DE SENECTUTE:
MORE LAST WORDS




NOVISSIMA VERBA:
LAST WORDS
By Frederic Harrison
CLOTH 10/6 NET
" In all tese judgments there is the
old ring of resolute sanity and fearless
independece of thought."
DALY TULIoaPa
T. FisB UNWIN LTD., LONDON.




DE SENECTUTE


MORE


LAST


WORDS


BY


FREDERIC HARRISON
D.C.L., LITT.D., LL.D.


T. FISHER UNW
LONDON: ADELPHI


IN LTD
TERRACE




First published in 1M


(AU tvght# vwd)




TO
CEDRIC CHIVERS, J.P.
MAYOR OF BATH
WHO HAS RENEWED FOR OUR CITY
THE FINE TRADITION OF
RALPH ALLEN




PREFATORY


This voluec contains some Essays of nine printed in
quite recent years which I desire to retain in a permanent
form   The first is a Dialogue on Old Age, containing
the thoughts of one entered on his 9'_nid year of life.
It is followed by his Memories of the Victorian era: its
characteristic persons, events, and manners. Next, is
the story of the City of Constantinople during its 2,580
years of cxvistence and vicissitudes. Then come critical
studies of poets and novelists, foreign and English.
Lastly, is a summary of modern attempts to form a
general synthesis of thought. Three of these studies were
Lectures given at the Royal Institution of London. I
huve to thank the proprietors of the Nineteenth Century
and After, of the Fortnightly Review, of the Forum,
of New York, and of The Times for their courteous
permission to use various contributions.
F.H.
Bath, December, 1922.




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


Mr. Frederic Harrison died on the 13th of January
and was correcting the proofs of this volume on the
morning of the same day.
He had read the first sheet and it was lying on his
bed, when I went in to say "Goodbye."  He asked
for my criticism and showed me the varied table of
contents. Our talk in those last few minutes touched
on several other points as well, and his mental power
and vivacity of manner seemed to me even greater than
when I saw him in London in the summer.  No one
could have thought that the end was so near and that
the final revision of those proofs would have fallen into
other hands.
The book which is thus so unexpected an epilogue to
a long and distinguished life, will appear to many readers
to reflect not inaptly the many sided interests, the genial
wisdom, the vigorous personality of its author.
It is a happy accident that it opens with the dialogue
"De Senectute,'" for his own old age was a living
example of what he preached. And the chapters which
follow on the Victorian Age have an added interest as
coming from one of its oldest and most notable survivors. He denied the special designation, but he stood
out as one of its most characteristic figures and summed
up many of its highest qualities.




INTRODUCTORY NOTE


The literary papers and the wonderful lecture on
Constantinople which he delivered in his ninetieth year,
attest the width of his vision and the depth of his knowledge. But it is most fit that the book should close with
the chapters on the Positive Philosophy, for amid all
the other writings, literary, political and social, which
he poured out especially in his later years, this remained
always the leading thread. The service of Humanity,
the subordination of all sectional interests to that
supreme idea, the unification of our own society and of
the whole world by common beliefs in duty, self sacrifice
and progress, these were his deepest convictions. He
would most wish to be remembered as the leading
exponent of these ideas in his own day and country,
and his friends must rejoice that the last of all his
writings repeat and enforce them.
F. S. MARVIN.
20 February, 1923.




CONTENTS


CHAP.
I'
II
HI
IV
V
VI
VIU
IX
x
XI


DE SENECTUTE: A DIALOGUE -
MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES
(1) THE COURT  -   -
(2) THE VICTORIAN TYPE(3) TRAVEL-OLD AND NEW
(4) OXFORD-OLD AND NEW
THE CITY OF CONS'rANTINOPLE -
GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY
THE ART OF TRANSLATION
THE SEXCENTENARY OF DANTE -
THE TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE
BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING
TOBIAS SMOLLETT -    -
CHARLES KINGSLEY -   -
THE NEW AGE          -   -


PAGE
-  -      1
23
23
33
87
47
55
-80
-  -    103
-  -    120
-  -    126
-  134
-  -    152
157
-  -    162
-  167


XII A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


q








DE SENECTUTE:
MORE LAST WORDS
I
DE SENECTUTE:
A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN
SCENE. The Gardens of St. Boniface, Oxbridge.
(1) The Rev. ONESIMUS SENIOR, D.D., former Rector of
Felix-in-the-Weald.
(2) JOHN OLDHAM, M.A., College Don, Dean.
(3) TOM RIPPER,-a former University Blue.
OLDHAM. We rejoice to find that you can
J     come up to our feast, Rector, and look at the
old place and the new mnen. Why, your degree
must have been in the early 'fifties! How puzzled you
must be with all the changes you see around-and, I
fear, how much you may be shocked!
0. SENIOR. Puzzled at times, my dear Dean, till I
have found out more of the facts-but not a bit shocked.
Pray don't call me Rector. After fifty years in my
quiet Rectory, and nearly seventy years of parish work,
I have resigned office, duty, and toil, and have settled
in peacefulness on a small bit of land which belonged to
my father. I have no work, no task, no responsibility,
no care, except to look back-and then to look forward.
I am futnctus officio —rude jam donatus. You could
not imagine how entirely tranquil is life when a man




MORE LAST WORDS


has no task pressing on him to be done-indeed when,
in the very last hours of his life, there is no task which
he can look to complete-none which he ought even to
attempt. For those who have worked their hardest for
the six days of the week, it is a moral duty-nay a sacred
duty-to rest on the seventh day-and only to think of
all that has been-and on all that is to come.
J. OLDIIAXM  But you, who have been so hard a worker
all your life, mlust feel the need of an aim to satisfy your
energy. You, of all our men, can hardly rest with mere
otium-evcn curm dignitatc, which indeed you have in
full lneasure, as you know.
O  SENIORl. Well! I have now a life of restfulness —
but not of idleness. I can still do something, if only it
be to offer advice, to warn men of dangers ahead. From
the hill-top of our long years of experience, we ancients
survex the ground both behind us as well as in front of
us. As we are not absorbed in any pressing problem
to be solved in the immediate present, we can take
longer and wider views, and we have outgrown the heat
of our strenuous days.
J. OLDHAM. Not, I trust, that you repeat the
aphorisms of a Chorus of Gerontes in the play of
Euripides on which I have just been lecturing.
0. SENIOR. Not a bit of it-more in the vein of
Athena or Artemis, when she appears above the temple
to clear up the catastrophe.
J OLDHAM. And you find that the younger ones
listen to your advice?
0. SENIOR. Now and then, yes! Perhaps our words
may seem to them to come true after a time. But we
retired veterans have no direct or personal aim to attain.




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN              8
It is enough that we do our best to put things fairly and
relieve our own spirits.  We don't pretend to be
prophets-nor even mentors, and we have nothing to
gain by our talking. But do not suppose that we are
indolent observers. We watch the tremendous stream
of events as they rush towards the unknown, as men
who have seen the various rivers which long ago joined
to swell the volume of to-day.
J. OLDHAI. And this continual observation of the
world around you gives you adequate occupation for
your thought-which we all know is far from obsolescent.
O. SENIOR. No! it serves to keep the mind alert with
incessant new conditions to observe. But, of course,
books fill the time of a very old man much more than
they ever did in his busy life.
J. OLDHAM. Books, no doubt! And you still keep
up with the new books to which the war seems to have
given a spasmodic vitality?
O. SENIOR. God forbid! For my part I an spared
the trouble of even casting my eye over the new stuffabove all over new novels.  The laudations of the
publishers of each "epoch-making romance," each
" novel of the age," leave me cold. I would as soon
listen to the chatter in a crowded tram-car or the
smoking-room of a country club, as read the modern
up-to-date novel of what they call Life. I can read the
old romances again and again still. I suppose I read
Scott and Fielding, Jane Austen and Trollope, year
after year-and I often turn back to Thackeray,
Disraeli, Dickens, even Smollett, if I feel bored or
sleepy. I have done quite enough of modern French
novels. But, after all, I get along with a very moderate




4


MORE LAST WORDS


resort to fiction-at lepst of modern times. It forms
but the "savoury" to my menu in literature.  The
complex experience of long life passed in various tasks
reveals to us more than to the young the profound
mysteries of human nature, as painted by the masters
of humour-Aristophanes, Cervantes, Moliere. I never
open one of these immortals without finding ores from
the bed-rock of humanity that I had forgotten or never
noted.
J. OLDHAM. Surely, your Greek does not last you well
enough to read Aristophanes in the original?
O. SENIOR. Perhaps not, as a Scholar would read him.
But I now read the wonderful version of my old contemporary B. B. Rogers, with the Greek on one page
and the English in verse on the opposite page. I don't
care a fig for the curious compounds and the Attic slang
and indescribable condiments which puzzled us so much
at school and college. I take Rogers' word for the
meaning-and I can enjoy the fun, the wild lampooning, and the Pindaric lyrics of the greatest of comedians
-without pulling out my Liddell and Scott.
J. OLDHAM. And do you read Don Quixote too in
Spanish?
O. SENIOR. No! I have tried it-but it is difficult.
And I love Italian too much to take kindly to Spanish,
which seems to me a dialect of Italian like Dorsetshire
English. There are excellent versions of Don Quixote,
and our tongue serves perfectly to render the Spanish
idiom. If they would print a copy with Spanish on one
page and English on the other I would use it. But
Cervantes has not the indescribable grace of words that
glows in the purest Attic; and an English version of




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 5
Cervantes' Spanish does not lose so much as does the
best English version of Aristophanes' Greek.
J. OLDIIA.I. And do you care for any version of
Moliere?
O. SENIOR. Proh Pudor! It is felony and treason to
translate Moliere. There again, half the glory of the
poet is in form. You could no more translate the
Precieuses than you could translate Horace's Odes.
Those only really penetrate into the secret of Moliere
who can recall the plays at the Francais and remember
Coquelin, Delaunay, and Got, Madeleine Brohan, and
Croixette.  Coquelin himself told me that, of all his
parts, he enjoyed "' Mascarille" the most. And as I
read my Moliere again to-day, the verve and sparkle of
those quips and repartees still ring in my ears after fifty
and sixty years have passed since I feasted at those
cecnac deorum in the historic Maison de Molierc.
J. OLDHAM. But what about tragedy? Do you find
that too gloomy for you?
O. SENIOR. Just the reverse! We old ones have seen
so many tragedies in the corld-such terrific peripeties
in the high and mighty-such incredible reverses of
fortune-such acts of Fate or Providence-we have
known too such tragedies in our own homes and in those
of friends and neighbours-that at the end of life, of
all men we seniors are taught to recognise that human
society is compacted of tragedies. The tragedies of the
great poets reveal the tragedies which in lesser degrees
are passing-it may be obscurely-in many a household,
to the eve so prosperous and happy. Human life is ever
playing out, in very minor keys and in very narrow
fields, the eternal human comedy-the inevitable human




MORE LAST VWORDS


tragedy. The long and crowded experience of old age
is more open to understand both, than is the eager joie
de vivre of youth.  Tragedy, you know, purifies the
soul by the presentment of the terrible and the pitiful.
For myself, I never have been so thrilled by great
tragedy in my early days as I am now in these last days.
To me, it is no longer poetry: it is the gospel of man's
destiny.
J. OLDIHAM. So you read your Shakespeare as much
as ever?
O. SENIOR. Indeed much more-though I choose the
plays now more carefully. I cannot believe that he
alvways did his best. I am sure he let his name stand
for not a little stuff which he knew w'as unworthy of
hinm. He felt his teeming mind so boiling over with
ideas, that he cared not if some of them went running
to waste. His was the greatest poetic force ever given
to man: but I cannot admit that he produced the
greatest of all tragedies.
J. OLDHAM. Then who did produce them?
O. SENIOR. For pure-perfect-sublime tragedy, I
hold by Aesc.hylus. And Sophocles was not far behind
him, as Aristotle suggests of the Oedipus. To me the
Trilogy of Orestcia has a massive grandeur, a concentric
symmetry, that even Lear and Macbeth do not reach.
And Prometheus soars into an empyrean of imagination
which the sixteenth century could not touch-much less
can the twentieth century touch it-nor even comprehend it.
J. OLDHAIM. And your chief reading now is with
Greek drama?
O. SENIOR. Quite so! I am too poor a scholar to read




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 7
the originals without all the help I can find. So what
with Jebb, and Verrall, and Murray, and Dr. Way,
and various versions in prose and verse, I have managed
in these later and more leisured years to work through
nearly all that is left of Attic tragedy. How magnificent
is the roll of those organ tones in iambic! Did human
speech ever sound such bewitching harmonies! With
what raptures do the chorus ring forth, as they circle
round the orchestra, chanting hymns such as eagles
might chant, if they had the sweet voices of larks!
J. OLDUIAM. Exceedingly beautiful in music, yet the
sense too often is nothing but commonplace and goodygoody truism.
O. SENIOR. True! but remember that these lines are
the words of musical chants. No one expects to hear
original ideas in the libretto of a modern opera. Much
of the choral strophes was equivalent to the trumpets,
drums, and cymbals which point the tramp of a soldier's
march. The chorus of Attic tragedy serves to supply
the lyrical element which our Elizabethan dramatists
flung recklessly into the dialogue-not seldom to the
injury of the action, and to delay the catastrophe or
adorn it with needless flowers. Even Macbeth and
Othello, whilst brandishing their murderous weapons,
talk superb poetry which might serve for an elegy.
J. OLDHAM. But you do not neglect Euripides-my
favourite-I hope?
O SENIOR. I used to be unjust to Euripides, I confess, perhaps from my old delight in the poetic duel in
the Frogs. But of late I have been turning again to
Euripides-with the help, of course, of the excellent
new versions we have got-Murray's and the rest. I
2




8


MORE LAST WORDS


can see why the ancients, as indeed did modern French
and German dramatists, preferred him, and why they
preserved twice as much as they preserved of Aeschylus
and Sophocles. I see why this was. He often degraded
the majesty of great tragedy into the excitements of
sensational thrill. He sacrificed the unity and awe of
tragedy by piling up a variety of startling surprises such
as in Ion, Hecuba, Heraclcs-just as Seneca and the
Elizabethan Renaissavcc loved to do. Euripides, like
Seneca, like Marlowe, like Webster, can pander to the
lust for blood and torture.
J. OLDII.AM. Oh! there is plenty of horror in
Aeschylus and Sophocles.
0. SENIOR. Yes! Prometheus and Clytemnestra,
Oedipus and Antigone, present the horrible-but it has
a: halo of the awful. It is sanctified with a divine judgment, like the horror of the Crucifixion.  But in
Euripides the horror is piled up double and triple, and
too often smacks of that beastly thing they call the
cinema-the grave, the very dust-hole of the drama.
And his catastrophe is jumbled up with a lot of logical
wrangling that is trivial when it is not sceptical.
J. OLDHIAM. And you do not care for his exquisite
lyrics and the pathos of his wonderfully varied crises of
suffering?
0. SENIOR. Do not mistake me.   I revel in them.
Quite lately, when laid on my sofa by an accident, I
have soothed a lonely time by reading over his masterpieces with keen enjoyment. I see now why Euripides
was the tragic poet to cultured readers both ancient and
modern.
J. OLDIIAIM. But you have plenty of other reading




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 9
besides tragedies and comedies, as we all know from
some lectures of yours that have reached us.
O. SENIOR. Oh yes! all forms of real literature attract
me-all the great books of the world. I suppose I have
managed in the last ten or twenty years, when I had
curates and my clerical work became less severe, to rub
up my Classics-Homer and Virgil; Sappho, Theocritus, and Catullus: Lucretius, Horace, and Juvenal.
J. OLDH.AM. Well! and as for the moderns; you do
not bar them, I hope?
O. SENIOR. I bar none, my dear Dean. Dante and
the great Italians who follow him, Fabliat.u, Morte
d'Arthur, old ballads, Milton, Calderon, Corneille,
Cowper, Burns, Byron and Wordsworth, are the books
I take up most often.
J. OLDHAM. What! not Keats, Shelley, Tennyson,
and Swinburne?
O. SENIOR. All these of course! You might as well
ask me if I do not sometimes open my Bible. The best
nineteenth-centulr men are to be "taken as read " in
any decent library, and certainly in my library they
are read. And I keep at my bedside, with my Hymnbook, a copy of the Golden Treasury-first edition 1861
-not the enlarged edition with the moderns-which
rather blunts the perfect aroma of the original choice.
J. OLDIAM. And don't you enjoy the Oxford Book
of Verse of 1901?
O. SENIOR. Yes! I have that by my side too. But
it is rather a study in English poetic literature than a
selection of the best. There are not 888 lyrics in our
poetry which are worth frequent re-reading. One half
of those in the Oxford book rather spoil the effect of




10


MORE LAST WORDS


the rest. Some are too lengthy; others are obsolete;
one or two rather gross.  No! I hold by the Golden
Treasury of 1861, and my well-thumbed, soiled copy
in linmp calf, always to be put in my case if I leave home.
Palgrave has less than 300 lyrics in his book: and that
is quite enough for daily use as a morning hymn, when
one does not want researches in forgotten literature.
J. OLDHAM. Why, my dear friend, in spite of your
eighteen lustra you seem to have got through a lot of
reading.  It is quite wonderful!  Tell us your secret
for it.
O. SENIOR. Not wonderful at all-there is no secret.
It is simply the choice of the best books-and keeping
clear of the second-best, and altogether clear of the
everyday rubbish on which so many men and women
waste their time. I thank Providence that my eyes are
as fresh as ever, and serve me at all times and for every
use. I am no great reader: I never was. I am neither
scholar, nor critic, nor book-worm. I am a humble pupil
of the really great readers such as Jowett and Pattison,
Monro and Jebb, in my college days, or Morley, Saintsbury, and Gosse to-day.  In my clerical days of old,
what with sermons, and parish work, and our village
club and desultory lectures, I had no spare time to read
more than was necessary for my practical tasks. It is
only in the last twenty years of my life that reading has
been to me ny chief solace, the only consolation in
bereavement, the support of my weakening limbs. But
I can tell you this-to you, Dean, in mid life, to you,
Tom, in your young life, it is only in the serene haven
of extreme old age, when all earthly cares seem like the
rough seas out of which we are now passed, that the glory




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 11
of great literature comes into the soul. We ancients,
who seem to you so useless and so incapable of happiness,
really live with the mighty ones of old. They seem to
be chanting a requiem   specially for us-requiem
aeternam dant nobis. We pass into their Limbo as
Dante does with Virgil in that fourth canto when they
come into the presence of the great dead poets and
hear the voice cry out-" Onorate J'altisslmo poeta."
By the way, I once heard that famous line used in a
pretty way. At a dinner-party a hostess offered her
arm as they passed out to Robert Browning, who
thought the privilege rather irregular, since a somewhat
important privy councillor was of the party. " Onorate
l'altissimo poeta " said the lady as she swept out on the
arm of the author of The Ring and the Book. But, to
be quite serious, it is we very old boys who really drink
to the last drop and in full enjoyment all that is great
in literature; for we only have ample leisure, no pressing
work on hand, have no stuff "just out " to waste our
time on; and, above all, we see both life and literature
as one great continuous whole.
J. OLDHAM. Ah! I can envy you now! How often,
when I am grinding a Greek Play with my class-half
of them teachable, the other half indifferent-how often
I wish I could just enjoy it, without worrying over a
corrupt passage and that ad i  XeY-vv. But surely,
your plan shuts you out from all the promise of fresh
beauty, original discovery, new thought. You are not
so hidebound to the living past, as to take no interest
in the living present, to say nothing of the future in
the vast womb of this gravid age?
O. SENIOR. If that were so, I should indeed be the




MORE LAST WORDS


mi) mpsim7us that some youngsters may think I am.
When I said that I am not absorbed in the new books
of the day, I never meant to say that I had closed down
my mind, and made it a hortas siccius of things long
finished-all now said. I do my best to understand
such dominant movements as the evolution of Darwinian
Evolution, the revival of metaphysics, of psychology
and psychiatry, Einstein and his commentators and
critics, such as Eddington, Italdane, Lodge, and
Wildon Carr.   Above all I watch the evolution of
Christian dogma and the secular interaction of religion
and science.
TOM RIPPER. 0, Sir, I do hope you read our new
young poets-some who fought, and sang, and died in
the great war. I knew Rupert Brooke and I have
listened to many another, as he repeated the last words
he ever put in rhyme.
0. SENIOR. My dear boy, I have read many of them
and feel stirred by them at times, even in my dry bones.
W\e know not what might have been.  I wish that I
could see the promise of a Shelley-or even of a
Tennyson in them. There was often in some a touch
of Swinburne. Yes! Perhaps many "a mute inglorious Milton " died gloriously in this most cruel of
all wars.
In all the flood of the new poetry which the present
century seems to have called to life, and which the
Great War and its manifold consequences have so keenly
stimulated, there is one character that I note-a character which debars it from any high rank. It is so
intensely personal, so monotonously lyrical, short,
scrappy, occasional. Light and graceful volumes of




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 18
Sonnets, personal emotions, sorrows, hopes, loves,
thoughts. I take up one of the latest that has reached
me-50 or 60 poenlettes in as many pages, all about
what   I feel," you " you said," what "we did,' " my
dream," "our joys,"    Farewell," " Never again,"; Memories," ' Tears," " Smiles, " Oblivion," "the
Tomb." All this in very graceful lines, it may be
musical, rather broken in rhyme, scansion, and metre,
too often very hard to follow, cryptic, designedly
mystical, but always quite personal and idiopathic to
the writer.
He seems to feel it acutely, and he is sure it must
interest us, but we knows nothing of him, his nature,
and his circumstances, nor do we enter into his emotions
with such keenness. All great poetry deals with great
subjects in rich and copious form. It tells of great
events, noble men, spacious times.  Wordsworth,
Shelley, Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne-wrote grand poems that were much more than
sonnets, songs, personal emotions.  Poems, to be
worthy of that high title, must be something more
than snippety verslets about the writer's own private
aches, loves, and thrills.
TOM R. And I fear, Sir, that you feel that we young
ones are wasting our lives over games-and you would
charge the general decadence to cricket, football, golf,
tennis, and polo?
O. SENIOR. Not I indeed! No one more heartily
than I values all our manly games, especially cricket,
which is moral and social discipline as much as athletic
training. As I was bowler in our eleven both at school
and at college I can read of the scores to-day with some




MORE LAST WORDS


interest. "E'en in our ashes live the wonted fires."
But I am old-fashioned and can remember the first John
Lillywhite, and I still believe in the round-arm delivery
which he invented. The new over-hand fling has spoilt
many a good man; and the l.b.w. rule has mixed football
with cricket. We old boys believed in length not in
pace  we played the ball with our arms, not with our
legs. Oh ves! You can't have too much real cricket.
What is wrong is that huge crowds gather to look at
games. to howl, cheer, and bet. And the crowds at
boxing matches are brutes. They play no games themselves, they only get excitement and partisan passions
and wax hot for their side to win. That is the old lust
for circecses which was the decadence of Rome and
Byzantium. There is no decadence in playing games:
but there is in wasting time, health and money, in
seeing others play. That is not sport. It is the vulgar
love of backing the winner. Gate-money is the prostitution of games.
TOM R. And you say the same of golf?
0. SENIOR. Well! Golf is not a game, because the
stroke of one player does not determine or affect the
stroke of his opponent-as in all real games outdoor or
indoor-from cricket to chess. It is a race, not a game.
But it does not interest me. Golf came South when
I was already an old man, and my Scotch friends never
got me to take it up seriously. Besides which, when
I tramp over a moor-and there are few in Britain that
I have not tramped-I like to be free to roam, to enjoy
a varied scene, to carry nothing but my own sapling,
without a fellow dragging a bag of clubs after me and
slily noting me down for a duffer.




A DIALOGUE IN A COIEGE GARDEN                15
ToM R. And you have no good word for polo, which
our men love?
O. SENIOR. That Is an ancient and noble exercise, I
grant. It is far older than any other game we play and
came from Asia into Europe. It has many of the
moral, as well as the physical, qualities of cricket.
Nay, it has even more, in that it brings into our game
the best gifts of that most generous of brutes, the horse.
I used to ride an old polo pony about the parish myself.
How old Galopin and I loved each other! Polo has
every good thing a game can have. But alas! It can
only be the play of very rich men or men from very rich
families-for a polo player must have ridden from his
boyhood and wants a whole stable if he is to play at all
-with a lot of perfectly trained beasts. It is a beautiful
sight to watch. But it must soon die out, like the
tournaments of old, which ended with the passing of
feudal resources and habits.
Toi R. And if cricket grounds, tennis-courts, and
golf links are only for the few, and polo stables too costly
for this democratic age, what is left?
O. SENIOR. Why, walking on our feet in fresh air!
That demands neither whole days of leisure, nor any
expensive ground.  Woods, commons, moors, hills,
mountains, sea-beaches, river banks, are easily reached
and open to all. This, the true form of athletic exercise,
is to be found anywhere on footpath and turf.  AXca,
7.:;,.;a' v,,.cvtZ, ayozx, aX-you know, was the source
of the Greek beauty of person. This kind of exercise
is open to all and everywhere. The downs and cliffs
and shores are in easy reach; even in our own islands,
the beacons, rocks, and fells are not far off. For those




16


MORE ILAST WORDS


who can leave home, mountaineering is of all forms of
sport the purest, simplest, truest. It offers no opponent
to be beaten, no " side " to win, no prize to be gained
-nothing but joy in the beauties of nature, in breathing
the infinite goodness of God's earth. Many a veteran
owes the health and serenity of his old age to his holidays
among the hills and mountains, the peaks and snows.
There is no struggling to win, no record to beat, no
brute to kill-there is poetry, beauty, knowledge-even
devoutness of spirit and awe at the majesty of this world.
J OLDAIIM. Surely, my venerable friend, you would
not condemn our fine manly sports-hunting, fowling,
angling,-and all those glorious forms of the chase,
which have done so much to breed the bone and to steel
the nerve of our manhood?
O SENIOR. Oh! my dear Dean, I condemn nobody.
I bar nothing that is honest and healthy. As to the
Sports," which mean the killing of brutes for amusement, I will only say that personally to me, they do
not accord with my clerical profession nor with my own
taste. I know nothing about them. Let me say, on
behalf of the very old, that we are now free to enjoy
the air and visions of the moor, the mysterious peace
of a shady glen, the swirl and babbling of a trout stream,
and all the charm of the countryside for itself alone,
without having our spirits stirred by the desire to kill.
As to the lust of slaughter being a necessary element in
athletics, I only say, as Sophocles in his ninetieth year
said of Love, we very old boys are " now free from that
wild beast."
J. OLDHAM. Think how splendidly our sporting men
fought!




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN              17
0. SENIOR. Of all the millions of our men-and
women-who fought and worked to win the war, not
one in a thousand had ever before handled a gun,
mounted a horse, or flung a rod. They did their bit
without "Sport "-without any practice in killing
brutes. And so one day the world will do its bit, we
trust.
J. OLDH.-M. And you still enjoy Nature even in your
ninetieth year?
0. SENIOR. Enjoy it? Yes! but in a simpler and less
boisterous way. Of course, the mountains, the rocks,
the boats, the diving, the tramps, of old days, are not
for us now. I can still reach on foot one of our downs
near us, and I sit for hours gazing across the distant
varied scene;-pondering, remembering, adoring it all
with a full heart-in perfect and unutterable peace.
In the face of Nature, the sense of our bodily joys has
faded to us old men, whilst the consciousness of our
spiritual joys is purer and unalloyed. Old age-I tell
you-is' full of compensations and consolations.
J. OLDHAM. And you still work in your garden-I
know you always loved it?
0. SENIOR. Work? No! But I love it as much as
ever-nay, more. I was always too busy to work myself. Busy men, with active tasks on hand, with books,
or with their pen, are alwNays too hard pressed to get as
much out of their gardens as they might. But now my
little patch gives me more enjoyment than ever it did
of old, when some urgent duty or study would so often
call me off. By the way, a clerical neighbour of mine
was a botanist of great reputation and learning; and he
kept it up when he was well over ninety years. I am




18


MORE LAST WORDS


no learned gardener.  It is enough for Ille to watch my
roses and ny lilies as they open, or the bunches of my
vine as they begin to colour.  A man finds peace under
his own vine, as it was in Solomon's day. Really to
enjoy flowers, fruits, trees, one must have leisure.
Men having wealth, public duty, high position, or
literary fame, very rarely find true leisure possible for
them. For us the very old, with our enforced leisure,
all the mysteries of flower, fruit and tree, are specially
revealed.  We can sit, without distinct thought or
pressing care, quite alone, in a retired grove, with a
sense of rest that few younger men can know.     You
remember Andrew     Marvell's magical poem Thoughts
In a Garden:
Casting the body's vest aside
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There, like a bird, it sits and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings.
It is given to us very old ones thus to be incorporate
with the peace of NatureWhile all the flowers and trees do close
To weave the garlands of repose.
J. OLDHAM. From all your experience of life then,
my dear friend, you would say that extreme age is not
the "labour and sorrow" that the Psalmist tells us.
0. SENIOR. Science, temperance, and good sense,
have greatly enlarged human life since David's day.
We all know many men, both in public and in private
careers, who, long past four score, are doing good work.
The average of man's working years has been greatly
prolonged, even in the present century. There are
thousands of very old men, and tens of thousands of




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 19
very old women, who are living peaceful and even useful
lives, if we cannot call it altogether happy.
J. OLDHAM. You will not claim happiness for them,
you sa?
0. SENIOR. AIy dear Dean, my dear Son, happiness
is a blessed state very rarely vouchsafed to any who have
passed a long life. The losses, ruined hopes, and failed
efforts in this world of ours are so frequent and so many
that very few who live long vears can have escaped
them. How few are there among the elderly, but have
had happiness for them blighted by this world-war and
all it brought about! To those who have suffered the
worst of bereavements-of a beloved spouse-the very
thought of ever being happy again seems a mockery.
Memory, peace, resignation alone are left. " In quietness and in confidence shall be their strength." Yet,
after all, those whom in extreme age the mercy of
Providence has blessed with health, modest competence,
and still active powers both of body and of mind;-and
these are not so very rare as to be counted quite lusus
naturae-to them, I say, even fourscore years and ten
ought not to bring despair, intolerable pain, desire of
immediate death.  They have to make ready for the
summons, to wait, to bear their lot in patience and faith.
J OLDHAM. A lot, you assure us, not intolerable!
O. SENIOR. Not intolerable to those whose whole
lives have been a wvise preparation for it. The last years
of man, like all that precede them, have their destined
compensations. No period of human life can be counted
one of perfect bliss. Three decades of joys. eager hopes,
misused opportunities-three decades of stern labour,
realized aimiis, inevitable failures-two or three decades




20


MORE LAST WORDS


yet to some of us of freedom, peace, and sad memories.
Such is human life, even to the most fortunate of us.
J. OLDHAM. The sad memories, I fear, include those
of friends and comrades who have passed away, some
of them even long ago.
0. SENIOR. My dear Dean, there you touch me to
the quick. Apart from the loss of our dearest ones to
which all human lives are more or less exposed, very old
persons of necessity lose most of their friends, companions, fellow-workers, intellectual intimates. Those
who remain are infirm and far away. Yes! we cannot
quite replace those we grasped most closely, whose
spirits touched the tenderest fibres of our souls.
J. OLDIIANI. You hold friendship to be impossible to
the very old?
0. SENIOR. New friendships, great friendships, perfect friendships, yes! I fear. All friends of another
generation, even the very best, are of a somewhat later
world. They cannot share our outlook-theirs is so
different. They face the world from another angle,
even with other eyes. They look forward, whilst we
look backward. They are not weighted with the mass
of past experience we have. We cannot enter into the
irrepressible hopes for the future which inspire them.
J. OLDHAM. The want of friends then is the chief
burden of great age?
0. SENIOR. One, at any rate, of its sore trials. But
there is compensation even in this. The comrades with
whom we lived and worked, hoped and rejoiced, are
gone. They are cut off from our lives and our works;
they inspire us no more with confidence and delight.
But mark-how death is the mysterious revealer of life.




A DIALOGUE IN A COLLEGE GARDEN 21
It takes away those who are dear to us, but it gives
them a halo of transfiguration. They have entered into
a more unearthly atmosphere. We see their merits
more clearly: we recall all that was best in them: any
sense of r;valry, discussion, doubt about them, has
disappeared: they are more than ever our friends, and
they speak to us with a new voice. How often does it
come to widower and to widow to feel that never in life
did the husband know all that glorified his lost wife, to
the wife to feel that she had never understood all that
her lost husband had in him! Either can say with the
poet "' my late espoused saint." Something of this
saintliness enshrines the memory of our lost friends.
We see them no more; we hear them no longer; but
they seem to us in remembrance greater and dearer than
ever they seemed to us in life. And this memory of
the departed friends forces us to feel constantly how
close to " the great majority " we are ourselves.
J. OLDIHA^t. You told us just now that you saw no
reason even for the most aged to desire death. And I
am sure you see no reason for them to fear death?
0. SENIOR. Why should we fear death? Every wise
man has made ample preparation to meet it. He may
fear disease, and lingering decay, and may long to be
spared from such an end. With a grateful sense of the
blessings I have received in a long life of moderate wellbeing I can still say w;th the philosopher Gorgias"nihil habeo quod accusem scnectutc '."' My life is lived
out. It is enough! I am the " conviva satur" of Horace.
With reverence I can repeat those solemn words from
the Cross: TErXearTt. It is finished! As for what remains
to be done, as to what is to come hereafter, I hold by




MORE LAST WORDS


all I have preached in my office, and by all I have
worked out in my own conscience for the faith that is
in me. I trust that when I have preached to others,
I myself shall not be found a castaway. The memory
of a life of honest work is not really grievous, whatever
be its failures and its sorrows. For my part, I have
done, I think, in my small parish even more than I
could have hoped to do, quite as much as I was ever
capable of doing, little as it is, and poor as is any
permanent result. If I had power to call out to the
Angel of Death, I would not ask him either to delay
his flight or to hasten it. May his stroke be sudden
whenever it shall come.   Do you remember that
beautiful etching of Alfred Rethel-Der Tod als
Freuud?  I have it framed and hung in my study.
There the aged peasant-perhaps guard or bailiff of a
monastery-has just returned from his day's work-his
staff and his broad-brimmed pilgrim's hat are laid down
by his side-his last supper is just finished-his book of
psalms lies open on the table-he has sunk back to rest
in his arm-chair, but his eyes are closed and it is his last
sleep.  The Saviour looks down on him from    the
crucifix hunts over his head. Death, shrouded in the
robes of a monk, steps forth and is tolling the passing
bell. The open window shows a fair plain beyond with
a river circling round the meadows; and a village spire
stands clear, as the last orb of the setting sun sinks below
the horizon. The whole atmosphere seems to be chanting-Pax vobiscium.    The picture is a favourite
study of mine. Avete atque T7alete Amnici —nci haud
iltmemores!




II


MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES
(1) THE COURT
W      E are all reading, or have read, Mr. Lytton
Strachey's brilliant study of Queen Victoria:
and as I am now one of the very few survivors
of those who witnessed her Coronation, and who remember her marriage, the early events of her reign, the Great
Exhibition of 1851, the Crimean Wrar, the Indian
Mutiny, and all the crises and pageants down to the
death of Albert sixty years ago, it may be worth while
to note some personal anecdotes that I recall.
In June, 1837, I was a lively boy of hardly six when
my father came down from London and told us the
" King was dead."  I was disgusted to learn that it was
a girl who succeeded to the throne. But in the family
of a City man of business, taking no part in politics or
in society, the accession of a Queen seemed a matter of
small consequence and moderate satisfaction.  When,
in 1888, I was taken up to London to the Coronation,
the delights of seeing famous men and the great world
cured my contempt for a girl sovereign, and opened to
me a new idea of life.  The Queen seated beside her
inother looked sweet, happy and radiant.  I recall her
slender person and her fresh complexion.  Everyone


23


3




24


MORE LAST WORDS


knows George Russell's story how the Master of the
Horse claimed t, sit beside the Queen-how she referred
him to the DtAe of Wellington, who said: " Why! if
she told you to run behind her carriage, like a d  d
tinker's dog, you would have to do it." There was the
Duke, and Anglesey, and Soult, and many a famous
hero of the Great War. It was my first view of Wellington. whom I so often saw in pageants and reviews, or
riding down Piccadilly, rolling about on his horse, and
raising his hand in salute. In our circles the Duke was
always spoken of as the ultimate referee in all difficulties,
and as a boy I used to ask questions about the
iron shutters he had put on the windows of Apsley
House when he had been stoned in the Reform agitations.  During the Chartist agitation of April 10th,
1848, we all put faith in the Duke's precautions against
an attack on the House of Commons, though we did not
then know how big and how efficient they were behind
the screens. Of course, even then his military arrangements against civil war were said to be wanton " provocations " to irritate the people.
To view the Coronation procession I was placed in a
stand exactly facing the North Transept door of the
Abbey.   The pageant, the military display, and the
crowd were far inferior to any at the Coronation of
George V. Even small boys could mix with the crowds
round the Abbey, and the troops were a trifle compared
with the army collected by Lord Kitchener in 1911.
My mother and grandmother had seats in the Abbey,
but the only incident they told us was of the shrieks of
someone who had a fit. My grandmother, at the Lord
Mayor's Royal banquet, sat next to Lord John Russell.




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


25


then Leader in the House of Commons, who very kindly
described to the old lady the chief personages present,
without a word as to any public affair.  Any idea of
the vast importance of the Queen's accession, of any
wild enthusiasm over the new reign, of any political
crises, or of party changes as imminent, never reached
our quiet home. We were a middle-clWss, business lot,
who had got over the Reform agitations, and thought
that Melbourne, and Johnny, with the Duke as umpire
in a row, would do very well and let us attend to our
own affairs.  Mr. Strachey very rightly deals with the
Court, Parliament, and politicians, and uses written
Memoirs of those who were in the thick of it; but, so
far as I can recall it, the City, the narkets, and average
homes took all the social and party storms above them
with true British phlegm.
Though I never had anything to do with the Court
or with Parliament, still, as I lived in a very busy
financial and professional world, I saw and heard of most
of what was going on. Confining my notes to the life
of Prince Albert, I can entirely support the very acute
psychologic analysis of Victoria and the estimate of the
Prince's ability and virtues as drawn by Mr. Strachey.
His two living portraits exactly coincide with the
impressions left on my memory.  Yes! I saw at Ascot
the "tremendous" Tzar Nicholas-" a very striking
man " he was, as Victoria wrote in her diary, a modern
Charlemagne he looked in a boy's eyes.  I remember
our admiration for the courage with which the Queen
and the Prince treated the assaults of Francis, Oxford,
Bean, and Pate. These abominable outrages much increased the popularity of both. And how we chuckled




MORE LAST WORDS


over the gymnastics of the " Boy Jones," who climbed
over the wall and down the chimney into a bedroom of
Buckingham Palace in order "to see the Queen at
home."' As we could see the Queen any day driving
or riding, we wanted to have him flogged before he was
transported.  I had a school-fellow with the name of
Jones, and he never lost the nickname I gave him"The Boy Jones."
The points on which my memory especially supports
Mr Strachey's study of Prince Albert are the Prince's
influence in artistic, industrial, and social development.
It is quite true that the Georgian and Early Victorian
era-say for the first half of the century-was a bad
time, largely to be charged against George IV., as
Regent and King. But it is not true to make the same
imputation on the entire reign of the Queen.  There
never was any definite Victorian era at all. Those busy
sixty-four years were continually changing, growing,
developing new ideas and tastes.  And so far as the
upper crust of society affected this development, it was
due to the Goethc-geist that Albert introduced.  As
my family and my personal interests in my boyhood
were nmainly in art, I had opportunities to observe this.
I recall the rebuilding of the Royal Exchange, of the
Houses of Parliament, the enlargement of the National
Gallery and the British Museum, and the competitions,
the prizes, and committees involved.  In 1841 Peel
appointed the Prince as head of the commission for rebuilding and decorating the Palace of Westminster, and
I took lively interest in the competitive show in Westminster Hall which first disclosed the genius of Tenniel.
The dead leaves began to stir, I am no believer in the




MIY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


27


art of the Houses of Parliament, nor in the painters,
architects and critics of that era.  But a new spirit
began.  Tennyson, Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill, Browning,
Dickens were in full swing.
The affair whereon my memory most completely supports Mr. Strachey's view of the Prince was the Exhibition of 1851 and all its direct and indirect effects. I was
then twenty, in residence at Oxford, but my home was
in London, and I was keenly interested in things artistic,
international, and progressive.  It happened that our
French tutor was attached, as interpreter, to the French
commission sent to London. Through him I had access
to the building almost daily, and I heard all that came
to the knowledge of his Committee.  I was present at
the opening and at the closing of the Show, and I made
a systematic study of the building and its contents, and
so I did in 1854 of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, as
I happened to be living near it. Now, from all I heard
and saw I am confident that from first to last both
Exhibltions were inspired by the Prince and completed
by his energy and judgment. It was his own idea; and
all the stimulus so given to the history and improvement
both of industry and of art was his work.  I am no
believer in the taste of either Prince or Queen.  But
Albert, at any rate, roused Society out of the conventional vulgarity into which the Regency had sunk it.
The ideas which he introduced were the international
relations of industry and art, the importance of popular
training in both, and the aim at efficiency by systematic
organization under public control.
I can bear witness to the keen interest roused in the
building of the Exhibition of 1851 and by the organiza



28


MORE LAST WORDS


tion of the contents.  It is easy now to joke about the
big glass-house in Hyde Park, but, in truth, the new
constructive conception, which was entirely due to the
genius of Paxton, has gone round the world and may
be seen in Europe and in America in a thousand forms.
It was an original invention as much as that of the dome
or of the spire.  And the glass hall was carried out by
the energy of the Prince, in spite of ridicule from architects and opposition from tradesmen. When the public
who loved their park found that it was intended to cut
down a grand row of ancient elm trees, the happy device
of a domed transept, raised 100 feet high to enclose
then, gave immense satisfaction.  It was really a new
architectural conception to raise a building which
covered some twenty acres and would hold 100,000
persons. It was a new sensation to us all to walk about
a hall with fountains and gardens which covered a row
of forest trees alive with wild birds. The Ruskins, the
Carlyles, and the social science philosophers rebuked the
no doubt extravagant hymns of triumph addressed to
the new-found goddess of mechanical industry.  But in
sober truth the scheme of 1851 has had important effects
on art, on industry, and on social betterment.
I saw the opening of the Show on May 1st, 1851; and,
though the crowds outside and inside were great, there
was no such tremendous excitement and gathering as the
Press and official reports would imply.  There was a
good deal of anxiety, inasmuch as London was full of
foreign exiles from the defeated revolutionists of 1848-9.
I saw the Queen drive up Constitution Hill in a closed
carriage surrounded by a guard, and we were told that
the side of the carriage was lined with steel. An amus



MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES               29
-      -.;..     "-.;rAe
ing incident of the day was the sight of the then famous
lion-hunter, Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming, who
marched grandly through the admiring crowd arrayed in
kilt with the Comyn tartan, a steel helmet and plume
on his head, and a terrific broadsword in place of a
walking-stick.  We understood that the uniform was
his own invention. It impressed the London boys, and
would serve to play Macbeth on the stage, but it cannot
have been used to terrify the African lions.  I was
among the six millions who entered the building during
six months, and I was present at the closing day,
October 15th, when we seemed loth to quit it; and I
remember how we waited in expectation to see Louis
Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot.
As to the person of Prince Albert, my recollection of
him is that he was at all times an elegant and handsome
man, whose looks improved by age, when the very
youthful bloom had worn off; but no one who saw him
in public or mounted would call him effeminate.  No
doubt he had the air of a ' foreigner," and that was
unforgivable to the eyes of the public, and even to
society.  There came down to us from above endless
stories of his stiffness, his etiquette, his domesticity, his
incorrigible prudery-how in a big shoot he would never
take his gun from the hand of a gamekeeper till it had
been passed on to an equerry-how he expected the
maids of honour to open the door for him when he
quitted the room. He was never indeed a noble-looking
soldier like the late Emperor Frederick, whom I remember with our Princess when he came over to his marriage
in 1857. For years, I fear, we all treated Albert with
disgraceful ill-nature.  Army, Navy, aristocracy, and




so30


MIORE LAST WORDS


Bohenia-sneered and jeered. Punch made a dead set
at him, until it was excluded from the Castle and
Buckingham Palace.   And the new uniform cap which
Albert designed was an endless topic for caricatures.  I
must say that Inuch of this abuse was unfair, ill-natured,
and ill-bred.
Mr Strachey has done real service to English history
as well as to literature by a study of the Victorian age,
which is full of true portraits and of brilliant painting.
His new book is equal to the best biographic pictures in
our language.  He avoids the extravagant contrasts of
Macaulay and the spiteful wit of Horace Walpole. His
natural gift perhaps is in irony; but the rather subdued
irony diffused throughout his new book does not injure
the essential faithfulness of his pencil.  His models are
rather French than English; perhaps he is thinking of
Voltaire and La Bruyere.   But in literary grace his
Queen   Victoria will hold its own with any of the
memoirs and biographies in the long list of those which
he has consulted. For Victoria and Albert, at any rate,
he has kept his vein of satire well in hand; and when,
with a quiet smile, he recounts the virtues and the merits
of Queen and Prince, much of it can be taken as serious
truth.  His Melbourne, his Palmerston, or Peel, Gladstone, and Disraeli, are all drawn with as much wit as
faithfulness.  They entirely agree with all that I heard
or saw of these famous actors in the Victorian drama.
As to Victoria, Mr. Strachey has fixed her place in the
history of England, and has very subtly analysed the
great virtues and mischievous defects in that composite
and variable character.  To my mind it proves the
danger of entrusting high political functions to a




Sti VICTORIAN MEMORIES


81


woman, and the wisdom of the people who invented the
Salic law.  The deliberate policy of Albert and of
Stockmar was the natural mistake of German princes
thrown into the confusion of British party government.
h1ad Albert lived and retained the infatuation and
shared the obstinacy of his wife, very serious calamities
would have resulted. His early death, perhaps happily,
removed the attempt to found a Prussian monarchy, and
forced the Queen back on to the constitutional limits
which she at one time failed to understand.  Let us all
trust that the throne shall never again be encumbered
with foreign Princes or with foreign Princesses.  I do
not find that Mr. Strachey has made enough of Albert's
very true-but indiscreet-speech during the Crimean
War, that " constitutional government was on its trial. "
I well remember the excitement it caused and the angry
questions it raised.
These ideas of Albert might have had disastrous
results.  But the high moral tone of the Prince, his
intense industry and serious nature, his culture and love
of art, reacted deeply and permanently on the age. Mr.
Strachey says "the middle-classes liked a household
which combined the advantages of royalty and virtue."
I can bear witness to the truth of this. "It was a model
Court."  ' No shadow of indecorum" passed over it.
" Duty, industry, morality, and domesticity triumphed
over cynicism and subtlety. " The royal pair took " the
narrow way of public and domestic duty ": they passed
"' delightful hours of deep retirement and peaceful
work."   Yes! and all this was a matter of bitterness
and ridicule to the aristocratic remnants of the preceding reigns. To the disgrace of what called itself




32


MORE LAST WORDS


"society " and its parasites, it was the very virtues and
strenuous lives of Queen and Consort which were objects
of contempt. That base legacy of evil times lasted long,
and is far from extinct yet in the world of fashion and
luxury. Indeed we may detect a touch of irony in Mr.
Strachey's eloquent eulogium of the "good" Queen
and her beloved " good and great" Consort.
This praise is quite compatible with the sense that
these domestic virtues and these strenuous aims were at
times overstrained, so as to defeat themselves and injure
the public.  The attempt to force upon their son a
rigorous education for which he was utterly unfit was a
cruel mistake.  The Queen's conduct towards her heir
at the end of her life was unwomanly and mischievous.
One passionate outburst in a moment of agony had lasting and serious consequences. For all that, the attempt
of Prince Albert to train his son to be " true Christian,
true soldier, true gentleman," was in itself a noble purpose, even if unreasonably pressed in detail.  Who is
going to sneer at the purpose itself? We are all grateful
to know that the same noble purpose can be carried out
for the heir to the Crown without rigidity and mistakes
in practice.  Victoria's grandson, we trust, will long
continue to show the example of a "model Court ";
quite as truly moral, if far more inspired with the best
traditions of our monarchy-one which combines " the
advantages of royalty and virtue " in ways at which no
cynic ventures to sneer.




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


33


(2) THE VICTORIAN TYPE
I would say a word on behalf of the Victorians whom
humorous young Georgians believe to have been given
over to all that was ugly and banal. Now, there is not,
there never was, any Victorian type, as having a common
character of its own, either in literature or in art, in
habits or in manners.  The 64 years of Victoria's reign
form a period of continued growth, of new ideas, of
intense vitality and change, of attempts to realize new
forms of intellectual and social evolution.
As a very old man who has lived through it all, and
well into this wondrous 20th century, I can recall a
variety of efforts during the 19th century to set up new
modes of life. Each succeeding generation, almost each
decade, had its own ideal or style; and no one of them
was quite old-fashioned or vulgar.  The view that the
Victorian type was conventional and dull, and that the
new Georgian type is so spiritual, strikes us veterans as
a droll bit of conceit.  We do not look back on the
Victorian time as a great age of refinement or of art.
But is the present so great an age either of beauty or of
manners?
I am an unprejudiced witness, for I have lived in four
reigns, and only just missed five. I remember the time of
William IV; and a very bad time it was, inherited from
the Regent and his vulgarities.  The advent of the
young Queen caused an immediate hush in these satyric
gambols; and when Prince Albert became Master of the
Ceremonies, the whole tone of society improved. Much
of the modern jesting about Victorian prudery is con



31


MORE LAST WORDS


cealed impatience of a moral reformation after an evil
time. No one dares to charge with prudery the Court
of to-day, though its sense of decency and honour is far
more practical and effective than anything attempted by
Victoria and Albert.
Complaints of Queen Victoria's conventional stiffness
may be narrowed down to this-that she idolized her
husband, who as a man really was virtuous, able, and
earnest.  It would have been better if she had given
less attention to politics and more attention to society.
But her conjugal devotion is not so unworthy a character
for a woman-or one at which bounders and hoydens are
entitled to jeer.
At the close of the 18th century, when Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Romney, and their set were gone-and
with them the pupils and imitators of Wren and his
school-when Horace Walpole, Burke, and Johnson
had left no adequate successors, then Prince George
entered on his reign of vice, vile taste, and vulgarity.
One of the worst periods of our social history ensued,
and it more or less degraded manners for the first 40
years of the 19th century.  But when Albert began to
have public influence and Peel recognised his merits, a
new epoch rose.
Young persons imagine utterly vain things about
"Early Victorian " dress, manners, habits, and furniture-such as heavy horse-hair settees, "anti-macassars," mahogany tables and side-boards, pantaloons or
peg-top trousers, and stuck-up collars, shirt frills, formal
compliments and solemn toasts, dinners at 5 p.m., and
" routs " with lemonade at 9 p.m. I can assure them
that they have picked up all this from their Dickens and




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


85


Thackeray and other novelists, who were really describing manners of the Regency time-or from the caricatures of Gillray, Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank
-from early Punch numbers of the forties, or from
illustrations of the serials of the time.  They take the
pictures of humorists and caricaturists as if they were
realist representations of current habits and dress.
Caricatures-by their name-profess to be exaggeration
of actual things and styles; they find their fun in the
survival of old-fashioned habits.  Thus, the gay youth
of to-day draw their ideas about their grandfathers and
their grandmothers from " Boz " and ''Phiz," who
were attributing to 1840 what belonged, if to any, to
1820.
Now, I remember the forties and the fifties perfectly.
I lived in London and in the country in various home
counties, in a busy professional and business society, and
I never saw these queer things. The habits of the upper
middle classes have not varied greatly in all this time.
The material and moral changes have been immense,
but social life has retained its external form. The dress
of men, at least in ordinary life, has hardly changed in
70 years.  Of course, the dress of women varies from
season to season.  But there never was any type of the
Victorian lady.  Perhaps in 1972 young persons will
imagine that ladies in the Court of Kinir George V wore
the costumes to be seen in the Punch cartoons and the
milliners' models of to-day!  As to styles of furniture,
ornaments, house decoration, and the like, I can recall
in some 80 years at least half a dozen-but none of them
that which is conventionally known as " Early Victoria." 'rhe young Georgian attributes to Victorians




36


MORE LAST WORDS


what was partly true of pre-Victorian times.  My
witness is that down from the marriage of Queen Victoria and the Reform age of the forties there came a
world entirely different from that of the Regent and his
crew- but it had no definite continuous character of its
own.
No doubt we have long thrown off the artistic ideas in
which Albert was bred in Germany and which he
laboured to naturalize in England; but we cannot forget
that at least he led the way to seek better ideals both in
industry and in art. From the first of the many Royal
Commissions, of which he was by no means the mere
figurehead, there grew up a succession of schools, movements, and thinkers who were trying new lines of grace,
culture, and thought. Were Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens,
Thackeray, Arnold, Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Millais
high priests of the conventional and the old-fashioned?
And when Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris were not the
prophets they had been in their own day, were Swinburne, Browning, and Hardy such slaves of the antiquated forms?
If anyone was truly Victorian it was Tennyson; and
if we do not now claim for him all that the Victorians
offered at his shrine, no one calls him a formalist or a
vulgarian.  It is true that we do not now admire the
Houses of Parliament, or the Albert Memorial, or the
Crystal Palace as triumphs of Victorian art: but it is
not easy to name any new Georgian buildings which are
so plainly superior-not even the great Waterloo
terminus.  I remember the completion of the British
M1useum facade, and I doubt if the new County Council
Hall will put it to shame.




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


87


From 1840 to 1901 there was a succession of schools
in all the arts of form, in music, and in letters. So far
from forming one school, they repudiated each other
and claimed to be founding a new style.   Pugins,
Barrys, Smirkes, Paxtons, Scotts, Streets, Jacksons,
W\ebbs followed each other, but in time, not in styleso did Turners, Ettys, Mulreadys, Maclises, Millaises,
Leightons; Dickenses, Thackerays, Brontes, Trollopes,
G. Eliots, Hardys, Barries, Sullivans.  Who can find
any common denominator, any Victorian stamp, any
kind of uniformity in all these?  Surely, it would be
hard to show in our history any period of two successive
generations in which there was so little uniformity, in
which there were so many efforts to break out into new
lines and to try a new life. It must be admitted that
the years since the death of Victoria had inventions of
their own.  They discovered jazz music, vers libres,
cinema movies, the fourth dimension of the universe,
cubism, and the New Woman.
(3) TRAVEL OLD AND NEW
I spent the autumns of 1845-6-7 in France in the
houses of French people with whom I was on intimate
terms.  In 1851 I sailed up the Rhine, drove into the
Black Forest, then was all over Switzerland, into Italy,
and so to Pans in the second Republic.  In 1853, we
drove about the Rh6ne country, and then all along the
Riviera from Cannes to Genoa, and thence to Tuscany
and Florence.  In 1855, T was all over Lombardy, and




38


MORE LAST WORDS


then to Verona and Venice; and I spent the autumn of
1865 in Rome and the country around. Since then, I
have watched the " progress "-may I say the vulgarizing-of Europe almost year by year.  My last climb
on the snow Alps was in 1914; my last visit to France
was in 1915.  But my memories dwell fondly on the
aspect of the Rhine, of the Seine, of the Alps, as drawn
by Turner and by Prout; of the Riviera, as described by
Ruffini's Doctor Antonio; of Italy as seen by Byron
and Goethe: of Paris, as etched by Meryon, of Rome,
as engraved by Piranesi.
Seventy years ago the fair face of Nature had not been
gashed by railway embankments, and medieval walls
had not been carted away for factories, American hotels,
and Parisian boulevards.  What the ages had left had
not been gutted to build avenues or to excavate for
antiques.  We travelled in horsed vehicles, about forty
miles in an easy day, we strolled and gossiped and
visited the church or the town hall in every place where
we halted to bait or to change our team.  We worshipped the Gothic cathedrals in their pathetic decay,
before the " restorer " had begun to destroy.  Of all
the joys of travel none equalled that of the vctturino
along the yet unravished Corniche, and the memories of
the secular roads that lead from Tuscany to Rome.
You who now whirl along in your Fiats and RollsRoyce, blinded by each other's dust, who feast in Metropoles and Ritzs, who intend to break the bank at Monte
Carlo-how little do you know all that you have lostthe native charm of each varied countryside-the feudal
remnants of city wall, tower, and gateway; the exquisite
tracery, carvings, and glass of the yet virgin Cathedral,




MY VICTrORIAN MEMORIES


39


the homely hospitality of mine host of the " Bear " or
the " Three Kings,' the smile of the buxom locandiera.
It is all over now! You may race about the Continent
in rapides or in cars, you may beat all the  records " in
motor times; you may have a ride on a camel and kill
big game, and even have the inside of a week in the
Eternal City-but as for seeing and knowing the countries you are whirled through, you might as well rush
through a picture-gallery on a bicycle, or get peeps of
the Riviera between the tunnels of the railway.
No doubt it used to be quite primitive, and modern
tourists would call it insufferable and slow. The charm
was in the novelty, the quaintness, the old-world air of
every new place. A Belgian town then was quite unlike
any other; still more unlike was a Rhenish town.  In
Germany, the people, the habits, the buildings were in
strong contrast to the Italian. France had, everywhere
before the Empire, a pre-Revolution, provincial aspect.
Frenchmen were still the most gay, cheery, wittiest,
idealists in Europe. In the forties, partly in the fifties,
even up to the savage war of 1870, the deep international
hatreds and jealousies had not matured.   French,
Germans, English, and Italians could talk pleasantly in
trains, coaches, or hotels. We would often share a big
carriage, exchange views about passport and douane,
even join as travelling companions for a run.  We all
dined at the same long table, and we could hand the salt
or pass the bottle with a courteous word.
The separate table, the "reserved " coach, had not
been installed.  The gloom  of national scorn and
revenge had not settled upon Europe.  We found a
common enjoyment in all we met.      The different
4




40


MORE LAST WORDS


nations did not regard each other as invisible beings"untouchable" as a pariah to a high-caste Brahmin.
We tried to learn something of the people of each
country we were in-its habits, ways, and tastes.
Everything we met seemed new.   But now European
travel has been " standardized," brought up-to-date,
machined into the same pattern-the same trains, cars,
hotels, avenues, boulevards, games, dress, food, and
amusements. People now travel physically rather than
morally or mentally-caclurni non animniumn mutant.
When, as one of a large family, I first visited France,
78 years ago, in 1845, we sailed in a clumsy paddle-wheel
steamer from the Thames to Boulogne. A stiff breeze
in the Channel forced us to put in at Ramsgate, and we
were some 30 hours between London Bridge and
Boulogne.   Laugh at us you who now do it in three
hours by train or half an hour by air!  But what fun
we had!    What a real sea voyage, what a round of
strange sights, what a new world! Oh! those fishwives and fisher-lads in their native dress, boots, and
caps, the soldiers of King Louis Philippe in red pantaloons-and the corpulent Major whose de'jeuner we
understood was 12 frogs. Boulogne in 1845 was a real
bit of 18th century France, redolent of Le Sage, Beaumarchais, Sterne, and Smollett.
We lived in an old 17th century house having inside
court and greenery.  I saw it 70 years afterwards quite
unchanged.   What pictures were the market and the
fish-stalls, the walls and gates of the Haute Ville, Saint
Nicolas with five centuries of picturesque decay!  The
Liane was a delicious river then, much like the Cherwell.
How we rowed on it, and picnicked, how we fished and




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


41


bathed and swam, and raced our bidets at the fair, and
danced at the village ducasses!  All that is over-the
whole town is brought up-to-date.  I groaned when I
first saw the huge Dome hung high above, which has
ruined Boulogne as a quaint seaport of historic France.
Factories, chimneys, railroads, and works have invested
the town and choked its river.  Few now stop to see
it, nor Calais, Dieppe, and Havre-all memorable bits
of seafaring France.  We crowd into the palatial
restaurant, bribe the porters and douane men, and hurry
to get into our coupe-lit in the express to Basle or Marseilles.
And then Normandy, its coast towns, the Seine,
Caen, Bayeux, Caudebec, and Rouen, where I spent
the autumn of 1847, was a real fossil bit of old France:
monarchist, fruitful, horse-breeding-alive with quaint
costumes, diligences and caleches with Beranger jollity,
Norman castles and Gothic churches.  How we drove
about that sunny country in one-horse gigs and searched
every village and farm for a Norman arch! Who sails
up that beautiful Seine now?  Who cares for the
Roman remains at Lillebonne, the Church of Caudebec, or for Richard's castle of Gaillard?  Who now
stops at a Norman village to hunt for anything but
petrol?  Who remembers Rouen in the forties with
the carved wooden houses on the river side and the old
Place as it was drawn by Prout, or the yet untouched
facade of the cathedral as drawn by Ruskin, or the
grand panorama from St. Catherine's hill, yet unstained
by railway viaducts and smoking factories?
Seventy years ago, when I saw it first, Cologne was a
real bit of antique Germany, the nave and towers of the




42


MORE LAST WORDS


Dome left half-built-the Rhine spanned only by a
bridge of boats, and traffic up or down the river by
barges, rafts, and heavy paddle-wheel steamers only.
The voyage up from Cologne to Mannheim was one long
dream of beauty and of romance, just as it was sung by
Byron, with its castles, towered cities, churches,
fortresses, and mountains. Now, we are whirled along
in the express (often at night) to Homburg, Baden, and
Frankfort; but we stop no more to see Drackenfels and
Lahnstein, Lurlei and St. Goar.  Perhaps it is as well
to hurry on since those scenes of beauty and tradition
which poets and painters have so often described are now
engulfed in double lines of railway and smothered in
smoking factories.
It was exactly 70 years ago when I first knew the
Alps. We were a party of three from Oxford. We
entered Switzerland by road through the Black Forest.
There were no railways, no motors or cycles-much less
that horror " the rack and pinion  mountain rail. We
entered, and we quitted, Switzerland by the old coach
road. We tramped the wahole way, occasionally getting
a lift in an einspiiner; we put up in the roadside
gasthauas, and chatted with every villager we met.
Except at Zurich, Lucerne, Vevay, and Geneva, there
were no modern hotels, and even those were moderate
in scale and in tariff. No need to telegraph for rooms:
no trouble about baggage; we carried some clothes on
our backs, and sent on luggage by the Post. Our
meals were neither Parisian nor Amnerican-potage
bonne femme, trout from the rushing streams, veal,
mehlspeise, fruit, oatmeal cake, butter, cream, cheese,
honey, home-made wine, and beer. We climbed every




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


48


aussichtspunkt and did some glaciers round Zermatt
and Chamonix.
We saw Switzerland from end to end, German and
French cantons alike. It was then as de Saussure saw
it in the 18th century. We saw the Swiss in their
homes and in their home life. There were no Metropoles and French menu on mountains 8,000ft. up. The
valleys rang with the shouts of cowboys and rancee des
vaches-not with the roar of steam-engines. For 30
days we saw Switzerland from Schaffhausen to Zermatt,
from the Jura to Lake Leman, from Bern to Chamonix;
and though we had the best of everything to be got,
our expenses were hardly ~1 per day. How different
is travel in the Alps to-day. Parties of mondaines
carry on as they might at Brighton, Vichy, or Hombourg, with the same games and the same luxuries.
Our '"mountaineers " are whirled in express trains,
usually by night, to the foot of the great Alps, where
they proceed "to beat the record " in athletic feats, as
if it were Wimbledon, Hurlingham, or the Oval, until
they are whirled home again in triumph or in defeat.
So in 1853 we went to the South of France, to Lyon,
Avignon, Marseilles, and drove about that Rhone country
to Nimes, Aries, Pont du Gard, St. Gilles, and the
Camargue.   Avignon had still its grand walls and
portals unbroken, and the vast historic castle and church
tower had not been disfigured by the preposterous
Madonna.   Of all my memories of travel the most
abiding is that of the drive along the ancient way from
Cannes to Genoa. In 1853 Cannes was a pretty fishing
village, a single auberge, no promenade, and but two
large villas. Nice and Mentone were still Italian cities:




44


MORE LAST WORDS


Mentone, a medieval walled city with gates and towers,
and a castle on the hill. The only inn was the primitive
Posta, which had in November but half-a-dozen guests.
Outside the walls were groves and gardens, olives, roses,
oranges, and palms, and the site of Monte Carlo was still
a vineyard. \Ve secured a roomy vettura of the old
Italian style with five horses, which at a leisurely pace
took us 25-40 miles each day.  The road was in full
sight of the sea, and was not hidden by a screen of railway embankments, or swept by clouds of motor dust.
There were constant halts for bait, luncheon, coffee,
and local exploration. Each village had its own special
landscape and character.  From the Var to Genoa it
was all entirely Italian-the Italy of the 18th century,
with its churches, battlements, campanili, its peasants'
costumes, colour, and homes, its lovely valleys, bays,
and headlands, not crushed and modernized by
monstrous hotels, pretentious casinos, and Parisian
boulevards.
The French Riviera now has been made a Paris or a
Ranelagh on the Southern Sea-a motor run-a tennis
and golf ground-the Vanity Fair-if not the " hell "
of cosmopolitan fashion.  The historic memories, the
picturesque antiquity, the genius loci are crowded out
by modern mechanics, sports, and splendours. Seventy
years ago there was nothing of all this: we saw the
Italy which Gray and Walpole, Byron and Goethe,
knew; but it is dissolving like a film picture. When I
first saw Florence it was in the time of the last Grand
Duke, of Savage Landor, and the Brownings. The
whole of the medieval walls and gates stood unbroken
outside the great walls were villas, but not the new




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


45


Florence of to-day. The Cathedral had no modern
facade. The Arno ran under its bridges as in the time
of Michelangelo. The Pitti was the residence and
Court of the Duke, and the grim palazzi were still inhabited by remnants of the families that built them.
We then lived in the heart of the old Tuscan capital
untouched by modern science and magnificence. The
city is improved in health and in convenience; but how
much of its charm has been " improved away "?
The same is even more true of Rome, which, when I
first knew it, was under Papal rule in the days of Pio
Nono and the French protection. Hardly a stone of
it had been touched for centuries. Outside the walls of
Aurelian nothing existed except the vast Borghese and
such fortress palaces. The Forum had not been excavated.  Cattle rested under trees, and fountains
bubbled on it, as in Piranesi's picture of 1757. The
Palatine was a private ground, partly reserved for nuns,
and all the Imperial palaces on it were buried. The
Colosseum was covered with its wild flowers and shrubs,
and masses were performed in the altars within its
podium. No embankment of the unruly Tiber had
been begun, and the Cloaca Maxima emptied itself
direct into the river  The whole of modern Rome
outside the walls has been constructed within my
memory. The horrid iron bridge to St. Peter's was
not; nor had the massive Via Nazionale cut its avenue
deep through the Rome of centuries. Of all European
cities, in proportion to its size, it has been the most
widely transformed and modernized.
But if of all European cities Rome has been the most
transformed in 50 years, of them all it has gained most




MORE LAST WORDS


in antiquarian interest. No student can forget all that
has been done by Lanciani and Boni and a great company of zealous diggers. As a place to study, it has
been immensely developed and enlarged. And as a
residence it has been equally improved in salubrity, in
convenience, and in security. In 1865 I was warned
by residents not to linger in the ruins at sunset, not to
walk or ride in the Campagna alone, at night to keep
in the middle of the dark streets, lit only with a casual
oil lamp and quite unvisited by police. But oh! the
models " on the Trinita steps, the brigands, Madonnas
and Josephs. in picture costumes, the Fra Angelico
priests and mendicant friars at every corner, the Pope's
gilt carriage, gaudy footmen and guard, the Salvator
Rosa beggars, the herdsmen and Pfifferari, the Rome
of Piranesi, the Rome of Byron, Corilnne, the Marble
Faw —Non e piu come era prima.
In 70 years foreign travel has gained immensely in
ease, in volume, in knowledge. Thousands go now
where only tens could go then.  Europe has been
opened to the masses, made familiar to the least learned,
to the most moderate purse.  New worlds of beauty
and of history have been revealed. I am no antiquarian
pedant, no blind believer in Ruskin. I am a modernist,
and for 70 years I have taken advantage of every modern
habit and invention. I write only to remind the travelling world how much has been sacrificed to their
comfort and their gain-how much untrampled beauty,
how many an old-world picture still remains to be
enjoyed, if they would leave the beaten tracks and
search for Nature and native ways, be it in French
provinces or German rivers and forests, in Alpine




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


47


valleys and snows, in the inexhaustible charm of Italy,
from the Var to the Lido, from Varallo to Ravenna,
from Como to Palermo.
(4) OXFORD-OLD AND NEW, 1848-1922
1848-die Joan: Bapt.-I was elected scholar of
Wadham, and in June, 1921, I came again to look at
my old college, university and city, and to meditate on
the changes which more than seventy years have brought
to all. Are they all changed so much? To the eyein form-in rule-nlaterially-yes! the change is indeed, startling.  Is it so in substance-morallyintellectually-spiritually? I am not so sure.
Seventy years ago, Oxford was a petty, quiet,
beautiful city of the cathedral and historic order, the
market town of a rich agricultural county  It has
grown immensely-doubled itself in area rather than in
population-has lost the air of a rural market townhas grown to be a big residential modern kind of
villa-dom. When I first saw Oxford in 1848 there was
really very little of new habitations outside the limits,
say of Hollar's sketch of 1648,-little of recent work
outside of St. Giles, or of Magdalen bridge, or of the
Castle remains.  From  Wadham   there were open
fields. Neither Parks, nor Keble, nor Manchester
Colleges, nor Museum, nor Library-it was all country
down to the Cherwell-no Schools Building in the High
Street-no Gothic or Tudor new buildings to the
colleges. All additions to the colleges since my under



48


MORE LAST WORDS


graduate days have greatly changed the look of Central
Oxford. New College, Balliol, Christ Church, have
thrown out vast new buildings which will not amalgamate with the tone of the original for a century at
least. When I first saw Wadham it looked what it
really was-one of the later foundations-added on to
antique Oxford outside the early wall. Now Wadham
is almost the only college which still looks as it was
founded and built by Dorothy Wadham three centuries
and ten years ago. Almost every other college now
shows signs of enlargement, restoration, and modernity.
And the vast new world of villas, halls, schools, and
playgrounds which encircle Oxford now, just as Hampstead, St. John's Wood, Battersea, and Wandsworth
encircle the City of London, have, to the eye at least,
entirely destroyed the tone of the old-world collegiate
town we loved 70 years ago. It was then a city of
reformed monasteries.  It is become an expanse of
agreeable villas. WAhere, oh! where is' That sweet city with its dreaming spires?"
It is there still-much changed by new Gothic enlargements, and quite engulfed in commodious residential
avenues, such as we find in Cheltenham and Clifton.
There is little dreaming in Oxford now. Men retired
from the Army, Civil Service, or busy with colleges,
usually do themselves very well.
Increased Life.
This huge growth of the city area with its new
population and business, with all the appliances of our
up-to-date habits, has wonderfully increased the life of




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


49


Oxford. In my time students worked within their
own colleges; when they went out, it was in cap and
gown, at least until afternoon. We went down to the
barges to row in morning coat and hat, and put on
flannels down there. For cricket we went to Bullingdon
and Cowley in horse-brakes. Lawn tennis, of course,
was not invented; the only parks were the grounds of
Christ Church, Magdalen, and New College. On
Sundays we walked ' in beaver " along the open roads
to Headington, Hinksey, or Cumnor. To cross the
Bodleian quad without cap and gown was to be fined.
Our dinner hour was 5 p.m., and we had to attend
Chapel eight times in the week. Examinations for
degrees were in classics and mathematics only. The
Freshman to-day will say "Wrhy! what smugs and
mugs you must have been!    Well! I don't know.
There were some good men who lived through it, and
came out of it.
What a different Oxford does a college Rip-vanWinkle find to-day! The streets of the old city and
the broad avenues for miles round it are whirling with
cars, motor-cycles, and thousands of " bikes," whereon
youths and girls, in most degagc clothes, without hats
and with more or less bare legs, rush from college to
hall, fron hall to school, club, union, or playground.
The cycles are thousands: every college gateway, every
lane, or free space is stacked with ' bikes" in serried
ranks. One of the new by-laws for men and women
is to go on wheels-even if only from Balliol to Christ
Church. Hatless and capless, with s;llanlandered necks,
with flannel " knicks," or jumpers streaming in the
wind, youth and maid rattle up and down, as if the




50


MORE LAST WORDS


University were a racing track. Time was when Oxford
called a man on a cycle " a cad on castors."  To-day
Oxford, male or female, lives on wheels. Alma Mater
has joined the Rotarian Society-if that means wheelmen and wheelwomen.
At first sight the great change is that the University
is no longer a monastery of unmarried men.  In the
streets the women seem almost as numerous, and quite
as busv, as the men. In 1850 there were no married
tutors and few married residents at all. UTntil the
summer term one rarely saw, and almost never met, a
lady.  In 1921, to the eve, the University might be
almost a bi-sexual mixed American college. It is not
so in reality. The co-education system is only in germ
-perhaps only on trial. I offer no opinion about its
success. Everyone must feel how greatly the colleges
have gained by the marriage of tutors, b; the various
openings to the education of women, and by the complete elimination of the monastic ideals and formulas.
The new learning, the new ways, the new dress, or
undress, the new athletics, are no doubt all to the good.
But is it necessary for youths and maids to tear about
with bare heads, to be such hustlers, to be so very
"mixed," to display so much gastrocnemius muscle?
The change within.
All this, however, is only as to externals. What is
the real substantial change within? Without doubt in
70 years the University as a centre of education has
developed, expanded, modernized. In 1851 the official
teaching was almost limited to the " humanities," the




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


51


classics, philosophy, and a modicum of mathematics.
In 1921 there is hardly a subject of human knowledge,
hardly a single language of articulate and inarticulate
men on this earth which has not its own school, professor
and students. The Indian scholars, the Rhodes scholars,
the women's halls, the non-university students, the
inter-collegiate system of lecturing, the great extension
of out-college students, the infiltration of the modernworld life into Oxford, have created a profound revolution. Almost every term now for years past has seen
a new statute, new rules of examinations, new professoriates, new languages, new degrees, so that the
University is an organism in universal flux. Its curriculum has gone back to Heracleitus' fIavra;s  Many
think this organic evolution is being overdone. But in
any case, no Continental, no American university can
now boast of being more up-to-date than Oxford.
And the critics who in Outlines, encyclopaedias, and
democratic platforms denounce Oxford as still hidebound to the ancient books are talking what is not true,
mere stale catchwords.
Has all this really destroyed the claim of Oxford to
be the seat of training in religion, philosophy, and the
" humanities " in a liberal sense?  I answer No! A
hoary visitor who finds himself plunged into the whirl
of young post-bellutn Oxford, who reads through the
Unzversity Gazette, with its incessant amendments to
old statutes, with its new schools of science, English
literature, modern languages, natural history, law,
modern history, chemistry, medicine, music, poetry,
agriculture, forestry, Indian and Oriental scholarships,
and now Rhodes and Zaharoff travelling scholarships



52


2MORE LAST WORDS


after all this he might think that Greek and Latin, the
humanities, were snowed tunder and had been buried
under indiscriminate neologies. It is not so really-at
least as vet. Oxford may become what universities are
abroad, but the old heart of the place remains much as
it was-with the humanities, antique tradition, the
culture, the moral-the Church-still dominant. Old
Oxford may be said to have taken to itself a new partner
-perhaps we ought to say a young wife. But as the
central pulse of the higher English thought, manners
and ideals, it remains still the true nursing ground.
And it will so remain until English society is very much
more democratized-and until Labour recognises as
education nothing but what will pay in material things.
Disraeli to Clemenceau.
It was a touching occasion to me the other day, at
the Entente Encaenia of June 22, when I took my seat
amongst the doctors, and compared the scene with what
I remember of the Encaenia of 1852, when Lord Derby,
being both Prime Minister and Chancellor of the
University, presided at the ceremony which gave
D.C.L. degrees to Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and half
the Cabinet. Though that was almost 70 years ago it
seemed to me but yesterday as in a dream. The same
secular Latin formulas, except that Lord Derby addressed his son as Fili mi dilectissime!-instead of Vir
egregie, praestantissime; the same D.C.L. robes, with
"the hideous clash of colours," crimson and rose, as
Burne-Jones said when he had to walk about the town
in his new disguise; the same crowd, the same gracious




MY VICTORIAN MEMORIES


58


ladies, the same shouts, and the same inaudible prize
compositions! Ah! I was an undergraduate then, up
in the gallery: we were a noisy lot, and bawled out
rude jokes at the Doctors and rude compliments to the
ladies' frocks.  Last June at any rate the boys were
well-behaved and silent. I came away, tired and ratherbored.  But I said: "No! Oxford is not really
changed. It is as ever the link between the old world
and the new! "
The ceremony of this year (1921) was a rivet for our
French alliance-for of the six Doctors, three were
French-the first being Georges Clemenceau. He was
hearty, jovial, and full of his fun.  At the ViceChancellor's house I saw a good deal of him, and had
the great pleasure of a quiet talk with hin before the
crowd began. I had known him in Paris in the old
days, when J. Chamberlain, John Morley, and I met
there and were hot fighters for the struggling Republic.
"The Tiger " was quite himself at Oxford-without
his claws, and beaming about his welcome from Leo
Britannicus. Not only in the Sheldon Theatre was he
received with roars of hearty applause; but as the
traditional procession of the Doctors wound round from
Exeter, through the Broad, to the Old Schools, the
great French patriot was warmly cheered by the crowds
which lined the streets. Really the G.O.M. of France
quite enjoyed himself-he is wonderful, even with a
bullet in his shoulder-one would take him to be
hardly 60.
One new development of the University is entirely
approved by all. In ny day the theatre was taboo;
everything dramatic was verboten; Thackeray was




54


MORE LAST WORDS


vetoed by the Vice-Chancellor as an "entertainer."
Now, drama is very nuch alive; and the serious study
of presenting masterpieces, ancient and modern, is
p actically part of the training. I enjoyed Twelfth
Night, played in the beautiful garden of the Warden
of Wadham in the afternoon under the trees, without
scenery, stage, or orchestra,-a true masque danced
out in shrubberies and lawns. It was very carefully
staged, costuned, and declaimed by the O.U.D.S.
with some expert lady help. I have seen the immortal
comedy a dozen times, with Irving, Tree, Lillah
McCarthy, and the rest. I never enjoyed it more than
I did in sight of a college that was building in the lifetime of Shakespeare, with the entire scene as it were
a madcap frolic in the household of a great Elizabethan
noble. Really, on the lines of the new Oxford drama,
an era of hope may set in for the British stage at last.




III


THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE
658 B.C.-1928 A.D.
T is only within living memory that a signal misconception about European civilization has at last
been redressed by a series of scholars at home and
abroad.  Historians and philosophers in England,
France, and Germany ignored, if they did not lampoon,
the services to mankind which the Roman Empire on
the Bosphorus secured to the West, during the eleven
centuries which separate the first Constantine from the
last. For 1,100 years Constantinople stood a veritable
Rock of Ages to preserve the continuity of ancient
civilization, the organism of government in peace and
in war, the tradition of the arts, the literature and
science of the world, the home of Eastern Christendom.
One after another, it drove back the Persians of
Chosroes, the Saracens of Arabia, the Ottomans of
Anatolia, and, between these tremendous enemies,
incessant onslaughts from Goths, Iluns, Avars, Russians, Bulgars, the pirates of the Mediterranean and a
swarm of barbarous races.
In an essay of 1908 Lord Morley calls this restoration
of Byzantine history '"in some respects the most remarkable literary event of our day."  'Finlay," he
says, " first unfolded what the Byzantine Empire was."
55:5




56


NIORE LAST WORDS


In 1855 Professor Freeman took up the cause, calling
Finlay's historical work the greatest that our literature
had produced since Gibbon.    Thirty years ago Professor Bury succeeded with far greater power to the
samne task, and ever since, with inexhaustible learning,
he has founded a school of Byzantine literature. He
opened to English historians the work of foreign
scholars, French, German, Russian, Hungarian, Greek,
and Oriental.  At home Lord Bryce, Professor Oman,
Sir Edw\in Pears, Sir Thomas Jackson, have been aided
by specialists in the literature, art, and antiquities of
By/zantinc agcs.
I do not prestume to deal with so vast a subject as the
Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted in time for 1,120
years, and in space once reached from   Spain to the
('aspian.  Nor shall I deal with the Turkish Empire,
which has lasted for 470 years and once reached from
the Upper Danube to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
M3.subject is far less ambitious, though in time it may
be longer, for Byzantium had been an historic city for
nearly a thousand years when Constantine enlarged it
to be the capital of his Empire.  I take the life-history
of a city, but of a city which has had its part in the
records of civilization for 2,581 years. and has been the
continuotus seat of Empire now for 1,593 years. To the
historic inagination Constantinople is, after Rome, the
most fascinating city in Europe. A French writer says:
' tout cc qui se lie a 1'histoire de Constantinople cnfii'vre
l'imagination."  During the early Middle Ages, with
at least one million of inhabitants, it was far the largest,
most civilized, most artistic and lettered city in Europe.
Its  ports, markets, spectacles, theatres, libraries,




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


57


schools, fortresses, and churches had no equals in the
West. Its social and intellectual condition was in some
things superior to that of Rome of the Antonines; its
luxury and its schisms had many analogies with those
of Paris and of London in the age of the Renascence
and the Reformation.
How rich is the life-history of the dominant cities of
the world-in their mysterious continuity under violent
mutations-of Rome, of Athens, of Paris, of London.
It has a glamour, a consecration, a kind of personality
in its indestructibility, even more than a famous hero.
Nowv, Constantinople has been the heart of Empire for
1,589 years-of military, naval, commercial, civil, and
religious organization-whether under Roman, Greek,
Latin, or Turk sovereigns. This continuity and concentration of all material and spiritual rule in one city
has no parallel in the history of man, for Rome was the
seat of empire for hardly four centuries, and for many
centuries Rome was a wilderness, a ruin, the casual
haunt of a miserable remnant.
Such was the fate, too, of famous cities-Jerusalem,
Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria, Antioch. Neither Paris
nor London has yet been for very many centuries the
sole seat of government, of church, of commerce, of
literature, of art. For fifteen centuries Constantinople
has been all this and mnore than this. Other cities have
grown and wasted; have died down and risen again.
The capitals of modern nations, except of England and
France, are things of yesterday. But since the official
recognition of Christendom, Constantinople has never
ceased to be the seat of empire, with a huge population,
with trade and commerce, splendid buildings, the




58


MORE LAST WORDS


clearing-house between Europe and Asia. This it owes
to its incomparable position in Eastern Europe-apt
equally for defence, for attack, for commerce, for centralization, and for retreat. It is the typical example
of a law of Montesquieu, the influence of physical
environment on human progress-how civilization is
interwoven with topographical conditions.
In a famous chapter Gibbon has shown the advantages
of this spot, its beauty, security, and wealth; formed,
he says, by Nature to be the centre and capital of a
great monarchy   The Bosphorus and the Hellespont
formt two gates which can be closed to an enemy and
opened to commerce. Surrounded by fertile plains in
Thrace and in Bithynia, with an inexhaustible supply
of fish and of various products, the peninsula, on the
point of which the city stands, has the advantages of an
island in peace and war, but an island protected north
and south by impassable straits. Thus it attracted the
commerce of the world, whilst having potential command of the sea. No other city of the ancient or the
modern world had at once such amenity, harbourage,
and security. London and New York are the only
capital cities that have vast opportunities for sea-borne
trade, whilst lying back from the ocean with adequate
protection.
Thus Constantinople came to be the first example of
that ' sea-power" of which the world has just seen the
greatest triumph, which Tyre, Carthage, Athens, enjoyed in their pride. All fell because they could not
protect their centre. For nine centuries Constantinople
held the straits. In the thirteenth century her rivals in
trade, Genoa and Venice, beat her down by their navies;




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


59


and the Turks broke in when her sea-power was gone.
And now for four and a half centuries the Ottomans,
wretched seamen themselves and futile admirals as they
are, have held the gates of the sea-as we, alas! have
known to our cost. It was sea-power, wide-ranging
commerce, an impregnable base, that enabled Justinian
to drive the Vandals out of North Africa, to recover
Rome and restore his Empire in Northern Italy, and
even in Southern Spain. This enabled Heraclian, in
his splendid campaigns of the seventh century-which
Professor Oman so happily calls " the first of the Crusades '-to drive back the Avar hosts and the Persian
king.  It was this that enabled Nicephorus Phocas to
reconquer Crete, to recover Syria, to threaten to lay in
ashes every port in Italy. For a century or more seapower has been lost to the Turks, and our Navy rides
before the Sultan's palace. But let us not forget the
vast possibilities which the Golden Horn has in reserve,
if it should ever pass to a great sea-Power.
I shrink from attempting to describe the landscape
which ancients and moderns agree to pronounce to be
the most beautiful in the world. Let us leave this to
the dithyrlambics of the Italian de Amicis, or, say, with
the Rumanian Princess, to describe it to those who have
not seen it, is trying to explain to the born blind what
light is like. Who could paint to the mind's eye those
endless vistas of bays, creeks, hillsides, crowned in the
far distance across the waters by the snows of Olympus,
whilst on the land side rise terraces, gardens, towers,
palaces, mosques and minarets, tier after tier, climbing
up the seven hills-and these are strewn with beech,
vine, acacia, cypress, and in front the Golden Horn is




tO


MORE LAST WORDS


alive with every shape of ship and boat?  The miracle
of its charm is this union of superb landscape-sea-coast,
wooded river, and mountain range-with the inimitable
confusion of picturesque architecture of every age and
style.
In 658 B.C. a colony of traders from the Greek city
of Megara opposite to Athens pushed up into the wild
country of Thrace and founded Byzantium on the point
of the promontory which juts out at the mouth of the
Bosphorus. In its origin it was a Greek city, the creation
of sea-power. For 2,110 vears it was a Greek city; for
470 years under the Turk it has still been largely Greek.
The origin of Byzantium was curiously like that of New
York. Adventurers from Holland in the seventeenth
century-it was then a s'ea-Power-pushed up into the
Indian tribes and founded a settlement on the island of
Manhattan. With its grand situation of harbours and
inlets, New Amsterdam grew to be New York, the
second city of the world. Both cities changed their
nationality and their name. Their almost unrivalled
situation. remaining the heritage of both, created their
power.
Down to Roman times Byzantium had a part in the
famous epochs in Greek history. It was at once captured when the Persians invaded Greece. When the
Persians were driven out, Pausanias, the General at
Platoea, was sent up to secure the straits at Byzantium.
There he began his orgy of pomp and lust, as Byron in
Manfred reminds us, as if that tragic spot infected the
spirit. Most of the names familiar to us in Herodotus,
Thucydides, Polybius and Plutarch left their mark
on Byzantium —Cimon, Alcibiades, Xenophon, Epa



THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


61


minondas,  Demosthenes,   Phocion,   Philip,  and
Alexander of Macedon.
The transfer of the capital of the Roman Enpire
from the Tiber to the Golden Horn, the foundation of
Constantinople in 330 A.D., was one of the master
strokes in the history of civilization-indeed, from the
material and strategic point of view, I hold it to be the
greatest.  Rome, Paris, London, Vienna, Moscow,
Madrid, Berlin, Washington, became capital cities by
gradual acts of the rulers in course of years.  But in
ten years Constantine remade the centre of the civilized
world. Nothing so stupendous in civic origins has ever
been accomplished before or since, for its effects have
been maintained with rare and partial breaks, for eleven,
nay, for fifteen centuries. The foundation of Alexandria
by Alexander, of Antioch by Seleucus, have some
parallels. Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, Delhi, have had
fluctuating histories.  Peter's creation of Petrograd
was a splendid mistake-which has ended in hideous
failure.  But the creation of Constantinople marks
Constantine as one of the truly great, beside Julius,
Trajan, Charles, and Washington.
We need not deal with his other, and greater,
achievement, the official adoption of Christianity.
Both transfer of capital and acceptance of Christendom
had long been preparing and were almost inevitable in
his day. Constantine did not fly from the Church as
Dante pretends in the famous line-per ccdere a!
Pastor si fece Grcco. He went to meet the Church.
For the fourth century at least, Constantinople rwas a
Christian city far more truly than Rome. Constantine
did not free himself from the Head of the new Church.




MORE LAST WORDS


Like our Henry VIII, he made himself the official Head
of the new Church. Though not baptised, he presided
at the Council of Nic.:ea, which formulated the Creed.
Constantine posed to be, and his successors made
themselves in fact, the temporal Head of the Eastern
Church. And this was the predominant principle in
the root-difference between the Roman    and the
Byzantine worlds.
''he New Rome was a splendid city extending inland
three miles from the headland, re-peopled with the
spoils of tenples, and protected by a wall from the
Miarmlora to the Golden Horn. In another century
Theodosius II raised a still vaster wall more than a mile
further out, the circuit we see to-day.  In another
century Anastasius built a further wall some fifty miles
across the country from the Marmora to the Black Sea.
This tremendous system of fortifying the most easily
defended corner of Europe succeeded in protecting
Christian and Greco-Roman civilization from the barbarians of the North and the infidels of the East for
more than one thousand years.
I need not describe the tremendous rush of the Goths,
the destruction of Valens at Adrianople, the policy of
the great Theodosius, the baffling of the heroic Alaric
and of the deadly Hun, the brilliant conquests of
Belisarius, the far more important campaigns of
Heraclius against the Persian king, the wonderful
recovery of the Empire under the Leos, again under the
Basils, the splendid defeats of Saracens and Avars, and
the terrific smashing of the Bulgars-down to the longdrawn bleeding to death of the Empire under the incessant attacks of Asiatic or Northern enemies and




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


63


Mediterranean rivals in trade. That is the history of
an Empire, not of a capital. It is a story of abounding
interest and of every quality of human nature, as it is
rich in lessons of statecraft, strategy, economics, and
polemics. It must be studied in the original Byzantine
historians, in Gibbon, Finlay, Bury, Oman, Pears,
Schlumberger, Diehl, Krumbacher, in what is now a
vast library of works in many European and Asiatic
languages. The history of the city is the history of its
walls, churches, palaces, its local antiquities, its Hippodrome, aqueducts, harbours, and the antiquities of some
two or three thousand years which are still gathered
together in this venerable store-house of the ages.
The walls of Constantinople, at least as they stood
down to living memory, are the most impressive and
instructive remains that witness to the military and
civic system of the ancient world. We have a masterly
study of them by the late Professor van Millingen of
Robert College.  This splendid work, published in
1899, has elaborate plans, maps, and illustrations.  I
have had the fortune of being on two occasions conducted round the walls by another resident historian,
Sir Edwin Pears. The land walls from the Marmora
to the Golden Horn have no less than three lines of
circumvallation, with broad causeways between each
line, and in front a moat some sixty feet broad and
twenty feet deep  Each of the three lines of rampart
had battlements, two lines being strengthened with one
hundred and ninety towers rising to about sixty feet.
This treble fortification was 200 feet in depth, with the
topmost towers rising to 100 feet above the country
outside and the city within. Along the Marmora and




64


MORE LAST WORDS


the Golden Horn also ran a great wall. The whole of
this vast enceinte of about twelve miles was finally
conpleted two or three centuries after the foundation
of the city.
The land wall was never pierced until Mahomet II
made a breach with his great guns. They count some
twenty sieges and investments which it withstood.
The Goths who overwhelmed Valens recoiled when they
came in face of the Imperial city. Alaric stormed his
way through the Balkans and Greece, but he turned
away from the city to the sack of Rome. Attila the
Hun-the original Hun-might levy tribute on the
Empire, but he dared not descend on the capital. All
throlugh the stormy centuries when Europe was swept
by cataracts of invaders, civilization, organized war,
policy, and commerce held on between the walls and in
the harbours of refuge of Constantinople.
It was a striking proof of its strength that Heraclius,
when at death-grapple with the Persian in the heart of
NMesopotamia, left the capital to be defended by his
lieutenant Bonus, who drove off 80,000 Avars in league
with the Persians, using at once his army to break out
from the walls and his fleet to sail out from the Golden
Horn. The most brilliant of all the many sieges was
in 673 A.D. when the Caliph Mouwiah for four years
invested the city with a mighty host in the first tornado
of Islam; and, after four years of desperate battle by
sea and land, was driven back by the terror of the new
Greek fire. This monopoly, the secret invention of the
Greeks, about seven centuries before the use of cannon
in Europe, was curiously like the German flammenwerfer in the late war. They squirted, we are told,




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


65


liquid fire from siphons. After studying what we learn
from Bury and other experts, I think we must conclude
that in the seventh century the Greeks had come very
near to the discovery of gunpowder, and also to propelling petroleum or naphtha from pipes. These were
not quite guns, because their powder had very poor
bursting force, and they did not know how to make
their pipes strong enough to resist an explosion. Their
tluns, in fact, were fireworks like Roman candles, but,
even so, their flames were deadly to ships and terrible
to men.
Forty years later the Sultan Suleiman again attacked
with two great hosts, one coming from the AEgean by
sea and one by land from Thrace. There was a regular
investment, but after four years of desperate war the
Saracens were driven back with enormous slaughter,
nor did any Musulmans for ages attempt to renew the
siege. Bulgarians followed Saracens, but their great
King Crumn failed to take the city, and in the eleventh
century they were crushed by Basil II, the terrible
" Slayer of the Bulgars." At the close of the eleventh
century the tremendous hosts of the first Crusade
reached the city; and then by the arts, the gold, the
visible power of the Emperor Alexius, the very
dangerous champions of Christendom were peaceably
transported to Asia-as we read in that unlucky travesty
of history, Sir Walter Scott's only failure. The Greeks
were the only immediate gainers by the first Crusades,
for they recovered countries from which the Saracens
were driven and had been so crippled that for four
centuries more no Asiatic Power reached the walls of
Constantinople.
The Crusades revealed to the Franks the inner




66


MORE LAST WORDS


weakness of the Empire.   They, brought Norman,
Christian, Catholic enemies and trade rivals to the
Levant, who displaced, undermined, and finally destroved the Greek bulwark that for six centuries had
protected  Europe from  Islam.  Genoese, Pisan,
Venetian, and Norman seamen had long been wresting
from  the exhausted Empire the commerce of the
Mediterranean. They had made the Crusades possible,
and the Crusades made them wealthy, ambitious, and
warlike. Sea-power was passing from the Golden Horn
to the Italian ports. At last the infamous so-called
C(rusade of 1204 stormed and sacked the city by a series
of attacks more bloody, wanton, and destructive than
anything ever done by Goth, Hun, or Turk. The
filibusters, whom Pope Innocent III had first blessed
and had then reproved, destroyed but could not restore,
or even hold, what they plundered. To this day the
historian, the antiquarian, the artist, the divine, groans
over the irreparable crimes of their greed, their hates,
and their lust. They did all they could to annihilate
New Rome in the name of the Old Rome and to sate
its vengeance. For two centuries and a half the Empire
struggled on, at times in chaos, at times with heroic
revival, facing the Ottoman as he succeeded to the
Saracen, who now was master of sea-power in the Levant
from which he had driven both Greek and Italian ships.
At last, in 1458, the ever-victorious Ottoman, under
Mahomet the Conqueror, overwhelmed the city by sea
and land; and by his new cannon broke down the mighty
land wall from which for just one thousand years Goth,
Avar, Persian, Bulgar, Saracen, Crusader, Russian,
and Ottoman had retired defeated or dislmayed. The




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


67


breach where the Turk stormed is still visible. The
book and the lectures of Sir Edwin Pears, as we stand
before it, make the story of this heroic fight live again
to our eyes. It roused to rare enthusiasm the stately
pen of Gibbon. Indeed, these ruins form one of the
most picturesque, pathetic, and menorable sights on
earth. What splendid arrays of Ronlan armies have
these old stones witnessed-now driving back barbarians,
now returning in triumph-what hordes of pagan,
Saracen, crusading invaders-and now for nearly five
centuries, what gorgeous musters of the Sultan's armies
on their march to Belgrade, Buda, and Vienna. For
fifteen centuries these hoary, ruinous battlements have
stood, whilst nations, empires, races, creeds have come
and gone-for the first thousand years never brokenfor five hundred years since the Conquest never touched,
never menaced until our own day at all.
Of the Hippodrome-a relic of ancient Byzantiumonly fragments and part of the site are now visible. Of
its ornaments still extant three only remain.  The
Obelisk was placed there by Theodosius, before the
division of the Roman Empire. It was one of King
Thothmes III, centuries before Moses, and was brought
from Heliopolis, or On, and this is a sister column of
our Cleopatra's Needle. Then there is the Colossus, a
pillar of masonry, once covered with plates of bronze,
94 feet high, restored by Constantine VII in the tenth
century. Between these stands the most ancient relic
of the Greek world-the Serpent colunn-the pedestal
of the golden tripod dedicated at Delphi by the allied
Greeks after the defeat of the Persians at Platpea. It
was unearthed by our own soldiers during the Crimean




68


MORE LAST WORDS


War, and it still shows the names of the thirty-one
States as described by Herodotus. For eight centuries
it stood before the altar to Apollo to bear witness to
the overthrow of Asiatic hordes. For sixteen centuries
it has stood in the Hippodrome to bear witness to the
link of New Rome with Old Greece. Mahomet the
Conqueror struck off one of the serpent's heads-a bit
of the bronze is preserved in the Museum. Surely, this
is one of the most venerable relics of the ancient world.
How truly do these trophies remind us of the continuity of civilization. One recalls the Pharaohs of
Egypt; another, the republicans of Greece; the third,
the pomp of Byzantine Emperors. To-day the whole
bears witness to the desolation of Ottoman decay. By
Constantine and his successors this imperial Circus was
covered with the finest works of Greek and Roman art
-chiefly of bronze, all melted down for coin by the
Crusaders of 1204, when the four horses of Lysippus,
which stood above the pavilion of the Emperor, were
carried off to Venice by Dandolo, and they still adorn,
or deface, the facade of St. Mark's. It is the very irony
of archaeology that a masterpiece of Alexander's
favourite sculptor, the ornament for six centuries of a
Greek agora, then for nine centuries the pride of the
Head of the Eastern Church in his hours of ceremony,
should be torn away by papal marauders to Italy, where
for seven centuries these royal steeds have pranced before the worshippers as they enter the famous Church
of the Evangelist.
That historic Circus-and much else in Stambulmust conceal under the ground inimitable works of art,
priceless records of the past, the solution of many an




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


69


antiquarian enigma. We may trust that if ever Constantinople be open to our scientific diggers, as much
may be revealed of various ages as in the cities of Greece
or in the Forum and Palatine of Rome. One day the
stones of Byzantium may be unveiled again along with
the stones of Jerusalem, Ephesus, Antioch, and all that
subterranean world of the Past which Moslem ignorance,
apathy, orthodoxy, still cover in long night and the dust
of ages. As one paces the deserted Hippodrome to-day
what visions crowd upon the memory-the forty tiers
of marble seats with the promenade above, all bright
with columns and statues-the factions of the citizens,
blue on one side, green on the other ranges-now yelling
with excitement at the racing chariots, now hailing a
new Emperor, now gloating over a ghastly executionthen breaking out into riot and arson, when 30,000 were
massacred by the guards.  Anon, a general or an
Emperor celebrates his triumph-a Belisarius, a
Heraclius, a Leo, a Nicephorus, a Basil, even a Manuel,
nay, a Frank Baldwin. Then at last a Mahomet, red
from battle, and for four centuries Sultans and Viziers
with Oriental pomp, till it all ends in the At-Meidan,
the parade-ground of the Janissaries-and after them
the mere waste-heap of the decaying Kaliffs that we
find to-day in that once crowded and gorgeous theatre.
The glory of Constantinople to the stident of art
lies in its churches and mosques, tombs and tiirbehs,
the remains of the Serai and its new museums. A few
words as to each, speaking only as a student with no
pretension to dogmatise in archaeology or architecture.
For the churches we are fortunate to have the elaborate
works of some learned experts; the magnificent quartos




7o


MORE LAST WORDS


of Sir Thomas Jackson (2 vols., Cambridge Press,
1913), Professor Van Millingen's Byzantine Churches
(Macmillan, 1912'), Sancta Sophia, by Lethaby and
Swainson (Macmillan, 1894), and the Greek work,
Explanation of Hagia Sophia, by E. M. Antoniades
(Athens, 1909, 8 vols., folio).  All four works are
profusely illustrated by plans, drawings, and photographs. Those who would understand this marvellous
evolution of Greek art should be familiar with these
books. Sir Thomas has traced the tentative efforts in
Syria and Asia Mlinor to construct domed buildings in
new forms, when in the fourth century A.D. the GrecoRoman architecture of Italy was in visible decline. At
Rome the mighty concrete dome of the Pantheon, the
largest span in the world in solid stone, was raised on
a circular base. The triumph of the Byzantines was to
raise in brick or stone a vast dome upon a square building. This was accomplished when Justinian built the
Church of the Holy Wisdom, still known as Aya Sofia.
His architects were Greeks of Asia Minor, Anthemius
of Tralles, near Troy, and Isodorus of Miletus. It was
consecrated in 537 A.D. after less than six years of
labour; and the Emperor in the pride of his heart stood
forth on the ambo and cried out: "I have surpassed
thee, 0 Solomon! "
Justinian, or, rather, the men of genius he employed,
really surpassed not only Solomon, but all previous
builders in constructive ingenuity-to my mind in
majesty and in beauty-if I dared to speak my whole
mind, I would say they surpassed all subsequent builders
in originality and dignity. This temple was a wholly
new creation, which at one stroke was the culmination




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


71


and model of one of the five master types of the human
art of construction. It has been the source of thousands
of domed fanes created for different faiths in Europe
and in Asia. But for earthquakes, it is the most enduring of all buildings: it is the only great building in
the world which has remained intact and in continuous
use for nearly fourteen centuries; if duly repaired in
time it may yet outlast its delicate Gothic rivals. To
make it, the temples and the quarries of Europe, Asia,
and Africa were stripped. Such lovely marbles, such
mighty monoliths, such exquisite ornament in bronze
and mosaic, have never been equalled-perhaps never
can be seen again-the marbles and the mosaics cannot
now be matched. To me it has a unity of tone, a
supreme harmony, a concentrated, and yet a radiant,
majesty that I do not feel in St. Peter's or St. Paul's
-No! not even in Amiens or Chartres. A vast dome
raised on the plan of a Greek Cross has a great advantage
over a dome on a Latin Cross with its long nave. And
when the whole interior is one vision of tinted marbles
and of gold mosaic, it produces an overpowering sense
of awe combined with a pervading glow of colour and
of light. Something of this may be realized in St.
Mark's at Venice, which is a very modest imitation of
St. Sophia, and on a small scale has the same combination
of marbles, mosaics, colonnades, and domes.  The
coloured lithographs which Louis Haigh made from
Fossati's drawings and Salzenberg's copies of the
mosaics give some idea of the original scheme of decoration; and Antoniades' photographs, plans, drawings,
and tinted facsimiles give an even better idea of the
effect. The peculiar power of this building is due to
6




72


MORE LAST WORDS


this, that on entering it from the noble Narthex one is
in presence of the whole of its grand area and height
and the manifold charm of its aisles, corridors, galleries,
colonnades, dome and the senli-domes-all in one
golden light. Its mass, its colours, its subtle harmonies,
fill the mind at one stroke. The design has the reserve
and the proportions of the Parthenon. The decoration
has a delicacy such as we once saw at Reims.
I say this simply of the interior.  The exterior has
no beauty-hardly even dignity or grace. St. Sophia
as a whole cannot be compared with such glorious fanes
as Wells, Amiens, Chartres-and what Reims once was
-even if we put aside the absence of all human figures,
the exquisite statues and reliefs which are so unspeakably
touching in Gothic work.    Why were Byzantine
churches so dull from the outside? Why had they no
towers, no pinnacles, no facades? St. Irene is positively.uly as seen from without, and St. Sophia is hardly
more dull. And the mosques, all modelled on St.
Sophia, owe much of their superior grace on the outside
to their beautiful minarets and their various domes. I
know no answer to this problem. I suggest it was
partly the fear of earthquakes, partly the need to support the domes with huge masses of masonry, as they
never invented, or dared not trust, the elegant flying
buttresses of the Gothic style.  French, German, and
Norman Romanesque, which had no fear of earthquakes,
and did not rely on a vast central dome, are often quite
as magnificent on the exterior as on the interior view.
And so, too, are modern domed buildings, St. Peter's,
St. Paul's, the Isaac Church of Petrograd, the Capitol
of Washington.




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


78


This Church of Aya Sofia, which is one of the precious
monuments of human evolution, is now threatened with
decay. Sir Thomas Jackson prints (Vol. I., pp. 105-7)
the report he made to the Turkish Minister in 1910,
and he informs me that the condition owing to settlement, cracks, and disturbance is now more serious.
Iet us trust this will be promptly repaired, whoever
rules at Constantinople. Well may Sir Thomas write:
' There is no building in the world with associations so
vivid, so well known, so overpoweringly connected with
the rise and fall of empires and the varying fate of mankind." For centuries, chants and litanies and homilies
in Latin and then in Greek rose up into that gilded
dome. Then for nearly five centuries there rose up
invocations to Allah and calls to the Faithful to hold
fast by the law of Islam. On what scenes have those
angels with the six wings in the four pendentives looked
down!-the pomp of Justinian and Theodora in their
glory; the crowning of more than sixty Emperors of the
East, and five more of the Latin rule, and at last the
inauguration of some thirty Sultans since the church
became a mosque. For more than one hundred years
the congregations were all fired by the passions of the
Iconoclast Reformation-each burning to defend or to
abolish the worship of images. What homilies, what
comminations, what Kyrie Eleisons have reverberated
in these walls! And after ages of devotional psalmody
and stormy polemics came those scenes of bloodshed and
agony and terror-first when the Catholic Crusaders
burst in to massacre and pillage the Greeks; then when
Mahomet the Conquerer rode in, they say, and stamped
his bloody hand upon the walls whilst his Turks tore




74


MORE LAST WORDS


away the Christian supplicants at the altar to slavery
and shame.
Of many hundreds of churches that had once been,
Professor Van Millingen describes more than twenty
still standing-ranging from  the fragments of the
Studion (before Justinian) down to the restored Chora
Church "of the Mosaics," completed about a century
and a half before the capture. All except St. Irene in
the Serai inclosure, which is an arsenal and museum,
have been converted into mosques. In Stambul are
also some score or more of fine mosques erected since
the Conquest, nearly all of them on the plan of St.
Sophia, and some of them almost its equal in size and
splendour. Of these, I think, we have as yet no
scientific account at all comparable to our books on the
Christian Churches; and we must rely on Fergusson's
second-hand summary. But many of these mosques
have superb features of their own. Their cloisters,
minarets, porcelains, and carvings, the lovely fountains
and tiirbehs round them, wait for fuller study, at least
in English. They far surpass in beauty and in historical
association anything still remaining in the city of
Christian cloisters or tombs. They are entirely the
work of Arab, Syrian, Greek, and Italian artists.
It is a noteworthy fact-and one that the historian
and the statesman must not disregard-that the Ottomans in Turkey adapted to their own worship the
Christian Churches with almost no real injury to their
structure or even any defacement unless by veiling the
figures and Christian symbols. In their own magnificent
fanes they closely followed the plan of St. Sophia and
other Byzantine Churches-and, indeed, they often




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


75


improved them in beauty by adding their minarets,
cloisters, courts, fountains, and tombs.
Inexhaustible are the antiquities of Stambul. First
the Old Serai with its roll of glories, tragedies, triumphs,
massacres, so admirably condensed in Lord Eversley's
new book, The Turkish Empire (F.    nwvin, 1917).
What pride, what force, what horror, what ruin in four
centuries have been crowded in those deserted and now
squalid courts! Even the modern Sultanate has given
the world in recent times a series of invaluable relics in
the two Imperial nluseums-with sarcophagi, bronzes,
statues, porcelains, inscriptions, tapestries, and jewels.
Almost unique are the sarcophagi of the finest Greek
art-called: of the Satrap, the Mourners, the Lycian.
But the gem of the museum-the gem of Constantinople
— is the matchless tomb named of Alexander, and certamly of his age and circle. This superb monument of
the great age of Greek sculpture is the one work of the
perfection of this art which has ever come down to us
absolutely perfect  untouched by time or accident,
retaining even its colours and the delicacy of its
chiselling. It was preserved untouched in deep stone
vaults and was discovered in excavations at Sidon in
1891 made by the trained expert Hamdi Bey. At my
first visit to Constantinople he showed the monument
and explained it to us in Lord Eversley's party. The
supreme harmony of design, of colour, of the reliefs,
the exquisite life and grace of the figures, the brilliancy
and the symmetry of the whole composition, make this
relic an incomparable example of the faultless genius of
Greece.
The material marvel of Constantinople is its position
between Europe and Asia, dominating the whole eastern




76


MORE LAST WORDS


side of our continent and also the sea and islands of the
Levant. This is as true in our day as in that of Constantine. The experience of the American Ambassador
in the great war, not yet ended, is vividly shown in the
book of SMr. Morgenthau, The Secrets of the Bosphorus.
The moral marvel of Constantinople as one of the pivots
of historical movement is the power of recuperation with
which it endows the State which makes it the capital.
When Constantine moved it to the East the Roman
Empire broke out with a new vitality, which. after the
disasters of Julian and Valens, seemed to make Theodosius the equal of Trajan. With Justinian it seemed
to renew the splendour, the art, the law, if not the
literature, of Augustus.   Heraclius, the  Isaurian
dynasty, the Basilian, for a season made New Rome
bulk as large as the Old Rome of the Caesars. The
eight centuries from Constantine to Alexius I-from
the foundation to the first Crusade-may equal, if they
do not surpass, the five centuries of Old Rome from
Augustus to Theodoric. They show as much statecraft,
organization, heroism-as much and more. If at times
they show the same vices, follies, confusion, they have
a Chrysostom, a Marcian, a Pulcheria, a Belisarius, a
Tribonian, an Anthemius, a Photius, a Leo-names to
be set beside those of any Italian, Frank, or Teuton in
the same dark ages before Charles the Great-if any
such names can be found.   It was the Crusades, the
jealousy of the Vatican, the rivalry of the Italian traders
which ruined the Byzantine Empire. The last two
centuries of decay were the real epoch of the " Lower
Empire "-of humiliation and weakness, relieved at
times by heroic efforts such as that of the last Constantine in the final siege.




THE CITY OF CONSTANTINOPLE


77


No sooner was the Ottoman Sultan in possession of
the capital than again Constantinople became the heart
of a mighty Empire, in breadth of domain, in armaments, in magnificence, in art, equalling the Byzantine
Empire at its greatest. After some two or three centuries of glory this Empire also began to wane. Since
the retreat from the walls of Vienna and the growth of
Russia, it has been a long story of decay and recrudescence, till it ends to-day in the capture of the city
by Western Christians coming up by sea, much as did
the Crusaders of 1204. It is no part of history, at least
of the history of a city, to adjudicate on the morals of
a race or the creed of any faith. To the impartial eye
of history the vice, crimes, horrors, which in five centuries have stained the Crescent are not without parallel
in those which in eleven centuries have stained the Cross
-and in Eastern Europe stain it still to-day. Nor has
the Crescent wanted examples of heroism, genius, even
magnanimity and justice.
A few words may be allowed as to the future of the
great city, though it is not the business of the historian
to forecast policy-all the more that in this sketch
neither politics nor churches are open to discussion.
But the lessons which history teaches us and the dangers
which history reveals are fairly within the purview of
my subject. The first-the great lesson-of the history
of Constantinople is its indestructible importance as the
stronghold of the long passage between the Aigean Sea
and the Black Sea. The Dardanelles, the Sea of
Marmora, and the Bosphorus form one extended sea-way
from Koum Kaleh by the tomb of Achilles, where the
Dardanelles are entered, to Roumeli Phanar at the top
of the Bosphorus where it opens on the Black Sea. Of




78


MORE LAST WORDS


this dominant avenue of commerce and national intercourse, the city lying in the centre along the separate
port of the Golden Horn is the inevitable mistress.
This continuous sea-way, more than 160 miles in
length, must be regarded as a vast navigable river; it
has a greater commercial and strategic importance than
such rivers as the Scheldt, the Rhine, or the Danube;
more than the Kiel Canal, and almost as much as the
Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. It seems to be an
obvious lesson of the past that in the interest of peace
and civilization the whole of this waterway of nations
should be held as a whole by some Power, and that a
great Power.
To split up this all-important passage between different masters, to detach the control of Bosphorus or
Dardanelles from the authority that controls the city,
would be to invite some external Power to get control
by bribing or menacing the weak State which possessed
some section of the long canal or could control the city.
The whole history of the Ottoman Sultanate for two
centuries proves that it was able to dominate the passage, to monopolise its advantages, not by reason of its
own strength, but by dexterously playing off the Great
Powers one against the other. The same incessant
rivalries and contests would be repeated and even
aggravated if control of the passage were in different
hands, or if control of the city itself was in hands other
than those which held the Straits. Surely it is to be
hoped that the League of Nations, or at least the
Concert of the Allied Powers, will find means to give a
permanent international character to this truly international highway of Eastern Europe and Western Asia
and of Northern Africa.




IV


GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY
HAVE long desired to utter a word on behalf of
my beloved poets of the ancient world; but I
know that it is a perilous adventure which may
be denounced as the paradox of a veteran scholar.
Common sense tries to hold me back and whispers
Periculosae plenum opus aleae
tractas, et incedis per ignes
suppositos.
But the die is cast; and here is my favourite paradox
which I throw down in defiance of the orthodox critics.
It is this:
In pure unmixed tragedy, the highest and most
potent form of poetry, the Attic dramatists are still
unsurpassed in power.
I explain the words of my challenge. I mean tragedy,
not drama, and tragedy in its massive elemental form,
free from romantic, subsidiary, or melodramatic admixture; tragedy every word of which adds to the
pathos, which from first to last holds the emotions
spell-bound with an overmastering sense of pity, sympathy, dread. I say that Aeschylus and his successors
in Athens did achieve this. No moderns have surpassed
-have not quite equalled-them  Some may say " We
do not like tragedy in the pure, unmitigated, sable hue
79




80


MORE LAST WORDS


you describe."  I reply " They do not know real
tragedy."  Perhaps they cannot bear it. The Greeks
could.
Of course, I know the outcry that will follow these
words —" Do you mean to put Shakespeare below
them?" Let me clear up this at once. I have always
maintained that Shakespeare is the greatest poet of
mankind-far above even Homer, Dante, Milton,
Goethe, or any of them. He is this by reason of his
vast knowledge of human nature, of his supreme mastery of every type of poetry-tragic, comic, lyric,
gnomic, even of melodrama, and farce. No other poet
had such a range of genius, such encycloppedic thought,
such witchery of language-nay, some of his profound
passages are in prose not in verse. In the piece I
contributed to the noble Book of lomage,* I imagined
all the dramatists of the world conferring the prize of
drama on our Shakespeare, and I made Aristophanes
say in the name of the Attics, "None of us old fellows
ever pretended to wear both comic and tragic wreath.
He alone has mingled both. he made Mirth and Terror
-Fantasy and Reality-join in one irresistible dance
of glorious life." Let no one say that I undervalue
Shakespeare. I worship him as the greatest of all poets.
My point is that in pure, i.e. severe, unalloyed tragedy,
Aeschylus and Sophocles are still unchallenged masters.
Shakespeare did not use this sublime form of tragedy.
Only once perhaps, in Macbeth, did he come near it.
His audience would not endure it. No modern audience
would. But it is the grandest, truest form of tragic art.


* Oxford Press, 4to., 1916.




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY                 81
Why is pure, unqualified tragedy the grandest form
of poetry-why are Shakespeare's tragedies less true
examples of this master art of verse than were the Attics
of the fifth century B.C.? Because then tragedy had a
religious sanction, was the sacrament of a religious cult,
was a rare national ceremony, was inspired by intense
patriotic enthusiasm, waas absolutely clear of any mercantile spirit, was a free gift to all citizens by aid of the
State and private munificence; and lastly, because it
appealed to the passionate interest of the most emotional and most artistic public that ever listened to what
we call "a play," but which they called a sacred  Act.'
These occasions of national festival, arising out of the
national worship, and regarded as acts of devotion to
the country's gods, drew audiences of highly trained
critics compaied with which the rabble who smoked and
drank in the pit of the Globe, and the bedizened Osrics
who lounged and jested on the stage, were vulgar idlers
-and even the petits maitres who listened to Corneille
and Racine were cliques of cynical litterateulrs.  The
ideals, the locality, the audience, the atmosphere of the
theatre which produced the Trilogy were infinitely
nobler than the ideals, the stage, the tone, the frequenters of the theatre that produced Hamlet. They
were on a grander scale, had a loftier aim, and a far more
aesthetic world to award the prize. Shakespeare was
the greatest poetic genius ever given to man. But it
was not given even to him to sweep away his environment, to defy his contemporaries, to recall the ages of
civic and poetic polytheism which were gone for ever.
Imagine the conditions of a tragedy at Athens, on
one of the great national festivals. A festival there was




82)


MORE LAST WORDS


not as with us are Christmas, Whitsun, or a Bank
Holiday, but as are in America the 4th of July, Independence Day, or in France the 14th of July, the Day
of the Republic. Worship of divinities in Greece
mealnt noble public ceremonies, the religion of Art, the
glorification of their City. With garlands, songs, and
sacred images the citizens at dawn crowded to the vast
theatre of Dionysus. It is carved out of the rock of the
Acropolis, and the marble seats rise, tier above tier, so
that thirty thousand persons can be seated, see and hear
In the ccntre stands the altar with incense, dedicated
to the cod, all in the radiant air of Greece, in sight of
the temple and the statue of the patron Goddess. All
citizens are admitted, at first without payment, then
with a nominal ticket to secure order of placing under
the theatre stewards. In the midst the Chorus chant
their hymns and tread their evolutions to the sound of
flutes. There that huge assembly sat through a long
day of ten or twelve hours, bringing with them flowers,
baskets of light food, cushions, and fans or straw hats,
eagerly watching the performance of which they were
to judge the prize. The whole city thrills with excitement. Only chosen dramas are allowed to be repeated.
There is no profit to be gained; no money risked or
won, the prize is a tripod of bronze awarded to the
patriotic citizen who provides the cost of the show.
In my mind's eye, I can watch the scene, for I have
myself stood on the stage of the theatre of Athens, as
well as that of Syracuse, and have recited passages from
the dramatists which were perfectly heard by my companions on the top benches. There would be no footlights, lime-lamps, constant change of scenery, and all




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 88
the mechanical tricks of the modern stage, no hurrying
to the theatre at night from the day's work, and hurrying away before the end to catch the tram, or to get to
a dance. Above all, there was no business manager
watching the till, no actor playing to the gallery, no
mlan anxious for a " big run " of the piece. There was
nothing "caviare to the general", there was no appetite for buffoonery, gore, or torture, at least not in
tragedy proper. The entire day was given up to worship
of the god, national pride, and high art. Surely these
were nobler conditions, a purer atmosphere, than when
a crowd, accustomed to bear-baiting and bull-fights,
gloated over a succession of ghastly episodes, whilst an
actor "' bombasted out the blank verse " of The Jew of
Malta, or of Tamburlaine, or even let us say of Timon
of Athens? Was our mighty genius able to free himself
from the conditions of his time? Did he not play for
hire? Did he not write to make his fortune? Could
he resist the call of the house, eager to see the curtain
fall on a stage "b choked with corpses "?
I must explain:-for I can feel the cries of anger and
of derision which this last sentence of mine will arouse.
I say it again, I revel in "Marlowe's mighty line"
about as much as Swinburne did. I honour Shakespeare not " short of idolatry " but with actual idolatry.
I rejoice in all that modern drama has gained by its
breadth, freedom, variety, subtlety, and humanity. Of
course I am a " modernist" in poetry. I well know
all that the Attic stage sacrificed by its conventions, its
limits, its conditions,-if you will, its superstitions.
Masks, buskins, plastic scenery, the inevitable Messenger, the moralising Chorus, are henceforth in



84


MORE LAST WORDS


possible, and were even then chains on the poet, an
encumbrance to the audience.   The dramia strictly
limited to national festivals, and maintained by private
munificence or State agency, is as dead and gone as
Dionysus and Athena. At the same time, Attic drama
had things we miss. Those who have seen tragedies
performed by daylight or in the open air well know
how much artificial light costs us in true art. The most
truly tragic Hanlet I ever saw was played without any
scenery at all. The simplicity, reserve, majesty, of the
Attic stave in costume, setting, and machinery, are lost
to us. The Greek Chorus filled an office which is most
badly needed in our drama, and is very ill supplied in
modern tragedies by the lyrical and moral element
forcing itself into the dialogue, or rioting in needless
monologues. Lastly, let me be understood as saying
not only that any revival of ancient tragedy is utterly
hopeless-but also that it never was at all perfect or
ideal-and may yet be followed by a far grander type
in the future of humnan art.
The conditions and surroundings of Attic tragedy
imposed limitations which kept it conventional and in
one sense even embryonic; but I cannot admit that all
which modern practice has added is true progress and
development. At least these antique conditions secured
what in my view is the grandest type of tragedy-I
nean that form of drama in which the emotion of the
audience is kept at the uttermost tension of sympathy
with human agony, anxiety in the issue of mortal
struggle between great characters, and the atmosphere
of noble souls above the range of our daily life.  In
Greek tragedy we are lifted up into a world of passion,




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 85
of extraordinary catastrophes, heroic virtues and
daemonic crimes-and whilst our nerves throb with
interest in these great crises of human destiny, in the
grapple of titanic beings, nothing is suffered to come
between us and those who play their tragic parts, nothing of gross and humorous life can disturb our gaze,
nothing is heard or seen that brings us down to the
level of common existence and vulgar commonplace.
Aristotle's description of tragedy is as familiar as it is
profound. Tragedy, he says, presents us with actions
of a solemn kind, which by means of what is terrible
and pitiful cleanse the spirit from all mean or sordid
associations.  Now Attic tragedy at its best did this
with a direct and simple stroke such as romantic tragedy
for all its many resources and breadth never was able
to achieve.
Of course I am carried away with delight by the magic
of Shakespeare's versatility, his immeasurable insight
into every vein in the human soul, by his royal mastery
of every human passion.  My point is that this vast
range of interest, this sense of omniscience which often
seems to us like inspiration, disturbs and dulls the
attention of ordinary mortals whose whole minds
should be fixed on the tragedy-i.e. on the terrible and
pitiable catastrophe they come to witness and to feel., We often hear that the interludes, secondary plot, even
comic scenes, interpolated into romantic tragedy, are
needed as relief to the tension, enable us to bear the
strain  I see the poetic and the moral value, nay let me
add, the melodramatic force, of such scenes as Hamlet
at the grave, or with the players, or with Osric; but,
whilst this adds to our interest in Hamlet's psychology,




86


MORE LAST WORDS


it blunts our pity for hi tragic end. Do we really
thrill with compassion as the dead lie about the stage
in a heap? No! we gather up our wraps, and we say
' Well! Fechter made a better Prince! " Hamlet we
all say-and I too say-is the most fascinating drama
in all human poetry. It is this because it is not simply
pure unrelieved tragedy-but is the most splendid form
which romantic tragedy ever achieved.
You may say " We prefer this romantic tragedythis met:aphysical subtlety, this revelation of character,
this nivstcrv in the convolutions of man's brain. We
need this relief from the strain of emotion." Be it so.
But this is obtained by sacrificing the potent moral
efficacy of intensive pity-i.e. of pure tragedy. Now
pure tragedy is the ideal culmination of dramatic poetry.
The Witches, the Porter, in Macbeth-alas! one of
the tragedies nmost cruelly mangled by interpolationsare rather poor stuff in themselves and add nothing to
the tragic power. I have seen on the stage the greatest
actors of our time in Macbeth; and I confess that, whilst
the tremendous scenes we all know by heart are Shakespeare at his highest, the play as it stands in our texts by
common consent is loose in construction, and as a whole
is not Shakespeare in his mastery of tragic sublimity.
I have seen two great Italian actors play Othello, which
in form is the most organic of all our tragedies, but I
cannot say that the interludes of vulgar riot and vice
gave me any relief from watching the diabolic craft of
lago and the agony of the heroic Moor. And as Johnson says, the end of Othello is not at all deepened or
heightened by the stabbings and bloodshed of the others,
when our eyes are strained to "look on the tragic load



GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 87
ing of this bed." Evidently, the Elizabethan audience
would have a big "butcher's bill," and he who had to
satisfy them in order to live was forced into what is
melodrama rather than tragedy. The great catastrophes
of Aeschylus and Sophocles close with one concentrated
note of pity and awe.
Romeo and Juliet is an immortal idyll of lovc rather
than a real tragedy, and the intermediate scuffles and
masques and the gross old Nurse rather jar on an idyll,
but they are delightful in romantic drama. The play is
better perhaps to read than to see, for the end on the
stage gets somewhat confused and impossible. Few of
the tragedies indeed can be performed quite as they are
printed. Hamlet as printed is too long for one evening.
And parts of the other tragedies have to be adapted to
a modern audience. I hold Lear to be at once the
mightiest and most profound embodiment of Shakespeare's genius-but as a poem-an epic-a human
apocalypse-rather than an acting tragedy. It is rarely
put on the stage-it loses and does not gain by being
acted-it cannot be really acted. I have witnessed it in
performance more than once by the best men of our
time. But to me, at any rate, the effect was rather to
make me wish I had never seen it on the stage. Thus
Shakespeare's prodigious power of creation swept him
up into a world of imagination above the range of visual
tragedy proper. We all read and ponder over Lear.
We do not wish to see it-we do not hope to see it
acted. But tragedy means scenes placed before our
eyes in very substance and truth —agony seen, not
described.
Whence comes this cry for " relief " in a tragic crisis?
7




88


MORE LAST WORDS


The Greeks wvere far more emotional and excitable than
any British audience.  They wanted no comic or pictturesque interludes. The wail of Cassandra, the farewell
speech of Antigone, reach the top note of poignant
pathos. The outburst of Clytemnestra over the corpse
of her husband, the yells of the Furies as they hunt
Orestes down-at which they say the women fainted and
the men howled aloud in the theatre-have never been
surpassed in tremendous horror. The last scene in the
Prometheus when ''the earth rocked in a cataclysm
and the sky was rent by whirlwinds, lightning, and
thunder," was the most awful ever imagined in drama.
The Greeks revelled in all this, though they craved for
no bloodshed, poison, and assassination on the open
stage, as did the groundlings of the Globe. For one
thing, Greek tragedies were much shorter. The three
plays of the Trilogy are hardly longer than Hamlet.
Then, the Chorus supplied the rest between each scene,
when the mind could dwell on the development of the
plot and could be charmed by pure lyric. Again, between each drama, each hardly longer than one modern
act, there was an interval allowed for movement, refreshment, conversation, perhaps for exchange of
critical opinion and formation of the popular judgment
on the piece. All this enabled an Athenian audience to
concentrate its whole soul on the scenes of awe and
pathos, and they would resent the intrusion of
Aristophanic fun or farce.
Now a word as to the Chorus. It is an indispensable
part in Attic drama; in truth, the drama grew out of
the Chorus. The Chorus is essentially antique-bound
up with ancient worship, the festival habit, and civic




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 89
life. It cannot be reproduced in modern times when,
at least in Northern Europe, public parades, religious
processions, hymns, and gymnastic reviews are out of
use. At Rome Seneca used and abused the Chorus out
of measure. But the modern classical drama has made
little of it. Racine used the Chorus in the exceptional
case of the two Biblical dramas written for school girls.
On the few occasions on which Shakespeare and Marlowe have a Chorus as Prologue, the effect is conventional and queer, in spite of some magnificent verse.
But at Athens the Chorus had a great part-a double
part. It made the whole performance a solemn and
civic act of ritual. It shed over the scenes of terror
the grace of high lyric poetry, a sacred consecration,
the moral truth, leaving the dialogue and the great
declamations free from florid ornament.
All this we moderns cannot recover. I once witnessed
the attempt to reproduce the choral tragedy by a troupe
of professional dancers in a circus, with the audience
seated round them in a circle, the actors on a separate
raised stage. The effect was artificial and cold, and it
was even worse when this was attempted for Oedipus
in  a  London    theatre.  The   Bradfield  College
Agamemnon, performed in Greek in the open air in
a chalk quarry, was much better. But the sacred fire
on the altar, the chant to the patron deity, the procession of elders or of virgins-all this means nothing
to us now. So the Chorus on a modern stage becomes
an impracticable relic of the past.
The Attic dramatists threw into the Chorus the most
brilliant flights of their poetic souls.  By a people
accustomed to open-air hymns the words of the most




90


MORE LAST WORDS


dithyramlbic poetry were perfectly heard. In all poetry
there is nothing mnore awful than that Chorus in the
l-galmcmnon about nursing the lion cub; nothing more
profound than that Chorus in the Antigone-" of all
wonders none is more wonderful than Man ", nothing
is more lyric than the hynln to the Sun-god in The
Maidens of Trachinia, or the lovely caressing songs of
the Sea Nyniphs in Prometheus  And Euripides too
made superb use of the Chorus which he tried to transform, as he often tried to transform tragedy proper;
and in his Ion he gave the choral art to the protagonist.
Altogether the Chorus gave to Attic tragedy a greater
quantity of imaginative poetry and airy lyricism than
is found in any romantic drama-even in A Midsummer
Night's Dream or in The Tempest.  I say quantity,
not quality of poetry.
But the Chorus had a second and most important
use-apart from its value in affording relief from strain
and satisfying the love of lyrical charm. Above all, it
left the dialogue and the set speeches-i.e. the action
of the drama-free from the language of fancy and
superfluous adornment. It kept the plot, or core of
tragedy, true to the level of a grand realism proper to
critical incident and direct assertion of will. Now in
romantic drama the characters-even more or less in
Shakespeare's-break out in mid-action into similes,
allusions, exaggeration proper to dithyrambic poetry
but contrary to nature in moments for decisive deeds
and big resolves. Shakespeare's redundant imagination
clothes the resolute purpose of hard, cruel, practical
men with a wealth of imagery-superb as poetry, but
actually clouding the immediate aim and retarding the




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 91
direct action. We so love the poetic ornament that we
will not see that it is often not only out of place but
false to real life. With Marlowe this constantly became
a superb rant, and with all the Elizabethans it was often
an almost farcical storm of big words and sesquipedalian
declamation.  Loyalty to our mighty poet must not
blind us to the fact that the Oestrus of inspiration too
often drove even him to crowd a speech of breathless
action with wreaths of fancy and with obscure tropes.
He was too great a poet to be able to check his Pegasus
to keep on earth in the sphere of pure tragedy.
Now I see that I must try to justify this shocking
heresy.  I will not take an early play or a play not
wholly his own.   I put aside Titus and Tirnon-the
Histories, and dramnas which are not true tragedies.
Romeo and Juliet is an idyll more than a tragedy. But
even in a rhapsodic idyll can extravagance go further
than a girl not yet fourteen saying:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Toward Phoebus' lodging; such a waggoner
As Phaeton would whip you to the West-etc., etc.?
Beautiful-lvric-but almost euphuistic.  Now Sophocles would put this in the Chorus, not in the mouth of
Antigone or Electra. Again Romeo, this virgin's lover,
is described as ' day in night," and will "lie upon the
wings of night, whiter than new snow on a raven's
back." Beautiful! we all say, but not Sophoclean
tragedy.  And when the crone tells her that Romeo
had killed Tybalt, she breaks out:
O serpent heart, hid with a flowering face!
Dove-feathe'red raveu! wolvish-ravening lamb!




92


MORE LAST WORDS


Poetry! yes, romantic poetry!-is it nature?     And,
surely, there is rank euphuism in the lines
Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound? O that deceit should dwell
In such a gorgeous palace!
Romeo is first a vile " book" and then a gorgeous
"palace."   Do war-brides talk like that?
Turn to Hamlet. I will not accuse Hamlet of bombast, because the Prince was a poet (I often think was
one Will of Stratford himself), at least he was in a state
of fierce excitement and was pretending to be crazy till
at last he forgot that his madness was not real. But
most of the others break into furious poetic tropes-the
King, the Queen, Laertes, Horatio.     Horatio was a
scholar and, speaking of the Moon, he says-to the
sentry at his postthe moist star,
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands,
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse, etc., etc.
Fancy a young Captain (from Oxford) so addressing
Tommies in the trenches.    So too, the King even on
his knees speaks splendid poetry. And the Queen's
exquisite dirge over the brook where Ophelia laypoetry that might make Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth green with envy-is utterly unnatural in the first
hour of a woman's sorrow. Sophocles would have put
it in the Chorus, not in a dialogue; and he certainly
would not allow Laertes to reply with the shocking
conceit that, as his sister had had too much of water,
he will try not to shed tears. Oh dear! And then
Laertes in the grave, holding his dead sister in his arms,




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 98
calls out to the comic grave-diggers to throw up earth
enough to make a mountain " to o'ertop old Pelion or
the skyish head of blue Olympus." Surely all this is
to "out-herod Herod."    Is it not "a robustious fellow tearing a passion to tatters, to split the ears of the
groundlings "?
No Greek audience would have endured such rantimitated from Seneca at his worst, nor would they have
endured to see eight of the characters in Haimlet killed
off-five of them on the stage. In Greek tragedies,
murder is not committed before the eyes of the spectators, and one pathetic death makes the tragedy. Half
a dozen corpses rather confuse and blunt the emotions.
So does the end of Othello, which has long been recognised as bathos, and is not played out on the stage with
all the stabbings and bloodshed which disturb our sense
of pathos in Desdemona's death. Othello truly says
Rude am I in my speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.
And yet his "unvarnished tale" discourses about
Anthropophagi. And he says of himselfwhen light-wing'd toys
Of feather'd Cupid seel with wanton dullness
My speculative and officed instruments:
his helmet may be made into a saucepan, etc. etc.
Then he tells Iago that his thoughts, "like to the
Pontic Sea," keep due on "to the Propontic and the
Hellespont."   And in his last gasping words he
describes hinmself as
one whose subdued eyes
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum.




94


MORE LAST WORDS


Poetic. Yes! but is it nature?
Then as to Macbeth-I think the most truly tragic
of the tragedies on the stage, when well acted and free
from  extravagant witch-pantomime, sword-play, and
from useless scenes which mnay not be Shakespeare at
all.  I have myself seen Macready, Phelps, Irving,
Tree and other men, Ristori, Helen Faucit, Kate and
Ellen Terry, and other famous actresses, and the effect
is tremendous.   But need Macbeth spout Pindaric
images about
Pity, like a naked, new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or henvn's cherubim, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the airor how witchcraft celebrates ' Pale Hecate's offerings,'
or of " Tarquin's ravishing strides," and how his bloody
hand  will "the multitudinous seas incarnadine"?
Magnificent, unforgotten lines! But are not these the
ideas of the marvellous poet who could beat Marlowe
and Webster at their own game, not at all the language
of a fierce Scottish chief of the tenth century about to
murder his Kin?
If we were to consider Anthony and Cleopatra and
Measure for Measutre as " tragedies "-which they are
not-both are often disappointing —even to me irritating-by their mixture of magnificent passages, great
poetry, profound psychology, with trivial, even disgusting, incidents. Both have scrambling plots without
any true dramatic unity or coherence. Anthony with
its incoherent jumping about the habitable world is
historical romance not tragedy-hardly serious drama
to witness, however interesting and fascinating to read.
The last two Acts of Measure for Measure are unnatural




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 95
and nasty fit for very coarse melodrama, and not intelligible as the conduct of decent men and women.
The Duke behaves like a King in a pantomime, even
Isabella stoops to a shady intrigue. We fear that both
plays are entirely Shakespeare's own. There is no
mistaking the author of some of the most magnificent
poetry in our literature. They prove to us in what a
world of vicious excitement his work was cast. The
praise of Anthony by Coleridge is extravagant, if we
consider it as a play, rather than a poetic tour de force.
And so is Pater's praise of Measure for Measure  Never
trust a poet as judge of poetry, nor a painter as judge
of painting. They are biassed by what specially appeals
to their own art. Now Coleridge wrote some absurdly
bad dramas himself; and Pater invented the euphuism
of the Victorian age.
Many persons who have seen the most popular plays
on the stage have forgotten and have ceased to read the
entire play carefully in the text. Most of the plays are
seldom acted exactly as they were written. Some plays
really gain by the acting version, because experience
has shown how the plot can be made more compact,
and even intelligible to an audience. Some plays lose
when important scenes are dropped. A really true
estimate of Shakespeare as dramatist, rather than as
poet, demands a complete and critical study of all the
texts as they are found in the Quartos and Folios.
This will show that Shakespeare did not write his
plays-at least most of them-with any thought of their
being read by a large public-certainly not in after
ages, in every household all over the world. He did
not write with any idea of leaving a great work of




96


MORE LAST WORDS


literature, as Milton wrote Paradise Lost, as did the
French and Italian dramatists. Nor did he write as did
the Greek dramatists for a very large public audience
and a nation of highly trained critics, who eagerly
followed every line. He had no thought of future
generations, of literature of a permanent kind. He
worked often hastily, sometimes carelessly for a small
— in part a rather gross and brutal-audience. He
seems to have despised it, and often gave them anything
that came to hand. He accepted his position as theatrical
craftsman. He meant to make a good fortune, and he
did. He seems never to have been conscious of his own
supreme genius, of the immortal part that it was
destined to plua in the future of his country and of the
world.
I have never seen any adequate explanation of this
unique phenomenon in psychology and the history of
literature. The stock praise of Shakespeare's sublime
modesty and suppression of self is no explanation.
There is nothing sublime or heroic in what we know
personally of the poet-nor did his contemporaries suspect it in the delightful, brilliant, good fellow they all
loved. We choose to imagine him as a moralist-almost
as a prophet. The stage Shylock as the hero of a
persecuted race is a mere modern attempt to cover the
poet's rather cynical view-which is the vulgar hatred
of the Jew, and in the farcical and inhuman plot of
The Tamina of the Shrew Shakespeare's own estimate
of woman is only too obvious; and the serious and
beautiful speech of Katharlna which closes the play is
an indictment on marriage and on civilization as we
understand this.




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 97
I know all this is blasphemy, sacrilege, parricide!
But I have long wanted to protest against the deification
of our immortal poet, and the sort of verbal inspiration
attributed to his every word. These plays are not Holy
Writ and much of the thirty-six dramas is not all his
best work, and a good deal in the texts we have is not
his at all. Even his best was written to fill the Globe
Theatre and was coloured by the tone and the ideas of
the regular playgoers between the time of Marlowe and
that of Ford-about two generations-an era of wonderful imagination, of irresistible genius, but an age of
wild passions and of gross taste. It was under the spell
of young scholars saturated with the Senecan drama;
and the tremendous contests of that age brought them
near to the Neronian love of holocausts in the Amphitheatre. Shakespeare and his company could not have
lived unless they ministered to that audience. Hence
we have the brutalities in Titus Andronicus, in Pericles,
Abhorson, the blinding of Gloucester, the massacre in
Hamlet-horrors which no Athenian could have endured to see. As Horace says, what we hear told has
not the same poignancy as what we see. Murder,
mutilation, torture, is revolting to decent men and
women. The instant desire to stop such horrors, to
turn away from the sight, to break out into imprecations, to interfere, chokes and drives out pity. Seneca,
Marlowe and Kyd taught Shakespeare to regard this as
fine tragedy. And Shakespeare has taught too many
of us to think so too. WVe read all this in our divine
poet and laugh at the Greek and the classical drama
which will not show slaughter on the stage But happily none of the worst horrors have ever been actually




98


MORE LAST WORDS


presented on the stage for many generations past. We
can bear to read them and accept then in reading on
the authority of Shakespeare.
All this is splendid as poetry. And great tragedy
must be clothed with poetry from the first line to the
last. It requires stately diction, free from all everyday
speech.  It admits declamation in due measure, as
belonging to vehement emotion. It does not admit
hyperbolic tropes or idyllic graces thrust into the midst
of dialogue and declarations of resolve. The Greek
dramatists use grand diction-especially Sophocles.
They keep lyric poetry for the Chorus. Aeschylus, no
doubt, occasionally breaks out into the "lofty-crested
plume-waving words s which Aristophanes ridiculesbut except in Chorus, Aeschvlus does not relax his Muse
into idyllic lyric. In the seven tragedies of Sophocles
there would not be found a speech such as in nature
no heroic character would utter-a speech which jars
on us as extravagant, fantastic, grotesque.
The secret of Sophocles is tone, i.e. harmony, keeping, unity.  He never "o'ersteps the modesty of
nature "; in the very " whirlwind of passion he begets
a temperance that may give it smoothness," as Hamlet
counsels but does not always so act.  The essence of
Greek, of all classical drama is Unity-not the antiquated and much abused Unity of Place or of Time
(both absurd conventions)-but the true Unity of a
concentrated impression on the main subject of interest.
This is not the pedantic Unity of Action vaunted by
French academics which ends in jejune narrowness of
subject; but rather a resolute purpose to keep the main
theme of pity and dread always predominant, so that




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 99
the mind is never distracted by secondary Interests,
however brilliant and full of new character they may be.
The essence of romantic drama on the contrary is
variety, contrast of character, multiplicity of impression.
This may be magnificent drama, Hamlet is its avatar.
But its very brilliancy, its variety, its profusion of
psychologic interest, inevitably dull or divert the force
of stroke on our emotions. Two agonies, two, even
three or four murders, catastrophes, anxieties and
dreads, do not add to the pity and the sympathy we feel.
They blunt it. Whose fate is the most pitiable-the
most undeserved-the most tragic-is it that of Hamlet,
the Ghost, or Ophelia, or her father, or her brother, or
Hamlet, the Prince? They all suffer cruelly, suddenly,
unjustly.  It is a veritable Dance of Death.  In the
Oedipus, in Antigone, in Electra, in Trachinians, in
Ajax of Sophocles-or Cassandra in the Agamemnon
of Aeschylus-tragic death is allotted to more than one,
but they are all the mere under-study of the one great
catastrophe on which all centres. That is the classical
Unity in tragedy, which perhaps is observed only in
Macbeth, and not entirely in that play. That is why,
when we had great actors, Macbeth was always the
favourite play of Edmund Kean and Mrs. Siddons.
The essence of the great Greek dramatists is a
stupendous and tragic action-a terrible catastrophe
wrought on some noble character-in the crisis of a cruel
struggle with destiny or ruthless enemies.  The
Prometheus is the highest type of this conception; and
in all the tragedies this is the central idea, in some with
a final salvation and rest from suffering. Excepting in
the Persae, which dramatizes one of the decisive battles




100


MORE LAST WORDS


in the history of civilization, wherein the author himself
had fought, the seven tragedies of Aeschylus and the
seven tragedies of Sophocles, as well as the eighteen
tragedies of Euripides, all turn on the epic and legendary
stones of the inexhaustible Greek mythology.  All
present the spectacle of heroic character, the will and
heart of superhuman men and women in situations of
agony.  Psychology, variety, incident, even subtlety,
there is: in some a tornado of passion, in all the deadly
grapple of conflicting natures and inextricable entanglement of plot. But the action is ever the dominant
theme. And this dominant theme is maintained with
a unlty of tone, a concentration of interest, which is the
supreme test of the purest art.
Modern romantic tragedy    makes character the
dominant theme and consigns action, plot, and
catastrophe to a secondary part.  In multiplying the
most startling contrasts of character, the most incongruous situations, the trivial and the sublime, humour
and death, it disregards tnity of tone. This romantic
drama has given us, as in Lear and Hamlet, immortal
creations of human genius, the greatest triumphs of the
poetic art. But as spectacles on the stage something
of tragic is lost.  Romantic drama sacrifices the
solemnity, the thrill of pure tragedy. And when half
the scenes are serio-comic, or when the period of the
drama runs over half a lifetime and three continents, or
if the characters are matured and developed in the course
of years-as in Winter's Tale, Troilus and Cressida,
Antony and Cleopatra, Tamburlaine, Schiller's Wallenstein and Goethe's Faust, not to mention Ibsenthen these plays are dramatized romances, not tragedies




GREEK AND ELIZABETHAN TRAGEDY 101
at all. Dramatized romances are often magnificent
poetry and intensely interesting. But in strict art, the
proper field to work out the formation of character, with
a plot drawn out in place and time, is romance rather
than drama. It is too great a strain to call on an
audience, in the space of three hours, to witness man
or woman grow from youth to age, fly to and fro, from
Rome to Antioch or Alexandria, or turn from a dreamy
pedant into a noble hero.
Our own tragedy at the latter part of the sixteenth
century was founded on Seneca and hardly ever shook
itself quite clear of some of the evils of its origin.
Seneca's ten tragedies all turn on the Greek myths
which  they  distort with  savagery, extravagance,
casuistry, and rhetoric. It is a pity that Seneca is not
now more read. In spite of his atrocities, his bombast,
his melodrama, he is interesting by his ingenuity and
as the author of modern sensationalism. Our Elizbethans were saturated with Roman drama. The
French and the Italian poets went direct to Greece. I
am not willing to defend the conventional limitations
imposed by their age on Corneille and Racine, nor the
rigid concentration on the catastrophe which Alfieri
imposed on himself. But French and Italian tragedy
has been too much neglected by us and even unjustly
decried by our foremost critics, until we have come in
our insular arrogance to hold as our creed-There is
but one form of tragedy, and Shakespeare is its prophet.
Racine and Alfieri had noble ideas of tragedy and have
left grand examples of its most stately form, though
Racine was led by desire for unity of tone to sacrifice
to the superstition of the academic unities; and Alfieri




102)


MORE LAST WORDS


would never suffer the tragic situation of the moment
to be relieved by the intrusion of a word of fancy or a
flight of poetic rapture.
Greek tragedy, I know, is extinct beyond possibility
of revival.  Its rare performance, its Chorus, its
mythologic subjects, its ritual solemnity, are no more.
It had its own defects in its Prologues, the passion for
long perorations, those alternate retorts (zcr/uueota), its
rigidity-its superstitious conventions, the intervention
of deities ex machtna.  At best, it was never perfect
art, never free art. But it had its own supreme ideal.
I can imagine that ideal taking on a more expansive,
more liberal, and more human form, if the heroic past
of Humanity ever came to receive a religious consecration, if Art ever could free itself from slavery to
Mammon; if every manifestation of human character
ever came to be invested in our eyes with a tragic
meaning of its own, whatever the humble exterior it
wears and the absence of pomp and dignity in the
estimate of the crowd.




V


THE ART OF TRANSLATION
MONG the intellectual advances of our age none
is more important than the sense of a high
literary standard in the art of translation. We
all now recognise the critical part which translation has
to play in general literature. For all but men of wide
learning, much of the great literature of the world is
known only by translation. Take the supreme case of
the Bible, of which the authorized version formed the
master type of the English language. To the millions
the power of the Old Testament is due to the sublime
effect of a unique translation from the Hebrew  and
to me the New Testament in English is grander than
in the Greek-which is largely a translation of other
tongues. See how many immortal works are known
to the general reader only by translation  Homer,
Plutarch, "Don Quixote," Montaigne, even to many
"Gil Bias" and "Faust."   But for adequate translations these would be sealed books to the multitude.
It is then of supreme importance to maintain the true
laws of translation. And the chief of these laws are:
(1), exact rendering of the full meaning; (2), some
echo of the original form; (8), clarity, grace, and
vigour in the new version.


103


8




104


MORE LAST WORDS


Now all through the eighteenth century, almost
down to living memory in the nineteenth century,
famous translations were produced in defiance of the
first two canons of translation, aiming only at clarity,
grace, and vigour in literary English, neglecting the
meaning of their author, and substituting a totally
different rhythm  of their own.  The most brilliant
example of this was Pope's " Iliad."  The life and
ring of these heroic couplets have carried the substance
of the immortal epic over the world, but they were
utterly careless of the Greek words, and alien to the
glorious roll of Homer's hexameter. Even more alien
to the stately pathos of Virgil and the subtle melody of
the " Aeneid," was Drvden's version. The success of
both started off translators in the same style-Dr.
Francis' Horace, Rowe's Lucian, Gifford's Juvenal,
Hoole's " Ariosto " and his ' Tasso "-" Translations
by Several Hands." it was called-Potter's " Attic
Dramatists," Melmoth's Cicero, and the like  The
aim was to produce "an elegant version," to imitate
the point and cadence of Pope and Dryeden, the flow
of Addison's or Johnson's prose. They made what
musicians call "variations" of popular themes. The
exact sense of the original, the harmony of its form,
was no business of theirs.
All this time the great scholars, many in Germany
and Holland, occupied themselves in collating texts,
explaining the meaning of the classics. usually in Latin
and with ponderous comments. They were not troubled
about fine versions, and seemed afraid of heing thought
readable.  At last in 1791 Cowper's "Iliad" and
" Odyssey " showed what could be done in blank verse




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


105


to render the meaning of Homer. Cary, in blank
verse, opened to English readers the idea of Dante's
great poem, which, if faithful in sense, conveyed little
indeed of the profound music of the Italian. Then
Shelley and Coleridge proved how the metre of Milton
could give us adequate translations of such poets as
Calderon, Goethe, and Schiller. In the middle of the
nineteenth century our chief scholars undertook the
most exact rendering of the classics in pure and graceful
English, which was at once nobly faithful to the
original and retained at least its dignity and life.
George Long, H A. J. Munro, John Conington,
Professor Jowett, Sir Richard Jebb, Andrew Lang,
Verrall, Rogers, Morshead, Bywater, Gilbert Murray,
Dr. Way, J    W. Mackail, Professor Fowler, have
given us in prose and even in verse, the sense if not the
majesty of the great books of old.
In prose literature we may almost claim for them a
complete success. Herodotus, Aristotle, Thucydides,
Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, are now revealed
to the mere English reader in their full sense and range
-even Plato, in all but his incommunicable charm.
For the poems of the ancients we can make no such
high claim. The first and the third law of translation
have been achieved-yes! exact meaning, clarity, and
vigour   But alas! where is the supreme form of the
original, the music, the mystery of word, the unforgotten vision, the inimitable phrase of the true seer?
As Shelley told us " It is impossible to represent in
another language the melody of the versification; even
the volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in
the crucible of translation."  Now Shelley wrote this




106


MORE LAST WORDS


as a note to his verse rendering of the opening of
Goethe's " Faust "-one of the most beautiful bits of
translation of poetry in our language. If Shelley could
not achieve the problem, no one else could. Dante had
said much the same long before. Still, translation of
poetry has to be. If the melody of the original cannot
be transferred, some "echo of its form" must be
caught, for even perfect prose of any sublime poem will
always strike us as cold-wanting in something.
For Homer, as many poets claim to be his translator
as cities claimed to be his birthplace. Pope caught
some ring of the battle hymns, but he sang them in a
modern tune of his own invention. Cowper-as poet,
the absolute antithesis of Homer-in a modest and
scholarly version, gave us the sense of the " Iliad," but
nothing of its majesty and fire. Then George Chapman,
poet and scholar, made a splendid attempt to do the
impossible in a version which revealed the Hellenic
world to John Keats, we know, but which, by its unwieldy  seven-foot rhyming  couplets reduced the
"Iliad" to what was hardly English verse-and certainly was not Homer's hexameter. He felt this, for
his "Odyssey" was in the five-foot couplets, like
Pope's, and was more like English verse, but not more
like Homer's. I can read Cowper's " Odyssey "; and
there is much beauty in Philip Worsley's version of
the " Odyssey " in Spenserian stanza. All attempts to
put the " Iliad " into any forn of stanza, or any formn
of rhyme, or into dactylics, or hexameters, much less
into any ballad metre, are in my opinion utterly futile.
If we want a translation in verse-and we do want itI prefer Lord Derby's " Iliad " in blank verse. It has




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


107


accuracy, dignity, vigour. The Stanley, at least, was
a chieftain, a ruler of men, an orator.
After much study of Matthew Arnold's masterly
essay On Translating Homer I still hold it possible to
put the " Iliad " into blank verse; and I think it has
been adequately done by the Earl of Derby. His
version was not published in complete form until some
years after Arnold's Essay, and it was not before
Arnold when he wrote     Lord Derby's translation is
not at all Miltonic, in the stateliness, conciseness, and
majesty peculiar to Milton. Lord Derby is far more
rapid, fluent, and impetuous than Cowper, and yet
dignified and epic. Compare the passages that Arnold
criticises from the speech of Sarpedon in " Iliad XII,"
or that of Achilles to his horse in " Iliad XIX," Lord
Derby's version has none of the stiffness, awkwardness
and commonplace which Arnold finds in other translators. Lord Derby's translation, I think, fulfils all
four of Arnold's tests. It is rapid: plain and direct in
expression: and also in thought: finally it is eminently
noble. As to Arnold's scheme of Homer in English
hexameters it was one of his blunders, as was also his
idea that the " Iliad " was composed by a single poet.
Arnold's own attempts have no ring or rhythm in
English verse, and in a long poem would be sadly
fatiguing.
Ancient poetry can be turned in our blank verse; but
rhyme is abhorrent to Greek and Latin; and it is the
inevitable snare in all our attempts to translate either.
The glory, the value, of the classical tongues is in the
precision, subtlety, and parsimonious use of words.
An English sentence must use twice as many words as




108


MORE LAST WORDS


the equivalent Latin, and nearly as many against the
Greek. Now, the exigency of rhyme compels a translator to resort to expletives which are not in the text
he is copying. Hence, phrases steal in, which dilute
and confuse the sense. Whatever the poverty of our
blank verse, it is free from the seductions of rhyme.
Again, the structure of our tongue, with crowded
consonants, crashing vocables, and paucity of vowel
endings, makes imitation of the ancient metres hopeless. The first line of the " Iliad " has only five words.
In English there must be ten. The first line of the
"Aeneid" has eight words. In English there will be
fifteen. The " Iliad " and the " Aeneid " are composed
entirely of dactyls and spondees. In English there are
no true dactyls nor spondees. An English dactylic
hexameter is too long, too jumpy, too much of a ballad
for a grand epic   For Homer especially there are
excellent prose versions, in the rather antique spirit of
Malorv and Browne, the " Iliad " by Andrew Lang,
Leaf, and Myers; the "Odyssey," by S. H. Butcher
and Andrew Lang. The true Homer is embedded
there.
The Greek dramatists fare better in translation than
Homer, for their dialogues are mainly in iambic metre,
and iambic is the natural metre for English verse. A
long succession of poets and scholars has given us
versions of Attic tragedies and comedies. Dean Milnan, Robert Browning, Professor Lewis Campbell,
E. D. A. Morshead, Professor Gilbert Murray, Miss
Anna Swanwick, Sir George Young, Dr. A. S. Way,
have translated in verse Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. J. H. Frere, T. Mitchell, B. B. Rogers, Pro



THE ART OF TRANSLATION


109


fessor Gilbert Murray, have made brilliant versions of
Aristophanes. In prose, the great tragedies have been
admirably rendered by Sir Richard Jebb, Dr. Verrall,
and many others.   To my mind, Dean Milman's
"Agamemnon," Miss Anna Swanwick's Aeschylus,
and that of Mr. Morshead, are the most like poetry in
English. Browning's experiments in " Agamemnon "
and Euripides would sound horribly queer to a Greek,
and the " Agamemnon " of Fitzgerald is an unforgivable paraphrase.  With all the scholarship and
versatility of Professor Murray, I cannot allow the use
of rhyme in the iambic dialogue of Greek tragedy.
Rhyme fatally obscures and dilutes the sense and is
alien to the Pheidian majesty of Aeschylus.  The
Aristophanes of B. B. Rogers is an astonishing triumph
of the power of English verse to render the dazzling
life and riotous wit of the greatest of all comic poets
known to man.
For Greek lyric poetry I can find no possible verse
translation, unless it be Calverley's Theocritus.  But
Pindar has been admirably translated in prose by
Ernest Myers; and so Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus
have been equally well given by Andrew Lang. So,
too, the lovely lines of the Anthology have been translated in prose by J. W. Mackail. When we come to
Sappho, translation is useless, except to help us read
the fragments in Greek. The beautiful little book of
H. T. Wharton, 1885-" Sappho: Memoir, Text,
Renderings, Prose Translation," has nore than thirty
translations in verse by famous persons from Catullus
to Mr. Gladstone. None of then wsill do. The literal
prose is bald and lifeless; the verse is mere modern




110


MORE LAST WORDS


prettiness, more than doubling the words used, and
losing all the passion and fire. Greek lyrical poetry,
above all Sappho's hymns and wails, can only be felt
in their native tongue.  As Shelley tells us-"the
volatile strength and delicacy of the ideas escape in the
crucible of translations."
And all this is evident when we come to the Latin
epic and lyrics. Dryden's " Aeneid" offends against
all canons of translation even more than Pope's " Iliad."
It is not correct is alien to Virgil's form  and what
vigour it has, is wholly without grace. In his huge
dedication Dryden discusses rhythm and boasts about
his system of scansion, but he is blind to the infinite
refinement of Virgil's art, and he is deaf to the exquisite
pathos of the inimitable verse.  How the Mantuan
would shudder as he joins Homer in the Elysian groves,
could he hear the sing-song of Dryden's cheap treble
rhymes! Nor is Christopher Pitt's version much better.
Then a great scholar, Professor John Conington, having
made a valuable prose translation of the " Aeneid,"
must needs turn it into the short ballad metre of Scott's
" Marmion "-an outrage to the stately " andante " of
Maro. So, Lord Bowen, a brilliant scholar, did six
'Aeneids" in a dactylic catalectic hexameter of his
own invention. Dactylics are impossible in English
verse, as Tennyson told us:" Barbarous experiment, barbarous hexameter."
The only possible verse translation of the " Aeneid"
is blank verse-as was true of the " Iliad." And this
has been excellently achieved by Mr. Charles J. Billson
who has given a version of the entire "Aeneid" in




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


111


blank verse, exactly line for line with the text on the
opposite page (2 vols. 4to 1906). The book from its
size and cost may not be widely known. But to my
mind, it is the type of what a verse translation of an
epic should be. And in this metre we have Tennyson's
magnificent rendering of the " Iliad " VIII, 542-561.
Munro's "Lucretius" is the pride of Cambridge
scholarship, and his careful prose translation has opened
to all who care to seek it the mystical agnosticism of the
ancient world. A good version in blank verse has
recently appeared by Sir Robert Allison.  Robinson
Ellis' life work on Catullus has been the pride of Oxford
scholarship, but his attempt at verse translation is a
melancholy mistake. Roman lyrics are as untranslatable
as the Greek-perhaps even more so, owing to the
severe conciseness of the Latin tongue. There are good
translations of them in prose; but I cannot find any
real success in verse. A prose version of a lyric is like
hearing a thrilling song strummed over on a piano.
Blank verse kills the lyric quality altogether. And
modern rhyme causes constant dilution and variations.
Of all lyrics this is most conspicuous in the Odes of
Horace. These depend for their charm on the simplicity, brevity, precision of phrase-the "curiosa
felicitas "-the "concinnitas" of the apt-the only
word. A line of Horace has to be expanded into two
lines of English-five words become ten or twelve-and
still the exact connotation is exhaled. Mr. S. A.
Courtauld has published the Odes with metrical versions
on the opposite page from some fifty authors. They
are all diffuse, or obscure, or unmusical —anything




MORE LAST WORDS


indeed but Horace, in spite of their ingenuity and care.
Oddly enough, where famous poets, even Milton and
Dryden, quite misrepresent or embroider Horace,
Calverley, Conington, Lord Ravensworth, and Whyte
M1elvillc, if they cannot hit the bull's-eye, make a close
mark in an  outer.''  As good as any is Mr. Courtauld's
own version of Ode I 9.-" Vides ut alta stat nive
candidumn.
'See! where Soracte's lofty brow
Is mantled o'er with glistening snow;
How with the weight the forests bow,
And clogged with ice the rivers flow "*
Yes! quite good! w-ere it not that English needs
twenty-five words to express what Latin can put in
seventeen words.   And then, the snare of rhyme!
" Brow ' and " snow " are too near in sound to make
different rhymes.  And "flow" is hardly right for
constiterint."
Mr. Courtauld adopts the excellent plan of printing
the original on the opposite page, as Mr. Billson does
with the " Aeneid," and as Sir Richard Jebb has done
for his Sophocles, and Mr. B. B. Rogers did for his
Aristophanes. This is the practice also of the very
valuable collection known as the Loeb Classical Library,
which already presents in handy 12mo. volumes a series
of Greek and Latin authors in verse and prose with
translation and original on opposite pages.  In these
neat manuals they whose ancient learning has gone
rusty, and they with whom it was never quite bright,
may renew, or improve, their familiarity with the im

*? And rivers ice-bound cease to flow




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


113


mortal works of old.  And there is a recent book by
Mr. J. T. Sheppard, who arranged the Cambridge
acting version of the Oresteia, I mean his new " Oedipus
Tyrannus." It has the Greek on one page, an exact
translation on the opposite page-the iambics in blank
verse, and critical notes to explain what in English
drama would be ample stage directions, and divisions of
acts and scenes. This seems to me the type of what is
wanted to illustrate the Attic tragedies. And it is the
plan long ago used by B. B. Rogers in his Aristophanes
to which his whole life was devoted.
WXe turn now to the modern languages, of course,
first to Italian, for this was far the earliest of the modern
languages to assume a final and organic structure. Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio wrote a finished poetry and
prose, when English, French, and Spanish, were beginning to crystallize. For Dante an enormous amount
of labour has been expended, and many lives have been
devoted to illustrate, explain, and translate him.  In
prose versions a great success has been achieved. In
1849 John Carlyle, brother of Thomas, published a fine
prose version of the "Inferno." Since then Mr. A.
J. Butler has turned the entire Divine Comedy into
pure and vigorous English. And Mr. W. Warren
Vernon has published and republished in six closelyknit volumes the three cantos with literal translation in
sectional ' readings," and abundant historical and
literary comments. The prose, too, of Abbe Lamennais
in archaic French will be of great use to those who are
beginning to study Italian.
It is impossible to notice all the verse translations.
Cary, Pollock, Longfellow, and many more, in blank




114


MORE LAST WORDS


verse or in couplets, do something to give the sense and
the profound rapture of the poet. But with Dante, as
with Homer, it is the grand music of the form which
is the mark of the supreme poet.  And the form of
Dante's great poem is more intricate and more subtle
than that of the " Iliad." Those who have studied the
terza rima with its treble rhymes, the involution of the
tercets, the concatenation and development of the idea
whlere the rhyme sounds like an echo, of "the linked
sweetness long drawn out," " the hidden soul of harmony "-they well know how impossible it is to reproduce that in another language. Again, Italian offers
such contrasts to English-one with its musical words,
ending in vowel sounds, its shrinking from a nest of
consonants, from doubled and trebled letters, and harsh
discords: the other, with all its power and life, proudly
disdaining languorous cadences.  All this defies the
transfusion of the "morbidezza" of Italian into the
masculine and organ-note of our tongue. For that
reason I hold all attempts to imitate the rhyme or to
resort to the metre of the original to be futile. Cayley,
Plumptre, Wright and others, have used immense
ingenuity and labour in pursuing a phantom. Dr.
Shadwell tried the short stanza of Marvell's " Horatian
Ode "-one pair of rhymed eight-syllable lines, and
one pair of rhymed six-syllable lines. Alas! short uneven lines, rhymed couplets, are far away from Dante's
majestic epic march. What English can match-" Lo
di che han detto ai dolci amici addio " —or again"Dolce color d'oriental zaffiro "? None, I trow!
When we come to the Italian lyrists, they have
exercised a masterful influence on our poetry from the




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


115


fourteenth century until our own day. Dante and his
cycle, his predecessors and his followers, Petrarch,
Filicaja, Manzoni, and Leopardi, have been the models
of our sonneteers. Dante and those before and after
him invented the sonnet; Petrarch perfected it and
settled its canons. A full account of these and of this
influence may be read in W. Courthope's great " History of English Poetry" (6 vols., 8mo., 1895-1910).
Wyatt, Surrey, and the Tudor poets passionately
seized on the general idea of the sonnet, fourteen lines
with alternate rhymes-but they did not know, or
could not adopt, the strict Petrarchian formulas.
These were-two quatrains of alternate rhymes in a
very artful sequence, with only two rhyming sounds for
the whole eight lines-then, at the end of the eighth
line a certain pause, with two tercets also in artful
sequence, with two, or at most three, new rhymes, but
no rhymed couplet at the close. The Tudor lyrists did
not attempt this most artificial and very difficult system.
Shakespeare's Sonnets follow a different scheme-viz.,
three quatrains rhymed alternately, and concluded with
a final rhymed couplet, so as to have seven different
rhymes in the fourteen lines, instead of four or five.
For the first time Milton wrote English sonnets in the
true Petrarchian form, or very near it. Our poets
have been very shy to fetter themselves with those
exotic rules-Byron, Shelley, Tennyson. Swinburne
have other melodies of their own. But Wordsworth,
Keats, Rossetti, Sir W. Watson have perfectly
mastered it.
I believe that all attempts to imitate in English the
metres of Greek, Latin, or any poetry in dactylic-or




116


MORE LAST WORDS


any form that makes a foot to consist of three syllables,
will fail, owing to the nature of our language. Our
words consist of so many knotted consonants that few
words of three syllables can be pronounced readily as
a single foot; and even if a dactylic foot of three
syllables is made up of short words-a, in, to, the-the
next word often begins with thick consonants which in
utterance cause a kind of stress. However little English
verse regards quantity, in the Greek and Latin sense,
the laws of the human tongue assert themselves in
utterance, and make it difficult or unpleasing to pronounce quickly syllables in which the vowels are embedded in a fence of consonants. Who could pronounce
as dactyls, tribrachs, or anapaests, such words aspleasantness, down-hearted, commandment? The best
that can be done is, by slurring over long syllables, to
make them serve in iambic or trochaic metres. All the
great and long poems in English are necessarily written
in iambics with partial use of trochees, and even they
are grandly indifferent to quantity.
Thus, on these grounds I hold that the only practical
metre for English translation of great poems should be
in the unrhymed blank verse which proves to be so
noble an instrument in the hands of Shakespeare,
Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson.
As to Spanish poetry, with its archaic system of
assonance in lieu of what we call rhyme, there is no
need to attempt "a version in the original metre."
Calderon's glorious dramas have been well translated
by D. F. McCarthy, who has turned fourteen plays into
successful English. The eight dramas by Edward Fitzgerald, by his own admission, are rather paraphrases




THE ART OF TRANSLATION


117


than an exact rendering of the Spanish. They are
surprising examples of what paraphrase can do; and, as
he says, this is rather fit for the more homely pictures
of national habits than for the imaginative poetry of
Calderon's greatest.
Some scenes of "The Magician" have been nobly
rendered in blank verse by Shelley. Would that he
had done more to make English readers know the poet
who in Spain filled the parts of Shakespeare and of
Milton, giving his country the national tragedy and the
ideal of the national religion.
We have been fortunate indeed to have abundant
translations of the great Spanish work of Cervantes, for
a mastery of the difficult text of " Don Quixote" is
not common. For centuries Jervis, Motteux, Smollett,
made it known to the English reader. Since then J.
Ormsby and Fitzmaurice-Kelly have made scholarly
translations of this immortal work. It is interesting to
note that our English tongue and our British sense of
humour enable us to put in racy and familiar style the
broad and domestic vernacular of Spanish and even of
French comedy. This is true also, I think of " Gil
Bias," which Smollett also translated and imitated, and
which can be fairly well read in English as in French.
And for many readers this is the case also for Rabelais.
The same fact strikes us in our wonderful modern
translations of Aristophanes, whose plays bristle with
swarms of strange phrases, wild compounds and all the
slang and ribaldry of the market place. Yet a scene in
Rogers' version looks to us as obvious and as irresistible
as a scene with Falstaff and Bardolf.
As to French poetry, no one ought to want trans



118


MORE LAST WORDS


lations, and there are hardly any to be had. The grand
tragedies of Corneille and Racine are neglected by those
who have Shakespeare on the brain, and no other
tragedies allowed to enter-or else by those who have
never witnessed these plays on the French stage. It is
only there, not in the book, that the pathos and dignity
of French tragedy can be felt. And the wit, the humour
and irony, the truth of Moliere as the great " censor
morum," can only be judged when we listen to the
supreme art of French actors in the " maison de
Moliere."  So I will not trouble about translations of
French plays. There are none of Corneille, and only
one of Racine. Van Laun has translated Moliere well,
but Moliere is only himself in his own house. And I
do not think that any English versions are needed for
the sparkling and fascinating lyrics of France-those
chansons, epigrams, rondels, which might be expressed
by a Russian dancer better than by an English versifier.
The mighty Hugo was almost too much for Tennyson
or Swinburne. But Sir George Young has made some
quite successful versions of selected odes, songs, and
ballads of Victor Hugo. I advise all who have valued
them to go on to the original French.
If German poetry is not read in the original by so
many and read as easily as the poetry of France, on the
other hand, German poetry and prose go into our
tongue more readily and naturally than do French or
Italian. Goethe and Schiller are at home with us.
There is an army of translators of " Faust "; Miss Anna
Swanwick, Bayard Taylor, Sir Theodore Martin, and
others —all with the dialogues and soliloquies successful
-but hardly so with Goethe's inimitable lyrics. Miss




__ LI_ I_


THE ART OF TRANSLATION              119
Swanwick and others have translated in verse Goethe's
other dramas. I have recently seen on the stage the
"Iphigenia in Tauris" of Euripides in the rhymed
version by Professor Gilbert Murray, and comparing it
with Goethe's "Iphigenia," also translated by Miss
Swanwick, it struck me that Goethe's drama, with a
different plot, was a poem of a far higher range, with
a more noble ideal of woman and of man, than the play
of Euripides, which withal would make a more interesting melodrama when powerfully presented on the stage
to those who could enter into the extravagant and inhuman mythology of the Hellenic Pantheon. Schiller's
dramas have been well translated also. Indeed I find
Coleridge's version of "Wallenstein " better reading
than Schiller's German.  The prose of Schiller or of
Goethe may go in English perfectly well.
Heine's lyrics are to my mind as little fit for poetic
version in English as Goethe's-even less so; for Heine
has not only a rare gift of the ' cantabile," but a rich
vein of that verve which is wanting in German " geist."
Selected poems have been rendered as well as possible
by Sir Theodore Martin and others. Heine's prose can
be read with enjoyment in English prose-much as we
can read " Wilhelm Meister" in Carlyle.
In concluding these brief notes on translation I would
only say that the prose of all languages can be-and
has been-translated with entire success in English
prose. The greater poetry of Greece and Rome, of
Italy, of Spain, of Germany, can be —and has beentranslated in blank verse with all but the incommunicable
music of the original. Translations "in the original
9




120          MORE LAST WORDS
metres" are always doomed to disappointment from
the stubborn quality of our tongue. And the haunting
lyrics of Attic traecdy, of Sappho, of Horace, of
Catullus, of Dante, of Tetrarch, of the old French
songsters, of Heine and Goethe, are really untranslatable, inasmuch as  the volatile strength and delicacy
of the ideas escape in the crucible of translation." So
says the greatest of all our translators-Shelley himself.




VI


THE- SEXCENTENARY OF DANTE
IHAVE written so much about Dante-" Calendar
of Great Men," pp. 336-342, and in " Among
My Books," pp. 42-47, and elsewhere, that I
have nothing new to say on the poem; but as the Italian
Sovereign and people have been holding a general
national triumph in the name of the poet, I
will make a few remarks on the position of Dante
as a creative national force, and, as it were, the
national Hero and Saint. This aspect of the great
Florentine is without any other example or parallel. It
is common agreement that three poets, Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, stand in a supreme level above all. Homer
the poet of the ancient world, Dante of the medieval,
Shakespeare of the modern world.  But Dante's place
has a quality which neither Homer nor Shakespeare
had: I mean as the creator of his own race as a Nation.
certainly not, in his own age, nor for centuries after.
The Italians had no national consciousness at all until
the Nineteenth Century; their being the ancient
heritage of the Germanic Empire, their intense municipal patriotism, and their country being the seat of the
Papacy, made Italian nationality a very slow and late
idea to form. But Dante, the artists, Bruno, Galileo,
Vico, laid the seeds of this idea; and Napoleon, Mazzini,
121




122


MORE ILAST WORDS


Garibaldi, and their followers, brought it into action.
Italy has been a nation now for fifty years; and to-day
it hails Dante as the Moses who led it out of Egypt.
Neither Homer nor Shakespeare created a nation.
Homer was the poet not only of Greeks all over the
ancient world, but of Romans and all cultured races of
antiquity.  It was never known who Homer was, nor
whence his poems first came.  He was the inspirer of
a race, not of a nation having a local seat of their own.
He did not create the Greek language, which we find
fully formed in Hesiod. Again, Shakespeare is the poet
of the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic and Scandinavian
peoples; but he did not create the English language;
which, as Bacon, Hooker, and Cranmer show, was
already organic.  And although Shakespeare has given
immortal utterance to English patriotism, England was
bursting with pride, ambition, loyalty, and confidence
long before his birth.  Now Dante created the Italian
poetic language; for, if some fine poetry existed before
his, the supreme majesty of his " Commedia " made it,
like our Bible, the recognised authority and standard of
poetic language. Then Dante was not merely the poet.
For the first 85 years of his life, as he tells us when his
great Vision begins, he was soldier, citizen, magistrate,
envoy, friend and counsellor of Princes; he was scholar,
philosopher, historian, traveller, theologian, and diplomatist.  He took in all accessible knowledge and
observed all things visible in States, Churches, and
parties.  In middle life he was cast out of Florence his
own city: for twenty years he went from city to city,
dreaming of union and peace. He thus became the first
real citizen of Italy.




THE SEXCENTENARY OF DANTE               123
It must be remembered that, although the " Cornmedia" is the ground for Dante's supreme place in
poetry, he wrote much more, and did many other things,
so that for one half of his life, he was a dominant personal force in active affairs both of States, parties, and
sects. As were Milton, Swift, Burke, or Carlyle, Dante
was not only the writer, but he was politician, critic, and
seer. All who study the Vision seriously ought to know
something of Dante's social writings, and political controversies.  All through them there runs the idea of a
sort of Revival —nnascimento-of Italy as a great solid
nation, as in the 'Commedia " there lies as a basis the
idea of a new Christian world. This potent and seminal
idea of Italian Unity lay burdened under Dante's
troubled life, and obscured under the mystical imagery
of his great Poem; but, as slowly in succeeding ages the
poem became understood, it began to be recognised,
whilst the sense of a common Italy grew to life after the
Napoleonic inundation and the revolutionary hopes it
had inspired. All through the 19th century the idea of
an Italian Nation developed, and Italians saw it foretold
by the first poet of Italy.  So Dante's Vision became
the Bible of young Italy, and Dante became the incarnation of Italian hopes and national vitality.
Prjmarily to us all of the West, Dante's Poem presents a moral and religious ideal, rather than a national
and political ideal.  But when we consider the entire
body of his writings and the story of his active career in
life, we find that at the centre of his thought and purpose
was the social duty of a citizen and servant of the State.
From first to last, Dante was the stalwart citizen of his
native land.  Much of this, both in his poetry and in




124


MORE LAST WORDS


his own life, rather detracts from the charm of his verse
and from the dignity and grace of his own character.
He would have been perhaps a much sweeter singer and
certainly a more amiable man, if he had been less
passionate in his political principles and aspirations. In
one sense, Dante was a revolutionary enthusiast, much
as were Milton, Burns, and Shelley. Now it is just this
quality in Dante's poetry which all through the Nineteenth Century made it the Bible of Italian nationalism.
To modern Italy, shaking off the fetters of Germans,
despots, and Popes, Dante became not only the supreme
poet, but also the great citizen.  And all this sense of
Dante as the Homer of Italian nationality has blazed up
in the celebrations which stirred Italy from the Alps to
Mount Aetna. To Young Italy, the " Commedia " is
what the Bible was to the Puritans of Cromwell's army.
In my own experience I have seen how this works out.
In 1850 as an undergraduate at Oxford I had as teacher
of Italian, Aurelio Saffi, the colleague of Mazzini in the
defence of Rome in 1849. Saffi at once put me on to
read the " Inferno ": he treated the poem as a Catholic
treats the Bible. Mazzini's reverence for Dante is well
known.   In 1859 I made a pilgrimage to the tomb of
Dante in Ravenna, and I was taken to it by Count
Cappi, once friend of Byron and the Gambas, who burst
into tears as he told me that the tomb had been
desecrated and the body removed. The bones have since
been found in the wall of the Church, but Ravenna
refuses to hand them over to Florence which cast out its
greatest son.
The 600th year since the poet's death has been
signalized by a really national ceremony all over Italy




THE SEXCENTENARY OF DANTE 125
-especially in the capital, in his birthplace and in the
burial place of the poet-in which the King and some
Ministers of the official world, the Pope and the People,
all took part.  Nothing like this has ever been done in
any other country or for any other poet.  Our own
Shakespeare centenaries have been thin and poor
attempts to honour our great dead.  My son, who has
just returned from  the pageant at Florence, has
described to me the magnificence of the sight, the
beauty of the processions and the decorations, the
general harmony and unity of the patriotic display, the
dignified bearing of the Royal and Official magnates, the
discipline, loyalty, and enthusiasm of the people.
P.S. 1923.-The extraordinary rise of the national
movement known as Fasczsmo is an Italian reaction
from the international schemes of Bolshevism which
tries to destroy the social cohesion of nations bound
together by a common country, history, and language.
Fascisti are essentially Dantistic: and their inspiration
is derived from the poet.  The six hundred years that
have passed since his death showed that Dante was not
only poet, but patriot, and prophet.




VII
TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE.
THE Italians had hardly completed the celebration
of the sixth century since the death of Dante,
when all France began to celebrate the third
century since the birth of Moliere. What Dante is to
the Italian world, what Shakespeare is to the Englishspeaking world, that Moliere is to the French world of
thought.  Strictly speaking, the anniversary of birth,
unless it be that of a divine being, has no special importance compared with the anniversary of death.  But as
France will not wait until 1973 to honour the memory
of her national poet, we must accept her decision, and
in the New Year offer our tribute with hers to JeanBaptiste Poquelin, dit MOLIERE, who was born in
the Rue St. Honore in Paris, in January, 1622.
All travelled Englishmen have enjoyed on the French
stage some of Moliere's most popular comedies-M.
Jourdain, Mascarille, Scapin, and M. Diafoirus.  And
all educated persons have at any rate read Les Femmes
Savantes, Tartuffe, and Le Misanthrope.  But I doubt
if the ordinary British play-goer, or the English general
reader, have even yet realized all the greatness of
Moliere as a supreme master of the human heart-as a
moral teacher, a prophet of "nobler modes of life."
Moliere is intensely French, and his dramas have to be
126




THE TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE 127
seen in all the subtle rendering of the traditional French
stage; they must be understood with acceptance of the
forms of French dramatic art; and his entire career, his
life, his nature, and his devotion to his fellow-artists and
their common aims must be grasped.  This cannot be
done if the plays are viewed only as an evening's lively
amusement, when Moliere is constantly weighed in the
scales with Shakespeare or Sheridan, or if Moliere is
known only by two or three of his masterpieces.  If
we are to know Moliere we must see him with French
eyes, estimate him with French esprit, and read him
altogether in his volume of work-early and late-in
prose and in verse. No one can enjoy the Agamemnon
or the Prometheus, (Edipus or Electra, unless he enter
into the atmosphere of Greek tragedy, and submit his
taste to those canons of dramatic convention.  So is it
with French drama. We must witness it on the stage
with French eyes; we must study its text with acceptance of the verdict of French criticism.
There is a strange similarity in the personal careers
of Moliere and of Shakespeare, widely apart as were
their genius and their art. Both were essentially actors
and dramatists, theatre-owners, and stage-managers.
All their dramatic works were written for the stage, not
for the library.  Both were intensely hard and rapid
writers, often throwing off in haste rough and even
patched pieces, which they never cared to revise or to
own.   Both were beloved by their friends and their
comrades.   Both were most generous, manly, and
honourable.  Whatever faults they had were in their
domestic lives.  Alas! we know a great deal too much
of Moliere's " dark lady."  There is now no mystery




128


MORE LAST WORDS


about Madeleine and Armande Betjard, at any rate if
we fling aside a foul suggestion of his enemies. As I
wrote in 1892:
" It is a cruel reflection on the weakness of human nature that
a spirit, so brave, so just, so wise, so generous, dwelling in a
genius so profound, so tender, so manly, and so truthful, should
have been bowed down in private, amidst his public triumphs,
by the weakness of irregular passion, the sacrifice of domestic
honour, and even the loss of personal self-respect."
Moliere, like Rabelais, Descartes, Diderot, and
Voltaire, like Corneille and Racine, was born of the bon
bourgeoise class, well-to-do traders and experienced
officials, and, like them, had an early and regular training by the Jesuit and theological colleges of Paris.
Many persons who have laughed over Scapin and Jourdain do not remember that Moliere had the very best
education of his time, that he had a sound knowledge
of the classics, and until his twenty-fourth year was a
student with an eye to a learned profession. He began
to translate Lucretius, which no one but a thorough
scholar would attempt; indeed, in the Misanthrope he
paraphrases in twelve lines a famous passage from the
fourth book. In another play he uses Horace's delightful ode, Donec gratus eram tibi.   Though he never
obtrudes his classical learning, a careful reader will
notice that it helped to form his style. Moliere studied
philosophy under Gassendi, who was a keen critic of the
antiquated Aristotelian doctrines, and he began the
study of law. Thus, until the stage swept the young
scholar on to the boards, he had all that Paris, then the
centre of the new culture, could teach. When he was
nine, his father, a wealthy tradesman, received an official
post from the King, and was attached to the Court. In




THE TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE                129
his college life the young scholar may have known the
Prince de Conti, who afterwards became his patron.
This Jean Poquelin, a son of central Paris, born into the
thriving bourgeoisie, educated in the most liberal schools
of that age of intellectual ferment, and as a youth introduced into a noble and courtly society, at the age of
twenty-three became first play-actor, and soon playwriter, and then, calling himself Moliere, wrote,
managed, acted plays with exhausting industry for
twenty-six years, and died, almost on the stage, at the
age of fifty-one.
The most useful way of honouring the poet would be
to read him carefully and thoroughly, say, in one of the
Paris editions in six volumes octavo, with notes and dissertations. Of course Moliere, like Shakespeare, grew
steadily as he mastered his art, and began by some poor
sketches and imitated work. Like Shakespeare, he had
to satisfy his "groundlings," who happened to be
royalties calling for an early "command."  And he
had a stiff battle to fight when at last he dared to satirise
the meanness of courtiers and the vices of clerics.  I
would not advise the reader to trouble himself with
Moliere's failure in tragedy. But I do beg him not to
limit his enjoyment of the comedies to their irrepressible
fun or their roaring farce.  Read, mark, and digest his
great masterpieces, and you will find beneath this
exquisite humorist the moral philosopher.
His masterpieces may be grouped as Les Precicuiscs,
L'Ecole des Femmes, Les Femiles Savantes, Tartutfe,
Le Misanthrope, and I rank them in that order:
beginning with gay, and then passionate, invective
against the affectation of female society, passing to a




130


MORE LAST WORDS


grave and exquisitely studied lecture on women's education, thence to a burning satire of religious superstition
and clerical hypocrisy, and, finally, to almost tragic
indignation at the hard lot of the truthful and honest
man in the midst of a frivolous and false society.  The
delicious satire on the vicious poetry of a degenerate age
is in itself a model of literary judgment. If Tartuffe be
the play which on the stage is the most brilliant drama,
Misanthrope to the thoughtful reader is a lesson in
ethics, a manual of moral uprightness.  Comte would
cite the line of Clitandre:
" Je ctn:sens qu'une femme ait des clart&s de tout."
Only Comte said the line ought to run-II convient.
The education of women should be on the same field as
that of men-only with a modified aim, and in a different
way.
In his masterpieces, and all but the Precieuses are in
exquisitely studied verse, Moliere is truly the moralist
-not dealing with vice and crime like Juvenal or
Shakespeare, but satirising the social affectation and
meanness of all classes in modern Society.  He did this
in a most systematic way-the meanness of pretending
to " fashion," of imitating rank, of display of wealth,
the affectation of learning, the pretension to science, the
assumption of godliness, the falsehood of a "smart"
world.  He is always on the side of honest conviction,
of the simplicity of the peasant, the native good sense
of the housewife and the homely maid, of the refined
lady, of the true gentleman.  As he is a real poet, he
never preaches, never dogmatises, has no theory to propound, and perhaps never utters his whole mind in a




THE TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE                  181
formal way. Such ethical standard as he holds up comes
out subtly, by suggestion and contrast.  It is always
balanced, moderate, humane, as of one who had studied
all sides of human nature, all types of social strata, rich
and poor, cultured and plain, in country and in city,
bourgeois or courtly.  His moral philosophy, always
comic and social, is the subtle tone and atmosphere of
his comedy, never the system or doctrine he has to teach.
It has much of the shrewdness of Montaigne without
his cynicism and his aloofness, and of our Bacon without
his rank materialism.  Moliere's ethic has something
of the all-round, double-sided, compensating view of
conduct that we find systematized in Aristotle-the
mean being the centre between opposite extremes of
impulse. Moliere in his humane, cheerful, manly satire,
seems ever inspired with native good sense.
It is this very moderation, good sense, good nature of
Moliere, the studious avoiding of sensation, the perfect
justesse of his language, and the intricacy of Alexandrine metre, which make it so difficult for the English
world to see all that the French world find in their
greatest poet.  Accustomed as we are to the lyrical,
romantic, and aerial comedies of Shakespeare, to the
brilliant repartees and sensations of Goldsmith and
Sheridan, English play-goers are too apt to laugh with
Mascarille, Scapin, and Jourdain, but they find
Clitandre a prig and Alceste a bore. And even to the
reader these plays seem to have longuceurs, endless
dialogues without action, and an irritating alternation
of masculine and feminine rhymes in speeches of fifty
or a hundred lines.  This is trying even to those who
speak French fluently.




132


MORE LAST WORDS


All this is very true; but we ought to let Frenchmen
decide what is.the best way in which to use their own
language. French has always been the natural language
of irony, of suggestion, of epigram, of verbal reserve,
of academic precision. Perhaps they over-rate its intellectual uses, even when they admit the majesty,
harmony, and radiance of English poetry. For nearly
three hundred years the entire French world have
decided that their academic conventions are the best
vehicles to present their drama in its most refined form.
We ought to acquiesce in this judgment by a people of
such keen intellectual force and of a literature with a
history so rich.  It is to us a psychological problem how
the country of Rabelais and Hugo could in dramatic
poetry put their inspiration into the strait-waistcoat of
these lines which scan in six feet only by the aid of two
or three letters which in speech are mute, and all the
mysteries of masculine and feminine rhymes.  And
then to think of an actor-manager-poet, like Moliere,
submitting his polished alexandrines to a critic like
Boileau to receive a further polish and get a more exact
and correct euphony.  Fancy Shakespeare asking Ben
Jonson to tell him if ' To be-or not to be " rang quite
true in his ear!
The product of Moliere's pen is one of the mysteries
of literature.  In his short life-some fifteen years of
incessant work-he produced more than thirty plays, of
which at least seventeen were in the rigid formulas of
Alexandrine rhyme. And this prodigious output, nore
than half of which was made under the fantastic and
arbitrary rules of French verse, was concocted whilst the
poor poet was torn asunder by the troubles of his




THE TERCENTENARY OF MOLIERE                 138
theatre, its properties, its personnel, and its liabilities,
by the quarrels and whims of his actors and actresses, the
bitter abuse of his critics, rivals, and patrons, the minscen-sccne of each new piece, the study of his own parts
in the play-perhaps, worst of all, the spasms of love,
wrath, and jealousy, due to the vagrancies of his young
wife-the complications arising from her amours-and
the wretched dregs of his own amours.  Peace to his
great soul at last!  But they know not yet where his
weary body is at rest.




VIII


BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING.*
W E, members of our Literary Club, who meet to
carry on the traditions of the men " of light
and leading " in our ancient city and this noble
county of Somerset, we are familiar with all that does
honour to both. But I fear that too many of our fellowcitizens seldom recall to mind-perhaps they hardly
know-all the titles to distinction they may fairly claim.
Let us devote a sitting to rehearse some of the memories
of which we are so justly proud.
With the Apostle we may truly say: "We are
citizens of no mean city "-certainly one of the most
ancient in Britain, one foremost among all the cities of
Britain, which by their Roman remains bear witness as
links between the civilization of the ancient and the
modern world.   Somerset and Devon are the largest
counties in the south of England-the heart of Wessex
-the original home of our Saxon Kingdom, every
corner of which is associated with our glorious Alfred
and the long struggle which made England as a whole.
Our county has two seats of ancient Bishoprics-two
grand cathedrals-in Wells, perhaps the most perfect
example of the decorative resources of the Gothic
* An address given to the< Bath Literary Club.
134




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING                185
builders.  Has any other county more splendid
churches, bell-towers and spires, more breezy downs and
beacon tops, more lovely valleys, such tremendous
gorges as those at Clifton and Cheddar —such luscious
meadows?   Is not Glastonbury the premier Abbey,
altogether the most venerable relic of early monasticism
in all Britain, the most pathetic of all ruins?
A word or two as to Glastonbury-which Cardinal
Gasquet, once Abbot of Downside, calls ' one of the
most renowned sanctuaries of the Christian world ""the centre of Christianity in Southern and Western
England during Saxon times." Do not these mighty
and historic ruins recall a world of past ages and
immortal heroes-of Arthur-Hic jacct inclitus rex
Arturius inl insula Avalonia-whose bones, they say,
King Edward I. and Queen Eleanor placed under the
high altar-and then again it was the refuge of Alfred
who had there the dream that inspired him-there, too,
is the seat of Abbot Dunstan, who as Archbishop of
Canterbury crowned Eadgar in the Abbey of Bath. As
a historian myself, I do not guarantee the authenticity
of all these legends about Glastonbury-not even about
the Arimathean Thorn which I salute daily in our
beautiful Botanic Garden.  I leave the responsibility
of these famous myths to the Cardinal and his friends,
whose historic style too often trenches on the flamboyant form of Gothic. But whether we accept all the
pious legends which have gathered round it, still, as Mr.
Ralph Cram says, " it is the first and greatest house of
the oldest and most famous monastic order."  For
legendary and poetic purposes I hold by Joseph of
Arimathca, by King Arthur, and Alfred, and Dunstan
10




136


MORE LAST WORDS


and all, just as I hold by King Bladud and the pigs, who
first discovered the nmiraculous power of our Baths.
Even if half of the tales about our county, its city, and
its abbeys are pious dreams, still there is quite enough,
in Bath and in Somerset, of real history, of immortal
poetry, of exquisite art, to place them both in the forefront of all that is most worthy of honour in the United
Kingdom.
Now-as to the famous Englishmen whom Somerset
bred, or healed, maintained, or honours.  Apart from
Alfred, saint, hero, and ruler, whose life and deeds
sanctify so many spots in the county, and other saintly
and venerable names of mediaeval times, we may claim
two of the chief philosophers not only of Britain, but
even of Europe-Roger Bacon, born at Ilchester in
1214, one of the greatest men of the Middle Ages; John
Locke, born at Wrington in 1632, whose reputation still
stands amongst that of the four or five British thinkers
of world-wide fame. Then we have great seamen, such
as Admiral Blake, born at Bridgwater in 1599, and Lord
Hood, Nelson's comrade, born at Butleigh in 1724;
John Pym, the great leader of the House of Commons
in their struggle with Charles and Strafford.  And we
justly claim as ours the great Lord Chatham, who was
M.P. for Bath, built his house in the Circus, lived at
Bath for many years as Prime Minister, and owned
Burton Pynsett at his death.  But I pass over all the
men of letters or of art who were born in the city or
county or who passed years in it-Bishop Hooper,
martyr of early Protestantism; the poet Coleridge,
Walter Bagehot; Alexander Kinglake, historian of the
Crimean War, and first of travellers; the painter Gains



BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING 137
borough; the architects, John Woods, the builders of
eighteenth-century Bath, men of European reputation,
and Ralph Allen, whom history and literature praise as
the ideal of a great citizen.
To-night we may take these as already toasted and
honoured. But I pass on to speak of the greatest of all
our literary names-one of the great names in the
modern literature of Europe-Henry Fielding, the true
creator of our home romance of life and manners, one
of the mighty masters of our English tongue, a rare
scholar, and a practical reformer of public law. I take
occasion to return to Fielding because a Professor of
Yale University in America has devoted years of
research to the life of our novelist, and he has just
published in three handsome octavo volumes everything
about Fielding, his friends, his family, his age, and his
works, which industry can collect.* We now have every
fact of our author, with meticulous research and patient
sifting of evidence, and we are not likely ever to discover
more.   Our American critic amply supports, and perhaps even exaggerates, the language of praise which all
competent judges have long devoted to Fielding's chief
works-Joseph Andrews, Tom      Jones, and Amelia.
He very rightly calls attention to the intense vitality
and truth to human nature in every character in these
books-never equalled unless by Shakespeare himselfto the consummate skill in the plot of Tom Jones-a
kind of skill that neither Richardson, nor Scott, nor
Dickens, nor Thackeray ever approached-which Coleridge declared was equal to the plot of Sophocles'
* The Hi.story of Hnry Fielding, by Wilbur L. Cross, New Haven,
U.S.A., and Oxford Uidvensity Press. Three vols. 8vo. 1918.




188


MORE LAST WORDS


(Edipus King.   Mr. Cross extols the inexhaustible
humour, versatility, and irony of the satire, such as
I1ucian, Cervantes, and Rabelais alone possessed; and,
lastly, the noble sense of humanity and the generous
instincts which shine throughout, both in rollicking
comedy and in naked farce.  Mr. Cross now tells us
the surroundings in which these wonderful pictures of
life were produced, the fields whereon all this panorama
of our eighteenth century was studied, and the real
persons whose portraits were drawn, or whose whimsicalities, virtues, and vices suggested the pictures. It is
needless to follow Mr. Cross in all his enthusiastic tribute
to these masterpieces.  As unerring and Hogarthian
studies of human nature in its every-day aspect of the
middle of the eighteenth century, they rank with the
most perfect achievements of creative genius.
We might exhaust an evening in discussing the beauty
and the charm of any single one of the great romances,
perhaps even in analysing any one of the leading
characters in each.  So I shall attempt nothing more
than to note those points in Mr. Cross' new work which
specially identify Fielding's life and romances with Bath
and Somerset-or those points which throw some new
light on Fielding as a man, a scholar, and a social
reformer.  Ordinary Bath books are apt to make
Fielding rather too much of a Somerset resident; they
entirely ignore his immense range of general culture and
learning; and still more they know little of his heroic
work as a practical moralist, wise law-maker, and
courageous magistrate. All these things Mr. Cross has
worked out with almost tiresome minuteness of documientary proof, accounting for every year, month,




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING                 139
almost every week of Fielding's short life, with its perpetual change of place and home, his unwearied activity
in his library, n his public office; his habits, his friends,
relations, pecuniary struggles, and reckless generosities.
MSr. Cross, of course, accepts Mr. Round's detection
(in 1894) of the spurious genealogy of the Denbigh
family as descended from the Austrian HIapsburgs. So
down goes the famous eulogy of Gibbon which in his
very flamboyant style told the world how " our immortal
Fielding will outlive the Escorial and the Imperial
Eagle." He certainly will and in 1919 we may perhaps rejoice that our great English moralist is no longer
to be encumbered with the thrones of Spain or of
Austria. The story of the forgery of documents for the
early Earls of Denbigh and Desmond, and the rest of
them down to the ancestors and father of the novelist,
are all told in great detail in Mr. Cross' first chapter
(pp. 1-41).
The popular account is that Henry Fielding was the
eldest son of General Fielding by the daughter of Sir
Henry Gould, and was born at Sharpham Park, near
Glastonbury, in 1707.  Perhaps some persons suppose
that he came of a wealthy and titled family, was heir to
his father's fine landed estate, and no doubt passed his
early life in Somerset. Nothing of the kind. His father
at marriage was simply major in a foot regiment, without any estate at all. He apparently ran away with Sir
Henry Gould's daughter, Sarah, who very likely bore
her first child-our Henry-at Sharpham Park, the
property of her father, the Judge. There is no register
of the birth, and it would seem that the major was then
in service in Ireland, but Cross thinks our Henry was




140


MORE LAST WORDS


really born at Sharpham, which had once been a manor
belonging to the Benedictine Abbey of Glastonbury.
Sir Henry Gould made his will just before the birth of
his grandson, and gave ~3,000 in trust for his daughter,
then Mrs. Fielding, ' but her husband should have
nothing to do nor intermeddle therewith."  Edmund
Fielding, the father, never became a General officer
until Henry was of age. He never had any interest in
Sharphanl Park-he was a gambler, married a series of
wivies, was continually in difficulties; and altogether was
a very unsatisfactory father to a young man of high
birth, ambition, pride, and genius.
Our Ienry lived with his mother and grandfather at
Sharpham Park for two years and a half.  In his third
year Sir Henry Gould bought a farm at East Stour in
Dorset, for which he paid ~-,750; he left Somerset and
went to reside there with his daughter and her children.
But on his death in 1710 the Fielding trustees, and
Edmund Fielding in part, bought the East Stour estate
from the executors of the Judge. Thus Henry's childhood and early youth were passed in Dorset, not in
Somerset; and his first impressions are all of that Stour
country.  East Stour in Dorset continued to be the
residence of Henry's grandmother, Lady Gould, of his
own mother and her numerous children, the father
apparently gambling in London. In 1718, when Henry
was eleven, his mother died and was buried at East
Stour.  Henry was sent to Eton and was taken charge
of by Lady Gould at Salisbury, which became his early
home. East Stour, indeed, and that Dorset country is
the scene of his first book, Joseph Andrews; and it
ceased to be in any sense the home of Henry in 1788,




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING 141
when he was thirty-one and long ago had settled in
London.   The idea that Henry Fielding was ever
owner of, or even heir to, considerable landed estates in
Somerset is entirely gratuitous.
A careful study of Mr. Cross' authorities will show
that Fielding's connection with Somerset or with Bath
is rather occasional and casual. If not born at Sharpham, he certainly passed his infancy there; and
possibly he visited his uncle there during his youth.
At Salisbury, living with his grandmother, Henry used
to see the beautiful sisters, Charlotte and Catherine
Cradock. According to Cross, Henry, then twentyseven, ran off with Charlotte, took her to Bath, and in
November, 1734, they were married at Charlcombein the register, both described " as of the parish of St.
James in Bath." This of course was a fiction, as neither
had any but nominal residence in Bath.  It has misled
some biographers.  The truth is that Henry, like his
father, made a runaway match with a lady of good position and some fortune. He had experience of it, for at
the age of eighteen he had attempted to run off with
Sarah Andrews, a beauty with a large fortune, at Lyme
Regis in Dorset; there he assaulted her uncle and
guardian who rescued her from the ravisher. Charlotte
Cradock, whom he adored, is his own Sophia Western
and his Amelia Booth. Fielding and his wife had two
girls, but she died young in 1744 at Bath, where he had
taken her for treatment.  The body was taken up to
London, and buried beside her daughter in St. Martin'sin-the-Fields-not in the Abbey at Bath. Three years
afterwards he married Mary Daniel, quite privately in a
London City Church.




1412


MIORE LAST WORDS


In Mr. Cross' three volumes we may read in exhausting detail the story of the Fieldings and the Goulds:
with all their wives and their children, their cousins and
their aunts, their quarrels, escapades, law-suits and
monetary difficulties, their changes of residence, their
loves and their hates.  It has this interest at least, that
Henry Fielding's life-his personal, fanily, and social
life-was itself a romance, and had many an incident
such as we find in the novels.  As Mr. Cross says, his
ancestors and his surroundings exhibit family pride,
humour, courage, military service, scholarship, and law
-and he himself concentrated in one the characters
of his forefathers.  It is unfair to assume that he was
either Tom Jones or Captain Booth; but he certainly
had in him many a strain that he depicted in their
portraits.
Now, as to Fielding's connection with our city and
county.   There is no positive evidence that he ever
regularly resided in the county, except as an infant, and
his visits to the city must be taken as incidents-first to
the Baths, his marriage at Charlcombe, his intimacy
with Ralph Allen at Prior Park, his undoubted stay at
Twcrton and also at Widcombe, Mr. Cross says 6 sometimes for several months in each year."   In 1742
Fielding was at the Pump Room with his wife and wrote
some verses to the reigning beauty, Jane Husband. He
had no doubt made the acquaintance of Ralph Allen,
then Mayor, who is celebrated in Joseph Anldrews, and
had already perhaps helped him with gifts.  Fielding
certainly knew Pope and he may have been with him as
Allen's guest at Prior Park.  Pope, writing to Allen,
April, 1743, says: "Fielding has sent the books you




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING                143
subscribed for by the hand I employed in sending the
~20 to him. In one chapter of the second volume he
has paid you a pretty compliment on your house." This
was the three volumes of the Miscellanies, published in
1743   The "' compliment "' was in the Journey to the
Next World.   But Fielding was continually praising
Allen and Prior Park. We must remember that Pope
died in May, 1744, when Fielding was only thirty-seven
and had not written Tom Jones nor A melia   and
Fielding's attacks on the Papacy and the Jacobites could
not be welcome to Pope.  There is no reason to doubt
Graves' account in his Triflers that Fielding "dined
almost daily at Prior Park and lived while he was writing
Tom Jones at Twerton, the first house on the right hand
with a spread eagle over the door," now "Fielding's
Lodge." Graves, the author of The Spiritual Quixote,
who did not take up his residence at Claverton until
after Fielding's death, may not have met him at all.
Graves does not say he met Fielding, but only " Mrs.
Fielding," i.e., the sister.  "Fielding spent the
summer and autumn of 1746 at Twerton and returned
for briefer periods in the two following years " (Cross).
Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun at Salisbury, and
finished in London.
Tom Jones, 1749, was written partly at Bath and
partly in London.
A nelia at Bow Street, 1752.
Much as we in Bath and in Somerset desire to think
Henry Fielding as one of ours, it is clear that the principal scene of his life was in London or its neighbourhood, at any rate from January, 1735 (astat. twentyeight), when he took his wife up to Buckingham Street,




144


MORE IJAST WORDS


Strand, at the house of Mr. Cradock, presumably a
cousin of his wife. In 1737 he became a student of law
in the Middle Temple, and he applied himself to law
with all his mind and his energy.  In 1739 he took a
house near the Temple, bought the series of the Law
Reports and diligently studied them.  In June, 1740,
after three years of study and the regular term dinners,
he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, had
chambers assigned him in Puimp Court, and attended
the Dorset Assizes.  After the publication of Miscellanies, April, 1743, Henry Fielding devoted himself to
law-his wife failing In health, he himself quite impecunious. He attended Courts regularly at Westminster
Hall, and in March and August went the Western
Circuit, including Taunton and Wells. Poor as he was,
he collected a Law Library of 300 volumes, mostly in
folio, studied and annotated them. IHe was in training
for the Bench. In October, 1748, he was made J.P.
for Westminster and then for Middlesex, and became
Presiding Justice at Bow Street.  There for the last
five years of his life he sat regularly as Justice-living in
the house at Bow Street, given him by the Duke of
Bedford, afterwards occupied by his brother, Sir John
Fielding, and burnt down in the Gordon riots. In the
elaborate researches of Mr. Cross we find Fielding in
Somerset only as follows: his birth and infancy at
Sharpham, at Twerton In the sumnmers of 1746-7-8, at
Widcombe about 1748.   His changes of place are as
numerous as those of Jones and of Booth in the
romances. Even whilst living in London, and rent free
in a fine house in Bow Street, he had constant short
residences near London at Twickenham, Barnes, and




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING 145
Ealing.  And this ever-moving body and adventurous
spirit now rests in far-off Portugal in sight of the
Atlantic.
Mr. Cross, with all his zeal and industry, has added
almost nothing new to what has been told us by Fielding's special interpreter, Austin Dobson, in his latest
Life of 1907. In fact, Cross of 1918 is only Dobson of
1907-" writ large "; indeed, rather voluminous than
luminous.
The points which Mr. Cross has elaborated more fully
than other biographers of Fielding are, first, his mastery
of law, his zeal as a judge, and his great and permanent
influence on legal reform; secondly, his range of learning and his whole mind saturated with ancient and
modern literature, both serious and comic.
He possessed nearly the entire series of then extant
law reports and he had annotated his own copies:
expertus disces quarm gravis iste labor.
In Bow Street he worked day and night, often sitting
till 2 a.m. The nominal salary would be ~1,000; but,
as he remitted fees, took to live with him his blind
brother John, his sister, and Margaret Collier, his
sister's friend, and was always giving with open hand,
he was usually in want of money. In May, 1749, he
was made Chairman of Quarter Sessions.  In June,
1749, his first Charge was published by desire- "a
masterpiece of zeal, acumen and learning" (Cross)addressed not so much to criminals as to the public. He
devoted himself with passion to the task of suppressing
brothels, gaming houses, and thieving, assault, and
murder in the streets. In July, 1749, with remarkable
courage he suppressed a dangerous riot in London, and




146


MORE LAST WORDS


stopped the sacking of houses by mobs.  He drafted a
Bill to check street robbery and sent it to the Lord
Chancellor Hardwickc. Then in a pamphlet he attacked
the gin trade and all its criminal effects.  In 1751 the
very important Gin Licensing Act was passed, in 1752
the Act against disorderly houses, then the Act against
murder in public places. He did his best to abolish the
disgusting practice of public executions at Tyburn, and
he certainly founded the system of a detective police in
plain clothes.  We all know from Hogarth, Smollett,
Fielding, and from Lecky's History of the Eighteenth
Celntury that the middle of it was a time of scandalous
vice, crime, debauchery, and coarseness: that London
was a sink of corruption and licence. A great improvement took place when George III. came to the throne
in 1760, even before the moral and religious revival of
the Quakers and the Methodists. Much of that revival
was the work of Fielding, who was a precursor of John
Howard, Elizabeth Fry, and Whitefield.
It may be thought a paradox that Fielding should be
lauded as a moralist and a reformer when he is usually
regarded as having ruined himself by intemperance.
Mr. Cross has very patiently investigated this charge.
Certainly Henry Fielding was a free liver-ate and
drank without regard to health, and was an intense lover
of enjoyment in all its forms. He was a jovial man of
his time, and no doubt would call Gray bookish, and
Cowper a milk-sop.   Walpole, Congreve, Addison,
Gibbon, Steele, Fox, and W. Pitt drank or caroused
with their fellows, and lived in a society that we should
think scandalous and indecent.  But Mr. Cross shows
that Fielding could not have been a sot, that his in



BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING 147
exhaustible labours in literature as well as in law, his
immense learning and his devotion to his public duties,
make it impossible that he could have spent his nights
in debauchery. Such prodigious work, in a life of perpetual anxiety, sorrow, and want, coupled with a reckless disregard of health in his habits, would make an end
of the strongest man in his forty-eighth year
There is no kind of evidence that Fielding was a
gambler or a rake.  Of course his ideas of chastity were
not those of our present code of religion or of morals.
He evidently thought that the free lives of young men
was a matter for their conscience and their God, and
not for the interference of their neighbours. But there
is no evidence that Fielding ever wronged any woman
or was what was then called a rake and a profligate. At
eighteen he made desperate love to a young lady of his
own rank.  For years he courted another young lady
living with her mother, and he married her when he was
twenty-seven.  There is no ground to doubt that he
lived in perfect fidelity to her and was almost distracted
at her death. He kept her maid in his household, and
they wept together over her memory. That he married
this woman three years afterwards seems rather to suggest virtuous habits.  She is said to have been a very
good wife, affectionate with all the children, and "a
very ugly woman." He made her his wife, for he was
a family man and a doting father. Had he been a libertine he would have done what men of his class and time
did, and would have not burdened himself with another
wife and more children. Both he and his father never
seem to have had too many.
We must always regret that Fielding allowed himself




148


MORE LAST WORDS


to use, and even to exaggerate, the foul language and
moral cynicism current in his age and amongst the set
of theatrical and idle people he lived with. It excludes
his books from the young and innocent. But, as Coleridge pointed out, the breezy coarseness of Fielding is
less mischievous than the close sentimentalism of
Richardson.  Still there are things in Fielding which
for my part I condemn on grounds of art quite as much
as of morality.  The Modern Husband is simply disgusting. So is Lady Bellaston. It is no use for Fielding
and his defenders to say that such things existed in the
smart world and were even tolerated in it. In the first
place, they were not tolerated on the stage and in novels,
even in that age and in that world.  The Modern
Husband play was denounced again and again; Lady
Mary Mortagu, Fielding's cousin, said he had made Tom
Jones "' a scoundrel."  In the next place, there are
things in fact which are so disgusting that they cannot
be the subject of Art.  Moralists, preachers, and confessors must tackle them, but they are unfit for comedy
and romance-the business of which is to charm, but not
to disgust. Juvenal and Swift may denounce them;
but the stage and the comic novel are not the place to
represent unnatural vice.  A husband selling his wife
to a rich adulterer, and a young man selling himself to a
lustful harridan, are not subjects for comic art.
There is all the difference between Tom Jones at the
age of nineteen, being seduced by a village trull, or Will
Booth, shut up alone in prison with a very handsome
young woman who passionately flung herself on him,
and the case of Jones hiring himself out to a harridan
whose person he must loathe.  The first is youthful




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING                  149
weakness, vice if you like, but very real human nature.
The other is a picture from which we turn with sickness,
and such pictures are not dramatic or romantic art.
In his Amelia Fielding rather forsook the art of
romance by his own personal disquisitions on moralsactual sermonising-and also by giving way to too
abundant memories of his immense reading. Certainly
Amelia contains a picture of conjugal love, of the
sublimity of a wife's devotion, of the remorse of a
husband who felt he was not worthy of her-such as is
unsurpassed in all literature.  When Fielding put as
motto to Amelia the famous lines:
felioes ter ct amplius
(Juos irrupta tenet copula,"
he was drawing on the memories of his own first wife
and their married happiness.  And his earnest purpose
was to show the world all that love and marriage could
realize of beauty and truth. The language of Allworthy
lecturing Tom Jones, the vision of purity in Sophia, the
saintliness of a wife in Amelia, the agony of remorse in
Booth, outweigh a thousand brutalities and the conventional cynicism of an age of social corruption.
A few words as to Fielding's learning which Cross
investigates.  His books sold for ~365, nearly ~100
more than Samuel Johnson's books.  There were 653
separate entries and some 1,400 volumes, " the largest
working library of the eighteenth century," also 228
volumes of law-practically all the then current Reports
-84 folio volumes of Statutes, and Rymer's Foedera
in twenty volumes, all the chief ancient and modern
histories, a complete classical Library, and also Photius'




150


MORE LAST WORDS


Bibliotheca.  He had a great library of modern literature, including the Bible in Greek, Latin, French, and
English, with commentators, theologians, and sermons.
No doubt some educated men then, as some modern men
now, collected fine libraries.  But there is ample
evidence that Fielding had read his books.  He annotated many.   He was a thorough master of Common
Law and Criminal Law. His Law essays are excellent
and had great influence.  A living Judge tells me he
finds in Fielding's Tracts sound law and invaluable suggestions.  His writings, whether of romance, satire, or
politics. abound with apt quotations and references to
1ll sorts of ancient and modern books, and they are used
with such skill and freshness that we see they come from
his own memory, not from dictionaries.  The mottoes
affixed to his plays, pamphlets, and novels are all singularly apt and worthy of attention.   They exactly
describe the purpose.  What could be better than the
motto of Tom Jones-qui mores hominurn multorum
v-idit, or the two mottoes of Amelia-one the felices ter,
the other the famous lines of Simonides of Amorgos:'u  s - /),Cy.0 ^ o U  E  ap,' '   XY.)t,~Tai
EcOX),;  S/LEv ' E C 5V. p  'vv y Y.'/:.
I don't know whence Fielding got this gnomic distich,
perhaps from Gruter's Collection, 1608, or his Photius,
1744. I find that the mottoes prefixed to his works are:
Horace, 8; Juvenal, 6; Plautus, 9 lines; Ovid, _2:
Virgil, 2; one each of PhTedrus, Cicero, Simonides,
Martial, Silius Italicus.  In the books themselves the
quotations are innumerable.  Mr. Cross' Bibliography
of Fieldings writings occupies nearly eighty pages of




BATH-SOMERSET-HENRY FIELDING 151
closely-printed octavos.  I count in it seventy-one
separate publications, written during Fielding's life
between 1728 and 17.34 (twenty-six years); almost the
most prodigious output of modern literature, unless it
were that of Voltaire.  Altogether I hold Fielding to
be equal to any of the foremost minds of his age-equal
to Johnson in learning; indeed, I think his learning was
of a more varied and deeper kind than that of Johnson,
as his philosophic power as a moralist wN:s greater and
more humane.   Fielding was a real philosopher as well
as a consummate wit, and a profound moralist who
devoted his life to cure society of some of its glaring
vices and foibles, in pictures of human nature in its
manifold forms, of which Homer, Aristophanes,
Cervantes, and Shakespeare are the immortal interpreters.


II




IX


TOBIAS SMOLLETT
(B. 1721-D. 1771)
T  HE year 1!'21 is the bicentenarv of Smollett, the
contemporary, rival, and imitator of Fielding.
Smollett once occupied as great a place in English
literature. He belongs to the era and class of Le Sage,
Fielding, Sterne, and Richardson; and, if not quite the
equal as an artist of these novelists, he may fairly claim
to be of their comnpany.  My own interest in Smollett
is of very late growth.  When I first took to reading
the eighteenth-century novelists, I found his cynicism
and his coarseness repellent; and I had an unwieldy
edition of his entire works, with Cruickshank's outrageous caricatures.  As a young nan I never read
enough of Smollett to see his merits beneath his
offences. But, happening of late to get a handy edition
of the romances in twelve volumes, 12mo, edited by
Pr(ofessor C. Saintsbury, with good illustrations, I
resolutely read thelm all through, and I must make
amends for my long neglect.
I do not like Smollett as a man. I think few people
do, or ever did. TIe had a miserable boyhood and
youth; he lhad a cruiel early life and he was bitterly used
by his family and by the world.  He was vain, quarrels15




TOBIAS SMOLLETT


153


some, coarse-minded, and shameless.  I had better at
once admit his literary faults.  He is habitually foulmouthed to a degree that exceeds the worst offences even
of his bad time.  In priapic obscenity he beats Sterne,
though I think that, in morals, his brutal ribaldry is not
so corrupting as Sterne's sniggering indecencies. However, much of the talk in Smollett's scenes is what we
imagine may pass in a low thieves' kitchen, a bargee's
pot-house, or a prostitute's supper.  Few women can
read Smollett with patience, and I would not recommend men to read him, unless they can bear the brutalities of Fielding's " Jonathan Wild."  Nor is Smollett's
foul tongue his worst fault.  His heroes, at least his
leading characters, are too often unmitigated villains
whose whole careers are persistent successions of vice,
inhumanity, and crime.  It is bad art to paint human
beings of such impossible-or at least such unnaturalviciousness.  And Smollett has none of the genius to
invent a convincing and consistent plot such as we have
in ' Tom Jones " and in the stories of the other novelists
we honour   Indeed, Smollett's boldest attempt to construct a plot with an eighteenth-century Don Quixote
is a laughable extravaganza.
Well, then! why recall Smollett's novels, and certainly nothing else of his work has any real merit.  In
the first place he was read, admired, and imitated
vehemently all through the second half of the eighteenth
century   The literary criticism of the age placed him
as a successful rival of Fielding, and even Sir Walter
Scott judged him as the equal of Fielding and far above
any of their successors.  Smollett, like Fielding, followed and imitated Le Sage's " Gil Bias," but he has




154


MORE LAST WORDS


neither the grace, the charm, the consistency, nor the
sound judgment of that immortal founder of modern
romance.   Still in parts of some of his novels, Smollett
equals perhaps in occasional scenes, even surpasses,
" Gil Bias " in fertile invention, in rapidity of action,
in variety of types.  " Peregrine Pickle " and " Count
Fathom," with all their lurid vice, have a wild profusion
of human eccentricity, a startling series of unexpected
novelties, which, with all the sensationalism they
exhaust and the improbable absurdities into which they
wander, are curiously entertaining  What is much
more, they reveal to us human curiosities-lusus humani
generls-human freaks-which are quite real, however seldom found in the world or in literature.  Like
all the great caricaturists from Cervantes to Hogarth and
Dickens, Smollett too often oversteps the limits of
actual nature; but like these masters, he has brought to
light sonie wondrous oddities from the lowest strata of
humanity.
On another ground Snollett is well worth reading * I
mean as an historian of his time.  The Britain of the
early Georges, along with its political, social, and intellectual brilliance, was stained with depravity, vice,
cruelty, and corruption.  No one has ever revealed its
darker side so truthfully and so ruthlessly as Smollett.
Ile knew it all only too well and he paints it with a
power even stronger than that of Fielding, who knew it
rather from above and officially, whilst Smollett had
lived in it, and studied it as a born artist of human
nature, though he did nothing, like Fielding, to reform
and abolish its evils.  Smollett had been a rolugh seaman, a tramp in the roads, a debtor in jail, a Grub Street




TOBIAS SMOLLETT


155


hack, and had bitter memories of the navy in the glorious
days of Rodney and Howe, of highwaymen and thieves
in the posting time, of prisons before Howard, and of
starving authors before Dr. Johnson. Fielding, Goldsmith and Hogarth gave us insight into corners of this
world of misery, cruelty, and vice, and so did Marryat
and Dickens much later. But Smollett has left records
of this world at its worst-with far more completeness
and with a darker brush.  He knew it, for he was of it,
and he studied it, as Juvenal or Swift had done, with a
heart of burning indignation.  I fear we must admit
that his picture is only too truthful.
But this vivid satire of a bad time would not be enough
to place Smollett amongst the immortal painters of
human life; if there were not much more in his
romances. And there is much more. If Smollett had
not altogether a fine nature, he had many generous
qualities.  He had a sincere love of honesty, charity,
good faith, and chastity, as essential virtues to be held
up as examples, wherever it could be found.  There is
an irrepressible humanity and generosity bubbling up
freshly in some of his wildest buffoons and even in his
reckless spendthrifts and debauchees.  He is a poor
hand at painting a noble and lovable woman; but there
is usually a rather unsubstantial angel hovering about
his very substantial rogues and profligates.  However
keenly he is interested in his wicked ones, he does not
leave wickedness triumphant at the end.  Nay, more:
some of his most comical clowns exhibit a patience, a
fidelity, a kindliness under cruel pressure, that is really
heroic.  And some of his supreme triumphs in the art
of caricature and humour have in them inexhaustible




156


MORE IAST WORDS


wells of benevolence, tenderness, and a sound heart.
Though his earlier, most popular, and from a literary
estimate his best novels, are on the whole lurid satires
of seamy life, there is in them a redeeming element of a
purer humanity.
All this would not be enough to cure me of my early
repugnance to Smollett's novels, were it not that in two
of them, especially in his last, there is a less cynical tone.
"Sir Launcelot Greaves" has a plot of outrageous
absurdity-a country squire careering round the England of  Tom Jones" in plate armour with a Sancho
Panza on a cart-horse. " Humphry Clinker " is a story
pieced out of a set of tiresome letters-which is to me an
intolerable form of plot.  Still, the Knight, when out
of his Quixotic buffoonery, is a noble gentleman with
generous and humane ideals-that most risky compound, a crazy hero, which nothing but the genius of
Cervantes can  make tolerable.   In  " Humphry
Clinker " again Smollett at last drops his study of foulmouthed ruffians, and has drawn the restoration of a
wretched foundling to a place of honour and merit,
whilst the poor boy's fine nature, fiercely tried in every
extreme, conquers our sympathy, in spite of the squalid
surroundings into which he was plunged at birth.
Neither " Sir Launcelot " nor " Humphry" are great
works of art; nor in art are they even Smollett's best
novels. But I can forgive him much for these two
pictures of brave, generous, faithful, and almost heroic
natures who shine forth out of grotesque foolery and
clownish debasements.




x


CHARLES KINGSLEY
A CENTENARY TRIBUTE
A POET, a novelist, a scholar, essayist, agitator,
reformer, preacher, teacher, priest, a man of
genius whose writings are alive and effective
after half a century has passed —above all, one of the
keenest spirits of that restoration of Labour that is
taking vast development to-day-such a man must not
be forgotten.
As I was but twelve years his junior myself, was also
at King's College in London, was at Oxford when some
of his most stirring work was done, and as I was afterwards in close relations with almost all his London
friends, I ask leave to say a few words about one who so
deeply coloured my own early life.
As I have already in my "Victorian Literature"
(1895) treated of Kingsley as a man of letters, I will now
regard him rather as social pioneer than as poet or
romancer.  If he did not reach quite the first rank in
poetry or romance, his versatility, his fecundity, his
imagination, had a sympathetic touch which struck
home and left indelible mark.  No ballads of that age
have such melody and charm.  His children's stories
will delight our descendants for generations.  There
157




158


MORE LAST WORDS


are scenes in " Hypatia" and in "Westward Ho! "
which are as vivid as the best of Scott's, which still to
men and women in their old age recall the enchanted
hours when they read them first in youth.  Kingsley
had real gifts as a poet, and real insight as a prophet.
He would have done far greater creative work if he could
have kept his social passion under control.  He might
have left more systematic influence as prophet if his
irrepressible versatility had not stirred him to break out
in almost every possible form of literary expression.
But my business now is to speak of him as social
pioneer.  Our modern Labour expansion dates from
the year 1848, with the Continental revolutions and our
Chartist agitation, followed by the great typical lock-out
of the Amalgamated Engineers in 1852, and then the
great Builders' Strike of 1861.  Out of these efforts of
workmen in Trade Unionism     and in Co-operation
sprang the literary and spiritual movement of the
cultured classes known as Christian Socialism, which has
gradually developed into the intellectual and moral
Socialism of the Fabian and similar societies.  Of this
early Christian Socialism, Frederick D. Maurice, from
1848 to 1872, was the founder and spiritual director;
Carlyle was the social philosopher and prophet; but
Charles Kingsley was the literary champion whose
ringing battle-cries led the van.  What a time was this
from 1848 to 1877, when the penal laws against Trade
Unions were in full swing!  In this period wages had
been as low as 15s. in towns, even 10s. in the country.
Trade Unions were illegal conspiracies.  Hours of
labour were never less than ten, and often ran into
twelve or fourteen.  Housing, food, clothing, sanita



CHARLES KINGSLEY


tion, were deplorably bad.  I speak of what I know,
for during part of this time I was at college or at
Lincoln's Inn, and for the last fifteen years I was in the
thick of the Labour fight.
So I can bear witness that from   1850 to 1875
Kingsley's Songs, Tracts, Novels, Sermons, were a real
inspiration to the younger men of academic training who
were entering on professional life in the Churches, in
law, in politics, and in business.  Tom Hughes, my
colleague in the Commission of 1867-9, was saturated
with Kingsley's works, and has written a fine preface to
the " Alton Locke " of 1877.  Of all the men round
Maurice, who founded the Working-Men's College in
1854, Kingsley's was the clarion voice which reached
the furthest and stirred men most.  His call to action
was far the boldest, the most passionate, the most manysided, and also, after Maurice himself, the one most
inspired by the Gospel.  Kingsley was then the only
Socialist who was a working parish-priest  One or two
of Kingsley's friends were in orders, as were Powles and
Kegan Paul.    But Hughes, Ludlow, Ruskin, the
Lushingtons, Hutton, Morris, and Furmvall, were all
laymen-and some of us very much laymen indeed.
The first of Kingsley's social novels was " Yeast," a
fierce, thrilling denunciation of the current social
wrongs. It was well named, for it was a kind of ferment
thrown into the ideas regarded as orthodox, and
Kingsley's genius itself was a kind of ferment made to
stir the dull mass of ordinary society.  It is full of
extravagance and inconsistencies, but its furious
eloquence reached a wider public perhaps than Carlyle's
cryptic epigrams.  The pamphlets, too, of "Parson




160


MORE LAST WORDS


Lot " were full of courage, sympathy, and indignation,
and told on the people like the pamphlets in the French
Revolution of 1789.  Then " Alton Locke " was an
even more complete and more artistic study of the same
message, manifestly inspired by Carlyle.  I can recall
the stirring effect of " Alton Locke " which I read in
the first issue as an undergraduate at Oxford, a long,
romantic, and revolutionary embodiment of much that
we found in a more spiritual form in the sermons of
Frederick D. Maurice. Kingsley himself in that book
evidently calls Carlyle his master, and Carlyle's
"French Revolution   ' "the epic of modern days."
Kingsley's three chiefs were, in poetry, Tennyson; in
economics, Carlyle; in religion, Maurice.  But his
ballads have a trumpet note that Tennyson did not
sound; his reforms are far more practical than Carlyle's;
and he was more of a parish parson than Maurice. He
kept pouring out such pamphlets as " Cheap Clothes
and Nasty," "Parson Lot," diatribes on plutocrats,
appeals in the " Christian Socialist," the " Co-operator," tracts, songs, and sermons.  Read the two big
volumes of his " Letters and Memories," by his wife,
1877, and see what an untiring, stormy, passionate,
generous, devout life was that of one who might have
been a great writer if he had not been a militant
reformer, who might have been a great social power if
he had a less impulsive and poetic temperament that
revelled in every manifestation of Nature or of Man.
Though Charles Kingsley would repudiate the profane and sanguinary fanatics of 1789, I think of him as
the Camille Desmoulins of our own Labour revolution
-the same audacity, fire, great heart, and that genius




CHARLES KINGSLEY


161


for hitting on the decisive word of the hour.  Parson
Lot in 1848 did what Camille did in the Palais Royal,
on July 12, 1789.   He gave the watchword "To
Arms " in British constitutional style, which ultimately
led to the fall of our plutocratic Bastille-if our Bastille
be yet really down.  But British ways are widely
different from Continental ways, and the nineteenth
century was very far from the eighteenth. And if midVictorian Conservatism denounced Kingsley as a dangerous revolutionist, we now know him as a sincere and
pious Churchman, a hearty friend and comrade, a
delightful humorist and songster-a truly affectionate
son, husband, and brother-of whom not a word ever
fell from his voice, nor his public or private writing, but
what will long remain to do honour to his memory.




XI


THE NEW AGE: HOW TO FACE IT
" LABORARE EST ORARE "
N E of the noblest sayings of medieval monastiO     cism-truly lived by the first generation of
Franciscans-was this motto, peculiarly fitting
to our time-a real New Age. How to face it? Why,
by work-by genuine, useful social labour.  As the old
mnonks said, to toil at producing things needful to human
life is to offer up ourselves to the law of Creation which
ordained that life on this earth could be sustained only
b1 the sweat of man's brow.  After the greatest catac(lsmn in recorded history-a moral and material Deluge
— we come again to this, that our civilization will be
drowned out unless it set itself anew to work-to work
in a right spirit and to a right end. Not to work, as we
have hitherto done, at our amusements, luxuries, and
vices.  But to abolish Idleness, eliminate all forms of
Idle Classes, make it felt that idleness is a social crime,
that an idle class is a crowd of wasters-a Class of
I Tndesirables.
Of course, a civilized community of workers does not
mean that work for all is manual labour for man, woman,
and child.  That is the crazy sophism of Karl Marx,
which has ended in the hideous orgy of Bolshevism.
MIarx was so far right when he said that work was the
162




THE NEW AGE


163


social duty of all-the sole justification of a competence
of living.  His fallacy was in assuming that Labour
meant nothing but manual toil to produce material
things. As we have seen, that ends in tyranny, chaos,
and famine.  The material things are no doubt a very
large part of the system of complex civilization, and the
manual work needed to produce them must employ the
large majority of the population.  But the knowledge,
science, powers of intellect and command, which are
required to organize Labour are so indispensable that
they often outweigh numbers by a thousand to one. A
factory without a highly trained and conpetent staff of
managers is as helpless as an army without officers or a
steamship without steam.  And in modern civilization
the vast complexity of all that ennobles our life and
distinguishes it from barbarism requires an infinite
amount of special training from childhood and rare gifts
of brain and of nature which are largely the result of
inheritance and tradition.
It may be asked: How are those to work who are
physically unfit to use their hands in an industrial sense,
have never learnt a trade, and could not earn a " living
wage" if they tried?  Well! the war lias shown us
one good thing in all its horrors.  Our idle classes, on
the whole, did put their backs into it-at least nearly
all of them tried '" to do their bit."  Very many of them
bled and died most gallantly.  The women of every
class showed us a noble example, and taught us all, even
the weakest and most frivolous, that they could do something useful to win the war.  Even the slackers pretended they were doing something.  It began to be
socially disgraceful-at any rate, "' bad form "-to be




164


1MORE LAST WORDS


conspicuously idle and useless.  It came to be like
shirking military service to be simply " having a good
time" when most of us were mourning, toiling, and
sweating over impending ruin.  The miners, who say
that an eight-hour day is intolerable, and fifty shillings
for five days' work is slavery, little know what long
hours, wasting capital, and half incomes meant to the
middle class and so-called luxurious orders whom their
strikes are pinching to the bone. Even during the war
there wvere too many insufferable idlers. But, as a rule,
people did work, or tried to work.  Idleness and mere
devotion to pleasure were felt to be unpatriotic, disloyal,
and socially discreditable.
Wihy can we not continue this very wholesome state
of mind?   If war is over between nations there is war
within the nation in sight all round.  It may prove
harder to win peace than to win war. To-day England
is under the thunder-clouds of a crisis as dark as any
during the war, in some ways a crisis even more
imminent.   Our country still calls on every man and
woman " to do their bit " to save it from ruin.  The
war has shown us that every citizen can do something
to help-even the boys and girls.  We have no longer
to manufacture guns, shells, and destroyers, nor to run
vast war-hospitals and knit socks.  But there is ever
with us still a whole people of sick, maimed, fatherless,
and destitute.  There is a terrible shortness of food, of
clothing, of wood, coal, metal, leather, and wool. It is
very well to call upon workmen to work their hardest,
to accept the orders of the State, to cease to strike every
second week, and to restore discipline in their ranks.
The middle class, the professional class, the rich and the




THE NEW AGE


165


well-born, well-bred, the so-called idle class, cannot
make food, clothing or houses. But can they do nothing
to help society in this hour of stress?  Yes! They can
show an example of self-denial, of self-restraint, of
discipline, and public spirit.  They can cease to flaunt
their idleness in the face of the workers.
There is quite as much to be done by the luxurious
and cultured as there is to be done by the bricklayer, the
miner, or the ploughman.  They can cease to create
the demand for useless display and wanton extravagance.
They can forbear to divert the labour of millions in
catering for their idiotic love of frivolities.  Let them
give the word that all such things show the ill-breeding
of vulgar profiteers-do not become fine gentlefolk.
During the war a gentleman was not anxious to be
" smart." Would that all of us would shrink from anything " smart," be it man or woman, lad or girl! Let
their pride be to show that labour must be concentrated
on producing things needed by the people, for their
health, education, and happiness-not on producing
things only to be wasted on idle amusements and shows.
The duty of all who cannot work with their hands is to
prove by their lives that they recognise the call to all
that can be understood as honest work.  It is appalling
to see what infinite waste of precious labour is flung away
on horse-racing, on fantastic clothes, jewellery, joymotors, unwholesome food and drink. Do these reckless spendthrifts know that to-day the food, the coal,
the conveyance of people is being given them as doles,
far below cost price, by a huge debt laid on our children
to pay? Truly, this time of national peril should force
on all the social duty of "rationing" labour, by our
ensample, if not wNith our hands.




XII


A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS*
I. ---BASIC PRINCIPLES
O define the term-philosophical synthesis, or,
in other words, a synthetic philosophy-Johnson, quoting Newton's Optics and Dr. Watts'
Logick, tells us that Synthesws is the act of joining,
opposed to analysis-and Synthetic is forming composition, opposed to analytic which   s; separation.
These terms have been in use for science and philosophy
ever since Aristotle and Plato-always meaning compounding, generalizing particulars on a system. Littre
calls synthese-" tableau presentant l'ensemble d'une
science"; in philosophy, the "construction of a system."   He quotes Descartes as identifying synthese
with composition.  Kant speaks of the "synthetical
unity of the manifold "! But the most familiar account
of these terms in English is Mr. Herbert Spencer's
title of Synthetic philosophy which he uses as describing
the whole of his system. Science, he says, is " partiallyunified knowledge; Philosophy is completely-unified
knowledge."   Accordingly, a philosophic synthesis is
a system of all general principles co-ordinated and
harmonized.
As night be expected froml the vast scale of such a
* Two lectures delivered at the Royal Institution, London, May 15, 1920.
i66




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


167


system-the examples of a true synthetic philosophy
have been extremely few. Certainly, the earliest-perhaps until our own age the only complete synthesis-is
that of Aristotle, the greatest mind ever given to man.
For the first time in the history of thought, almost, we
may say, for the last time, Aristotle grasped the whole
range of then existing knowledge, cosmic, physic,
biologic, sociologic, and ethic: he signally enlarged
many of these, and reduced the whole to systematic
order. Of course, his astronomy and his physics were
rudimentary, his biology a mere torso, and in sociology
his want of any recorded history and any wide experience
of a civilized world left his ideas of evolution almost nil.
But his conception of a synthetic philosophy marks one
of the grandest epochs in the whole intellectual story
of man.
After Aristotle the ancient thinkers parted-one
series to pursue the special sciences, the other to devote
themselves to metaphysics, logic, and ethics. Aristotle's
works were neglected, and even lost until they were
recovered by Musulmans and Jews from Baghdad and
Spain and handed on to the mediaeval schoolmen. The
greatest of these, Thomas Aquinas, basing his thought
on Aristotle-in fact a Catholic interpreter of Aristotle
-in his short and laborious life produced what, with the
very limited science of the age, may be regarded as a
synthetic philosophy on a strictly theological basis.
Descartes and Bacon no doubt conceived some such
scheme, but the science of both was too imperfect, and
Bacon's mind was too analytic, to produce a really
synthetic philosophy, nor can we take Kant, or Hlume,
or Hegel, to have achieved such an encyclopaedic task
12




MORE LAST WORDS


on  their metaphysical basis.   Voltaire, Diderot,
D'Alembert, and Condorcet, saw     such a possible
Utopia on a scientific basis, but they were all of too
revolutionary a temper to attempt so vast a reconstruction of knowledge. Of the moderns, Leibnitz perhaps
was the nearest to succeed in the task; for Leibnitz was
as great in science, as he was in law, morals, and social
philosophy.
I reserve criticism of the Hegelian and the Spencerian
systems and any comparison of these with the Positivist
system to a subsequent lecture, and here I will only say
that the former two are, to my mind, inadequate; first,
because the relative philosophy repudiates all forms of
absolute doctrine, whether metaphysical or scientific,
secondly, because neither Hegel nor Spencer attempt
to co-ordinate the physical sciences; and the dynamics
of sociology (i.e., history) are left too vague by Hegel
and are totally ignored by Spencer. My thesis to-day
is that the relative, that is the human, synthesis of
Auguste Comte, is the only adequate co-ordination of
ultimate principles of knowledge as yet before the world
— thourh I freely admit that seventy years have made
an enormous advance in the sciences, amounting indeed
in some of their branches to complete recasting; and
also that much of the synthesis itself must be regarded
as a Utopian ideal of what may ultimately be achieved
on similar lines.
In this summary of the earlier philosophies it would
be impossible to attempt an estimate of how far any of
them can be said to have attained to a system of general
principles of human knowledge.  It is enough to say
that neither the physical sciences nor the evolution of




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


169


civilization were sufficiently advanced to make success
possible-at least down to the time of living memory,
i.e., the middle of the nineteenth century.  Many
thinkers, and no doubt most specialists, would deny
that it is possible now-if it ever will be. But the
school of thought in which I have lived, holds that some
attempt to such a synthesis can now be made, and
ought to be made-and has been made.      Without
disputing the value of other systems, I hold that there
have been in the nineteenth century three systems which
can be called philosophic syntheses: the absolute
ontological synthesis-on the lines of Hegel. the
absolute scientific synthesis on the lines of Herbert
Spencer, the relative scientific synthesis on the lines of
Auguste Comte. It is these three only which I am
about to discuss.
Before describing the relative (or human) synthesis,
I must state the principal postulates on which it is built.
I call them postulates, though we regard them as
demonstrated certainties, because I could not here
attempt to set out the demonstration I am well aware
that all who hold by ontological metaphysics would
deny every one. These postulates, or axioms, are the
universal reign of Law, the Relativity of knowledge,
the idea of Evolution in the moral as in the material
world. These axioms are the groundwork of modern
science. To analyze these dogmas more in detail, we
say:
1. All facts of observation, physical or moral, are
subject to invariable law.
o. All knowledge is based on observation of facts,
direct or indirect, and as being obtained by the human




170


MORE LAST WORDS


organism, we cannot eliminate sensation as in part the
source of everything we know or conceive.
3. Hence, all knowledge must be relative to the
human faculties, which are composed of physical, moral,
and mental powers. Comte carries to the furthest limit
the relative philosophy by the axiom  " Everything is
relative not absolute-unless it be this axiom itself "
4. All observations of the material, moral and social
worlds manifest a continuous development-now known
as evolution. " Progress is the development of Order,"
i.e, effective advance can only issue out of elements
already prepared for new conditions.. Psychology or the laws of mind can be based only
on the facts of man's nervous organism, and so far must
start with Biology.  To '"interrogate the consciousness  apart from the entire human organism is futile
and misleading.
6. Society is subject to the invariable law of evolution; and hence arises a science of Sociology-a name
which Comte invented in 1837-and which for the first
time he reduced to a systematic-albeit a rudimentary
form.
All these propositions are the common ground of the
philosophy of experience and of relativity, as expounded
by Mill and his followers, and by Spencer and his followers, and by many important schools of biology and
social science. I now add the dominant laws which are
specially distinctive of the Positivist school.
7. The law of the Three States, i.e., of intellectual
advance, first by fictitlous, or fanciful agencies, then by
crude generalizations from hypothetical causes, lastly,
from scientific proof. This series of explanations is




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS
*


171


usually relative to specific branches of thought, and all
three states may co-exist in the same mind as to
different classes of things.
8. Comte's classification of the true or pure Sciences
in the order of their increasing complexity of subject
and decreasing generality of range are these sevenMathematics, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, Biology,
Sociology, Morals. All admit numerous sub-divisions
and  compositions, as Geology   needs Astronomy,
Physics, and Biology, as Sociology needs Biology,
Psychology, Economics, and History. The seven pure
sciences are independent, but serial in the order named,
and are abstract, dealing with general principles, not
concrete or practical.
9. The philosophy of history used is specially the
work of Comte. It has no rival as a detailed and continuous story of civilization-and has been warmly
supported by Mill, by Littre, and others at home and
abroad.
10. Philosophy is not, and cannot be, a system
merely of intellectual doctrines, but, as Aristotle said,
must aim at guiding and directing human life.
Philosophy cannot be detached from morality, society,
and religion. All of these necessarily rest on Philosophy
-which unites those dominant and general ideas that
practically determine character and life.
I reserve the cardinal question which may seem to
cut the ground from under all I have to say about a
synthetic philosophy. Even if it were a possible search,
they say, what would be the use of it in the vast range
and diversity of modern thought, and the infinite
problems of practical life?




172


MORE LAST WORDS


To-day, I only say that all serious men, whatever
their duties, their learning, or their religion, have
ultimate general ideas on which their minds and their
lives rest, even if they are not conscious of any system
of thought.   That is their philosophy.   And as
philosophy must deal with the co-ordination of ideas
about the World and Man and give some rational clue
to their relations, Philosophy must group scientific
knowledge and practical morals, and form a synthesis
of knowledge and life, however rough and vague this
may be.
All men and women, who are not ignorant or triflers,
have at the back of their brains some sort of philosophy
of thin.s, which thev regard as the rational ground of
their conduct. Accordingly, a synthetic philosophy is
not only a necessity of the human mind, but is the
indispensable ideal which determines practical life.
n.-PRINCIPLES OF THE POSITIVE SYNTHESIS
As I have said there are but three possible syntheses
of ultimate generalizations: (1) an absolute ontological
synthesis which conceives the Universe as under some
pervading Power, (2) an absolute scientific synthesis
which undertakes to explain the    Tniverse on demonstrable laws; (3) the relative synthesis of positive
science, limited in space to our visible system, in time
to the real or historic record, and in subject to human
life. The governing idea of the Positive Philosophy is
to carry out to its legitimate consequences the conception of Relativity that has won so large a realm in the
world of modern thought. If all later Metaphysics fall
back on the basic truth of the Limitation of the human




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


173


mind, if all that we can know and can do, must be
subject to the conditions of our human organism, it is
in vain to spin cobwebs about the Universe, whether
you think that intuition or that science can supply them,
and it is vain to waste labour on such knowledge as
would be useless to human life even if it could be
attained, or to nourish dreams about an existence which
is not that of men and women at all.
The human synthesis which we propose repudiates
any objective, i.e., non-human, unity, whether metaphysical or scientific, and holds firnlyd to a human or
subjective unity, that is, in conception and in aim,
limited to man's resources and to his life on this earth.
Instead of trying to know things as they are, or as they
might be, we aim at systematizing the knowledge of
that which affects man, and which groups knowledge
round its relation to man, and its power of affecting
man's life. This means an arrangement of all our ideas
from the central point of Man, that is, the entire life of
the human race, in its noblest and highest aspirations.
The Positive Philosophy is geocentric in its science,
i.e, regards everything outside this earth from the point
of view of our Earth, and it is anthropocentric in its
moral and spiritual aspect, i.e., its beliefs and its hopes
are concentrated on human life.
After stating the six general axioms of thought which
are common to the philosophy of Comte and to the
Philosophy of all schools of Relativity, Experience,
Law, and Evolution, I will now speak more in detail
of those principles which are more specially distinctive
of Positivism, and originate with Auguste Comte.
The first of them is the law of the Three States, through




174


MORE LAST WORDS


which all subjects of inquiry pass ---() the Fictitious,
without attempt at proof, (2) the Metaphysical, reference to abstractions, or unverified scientific guesses, (3)
Positive conclusions from strict scientific proof. These
three modes of thought pass gradually into each other,
in this order. They are all to be found together in the
same individual mind, and in all ages-on different
subjects of thought. An astronomer may believe the
I niverse to be ruled by the Creator, or by Mind, or by
Chance: he may believe that history revolves in fixed
cycles, and he may hold the Newtonian theory of
Gravitation.  The fictitious stage does not mean the
Theological, because the Lucretian belief in Chance,
Atheism, and Materialism are examples of the fictitious
theory.  The metaphysical stage is not peculiar to
Ontology.   It includes unverified hypotheses under a
scientific mask, such as crude dogmatism about racial
characteristics. The Positive stage of thought includes
all true scientific belief, a state of miind in which all
educated men rest for a very large part of their settled
thoughts; but which few exact for every conceivable
matter of thought, from the origin of the Universe to
Nature, and to the limits of human consciousness. This
primary Law of the evolution of thought was formulated
by Comte in 1822, 100 years ago. It lies at the basis
of Positivism; it has been ardently supported by Mr.
Mill and his school in England, by Littre and his school
in France, and has triumphantly resisted all attempts to
displace it. Recent attempts to do so seem based on
an imperfect understanding of Comte's law.
The Classification of the Sciences is the cardinal
instrument of the Synthetic Philosophy. It proposes




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


175


to form an ascending scale of the Sciences in the order
of their increasing complexity of matter and decreasing
generality of range. Again, they are abstract, meaning
general laws of each order of Science-not concrete
applications and combinations. All seven sciences have
many sub-divisions and innumerable cross divisions in
practice. The seven master sciences lead up to one
another and form the basis of each other in that order.
Mathematics are the foundation of all science. It is the
logic, or organon of Science. It is the groundwork of
Astrononmy-which has a special and narrower range
but is deeply complicated with Physics. Physics in all
its various branches, dealing with the whole range of
cosmic phenomena is a science more general in range
than Chemistry, which practically deals with terrestrial
matter. So, too, Biology is general to all living organisms, and is obviously wider than Sociology, which
has to include not only Social biology-but the interaction of n-ind, will, and feeling —Psychology, history,
economics, and religion-and thereby is a more complex
and less exact science than Biology. Lastly, Morals is
a specialized branch of Sociology-not so wide but even
less exact. As the code of human Duty, it is the
ultimate crown and aim of all knowledge-i.e., the
highest of the Sciences.
It must be understood that this classification of the
Sciences is confined to the abstract, i.e., the most
general laws, independent of all applied science and
practical uses in concrete things, and independent of all
composite sciences of mixed science-such as geology,
economics, psychology, physiology, geography, botany,
electricity and the innunerable sub-divisions and inter



176


16MORE LAST WORDS


actions of the concrete sciences. To form any sort of
scale or synthesis of these would be futile. The seven
Positive Sciences are strictly abstract, general, fundamental, dealing only with dominant laws of a kind
which are distinctive and not interchangeable, nor intermixed: as is geology, which uses alternately many
sciences-astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.
Astronomy has no need of Biology, nor has Biology of
Morals. Comte's classification of the sciences has been
actively supported by Mill and his followers in England
and by Littr6 and his school in France and elsewhere.
Both have refuted the oriticism of Herbert Spencer,
which turned entirely on his confusing abstract laws
with concrete applications, and with failing to notice
that Comte's classification was strictly limited to the
abstract sciences, on the ground that a classification of
the mixed concrete branches of knowledge would lead
to endless confusion and useless detail.
Taking these seven master sciences in their order,
Auguste Comte proceeded to group their elementary
laws in a coherent system-tracing the gradual evolution in the order of historic formation and of their
influence each on the successive science, as Astronomy
grew out of Mathematics, as Physics grew out of
Astronomy, and Sociology out of Biology. I risk the
contradiction-I may say the derision-of the learned
when I claim that this is the first attempt at a synthesis
of all knowledge, and is still the only synthesis extant.
I am far from pretending that it is adequate-much less
that it is final. But it is the only sketch yet offered to
the seekers after Philosophy. I shall not presume to
state even in summary this attempt to fuse scientific




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


177


knowledge into a coherent scheme. It may be studied
in the six volumes of Comte's Philosophic. in the four
volumes of his Politique, in his Astronomie Populaire,
in his Synthese Subjective. All these are now seventy
or even eighty years old. In these three generations
enormous strides have been made in such sciences as
Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, whilst little essential
has been added to the Astronomy of the Solar System.
Nor was Comte a master in any of these sciences, as
they existed even in 1840. He was a specialist in
Mathematics. He was a student of the great Physicists
and Biologists of his time  He published a specialist
work on Astronomy, and he xwas the real founder of
Sociology, and he sketched his own special science of
Morals. Of course, in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology,
the outlines of a co-ordination of their principles made
in 1840 could be little but an ideal, a suggestion of what
might be done, nor do we claim for these any higher
value. But in Philosophy, ideals, and even mere creative
Thoughts, are of immense value. How crude was the
~science of Physics and of Biology in the age of Aristotle
and Plato! How potent have been their attempts at
a synthesis!  How   fanciful was the Ontology of
Aquinas, and yet what a world has it enslaved! How
primitive was the Astrology of IHipparchus and
Ptolemy. Yet how great was its dominion, even over
religion, for 1600 years! How scanty was the science
of Descartes and Bacon. Yet how deeply did it transform the thought of mankind!
Turning now to the third of the distinctive principles
of the Positivist School, the Science of Sociology, we
claim that this was truly founded by Auguste Conte




178


MORE LAST WORDS


in the three latter volumes of his Philosophie Positive,
1839, 1841, 1842, and in the four volumes of his
Politique Positive, 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854. But the
general idea of sociology had been sketched in essays of
1819, 1820, 1822, 1825, 1826. The science is thus one
hundred years old.  In his great Dictionary Littre
describes Sociology as the science of the development
and constitution of human societies, and he adds that
the hybrid title was due to Comte, who called it a happy
combination which recalled the Greek and Roman
societies with whom ideas of social systems arose. The
title Sociolowy and the legitimacy of the Science so
called has been adopted by various schools of thought
in the civilized world and has been popularized in the
English-speaking world by the works of Herbert
Spencer and his followers. It must be specially noted
that Comte made no claim to have done more than to
have instituted the science, i.e., to have given its elements and scheme, not to have constituted it in a complete and permanent form. This, he said, must be left
to his successors.
The institution of Sociology as a real science is the
main achievement of Comte, as it occupies the larger
half of his earlier work, the Philosophie, and the whole
of the subsequent work, the Politique. We claim it
to be the most important contribution to General
P'hilosophy, since the ages of Descartes, Bacon, and
Leibniz. Since it involves, as its intellectual basis, the
physical sciences and prepares the ground for Morals,
Comte's Sociology is in effect a Synthetic Philosophy
of human progress. Of profound importance is the
division of the Social Science into Statics and Dynamics




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


179


-i.e., into the essentials and permanent institutions of
human society-and the progressive development of
society in the ages, in fact, the history of civilization.
This conception of Statics and Dynanlics, first published
in 1839 (Vol. IV, Phil Pos ), has been adopted by most
students of Sociology, and especially by Herbert Spencer
and his followers. The grand dualism of Sociologybetween the study of the fixed and elementary organizations of Society and that of its development and evolution
was naturally founded by a mathematician, to whom
Statics and Dynamics were fundamental ideas. This
brilliant conception threw a flood of light on all subsequent philosophy and has been the guide of all who
reason about the progress of Society, especially since
Herbert Spencer published his Social Statics in 1851.
Social Statics, indispensable as they are, take up only
the initial parts of Comte's Sociology and consist entirely of abstract or indestructible laws of human
societies-such  as  Religion,  Property,  Family,
Language, Government, Education, Morality. Now,
all of these are treated from the point of view of
permanent principles, not of the practical and special
forms in past or present nations.  Thus religion is
treated not as it is in any human creed, but in the
conditions to which all creeds conform, i.e., having
Doctrine, Worship, and Government-a dogma, or
intellectual foundation-Worship, or the appeal to
emotions-Discipline, or the rules of practical conduct
and order. These are treated as indispensable elements
of any kind of religion, without reference even to
Comte's own scheme of a religion of Humanity.  Indeed, I remember that an eminent Anglican Bishop




180


1MIORE IAST WORDS


spoke of this analysis as of profound value as a scientific
instrument of thought.   After thus analyzing these
seven normal institutions of all types of society, even
the most rudimentary type and the most revolutionary,
Comte's Social Statics proceed to formulate the conditions of social harmony, to be attained only by a coordination of intellectual, noral, and practical bonds of
unity and peace.
But the sccond part of Sociology, Social Dynamics,
is far the larger and most original side of Comte's contribution to the science.  He calls it "the necessary
and continuous movenent of humanity "-in other
words, the Science of Progress.  But by Progess, he
does not mean invariable advance to a higher state, as
a recent critic assumes, but evolution or growth, the
expansion of a previous condition under normal forces
of life. It is plain how widely Social Dynamics distinguish Sociology from Biology, dealing as it does with
all animal life. The world of the higher brutes exhibits
elementary Social Statics, the germs of Family, Governilent, Morality, even of Language. But Social Progress is exclusively human. The glorious privilege of
HIumanity is that it hands on from generation to
generation its knowledge, its laws, its habits, its
aspirations and its hopes. Whatever objections may be
raised to apply to individuals Campbell's fine line, " to
live in hearts we leave behind us is not to die," is certainly true of generations of men in social organisms.
Civilization hands on the torch of life, as the old poet
said. To reduce this to scientific laws is to found a
Philosophy of history.
Comte never pretended that he was the sole originator




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


181


of Sociology. No philosopher has ever been so anxious
to do justice to his predecessors in thought. As to
Social Statics, he amply records all that was done by
Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, and the Roman moralists.
In Social Dynamics the ancients could do nothing, for
they had no possible history of civilization, nor could
the Medieval thinkers do anything, for they had only a
distorted history of civilization.  But Vico, Pascal,
Leibniz, Montesquieu and Condorcet, had fertile views
of human progress-though none of them    had any
sound theories of history from the dawn of records to
our own days. I claim that for the first time in human
thought Comte produced a really scientific scheme of
History from Fetichist times to 1848. This history is
contained in Vols. V and VI of the Philosophie, 1841,
1842, and in Vol. III of his Politique, 1853. When I
turn back in mind to all that is contained in these two
works, I say first, that Comte was too modest in saying
that he had instituted, or founded, Sociology, but had
not constituted, or elaborated it. He really went far
to elaborate it as a developed science in all Its parts and
scheme. Secondly, I say that this Philosophy of History is the most original, most important, most creative,
step that was taken by the Philosophy of the nineteenth
century.
If such language sounds extravagant, I may remind
critics that, in the midst of his attack on Comte's later
work, J. Stuart Mill used language almost as strong of
this Philosophy of History, and especially of the New
Calendar of Great Men, in which Comte gave his synthesis of history an artistic symmetry. All Mill's school
adopt and use the same sketch of history, as do LittrY,




MORE LAST WORDS


and many others in France, in Europe, and in America.
I will make a clean breast of it personally. I have
studied this vast revelation of the past now for more
than 60 years. I have weighed it, tested it, taught it,
lived in it-much as the Puritans of Milton's time lived
in their Bible as the revelation of man's past and future.
And though I am not convinced of every part of it,
though much else of Comte is to me held in suspense,
this sketch of History seems to me decisive-but merely,
as a provisional programme.
The Calendar, with its classified list of 559 names of
typical men and women in the history of all ages and
nations, is a conspectus of general civilization-and with
the Biographies of which there is now a second edition,
it forms a scientific conception of the past. So the
Library, or list of some 270 works by 140 authors,
ancient and modern-in four groups-Poetry and
Fiction, Science, History, Philosophy and Religionforms an organized scheme of general Literature. Then
follows the general Scheme of Philosophy, with an
arrangement of Laws of Thought, the analysis of
Psychology, and the foundations of Morals.
Taken together-this concrete theory of all human
history, the artistic grouping for each day of the year,
the leading pioneers and leaders of civilization-the
Library of all that is most invaluable in the world's
literature-the canons of Philosophy and Morals-these
connected and correlated Schemes of Art, of Action,
of Philosophy, of Science and Society, form a Synthesis
of knowledge. And I claim for it that it is the only
complete, coherent, and scientific synthesis now extant.
In a future Lecture I propose to treat its reaction upon
modern thought, its critics and its future aspirations.




A 1PHIIOSOPIIIC SYNTHESIS


183


III. —REACTION AND CRITICS OF POSITIVISM
Having in the first lecture explained the philosophic
Synthesis of Auguste Comte, I now deal with its Reaction on modern thought, and its principal critics,
confining myself as before to the intellectual side, and
not touching on its social, ethical, and religious
development.
By the reactions of this Synthesis I mean its general
and indirect influence not merely on systematic
philosophy, but its subtle permeation on ideas of every
kind. There was once a popular notion that Positivists
were an exceedingly small, narrow, bigoted sect, rigidly
bound to a hard-and-fast body of dogmas, in which no
doubt or qualification could exist, and which must be
believed as having a sort of virtual inspiration. If any
such there be, they are quite unknown to me and to my
friends. We are not Comtists: we have no sect, no
orthodoxy, no creeds. Wve know that much in the
voluminous works of Comte is a utopian ideal, waiting
for adequate proof, and, in the world as it is, quite
impracticable.
Very different is the case with Comte's general
philosophy or Synthesis-the relative, human, subjective systematizing of all knowledge round the ideal
of the evolution of humanity. This has slowly grown
in the hundred years since it was first elaborated into
an axiom of thought which colours and inspires modern
reasoning about science as well as about society.  On
every side we recognise in all forms of serious thought
an unconscious Positivism of which we trace the original
source. Positivism is in the air-so far as it means the
13




184


MORE LAST WORDS


spirit of scientific demonstration, the concentration of
all knowledge to the practical improvement of human
life, the organization of the past to form a base for our
social enlargement in the future. The instrument-as
Bacon would say, the Noviim Organum-of this idea
was the conception of Sociology-a science of Society
in its two essential branches of Statics and Dynamicsthe unity of all useful knowledge, not in order to form
an intellectual triumph, but to found a practical science
of life-the law of the three successive stages of thought
-a philosophy of history-a subjective synthesis.
Now, this conception of Sociology-of Social Statics
and Dynamics-this philosophy of history, of civilization passing through successive stages: of war, local
defence, and industry-is clearly due to Comte and is
about 100 years old. It was first suggested in his essays
of 1819-1826 and fully described in the Philosophie of
1830-1842. The term Social Physics was changed into
the new term of Sociology in 1839. The name and the
science were a revelation. Vico, Kant, Herder, Hegel,
Condorcet, had written on the Philosophy of History
as a side of their own metaphysical views of Nature and
Man. But none of these had reduced their theories to
strictly scientific form, nor did they elaborate a concrete
system of historical facts and persons so as to prove a
true filiation of ideas and manners. All of these great
thinkers had prepared the way for Sociology; and
Comte and his school have always done justice to their
work. But their theory of history was so completely
incorporated with Ontology or was left so obscure,
vague, and impersonal, that it cannot be called science.
A hundred years earlier Vico had grasped the idea of




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


185


law in things social; but his theory of cyles was so obviously untrue in fact, and so fatal to ideas of human
progress, that it could not be regarded as a scientific
basis of evolution. Montesquieu perhaps was the first
to formulate a sound definition of a general law; but he
grossly overrated the material environment as affecting
civilization. And Condorcet, master of physical science
as he was, was misled by his revolutionary prejudices
to ban the whole mediaval world.   Kant's essay of
twenty pages is worthy of his great name; but this
profound sketch could not pretend to be a science of
history. And the great work of Herder was instinct
with the idea of human evolution, but was far from
reducing the facts of history to definite and coherent
laws. Of all these philosophies of history that of Hegel
is far the most important. Its publication was nearly
contemporary with the Lectures of Comte, and it was
quite unknown to him. Hegel's is an attempt to make
the history of humanity fall into line with, and fill a
vacant space in, his Ontology of the Universe, and it is
inspired by the central purpose of showing how the
TWelt-idee had been incarnated in great men, and had
fashioned the successive epochs of civilization.  This
theory, the most intelligible and most popular of the
works of this great genius, is full of brilliant suggestions.
But it is a metaphysical, not a scientific, view of the
Past. It is bound up with airy visions of the Mind of
thie Universe; and it disappears when that bubble bursts.
Those of us who regard the Absolute Mind of the
Universe as a grandiloquent dream cannot accept
H-egel's Philosophy of history as being in any sense a
preparation for Sociology as a science.




186


MORE LAST WORDS


Comte was always referring us back to those who
had prepared the ground for Sociology as a Science.
First of all was Aristotle, who laid the solid foundations
of Social Statics, the permanent elements of SocietyFamily, Property, Government, Class, Education, and
Discipline. For Dynamics, Aristotle was debarred by
having no material for the progressive history of Society
or of any history but that of Contemporary Greece.
The Catholic Church, succeeding to the Roman Empire, realized in mind one of the secular evolutions both
in Thouloht and in Life. Vico and Montesquieu, in the
first half of the eighteenth century, had:a clear sense
of scientific laws in Society. Pascal, Turgot, Kant,
Hume, Condorcet, adumbrated evolutionary laws of
Society in the second half of the eighteenth century.
It was not until after the Revolutionary upheaval and
the end of the great European Wars that it was possible
to form a scientific Sociology.  Nor would this have
been possible then but for the advance of physical and
biologic science, and the new revelation of primitive
societies in the Asiatic, American, and Pacific worlds.
Early in the nineteenth century, physical and moral
science, primitive and cultured societies, the Past and
the Present, had been brought together as they never
wvere before. In spite of two generations of revolution,
of world-wide war, of bitter race antagonism ---the idea
of the unity of humanity filled the general mind. A
great synthetic genius appeared and the science of
Sociology was founded.
See how, in this period since 1840, ideas of a social
science, social laws, social evolution, have come to be
familiar to all through the Press, through education,




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTIIESIS


187


even in politics-among those who never heard of
Comte and perhaps consider Sociology to be pedantic
jargon. That is the way with new seminal ideas which
fall in a soil duly prepared to nourish them. So it was
in the middle of the last century when Darwin propounded the theory of physical evolution by natural
selection. In seventy years this has gone round the
world, and has taken new forms with those who have
never studied Darwin's books and even with those who
think many of his conclusions inadequate and wrong.
It was so with IIlume, with Locke, with Adam Smith,
pre-eminently so with Bacon, with Descartes, with
Harvey, Newton, Galileo. and Kepler.  We may go
back and think of Aquinas, Augustine, the Roman
lawyers and moralists, and above all of Archimedes and
Hipparchus, of Plato and Aristotle. Great evolutionary
and creative ideas ultimately govern the world. And
they do this, even when they are misunderstood, modified and corrected, and when they are mixed up with
much that is rejected.
What melancholy, almost comic, chapters in the
history of human thought, are those which record the
wonderful defects and aberrations of the great thinkers
who in fact transformed the mental atmosphere of after
ages. The grand truths of Adam Smith are words of
scorn to modern Socialists who misinterpret-rather
than misuse-his scientific axioms. The rleat influence
of Bacon is not lost because of his very poor knowledge
of science and of his ignorance of mathematical deduction. Descartes, again, so cxaggerated mathenatical
deduction that he tried to construct a universe by his
forlmulas, and ended in the grand dream of concentric




188


MORE LAST WORDS


Vortices.  Turn to the ancients-the astronomyv of
Hipparchus and Ptolemy ruled men's minds for fifteen
centuries though it was based on the primitive fancy
that the earth was the centre of the solar system. The
influence of Aristotle has been the most efficient and the
most permanent of all human minds in the evolution of
philosophy; but his physical science was rudimentary,
he had no history at all, and even in his great creation
of Social Statics, he took slavery to be an institution of
Nature. As to Plato, whose influence on thought
altogether was only second to that of Aristotle, he committed himself and his successors to those mischievous
extravalgances about Fanily and Property, Marriage
and Government, which have been recently described
as "the most notable example of systematic wrong
thinking ever given to the world." I recall these cases
to show that the mighty synthetic ideas in general
philosophy do not fail to live and work because they are
found to be in part mistaken, premature, and doubtful.
I am far from applying any of these terms to the
Subjective Synthesis and the Sociology of Auguste
Comte. But I do say that attempts to reject his system
as worthless, because specialists think they can pick
holes in details, or incidents of it, is contrary to all that
Ias happened in the evolution of philosophy. And
nearly all the current criticism, at any, rate of Comte's
Sociology, consists of special and entirely subordinate
details.
The sociology and the scientific systematization of
human evolution is the most original, and now the most
efficient contribution of Auguste Comte to modern
thought. But for general philosophy a far wider scope,




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


189


and what will ultimately prove to be his decisive influence, is the construction of a relative scientific
synthesis-that is, a systematic philosophy of Thought
and of Life based on the logic of demonstration and
reality, and limited to Humanity and our World.
Comte's Synthesis is the only one to which both these
conditions-relative and scientific-can apply.  All
forms of Ontologic philosophy-of which that of Hegel
is the type and the most important-are absolute-not
relative-in that they claim to explain the Universe, or
Things-in-themselves; nor are they scientific, because
they claim to transcend scientific knowledge, in which,
to our mind, the laws of sensation have to be an inseparable part.  Again, all forms of Evolutionary
philosophy, of which Spencer's is the most systematic
and important, whilst claiming to be scientific are still
absolute, in seeking to explain the Universe, and in any
case to transcend the field of human knowledge, which
we maintain to be the only possible sphere of our human
powers. Colite's relative and scientific synthesis stands
apart and alone.
I shall waste no words in answer to those who, calling
themselves practical men, experts in special departments
of science and economics, declin against system altogether. All serious thinkers know that ideas which defy
generalization and co-ordination cannot be either lasting
or efficient. The loose disparate notions of the man-inthe-street may work well enough in material business,
but they are liable to change and have no creative power.
Morally and intellectually, as in armies in the field,
unorganized crowds are easily broken up.  In science,
in philosophy, in politics, in religion, organization-that




190


MORE LAST WORDS


is systectn-is the sole bond of power.  All men who do
anything, who found anything, or lead others in action
or in brain, hold on by some kind of system they take
to be true and useful-whether they are conscious of it
or not, and certainly, whether or not they could express
it clearly in words.  The supreme form of system is a
Synthetic Philosophy of knowledge and of life.  All
serious men believe that they have something of the kind
-though too many of them refuse to state it-perhaps
are not able to state it.  The great question is-Is it
trc. is it useful to man, is it within human range?  In
other words-Is it relative as well as scientific?
Now Conte's classification of the Sciences in the
abstract-in the series of their increasing complexity
and their decreasing range, from Mathematics to
Sociology and Morals-attacks the supreme task of
Philosophy-the co-ordination of general knowledge.
I believe there has been as yet no other. Down to the
first half of the nineteenth century, none could be
formed, owing to the imperfect condition of such
sciences as Physics and Biology and the total want of
Sociology. However high we rate the metaphysics and
the Psychology, the Logic and the Ethic of Hegeland of all the eminent post-Hegelians-no one pretends
that they have produced such a co-ordinated scheme of
the interdependence of the Sciences as is contained in
the ten volumes of the Positive Philosophy and the Positive Polity.  A long succession of eminent specialists,
Littre, Levy-Bruhl, Mill, Lewes, Bridges, abroad and
at home, have accepted the value of this scheme. I do
not pretend to defend it in its complete elaboration.
Science in these seventy years has passed far on, and has




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


191


left much of its special work more or less derelict. But
the conception of a coherent scheme of all scientific
knowledge was as important as the premature attempt
of Aristotle; it was far more truly scientific than that of
Descartes and Bacon-and far more systematic than
that of the Encycloptadists in France, or of Locke and
Huime at home.
The attempts of all the great Metaphysicians to unify
knowledge are based upon the idea of finding dominant
principles which underlie and co-ordinate all the sciences
and apply alike to man's knowledge and mind and to
the world without.  They do not undertake to connect
the positive sciences in an ascending series so as to show
their evolution one out of the other, apart from unifying
principles governing all sciences alike.  Comte's Synthesis is a totally different thing, for it repudiates any
identity of governing principle, and recognises appropriate methods and special logic for each science in turn.
Besides which, it repudiates all kind of attempts to
explain the sciences by general principles that rule in
the Universe, or such as rest upon intuitional revelation,
that is, are independent of solid proof, and eliminate
from  evidence any contribution from  physical data.
The sciences grow from generation to generation from
accepted truths which are permanent.     Intuitional
reNvelation dissolves in successive mists as each thinker
refutes his predecessor.
IV-COMTE AND SPENCER
I turn now   to the " Synthetic Philosophy" of
Herbert Spencer.   No doubt this is designed to be a




192


IMORE LAST WORDS


real Synthesis-or co-ordination of general knowledge-a science of the sciences.  It is, or professes to
be. strictly scientific, resting on demonstration and verifiable evidence.  I have before described it as an absolute scientific synthesis: and it is the only British
synthesis -et extant.  I have known intimately Mr.
Spencer all my life and I have often professed my profound admiration for his vast intelligence and noble
character.  When I was called upon to deliver at the
University of Oxford the first Herbert Spencer Lecture
in 1905, now published in Vol. I by the Clarendon Press,
I made abundantly clear my sense of his great powers
and the measure of my own agreement with his
philosophy. My present purpose is simply to compare
his "Synthetic Philosophy" with that of Auguste
Comte.   The conception, the name, the arrangement
of his Philosophy was obviously borrowed from Comte,
as were the titles of " Social Statics," " Sociology,"
" Environment " (or milieu), " Social Organism."  I
know the persistent efforts made by Spencer to deny
any filiation of his system with that of Conite.  They
are too obsolete to be even arguable now.  Herbert
Spencer's first work, " Social Statics," was issued in
1853.   Comte's "Positive Philosophy," adumbrated
in essays from 1820, the year of Spencer's birth, was
published in the years 1830-1842, and \was quite complete when Spencer, aged 22, was working as a civil
engineer student on a railway at Worcester.  In 1853,
wihen he published his first work, he had been for three
years the intimate friend of G. H. Lewes, who was an
active adherent of Comte, and had published his " History of Philosophy" in 1845-4-, and his " Comte's




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTIESIS


193


Philosophy of the Sciences " in 1853. It is idle to pretend that Spencer, who read very little, but picked up
his great knowledge, as Huxley told nle, by conversation
with specialists, did not read Comte.  Nor did he read
Kant or Hegel.  But for years before his first work he
had been in close intercourse with Lewes and George
Eliot, both keenly interested in Comte's System.  To
pretend now that Spencer, when in 1862 he began to
issue his '"Synthetic Philosophy" knew nothing of
Comte's " Synthetic Philosophy," completed in 184"2,
is as preposterous as to tell us that the author of the
Gospel of St. John knew nothing of Plato.
Mr. Spencer's Synthesis is not only an imitation of
Comte's, and adopts most of his distinctive terminology,
but it accepts the most important of the postulates or
axioms on which the Positivist Synthesis is built, viz.,
the universal reign of Law-the Law of Evolution-the
Relativity of knowledge-the repudiation of non-verifiable hypotheses-the idea of a synthesis of sciencethe end of philosophy being the amelioration of the
human organism. But the decisive differences between
the Synthesis of Spencer and that of Comte are these.
First, Spencer's is an objcctivc Synthesis applying to
the Universe. Spencer attempts the problem of solving
the mystery of the Universe-not on metaphysical,
idealist, or intuitional methods —but on methods, he
thinks, of positive science. His prinmary axioml is this.
Throughout the Universe, in ceneral and in detail,
there is an unceasing redistribution of matter and
motion."  The cardinal principle of his Cosmical
Philosophy is "an integration of lmatter and concomitant dissipation of nlotion." And his law of Evolu



194


MORE ITAST WORDS


tion governs and co-ordinates all the Sciences in turn.
This is in his svstcll the Unity of Knowledge.  Now,
the Positivist system  repudiates such  a Cosmical
Philosophy as a pretentious dream.  Even if this law of
evolution were both intelligible and true, to apply it to
the Universe is as completely metaphysical and hypothetical as the Cosnloony of Moses or of Brahma, or
any of the sonorities of a Welt-idee.
The second   lecisive difference is this.  Spencer's
Science of the Sciences opens with " First Principles
-a volume of 500 pages full we admit of profound
thouliht-in 22 chapters, all of which apply to the world
in general.  The system of Philosophy then passes to
Biolory, going on to Psychology, Sociology, and
MIorality.  But Mathematics, Geometry, Astronomy,
Physics, and Chemistry, the whole world of numbers,
space, mechanics, inorl:nic science, is entirely dropped
-and on grounds so inadequate as these that-" the
scheme is too extensive," and that " organic nature is of
more immediate importance."    So this co-ordination
of all the sciences omits wAhat Positivists call four or five
master sciences, each with their countless subdivisions.
See how Imore patiently Comte works through his
science of the sciences.  The first volume of his
Philosophie   (1830, 739 pp.) is devoted to the theory
of Mathematics, with eighteen Lectures on the Calc('lus, on Alnalysis, on Geometry, on Mechanics, on
Statics, on Dynamlics.  The second volume of his
Philosophie   (1835, 772 pp.), is devoted     to
Astronomy and Physics: having eighteen Lectures on
the Astronomy of the earth and of the solar system, on
gravitation, side-real astronomy, and positive cos



A PHILOSOPH-IC SYNTHESIS


195


Inogony, on Physics, baroloog, thermology, acoustics,
optics, electrology. Five Lectures in the Third Volume
of the " Philosophie " (1838, 260 pp.) are occupied with
Chemistry, inorganic, organic, and electro-chemical.
Here then are 41 separate essays on the entire range of
the Sciences which precede Biology.  They occupy the
greater part also of the first volume of the " Politique "
(1851); and Comte published separate works on
Analytic Geometry" (1843), on     'Popular Astronomy" (1844), and on " Positive Logic" (1856).
Whatever may be the value of these treatises, and
Auguste Comte was a consummate master of Mathematics, Geometry, and Astronomy, his scheme of a
science of the sciences included an elaborate, but
abstract, analysis of the dominant ideas in all this enormous ocean of knowledge. Even if the future finds that
it failed, it contained an illuminating and inspiring idea
of the concatenation of the inorganic sciences and of
their successive evolution one out of the others.  In
Spencer's so-called  "Synthetic  Philosophy"  this
mighty Ocean of Thought is a vast Mare ignotum.
The third decisive difference between the Synthesis
of Spencer and that of Comte is this.  Whilst in both
the principles of Sociology and of Ethics form by far the
largest part of the whole, Spencer limits his Sociology
to Statics, i.e., to the elements and origins of society,
institutions, government, and social organization; he
entirely puts aside history, the evolution of society,
Social Dynamics, in fact. Now the three later volumes
of Comte's "Philosophie" (1839, 41, 42), the third
volume of the " Politique " (1853) are entirely occupied
with a philosophy of history. This is a real explanation




1 I6


MORE LAST WORDS


of the successive types of human civilization and of the
dominant epochs and events from primitive times down
to the Revolution of 1848.  Even those who are most
opposed to every utterance of Comte on things political,
economic, or religious, have been profoundly impressed
by his philosophy of history as a coherent scheme of
social and racial evolution.  It has subtly infused itself
into the historical mind of our age.  Of all this Mr.
Spencer has absolutely nothing to say.  His whole
explanation of the Past of Humanity is obsessed by the
illusion of an arid Pacifism, which to those who have
lived through the Great War is comic when it is not
repulsive.
Any Philosophy which pretends to dogmatise about
the Universe or even the accessible World, but which
drops out of its purview the whole range of inorganic
science, which has no practical and concrete philosophy
of history-is not Synthetic Philosophy at all.  Comte
alone has produced a truly Synthetic Philosophy.  In
the sciences of Physics and Chemistry-which in the
last hundred years have been so enormously developed
-his knowledge was limited by the deficiencies of his
age; nor do we claim that in these he was himself a
recognised master as he was in the mathematical and
so(cial sciences. But it was a trivial form of controversy
when chemists and electricians and other specialists
declared that, since the chemistry of 1830 was obsolete,
Comte's classification was worthless; when biologists
declared that those who wrote before Darwin could be
nothing but tiros.  I remember how a very eminent
biologist ridiculed Comte for doubting the reality of
ether-" the fundamental basis," he said, " of modern




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


197


physics."  Well! fifty )rears have passed; and now men
of science are still debating many things untouched or
misunderstood by Darwin; and as to the absolute reality
of ether in the Universe, modern science is inclined to
hold that the relativity of our knowledge of the World
without is far from postulating the existence of ether as
its basis.
The seminal effect of a synthesis of Thought, which
concentrates ideas and lights up diverse kinds of learning
into a glow of harmony, is not to be required to answer
the last new puzzle to be solved, nor is it to be condemned by technical details. Descartes, Roger Bacon,
Francis Bacon, Kant, Hegel, and their successors, propounded many things which the world has found to be
visions and even absurdities.  What in the end really
tells on the progress of Thought is the genius of synlmetry. That which tells in the work of Auguste Comte
will prove to be these things-his profound sense of the
limitations of the human mind-his dominant sense of
the human Organism-his constructive picture of the
human Past.   Of all his works, the " Calendar," or
tableau of the authors of civilization from Moses to
Bichat is the most artistic, as well as the best known.
Take that co-ordinated scheme of the great men of all
ages and races, as explained in the volume of which a
new edition is now published, and we have in summary
a philosophy of the human race, which is a prose poem,
not unlike in design the great epic of Dante; and it is as
truly a work of art, though on far more solid foundations
of scientific reality and fact.
Time would not allow me to expand what Comte
described as Primary Philosophy.  The general Laws




198


MORE LAST WORDS


of Thought-that is, a System of Logic, which underlying both the Classification of the Sciences and their
correlation, the scheme of Social evolution, the analysis
of human nature in action, intelligence, and feeling, and
the ultimate ascendancy of Morals.  Though I have
confined my argument in these two Lectures to the
Philosophy of Comte's system, I cannot conclude without noting that this, from first to last, stood as a foundation for a wider purpose.  From youth till death, from
1819 down to 1857, his scientific philosophy and his
social polity were one coherent and consistent scheme.
It was an organic scheme of thought and of life, fully
conceived from the first as having two correlated aspects
-conviction and practice, sound knowledge leading up
to right conduct-in other words, science and a good
life.  The attempts at home and abroad to show that
his Philosophy and his Polity are at variance have been
proved to be due to inadequate study of both works and
also to moral and intellectual divergence on principles.
Miss Martineau in her translation of the Philosophy
purposely omitted the last 10 pages which I have
restored in the edition of 1896.
The distinctive feature of both as an entire scheme of
thought and life is this: It is the only known system of
philosophy (at least since the Middle Ages) which
avowed itself as the basis of a new form of life.  Conversely it is the only known scheme of Social and
religious union which is necessarily based on a scientific
philosophy. No other Synthesis-whether theological.
metaphysical, or material, combines social re-organization with science. This interdependence of knowledge,
action, and feeling is common to all Comte's works from




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


199


youth to death. From the first he regarded his scientific
studies as the instrument of a social re-organization.
His mind was filled with the idea of social, economic,
political, and even international harmony and peace to
be maintained by means of a sound education in
physical, sociological and moral science. It is from this
dualism that opposition to all he wrote has arisen. The
teachers of moral and religious regeneration are too
often scandalized by being told they must begin with
demonstration of physical laws and natural science.
Specialists in natural science too often ask what have
experimental discoveries to do with social re-organization?
All this comes out especially in Comte's repeated
explanation of the ideas which he regarded as inherent
in the term POSITIVE.     Of course, he used it in the
ordinary French sense of scientific, not in the English
sense of dogmatical, stubborn in belief (as Johnson
explains a word of which he was a past master). For us,
Positive has seven meanings 1, real, i.e., not imaginary
or miraculous: 2, useful, of some benefit to mankind:
3, certain, i.e., having scientific proof: 4, Precise, i.e.,
exact, according to the true degree of exactness possible
in each science, infinitesimal precision in Astronomy
and Physics, practical precision in History and
Psychology: 5, Organic, i.e., constructive rather than
destructive; living, or progressive, rather than fixed and
immutable-in a word, evolutionary: 6, Relative, i.e.,
not absolute always referring us to human faculties,
earthly conditions, and ideas that are subordinate to the
facts and purposes before us, and not arbitrary, or the
result of our pre-possessions, wishes or dogmas: 7, Sy!mI4




200


MORE LAST WORDS


pathetic, i.e., having some relation to human feelings
and emotions. Accordingly, for years past I have myself used the terms Positivism and Humanism as interchangeable; and in the POSITIVIST REVIEW recently I
saw it proposed to drop the term Positivist and adopt
that of Humanist.
In the last years of his life Comte published his
"Synthese Subjective " which opens with the following
passage-a summary of his entire system.   It is somewhat close and esoteric in expression-but not nearly so
complex as Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous dogma of
universal evolution and the instability of the homogeneous.   Philosophy from   Aristotle to Hegel has
abounded in esoteric language.  Well! Comte's opening sentence is this:
" To subordinate Progress to Order, Analysis to Synthesis,
Egoism to Altruism; such are the three statements, practical,
theoretical, and moral, of the problem which man has to solve,
and by solving to attain a complete and stable harmony."
The meaning is plain. Order, i.e., the external conditions of terrestrial life and the permanent institutions
of human society precede and form the foundation of
all Progress, or Evolution:-Physical, social or moral.
Change, if called Evolution or Improvenment, cannot
escape from  the domination of existing facts.  The
Future must start from   the Past, in knowledge, in
society, in morality.  Synthesis, i.e., general conceptions, must inspire Analysis, or the direct observation
of concrete phenomena. To observe accurately we must
start with and aim at some governing theory. Altruism,
that is, due and rational regard for other beings, must




A PHILOSOPHIC SYNTHESIS


201


govern egoism-the pursuit of personal aims.  It does
not eliminate, suppress, or dominate egoism; but
altruism must be kept in view as a superior object.
These three laws of human nature refer respectively to
activity, to intelligence, to feeling-to man's energy,
brain, and heart.  Together they form the task which
humanity has to carry out and when Humanity has
succeeded in so doing, social and moral harmony will be
achieved by man.
Comte goes on in this passage to say: These three
forms of the task of human life are not distinct and
separable. They must be jointly achieved, for they are
closely united by reason of the interdependence of
activity, intellect, and feeling.  Intellectual harmony
and practical harmony are impossible without moral
harmony.   Thus improvement is subordinate to conservation, the spirit of detail to the genius of synthesis.
Religion is as much superior to Philosophy as it is to
Politics. This is the last word of Auguste Comte.
I cite this concentrated programme of human
Thought, Society, and Duty as a real Philosophical
Synthesis-and so far as I know it is the only Synthesis
extant-which combines and gives equal consideration
to man's energies, his mind, and his emotions.


Prii ted in Great Britnin by Ebleneser Ba!ies 4 Son, Trinity Workas Worcester.








MEMORIES OF LATER YEARS.                     By OSCAR
BROWNING. With a Portrait Frontispiece. Demy 8vo,
cloth. I2S. 6d. net.
In March, 1910, the author published a book entitled
"Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and elsewhere."
The first edition was sold out in four weeks. It was read all over
the English-speaking world, and is still; indeed, the author only
recently received a letter saying that the writer had just read it
for the fifteenth time. The book contained more or less the
narrative of the first sixty years of his life. He is now eightyfive, and in this new book he gives some account of the last
twenty-five years. It will narrate, among other things, his
journey with Mr. Lloyd George in the Mediterranean; his visit to
Lord Curzon when Viceroy of India; his meeting with the present
Queen Mary in Switzerland and her visit to him at Cambridge;
the close of his work as a Don at Cambridge; his literary life at
Bexhill and his last ten years in Rome. The author gives an
account of his journey to South Africa with the British Association and to Athens and Constantinople; also of his sojourn in
different parts of Italy., ROBERT BROWNING, The Poet and the Man,
1833-I846. By FRANCES M. SIM. Demy 8vo, cloth.
ios. 6d. net.
This contribution relating to the literature of Browning should
be of interest to students and lovers of the poet. New material is
drawn upon which throws light upon the poet's early life and
work with respect to the poem of Pauline, and the speculations
arising from the subject are justified by authentic authority of that
time in the great poet's life, when his way was baffled and
difficult.
The story of his dramatic effort and the period of production
of Paracelsus Sordella, the poems produced by his Italian journeys,
and the story of the circumstances leading up to the marriage of
Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, are told in a manner that should
appeal to popular interest as advancing matters of fact and speculations in the development of a great poet and a great man hitherto
untouched by students of Browning.
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., I, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON, W.C.2




THE DECADENCE OF EUROPE. By FRANCESCO NITTI, former Premier of Italy, Author of
"Peaceless Europe." Translated by F. Brittain, B.A.
Cantab. Second Edition, with a new Introduction. Demy
8vo, cloth. ios. net. (Third Impression.)
This book is an attack on the Treaty of Versailles, claiming
that Germany has had neither mercy nor justice. The only salvation
for bankrupt and demoralised Europe, says Signor Nitti, lies in a
revision of the Treaty and the recognition that Germany cannot
pay the absurd sums demanded. The tone underlying the whole
book is an accusation against France of rapacity and vindictive.
ness, and Signor Nitti frankly states that the main obstacle to
reconstructing Europe is France. He shows Great Britain to be
working constantly for giving fair play to Germany, and regards
this and America's moral support as the only hope for the saving
of Europe from ruin.
THOUGHTS ON SOUTH AFRICA. By OLIVE
SCHREINER, author of" Dreams," etc. Demy 8vo, cloth.
2is. net.
Olive Schreiner was one of the leading authorities on South
Africa, its problems, races, charms and history. In this book she
records an invaluable set of recollections and pictures of a South
Africa which has now vanished.
She gives a most interesting account of South Africa's early
days, the history of the country, the Boers and the natives, and
the narrative is illuminated and inspired by her matchless gifts
of style.
It is a really valuable and important contribution to the
literature of South Africa, which will be read both by the student
of history and the general reader.
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., i, ADELPHI TBRRACE, LONDON, W.C.2




LEOPOLD I OF BELGIUM: SECRET PAGES
OF EUROPEAN HISTORY.                       By Dr. EGON
CASAR CORTI. Translated by JOSEPH McCABE.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo, cloth. 2is. net.
' The Life of Leopold I of Belgium is no perfunctory piece of
Court etiquette. Both in his personal character and in his diplomatic work he was profoundly interesting, and Dr. Corti has
treate both with admirable candour and insight. He never leans
to the strained adulations of a Court bard. Most people will be
surprised to learn how large and important a part the Belgian
monarch played in the European drama of his time. Dr. Corti
has been fortunate in obtaining access to 136 unpublished letters
of Leopold I to various monarchs and statesmen, and he is
enabled to throw new and most valuable light upon the development of Europe before the Great War.
RUSSIA BEFORE DAWN. By F. A. MACKENZIE.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo, cloth. 2Is. net.
In this book Mr. Mackenzie shows new Russia as it really is.
He was the first independent investigator allowed into Siberia
from Europe by the Communists since the revolution. He has
travelled during the past year from end to end of Russia, even
obtaining entry into some of the most secret prisons and talking
with the political suspects there.
The author was mistaken for a bandit in Ufa, and nearly
shot; he was smashed up at Cheliabinsk; he was held a prisoner
by floating ice for days on the Irtish, where the temperature fell
to ninety-seven degrees of frost. The book is so up to date that
it describes the Nijhni Fair in August and the trial of the Social
Revolutionaries.
THE TURKISH EMPIRE. From 1288 to 1914.
By Lord EVERSLEY. And from 1914 to 1922. By Sir
VALENTINE       CHIROL.      New   and  Revised   Edition.
With a Frontispiece and Three Maps. Demy 8vo, cloth.
2Is. net.
Chapters 20, 21, and 22 have been specially written by Sir
Valentine Chirol, a recognised authority on Eastern affairs.
These deal with the genesis of the Turkish-German Alliance, the
story of the War up to the Armistice, and the events in Turkey
up to and including the deposition of the reigning Sultan.
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., I, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON, W.C.2




THEORY OF SOCIAL ECONOMY. By GUSTAV
CASSEL. Translated      by Joseph   McCabe. Demy 8vo,
cloth. 2 volumes. 42s. net.
The distinguished Swedish economist, Professor Gustav
Cassel, has been prominent for some years amongst the experts
who have been trying to find the remedy of Europe's maladies.
His great work will be welcomed by English economists and by
many others. There are in it not only novel and profound views
of familiar economic subjects, but the book is unique in that it
includes the very elements of the science and takes the reader on
with ease to its most difficult heights. The work had the special
support of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and it is being
translated from the enlarged second edition, with the collaboration
of the author.
WHAT THE JUDGE THOUGHT. By His Honour
JUDGE EDWARD PARRY. Demy 8vo, cloth. 2is. net.
(Second Impression.)
" It would be difficult to praise this book too highly, for it is
compact of values and through it all-and it is a mixture of
biographies, anecdotes, expositions, and criticisms-there flows a
current of shrewd common sense directed against the follies and
obfuscations of the Law, past and present. -Pall Mall Gazette.
PASTEUR AND HIS WORK. By L. DESCOUR.
Cheap Edition. Demy 8vo, cloth. IoS. 6d. net.
"There is no story to equal Pasteur's in all the records of
man's achievement. No story is at once so human, so patient, so
full of triumph."-The Times.
" Mr. Fisher Unwin has had the privilege of publishing one
of the noblest biographies in the language. I mean ' Pasteur and
his Work,' by L. Descour. "-CLAUDIUS CLEAR in the British
Weekly.
T. FISHER UNWIN, LTD., I, ADELPHI TERRACE, LONDON, W.C.2