from it. If Miss Rebecca Sharpe had really
been a Montmorency, and a matchless beauty, and
a maid of honour to a Queen, she might have sub-
limated into a Beatrix Esmond. It is for this proud,
capricious, and heartless beauty, that Henry Esmond
sighs out many years of his life, and does not find
out, till she is lost to him and to herself, how much
he loves her ‘little mamma,’ as the Saucy young lady
is fond of calling Lady Castlewood. Beatrix belongs
to the class of women who figure most in history,
with eyes as bright and hearts as hard as diamonds,
as Mary Stuart said of herself; and Mary Stuart and
Miss Esmond have many points in common. Of her
end we are almost disposed to say with Othello,
‘ Oh! the pity of it, Iago, oh! the pity of it.’ Un-
lovely as she is because unloving, yet her graces are
too fair to be so dragged through the dirt—that
stream is too bright to end in a city sewer. But the
tragedy is no less tragical for the tawdry comedy of
its close. Life has no pity for the pitiless, no senti-
ment for those who trample on love as a weakness.
“ESMOND.” 261
These three characters are the most prominent in
the book. With one or the other of the two women
Henry Esmond’s thoughts are almost always engaged ;
and it is to win the reluctant love of the daughter
that he seeks distinction as a soldier, a politician,
and finally a conspirator in behalf of the son of King
James. In this threefold career, he has intercourse
with Addison, Steele, and the wits; serves under
Marlborough at Blenheim and Ramilies; is on terms
of intimacy with St. John and the Tory leaders. A
succession of Wiscounts Castlewood figure on the
scene, all unmistakeable English noblemen of the
Stuart period. A dowager Wiscountess is a more
faithful than flattering portrait of a class of ladies of
rank of that time. The Chevalier St. George appears
oftener than once. The great Duke of Hamilton is
about to make Beatrix his Duchess, when he is
basely murdered in that doubly fatal duel with the
execrable Lord Mohun, who had twelve years before
slain, also in a duel, my Lord Wiscount Castlewood,
the father of Beatrix. The book has certainly no
lack of incident; the persons come and go as on the
scene of real life; and all are clearly conceived, and
sketched or painted in full with no uncertain aim
or faltering hand. To draw character has been the
predominant object of the author; and he has so done
it as to Sustain a lively interest and an agreeable
262 JESSAYS.
alternation of emotions, through a form of com-
position particularly difficult to manage without be-
coming soon tedious, or breaking the true conditions
of the form. Mr. Thackeray has overcome not only
this self-imposed difficulty, but one greater still,
which he could not avoid—his own reputation.
Jºsmond will, we think, rank higher as a work of
art than either Vanity Fair, or Pendennis ; because
the characters are of a higher type, and drawn with
greater finish, and the book is more of a complete
whole: not that we anticipate for it anything like
the popularity of the former of these two books, as
it is altogether of a graver cast, the satire is not
so pungent, the canvas is far less crowded, and the
subject is distant and unfamiliar; and, may be, its
excellences will not help it to a very large public.
The Spectator,
Nov. 6, 1852.
“MY NOVEL.” 263
“ MY WO VEL.
OR, VARIETIES OF ENGLISH LIFE”
MR. CAXTON junior has, he informs us, written his
novel with the twofold purpose of making up the
- deficit in his annual income caused by the repeal
of the Corn-laws, and of doing his part to counteract
the effect of incendiary publications, by exhibiting
the rural aristocracy, and generally the richer classes,
in a truer and kindlier light than that which is
thrown upon them by the dark lantern of Socialist,
Radical, or Free-trade Diogenes. The second title
of the work implies even a broader and more philo-
sophic purpose. For while every English novel
must represent varieties of English life, that which
assumes to do this in a special Sense must be in-
tended to display the relations of one part of our
social fabric to another, and to trace a wise design,
a unity of aim, a complex harmony, in the whole
264 ESSAYS.
made up of these varieties. The first of Mr. Caxton's
objects have doubtless been obtained; the other has
not been accomplished either in its wider or its
narrower sense. Mr. Caxton does not specify the
dangerous works to which his own is designed to be
an antidote; and he remarks in the course of it that
it is easier to live down than to write down in-
flammatory class appeals. We are rejoiced to agree
with him, that a kind-hearted sensible Squire and
a good parson are likely to do more in the recon-
cilement of classes than any books which he can
write; and the more, because he seems not to have
mastered the first element of success in his under-
taking—a knowledge of the mischief to be en-
countered, and of the causes which have produced it.
It is not generally supposed that Socialist schemes
or democratic rhetoric have found their way very
extensively to the intellect and passions of the agri-
cultural poor in England; nor, so far as landowners
and parsons have been the objects of invective, has
want of kindliness and benevolence been the vice
attributed to them. Cordial good-nature and a frank
dignity are the popular attributes of the ‘good old
English gentleman’; and had such qualities been
sufficient to prevent what is called, by a rhetorical
exaggeration, in this country at least, ‘the war of
classes,’ that war would never have broken out.
“MY WOVEL.” 265
But, unfortunately, these very country gentlemen—
“our territorial aristocracy,” as Mr. Disraeli is fond
of calling them—with all their virtues, had a natural
tendency to high rents; and being in possession at
one time of paramount legislative power, they passed
laws which gave them artificially high rents at the
expense of the rest of the community. This is the
origin of what was certainly a combat between
classes; but that is over now. How far English
landowners have forgotten that property has its
duties as well as its rights and enjoyments, is quite
another question; and if Mr. Caxton wishes to go
into it, he will find that fancy-portraits of a model
Squire and a model parson are but dust in the
balance against the facts represented by the words
rural pauperism, rural ignorance, and rural brutality.
If he wants to know—as he seems to have rather
a Páll Mall notion of country life—what these words
mean, let him consult Sidney Godolphin Osborne
and Charles Kingsley, who are both gentlemen and
parsons working among the agricultural poor.
Granted that a goodnatured squire, with eight
thousand acres of land, arable and pasture, and not
a mortgage on it, aided by a parson with a decent
income—or even one who can give to the “res
angusta domi” the dignity that high character,
good manners, and intellectual accomplishments, will
266 JESSAYS.
V
bestow—may do great things for a parish. The
Sagacious Mrs. Glasse prefaces her receipt for hare-
Soup by the pithy direction, first catch your hare.
So, we say, first put your unencumbered well-
meaning Squire and phoenix parson in every parish
in England, or in the majority of parishes, and then
will be time enough to discuss what good may be
got out of them. It is the burdened estates pre-
venting improvement, and the parsons careless,
Sauntering, often with little more intellectual culti-
vation and much less practical knowledge and good
sense than their farmers—these are the things that
constitute the circumstances with which we have to
deal in too many of our country parishes, and which
have borne fruit in the fearful triad the consideration
of which we recommended to Mr. Caxton's notice.
But our novelist does not seem to know what
to do with his squire and parson when he has found
or invented them. A considerable vagueness as to
the daily life, business, enjoyments, and manners of
an English village, must have come over the mind
of Pisistratus while he was in Australia making the
fortune which he, not prescient of Free-trade ini-
quities, was rash enough to invest in Uncle Rowland's
acres; or, with the object he announces, he would
certainly have given us some more definite picture
of our sweet country life, with its immemorial
“MY NOVEL.” ! 267
charms, and of the duties and pleasures of a great
proprietor and a country rector, than is to be found
in My Novel. We always thought it spoilt the
energetic moral of The Caactons, that Pisistratus
should rush back to the old country the moment
he had made a few thousand pounds. He ought to
have become an Australian “gentleman”; that
would have had significance. But now that all his
agricultural experience has not enabled him to invent
a more novel or more useful function for a squire
and his benevolence and his capital, than to set
him employing labour during a hard season unpro-
ductively, in digging a fish-pond that he didn’t
want, we begin to suspect Pisistratus of being a
charlatan, and that he neither knows nor cares
much in his heart about agriculture, and country
gentlemen, and the rural poor. It was not on the
Balatine that Virgil heard the hum of the bees, or
smelt the sweet thyme, whose music and fragrance
have been for nearly two thousand years wafting
the country—all brightness, melody, and perfume
—into close chambers, into walled-up cities, into
crowded streets, and dismal alleys; and it is not
in Pall Mall that one can learn those secrets of the
country which if reproduced in a book would breathe
from its pages May-bloom and new-mown hay, calm
delights, unwearying occupations, robust and ani-
268 FSSAYS.
mated health—not even in the country, if one carried
thither a Pall Mall mind and heart. There is about
Mr. Caxton's picture of Hazeldean and its master
of the same name—Hazeldean of Hazeldean—the
rhetorical vagueness and want of detail which betray
the writer aiming at a generalization but having no
knowledge or vivid sense of the particulars; not that
the sort of man is not well enough described—novels
and Tondon experience would serve for that—but
there is no presentation of that country-gentleman
life, with its accessories which is necessary for the
attainment of the author's professed purpose. Imagine
a picture of our rural life with no tenant farmers,
and this too by a man who professes to exhibit that
life with a practical aim But even the artist, were
he of a high and conscientious intellect, could not
omit so essential a feature of the moral rustic land-
scape. In fact, Mr. Hazeldean of Hazeldean is de-
scribed; and his park and house, and wife and sister,
and parish-stocks and parson and bailiff, are described
too, and as a picture of still-life we have no ob-
jection to the descriptions: what is wanting is action
and dialogue bearing upon the main purpose of the
book,-for of action and dialogue of the ordinary
novel sort there is plenty, and amusing enough. The
mere existence of such folks as our best country
gentlemen and their families may be a startling
“MY NOVEL.” 269
novelty to an American, or an Australian who has
forgotten the old country; and rural discontent may
Seem to Such a stranger at first sight unaccountable,
though we are by no means sure that he would not
fix upon that as its inevitable cause, with his colonial
feelings about the relative value of independence and
comfort. But one who pretends to be alive to the
animosities of classes in England might know that
he is contributing no novelty when he simply informs
us of the existence of a cordial, manly, somewhat
irritable, middle-aged gentleman, who is proud of
his eight thousand acres, considers the landed interest
identical with the constitution, but with all his
pride and irritability, and prejudice and narrowness,
remembers that a Hazeldean of Hazeldean has duties,
and does for “his poor’’ all that his limited conscience
and feeble inventive faculties suggest to him. These
general characteristics of the country gentleman, as
statistical facts, we are all familiar with. But our
author fails both in his aim as social physician, and
in dramatic presentation of his subject, when he
contents himself with a vague general conception,
and labels his dramatis personae, instead of developing
them in action. The Hazeldeans of Hazeldean have
for hundreds of years influenced directly the villages
in which they have lived and ruled, and have in-
directly contributed peculiar elements to the national
270 FSSAYS.
character, and no slight bias to the national policy.
To present this general truth dramatically, would
be to make it felt and appreciated more profoundly
and by a wider circle, and is an aim worthy of an
English gentleman and literary artist. But to do
this, he must show his type of the class in action, as
landlord, master, neighbour, sportsman, magistrate,
a paternal despot in his village, a free and kindly
man in his family, a gentleman and an aristocrat
among his peers. For it is by action in all these
and more capacities that the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean
are what they are; not by being dummies, with all
these titles painted up underneath them. And what
makes My Wovel a more striking failure is, that an
active life of this range and variety is more capable
and easy of artistic treatment than that of most
workers among us would be, in proportion as it is
at once less special and mechanical than that of the
professional man, the merchant, the shopkeeper, and
artificer, and less abstract than that of the statesman
and politician. It deals on the one hand with natural
objects and processes of production of vital import-
ance to a nation, with agents, phenomena, and
scenery, delightful to the imagination as well as
interesting to the understanding; while on the other
hand, it has to do with the government of men, on
such a scale as to admit of that individualized treat-
“ MY NOWEL.” 271
ment which gives the direct human interest, so diffi-
cult to realize in those legislative or administrative
processes in which the masses are dealt with on
broad generalizations, and regarded not so much as
individual men, but as the constituent elements of
blue-books and statistical tables. To show all this
living on the canvas, would indeed have been to
do something for the order to which our author
belongs by birth, estate, and county-membership.
It would have been still more to the purpose to
show how these same Hazeldeans, worthy and love-
able race though they are, are to develop into the
landowmers of a new era, and in increased knowledge,
energy and enterprise, are not to lose the old charm
of frankness, kindness, and pride of gentlemen; to
make us feel how these country gentlemen may still
be, as they ought to be from their position and
antecedents, the leaders of agricultural improvement,
the true aristocracy of an industrial people. But
for all this, practical knowledge, and, what is more,
genuine earnestness, would have been needed; and it
was easier to write a novel of commonplace material
dexterously constructed, and spiced with a proper
amount of the old familiar Sentiment and the new
pseudo-Shandyism, which is the merest reflection
from books.
If, leaving these country folks with the general
272 ESSAYS.
acknowledgment, that, so far as description can be
a substitute for dialogue and action, they are well
described, and nice points of character seized, and
a pleasing impression of the Hazeldean family pro-
duced, we trace the purpose of the author in the
other characters of the book—extending through four
volumes, but in quantity nearly equalling three Ordi-
nary novels—We confess ourselves utterly puzzled
to detect any difference as regards aim and philo-
sophic depth between this and any other novel
by the same author, or indeed any “fashionable
novel” of the day. We have in addition to the
EIazeldeans, father, son, wife, and sister, and the
parson and wife, a Cabinet Minister burdened with
a secret remorse—his friend Lord Lestrange, all that
is charming, good, and elevated, but crushed and
repressed by a regret dating twenty years back—a
scheming young gentleman, a relative of the Cabinet
Minister, and the villain of the piece—a semi-Jew
baron, ci-devant solicitor, who lends money and lives
in “the first society,” and calls the Cabinet Minister
“my dear fellow”—an Italian nobleman in exile,
with his daughter—another Italian nobleman and his
sister, plotting against the former—a peasant poet,
who wins his way to eminence, and turns out to be
the legitimate son of a great man—an uncle by the
mother's side of the poet, who returns from America
“ MY NO WJEL.” 273
with a fortune, and becomes a manufacturer and
finally a man of fashion and M.P. for a borough: all
these we have, and a very complex and interesting
story is made out of their combinations; there are
even scenes of great power, of the sort that Macready
on the stage could have given prodigious effect to :
but the purpose of the book seems clean gone out
of the writer's mind, and we can conceive any novel
of the season doing just as much and just as little
to knit closer the ties that bind class to class in
England, or to make one class appreciate and look
with truer and kindlier eye on the others.
Indeed, there are characters in My Novel, and
there is a pervading tone, which, so far from har-
monizing men of different degrees and different occu-
pations in our land, seem to us calculated, if they
had any practical effect, to do just the opposite. Mr.
Sprott the tinker, whose pleasure it is gratuitously
to enlighten his rustic brethren on the question of
their rights and the wrongs of the rich, is not a
flattering specimen of the poor man political. But
let him pass as a sketch and a scarecrow. Mr.
Richard Avenel, the maker of his own fortune, the
manufacturer, and Radical borough M.P., may too
be a portrait from life; we do not doubt that worse
men and vulgarer men have sat and are sitting in
the House of Commons: but he is still an outrageous
T
274 ESSAYS.
caricature, were he ‘liker than life,’ because he is
presented here as the type of a class, and as the com-
mercial analogue of the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean.
He is the prosperous middle-class man, as he appears
to the horrified vision of May Fair and Almacks;
not even to those artificial eyes quite devoid of a
certain rude strength and rough utility, but with all
that, a singularly absurd, coarse, Selfish, grasping,
tyrannical, title-hunting, and unpleasant “intrus.’
Nor, broad as is the canvas spread, and facile as is
the master's hand, does that great “people,’ without
which English “society’ is a capital without a
column, gain admission even to the background of
the picture, except as a group of undistinguishable
grumbling rustics in one corner, and a corrupt and
equally undistinguishable borough constituency in
another. A deep and inbred contempt for the
middle class would be the only interpretation of a
picture of English society which ignored or only
sarcastically noticed them, were it not to be explained
by a defect in this author's genius and sympathies,
alike fatal to him as philosophic politician or as
philosophic artist.
And this is, that of the English world, which it
is his vocation to paint and to influence, he knows
and comprehends and cares for only the lightest froth
dancing on the surface. We have seen that in his
“ MY WOWEL.” 275
village he could conceive and describe his characters
of squire and parson with their families; below this
he could not even go by description, and he fails
to exhibit even them as actors in the real interests
of their lives. It is the same when his scene is
transferred to London. Dandies and fine ladies—
men and women upon whom life forces no serious
duties, and who are not great enough to impose them.'
on themselves—dress, talk, flirt, and intrigue upon
his stage. Even the political life which is bound
up in England with fashionable life he touches with
the vaguest, dreamiest pencil, and as if none of the
substantive interests and manly virtues with which
it is concerned had ever made themselves felt by
him. He can understand it as an exciting personal
game, more absorbing and more reputable than
hazard, with great prizes for those who can win
them, and draughts of Nepenthe for those whose
youth has left behind it little but gnawing regrets.
But as the highest form of business, or the serious
passion of serious men, and the duty of those whose
rank and fortune release them from the ordinary
duties of the less wealthy and eminent, we do not
mean to say that he cannot form the conception or
use the phrases, but it is not that view of political
life with which he sympathises, or which his genius
aspires to represent among the varieties of English
T 2
276 JESSAYS.
life. Nor, indeed, apart from motives, does he
dramatically represent the life of a political leader.
Here again he can form the conception, describe the
man; but his portrait wants details—that is, it wants
knowledge, his statesman does nothing as a states-
man. It cannot be in this case that life has pre-
sented no models to the writer. His manhood must
‘have been passed in the familiar society of political
Englishmen of the higher rank. It must be that his
genius is not receptive of this sort of experience;
that it presents to his imagination no beauty or
interest; it is not available to him for purposes, of
art. Go even into a class with which he ought to
be more familiar still, among the men of letters: we
have in this book three distinct types from this class,
—Leonard, the poet; Henry Norreys, the man who
follows literature with the diligence and sobriety of
a lawyer; and John Burley, the reckless, dissipated
man of genius, who is always out at elbows, elo-
quently drunk, and dies of delirium tremens. The
two latter are strongly marked types, and we know
precisely the sort of men intended, if not the very
men who sat for the portraits. But this is know-
ledge we bring to the book, not knowledge we get
from it. There is little dramatic power in the re-
presentation; we easily fill up features so strongly
marked, and we must not put down to the credit of
“ MY NOVEL.” 277
the artist what belong really to the subject and to
our own familiarity with a class. Leonard, on the
other hand, upon whom much more talk is lavished,
remains in his poetical character a mere nominis
umbra; not a characteristic of his genius is made
real and intelligible to us; he cannot have been as
poet and man of letters clearly and distinctly before
the author's eye. Thus, even with those classes of
society with which he must be familiar, he cannot
deal dramatically: he has not the genius for pre-
senting individual character, the primary dramatic
faculty; much less the faculty—requiring so much
study, observation, and Superiority to conventional
prejudices, in addition to dramatic genius—of pre-
senting class characters individualized, the distinctive
features of the man moulded and coloured by the
work he does, representative therefore of the social
function and peculiarities of their class, true typal
varieties of English life. It is needless to add, that
of the working lives—and that means the serious
portion of the lives—of the merchant, the manu-
facturer, the lawyer, and other ‘working classes,’
not the faintest representation is conveyed. Baron
Levy and Randal Leslie, who plot together against
the fortunes of their fellow ‘varieties,’ are the only
‘working men’ really exhibited in that which is
their business and function. In a word, it is only
278 ISSAYS.
the amusements, the pleasures, and the passions of the
idle members of English society, which Sir Edward
Bulwer Lytton has ever succeeded in painting. He
cannot paint the busy classes, even in their pleasures
and their family life and their passions—not even
those who belong to his ‘society’—because the
serious occupations and interests of men and women
affect their pleasures and their passions; and with
these and the characters they form he has no adequate
acquaintance and sympathy. So, as we said, he
paints the froth of society; and very gay froth it is,
and very pretty bubbles he can make of it: but this
is not reconciling classes, or giving a philosophic
representation in fiction of the great organic being
we call the English nation; and so far as My Novel
pretends to be anything more than anybody else's
novel, anything more than a well-wrought story,
constructed out of the old Bulwer-Lytton materials,
the pretence is fabulous and the performance does
not answer to it. We have a novel neither better
nor worse than its predecessors; but we have not
a great work of art reared on a basis so broad as
a general survey of English life in the earlier half
of the nineteenth century.
Would such a work of art be possible 2 A mirror
that should show to a nation of workers—to a nation
whose family hearth is dear and sacred, to a nation
“MY WOWEL.” 279
that is earnest, practical, grave, and religious—its
own life, complex and multitudinous, as it might
reflect itself upon the imagination of a great poet,
who to masculine understanding trained by obser-
vation and study should add the large heart and the
clear eye to which nothing human is uninteresting
or blank? Homer did something of this sort for the
Greece of his day; Dante for the Italy of his;
Shakspere for the Europe of his. These men knew
not such a word as commonplace or low, except as
applied to what is stupid and base. The broad field
of human life was to them a field of beauty, richly
clothed with food and flowers for the sustenance and
nourishment of a vigorous imagination. Art can
indeed harmonize classes when the artist is such as
these, when, on the one hand, the dignity and
worth of the various callings that minister to the
convenience and promote the improvement of a
nation, are illustrated by viewing them as harmo-
nious parts of a great whole; and on the other,
when the men who pursue these callings are repre-
sented with the interesting varieties impressed upon
the common humanity by circumstances and edu-
cation, but still as not having that common humanity
obliterated and replaced by Some ludicrous or mean
features, characteristic, it may be, of their occupation,
but not characteristic of men to whom an occupation
280 JESSAYS.
should be a servant and not a master. Till art deals
again as it did in its mighty youth with common
life—with that which is the business of a busy
struggling world—neither will art regain its strength
and renew its youth, nor will common life reappear
to us with the freshness and the sacredness which it
had to the eye of those who first became self-conscious
and burst into song. Dandy literature and superfine
sensibilities are tokens and causes of a degenerate
art and an emasculate morality; and among offenders
in this way none has sinned more, or is of higher
mark for a gibbet, than the author of My Novel.
Such books as his, when they appear in their true
characters, are judged according to one standard;
but when they come in the guise of profound meaning
and lofty aims, and give themselves the airs of being
grand concrete philosophies, the judge looks at them
in quite another light, tries them by a higher code,
and condemns them accordingly, as well-dressed
impostors.
The Spectator,
I'ebruary, 19, 1853.
** BLEAK HOUSE.” 281
DICKEWS’S “ BLEAK HOUSE.”
“I BELIEVE I have never had so many readers,”
says Mr. Dickens in the preface to Bleak House,
“as in this book.” We have no doubt that he has
the pleasantest evidence of the truth of this con-
viction in the balance-sheet of his publishing-account;
and, without any more accurate knowledge of the
statistics of his circulation than the indications fur-
nished by limited personal observation, we should
not be surprised to find that Punch and the Times
newspaper were his only rivals in this respect.
Whatever such a fact may not prove, it does prove
incontestably that Mr. Dickens has a greater power
of amusing the book-buying public of England than
any other living writer; and moreover establishes,
what we should scarcely have thought probable, that
his power of amusing is not weakened now that the
novelty of his style has passed away, nor his public
282 ESSAYS.
wearied by the repetition of effects in which truth of
nature and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed
to mannerism and point. Author and public react
upon each other; and it is no wonder that a writer,
who finds that his peculiar genius and his method
of exhibiting it secure him an extensive and Sustained
popularity, should be deaf to the remonstrances of
critics when they warn him of defects that his public
does not care for, or urge him to a change of method
which might very probably thin his audience for the
immediate present, and substitute the quiet approval
of the judicious for the noisy and profitable applause
of crowded pit and gallery. Intellectual habits, too,
become strengthened by use, and a period comes in
the life of a man of genius when it is hopeless to
expect from him growth of faculty or correction of
faults.
JBleak House is, even more than any of its pre-
decessors, chargeable with not simply faults, but
absolute want of construction. A novelist may
invent an extravagant or an uninteresting plot—may
fail to balance his masses, to distribute his light and
shade—may prevent his story from marching, by
episode and discursion: but Mr. Dickens discards
plot, while he persists in adopting a form for his
thoughts to which plot is essential, and where the
absence of a coherent story is fatal to continuous
“ BLEAK HOUSE.” 283
interest. In Bleak House, the series of incidents
which form the outward life of the actors and talkers
has no close and necessary connexion; nor have they
that higher interest that attaches to circumstances
which powerfully aid in modifying and developing
the original elements of human character. The
great Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which
serves to introduce a crowd of persons as suitors,
lawyers, law-writers, law-stationers, and general
spectators of Chancery business, has positively not
the smallest influence on the character of any one
person concerned; nor has it any interest of itself.
Mr. Richard Carstone is not made reckless and un-
steady by his interest in the great suit, but simply
expends his recklessness and unsteadiness on it, as
he would on something else if it were non-existent.
This great suit is lugged in by the head and shoulders,
and kept prominently before the reader, solely to
give Mr. Tickens the opportunity of indulging in
stale and commonplace Satire upon the length and
expense of Chancery proceedings, and exercises ab-
solutely no influence on the characters and destinies
of any one person concerned in it. The centre of
the arch has nothing to do in keeping the arch to-
gether. The series of incidents which answers to
what in an ordinary novel is called plot, is that
connected with the relationship of the heroine (again
284 JESSAYS.
analogically speaking) to her mother. Lady Dedlock,
who when first introduced to the reader is a stately
lady of the supremest fashion, has before her mar-
riage with Sir Leicester Dedlock given birth to an
illegitimate child, whom she supposes to have died
in its birth, but who, under the name of Esther
Summerson, was brought up in obscurity. The
truth becomes known to her Ladyship, and is ferreted
out by the family solicitor, Mr. Tulkinghorn; a
person of eminently respectable standing, but incom-
prehensible motives, who tortures Lady Dedlock with
mysterious hints, and afterwards direct menaces of
disclosing her shame to her husband; at which stage
of the proceedings he is shot in his chambers. The
reader is so artfully tempted to suspect Lady Dedlock
of the deed, that all but the simplest will at once
conclude that a theatrical surprise is meditated; and
accordingly, the real culprit turns out to be Lady
Dedlock's French maid, whom Mr. Tulkinghorn had
used in discovering the secret, and afterwards treated
with harshness and contumely, that roused her ma-
lignant temper to a murderous revenge. The secret,
however, is not buried with Mr. Tulkinghorn; and,
maddened by fear of discovery and open shame, Lady
Dedlock flies from her home, and dies of exhaustion
at the entrance of a wretched city churchyard, where
her lover was buried, and where she is found by her
“ BLEAK HOUSE.” 285
daughter and a detective policeman who had been
sent in quest of her. Literally, we have here given
the whole of what can by any stretch of the term
be called the main plot of Bleak House. And not
only is this story both meagre and melodramatic, and
disagreeably reminiscent of that vilest of modern
books Reynolds's Mysteries of London, but it is so
unskilfully managed that the daughter is in no way
influenced either in character or destiny by her
mother's history; and the mother, her husband, the
prying solicitor, the French maid, and the whole
Dedlock set, might be eliminated from the book
without damage to the great Chancery suit, or per-
ceptible effect upon the remaining characters. We
should then have less crowd, and no story; and the
book might be called ‘Bleak House, or the Odd
Folks that have to do with a long Chancery Suit.’
This would give an exact notion of the contents of
a collection of portraits embracing suitors, solicitors,
law-writers, law-stationers, money-lenders, law-
clerks, articled and not-articled, with their chance
friends and visitors, and various members of their
respective families. Even then, a comprehensive
etcastera would be needed for supernumeraries. So
crowded is the canvas which Mr. Dickens has
stretched, and so casual the connexiom that gives to
his composition whatever unity it has, that a da-
286 JESSAYS.
guerreotype of Fleet Street at noon-day would be the
aptest symbol to be found for it; though the daguer-
reotype would have the advantage in accuracy of re-
presentation. In addition to all other faults of con-
struction, the heroine is made to tell her adventures
in an autobiographic narrative; and as this would
not suffice, under the conditions of a mortal existence
limited to one spot in space at a time, for the endless
array of persons who have to talk and be funny and
interesting, the writer intercalates chapters in his
own person,--a mixture which has the awkwardest
effect, and is left in its natural awkwardness with
no appliances of literary skill to help it out.
The result of all this is, that Bleak House would
be a heavy book to read through at once, as a pro-
perly constructed novel ought to be read. But
we must plead guilty to having found it dull and
wearisome as a serial, though certainly not from its
want of cleverness or point. On the contrary, almost
everybody in the book is excessively funny, that is
not very wicked, or very miserable. Wright and
Reeley could act many of the characters without
alteration of a word; Skimpole must be constructed
with an especial eye to the genius of Mr. Charles
Matthews; O. Smith will of course choose Krook
or the sullen bricklayer, but probably the former,
for his effective make-up, and the grand finale by
“BLEAK HOUSE.” 287
spontaneous combustion,--which, however Nature
and Mr. Lewes may deride in the pride of intellect,
the resources of the Adelphi will unquestionably prove
possible: the other characters of the piece would
be without difficulty distributed among ladies and
gentlemen familiar to the London boards. By all
which is implied, that Mr. Dickens selects in his por-
traiture exactly what a farce-writer of equal ability
and invention would select, that which is coarsely
marked and apprehended at first sight; that which
is purely outward and no way significant of the man,
an oddity of feature, a trick of gesture or of phrase,
Something which an actor can adequately present and
in his presentation exhaust the conception. And
this tendency to a theatrical method shows itself
again in the exaggerated form which his satire as-
Sumes, and which even when the satire is well
directed robs it of its wholesome effect. The theatre
is obliged to drive its points home, or they would
be lost; the majority of our actors want skill to
present a character coloured and drawn true to nature,
and a London mixed audience would not appreciate
the exquisite art that disdained coarse exaggeration.
But the gross caricature of the stage is unbearable in
the study : we read with some other purpose than
to laugh; and if the Harold Skimpoles and Mrs.
Jellybys of the novel are Supremely ridiculous, we
288 ESSAYS.
only refer to their counterparts in real life to note
that the artist has failed in his execution, and has
yet to learn by a deeper study of Nature how
cunningly she blends motives, and how seldom men
and women are entirely absurd or selfish without
a glimmering and uneasy consciousness that all is
not quite as it should be.
The love of strong effect, and the habit of seizing
peculiarities and presenting them instead of cha-
racters, pervade Mr. Dickens's gravest and most
amiable portraits, as well as those expressly intended
to be ridiculous and grotesque. His heroine in Bleak
Płouse is a model of unconscious goodness; sowing
love and reaping it wherever she goes, diffusing
round her an atmosphere of happiness and a sweet
perfume of a pure and kindly nature. Her uncon-
sciousness and sweet humility of disposition are so
profound that scarcely a page of her autobiography
is free from a record of these admirable qualities.
With delightful naïveté she writes down the praises
that are showered upon her on all hands; and it is
impossible to doubt the simplicity of her nature,
because she never omits to assert it with emphasis.
This is not only coarse portraiture, but utterly untrue
and inconsistent. Such a girl would not write her
own memoirs, and certainly would not bore one with
her goodness till a wicked wish arises that she would
“ BLEAK HOUSE.” 289
either do something very ‘spicey,' or confine herself
to superintending the jam-pots at Bleak House. Old
Jarndyce himself, too, is so dreadfully amiable and
Supernaturally benevolent, that it has been a common
opinion during the progress of the book, that he
would turn out as great a rascal as Skimpole; and
the fox on the symbolical cover with his nose turned
to the East wind has been conjectured by subtle
intellects to be intended for his double. We rejoice
to find that those misanthropical anticipations were
unfounded; but there must have been something false
to general nature in the portrait that suggested them
—some observed peculiarity of an individual pre-
sented too exclusively, or an abstract conception of
gentleness and forbearance worked out to form a
sharp contrast to the loud, self-assertive, vehement,
but generous and tender Boythorne. This gentleman
is one of the most original and happiest conceptions
of the book, a humourist study of the highest merit.
Mr. Tulkinghorn, the Dedlock confidential solicitor,
is an admirable study of mere outward characteristics
of a class; but his motives and character are quite
incomprehensible, and we strongly suspect that Mr.
Dickens had him shot out of the way as the only
possible method of avoiding an enigma of his own
setting which he could not solve. Tulkinghorn's
fate excites precisely the same emotion as the death
TJ
290 ISSAYS,
of a noxious brute. He is a capital instance of an
old trick of Mr. Dickens, by which the supposed
tendencies and influences of a trade or profession are
made incarnate in a man, and not only is ‘the dyer's
hand subdued to what it works in,’ but the dyer is
altogether eliminated, and his powers of motion, his
shape, speech, and bodily functions, are translated
into the dye-tub. This gives the effect of what some
critics call marvellous individuality. It gives dis-
tinctness at any rate, and is telling; though it may
be questionable whether it is not a more fatal mistake
in art than the careless and unobservant habit which
many writers have of omitting to mark the effect of
occupations upon the development and exhibition of
the universal passions and affections. Conversation
Kenge and Wholes, solicitors in the great Jarndyce
case, have each their little characteristic set of phrases,
and are well-marked specimens of the genus lawyer;
but as they only appear in their professional capacity,
we are not entitled to question them as to their
qualities as mem.
The allied families of Jellyby and Turveydrop
are in Dickens's happiest vein, though Mrs. Jellyby
is a coarse exaggeration of an existing folly. They
may, we think, stand beside the Micawbers. Mrs.
Jellyby's daughter Caddy is the only female in the
book we thoroughly relish: there is a blending of
“ BLEAK HOUSE.” 291
pathos and fun in the description of her under the
tyranny of Borrioboola Gha, that is irresistible; and
her rapid transformation from a sulky, morose, over-
grown child, to a graceful and amiable young woman,
under the genial influence of Esther Summerson, is
quite Cinderella-like, and as charming as any fairy
tale. Inspector Bucket, of the Detective Force, bears
evidence of the careful study of this admirable de-
partment of our Police by the editor of Household
Words; and, as in the case of Kenge and Wholes,
the professional capacity is here the object, and we
do not require a portraiture of the man and his
affections. Poor Joe, the street-sweeping urchin, is
drawn with a skill that is never more effectively
exercised than when the outcasts of humanity are
its subjects; a skill which seems to depart in pro-
portion as the author rises in the scale of Society
depicted. Dickens has never yet succeeded in catch-
ing a tolerable likeness of man or woman whose lot
is cast among the high-born and wealthy. Whether
it is that the lives of such present less that is out-
wardly funny or grotesque, less that strikes the eye
of a man on the look-out for Oddity and point, or
that he knows nothing of their lives, certain it is
that his people of station are the vilest daubs; and
Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with his wife and
family circle, are no exceptions. -
D 2
292 JESSAYS,
If Mr. Dickens were now for the first time before
the public, we should have found our space fully
occupied in drawing attention to his wit, his in-
vention, his eye for common life, for common men
and women, for the everyday aspect of streets and
houses, his tendency to delineate the affections and
the humours rather than the passions of mankind;
and his defects would have served but to shade and
modify the praises that flow forth willingly at the
appearance among us of a true and Original genius.
And had his genius gone on growing and maturing,
clearing itself of extravagance, acquiring art by study
and reflection, it would not be easy to limit the
admiration and homage he might by this time have
won from his countrymen. As it is, he must be
content with the praise of amtising the idle hours
of the greatest number of readers; not, we may hope,
without improvement to their hearts, but certainly
without profoundly affecting their intellects or deeply
stirring their emotions. Clever he undoubtedly is:
many of his portraits excite pity, and suggest the
existence of crying social sins; but of almost all we
are obliged to say that they border on and frequently
reach caricature, of which the essence is to catch
a striking likeness by exclusively selecting and ex-
aggerating a peculiarity that marks the man but
does not represent him. Dickens belongs in liter-
“ B.L.E.A R HOUSE.” 293
ature to the same class as his illustrator, Hablot
Browne, in design, though he far surpasses the
illustrator in range and power.
The Spectator,
Sept. 24, 1853.
294 ESSAYS.
IſINGSLEY'S “ WESTWARD HO/”
Mr. KINGSLEY has secured the first requisite of
success as a novelist, by choosing an interesting Sub-
ject, which both excites and justifies the powers of
art and genius expended upon it. If it has been
at times necessary to protest against the application
of the principle of ‘cui bono’ to works of art, it
has been because the application has been improperly
made, the principle wrongly or narrowly interpreted,
not because art is exempt from the necessity of
being available for something higher than the pastime
of inactive minds and jaded energies. To make us
wiser and larger-hearted—to conduct us through a
wider range of experience than the actual life of
each generally permits—to make us live in the lives
of other types of character than our own, or than
those of our daily acquaintance—to enable us to pass
by sympathy into other minds and other circum-
“ WESTRWARD HO !” 295
stances, and especially to train the moral nature by
sympathy with noble characters and noble actions,
—these are the high aims of fiction in the hands of
its master wielders; these are the aims which have
raised novels and dramas to an importance which
Nature herself indicates in assigning to their pro-
duction those powers which the consent of all ages
allows to rank Supreme among the gifts of the human
TàC0.
Mr. Kingsley's object is to paint the types of
character, and the sort of training, by which Eng-
land rose in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to be
mistress of the seas, and a model to all Europe of
material prosperity and national unity—a powerful,
a wealthy, a free, and a happy people. He does
not, of course, attempt any such absurd impossibility
as to epitomize in the fortunes and career of a single
man or family the infinitely complex elements and
agencies that go to make up the life of a nation
at any one time; nor does he select the central
Government, with its Court, its Administration, and
its Parliament, and write a political novel to illustrate
the policy of Elizabeth, and the various wisdom and
talent of her Ministers, with the hearty yet perfectly
independent action of the national assembly. He
takes as his type of Elizabethan character and ac-
tivity a Devonshire youth, of good birth, and in no
296 ISSAYS.
way distinguished from other sons of country gentle-
men by either fortune, or learning, or genius, but of
great bodily strength, of lively affections and Sweet
temper, combined with a marked propensity to combat
from his earliest years; a character that when trained
to self-denial and a high sense of duty to God and
his country, and practised in the arts of war and
Seamanship, presents perhaps as perfect a specimen
of glorious manhood as men have ever obeyed with
implicit confidence and women worshipped as their
natural liege lord and defender. Beside Amyas
Leigh stand grouped his brother Frank, charmingly
contrasted with him in all points except his pure
and warm affections and chivalrous honour; and
his mother, a Saintly lady, whom early experience
of calamity has sobercd down to perfect Serenity,
and whom later sorrow and boreavement transfigure
to almost unearthly intensity of faith, love, and re-
signation. The worthies of Devon—Sir Walter
Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville, Admirals Hawkins
and Sir Francis Drake; families whose names are
still the bright stars of the West—Fortescues, Chi-
chesters, Carys—blend in the action and interest of
the scene. Burghers of Bideford, plotting Jesuits,
Romanist country families, mariners who have sailed
round the world with Drake, mariners who have seen
Columbus and Cabot and Vasco de Gama, country
“ Iſ ESTIVARD HO !” 297
parsons, gentlemen adventurers, Spanish dons, South
American Indians, and victims of the Inquisition,
crowd the story with variety of character and in-
cident. The scene itself spreads out from Bideford,
near which is the family seat of the Leighs, through
North and South Devon, to London in a passing
glance; to Ireland and its wars, in which Amyas
takes a distinguished part; to the Spanish main, and
the boundless South American continent, where in-
deed the most interesting part of the adventures
take place; back again to Bideford, and Plymouth;
whence Amyas Sails in command of his ship, to
take part in that most memorable sea-fight, the
twelve-days battle, in which the Spanish Armada
was chased from Plymouth round the South and East
coasts of England, and finally broko, fled, or went to
the bottom, some escaping to Norway, a few under
Medina-Sidonia back to Spain; and England was
saved, and the long dream of Spanish ambition and
Popish vengeance dispelled for ever. Through all
this variety of incident and character Mr. Kingsley
never flags, never becomes wearisome. His men and
women live in his pages, talk life and not book;
and our sympathies move with them, so that, as
in life, we do not impatiently look for the issue, but
take an ever new interest in the details of the pro-
gress towards the issue. There may be differences
298 JESSAYS.
of opinion as to the estimate Mr. Kingsley has
formed of particular men of the age; there certainly
will be opposition elicited by some of his opinions on
the religious manifestations of that age; Papist and
Puritan will scoff almost alike at his estimate of the
Church-of-Englandism of that day; and while the
Dissenter of to-day has little reason to quarrel with
the novelist for embodying Elizabethan Puritanism
in such a stern warrior, admirable Seaman and gunner,
true comrade, Spaniard-hating and God-fearing Eng-
lishman, as Salvation Yeo of Clovelly, we are not
disposed to accept Mr. Kingsley's types as expressive
of any but one and that the worst form of Romanism
in the age he depicts. But this is not so much un-
fairness on his part, as a necessity of his story,
which leads him to deal with plotting Jesuits, semi-
Inary priests, and Spanish American bishops and
inquisitors, rather than with the body of English
Catholic gentry, to whose loyalty he bears high and
notoriously well-deserved testimony. Still, the re-
sult is a somewhat jarring sense of a partial repre-
sentation in this respect, which we wish the con-
structive skill of the writer had been employed to
obviate; though we would not, for any breadth of
charity or comprehensive philosophy, lose or weaken
the intensity of his conviction that the Protestant
cause in that day was the cause of God, of freedom,
“ WEST WARD HO !” 299
of English nationality, of American United States,
and of all which has made Europe different from
what it would have become had the Spanish dream of
universal empire and the destruction of Protestantism
been realized. It was this conviction that was at
the root of the heroism of our land in that day, and
it is the reflective glow of this conviction that gives
its spirit-stirring trumpet tone to Mr. Kingsley's re-
presentation of that heroism.
We began by saying that Mr. Kingsley had
chosen his theme well, because of its interest at any
time to us Englishmen, descendants of the heroes of
the Armada. But just now it seems especially
opportune that we should look back for practical
lessons, for encouragement, direction, and warning,
to an age when great actions seemed the spon-
taneous instinct of the community, and success rose
to the amplest range of aspiration. If miracles were
wrought then, they were wrought by men using
human means, under that agency which will always
work miracles—under the inspiration of a faith in
righteousness being the law and order of the world
—of a manful resolution to dare everything for the
right—of a prudence to judge of means—of a gallant
spirit to hold life and labour and pain all well spent
in the service of their country, and in the cause of
God, freedom, and human happiness. The same
300 FSSAYS.
spirit, employing means and mechanical skill of
which Elizabeth's heroes nover dreamed in their
wildest aspirations, will again produce proportionate
results. But...we talk of righteousness and faith in
God, and believe in mechanical forces calculable by
measurement and arithmetic ; we talk of genius and
strong will, and believe in routine and a system of
mutual check; we believe in these, or rather we
have no belief in anything, and this is the expression
of our unbelief, our incapacity, our helplessness, our
despair. Welcome war, welcome pestilence, welcome
anything that will rouse the once noble English
nation from this paralysis of true human, true national
life; that will force us once more to seek out clear
heads and brave hearts, and thank God, as for His
choicest gifts, for men who will work themselves,
and govern us and teach us to work—for men like
those worthies ‘whom,’ as Mr. Kingsley says in
a hearty dedication of his book to the Bishop of New
Zealand and Rajah Sir James Brooke, ‘Elizabeth,
without distinction of rank or age, gathered round
her in the ever-glorious wars of her great reign.’
Westward Ho / partakes much more of the cha-
racter of biography and history than of the ordinary
Sentimental novel. Love plays a great part in the
progress of the story, as it does in the lives of most
men; but it is as motive influencing character and
“ WESTIVARI) EIO tº 301
determining action that it is exhibited, not as itself
the sole interest of life, the single feeling which
redeems human existence from dulness and inward
death. The love which acts on the career and
character of Amyas Leigh does not spend itself in
moonlight monologues or in passionate discourses with
its object; nor does the story depend for its interest
upon the easily roused sympathy of even the stupidest
readers with the ups and downs, the fortunes and
emotions, of a passion common in certain degrees
and certain kinds to all the race. It is no such
narrow view of life that is presented here, but rather
that broad sympathy with human action and human
feeling in its manifold completeness which gives to
art a range as wide as life itself, and throws a con-
secrating beauty over existence from the cradle to
the grave, wherever human affections act, wherever
human emergies find their object and their field,
wherever the battle between right and wrong, be-
tween sense and spirit, is wagod—Wherevor and
by whatever means characters are trained, principles
strengthened, and humanity developed. And this
comprehensive character—displaying itself in as-
signing its true relative value to cach thing—we
take to be the distinguishing test of high art, and
that which marks it out from all mere SCntimentalism,
prettiness, eclecticism, or whatever other name we
302 ESSAYS.
may give to man's attempts to reduce nature to some
standard of his own taste, or the taste of a particular
age or clique, instead of endeavouring to enlarge his
heart and open his eyes to see and feel the wonders
and the splendours which are poured down from
heaven on earth, in the least of which as in the
greatest the Infinite reveals Himself for those who
through the letter can penetrate to the spirit.
The Spectator,
March 17, 1855.
“NOOTES AMBROSIANZE.” 303
WIZS OW’S “WOOTES AMBR OSIA WZE.”
MANY of the causes which contributed to the interest
excited by the Noctes Ambrosiana, on their first
appearance in successive numbers of Blackwood's
Magazine, have ceased to operate. Political measures
round which parties were then struggling with fierce
passion and loud mutual denunciation have been
built as firmly into the constitution as Magna Charta
itself. The men engaged in those conflicts have
become historical personages, or have fallen into utter
oblivion; in either case escaping from the partial
judgments of that time, and no longer lending a charm
not its own to panegyric or invective. So, too, the
literary celebrities of that day have either attained
a fixed rank or been forgotten; we no longer interest
ourselves in disputes about their claims. And in the
case of both political and literary personages, what
was then fresh and piquant personality has become
304 ESSAYS.
familiar history or stale gossip; pointed allusions
have lost their force, half-revelations have been
superScded; and we wonder, as we read, at the
amount of feeling exhibited towards men and Women
who are now, for the most part, shadowy names, with
scarce an association connecting them with our living
sympathies. Yet, in spite of this inevitable offect
of the lapse of twenty or thirty years upon papers
discussing so largely topics and people of temporary
interest, such is the high quality of the genius
lavished upon them, that the public will read by far
the larger portion of the Nocles with as much delight
as at first. They appear now with a claim to rank
as English classics—as the choicest production of
their author, one of the most highly endowed men
of his time. Their chief interlocutor, the eidolon of
the Ettrick Shepherd, is ranked by Professor Wilson’s
admirers with the most forcible characters known to
us through history or created by fiction. Thus,
Professor Ferrier, introducing the Wootes with a
preface, says—“In wisdom, the Shepherd equals
the Socrates of Plato; in humour, he surpasses the
IFalstaff of Shakspere; clear and prompt, he might
have stood up against Dr. Johnson in close and
peremptory argumont; fertile and copious, he might
have rivalled Burke in amplitude of declamation.”
Socrates, Falstaff, Dr. Johnson, and Burke, all in
“NOOTES AMBROSTANAE.” 305
one! and that one talking a broad Doric, that seems
to an English ear the native dialect of humour,
plastic alike to pathos, fun, and homely shrewdness;
a shepherd, too, knowing all the shy charms of
nature in remotest haunts of Solitude and silence—
all the racy characteristics of pastoral life and pastoral
people, their joys, their sorrows, their pleasures,
and their business. Estimated thus, the Shepherd of
the Noctes would really be the most marvellous of
the creations of that literature which stands highest
among the literatures of Europe for its presentation
of human charactor. And, with some qualification,
the estimate is not so absurd as at first sight our
habitual reverence for such names as Professor
Terrier has brought into his comparison would con-
sider it.
The truth is, that Wilson, one of the most re-
markable men that ever lived for the variety and
strength of his powers, has thrown into the Shep-
herd's talk the teeming activity of his own mind
and heart; and so far as characters are displayed
in life, and in that fiction which, reflects life, solely
by their desultory talk, the Shepherd may fairly be
matched with any one. If it was simply as a
shrewd talker that we knew Socrates—if Falstaff
was to us simply a Sayer of good things, Dr. Johnson
a hard hitter in argument, Burke a copious and
X
306 JESSAYS.
splendid declaimer—Wilson's Shepherd might with-
out exaggeration be put upon a level with all these
remarkable characters. He talks as shrewdly as
Socrates, as wittily as Falstaff, as weightily as
Johnson, as splendidly as Burke; Or, at least, the
exaggeration of such assertions might pass without
challenge. He does talk more shrewdly, wittily,
weightily, and splendidly, than any man we have
the pleasure of knowing. But the talk of these
famous personages is all related to action or serious
discussion—is the genuine utterance of the men in
contact with facts, either engaged in the business
of life or in the pursuit of truth. Something more
is revealed by it than a kaleidoscope quickness and
variety of intellect; it displays at once and sub-
serves the will and the affections. Socrates talks
cleverly, and gets his opponent generally into
chancery—a feat which would raise him to the rank
of a first-rate Sophist; but we value him for his
genuine earnestness in pursuit of truth, his plainness,
his fearlessness, his candour, his pure and aspiring
soul—dialectic is simply his instrument. Falstaff is
witty, but not wittier than Sheridan or Hook: what
we admire in him is the profound sincerity of his
sensual abasement—the devotion of the whole man,
wit, understanding, reason, conscience, to the pleasures
of the animal man—his utter insensibility to the
“ NOCTES AMBROSIANZE.” 307
higher claims and enjoyments of his humanity; it is
a character, not a talker, that delights us in the fat
knight. So in Johnson, and Burke, the talk is
merely instrumental, symptomatic of a whole man
talking. But in the Shepherd of the Noctes the talk
is the be-all and the end-all; the man is a talker
and little else; and we identify him with his talk
almost as little as we do an actor with his part.
This is partly owing to the form adopted: desultory
talk “de Omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis” can
never thoroughly develop a character—can do nothing
but show a man’s versatility of intellect and command
of language. But it is also owing to the fact that
one of the Shepherd's traits is the queerest and most
grotesque vanity—almost the only trait borrowed
from the original model; and that he is throughout
represented as talking for effect, to show off his
eloquence. We have not, consequently, a character
completely developed, but merely a man who can
assume all characters for the nonce; can be funny,
pathetic, wise, descriptive, poetical, or sensual, just
as the play requires. And he is so palpably acting
that he tires us by his cleverness of assumption, just
as a hired mountebank would tire us by insisting on
showing off his powers of mimicry in conversation.
Another objection to the Noctes as a whole may
be conveyed in the words of Mr. Foster, who, in his
X 2
308 JESSAYS.
admirable life of Goldsmith, says—“Of the many
clever and indeed wonderful writings that from age
to age are poured forth into the world, what is it that
puts upon the few the stamp of immortality, and
makes them seem indestructible as nature ? what is
it but their wise rejection of everything superfluous?”
We estimate works of art, as we estimate characters
in life, more by their unity and completeness than
by their richness and profusion of raw material. It
is coherence, order, purpose, which make the differ-
ence between Nature and Chaos. And if all the wit,
the wisdom, the geniality, and the imagination of the
Noctes Ambrosiana fail to Secure them a place among
English classics, it will be because these are reduced
to no order, subordinated to no general purpose,
organized into no whole. They will even then
remain the very best magazine papers that were
probably ever written.
The Spectator,
November 24, 1855,
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 309
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY.
THE “Cours de Philosophie Positive” is at once
a compendious cyclopædia of Science and an exhi-
bition of scientific method. It defines rigorously
the characteristics of the several orders of phenomena
with which the particular sciences are concerned,
arranges them in an ascending scale of complexity
and specialty beginning with mathematics and
ending with social physics or Sociology, and assigns
to each science its proper method in accordance with
the nature of the phenomena to be investigated.
The connexion between the Sciences thus arranged
is, that the laws of each preceding order of pheno-
mena are operative in that which succeeds, but in
combination with a new order of laws, the study
of which constitutes the advanced science. As
might be supposed, the sciences have historically
developed themselves in accordance with this arrange-
310 JESSAYS,
ment, the simpler and more general first, the more
complex and special afterwards. Thus we obtain
not only a lucid and rational classification, but
a logical genealogy and an historical law of evo-
lution, forming a sure basis for education and a
luminous indication of future progress. An arrange-
ment so simple in its principle, so fruitful in its
results, one may well be astonished at having had
so many ages to wait for. It is, however, unques-
tionable that, though half-formed Suggestions of
such a classification are here and there to be found,
and though Hegel in particular, proceeding on a
totally different method, has reached an arrangement
that superficially resembles M. Comte's, yet to the
latter belongs the honour of having thoroughly
worked out the conception, of having rigorously
determined and decisively constituted the filiation,
of having exhibited the relations between phenomena
and method, and finally of having accurately con-
ceived and initiated the crowning science of Sociology,
with its two departments of social statics and social
dynamics, dealing the one with the conditions of
the stability of human societies, the other with the
laws of their progress. Because it is not merely
a cyclopædia of scientific facts, but an exhibition
of the methods of human knowledge and of the
relations between its different branches, M. Comte
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHIV. 311
calls his work philosophy ; and because it limits
itself to what can be proved, he terms it positive
philosophy.
That, during the twenty years since the appear-
ance of the first volume of the original work, it has
powerfully influenced the thoughts and writings of
the most exact minds engaged in speculation in this
country, will be doubtful to no one who compares
the books published on the general principles and
mutual relations of Science before and since its ap-
pearance. That it has given a far more special and
directing impulse to those writers than most of them
have been or would be willing publicly to avow,
is Miss Martineau's opinion, and one of her motives
—a highly honourable one—for presenting a trans-
lation of the original work to the English public.
The motive assigned by Miss Martineau for this
assumed reluctance to credit Comte with his due
share of influence, is one likely enough to have pre-
vailed with all English writers who were not very
far above the common level in moral courage, or
very far below it in insolent bravado and conceited
contempt for the opinions and sympathies of their
countrymen. For M. Comte's book, besides being,
as we have described it, a treatise on science and
scientific methods, is also a fierce polemic against
theology and metaphysics, with all the notions and
312 JESSAYS.
sentiments that have their roots in them, all the
beliefs and hopes which are considered, among us, if
not the foundations, at least indispensable supports
of morality. M. Comte scornfully denounces theism
and atheism as equally unwarrantable intrusions into
a province beyond the faculties, and barren for the
needs of man; he treats our hope of a life beyond
the grave as a childish chimera; mind he scouts as
a metaphysical entity, on a level with the “occult
causes” of the schoolmen; Him, whom other men
worship as the source and sustainer of their own
lives, and of all the powers at work around them, he
treats as a poor old dethroned Fetish—a roi fainéant,
kept up, like the descendant of the Great Mogul,
from unmeaning habit of accustomed reverence, or the
idle prejudices and selfish interests of metaphysicians
and theologians—a useless ceremonial, from which
all power has been transferred to positive laws, and
all glory to their discoverers. In the universe of
man and the worlds he resolves to see only a vast
consensus of forces, an infinite whirl and rush of
phenomena, of which we can learn by observation
the uniform coexistences and sequences, but know
not, nor need to know, whence they flashed into
being, what power sustains them, or what their
mighty movements mean. What appears, we may
and should investigate—to what is, we have no
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 313
access, no ascertainable relation. M. Comte aims,
in fact, not simply at renovating Science by reforming
its general conceptions and completing its rànge, but
at rigidly limiting human beliefs and speculations,
and on the basis of demonstrable knowledge of
phenomena constituting a reformed order of practical
life and society. It was long ago said by one of our
most brilliant living wits, “There is no God, and
Miss Martineau is his prophet”; and it therefore
excites no surprise that the same-pretensions, which
are supposed to have deterred other English writers
from acknowledging their obligation to the French
philosopher, should have induced her to undertake
the laborious task of translating and condensing his
six bulky volumes into two. She sees in his strict
limitation of the human faculties to phenomenal
knowledge—in his treatment of all that cannot be
demonstrated by sensible experience as chimeras—
a means not otherwise procurable of remedying the
intellectual anarchy of her country, of reinstating
firm beliefs and impregnable principles in religion,
morals, and politics, and so putting a final check
upon the spread of weak and inconsistent practice,
general faintness of heart and uncertainty of mind.
For she too thinks that all the old beliefs and
philosophies were but leading-strings and baby-
jumpers for our race; that they have long encum-
314 I'SSAYS.
bered the movements of the growing boy, and must
be cleared off–sent abroad, perhaps, for the ab-
origines of Australia and Terra del Fuego, who have
yet to pass through the phases of Western Europe,
though the duration of the crisis may be materially
abridged for them by the influence of the nations
which have preceded them in the course of human
evolution.
It is these pretensions of the positive philosophy
with which alone we profess to deal, because it is of
these alone that there can be any dispute amongst
competent persons. If observation of phenomena is
our sole source of knowledge, no one questions but
that the “inductive canons” are the guides to ac-
curate observation and the rules of safe generalization.
The assumption is, however, somewhat extensive;
and M. Comte nowhere attempts to demonstrate this
fundamental position of his system, unless it is
demonstration to assert that theology and meta-
physics have been barren speculations, whereas
positive Science has gone on from age to age extend-
ing its domain and adding to men's practical and
demonstrable knowledge. This, however, our space
will not allow us to discuss. Nor can we do more
even with respect to these pretensions than to speak
of some preliminary considerations which lie in the
way of their admission. As a series of treatises on
COMTE'S POSITIVE PEIILOSOPHY, 315
the various sciences, M. Comte's work might be full
of errors of detail without much impairing its value
as a philosophic classification ; and in fact, with
respect to all but the simple sciences, even if it had
been without blemish at the time of its publication,
years are so rapidly developing our knowledge that
it could have retained its perfection only a short
time. As a treatise on method, it falls so far short
of Mr. J. S. Mill's Logic in exhaustive treatment and
in clear terse style, and has besides been so ably
criticised by him in various parts of that admirable
work, that it is superfluous to point out its special
defects to the English student of philosophy. In
spite of antiquated details and of special defects,
however, the work will always retain a most distin-
guished place in the history of opinion; and to it
must the student resort who shall hereafter wish to
sce the form which the science of social physics
acquired in the hands of its first rigorously positive
investigator. We have simply to inquire what its
great claims are to supply the place of those theo-
logical and metaphysical beliefs and sentiments which
it proposes to supersede—what support it can lend
to moral principles and noble conduct, cquivalent to
the aids of which it would deprive us.
It is not unlikely that a preliminary objection
would ordinarily be taken against the pretensions of
316 ESSAYS.
positivism to exclude all other motives to action, and
other grounds of assurance, in the fact that except
for the simpler sciences, from geometry to chemistry
—physiology rapidly advancing to meet them—it is
as yet in its infancy, and has no body of doctrine
to substitute for what it displaces. A positivist
would answer to this, that conscious ignorance is
better than chimerical fancies, which not only them-
selves mislead, but prevent the growth of true
doctrine; that we are possessed of empirical laws as
to physical life, individual conduct, and social organ-
ization, by which to direct experiments and guide
practice with more or less approximation to truth;
and that, scientific conceptions and Scientific methods
once instituted, a body of doctrine will accumulate
with a rapidly accelerating ratio. A more funda-
mental objection is, that after leaving physiology, we
get into a region of phenomena where Will plays a
leading part, and, quite apart from all consideration of
theistic interference, introduces a disturbing element
that baffles the previsions of science by destroying
the uniformity in the connexion of the phenomena
of conduct. Whatever theory, however, be held
about the human will, whatever phrases be preferred
to express our consciousness of its mode of operation,
it is undeniable that an act of determination is uni-
formly preceded by a predominant desire in con-
COMTE's POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY, 317
formity with that act. The question therefore really
is, can the Succession of our desires be reduced to
uniform laws? Given the character and the circum-
stances of a man, is it possible to determine what
desires will direct his action? The popular, or rather
the metaphysical voice, denies this possibility; but,
we think, more in the interest of certain other theories
—such for instance as human responsibility—than
because facts compel this denial. For if this de-
termination of human actions be really impossible
under the assumed conditions,—in other words, if
human actions are capricious and arbitrary in any
other sense than arises from the complexity and in-
calculable nature of the motives which determine
them,--what is the meaning of education, of moral
and social influences, of any legislation but what is
penal, or indeed even of penal legislation ? Plainly,
all these agencies rest for their validity upon the
commonly-believed fact that motives influence con-
duct; that one train of motives ever acting upon a
human being of given tendencies induces conduct
different from another train of motives. Religion
itself, what is it but a fresh and higher presentation
of motives—truths revealed to influence human con-
duct, which other known truths are not capable of
influencing in the same direction to the same degree ?
It is true that nothing appears at first sight more
318 JESSAYS.
variable, more capricious, less subject to any uni-
formities of sequence, than the phenomena of human
conduct: but then, it is to be remembered that the
determining conditions of human conduct are in-
finitely various and complex. For this reason, Mr.
Mill has carefully guarded against the extravagant
supposition that the future acts of men and of societies
can, in the highest possibilities of social science, be
foreseen like the phenomena of the heavenly bodies;
and has limited the utmost attainment of that science
to determine that given circumstances have a tendency
to alter given characters in ascertainable degrees and
directions, or that under given circumstances given
characters will act in a determinate manner. Nor
has M. Comte carried his speculations to a more
extravagant pitch than this; which seems, after all
said, to be nothing more than the enunciation with
scientific precision of a belief we all act upon every
day of our lives, and on which most of the institutions
of society—i.e. all which have a moral or educational
aim—are founded.
Putting aside, then, these two objections, which
lie, the one against the present claims, the other
against the possibility, of Social Science,—and Sup-
posing such a science not only to the extent indi-
cated possible, not only constituted in conception and
method, but so far constructed as that the tendencies
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 319
of men and of Societies under given circumstances
shall be rigorously demonstrated,—our inquiry is,
whether such knowledge is adequate to supply the
forces necessary to maintain individuals and societies
in a right course of conduct. We assume the con-
ditions known under which the human being may
be trained to any given line of conduct; but how
do we determine the line of conduct to be enforced
on men and on Societies? The phenomena of human
action being, in virtue of their complexity, eminently
modifiable, have we from positivism any principle
on which to found our modifying interference, any
end by which to shape our education, our social or-
ganization, our legislation? Comte bases on the past
history of human evolution a brilliant generalization
of the phases of speculative opinion through which
mankind has passed or must pass, and indicates the
coexistent social and political phenomena which be-
long to each phase. In every department of specu-
lation that has run its course, mankind has passed
through three stages, or modes of viewing the phe-
nomena whose explanation is sought,-the theologic,
in which all action in the world is referred to a
volition in or above the objects moved; the meta-
physic, in which the action is referred to mysterious
entities Supposed to reside in objects moving, and
which are in fact nothing but abstract conceptions
320 ESSAYS,
of the phenomena themselves; and finally the positive,
in which no explanation is sought beyond the classi-
fication of the phenomenon along with similar phe-
nomena, and the ascertainment of its precedent con-
ditions. This bare statement can give not the faintest
conception of the value of the generalization—if only
estimated as an hypothetical approximation to a true
law—in studying universal history. But M. Comte
authoritatively lays it down as demonstrated to be
the leading law of human evolution, since all other
social phenomena follow its phases. If we are not
satisfied with his proofs, if we object that the first
links in the chain of evidence are altogether wanting,
and that the hypothesis is based upon no exhaustive
analysis even of the facts which history has recorded,
—we are cavalierly informed that social science re-
quires the establishment of such a law, and estab-
lished therefore it is and shall be. This law of
evolution being then established to M. Comte's satis-
faction, and for the sake of argument to ours also,
how does it supply the guiding principle we are
in quest of to regulate the future course of that
evolution, so far as our modifying power may ex-
tend ? Here M. Comte becomes altogether obscure
and contradictory. It seems sufficient to him to
know the law of the phases through which belief has
passed in reference to certain departments of science,
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 321
and is, in his opinion, to pass in all branches of know-
ledge and speculation. The other Social phenomena
being dependent on or at least following the changes
of speculative opinion, their law is known too. But
we are as far off as ever from any guide for indi-
vidual conduct, or for the action of society. It may
be that M. Comte thinks it superfluous, having in-
dicated a law of human progression, to do more than
hint that we are to obey it, and become positive as
quickly as we may ; and that this once in course of
accomplishment, the Social movement will proceed
harmoniously in its normal course, bringing felicity
the highest attainable to individuals and to societies.
But even this very vague injunction, to make posi-
tivism our aim and guiding principle of conduct, has
after all not even the slight practical bearing which
at first sight it seems to have. For we are over and
over again assured by M. Comte, that the general
course of human evolution is beyond human control;
that only secondary modifications as to speed and
minor indirect influences of the main movement are
within our power. Indeed, the whole course of his
demonstration from history shows this, inasmuch as
the evolution has proceeded into the third and final
stage not only without conscious effort of men so
to direct it, but against their continuous effort to
thwart it and turn it to another direction. If, then,
Y
322 ESSAYS.
only secondary modifications and indirect fluctuations
and regurgitations of the main current are within
our influence to control and regulate, of what possible
use can it be to inform us only of the main law of
evolution, with whose course we have nothing to do
but to acknowledge it and submit to it? It is just
of the things that are within our power that we
have need to know, in order to regulate our conduct.
A man wishing to build a house must indeed obey
the law of universal gravitation, but it will help him
little practically to have that law enunciated with
the most convincing pomp of historical proof and the
most rigid mathematical precision. We are obliged
to conclude, then, that positivism in M. Comte's
hands, while pretending to take upon itself the regu-
lation of human conduct, fails to furnish a guiding
principle for either individuals or societies. It sends
us to sea with an admirable chart of the tides,
currents, and winds; instructs us how eminently
modifiable these forces are by the rudder; but declines
to provide us with a compass, or to Say anything
about the port for which we have to steer. All that
can be done in such a case is to lie on one's back
and look at the stars, or exercise an empirical
prudence in selecting such a course as fancy or fore-
sight may suggest. To drop metaphor, we must
still have recourse to our celestial guides, or to our
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 323
internal monitions, in our voyage along the stormy
Sea of life; for M. Comte provides us with no satis-
factory substitute.
IBut morality implies not only a fixed aim, a
principle of action to maintain steadiness amid the
conflicts of contending motives; it equally demands
ruling influences that are adequate to maintain
obedience to the principle of action, persistence to-
wards the aim. Suppose, then, society constituted
On a positive basis, its principle of existence un-
disputed, what motives could the system present to
the members of society, young and old, to compel
obedience to its regulations 2 of what forces would
its moral police find themselves possessed ? They
would have the advantage to begin with of a uniform
state of belief, moulding all social influences and
institutions, and so by its indirect as well as direct
effects tending to check that intellectual discord and
uncertainty from which so much of our social and
individual weakness proceeds; an enormous force, not
to be easily overestimated—liable, however, we must
remember, to be rudely broken in upon by specu-
lations of a contrary character, so long as any field
remained open for such speculations: and to the
young citizens of the Positive society the Unknown
would still remain open, and dreams and reminis-
cences could scarcely fail to float in from that region,
324 IESSAYS.
and fall as fruitful seeds on spirits impatient, as
experience tells us human spirits ever will be, of the
limitations of certain knowledge. So that even for
positivism there is no guarantee against the inroads
of metaphysics and mysticism. But, be that worth
what it may as an argument, the direct moral force
of positive teaching would lie in the demonstration
of the issues of conduct on society at large and on
the individuals acting—in the strength and vivacity
of the personal and general affections; of course,
rewards and punishments might be as effectual as
with us at present. In fact, with the exception
indicated above, and that only amounts to difference
of degree, the motives of positivism are all in force
now ; and added to them are all those sentiments,
hopes, and fears, that spring from a belief in God
and a confidence of life beyond the grave. We can
speak of self-interest, of love of country, of attach-
ment to friends and relations, of the closer ties of
family and love between man and woman, of the
charms of knowledge, of the influences of art, of the
sympathies inspired by generous actions, as well as
the positivist. But we can speak too of a personal
Being of infinite love, purity, and power, to whom
We are responsible, and who we are taught to believe
Watches our course with a tender interest, for which
no name is sufficiently expressive but those which
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 325
denote the dearest earthly relationships. We can
speak too of a life hereafter, and are taught to believe
that the formation of characteris of infinite importance
compared with all other issues of conduct, because
character is eternal, and what is done and thought
here bears fruit of weal or wo beyond the limits of
time. Even these mighty moral forces are con-
tinually found insufficient to keep us up to our
imperfect sense of duty, to make us ever regard that
highest social law which says ‘Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself.’ What, then, has positivism
to offer as a corrective to selfish passions and short-
sighted lust of present gratification, that can do in
the place of these ? We assumed vastly too much
when we conceded to this system that the affections
will flourish with the same vigour if the belief of
man's immortality is destroyed; yet these, again, are
among our strongest purifying influences—strongest
to refine, strongest to free from selfishness. So it
appears that this system not only fails to provide an
aim for the action of man and of society, but if an
aim were conceded to it, has no moral force to keep
men steady, no counteracting power to the notorious
Selfishness and sensuality against which we have to
be ever on our guard.
But if all else prospered with the positive philo-
Sophy—if demonstration compelled us to admit its
326 JFSSAYS.
law of historical evolution—if it provided aims and
motives to individual or social conduct—there remains
one objection fatal, in our opinion, to its presump-
tions. It professes the power to elevate human life
to heights of felicity and knowledge of which we
as yet only dream—that it will bring round the
golden year for which poets have tuned their most
stirring songs and prophets yearned upon their watch-
towers: and could it perform all its votaries promise,
what would be the inevitable result 2 Undoubtedly
that, the lovelier and the richer life grew—the higher
in dignity, the firmer in purpose, the fuller of grand
results—the fiercer would rise the longing for im-
mortality; the more would the men and women of
the ‘crowning race’ shrink back appalled with horror
from the thought of personal annihilation. By this
contradiction the scheme stands condemned in the
moral judgment. Probably, were it to become the
creed of the world, it would be condemned not by
such contradiction, but by belying the promises of
its author, and by degrading and sensualizing human
life till man would care as little about death as a
dog does, or rather seek it as Soon as his sensual
faculties were so impaired that life yielded less
physical pleasure than pain. If a practical test of
the positive creed be wanted, there is one ready at
hand. Let any one follow to the grave the wife, the
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY, 327
child, the parent he has loved and lost, and seek to
comfort himself by the reflection that the loved one
is absorbed in the grand étre—in the totality of or-
ganized life existing through all time in the universe.
No whatever speculative difficulties may beset and
bewilder us when intellect is busy, and feeling and
action suspended for a while, we shall all be glad,
when bereavement and Sorrow cast their shadows
over our path, to take refuge in the faith of our child-
hood; and the words of our Burial-service, ‘Dlessed
are the dead that die in the Lord,’ will fall upon
the ear with an assurance all the more sure from the
doubts with which we have struggled, and the clouds
of speculation that have hid the great moral verities
for a time from our overstrained eyes.
The Spectator,
February 11, 1854.
TTIE EN D.
CAM BRIDGE :—PRINTET) IXY JONATHAN PA I.M.F.R.
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