A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. WORKS BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. "The clumli wistful y.irnincr in mnn to something higher — yearning such as the animal creation showed in the Greek period towards the human — has not as yrt found any interpreter equal to Buchanan." — The Sf>eciator. " In the creat ]iower of appealing to universal Humanity lies Buchanan's security. The light of Nature has been his guide, and the human heart his study. He must unquestionably attain an exalted rank among the poets of this century, and produce works which cannot fail to be accepted as incon- testably great, and worthy of the world's preservation."— Cc«;'f;/?/^rrtrj/ Rci'iciv. " P>uchanan is the most faithful poet of Nature among the new men. He is her familiar. Like no British poet save himself, he knows her." — Sted- mans Victorian Poets. POETRY. COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF ROBERT BUCHANAN. With a .Steel-plate Portrait engraved by Armitage. One Vol. Crown 8vo, ys. 6d. SELECTED POEMS. With Frontispiece by Thomas Dalziel. 6s. BALLADS OF LIFE, LOVE, AND HUMOUR. With Frontis- piece by Artiu-r Hl'ghes. 6s. LONDON POEMS. 6s. ST. ABE AND HIS SEVEN WIVES. With Frontispiece by A. B. HOLGHTON. 5S. WHITE rose" AND RED. 6s. THR EARTHQUAKE; or. Sis Days and a Sabbath. Part First. 6s. PROSE FICTION. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3s. 6J. each ; post 8vo, illuminated boards, 2S. each. THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD. A CHILD OF NATURE. With a Frontispiece. GOD AND THE MAN. With Illustrations by F. Barnard. THE MARTYRDOM OF MADELINE. With a Frontispiece. THE NEW ABELARD. FOXGLOVE MANOR. LOVE ME FOR EVER. With a Frontispiece by P. Macnab. MATT: A STORY OF A CARAVAN. DRAMA. POETICAL PLAYS. \In the Press. MISCELLANEOUS. SELECTED PROSE: A POET'S SKETCH-BOOK. Crown £vo, 6s. THE HEBRID ISLES. With a Frontispiece by W. Small. Crown Bvo, 6s. LONDON: CIIATTO & WINDUS, TICCADILLY. ^--N^«-X- (7 — A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. BY ROBERT BUCHANAN. I never bowed but to superior worth, Nor ever failed in my allegiance there I — Young. Y^ii->iwi^, ^' A CFTHE \X UNIVERSITY / O F ,/ ■^K LONDON: WARD AND DOWNEY, 12, YORK STREET, CO VENT GARDEN, W.C. 1887. CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS,. CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. B77 PREFATORY NOTE. Most of the articles in this volume are reprinted from the critical and other periodical papers of the day. They have no arbitrary connection with each other, but they sufficiently indicate the point of view of a writer whose opinions are somewhat independent of current criticism. Some of these opinions will doubtless awaken animadversion in quarters self-considered authori- tative ; but the literary Inquisition, like its religious, prototype, will soon be a thing of the past, andj^ in\, the meanwhile, I am fortunately not alone in refusing to accept all literary religions merely because they j are based on good historical evidence, and possess \ quasi-miraculous pretensions. At the same time, \] have quite as great a distrust of my own discernment, as of that of any of my contemporaries. I simply put down my impressions for what they are worth, and leave the rest to the common-sense of the reading public in general. R. B. London, October ^ 1886. To THE QUARTERLY REVIEWER. '■^Avi Cccsar, te saluto vioriHtTiimy Sir, — Permit me to inscribe these Essays to you, as a slight ex- pression of the estimation in which I hold you. If you survive long; ^' enough to read them (for the booksellers report that you are fast; ,^ sinking, with a circulation so languid as to be hardly perceptible in ^ the pulsation) they may perhaps do you a little good ; at any rate, ""^^ they will so far gratify and serve you as to remind the world of your' -^ existence ; and when you are dead and buried, they may perhaps help to preserve your name from unmerited oblivion. I know that you have many enemies, who rejoice at your de- cadence and downfall. I shall do nothing of the kind, for I hold j you have done good public service by bringing pedantic criticism into / discredit. When you were young and strong and clever, you had the' courage of your opinions, and cordially hating every form of literary revolt, you served the cause of retrogression with no little success., Later'bn, even, your very audacity in evil-doing made you amusing.! But that is all over now. Your time has come, and in your last sick- ness you have this one consolation — that you have been evenly and triumphantly malicious, thoroughly and roundly unintelligent, from the> first to the last of your career. You have never said a generous word to help a rising reputation ; you have never failed to crawl obsequiously on the ground before every form of mediocrity. Ydu~have seen a poetaster in Mr. Tennyson, and a brilliant poet in the writer of the '* Lays of Ancient Rome." You have hated progress, derided origin- ality, insulted every honest spirit of your period. It may comfort you a little on your deathbed, to know that even your opponents admit your consistency. It is sad to reflect that the doom of dotage has fallen upon a spirit that once seemed so playful. The day appears to have passed when public interest could be awakened by the appearance of some half- dozen ill-natured pamphlets in a paper cover, or by the phenomenon of an antiquated literary watchman rushing out into publicity, months after the henroost is robbed or the house burnt down, with cries of " fox ! " and " fire ! " The spitefulness you once expanded into a long article, is now concentrated by your successors into half a newspaper column. You affected to be scholarly ; they pretend only to be plainA spoken. Other times, other manners. When I read the journals which \ have superseded you, I almost regret your extinction. Be comforted, however, by the assurance that no critic of the future will ever surpass you in the sincerity of his endeavours to promote the science of mis- construction and the art of nepotism, or exhibit a more splendid record ^ -of literary mistakes. I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant, ROBERT BUCHANAN. London, ya/^«a;7, 18S7. CONTENTS. PAGE FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO : I. Prometheus i II. GiLLIATT .10 III. ^SCHYLUS 20 IV. The One God 29 V. Victor Hugo 32 VI. The Promethean Myth. . . . . 40 VII. Summary 4S THE CHARACTER OF GOETHE: I. The Amours 54 II. Goethe's Toryism 69 III. Sources of Agitation 83 A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS 96 FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA: I. Robert Ingersoll . . ' . . . • i35 II. OcTAVius Frothingham 140 III. The Hope of the Human Race . . ,148 X CONTENTS. A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTI .... 152 PAGE. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK; A Personal Re- miniscence 162 SYDNEY DOBELL, AND THE " SPASMODIC SCHOOL"; A Souvenir 185. THE IRISH "NATIONAL" POET .... 204 HEINE IN A COURT SUIT 210 A TALK WITH GEORGE ELIOT .... 218 THE LITERATURE OF SPIRITUALISM; "Post Mortem" Fiction 227 THE MODERN STAGE: I. Notes in 1876 239 II. A Note in 1S86 281 III. The Drama and the Censor . . . 297 FLOTSAM AND JETSAM ; I. A Note on Emile Zola 303 II. Charles Reade ; A Souvenir . . . 308 III. George Eliot's Life 314. IV. Epictetus 322 V. The Gospel according to the Printer's Devil 33a VL "L'Exilee" in English 333 VII. The Church and the Stage . . . 338 vin. The American Socrates . . . .341 CONTENTS. xt FROM POPE TO TENNYSON PAGE. 347 A LAST LOOK ROUND : I. CiRCUMSPICE .... II. First, hear the Cardinal . III. The Attitude of Science IV. Minor Results and Influences V. The New Gironde . /V?^' / VI. The Outcome in Society (jiAAl- / VII. Conclusion .... 359 361 365 370' 374 377 382. A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. From .ESCHYLUS to VICTOR HUGO. '* Look on this pic tu?-e, and on this.^'' I. PROMETHEUS. The scene is Mount Caucasus^ a cragg-y desert, silent, inaccessible ; the clouds come and go silently above, the Euxine glimmers faintly far away. All the eye beholds is sombre, terrible, colossal, shadowed with the mystery of some awful event. Three gigantic Shapes rise, leading a fourth in chains. The first is the god Hephoestos, accompanied by two formless and awful figures, Kratos and Bia.* He whom they lead is Prometheus, called the Fire-bringer, because he has brought fire to men, and thus incurred the wrath and avenging hate of Zeus, the " new tyrant " of Olympus. He is silent, while Kratos speaks. " Bind this crafty one to these rocks, and so fulfil the behests of the Father." Reluctantly, tenderly, * Generally, with an unpleasant allegorical flavour, translated "Strength" and "Force;" but they are entities, not abstrac- tions, and it would be as reasonable to introduce Prometheus simply as "Foresight," or "Forethought." 2 A LOOK- ROUND LITERATURE. as beseems a god, Hephoestos performs his duty, littering at the same time a prophecy of almost inconceivable suffering. And thou shalt here behold Nor face nor form of any hving man, But scorching in the fiery breath o' the sun, Shalt lose thy skin's fair bloom ; and thou shalt joy To see the spangled night devour the day, And yet again to see the sun return Scattering the dews of dawn ; and evermore The ever-present ill shall crush thee down. The crucifixion is complete ; arms, legs, ribs, every joint and thew, are fast bound, and to com- plete all, the sharp tooth of the adamantine wedge is driven right through the Titan's chest. At last the servants of Zeus withdraw, leaving the sufferer alone with Nature ; and now, but not till now, the pent-up agony of his heart bursts forth in one great wail, one passionate appeal of immortal pain : '* O holy ether, and swift-winged winds, O springs of rivers and in- numerable laughter of the ocean waves, O earth, mother of all — you I invoke, and the all-beholding circle of the sun.'' This, in the most wonderful of untranslatable iambics, followed by a scream of indig- nant anapaests equally untranslatable : " O see by what pitiful bonds worn away, I shall wrestle through aeons of pain '/' His call is quickly answered. A music and odour are blown to him from the far-off sea, and soon the air trembles with the stir of won- derful wings. The Chorus rises — beautiful ocean spirits hovering over him with soft and soothing song. As they float above him, fixing their gentle eyes on the lineaments of his sorrowful countenance, he tells them who and what he is, his story, and the story of his offence against Zeus. When confusion and anarchy arose among the FROM yESCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 3 gods, some wanting to depose Kronos that Zeus might reign, others striving that Zeus might never reign, Prometheus was the only Titan who stood on Zeus's side ; and by his help Zeus conquered. But this disease exists in sovereignty, Never to trust one's friends. No sooner was Zeus seated on the ancestral throne, than he began to persecute the race of men, with a view to their utter annihilation and the creation of a new order of creatures. But Prometheus interposed on behalf of humanity ; firstly, by teaching men to be less fearful of the supernatural, to cease, in other words, from ''dwelling on their doom;" and secondly, by teaching them the use of fire, parent of innume- rable arts. The Titan has arrived at this point of his narration, when the Chorus alight on the ground, surrounding him, and simultaneously Okeanos their father arrives, riding on a gryphon. The ancient sea- god comes to proffer counsel, which is gloomily received, for he recommends a certain amount of submission to the powers that be. He will himself, he suggests, intercede with Zeus. For reply, Prome- theus reminds him of the fate of the other Titans — Atlas and Typhon : And by the fortunes of my brother Atlas My soul is troubled ; — he who stands i' the west Upbearing on his shoulders silently A burden borne not easily by arms, The pillar of the heaven and of the earth. And troubled was my soul when I beheld The earth-born dweller in Sicilian caves, The hundred-headed Typhon, fierce as fire, Crushed down ; for he, the foe of all the gods, Rose hissing horror with terrific jaws, And from his eyes a gorgon fury glared, Threat'ning red havoc on the rule of Zeus. But on his head flashed Zeus's fiery levin, B 2 4 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. The burning and unsleeping thunderbolt, Which clave him even as he threatened. Smit to the vitals, to a cinder burned. His force devoured by lightning, prone he fell ; And now a corse effete, outstretch'd he lies Close to that ocean strait prest down between The leaden weights of Aetna ; and HephcEStos Forgeth the liquid mass of glowing flame, Seated above him on the mountain heights, Whence in the time hereafter shall outspring Rivers of flame with fiery mouths devouring The furrow'd fields of fruitful Sicily.* Finding his task hopeless, Okeanos withdraws. The Chorus surround the Titan, uttering music of infinite tenderness. His voice trembles as he tells them of his gentle deeds, his love for humanity. It was not enough to give men fire ; he gave them living souls. Before his beneficence, they had been as " phantoms seen in dreams " {oveipaToiv oklyKLoi nopcfiaiai). They dragged their weary lives along. Houses they had none whether of wood or stone, but they dwelt, numerous as gnats, in the sunless hearts of caverns; and they knew not how to distinguish the seasons, until Prome- theus instructed them in the risings and the settings of the stars. He then taught them Number {dptOfibv), and the arrangement of letters {ypayip.aT(ov o-wdeo-cis), and Memory, handmaid and Mother of the Muses. Nor was this all. He instructed them in horse-taming and horsemanship, and in navigation of the ocean ; what medicines to use in sickness, where to find, and how to combine them ; how to divine auguries and omens, both ordinary and extraordinary ; and how, delving in the deep earth, to discover the precious metals. He concludes — Summed in one little sentence hear the truth, All arts to mortals from Prometheus came ! * This and the other renderings in the text are original. — R. B. FROM yESCHYLC/S TO VICTOR HUGO. 5 The dialogue now touches on divine Mysteries. Pro- metheus prophesies. After thousands upon thousands of years, he is to find a dehverer. The thing is fated^ and even Zeus is the creature of fate. " What, then, shall be the fate of Zeus ? ^' ask the Okeanides ; but Prometheus refuses to answer_, the time being not yet ripe. An unconscious answer comes, however, through a sudden apparition. lo, in the shape of a white heifer, enters, rolling her wild eyes round and wailing loudly. In a frantic song, she bewails her miserable fate, and calls upon Zeus to pity her. She is still moaning, when Prometheus utters her name — " lo, daughter of Inachos, who filled the heart of Zeus with love, and who is now, through the hate of Here, driven from land to land." Presently, while her soul is soothed for a time by the sympathy of Prometheus and the Maidens, she tells the whole story of the divine love and persecution. But now in clear narration you shall know All of these things ye crave ; but ah, I grieve Ev'n while of that same heaven-sent storm I tell, And of the cruel changing of my form, The way it came upon me miserable ! For ever thronging in my virgin bowers Came nightly dreams with smooth and honeyed words Beguiling me : " O maiden, triply blest, Why linger on in cold virginity When most exalted wedlock waits for thee ! For shafts of love outshooting from thine eyes Are burning in the breast of highest Zeus, Who now would mingle with thee amorously. Wherefore, O child, disdain not Zeus's bed. But hie thee forth to Lerna's deep green mead, Where feed thy father's oxen, flocks and herds, That so the Eye Divine from its desire At last may cease." At voices such as these I wretched trembled nightly, till at last I dared to whisper in my father's ears My visions. Then did he send messengers To Pytho and Dodona frequently, 6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Seeking to know how best to please the gods In words or deeds ; and ever they returned With numberless ambiguous oracles, Most dim of meaning and most dark to read. At last there came a clearer oracle Charging upon my father Inachos To thrust me from his threshold and his land That I might wander homeless, desolate, On the remotest limits of the earth ; And threatening if he failed in this dark deed, That fiery lightnings should be sent from Zeus To sweep away the remnant of his race. So, overawed by Loxias' oracle Unwilling he drave me unwilling too Out of his house, since Zeus's cruel curb Constrained him to this deed in love's despite. Then suddenly my senses and my shape Became transformed, and even as ye behold, Horned as any beast and driven on By the fierce pricks of the sharp stinging fly, With maniac leaps I rushed until I came To the soft stream Kerchneian and the fount Of Lerna. And the Herdsman born of earth, The fierce and headstrong Argus, followed me, Watching my track with eyes innumerable. Him sudden accident surprised and slew. But I abide, by maddening pangs impelled From region into region of the earth. The Okeanides utter their pity in loud wails. Then Prometheus describes to lo the whole of her future fortune ; and to prove the truth of his prophetic powers, he follows with a recital of her wanderings past, describing point by point, and picture by picture, the whole extent of her toilsome journey. Midway in his recital, he comes to a more explicit prophesy concerning the fall of Zeus. A day shall come when a child of Zeus, mightier than himself, as Zeus was mightier than Kronos, shall hurl him down from heaven ; before or about the occurrence of this event, a child of lo, the third generation after her, shall release Prometheus from his bonds. Not to be misunderstood by too dark an augury, the Titan ^ FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 7 concludes by recurring to the end of lo's wanderings and the birth of the Deliverer : — Remotest of the land, a City stands, Canopus, at the very mouth of Nile ; There verily shall Zeus restore thy soul Smoothing thee only with his outstretched hand, Touching, not terrifying thee ; and lo ! Of that same touch thou shalt conceive and bear The dark-skinned Epaphos, "Touch-born ; " and he Shall gather in the fruit of every land Whose fields are watered by broad-bosom'd Nile. There in the generation fifth from him Shall fifty children come of female seed, And these against their will shall journey back To Argos, flying nuptials with their kin, These kin their cousins ; and these last, as kites Not lingering long behind the doves they seek, Shall come pursuing evil marriages, But God shall grudge to yield unto their arms The bodies of the virgins. And at last In bloody woman-watches of the night. Those men shall perish, stab'd and smit to death, Darkly, within the land Pelasgian ; For by his bride shall every husband die, Staining with his red blood the two-edged sword. But love shall soften one of those fierce maids, And trembling, hesitating, choosing rather To be deemed weak than to turn murderess. This one shall spare the sharer of her bed ; And from her seed shall spring the royal race At Argos. Long and tedious 'twere to tell These things at length and clearly ; but i' the end, Of this same seed a hero shall be born Mighty to bend the bow and hurl the dart, And he it is who from my sufferings At last shall set me free ! This oracle The Titan Themis, my ancestral mother, Rehearsed unto me darkly long ago ; But how and when the thing shall come to pass Tedious it were to tell, tedious to hear, Nor could ye gain at all by hearkening. As he ceases, lo bursts into renewed lamentations, and stung* again by her grief, rushes onward down ■^ It is rather puerile to render the olarpos of v. 567 and 880 literally, as most of our translators do, as if this olarpos were 8 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the mountain side. In a low monotonous song, the Okeanides sing, while Prometheus falls into a gloomy trance ; awakening from which, with a bitter smile, he repeats his awful threats against the King of Heaven. His words are wrapt in mystic darkness, trenchant and terrible though they be. One point is certain — Zeus is to fall. The Okeanides, again sur- rounding him, look on him sadly, for the frightful power of the Deity has terrified them, and they regard the Titan, still with the old pity, but with a new despair. Their terror and submission irritates him anew, and he exclaims : Worship then, flatter him, the King of the Hour ! For me, I care for Zeus, yea less than nought. Let him abide this httle while, and rule Even as he pleases, — long he shall not rule O'er the immortal gods ! As he speaks, he beholds, brightly approaching, the god Hermes. The terrible threat has been heard in Olympus, and the messenger of Zeus has been sent to demand, in no measured language, the full ex- planation of when and by whom Zeus is to be over- thrown. In the angry scene that follows, Prometheus still preserves his dignity, coldly refusing to gratify his persecutor with one syllable of the awful truth, but still defying him to do his worst. That worst is soon to come. Horror is to be heaped on horror, torture on torture. Even as Hermes speaks, the earth begins to tremble, the heavens to flash fire. the o|uo-ro/xos' /Muco\|/- of v. 674, Still more ridiculous does it seem to conceive that the Spectre of Argus of which lo raves in v. 568 was actually present on the stage. Professor Plump- tree, in his excellent translation, falls into this error of stage direction — " Enter lo," etc., followed by the Spectre of Argus — as if he were glaring in the background, like Banquo's ghost, and rolling his hundred eyes to affright the groundlmgs. FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 9 While the Okeanides cower and moan, Hermes with- draws, and on the Titan's head falls the full thunder- bolt of Zeus. To the very last the mighty voice is heard intoning : Yea, now, in very deed, No longer only in word, The earth is shaken and stirr'd, The fiery levin is freed. The thunder rolleth by, Storms whirl the dust on high. Downward with madden'd motion The mighty whirlwinds leap, The sky is blent with the ocean, And deep is mingled with deep. Such is the horror hurl'd From Zeus's terrible hand, In dark confusion whirl'd I tremble and shake, yet stand. O holy Mother, see; O all-encircling air, Light of all things that be, Behold what wrongs I bear ! With the immortal appeal, the voice ceases ; all is silence and darkness. Such is a brief sketch of the "Prometheus Bound" of ^schylus, a work so familiar to students that a detailed description of it would be superfluous, were such a description not absolutely necessary for the purpose of the comparisons to be instituted in the present article. This immortal piece bears the same relation to tragedy that the " Laocoon " does to sculpture ; it is absolutely solitary and supremely great* In the depth and infinity of its suggestions, ■^ Thirty pages of close print would contain this masterpiece. It is about as long as a single book of "Paradise Lost," and not very much longer than Mr. Tennyson's " Enoch Arden." The whole trilogy, of which it was a part, could have been included in the space of one of the volumes of an ordinary three volume novel ! lo A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. it is even more pregnant now than it was to the con- temporaries of its author ; every century adds to its significance, every literary remove heightens its grandeur. It has no equal because it has no rival. It deals with shapes so colossal, with ideas so sublime,, that we still tremble before them in wonder akin to superstition. If the Bible overshadows us like a cloud,, the Prometheus overawes us like a mountain. Its peaks touch the stars, its base is rooted deep in human soil ; wind, rain, and snow abide upon it, and mystery dwells upon it ; it stirs with the blind motion of supernatural powers — Zeus slipping like an ava- lanche to his doom, the Titan towering far above in the beauty of unimaginable power. A Voice comes from it, with such music as shall be never heard again, for '' that large utterance of the early gods " is dead for ever. II. GILLIATT. I HAVE given one picture. Let me turn now to the other. The scene is scarcely less wild and desolate than was the Scythian Caucasus. It is a lonely reef of rocks in the midst of the ocean ; nothing is seen but the cloud, rock, and the water, no sound is heard save the sound of sea-birds, the plash of the silent sea. Suddenly the eye becomes conscious of two things that it had not seen before — of a lar^^e vessel FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. ii wrecked and sucked up between two mighty masses of rock, where it hangs suspended, and of a soHtary figure which stands behind it, looking upward — the figure of a man. This man, too, is Titanic ; so at least he seems in the dim low light that surrounds him. This form too is in revolt, not against a cruel and malignant Deity, but against those powers of Nature which are even more cruel and malignant ; and he too will endeavour to conquer, but by active resistance, not sublime endurance. His work lies before him. If, in defiance of the elements, he can detach that suspended wreck from its niche, piece it again into a goodly vessel, set it again afloat upon the sea, and all this by the unaided craft of his own brain, and the strength of his own arm, why then, the Tyrant is conquered, and the human Spirit rises irresistible and supreme. The man, however, has a lower end in view — he hopes, by his miracle of salvage, to win to himself the love of a woman, the daughter of the man whose wealth has been lost in that missing vessel. For this being in mid-ocean is no Titan, no colossal comrade of gods and demigods, but only a poor Toiler of the Sea, dwelling in a poor home in the island of Guernsey, and earning his subsistence by the work of his own hands. " Tel etait Gilliatt. Les fiUes le trouvaient laid. II n'etait pas laid. II etait beau peut-etre. II avait dans le profil quelque chose d'un barbare antique. Au repos, il ressemblait a une Dace de la colonne trajane." He was thirty years old, but he appeared five-and-forty ; for he "wore the dark mask of the wind and the sea." Gilliatt, then, is here on the Douvres, a desolate reef of rocks out in mid-channel, resolved upon a work which, to all intents and purposes, is impossible — the rescue of a steam-ship, which, instead of sinking to 12 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the bottom as is the usual fate of wrecks, has been suspended miraculously in mid-air. La coque dtait perdue, la machine dtait intacte. Ces hasards sont frequents dans les naufrages comme dans les incendies. La logique du desastre nous echappe. Les mats casses etaient tombes, la cheminee n'etait pas meme ployce ; la grande plaque de fer qui supportait la meca- nique I'avait maintenue ensemble et tout d'une piece. Les revetements en planches des tambours dtaient disjoints k pen pres comme les lames d'une persienne ; mais a travers leurs claires-voies on distinguait les deux roues en bon dtat. Ouelque pales manquaient. Outre la machine, le grand cabestan de I'arriere avait resiste. II avait sa chaine, et, grace a son robuste emboitement dans un cadre de madriers, il pouvait rendre encore des ser- vices, pourvu toutefois que I'effort du tournevire ne fit pas fendre le plancher. Le tablier du pont flechissait presque sur tous les points. Tout ce diaphragme etait branlant. En revanche le trongon de la coque engage entre les Douvres tenait ferme, nous I'avons dit, et semblait solide. Cette conservation de la machine avait on ne salt quoi de derisoire et ajoutait I'ironie a la catastrophe. La sombre malice de I'inconnu eclate quelquefois dans ces especes de moqueries ameres. La machine etait sauvee, ce qui ne I'empechait point d'etre perdue. L'Ocean la gardait pour la demolir a loisir. Jeu de chat. His first care is to find a place of shelter for himself while he remains on the reef, and this he at last finds in a sort of hole in the rock. As he prepares his lodging, multitudes of sea-birds hover above him. " C^etaient des mouettes, des goelands, des fregates,* des cormorans, des mauves, une nuee des oiseaux de mer_, etonnes." A week passes away. This first week * It is as consistent to introduce the " frigate-bird " here as to write of the sea-serpent. The mistake is trifling, but it points to a general want of veracity, which would be repelling in a _vvriter of less genius^ Further on, he describes a purely im- possible flight of cormorants. Here as elsewhere, he writes like a man who has got his notion of the sea from books, and had never seen a sea-bird. Who doubts the genius? but it is genius reckless of all consecjuences and indifferent to all verification. FROM jESCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 13 is employed in gathering together all the flotsam and jetsam of the wreck — ropes, chains, pieces of wood, " broken yards," blocks and pulleys. Then — A la fin de la semaine, Gilliatt avait dans ce hangar de granit tout I'informe bric-a-brac de la tempete mis en ordre. II y avait, le coin des ^couets et le coin des ecoutes ; les boulines n'etaient point melees avec les dresses ; les bigots etaient ranges selon la quantite de trous qu'ils avaient ; les embou- dinures, soigneusement detachees des organeaux des ancres brisees, etaient roulees en echeveaux ; les moques, qui n'ont point de rouet, etaient separees des moufles ; les cabellots, les margouillets, les pataras, les gabarons, les joutereaux, les calebas, les galoches, les pantoires, les oreilles d'ane, les racages, les bosses, les boute-hors, occupaient, pourvu qu'ils ne fussent pas completement defigures par I'avarie, des compartiments differents ; toute la charpente, traversins, piliers, epontilles, chouquets, mantelets, jumelles, hiloires, etait entassee a part ; chaque fois que cela avait et^ possible, les planches des frag- ments de franc-bord embouffete avaient ete rentrees les unes dans les autres ; il n'y avait nulle confusion des garcettes de ris avec les garcettas de tournevire, ni de araignees avec les touees, ni des poulies, ni des morceaux de virure avec les morceaux de vibord, un recoin avait ete reserve a une partie du trelingage de la Durande, qui appuyait les haubans de hune et les gambes de hune. Chaque debris avait sa place. Tout le naufrage etait la, classe et etiquete. C'etait quelque chose comme le chaos en magasin. These disjecta membra were arranged in one great hollow of the crag which he used as a storehouse. Another hollow close by he determines to use as a forge. The preparation of the forge need not be described in detail, but it is successfully accomplished. With forge and magazine all prepared, Gilliatt sets to work in earnest, with a " fierte de cyclope, maitre de Fair, de I'eau, et de feu.^^ It is necessary, however, to nourish himself while so doing, and he therefore spends a certain portion of the day in searching for crabs and other shell-fish. While so doing, he pene- trates, through a narrow fissure, into a mighty water- cavern situated in the very heart of the rocks. The water therein is of " molten emerald ^' (de Vemeratide 14 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. en fusio?i)y a cloud of delicate beryl covers the shadowy walls and overhanging arches, pearls drop momently from the long water-mosses that cluster overhead, and through all the dimness the sea shudders like a palpitating heart. Beautiful as this cavern appears, it is fatal. Empty of all life as it seems, it is nevertheless a habitation. An evil spirit dwells within it, a monstrous and horrible Ocean- form. Of this master of the mansion, Gilliatt, during his first visit, got only a glimpse. Tout a coup, h quelques pieds au-dessous de lui, dans la transparence charmante de cette eau qui etait comme de la pierrerie dissoute, il apergut quelque chose d'inexprimable. Une espcce de long haillon se mouvait dans I'oscillation des lames. Ce haillon ne flottait pas, il voguait, il avait un but, il allait quelque part, il etait rapide. Cette guenille avait la forme d'une marotte de bouffon avecdes pointes ; ces pointes, flasques, ondoyaient ; elle semblait couverte d'une poussiere impossible a mouiller. C'etait plus qu'horrible, c'etait sale. II y avait de la chimere dans cette chose ; c'etait un etre, a moins c{ue ce ne fut une apparence. Elle semblait se diriger vers le c6te obscur de la cave, et s'y enfon^ait. Les dpaisseurs d'eau devinrent som- bres sur elle. Cette silhouette glissa et disparut, sinistre. This is Gilliatt's first glimpse of the " Pieuvre," or Poulp, a creature to which gorgons and chimeras were trifles, and which, scientifically speaking, is simply a ridiculous exaggeration of the octopus. For the time being, Gilliatt withdraws, attaching little im- portance to the apparition. By a series of manoeuvres, in themselves impossible from first to last, he releases the vessel from its perilous position, pieces it together, fixes the engine again in its proper place, and softly deposits the whole in the sea beneath. It would be tedious indeed to linger over the details of this miracle ; enough to say, the deed is done, and all by the unaided might of one man. The weather is calm, and little more remains to do but to depart to 1 K FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 15 Guernsey. The elements, however, have determined not to let Gilliatt depart without a struggle. *' L^Abime se decidait a livrer bataille." It is the period of the equinox, and Nature is gathering her powers. Gilliatt has not long to wait. The wind is arising — " le vent, c'est tous les vents ; toute cette horde arrivait; d'un cote, cette legion — de I'autre, Gilliatt ! ^^ The tempest comes, the battle between Man and Nature. Fortunately, Gilliatt, at the first warning of danger, has fashioned a rude sort of breakwater, by which the full force of the sea is broken, and the vessel preserved from destruction. Now roars and shrieks a tempest as awful as that other which Zeus hurled upon the head of Prome- theus. It is superfluous to repeat in detail how the fight proceeds, till finally Man conquers. For twenty hours lasts the Titanic strife. Then suddenly the heavens turn blue, and Gilliatt, overcome by his efforts, drops like a stone and sleeps. When he awakens, all Is calm, but he is famishing for food. Stripping himself to his " pantalon,'' and taking with him a large knife to detach stray shell-fish, he creeps down to the nether-caves seeking cray-fish {Jangoustes) and crabs. While in pursuit of a large crab, he enters that very cave which he discovered weeks before. Thrusting his hand into a fissure, he suddenly feels his arm seized. An indescribable horror seizes him. ^' Quelque chose qui etait mince, apre, plat, glace, gluant et vivant venait de se tordre dans I'ombre autour de son bras nu. Cela lui montalt vers la poltrine." As he stands stripped, tentacle after tentacle {laniere) slips round him, till he is emxbraced on every side, in every limb. He shrieks in horror. " Brusquement une large viscoslte ronde et plate sortit de dessous la crevasse. C^etait le centre ; les cinq i6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. lanieres s'y rattachalent comme des rayons a un moyen ; en milieu de cette viscosite il y avait deux yeux qui regardaient. Ces yeux voyaient Gilliatt. Gilliatt reconnut la Pieuvre." * Now begins the second combat, between Man and the Execrable. It is quickly decided in Man's favour, and the "viscosity," with its head hacked off, tumbles into the water, dead. Directly after his victory, Gilliatt explores the lair of his enemy, and finds, among other horrible evidences of its predatory habits, an entire human skeleton, having around it a brazen belt containing a large sum of money lost by the owner of the wrecked vessel. Fortune has indeed been favourable to the mighty Toiler. The vessel saved, a lost fortune discovered, miracles of achieve- ment done, and mountains of difficulty overcome, he points the steamer's bow for Guernsey — "homeward ho ! ^^ The rest of the tragedy — for a tragedy it is though told in modern prose — may be given in a few words. The prize for which he has wrought through- out is not to be his. Deruchette, the dream of his desire, loves incarnate weakness in the shape of a Protestant priest. For Gilliatt, when he appears before her in all the glory of his triumph, — " tel qu^il etait sorti, ce matin meme, de Fecueil Douvres, en haillons, les andes perces, la barbe longue, les cheveux hausses, les yeux brules et rouges, la face ecorchee, les poings sanglants, les pieds nus,^^ — Gilliatt, thus * " Pour croire a la Pieuvre," the author here naively remarks, " il faut I'avoir vue ! " Everybody has now seen the Octopus, which distinct anti-social creature may be taken as the '^ Pieuvre's" representative. In some Japanese pictures of gigantic cuttle-fish, lately published in the Field, there is a parallel to Victor Hugo's exaggeration. One monster is de- picted embracing and overthrowing a large sailing-vessel ; its tentacles are as Ions: as the mast. FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 17 returning, is simply an object of horror. The father may exclaim "c'est mon vrai gendre," but the woman looks on with sickening despair. The end of all is very sad ; for here one misses that Titanic will which overcame the tempest, tore a fortune out of the very teeth of the winds, and slew the Poulp, or " Chimasra." Nobly indeed does Gilliatt resign Deruchette to him she loves, nobly does he join their hands, concealing his own ill-fated passion. But his heart is broken. As the pair sail away from Guernsey, Deruchette accompanying her husband to the far-off scene of his gentle pastoral labours, as they sit on the deck of a sailing vessel hand in hand, they pass close by the sea-cliffs, and standing out from these a detached rock in which is a stone seat, called Gild-Holm-^Ur. Now, at high water this seat is entirely covered by the tide, and in this seat Gilliatt sits, — and the tide is rising. With his eyes fixed on the vessel as it glides away, he sits awaiting his doom. The tide rises to his waist. An hour passes, and it rises to his neck. Slowly the vessel fades away on the far horizon line. At the moment it entirely disappears from view, the head of Gilliatt is submerged. '' II n^y eut plus rien que la mer.^^ The Titan, then, is no Titan after all. All the glory of his victory, all the beauty of his victory, has ended in the basest of all self-abnegation — suicide. To the " anarchy ^^ of Nature he was equal, but he is far too weak for the " anarchy of the human heart.'^ He is utterly fallen. Such, then, is the " Travailleurs de la Mer " of Victor Hugo, a work in many respects the writer's masterpiece, and well known to many who have not read it by its exaggerations about the "pieuvre,'' or poulp. To convert this work into a masterpiece worthy to rank with " Prometheus " would be im- c i8 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. possible, for its form and music alike belong to a lower art ; but if its imperfections were obliterated by the simple process of reducing its bulk to one-third or one-fourth, its literary worth would be far higher than it is. It contains ideas and creations of un- equalled grandeur — forms worthy of Greek sculpture — a sublime certainty of power which leaves all other contemporary fiction far behind indeed — a colossal imagery which has perhaps not been surpassed since iEschylus lived and died, and which has certainly not been rivalled by any poet but the one who painted the wondrous picture of Nimrod in the " Inferno." Though written in splendid prose, it is intrinsically a poem ; and because it is a poem in essence, one wishes it had been a poem in fact. I am not so blind to the wonderful advantages of its prose form as to wish that it had been written in vei'se; that is quite another matter; I merely regret those portions which owe their inspiration to Alexander Dumas, just as I regret those portions in " Les Miserables ^' which catch the inspiration and follow the style of Eugene Sue. These deductions made, the " Tra- vailleurs de la Mer " remains a marvellous work ; to be read not merely once but many times ; yet once read, never to be forgotten. Despite its faults, it approaches nearer to the ^schylan ideal than any other modern work not written by its author. The preface to " Les Travailleurs de la Mer " is as follows : La religion, la socidtd, la nature ; telles sont les trois luttes de rhomme. Ces trois luttes sont en mcme temps ses trois besoins ; il faut qu'il croie, de la le temple ; il faut qu'il crie, de Ik la c\\.€ ; il faut qu'il vive, de la la charrue et le navire. Mais ces trois solutions contiennent trois guerres. La mysterieuse difficult^ de la vie sort de toutes les trois. L'homme a affaire a I'obstacle sous la forme superstition, sous la forme prejugd, et FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 19 sous la forme element. Un triple anantre pese sur nous, I'anantre des dogmes, I'anantre des lois, I'anantre des choses. Dans Notre Dame de Paris I'auteur a denonce le premier ; dans les Miserables, il a signale le second ; dans ce livre, il indique le troisieme. A ces trois fatalites qui enveloppent I'homme, se mele la fatalite interieure, I'anantre supreme, le cceur humain. Whether or not this idea is, as some expect, an after- thought of the author, frequently over anxious to fashion his works into imaginary unity, it is not for me to decide ; but if the idea be admitted and found penetrating the three works in question, it simply renders conclusive the measureless despair of the author^s moral teaching. Centuries upon centuries have passed since ^schylus wrote his Promethean trilogy, and only the gloomiest part of that trilogy remains ; since that masterpiece was lost and found, Christianity has been, with its lights and its awful shadows ; not a god of the old mythology remains, not a shadow of the lost superstition abides ; empires have risen or fallen upon this truth, that Zeus is not, but that Christ, whether in the flesh or the spirit, is and shall be — a trutii which, nowadays, is as much the spirit of Mr. Spencer's teaching as of that of the late Mr. Maurice ; and yet, for all this, for all the lapse of centuries and the roll of opinion, that sculptured ^^Prometheus'' remains a more enlightened and enlightening thing than the figure of this other Toiler, working in all the illumination of the modern ^' idea." If the greatest poet of our generation has read upon the page of modern history only this one word "dmyKe," or fatality, and if this miserable word is the centre of his creed and ours, then well may we wish that we, like^schylus, had been Pagans, " suckled in a creed outworn." I shall endeavour to show, further on, that the defects of Victor Hugo c 2 20 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. are not necessarily those of his generation, and that, for those who read between the lines, even his most hopeless utterances are far removed from sceptical despair; but his fault is, that while his reason is illu- minative and propagandist to a degree, his imagina- tion, for reasons partly national and partly literary, is to a deplorable extent retrospective and over- shadowed with gloom. Feuerbach in his darkest mood is as cheerful as this poet in his brightest. He preaches a breezy doctrine of democracy, as if he were opening one of the seals of an Apocalypse. His ideas are often divine, his creations are more frequently devilish. At his highest he is a dark angel, moving in the shadow of his own wings ; at his lowest, he is a nightmare. From a literary point of view even he is alarming. Two-thirds of his words are about as valuable as, the contents of the daily journals. The remaining third is more precious than any other imaginative utterance now heard in Europe, and yet, though its power of putting great and vague ideas into colossal forms is unexampled, it contains a philosophy of mere misery, a morality to be surpassed even among the sweepings of those sophists Mr. Grote loved " not wisely but too well.^' IIL ^SCHYLUS. Let us turn back to ^schylus, and examine a little closer into his altitude as a poet and his claims as a teacher. Every one knows that he remained throughout his life what Victor Hugo began by being FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 21 — an aristocrat, a worshipper of the ancient order. He was a Eupatrid, a member of the proud old -nobility; and he preserved to the end the dignity, the hauteur, and the prejudice of his class. More noteworthy still is the fact that he was born at Eleusis. It is no part of my purpose to enter into the controversy as to whether or not he was actually " initiated " into the Mysteries ; certain it is he preserved for them a holy and deep-seated awe, and that they had a mystic influence upon his intellect and on his style ; so that even Aristophanes, in the " Frogs," makes him invoke Demeter : Ar]ixT]T€p T] dptyjracra Tr)v ffirjv ^peva, €ivai /xe T(ov acov ci^cov p.vcrTqpi(t>v ! ^ It would be more to the point to examine what these Mysteries eventually were, had I leisure and erudition for such an inquiry ; the truth, however, is involved in hopeless darkness, and scholars are hopelessly disagreed, some seeing in the Mysteries a solemn and sublime preservation of primitive theology, while others find in them only Phallic symbols and debasing orgies. With the last-named opinions, however, only pedants could agree. The grandeur of the very temple itself, the style of its architecture, the solemnity of its surroundings, were alone enough to dispel merely debasing associations; and when we add to the testimony of ^schylus himself that of such men as Sophocles and Pindar, we cannot but believe that the Mysteries, whatever some of their external forms may have been, had a deep and beautiful meaning, and a purifying influence. This much being conceded, we have little or no difliculty in comprehending the right * V. 886, 887. 22 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. character of ^schylus himself. He is a veritable Priest of Eleusis, uttering his oracles in mighty verse. He accepts the ancient myths without doubt and without hesitation. The overthrow of Kronos by Zeus is as truly a fact to him as the creation of the world in six days is a fact to an orthodox English bishop. He believes in the old theogony, and he knows every one of its members as a Roman Catho- lic knows his saints. His faith is mighty within him. To regard these wondrous shapes as mere symbolism^ as mere abstract attributes idealised into divine per- sons, to think of Prometheus as mere " Forethought," in the spirit of a didactic essay by a modern philologist, would be as much heresy in his eyes as to accept the Bible simply as " supreme literature " is heresy in the eyes of the editor of the Record. The order of things has been told him, and by that order he abides. But the very law of that order, he perceives, is constant change. The better displaces the worse, in heaven as on earth. Zeus has reigned, but Zeus must fall. Here a difficulty interposes. It is clear that the poet uses the word " Zeus " in two ways — using it sometimes to describe the personality of the tyrant who deposed Kronos and tortured Prometheus ; but at other times, and more frequently, to denote ( " in a mystery," as John Bunyan would express it) the supreme and divine Idea which, through all human and superhuman interpositions, works for righteous- ness. Nothing could be more explicit and tremen- dous in its abuse of the Olympian Individual than the whole of the "Prometheus." Zeus is the synonym for everything that is treacherous, lecherous, inces- tuous, suspicious, tyrannous, loveless, hopeless, and diabolical. Milton is far kinder to the devil than ^schylus is to the Father — such a Father ! — as con- FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 23 temptible in the Greek fragment as in the lovely English poem of Shelley. There can be no mistake about it, and the vituperation is given all round. But who can imagine for a moment that ^schylus, in the following passage of the "Agamemnon/^ is singing of the same Being? Zeus, whoe'er he be, Whether that name be pleasing in his ear By which I call him now : For, weighing well all other names, I fail, When seeking from my soul To cast away all care, To fathom any but this name of Zeus. For One who reigned of old, Full of the might of war. Is fallen, and is no more ; And one who followed him Hath fallen in his turn. But Zeus abides, and he who woos him well Shall surely reap the wisdom of the wise. Yea, Zeus is he whom we must woo with prayer, And with ovations, would we prosper well — He who to wisdom leads us, making sure Sad teachings wrought from pain ; For in the dead of night Come conscience-waking cares and agonies, And mortals then against their wills grow wise. Such grace, I trow, is shed by the Immortals, Seated above on their eternal thrones."^ No, this is not the Divine Tyrant, but the Divine Idea which has displaced him, and taken the name of which he is unworthy. * Above is part of the extraordinary first chorus of the "Agamemnon," afterwards alluded to again. No attempt is made to translate it literally or rhythmically ; it is quite un- translatable, and I merely attempt to convey its spirit. The confusion of Zeus himself with the Sat/xot-e? (here, however, translated " Immortals " ) is an example of the poet's per- plexing way of mingling modem Athenian conceptions with the old theogony. 24 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Agairij in the " Suppliants " : — Calm, without effort, is the work of Zeus : Thron'd loftily, he works, we know not how, His perfect will. Again in " Eumenides^^ : — All things he rules, unwearying, with no toil. This is the one God that abides, though the many change and pass ; this is the supreme Spirit, far more akin to the to 'Epw/iei/oi/ of Aristotle, and the eternal *'Ich^' of Fichte, than to the colossal Constitutional Monarch overthrown by Demogorgon. This more resembles the " stream of tendency that works for righteousness," than the wicked Impostor who carried into divine life the indecency of a Nero and the cruelty of a Tiberius. In a word, the poet, half un- consciously, is intoning the music of that monotheism which interpenetrates all polytheistic systems, and of which he is as certain as Plato himself. Zeus, thus conceived, is not merely " mighty of the mightiest," as the same poet, indeed, calls him ; he is the ^^ secret force destroying wrong, as water weareth stone ; " he is the everlasting Principle by which truth is vindi- cated from generation to generation, and through which suffering becomes self-compensating and di- vine ; he is the Quiet Waters that receive the virgin corpse of lo in the end, and he is the Peace that broodeth like a dove in heart of the triumphant Titan. But, far more than this, he is Supreme Justice, Lord and Master of the Erinnyes, ever urging them on to righteous vengeance, until (as in the " Orestes "), Nature is vindicated, and they drop to sleep. If, as is believed, ^schylus designed the masks for many of his characters, as well as assisting other- FROM ^SCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 25 wise in the artistic and scenic decorations ; and if these masks of bronze answered, as they must have done, to the tragic ideas of their creator, his heart must often have ached in their fashioning. Well might the Greek Theatre be formed on a mighty scale, with the quiet heavens overhead, figures of superhuman height moving on the stage, masks of mysterious awe glimmering far away. No human face could have borne throughout a play the fixed expression of monotonous pain of an CEdipus, an Orestes, or, above all, a Clytemnestra ; no living actor could have personated these characters in what is now known as the natural style without emotion bordering on madness. In assisting at their show, we are passing, as it were, under the very shadow of God. The infinite sibilations of the " Inferno " are not more real than the cries we hear from those brazen throats ; yet we take comfort from the very mistiness and vagueness of the forms. Lear's thin, human cry tears our heart-strings, but the wild groan of Orestes comes to us subdued into a prayer. We hide our faces from the sight of the " pretty princes smothered in the Tower/' from little Arthur's plead- ing face held up to Hubert — Must you with hot irons burn out both mine eyes ? This is too common — pitiful ; we cannot bear it ; but the slaughter of Agamemnon, and the torture of Prometheus, and the murder of Cassandra, and the death of Clytemnestra by the fruit of her own womb, all these we can bear, because they are less realities than symbols, seen in a shrine, of natural laws vindi- cated despite unnatural passions, and of the Divine Justice and Pity which is ever awaiting to redeem the deeds of guilt. To read the " Agamemnon " or the 26 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. "Prometheus^' alone, is like ending at the murder scene in Macbeth, or stopping at the early books of " Paradise Lost/' Each play bears the same relation to its group that each act of Shake- speare bears to a complete drama. We must read on until the end if we wish to receive the sacrament of a Greek Trilogy. In the Orestean group, fortunately preserved for us intact, we get the whole picture- complete, with all its issues and its compensations. In the case of the " Prometheus,'' we have to guess the beginning and the end ; and fortunately we can do so with ease and pleasure ; but it is not too much to say that we could better spare three or four of the plays of Shakespeare, or, better still, one entire half of the Elizabethan dramas, than the lost " Prometheus Purophoros" and " Prometheus Luomenos " of ^schy- lus. The loss of the play last named, commonly known as the " Prometheus Solutus," is simply in- commensurable. Not even the lovely lyric drama of Shelley, which we owe to it, can make that loss endurable. Nay, for that one lost masterpiece, one would freely exchange any existing masterpiece, with two exceptions. King Lear , and the " Inferno." Only less wonderful than the " Prometheus " is the " Agamemnon." Here, as in the other, the spirit is wrathful, religious, and terrible. It is not my pur- pose to recapitulate its features, as I did those of the " Prometheus ; " such a recapitulation is unneces- sary for the purposes of this paper. In some re- spects, the "Agamemnon " is unequalled. The first chorus of Argive elders is, without any exception whatever, the weirdest, most wonderful, soul-over- whelming piece of melody to which the human ear ever listened. It is, even apart from those solemn religious suggestions in which it abounds, a sacred FROM JESCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 27 oratorio without any parallel ; and delivered in the Greek amphitheatre, with all due pomp of accompani- ment and gesture, it must have been as awe-inspiring in its rapid, mysterious imagery, as the very intona- tions of Eleusis itself. Unfortunately, it is untrans- latable. Other Greek choruses may be rendered with a dim approach to the reality, but this chorus it is simply impossible to render at all. It has all the volume of the Psalms of David, with all the music of the ancient world. As one reads it, one cannot help believing that its melody was found in some old oracle, which caught it from the murmur of the neighbouring sea. It comes like a conjuration. aiKivoVy aiXivov invi, to S' ev viKaroi. And no sooner has it ended, than there rises up, pale,, terrible, crowned, with a mask fixed into one white gleam of murderous resolve, the shadowy figure of Clytemnestra. But God, in that deep music, has been invoked, is with us, is watching, and we do not fear. That awful woman may move on to her revenge — the bath is prepared wherein the corse of Agamem- non will soon be lying — all will be fulfilled as has been fated from the beginning (since crime breeds crime,, and of Agamemnon^s own sowing springs the bloody seed) ; but still, God is with us, with the spectators as with the actors, and we gaze on. Thus fortified, we can bear even Cassandra^s piteous wail, which is soon heard rising to the very heaven of heavens. For we are not met merely beholding a play ; we are par- taking in a holy ceremony, by which God will be surely justified. Far different, here observe, is the art. of Shakespeare. He, too, wrote his "Agamemnon," calling Clytemnestra Lady Macbeth, and Aegisthus Macbeth, and his work, far inferior as it is, parades L 28 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. these humanising touches which in a purely divine tragedy are incidental. Supreme pity is his last word, not supreme justice and religion. As we see the bloody Thane staggering across the stage in his last infirmity, crying, I have lived long enough — my way of life Has fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf ; And that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends, I must not look to have ! we almost forget his crimes, in the utterness of our pity for his poor humanity. There is pity too, but of a sublimer sense, in the "Agamemnon.^' When in the " Libation-pourers/^ Clytemnestra falls at her son's feet seeking mercy and crying, I reared thee — I would fain grow old with thee ! and when, after slaying her, Orestes cries. May the Great Sun, beholding all we do. Bear witness for me, that I justly wrought This doom upon my mother ! we are too awe-stricken for pity. Fate is speaking through the very lips of the Avenger, and Zeus is approving. Yet even as we hear we know, from vague murmurs of the Chorus and from certain sub- lime expressions of Orestes himself, that all is not yet well, that Orestes has violated a natural law even in avenging his own father, and that vengeance is not man's, but God's. We do not weep, as in Shake- speare ; we pray. We do not turn away sadly con- scious of human problems, tenderly stirred by human voices, as we do when we close a play of the great feudal poet ; we come away as from a Temple, not wholly comforted, but reverent, and resolved. FROM JESCHYLUS TO VICTOR HUGO. 29 IV. THE ONE GOD. The great Greek masterpieces owe no small part of their inconceivable splendour as exercises of re- ligion to the existence of the Chorus. The Chorus is, as it were, the idealised human spectator, ever prepared with comment on events too strange for comprehension. Its members, from their position round the Thymele, midway between actors and audience, are enabled, as the play proceeds, to give expression to the emotions which are disturbing the bosom of every spectator who possesses a particle of human nature. In a modern performance, we must repress our pleasure and pain, no matter how strongly they are excited. In forming actually or in imagi- nation part of the audience at a Greek play, we are perpetually entering our fiery protest against iniquity, and calling aloud to God for His retribution. The moment our emotion masters and suffocates us, the Choragus finds voice in our name. Our human na- ture is vindicated. It is we ourselves, so to speak, no mere person of the drama, who conduct that fierce dialogue with the contemptuous Aegisthus at the end of the ^^ Agamemnon." We hiss at, deride, insult, mock, and defy the obnoxious character. Thrive on, stuff, gorge thy fill, polluting right ! we shriek ; and when he threatens us, we cry tauntingly, Boast on, and crow — like a cock beside his hen ! Our hootings and exclamations follow him as he retires, led off by Clytemnestra, and the curtain falls. 30 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Again in the " Prometheus ^^ when the Okeanides upHft their voices against the iniquities of the Olym- pian tyrant, we are the Okeanides. We call aloud, that the heavens and the earth may hear us, Of all the gods, what god is there so cruel That he rejoiceth in thy sufferings ! We cling around him, soothing and comforting him, and even when Hermes threatens us with the fiery levin if we remain, we do not go. Nay, we are even those fierce Erinnyes, hounding Orestes from land to land — for our human nature sickens at matricide, and we are not appeased until we receive full atonement, in utter contrition and devotion of sacrifice ; then, -as the Eumenides, our cries are still. Thus, as I have indicated, the spectator of a Greek play is assisting at a religious service, in which he joins when the emotion masters him — not wildly and madly, but in a solemn spirit befitting the tragedy of great human issues. He who reads his Bible and finds it holy, and yet can read his " ^schylus '^ and call it pagan, has much to learn as to what is and what is not edification. If Isaiah and Ezekiel are prophets, Prometheus and the rest are prophets too. The voice of one crying in the wilder- ness never uttered solemner warning to man than do the Argive Elders of the divine chorus. If the Lord God of the " Psalms '^ is terrible and overwhelming, the Lord God of the " Suppliants " is beautiful and wise : Our sire is He, creator of our being. Monarch whose right hand worl- »^ V-. I I OF C LT'-'^. -^Qj^ Q^ LUCRETIUS, 97 things, amid the whirlwind which already threatens to blow the roofs off all our churches and carry away one-half of our libraries, one word we hear distinctly pronounced with reverence again and again, one name we hear^ almost forgotten by all save students, until eager scientific dreamers recalled it in order to give its owner his apotheosis — one name of a dead poet — Lucretius, the singer and expounder of the Cosmic " Nature of Things." Just as Democritus has dethroned Plato, Lucre- tius is dethroning — whom shall we say, when our choice of pagan theogonists is so limited ? — well^ ^schylus. We have discovered that the real poet after our own hearts is not one who can sing to us in noble numbers of superhuman endurance and the wrath of gods, of mighty ideals shattered or up- raised by divine destroyers and demi-divine inter- cessors ; nay, that we infinitely prefer a poet who can tell us in voluminous numbers how "nothing was ever begotten out of nothing by divine aid," how flesh is grass, and all things, like the flowers, must dis- appear; how and in what measure we may conduct the breed of the human species ; and how, finally and chiefly, we can give the liliputian ATOMS their just due as the creators of both protoplasm and poetry, substance, sense, and Soul. We wanted just such a poet for this period, and so, going back to B.C. 99, we find him ready made — a " cosmic creature," as musical as need be to ears unattuned to the hexameters of Virgil, and as explicit in his physiological explanations as Walt Whitman ; a great, indeed, and an eminently sincere poet, with the splendid qualification of never even having heard of that " obstruction," Christianity ; just, in fine, such a singer as our own Tyndall would be, if the Professor would only put his ornate periods into H 98 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the flowery fetters of rhyme. Of course, and as the reader may conceive, he could not be always right, living- as he did before the birth of Science, but his book is universally admitted to be wonderfully "correct" in essentials, and a sublime specimen of what is now termed the "scientific" imagination. We know now that the Atoms, which he dreamed of, are acknowledged facts ; and if we only bridge over the gulf between his two first books and the other four by a few scien- tific links, such as "protoplasm,^^ we shall find in the " De Rerum Natura '^ an admirable exposition of the History of Creation, as far as we can at present under- stand it. If the end of the fourth book is expurgated, the book will do to read even in young ladies' colleges. For those who find a poem fatiguing which contains no imaginative pictures of the supernatural, we may point out the memorable dedication to Venus, ^neadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas, as an admirable substitute (somewhat out of place, it is true, in so precise a production) for any of those absurd religious conceptions with which we are familiar. It is time to be serious ; and lest the critic of the period, ever on the look-out for heresy against the spirit of the laboratory, should accuse me of treating a great and influential poet with irreverence, let me confess at once my deep and profound admiration for the poet in question. So far from grudging him his apotheosis, in which even Bishops cordially assist, I rejoice over it as another token that justice, poetic or non-poetic, is done to all great thinkers sooner or later. I welcome even the Atoms, and the volu- minous literature the little semina have created. I cordially agree with Dryden, who criticised A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 99 nothing that he did not illuminate, and who has left us the best criticism of this author extant^ that Lucretius possessed a "sublime and daring genius," to which, let me add, no amount of study can do too much honour. Who that remembers the lovely glimpses of nature so frequently given as we traverse the arid track of Materialism over which he leads us, can doubt the "genius," or deny that it is "sublime"? Sometimes, indeed, when I remember such pictures, I am inclined to place Lucretius higher than a final judgment may prove warrantable. As I behold the clouds above me, Dant etiam sonitum patuli super sequora mundi ; and the "coerulean of the great universe" and the vast tract of the ocean at my feet, Maxima qua nunc se ponti plaga coerula tendit; and the " daedal Earth yielding up her flowers," Tibi suaves dasdala* tellus Submittit flores ; and in dark solitary places beneath the " shadows of Orcus and hateful pools," An tenebras Orel visat vastasque lacunas ; and the " flaming walls of the world," Flamantia mcenia mundi ; and beyond that even, the " divine shores of light," Dias in luminis oras ; so I know by these and many other tokens, beautiful * Mr. Munro translates this into " manifold of works," but surely he might have adopted the actual equivalent so repeatedly- used by Shelley. Thus : Through thee the daedal Earth Brings forth fresh flowers. H 2 loo A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. and musical exceedingly, that a Poet is guiding me, not a peripatetic Pedant pale with joy of the dis- covery that the moon is 7wt green cheese. Nay, I forget, amid such glimpses, that a Lucretius leads me and not a Virgil, and that I am being guided — dare I say it under the new scientific Inquisition ? — through an Inferno, It is only when my foot falls on the dark graves beneath it, when my breath inhales the lowest atmosphere of a poem which begins with a parody and ends with a pestilence ; it is only when the ATOMS darken the vision and perplex the judgment, that I know I am visiting an Inferno indeed, and cry pitifully with Dryden, — our guide "is so bent on making us a materialist, and teaching us to defy an invisible power — in short, he is so much an Atheist J that he sometimes forgets he is a Poet!^ It is perhaps too much to assume in the ordinary English reader, for whom I write, any special acquaintance with Lucretius and his writings ; and it has seemed to me likely that a short sketch of the poem, with a few remarks en passant on its bearing towards modern thought, may not be unacceptable. Far be from one, whose scientific pretensions are Infinitely modest, to wear and tear the reader with another disquisition on the Atomic Theory; even were I armed and ready for such work, I should not attempt it under the Inquisition, when the next unpardonable sin to believing in a Deity is to offer any reasons for so believing, and when even a semi- scientist like Mr. Lewes is listened to with ill-disguised contempt, simply because he has not spent even his suckling-time in a laboratory. My attempt is much humbler on the present occasion. I shall be very respectful to the Atoms, and accept any explanation of their existence which their disciples — I was A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. loi going to say their creators ! — are willing to give me : I shall touch very delicately on Evolution, and not at all, perhaps, on Protoplasm ; and when I have given my brief account of Lucretius and his poem, I shall only suggest, in the most reverential manner possible, that good poetry was never wasted on a worse subject^ and that, if this is the most poetic solution of Creation that MATERIALISM has to offer us, the world will feel itself justified, pace Professor Tyndall, in resuscitating some Poet of SPIRITUALISM as soon as possible ! Our poet begins,, as I have said, with a parody — the memorable address to Venus ; and the picture he draws of her power is very beautiful. She is the divine spirit of things ; all follow her and obey her, the winds, the clouds of heaven, the flowers of earth, the waves of ocean smiling at her advent, and heaven rejoicing in her light. That his picture may not be too insubstantial, he describes her with Mars lying at her feet, looking up at her in passion, while his breath is lingering on her lips ; and — O si sic omnia ! — he begs her, in her own lovely language, to buy peace for Rome, that he may quietly sing to Memmius of the wonderful Nature of Things. The style of this invocation is at once Homeric and Virgilian ; it is both simple and ornate ; but it is, in the highest sense, a parody, because it is the mere imitative con- juration of a divine entity in whom the singer has no faith. What he really means by Venus, despite all his beautiful prelude, is made explicit enough in Book IV. :— Sic igitur Veneris qui delis accipit ictus, Unde feritur, eo tendit gestitque coire, etc., Haec Venus est nobis ! hinc autem est nomen Amoris ; Hinc illaec primum Veneris dulcedinis in cor Stillavit gutta et successit frigida cura. 102 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. This " alma Venus/' observe, remembering the epi- gram of Novalis, is the first of the Lucretian " Spec- tres." We are now at the portals of Chaos ; passing which rapidly, we at once see the darkness gather- ing, but are detained for a moment while the Poet tells us of the curses of religion and the blessings of Epicurus : — When human life lay foully desolate, Crush'd 'neath Religion, who with hideous head Lower'd horribly from all the gates of heaven, A man of Greece dared to uplift his eyes, And braved the dreadful Phantom to her face ! Him neither fables of the gods could tame, Nor thunderbolts, nor the deep roar of heaven. These only raised fresh hunger in his soul To be the first to break with mortal hands The bars of Nature's yet unopen'd gate. He conquered, therefore, by the living will "Within his soul ; and lo ! he swiftly passed Far out beyond the flaming walls o' the world, Traversing with unconquerable mind The most immeasurable universe ; From whence returning victor, he expounds "What can, what cannot, be, explaining clear The principles and boundaries of things. Thus, in her turn, Religion is cast down And trampled underfoot, and up to heaven "We soar, exalted by his victory ! Thus singing I am haunted by a fear That thou* may'st deem we walk unholy ground, And tread upon the wicked ways of sin ; — Quite otherwise ! for 'tis Religio7is self "Who is the mother of most damned deeds. Thus once at Aulis gather'd mighty chiefs, The flower of Danai and the first of men, Staining with Iphianassa's gentle blood The thirsty altars of the Trivian maid. Soon as the fillet clasped her virgin hair, And dropt in equal length down each pale cheek. And she beheld her sire stand sorrowing Close to the arch-priests with the hidden knife, * Memmius. A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS, 103 And all around her weeping countrymen, Then, dumb with horror, dropping on her knees, She sank upon the ground .... What could it then avail the luckless Maid That first her lips had prattled to the king The name of ' Father ? ' Shrieking, shivering, Uplifted in the cruel hands of men. She straight was borne, not with sweet bridal song And solemn rites of Love's first sacrifice, But stain'd while stainless, in her bridal prime, There on the bloody altars to be slain By that safe father's sacrificial stroke — That gods might give the Greeks a favouring wind, And prosper well the sailing of the fleet. Such evils evermore to mortal men Religion teaches ! "^ This passage, perhaps the most striking in the whole poem, is the prelude to the poet's avowal of simple and unvarnished materialism. Beginning with his first and cardinal principle, that nothing was ever begotten out of nothing by Divine intervention, Nullam rem e nihilo gigni divinitus unquam, he proceeds to pile illustration upon illustration of this solemn discovery. I need not follow him through his long catalogue ] enough to say that he is entirely at one with Professor Tyndall on such points as the efhcacy of prayer. That the laws of Nature are un- alterable, that it is absolutely decreed what each thing can do and what it cannot do, that phenomena of all sorts are produced by natural laws, and that nothing whatever can happen without a natural cause, * This and the other metrical renderings in the text make no pretence to constant literal correctness, though they are often pretty close for a free translation. Mr. Munro's unpunc- tuated prose, though admirable from certain points of view, is, as a rule, very hard to follow, and too full of attempts to get an esoteric and laboured meaning out of single words. 104 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. are propositions on which I cordially agree with him, — and so, we presume, would any decently-culti- vated Bishop. He proceeds forthwith to prove the imperishability of matter ; next, the existence of Void {iiamqtie est in rebus inane), without which Motion would be impossible ; and next, that Matter and Void compose Nature, and that nothing beyond these exists. All this is expressed very admirably, with as much poetry as the subject is capable of bearing, and more- over, melodiously — the lines making the hard, regular, metallic music of the blows of a smith's hammer on his anvil. We are now face to face with the Atoms, or first beginnings, out of which all other bodies, how- ever simple, are fashioned ; no force can affect them, they are indestructible ; while all things we behold around us — even iron, stone, brass, marble — are de- structible, consisting, as they do, of Matter and Void. Thus, the Atoms are solid, being without void. While ever entering into fresh combinations, they remain the same for ever. They are perfectly hard, inde- structible, eternal. To paraphrase Goethe, " the wonderful eternal Atoms are great as in Creation's day." Nevertheless, they are invisible — lying " far beneath the ken of sense ; " and yet for all that, they have parts — each part being so small that it has never existed and can never exist by itself, being by its very nature a part of the Atom.* * These first beginnings have parts, but their parts are so small as not to admit of existence separate from the atom. The atom, therefore, has not been formed from a union of these parts, but they have existed in it unchangeably from eternity. Such parts, then, are but one more proof that the first beginnings are of everlasting singleness. Again, without such ultimate least things, the smallest and largest things will alike consist of infinite parts, and thus will be equal. Again, if Nature went in division beyond the atom, such least things A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 105 With all the recent literature of the Atomic Theory, newly set before us, with Tyndall's Address, Clark Marshall's Essay on Molecules, Professor Jenkins' "North British Review^'' Essay on the Atomic Theory of Lucretius, and Professor Veitch's bright little brocJiiire under the same name — all, doubtless, fresh in the minds of our readers — it would be superero- gatory to describe the Atoms further in detail. Enough to say that the theory of Lucretius, averring the existence of ultimate and indivisible particles of matter, is now universally admitted by modern chemists. It is admitted, too, that there is a limited number of different Atoms, out of each of which is composed an elementary chemical substance. "And therefore," in the words of Newton, " that nature may be lasting, the changes in corporeal things are to be placed only in various separations, and new associa- tions and motions of these permanent particles." This is the secret which keeps Nature for ever fresh and new, this is the unchangeable law of never-changing change ; by this the sun shines, and the flowers grow, and the bosoms of love rise and fall ; and the world of things, despite its innumerable transformations, is the same world of Genesis, as fresh and fair now as ever. This, so far as I have described it, is a satisfactory as these parts of the atom could not have the qualities which birth-giving matter must have — weight, motion, power of striking, and clothing, and combining. A passage necessarily obscure, because dealing with one of those questions which utterly elude the grasp of human reason. Epicurus, building up his dogmatic system, and hating all scepticism of first prin- ciples, determined that his atoms should have size, shape, weight — in his own words, fxeyedos crx^fJ-a l^apos — and therefore ■extension. But, if extension, then parts ; and how can that which has parts be indivisible ? — MuNRO's Notes. io6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. creed, and by no means naturally connected with the poet's other theories. The One remains, the Many change and pass ; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity. Towards the end of Book II., however, we get a glimpse which would satisfy Dr. Gumming. The fruit ripens and falls in its season, man grows and decays in his season, and in its season the earth shall perish — for want, Lucretius explains, of sustenance. And in this wise, so storm'd, the walls o' the world Shall crumble into ruins and decay. E'en now the age grows frail, and mother Earth, Out of whose womb all mighty races came, With all the bodies of gigantic beasts, Grows sick, and scarce can bear her pigmy forms. For ne'er methinks by any chain of gold Let down from Heaven upon the nether fields Came down the races of humanity. Nor out of ocean and rock-rending waves Were any mortals born, — but the same Earth Which bare them in her womb, now with her milk Feeds them and suckles them ! With this end of Book II. the reader finds a great dark- ness growing upon him : and, in fact, such a darkness is necessary, unless he prefers to be led blindfolds Dazzled with the mystery of the Atoms, he moves on,, in humble expectation of having the whole further process of Being explained. No explanation is vouchsafed him. Book IIL opens with another eulogy of Epicurus, who, by teaching men that the world was not formed by a Divine Power, but by a fortuitous concourse of Atoms,, relieved men from supernatural dread — of the gods, of death, and of post-mortem punishments. It is a great jump from the fortuitous concourse of chemical elements to the mind and soul of man — a jump which A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 107 could never be forgiven in a theologic poet, but is highly eulogised in one whose "scientific imagi- nation^^ favours modern Materialism. Animus, or mind, resides in the heart, while anima is diffused throughout the whole body ; and both animjis and anima are simply combinations of minute atoms. We are thus gradually led to the main argument of the book, that what is called the soul perishes with the body : Quid dubitas, tandem quin extra prodita corpus Imbecilla foras, in aperto, tegmine dempto; Non modo non omnem possit durare per sevum, Sed minimum quodvis nequeat consistere tempus ? This position, that the soul is born and dies with the body, is sustained in a style of argument worthy, not of a supreme poet, but of the late Mr. Winwood Read or Dr. Draper of New York.* Death, therefore, I opine, concerns us not, Since the mind is but mortal, and will perish ! For consolation, we are reminded that the best men die as well as the worst — even Epicurus being turned to dust. This may be comfort to Professor Tyndall, who can look forward cheerfully, in his sweet poetic way, to " melting like a streak of morning cloud into the infinite azure of the past." Unfortunately, neither the prospect nor the arguments would satisfy ordinary mortals who are not professional chemists. So far as our human guide is concerned, he has, I repeat it, led us into an Inferno, and already we seem to hear the wail of the lost — an infinite ululation. For all that, the poet contains such an abundant * This, however, is not the position sustained by Dr. Draper in his "Physiology." I io8 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. happiness within himself, that he sings figuratively to dispel our fears : The pathless tracks of the Pierian springs I tread, before untrodden, and with joy Approach the waters, stooping down to drink. Gladly I pluck fresh flowers, and for my brow Enweave a chaplet from those secret spots From whence tlie Muses never yet have given A wreath to cover any mortal head ! His task it is, he adds, to free the mind from super- stition/ and to set forth a dark subject in the most lucid verses possible. He proceeds, still following the ideas of Epicurus, to treat of Images — how they are discharged from the surfaces of things, how these images affect the eyes, and are in a certain subtle sense corporeal, as well as taste and sound. After a variety of striking illustrations, he comes back to Venus, and treats very physiologically of the nature of love and desire. Book V. is chiefly devoted to proofs that the world is not eternal, because as the chemic elements are changeable and perishable, the world is change- able and perishable too. The world began and the world will end. Therefore, not closed is the gate of Death Against the sun, the skies, the earth, and sea, But ever yawning with wide open'd maw It looketh on them, waiting for their coming ! He proceeds, as explicitly as possible, to explain the world^s beginning; and to show, recurring here to his main point, that nothing was originally done by Divine Wisdom or Understanding. "The first beginnings of things, many in number in many ways impelled by blows for infinite ages back, and kept in motion by their own weights, have been wont to be carried along and to unite in all manner of ways, and thoroughly to A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 109 test every kind of production possible by their mutual combinations ; therefore it is that spread abroad through great time, after trying unions and motions of every kind, they at length meet together in these masses, which suddenly brought together become often the rudiments of great things, of earth, sea, heaven, and the race of living things." * He then describes creation according to the cosmogony of Epicurus — the birth of the earth, the uprising of the fiery ether, and of the sun, moon, and stars ; and of course he is not to be censured for placing the earth in the middle of the world. Of day and night, of eclipses, of plants, animal life, and man, he discourses with " scientific " eloquence. Here certainly he gives us an inspired fore-glimpse of the doctrine of Evolu- tion and the survival of the fittest : And many living things have died away, Too weak to procreate and save their seed. For wheresoe'er the breath of life is drawn, By cunning or by courage or by speed Each race has saved itself from the beginning. And many things, through use to mortal men. By us protected, prosper and endure. By courage, lions fierce and savage races Have been protected ; foxes by their craft ; And by their flight, swift stags. But faithful dogs, Light-sleeping, and all seed of burthen'd beasts, And all the woolly flocks and horned herds, Have thriven, O Memmius, by the help of man. He proceeds to describe the early state of Nature, and soon, in a passage of surprising eloquence, he describes the condition of primitive Man himself: Then was the race of men a hardier race, Like to the hard, strong earth from which they sprang. And on the ground- work of their mightier bones Strong thews and sinews knit the frame of flesh. ■^ Munro's translation. no A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE, Not then, by quick extremes of heat or cold, Or food unfit, or any malady, Did mortals sicken. While the sun thro' heaven Rolled on thro' many lustres, they prolonged A life as roving as the life of beasts. No hand then guided the sharp crooked plough, Or dug the fields, or sowed i' the earth new seeds, Or cut old boughs away with pruning-hooks ; What had been given by the sun and showers, What green Earth freely on her bosom bore, Was ample then to satisfy their needs. Mostly on acorn-bearing oaks they fed, Or berries of the wild arbutus-trees, Which now thou seest in winter-time grow red, And which were then more large and plentiful ; And many wholesome fruits and foods beside, More than enough for miserable men. The flowery freshness of the green earth bare. Then rivers and soft fountains called to them To come and quench their thirst ; as, nowadays, The torrent waters rushing from their hills With bubbling murmur echoing far and wide, Summon the thirsty tribes of savage beasts. Within the silvery temples of the nymphs Then, too, they rested after wandering, And watched the quiet waters creeping forth, Bathing with limpid flow the dripping rocks, Trickling all silvery o'er the emerald moss, Or bubbling brightly o'er the level plain. And yet they knew not how to work with fire, To tan wild hides, or clothe about their frames With skins of beasts ; but deep in glades they dwelt, In hidden forests, under mountain caves. Sheltering their rugged limbs among the boughs From the wild beating of the winds and rains. They knew no common use nor common weal, No common law nor custom ; for himself Each struggled, taught to think of self alone. And whatsoever he by fortune found Each to his own lone cavern bore away. And, marvellously swift of hands and feet, W^ith stones and great clubs fashioned out of trees, They hunted down the forest-ranging beasts ; And some they conquered, and from some they fled, Crouching and hiding ; and when night-time came. They rolled themselves like swine upon the ground. And cover'd up their limbs with boughs and leaves. A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. in Yet never wailed they for the day to come, Nor wandered through the shadows of the night With terror stricken ; silent, sunk in sleep. They waited, till the sun with flaming torch Illumed the heavens ; for they had ever known Such alternations of the light and dark, And so no wonder fell upon their souls, Nor any fear that an eternal night Might come upon the earth and cover it, Veiling the golden sun for evermore ! This is quite in the spirit of Sir John Lubbock, and yet it has also a flavour of Rousseau. What follows is much in the same vein, and quite en rapport with modern science. How men learnt the uses of fire, and sheltered themselves from the cold ; how men softened, and leagues of friendship ,were formed ; how speech was learned, and human intercourse increased ; how more and more every day those who excelled in intellect kindly showed men new methods — till, at last, kings were elected, towns built, wealth accumu- lated, and the worship of the gods began. Finally, civilisation came. " Ships and tillage, walls, laws, arms, roads, dress, and all such things, all the prizes, all the elegances, too, of life without exception, poems, pictures, and the chiselling fine-wrought statues, — all these things practice, together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind, taught men by slow degrees as they advanced on the way step by step. Thus Time by degrees brings each several thing forth before men's eyes, and Reason raises them up into the borders of light ; for things must be brought to light one after another and in due order in the dif- ferent arts, until these have reached the highest point of development.''''* So ends the fifth book. Book the sixth and last opens with an eulogium ■^ Munro. 112 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. of Athens, first teacher of agriculture and useful arts to suffering men, and the thrice-honoured birthplace of Epicurus. Lucretius then elaborately explains the nature of thunder, and of those luminous portents which from time to time affright the world. He shows that thunder is simply the collision and clash- ing of clouds, and that lightning is the fire struck out by such collisions. Recurring again to his main point, he heaps derision on those who attribute storms- to the instrumentality of gods. If Jupiter and other gods above Can shake the glittering regions of the sky With awful sound, and wheresoe'er they will Hurl down avenging fires, why spare they those Who fear not to commit atrocious crimes ? Why scorch them not with lightning thro' and thro', Making a sign to teach us mortal men ? And why is he whose conscience knows no sin, Tho' he be stainless, wrapt about with flame, And caught into the fiery arms of heaven ? Why aim the gods at solitary spots. Wasting their labours and their thunderbolts ? Is it to exercise their arms and thews ? Why does the Father suffer this Himself, And not reserve it for His enemies ? etc. In the same spirit he explains earthquakes, the secrets of the sea, the volcanic flames of Etna and the inundation of the Nile, the temperature of wells and springs ; and, finally, coming to the loadstone or magnet, he recapitulates all that he has said, in the first part of his poem, on the rarity of bodies. " It is necessary to establish that nothing comes under sense save body mixed with void. For instance, in caves, rocks overhead sweat with moisture, and trickle down in oozing drops," etc. This being understood, mag- netism is a stream of atoms being pulled back to fill the vacuum in the middle of the loadstone. By a somewhat abrupt transition, Lucretius next treats of A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 113 diseases " and, from what causes the force of disease may suddenly gather itself up and bring death, deal- ing destruction on the race of man and the troops of wild beasts/^ The air is full of seeds, some salubrious, some noxious to man ; and as these predominate in the air, health or sickness prevails. This last part of the poem resolves itself less into an explanation of diseased phenomena than a mere catalogue of dis- eases. We are told of the Egyptian leprosy, of the Attic gout, and, finally, as a crowning picture, of the Athenian plague. No detail is spared us of the horrors of that pestilence. The poet, as if determined to deepen into horrid certainty the mental dread within us, and to save us from mad belief in Divine Beneficence, piles horror upon horror, mingles a hospital with a shambles, and shames the Muse out of her own natural joy. These are the last lines of the entire poem — And some were seized with such forgetfulness, Themselves they knew not ; and though corpses lay Piled upon corpses tombless on the earth, No bird or beast of prey came nigh the stench, But hovered far away ; and if by chance One came and tasted, it grew sick and perish'd. Yea, wild birds hung aloof, and savage beasts Hid in the dark recesses of the woods. Many dropped down in death ; hounds in the street Lay stretch'd, scarce struggling, and turn'd o'er and died. Then silently passed hurried funerals, Followed by none that mourn'd. And mortal men Knew for this evil thing no certain cure ; For what to one man gave new hfe and health, And suffered him again to see the sun, Struck down another into fatal death. In these sad days this was most pitiful. Most quick to rend the heart : — when any man Found himself prisoned in the fatal folds, He struggled not, but, lost to life and use, Lay on the ground awaiting certain death, And yielded up his spirit as he lay. 114 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Ever and ever, like to flocks and herds, They caught the direful plague from one another ! And death was heaped on death, for those that fled, Fearing to tend their kinsmen stricken down, Were dreadfully pursued in turn and slain, To direful death condemned by dread of death, Unpitied, doomed, and in their turn forlorn. ^ % ^ ^ "k "k Then every herd and shepherd in the hills, And every mighty guider of the plough. Sickened, and in their huts were left to rot, Dead, slain by poverty and fell disease ! And so dead parents over their dead young Lay scattered, and upon their parents dead Dead children ; and from country into town The peasants, driven by the fatal plague. Came ever, bringing horror in their train, In all the public places sheltering, Until Death drifted them in direful heaps One on another ; and impell'd by thirst, Many crept forth, and crawled along the street. Until they reached the fountains, stooped to drink. And even in drinking died i ^ -^ -^ And all the blessed sanctuaries of the gods Were piled with corpses, and the heavenly shrines Were brimful, for the guardians of the places Had thrown them open to the coming guests. And no man worshipt now to any god. For each man's heart was full of present ill. And gentle rites of burial were forgotten Which all that pious town had used before, And men ran hither and thither wringing hands, And burying their dead as best they might. And out of horror and of poverty Were born dark deeds ; for many, shrieking loud, Upon the funeral pyres of strangers placed Their kinsfolk, setting torches to the same. And there they fought, with flowing streams of blood, Sooner than quit their places by their dead ! It is veritably the last circle of the Inferno, whence emerging at last, to our infinite relief, we '*' again be- hold the stars.''* Brief and insufficient as my glimpse has been of a * Dante, " Inf." xxxiv. / A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 115 work which stands solitary in the literature of an- tiquity, as the one great poem explaining the phe- nomena of nature, I have sufficiently expressed its spirit to show what attraction it has for modern materialists. Utterly in revolt against the Alex- andrian philosophy and poetry, then so fashionable^ Lucretius determined to be terribly non-ideal and realistic. '^ His poem is indeed/^ as Professor Veitch has admirably expressed it, " a type in the world of thought of the irrepressible Roman spirit of absolute sovereignty, and love of orderly rule in the world of practical life and action/' He himself stands sovereign and centre of things, with no doubts and prevarica- tions, but with a precision of conception which sup- plies the place of actual verification. Yet they have learned little of Lucretius, they have penetrated but little into his arcana, who aver, like many modern writers who would fain make him a mere enemy of the ancient polytheistic religion, that this poet had a divine consciousness of " something more than Matter.^' To hint as much is to misconstrue Lucre- tius completely. He is a materialist pure and simple, solemn and staunch ; as bigoted in his creed and as certain of his gospel as the veriest divine that ever thumped a cushion ; as anxious to proselytise as any other more popular Apostle ; with all the zeal of a missionary, and all the pomposity of a Bishop. He leaves no room whatever for that Unknowable in which our later prophets, such as Mr. Spencer, have so much faith. His individual knowledge may be in- adequate, but all things are ascertainable by the human mind — and why ,? — because there is so little to ascertain. A Void and a fortuitous concourse of Atoms; a Creation and a Change; a march of elements^ for ever destroying and forever renewed — this is what I 2 \ Ii6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. he has to show us, pointing upward. Pointing down- ward, the earth rolling on to some fiery end, and ever growing weaker and weaker ; Man in countless gene- rations passing from primaeval simplicity to stages of degeneracy, decay, and death ; gods fading away like wreaths of morning cloud, while pestilence and famine complete the doom of each benighted race. His ideas and pictures, like his language, are vivid and grandiose. One feels a certain sense of vastness, of expanse, of duration. I cannot, however, agree with his warmest admirers, that his highest characteristic is an extraordinary feeling for the Limitless. On the contrary, I am acquainted with no poet who con- fines our conceptions so specifically within a given area ; who so persistently weighs and appraises the finite with so feeble a conception of the Infinite ; who shocks us with so many prophecies of the scien- tific lecturing-table and the medical dissecting-room ; who is, in a word, so supremely and absolutely blind to all the higher phenomena of Mind. His attitude is Napoleonic; he is master of all things, and conquest can no further go. He has the lowest possible con- ception even of atomic forces, the vilest possible estimation of the nature and destiny of Man. He is courageous, for he can live ; he is not hopeless, for he can die. He knows that God is a Phantom, that Love is a physical desire, that Man is a creature of matter, and that both Man and the world must perish. This knowledge brings him no sweet assurance ; it is a cup of hemlock, which only the wise may drink, and which he therefore drinks with becoming pride, but utterly without joy. He is a materialist, for he believes the world is over-ripe, and is slowly hastening to decay ; he is a pessimist, for he believes that civi- A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. I17 lisatlon brings no bliss to ^^ miserable men/^ Passing out with Epicurus beyond the *' flaming walls of the world," he has only discovered that there is nothing there. In truth, this passing the " flaming walls " was only a dream. All the time he was standing at his own door, contemplating the Necropolis, and wondering when his time would come. If modern Materialism had no more philosophy to teach them than we find in the pages of the '^ De Rerum Natura/^ men should despair indeed ; but, fortunately, nothing is more jubilant and self-satisfied than the tone adopted by every demi-god of the modern lecture-room. The '' grand old Pagans," as Professor Tyndall cheerfully calls them,* might de- spair, but our contemporary Pagans mean to do nothing of the kind. The condition of the world is every day growing brighter, the happiness of man is every day growing surer : these are formulas on which they habitually insist; and the inevitable amelioration of things is due, they add, not to Re- ligion, but to Science. What they mean by Science they have never quite explained, any more than many of their opponents have explained what they mean by Religion ; but some things are clear : for example, that just as the religion of such men as the Duke of Argyle and the Bishop of Carlisle is scientific, so the science of such men as Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer is religious. In the controversial jargon of the day there is a strange confusion of terms. For example, Dr. Draper (in that very super- ficial book on the " Conflict of Religion and Science,'* which Professor Tyndall is so fond of rashly praising) ■^ " Crystals and Molecular Force." k liS A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE, means by Religion chiefly the Roman Catholic Church, and by Science many discoveries which we might almost class as purely mechanical. "I have said nothing," he cries_, with a mental confusion which would be fiercely reprobated in a theologian, " nothing adequate about the railway system, or the electric telegraph ; nor about the calculus, or lithography ; the air-pump, or the voltaic battery ; the discovery of Uranus or Neptune, and more than a hundred asteroids ; the relation of meteoric streams to comets ; nothing of the expeditions by land and sea that have been sent forth by various Govern- ments for the determination of important astro- nomical or geographical questions ; nothing of the costly and accurate experiments .they have caused to be made for the ascertainment of fundamental physical data. I have been so unjust to our own century, that I have made no allusion to some of its greatest scientific triumphs ; its grand concep- tions in natural history ; its discoveries in mag- netism and electricity ; its invention of the beautiful art of photography; its applications of spectrum analysis ; its attempts to bring chemistry under the three laws of Avogadro, of Boyle and Mariotte, and of Charles ; its artificial production of organic substances from inorganic material, of which the philosophical consequences are of the utmost im- portance ; its reconstruction of physiology by laying the foundation of that science on chemistry; its im- provements and advances in topographical survey- ing, and in the correct representation of the surface of the globe. / have said nothing about rifled guns and armoured ships, nor of the revolution that has been made in the art of war ; nothing of that gift to women y the sewing-machine ; nothing of the noble cojitentions A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 119 and triumphs of the arts of peace — the industrial exhi- bitions and world's fairs.'' * Nothing, let me add, about the Crystal Palace and the Barnum Hippodrome of New York ; nothing of the kaleidoscope and the magic lantern ; nothing about the School Board and the workhouse, of the treadmill and the penitentiary ! When a scientific pedant writes nonsense like this, it is difficult to be serious. Blindly oblivious of all those enormous tracts of knowledge, both moral and physical, which have been gained solely for us by the religious in- stincts of man, he seems to be claiming all the victories of Art for peripatetic chemists and quacks of Nature's laboratory. The truth is. Religion and Science cannot be separated on the off-hand assump- tion, now so generally made, that the one is not ^' religious,'^ and the other is not " scientific." To my mind, for example, Mr. Spencer is an eminently religious man ; not certainly in the sense which con- fuses Dr. Draper, but as a man in whom, to paraphrase Professor Tyndall's pompous remark concerning him, " the ganglia are sometimes the seat of a nascent poetic thrill." Professor Tyndall himself "goes to church,^' in a building of his own uprearing ; and it is in no irreverent mood, though the irreverent may sometimes laugh at him, that he stands on a magnetic stool, or experimentalises with a raw turnip. No one familiar with his higher ideas can doubt that he is a man capable of the most noble emotions, and as beneficent in his social conceptions as any Christian of this generation. It is unjust, therefore, to call such men irreligious ; and it is, moreover, very con- ■^ "The Conflict between Religion and Science." By D Draper. International Scientific Series. (King and Co.) I20 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. fusing. They are doing missionary work of a very fatiguing kind, and their efforts deserve our warmest encouragement, however much we may quarrel with their " ideas." It was therefore in a truly proselytising spirit that Dr. Tyndall, in his memorable Belfast address, while rapidly surveying the history of the Atomic Theory from Democritus downward, drew special attention to the scientific forecasts of Lucretius. He first called attention to the original propositions of De- mocritus, that — (i) From nothing comes nothing ; nothing that exists can be destroyed ; all changes are due to the combination and separation of molecules. (2) Nothing happens by chance ; every occurrence having its cause, which it follows from necessity ; (3) the only existing things are atoms and void ; (4) the atoms, infinite in number and infinite in form, strike together, and the lateral motions and whirling which thus arise are the beginnings of worlds ; (5) the varieties of all things depend on the varieties of their atoms, their number, size, and ag- gregation ; (6) the soul consists of fine, smooth round atoms, like those of fire, and in their motions the phenomena of life arise. " The first five pro- positions," added the Professor, " are a fair general statement of the Atomic Theory, as now held ; as re- gards the sixth, Democritus made his fine smooth atoms to do duty for the nervous system, whose functions were then unknown.'' Then, tracing the opinions of Epicurus concerning death, he introduces, by way of anecdote, a fallacy of his own, much in favour at the present day, and used as a constant argument by Mr. John Morley. ^^'Did I not be- lieve,' said a great man to me once, " that an Intel- ligence is at the heart of things, my life on earth A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 121 would be intolerable/ The utterer of these words is not, in my opinion, rendered less noble, but more noble, by the fact that it was the need of ethical harmony here^ and not the thought of perpetual profit hereafter^ that prompted his observations." Now, I have already called Dr. Tyndall a re- ligious man, a man of reverent and holy bearing towards all the great mysteries of creation ; but here, simply by passing beyond his depth, he is childishly unjust to those who, not without mightier reasons than any he can ever find among the atoms, believe in the infinite possibilities of spiritual existence. Surely the History of Religion, not as set forth by a superficial pamphleteer, by Dr. Draper, but as con- tained in that aggregation of individual history which we call ^^ Biography," should teach him that HegeFs favourite joke is not worth this repeated reproduction. The religious thirst for future life is quite another thirst than that for the bomis for good conduct often sought by so-called Christians, and seeing that it exists most in those who are content to accept life as an interminable labour darkened by sorrow and by suffering, it should not be classed as alto- gether a selfish hope of reward. From the mo- dern utilitarian point of view, of course all effort is selfish ; and from the same standpoint, there is no particular nobility in struggling after truth before astonished Belfast audiences, or experimentalising in the interest of humanity on an electric stool ! Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise, (That last infirmity of noble mind) To scorn delight and live laborious days ! Noble as is the Professor's desire for fame, I ques- tion his capacity for martyrdom, and his insinuations, concerning religion are more in the spirit of a bigoted 122 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE, bishop than of a good philosopher. Would he not consider it rather hard if an opponent — say the Bishop of Manchester — were to say, " This publishing of pamphlets is all very well, if it were not for the thought of personal profit, whether in the shape of fame or money, here'' The truth is, the Professor, stirred into polemics by irritating opponents, does himself the injustice to confound " hope of reward " with " a love of service," which love, I am sure, is the animating spirit of his own life. Now, the re- ligious conception is simply this, — that this life, with all its hindrances and imperfections, is infinitely too brief for that divine service, or supreme self-sacrifice, which many creatures love to intoxication. It is not pleasure that is solicited ; it is continual hard work, even associated with pain ; and it is not too much to say that this desire to enlarge the vital horizon is the source of nobler sentiments than the conviction that Death merely robs us of sensation. It is the Ma- terialist here, not the Idealist, who clings firm to the vulgar conception of Heaven and Hell. Dr. Tyndall would doubtless afiirm of the early Christian martyrs that they were upheld by the conviction that God would justify Himself after death and make them glad, and so in truth they thought ; but it requires no very close study of history to see that many of these meant by heavenly gladness only a further series of personal labours, a further purging and purification from human impurity. The insinuations of the materialist would be unjust even if urged against the best forms of Mahomedanism ; as urged against the higher Christianity, they are simply absurd and self-refuting Religion, rightly understood, is the love of holy service. In this sense, as I have suggested, a Ma- terialist may be very religious ; but the state of mind A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 123 with him is generally this — either that a brief life satisfies his activity, or else that the constant contem- plation of the infinitesimal destroys the power of his capacity to generalise truly. With one to whom poetic emotion is "the thrill of a ganglion," thought ''cerebration/* life "molecular force,** creation "evo- lution/* crime " cerebral disease,** Religion may well become a question of " rewards and punishments ; " but it is as unfair to dismiss Religion in this super- ficial way, as it would be to treat modern science from the point of view of the holy Congregation of the Index. I have no objection whatever to modern Ma- terialism ; it is a vital and it may be an elevating creed. I have the highest objection, however, to its criticism of those ideas which it does not under- stand, and which, if we accept its own showing, can never be formulated. Doubtless, it is a far higher and holier belief than the crude religions of Epicurus and Lucretius, in so far as it preaches beneficence, under certain limitations, to the inferior races of men and to the inferior races of beasts. It is a creed of continence, of health, of sobriety, of enduran^^, and perhaps self-sacrifice. But it is not, at least as pre- sented to us by its leading teachers, the creed it pro- fesses to be — that is, a creed of Verification. A Christian is more logical in believing his Christian evidences than a Materialist in accepting his theory of the Atoms; for the very existence of the last is postulated as a theory, while the former, whether false or true, are invariably valued in so far as they are evidence — that is, are verification. I ac- company Dr. Tyndall through his Universe ; I seem to see his atoms falling through infinite space; I hear him crying, " I prolong the vision backward 124 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. across the boundary of the experimental evidence^ and discern in that Matter which we, in our igno- rance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quahty of Life/^* Very good, I reply; but what right have you to " prolong your vision across the boundary of the experimental evidence"? You laugh at others for doing so. You are an experimental philosopher — you can tell us startling things about the phe- nomena of light, heat, radiation, and magnetism — but neither you nor any of your school can tell us one fact, can give us one idea, explaining the phenomena of Life itself. Suppose we, in our turn, were to cry to you, " This is our Universe ; we know we are, we see what is ; we prolong the vision forwards across the boundary of the experimental evidence^ and discern in that Spirit of which you, in your igno- rance, can give us no explanation, and notwithstand- ing your professed reverence for the Unknowable, are daily covering with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of Life.''^ It is not right that I should be construed as objecting to Science, or to its leading modern doctrine, that of Evolution. On the contrary, I quite agree with Mr. Darwin (who showed in all his discussions a reverence of tone and a purity of pur- pose in which he is almost unique) that " it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to think that He created a few original forms, capable of self-develop- ment, into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required afresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.^' (It is but just to add that Mr. Darwin is merely quoting with approba- * Belfast Address. J A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 125 tion an eminent " author and divine," not using his own words.) Here, however, the pupil and the master are hopelessly at war, Dr. Tyndall almost accusing the great Apostle of Evolution of heresy to his own creed. " The anthropomorphism, which it seemed his object to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude. We need clearness and thoroughness here. Either let us open our doors freely to the con- ception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of Matter.^^ In my opinion, and doubtless in the opinion of Dr. TyndalFs great master, no such alternative is necessary ; for it is not necessary to discuss Creation at all, seeing that all Science can tell us is that it knows nothing what- ever on the subject ! All that it does is, passing the boundary of the experimental evidence, to find the Atoms — a name given to numberless forces we can- not understand. We reach these organisms which Mr. Spencer compares to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water ; we come to the ^' protogenes '' of Haeckel, a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character. We go further, thanks to the Professor : we break a magnet into infinite pieces, and we find that each of the pieces, however small, carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. This experiment is so conclusive to the Professor, that he *'at once closes with Lucretius,^^ affirming that Nature is seen " to do all things spontaneously and without the meddling of the gods," and with Bruno, that she is " the Universal Mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own womb.^^ What then ? Surely these vague generalisations are un- worthy of a physicist. Does the breaking of the magnet, " even when we prolong the intellectual vision 126 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. to the polar molecules/^ bring- us one whit nearer to the Mystery we are investigating ? And if it does not, which materiahsts themselves admit, why make it the basis of an atheistic assumption ? In no single instance have vital and physical forces been found interchangeable on the principle of the correlation of force. Protoplasm has never yet been developed from inorganic matter, although Dr. Bastian's experi- ments show that what he calls Archebiosis is possible — that is, spontaneous generation of life from dead organic matter. Heterogenesis, or the production of life from any form of inorganic matter, is admittedly impossible. Only by doing what is forbidden to the Spiritualist, only by '^prolonging the line of the intel- lect beyond the range of the sense,^' can Professor Tyndall support Bruno's principle — that from Matter Life originates. In his '^ Fragments of Science," he affirms that the polarity of magnetism gives a basis for the conception that " atoms and molecules are endowed with definite attractive and repellent poles, by the play of which definite forms of crystalline architecture are produced. Thus molecular force becomes structural. It required no great boldness of thought to expend its play into organic nature, and to recognise in molecular force the agency by which both plants and animals are built up.^^ Elsewhere, in language which all classes of thinkers must recog- nise as beautiful, he pursues the same investigation : I wish, however, to show you the molecules in the act of following their architectural instincts, and building themselves together. You know how alum, and nitre, and sugar crystals are formed. The substance to be crystallised is dissolved in a liquid, and the liquid is permitted to evaporate. The solution soon becomes supersaturated, for none of the solid is carried away by evaporation ; and then the molecules, no longer able to enjoy the freedom of liquidity, close up together and form crystals. My object now is to make this process rapid enough to enable you to see it, and still not too rapid to be followed by A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 127 the eye. For this purpose, a powerful solar microscope and an intense source of light are needed. They are both here. Pouring over a clean plate of glass a solution of sal-ammoniac, and placing the glass on its edge, the excess of the liquid flows away, but a film clings to the glass. The beam employed to illuminate this film hastens its evaporation, and brings it rapidly into a state of supersaturation ; and now you see the orderly progress of the crystallisation over the entire screen. You may produce something similar to this if you breathe upon the frost ferns which overspread your window-panes in the winter, and permit the liquid to re-crystallise. It runs, as if alive, into the most beautiful forms. In this case the crystallising force is hampered by the adhe- sion of the liquid to the glass ; nevertheless, the play of power is strikingly beautiful. In the next example our crystals will not be so much troubled by adhesion, for we shall liberate the atoms at a distance from the surface of the glass. Sending an electric current through water, we decompose the liquid, and the bubbles of the constituent gases rise before your eyes. Sending the same current through a solution of acetate of lead, the lead is liberated, and its free atoms build themselves into crystals of marvellous beauty. They grow before you like sprouting ferns, exhibiting forms as wonderful as if they had been produced by the play of vitality itself. The ineclianism of the process is rendered intelligible by the picture of atomic poles ; but is there nothing but mechanism here ? There is something, in my opinion, which the mind of man has never yet seized ; but which, so far as research has penetrated, is found indissolubly joined with matter. I have seen these things hundreds of times, but I never look at them without wonder. And, if you allow me a moment's diversion from my subject, I would say that when standing in the spring-time and looking upon the sprouting foliage, the lilies of the field, and sharing the general joy of opening life, I have often asked myself whether there is no power, being, or thing, in the universe, whose knowledge of that of which I am so ignorant is greater than mine ? I have said to myself, Can it be possible that man's knowledge is the greatest knowledge — that man's life is the highest life ? "^ The Professor, we should think, is almost solitary in seeing any resemblance between a crystal and a life cell. The microscope instructs us that real living germs have the power of motion and proliferation in quite a different measure to that vouchsafed to a * " Crystals and Molecular Force." By John Tyndall, F.R.S. (Longmans.) 128 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. crystal ; and we should have " to prolong the in- tellectual vision very far indeed " before we could imagine a crystal transmuting itself into an organic form. And here, in view of that last quotation from the Professor, I cannot help complaining of a certain inconsistency. Nothing, it is clear, can be more materialistic than the tendency of Dr. Tyndairs general teaching, yet it does not prevent his ganglia, like Mr. Spencer^s, from begetting a nascent poetic thrill. ^' I have said to myself," he cries under such an emotion, " can it be possible that man's know- ledge is the greatest knowledge — that man's life is the highest life "i '^ Well, admitting for a moment that the theory of Evolution is strictly correct, may we not prolong the vision so far forward as to as- sume the existence of beings as much our superiors, as we, in our highest thoughts, are the superiors of the primordial germs ? Dr. Tyndall, possibly, would smile at this, and refer us to the evidence of the senses; but such beings, if they existed, would be no more apparent to ordinary sight or touch than the primordial germs. Electricity is atomic, yet it is in- visible, and moreover it is a force. Furthermore, admitting the theory of crystallisation, would there be a greater invisible leap between that form of matter which is structural and that form of matter which we might call spiritual, than there is between that form which is crystalline and that other which is structural ? If a life germ can be developed out of a crystal, why may not a spirit (using that term for want of a better) be developed out of a body } In another and clearer phraseology, made clear to us by the teaching of a Seer whom Dr. Tyndall utterly misunderstands, may not a spiritual I I A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 129 body issue in the course of Evolution from a body corporeal ; and, further, seeing that the process of evolution has been going on so long, may not such spiritual bodies exist, although they are as unre- cognised by us as we are unrecognised by the silk- worm in its cone ? Professor Tyndall is very sarcastic on what he calls •* psychic " conditions, '^ obviously connected with the nervous system and the state of the health, on which is based the Vedic doctrine of the absorp- tion of the individual into the universal soul." He cites Plotinus, Porphyry, Wordsworth, and Emerson as being subject to such ecstasies ; and as if this con- fusion of types were not sufficient, he carelessly joins with the rest the name of Swedenborg. Now, in Swedenborg he might have found, up to a certain point, a most powerful ally, as he would discover in a perusal of the " Mechanism of the Intercourse of the Soul and the Body ; " where the great thinker clearly shows that the Soul is finite, that it is one of the Body's natural parts, that its seat is in the brain, and that it resides particularly in the cortical sub- stance of the cerebrum, and partly also in the medulla, but is ubiquitous in all parts of the brain. ^Again, we do not think that Swedenborg prolongs 'his intellectual vision more unwarrantably than Dr. Tyndall, when he affirms, in his " Economy of the Animal Kingdom," that " should any one of the external spheres of nature be dissolved, the internal nevertheless remains unharmed ; thus, where Air ceases Ether is found ; when the red blood dies its animal spirits survive ; and though death destroys the body the Soul escapes unscathed." It would be wasting time to prolong this allusion to him whom Mr. Emerson calls " one of the mastodons of litera- K I30 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. ture/' or specially to enlarge on his superficially mystic but intrinsically scientific conceptions of the Spiritual Body. Nor must I for a moment be understood as preaching Swedenborgianism. I am only suggesting that Dr. Tyndall's sneer at Swedenborg was uninstructed, and that there are some few quasi-scientific suggestions of the Swedish seer which may, after all, come as close to a solution of organic life as an explanation which attempts to connect organic life with crystalli- sation, and spiritual life with the phenomena of mole- cular force. On the whole, one is grateful that the Professor sometimes believes in the possibility of higher types than the human. May I then suggest to him that perhaps that Matter in which he discerns the pro- mise and potency of all earthly life, may in reality be only a phenomenon of spiritual force ? and though it is admittedly impossible to tell whence that spiritual force, or life, has emanated, that it is not quite so impossible to guess whitherward it is to grow ? The sum of force is indestructible and un- changing, the forms of force are destructible and ever-varying. We find Death universal, but Life omnipotent. We are not so sure that we die, as that Death cannot destroy, but can only change, the sum of force within us. Unless Dr. Tyndall can prove to us that this sum of force, including the basis of consciousness itself, is so redistributed among the elements that no possibility of future existence is tenable, he should cut from his programme of Mate- rialism his dogma of the mortality of the Soul. Unless he can prove to us what consciousness is^ we cannot accept his dicta that consciousness dies. " Old de- cays,""' sings the poet, " but foster new progressions ; A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 131 and this may be as true of the cerebral forces as of what the Professor calls a " hydrocarbon/-' Again, since the atoms are imperishable, and Thought is assumed as the highest evolution of the atoms, Thought itself is atomic, Thought itself is a form of force, Thought itself, despite its infinite fresh combinations, is indestructible, possibly as much so as any given gas. ^ In the course of his memorable address at Belfast, Professor Tyndall gave an imaginary dialogue be- tween a Lucretian and Bishop Butler, apropos of the Bishop's position that " our organised bodies are no more a part of ourselves than any other matter around us." I wish I had space for the whole argument, which I am compelled to condense. The Lucretian commences thus : " You speak of ' living powers,' * percipient or perceiving powers,' and ' ourselves ; ' but can you form a mental picture of any one of these apart from the organism through which it is supposed to act ? . . . . The true self has a local habi- tation in each of us ; thus localised must it not possess a form ? If so, what form? .... When a leg is amputated the body is divided into two parts ; is the true self in both of them or in one ? . . . . What if you begin at the other end and remove, instead of the leg, the brain ? . . . . Or, instead of going so far as to remove the brain itself, let a certain por- tion of its bony covering be removed, and let a rhythmic series of pressures and relaxations of pressure be applied to the soft substance. At every pressure the faculties of perception and of action vanish; at every relaxation of pressure they are restored. . . . Where is the man himself during the period of insen- sibility ? You may say that I beg the question when I assume the man to have been unconscious, that he was really conscious all the time, and has simply forgotten what has occurred to him I do not think your theory of instruments goes at all to the bottom of the matter. A telegraph operator has his instruments, by means of which he converses with the world ; our bodies possess a nervous system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving power and external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his battery, demagnetise his needle ; by this means you certainly sever his connection with the world ; . . . . but the operator survives, and he K 2 132 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. knows that he survives. . . . Another consideration. . . . the brain may change from health to disease, and through such a change the most exemplary man may be converted into a debauchee or a murderer. . . . Can the brain or can it not act in this distempered way, without the intervention of the immortal reason ? " And the Bishop, whose arguments we also condense, replies : " You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things, including organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you, in the first instance, how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that you can build crystalline forms out of this play of molecular force ; that the diamond, amethyst, and snow-star are truly wonderful structures which are thus pro- duced. I will go further and acknowledge that even a tree or flower might in this way be organised. Nay, if you can show me an animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also might be put together by the suitable play of molecular force. . . . Now comes my difficulty. Your atoms are individually without sensation, much more are they without intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem ? Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless, and observe their running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can you see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise ?....! am able to pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain thrown into tremor. My insight is not bafded by these physical processes. What baffles and bewilders me, is the notion that from these physical tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can be derived. . . . Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is quite as great as mine. You cannot satisfy the human understanding in such demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness." All this is very admirable, if we can only imagine any one admitting offhand, that " trees and flowers " A NOTE ON LUCRETIUS. 133 might be organised out of the play of molecular force; and Professor Tyndall honestly exclaims, " I hold the Bishop's reasoning to be quite unanswerable/' He might, had he read his Swedenborg, have constructed for the Bishop a train of still more unanswerable arguments ; or turning to a contemporary writer, he may find in Mr, Allanson Picton's ingenious essays* a still further series of proofs that Matter is in its ultimate essence spiritual, and that we are certain of one thing only, the existence of spiritual life. I have left Lucretius far behind me, gazing still with a sense of complete mastery on his primordial universe, where there is no room, not even an inter- mundia, where the gods, or a God, may dwell. In investigating the creed of his representative modern followers, of him to whom the torch of Lucretian illuminative genius has been passed on, I have j found more comfort combined with far less coherence. ' Professor Tyndall is certainly a materialist, though he has no particular affection for the name, and he is \ also, but in no offensive sense, an atheist, though he \ refuses to put that word upon his banner. In days when so much heat is still introduced into popular controversy, his caution is perhaps necessary ; yet I should admire him more if he showed more com- pletely the courage of his convictions. His theory of organic matter is destructive to any sort of Deism ; indeed, so far as I see, it leaves no room whatever for even the higher Pantheism, though it is full of that Lower Pantheism which sees in every clod and stone the potency of universal life. He disclaims anthropomorphism, but he cannot free his " ganglia " •^ "The Mystery of Matter." By Allanson Picton. (Mac- millan.) \ 134 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. altogether of mysterious *^ thrills/^ His tone is one of quiet insinuation, rather than of formal avowal ; but his highest mood is poetic, not scientific. If he would only express his ideas in poetry, much of his writing would be as valuable as much of Lucretius, and he could soar to sublime flights of delicious uncertainty by his admirable plan of "prolonging the intellectual vision beyond the region of the senses ! '^ FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. I. ROBERT INGERSOLL. There is a notion even in refined circles in America that the influence of a man like Colonel Robert IngersoU may be an influence for good. I altogether fail to see it. While doing full justice to the honesty, the courage, and the good humour of this remarkable orator, I am convinced that he is precisely the sort of teacher — I had almost written devil's advocate — to whom Americans should just now shut their ears. Free thought should be distinguished from the of- fences against common intelligence committed by a Philistine of the Philistines. IngersoU enters the temples of religion with his hat on one side, a cigar in his mouth, and a jest upon his lips. No matter who the god may be — Vishnu, Buddha, Apollo, or Jesus — he is ready to tackle him in his own peculiar vocabulary. His philosophy may be summed up in the words of Burns : To make a happy fireside clime To weans and wife — That's the true pathos and sublime Of human life ! 136 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. This philosophy is all very well in its way, just as well as eating and drinking", dancing, marrying and giving in marriage, and infant-dandling ; but if it were all-sufficient, George the Third would have been a great king, and Voltaire would have been a great poet. To take Colonel IngersoU seriously, of course, would be like asking for reverence from Mark Twain. He represents the natural reaction of American Bohemianism against the Puritanism of Boston and the overstrained Transcendentalism of Brook Farm. But he is just the sort of person of whom America does not stand in need. The pre- dominant vices of America, especially as represented by its great cities, are its irreverence, its recklessness, its impatience — in one word, its Materialism. A nation in which the artistic sense is almost dead, which is practically without a literature, which is impatient of all sanctions and indifferent to all religions, which is corrupt from the highest pinnacle of its public life down to the lowest depth of its journalism, which is at once thin-skinned under criticism and aggressive to criticise, which worships material forces in every shape and form, which despises conventional con- ditions, yet is slavish to ignoble fashions, which, too hasty to think for itself, takes recklessly at second- hand any old or new-clothes philosophy that may be imported from Europe, yet, while wearing the raiment openly, mocks and ridicules the civilisation that wove the fabric — such a nation, I think, might be spared the spectacle of an elderly gentleman in modern cos- tume trampling on the lotus, the rose, and the lily in the gardens of the gods. The exhibition can do no good; it may do no little harm. If the science of mythology did not exist, if the old gods or the new had any bloody altars left, if the tongue of free 1 FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. i37 thought had not been loosened once and for ever, it xnight be another matter ; but the danger now is, not that men may believe too much, but that they may believe too little ; that in due time scepticism, which has demolished all religions and fatally discredited the divine religion of poetry itself, may turn the Temple of Mystery into a bear-garden or a beer- garden, exchange the language of literature for the argot of the cheap press, and Americanise even the sentiment of humanity. " I beg to remind honourable gentlemen,^^ said Benjamin Disraeli, on a memorable occasion, '^ that we owe much to the Jews." I beg to remind the Colonel Ingersolls and Mark Twains of that continent that we owe much to the gods, without whom, when all is said and done, The world would smell like what it is — a tomb ! But for them, Europe would have been Americanised long ago ; but for them, Europe would have arrived centuries since at the blessed era of presidential elec- tions, colossal public swindles, races for money-bags, the torturing rack of the interviewer, and the in- quisition of the newspaper ; but for them, but for the divine tyrants and instructors of mankind, malignant or benignant, terrible or beautiful, the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Leopardi might have been ante- dated a thousand years. For my own part, I should ' prefer even to accept hell with John Calvin, rather than to eat cakes, drink ale, and munch hot ginger with Colonel Ingersoll. He is the boy in the gallery, cracking nuts and making precocious comments during the performance of the tragedy of life ; blind to the splendour of the scenery, deaf to the beauty of the dialogue, indifferent to the pathetic or tragic solici- tations of the players ; seeing in Christ or Buddha or 138 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Jehovah only a leading man spouting platitudes, and indifferently dressed for the part he is playing. A great mythus is to him a great " lie," nothing more ; a great poetical theology is only an invention of the arch- enemy. Hugely does he enjoy the joke of the garden of Eden or the tree of Iggdrassil ; clearly does he perceive, having hung round the stage-door of the world, that the goddesses are only ballet-girls, ex- hibiting their nudity for so much a night. For him ^schylus has no terror, Sophocles no charm, the author of the Book of Job no pathos ; everything is leather and prunella, except the performance of Harlequin. That such a person should have a large following, among a generation so much of his way of thinking, is no matter for surprise ; a few centuries ago it might have been a cause for joy ; but in the nineteenth century it is truly sad, as showing how little Science has done, after all, to elevate the intellectual condition of the masses. The same uninstructed influence that is thus brought to bear upon religion would speedily be fatal, and already, as I have suggested, threatens to be fatal, to all poetry, all true literature, all great art, and, in the long run, all speculative science. Colonel IngersoU is very fond of proclaiming his ad- miration for the great scientific teachers of the age ; but in reality he is as far away in spirit from the thought of Darwin as from the vision of Shakespeare, as obtuse to the scientific problems as to the pathetic poetic fallacy. Religion is the grave, elder daughter •of Poetry, and to understand religious questions a man must have the heart of a poet. Science, too, is the daughter of Poetry ; indeed, her youngest born ; while calmer and colder than her mother, she has the 5ame far-away, rapt look into the heaven of heavens ; J FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 139 and her teaching is for poetic hearts also, not for those who confound her with her sordid and hard- working handmaid, Invention. Science ranges the universe, touches the farthest suns, reaches the farthest cloud confines, and cries honestly and loudly, " Thus far — no farther — here I pause; ^' and then even she begins to dream. Invention squats on the ground, sets her little water-wheel, lights her little lamp, pieces her mechanical puzzles, does homely work, delightful and useful to everybody. But Invention- worship is fetish-worship, and Colonel Ingersoll is a fetish-worshipper — that is to say, an individual exactly at the savage stage where neither religion nor science begins. To go to him for religious guidance, is like asking a native of the kingdom of Dahomey to favour us with his ideas on Free-will, the Incarnation, the philosophy of Plato, the art of Raphael, the poetry of ^schylus, the music of Beethoven, and the philosophy of Comte or Spencer. The Christian stage, whatever objection we may take to it, is higher than the fetish-stage, and the lowest form of anthropomorphism is infinitely su- perior to totem-worship. The mass of mankind do not need to be told that it is well to fill their bellies, to love their children, to live amicably with one another, to accept no guidance but their own very questionable ^^ common-sense ; '^ all that is taught to them of right and of necessity by the conditions of that period of evolution which they have already attained. What they require to learn is, that life necessitates divine sanctions as well as cheery conditions ; that the gods are not dead, but living — imperishable ideals fashioned by the sublimest and supremest conceptions of mankind ; that the truth of any religion lies not in its dogma. I40 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. but in its moral beauty or poetical imperishability, because just so far as it is beautiful is it funda- mentally and actually true ; that our sharpest hours of suffering contain our clearest moments of insight; and that human love and sympathy are born, not of common junketing, but of common despair and sor- row. The gospel of hot ginger, as preached by Colonel Ingersoll, would soon make of New York another Sodom. Fortunately, such a man as Octavius Frothingham is hard by, to vindicate the poetry of religion against the champions of cakes and ale, and to prove that free thought, even in America, does not necessarily imply free permission to outrage your neighbour's most sacred convictions. II. OCTAVIUS FROTHINGHAM. Mr. Frothingham is well known to most readers of religious literature as one of the most brilliant and enlightened apostles of free thought or radical religion in America. Until quite lately, I believe, he preached every Sunday in New York ; with the field of his present labours I am unacquainted ; but my knowledge of him is altogether based on his writings and on Mr. Stedman's little monograph — one of those admirably lucid bits of crystallisation for which the writer is distinguished. Of course, a man educated like myself in the school of Eng- lish Jacobinism finds in Mr. Frothingham a not very novel type of thinker, uttering sentiments with FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 141 which the world of free thought has long been familiar; but the author of "Transcendentalism in New England " has a distinct individuality, often perfervid, occasionally convincing, and never tire- some. His style is admirable, even where his matter is questionable, as it now and then is ; and, on the whole, America is to be congratulated on the privilege of listening to such a man. But does America listen to him } It would very much as- tonish me to hear that it did. His faith is far too filmy, his foothold much too unsteady, to carry -conviction to the hearts of a hasty generation. His tolerance to all religions, all opinions, all orthodoxies and heresies, is beautiful and welcome, but his infinite patience lacks, to my mind, the shaping power of conviction. He has set his soul free of every bond and shackle, but he leaves it to beat the empty air. With all this, it must be clearly un- derstood that his written works have the highest of all literary merits, that of directly stimulating thought in the reader ; they are full of grave, wise, tender, even profound things, expressed in perfect language ; they are reverent to the very extremes of their gentle audacity; and there can be no doubt whatever that they have had a deeply beneficent influence when- ever and wherever they have been studied. But the fatal spirit of a self-destructive latitudinarianism, which has paralysed the will of every transcenden- talist from Hegel downward, possesses Mr. Frothing- ham also. His message to men carries no conviction, for it has neither the hate of hate nor the love of love ; it lacks the fertilising energy and superb bigotry of a logical belief. Mr. Frothingham, for example, utterly repudiates Anthropomorphism. The universe, in his conception, 142 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. is, as it was to Spinoza, as it has been to every true transcendentalist, a system of universal Law, entirely divorced from personality. From one point of view, this conception is rational and impregnable ; from another, it is inexpedient, not to say trivial. No sane man doubts the profundity of the current ideas on which Mr. Frothingham sails so cheerfully; of the " stream of tendency " and the " power beyond our- selves which works for righteousness;" but many men doubt, as I do, the scientific necessity, or the mental possibility, of divorcing the idea of God from the idea of personality. The poetical image of the magnified non-natural man at least hits the mark better than the preposterous images of " streams ^^ and " tendencies " and impersonal work- ing " powers '' beyond humanity. Very instructive it is to observe, in this connection, how the apostle of blind law, taken off his guard, appropriates the anthropomorphic metaphors : The Radical has no definition ; he does not venture on a written definition. He will not define or confine the infinite. He has no interpretation which he can accept or impose upon anybody else ; but the substance of the idea he holds in a manner so transcendental, grand, vast, and beautiful that the others dwarf themselves into utter insignificance. The Hebrew Jehovah seems to him a fanciful and fantastical idea ; the Christian's triune deity is limited ; and the theist's conception of the personal God is bounded. The Radical believes in the -universal law, omnipotent, omnipresent, sweeping thirough the world, administering the least things, controlling the greatest, holding close relations between you and me, Jioldiiig in the hollow of its hand 2\\ the affairs of all the nations of the globe. This idea of law — material, intellectual, spiritual — compre- hends everything, all the domain of reason, all the domain of hope, so vast that no faith can scale its heights, so tender that one can lie like a child on its bosom, so mighty and majestic that nobody need be afraid that it cannot overcome every obstacle in the way of the highest and noblest advance. (" The Mission of the Radical Preacher." By O. B. Frothingham.) ! FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 143 Which, after all, is the most illogical and fantastic, the idea of a Hebrew Jehovah, or of a Christian triune deity, or the picture of a Universal Law that " administers " and " controls/' holds affairs in " the hollow of its hand," and is so " tender that one can lie like a child on its bosom ^' ? Every one admits that God, in the Absolute, is unknowable and incon- ceivable ; but the consensus of human experience has established that the only image that can represent His relation to conditioned creatures is the human or anthropomorphic one, though it has made modern scientists so angry. After all, is not the rejection of the popular image made in the most '''crass '^ spirit of transcendentalism ? Where is the wisdom of a criticism that would endow blind law with " hands " and a " bosom," and in the same breath object to the terminology of the Lord's Prayer ? Elsewhere in the same book from which I have quoted, Mr. Frothingham's language becomes less contradictory, but even more extraordinary — so extraordinary, indeed, that, if it came from any other pen, one might presume that the writer had no spiritual claim to speak in cathedra on religious topics at all. In proclaiming his revolt from the Christian religion, and his rejection of the Christian idea, he admits, regretfully, that the Christian faith still prevails, that it keeps alive the potent activities that sustain the life of Christendom. Nevertheless, he adds, '' it is a superstition ; it is not grounded on history, on knowledge, on science, on fact, but it is a fancy, an imagination, a tradition ;" and now, in the natural course of things, it is dissolving away before the breath of science. People, he naively affirms, reject it in the great centres of activity — in Paris, in Berlin, in London, in New York ! Among other 144 ^ LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. reasons for the long permanence of this false faith, and its still surviving power, he gives the following : I. The exceeding antiquity of the system ; 2. The hindrances so long thrown in the way of Biblical criticism ; 3. Mirabile diciiL^ the persistence with which the faith is taught. The last reason is a superb non seqidtiw ; it is simply affirming that the zeal with which an army fights its battles is in direct ratio to the weakness of its cause ! But, not content with so wonderful an affirmation, Mr. Frothingham goes on to arraign Christianity because it is the *' religion of sorrow. ^^ He quotes both Jesus and Paul in illustration of his statement. Then he adds, not without eloquence : Through the chinks we can see the light. The condition of man becomes more comfortable, more easy ; the hope of man is more visible ; the endeavour of man is more often crowned with success ; the attempt to solve the darkest life-problems is not so desperate as it was. The reformer meets with fewer rebuffs ; tlie philanthropist does not despair as he did. The light is dawning. The great teachers of knowledge multiply, bear their burdens more and more steadily ; the traditions of truth and knowledge are becoming established in the intellec- tual world. It is so ; and those of us who have caught a vision of the better times coming through reason, through knowledge, through manly and womanly endeavour, have caught a sight of a Christendom passing away, of a religion of sorrow de- clining, of a gospel preached for the poor no longer useful to a world that is mastering its own problems of poverty and lifting itself out of disabling misery into wealth without angelic assis- tance. This is our consolation ; and while we admit, clearly and frankly, the real power of the popular faith, we also see the pillars on which a new faith rests, which shall be a faith not of sorrow, but of joy. (" The Rising and the Setting Faith, and other Discourses.'^ By O. B. Frothingham.) Is it necessary to demolish this cumbrous snow- heap of misconception, to point out the fallacy that confuses the Christian sentiment with the utilitarian philosophy of loaves and fishes ? If all that Jesus meant was that the poor should become the rich in FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA, 145 another world, and the suffering become the joyful ; if the kernel of His teaching was merely, as narrow logicians have suggested, the notion that bad luck here would of necessity ensure a bonus elsewhere, Christianity would stand but a poor chance at the hands of either the higher or the lower criticism. What Jesus did teach, or what we have learned at least by the Divine Ideal that He afforded, was, and is, that worldly knowledge, worldly prosperity, worldly success and happiness, are poor things compared with the heaven of sin vanquished, the other world of supreme love and insight. If the triumph of the political economist were quite secure ; if the earth were equally divided among men according to some such scheme as that of Henry George ; if there were no workhouses in it, and no prisons, the poor would still inherit the kingdom of heaven ; for the true poor of the Christian idea are those who despise ignoble prizes, who are indifferent to vain knowledge, who have found in the certainty of human failure the sublimity of sympathetic love and insight. It must be borne in mind, too, that Jesus could sit down with the rich man as well as the poor, when the rich man was poor " in spirit." To refute Mr. Frothingham here would be to refute the whole argument of utili- tarianism, which has already been done, or attempted, and is of course far beyond the scope of this paper ; nor am I in any way holding a brief for the Christian religion, or speaking from the point of view of the orthodox believer. But let us have fair play on both sides, nor attempt to answer the proposition that one may be multiplied into three by an assertion that two and two are four. Elsewhere Mr. Frothingham clearly expresses his conviction that perfect happiness is simply impossible under mundane conditions, and 146 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. that mere knowledge and power may be, and gene- rally are, in the nature of vanity. As long as these things are true, there is room in our dialectics for the Christian argument that the compensations of a higher and nobler life are precisely what is needed for the settlement of the complex human problem. It is melancholy to find a thinker like Mr. Frothingham, among Americans, of all people in the world, arguing that there is to be a millennium of inexhaustible dry goods and of physical prosperity, compared with which the coming of the Messiah w^ould be but an ineffective performance. Mr. Frothingham writes very eloquently on evolu- tion ; accepts all its splendid suggestions^ both in the material and in the moral world ; shows clearly that cause follows effect in the social 'as well as the physical sphere, and that out of evil must come evil, and out of good must issue good. He accepts, if I understand him rightly, the Comtist notion of the perfectibility of Humanity, and infinitely prefers the Grand Eire, or divine adumbration of the genius of man, to either Jehovah or Jesus, Buddha or Balder. He does not, however, imitate Colonel Ingersoll in treating any of these gods with disrespect, but he nevertheless measures them with his free-thoueht foot-rule, and finds them, at the best, only a cubit high. What, after all, is this Grand Eire of which we hear so much ? Not the Son of Man transubstan- tiated, but the Spirit of Man glorified ; not the Paraclete, the Redeemer, or the Divine Ideal, but the vague, impersonal, stupendous, and overpowering out- come of all human intelligence, effort, suffering, limit- less struggle, and despair. His other names are Science, Knowledge, Intellectual Victory, Moral Su- premacy ; his other name will be Happiness, or FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 147 Stimmum Bomim, by-and-by. Well, when our Grand Eire looks forward, what will be his prospect? A reign of indefinite but not endless length, cut short inevitably, sooner or later, by the cataclysm of our solar system. In the far future, then, inevitable Death. When he looks backward, what must be his retrospect t Far away as the first beginnings of life he traces the progression from, pain to pain, marks the graves of the generations, from the tomb of the pterodactyl in the chalk to the sepulchre of Franklin among the Arctic snows. Far backward then, Death too ; aeons of agony, vistas of the types that have perished to fashion the Grand Eire for his short ecstatic reign. Science may smile at the thought of compensation ; but surely the Grand Eire, with his supreme potentialities of pity, must say to himself, ■" Alas and alas ! though my children now rejoice, like motes in the sunbeam, what of those who have been destroyed, tortured, and obliterated in the long dark- ness that preceded this splendid dawn of day ? " And so, after all, the Grand Eire, with all his good inten- tions, finds his poor feet slipping and sinking in the arid sands of pessimism, and the only gospel left for his worshippers to preach will be the old weary gospel of the materialist, " Eat, drink, and be happy, for to- morrow we die ! " L 2 148 A look: round literature. III. THE HOPE OF THE HUMAN RACE. But to do Mr. Frothingham justice, he is not a pes- simist. In one of the very finest of his essays, the sermon on " Immortality/' a piece of writing- that can be read and re-read for its marvellous clearness of exposition and its consummate beauty of ex- pression, he echoes, though somewhat half-heartedly, the great hope of the human race for an individual existence after death. But in scrutinising his argu- ment closely, we perceive that, while he welcomes with enthusiasm the conception of the Grand Eire, and states that chimerical Being's case with splendid eloquence, he is lost in amazement that Humanity ever contained that other idea of a personal immor- tality ; can see no rational excuse for it ; fears, indeed, that it is altogether too shadowy to be at all tangible. All he can venture to say in plea for it is that its very audacity favours it, its very wild- ness is its guarantee. Here, again, we get frank con- fession, but bad logic. How a faith can be vindi- cated by its own sheer improbability, how a belief may be true because it goes in the teeth of all ex- perience, I leave for the transcendentalists of free thought to decide. I believe the evolutionists have clearly explained how the notion of life after death " developed '' easily out of the first superstitions of the human race, and how its permanence in all com- munities and most individuals proceeds from the permanence of other instincts seemingly imperishable. But where I join issue with Mr. Frothingham is at the one point where issue is possible — that the idea of FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 149 immortality is irrational and opposed to common ex- perience ; for if it were ^o, there can be no doubt that it would have been "obliterated" long ago in the process of evolution. It is not because it is pre- posterous, but because it is probable, that it has kept its strenuous hold on the hearts of mankind. Jesus, in His supreme practical wisdom, in His relentless logic, y^ perceived this fully, perceived that this very idea was the natural, indeed the only, escape from between the horrors of our mundane dilemma. And forthwith (for I hold that this Man, whatever His credentials, was scientific or nothing) He proceeded to verification. Opening the human heart. He found that it demanded ampler life on account of the infinite possibilities of love without it. Examining the social organism, He saw that its structure was welded together by the blood of human martyrdom, that every hope and every aspiration within it were based upon the certainty that consciousness, and all its consequent affections, must be permanent, and therefore immaterial. The law of growth was absolute, the indestructibility of force was sure, and the permanence of force was the certainty of the Soul. As for His creed being one of sorrow, that is not strictly true ; it is the world that is sorrowful, not the creed that redeems it, which, after all, has never until now had a fair trial. Christianity in its essence, apart from its miraculous pretensions, is, like the mind of its founder, strictly simple and scientific. It may not be feasible, we may be altogether unable to believe it, itS; history is a long chapter of horrors and enormities, and for some inscrutable reason its priests and paid pro-i fessors have almost invariably been the enemies of! human progress ; but, compared with any other creedj that has been offered in God's name to men, it has thei solitary merit of logical truth and common-sense. Ifj ISO A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. we admit its fundamental proposition, that spiritual personality is permanent, and is at the same time directly conditioned by unselfish love and brother- hood, all the mystery and pain, all the struggle of the ages, becomes clear. Moral salvation, being inde- pendent of dogma or of worldly happiness, was as possible for the first half-savage human product as it is possible now for the highest and the meanest of mankind. Knowledge is nothing, power is nothing, material success is nothing ; the insight of love is every- thing, and looks right up into the heaven of heavens, crying, " O grave, where is thy victory ? O death, where is thy sting? " In saying so much, perhaps, concerning one or two points of Mr. Frothingham's teaching, I may seem to be carping at what I came to praise. Let me repeat, then, that the said teaching is in the main as wise as it is beneficent, as beautiful as it is just. For every flower that grows in the gardens of the gods, Mr. Frothingham has reverent admiration ; he is Pharisaic to no creed, but tolerant toward all. With his faith in the teaching of science I can find no fault, except that it blinds him now and then to the subtler issues of life and experience ; it is, indeed, a kind of faith that must grow in the hearts of all men, and ultimately, I believe, lead to the triumph of the Christian ideal. The star of a holy purpose shines at all times, more or less brightly, through the clouds of the writer's transcendentalism. For with all his scientific leanings he is of the race that produced Emerson and Theodore Parker ; he possesses by temperament their vagueness and haziness of logic, leading sometimes to that uni- versal tolerance which makes religion blow neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm. Mr. Frothingham has done noble work in negativing the pretensions of still FREE THOUGHT IN AMERICA. 151 rampant dogmatisms and special Providences, in asserting the supreme right of private judgment, in bearing testimony from the pulpit that the teachings of Science^ instead of narrowing, enlarge the heavenly- horizons, and in following the divine thread of meaning to be found in all creeds and all theologies. His teaching has the one cardinal defect, that it lacks the consecrating touch of pathos that accompanies the highest kind of spiritual solicitation, which we feel as certainly in the Buddhist books as in the Jewish Testament, in the tragedies of Sophocles as well as in the moralities of John Bunyan, and in the prophecies of Walt Whitman (despite all the Emersonian leaven) as well as in the child-like songs of Whittier. For this is the fatal tendency of Transcendentalism — to soften the lines of conviction, and to strain the anguish out of sentiment. There is no pathos in Emerson ; never once does his gentle hand, grasping its soothsayer's wand, touch the fountain of tears ; yet even such a man as Spurgeon can stir that fountain, if only with the mere breath of a phrase. And no creed without pathos will ever justify the great human hope, or conquer the great human heart. So I part from Mr. Frothingham with no lack of respect and admiration, but with some little sadness, feeling that the tale he has to tell is one already twice told, and misses the charm of the fairy stories of God, which will continue to add to human happiness so long as the heart of man is as a child's and some glimpses of a heavenly dream remain. A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTI. " Some positive, persisting fops we know, Who, if once wrong, will needs be always so ; But I, with pleasure, own my errors past, And make each day a critic on the last." Pope's Essay on Critkis7Jt. In the early spring of the present year there passed away at Birchington-on-Sea, in Kent, one of the most original painters and most gifted poets who was ever sent to lend light and leading to a perverse generation. A man unique in this particular — that he passed through good and evil report with serene indifference to mercenary reward or social successes ; and that, while exercising an unusual influence on the higher culture of his age, and living in the very midst of a busy and somewhat pertinacious artistic circle, he re- mained personally unknown to most of his contempo- raries, as well as to the public at large. He painted pictures, which I can neither blame nor praise, for I know them too little, but which those well fitted to judge have classed as masterpieces. He wrote poems, which have been both lavishly praised and harshly judged, and which remain, after all is said and done, among the spiritual productions of the present genera- tion. Even fairer than his artistic or literary fame was the love and admiration he awakened in all who knew him. He not merely founded a school, he created a kind of artistic religion, which is fast spread- ing, through the labours of loving disciples. A man A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTL 153 remarkable for his intellectual gifts, he was still more remarkable for his unique power of awakening artistic faith and literary fervour. Missed now by his own circle, he will ere long be missed more by the world which least appreciated him while living; for, when the true aestheticism has indicated itself, and the false asstheticism, which still overshadows it, has withered like an unwholesome weed, the name of Rossetti will be sadly remembered, as that of one of those veiled spirits who sometimes walk the earth to make men pure, and literally to '' brighten the sunshine/^ When I remember how truly great he was — in that best greatness of modesty and meekness of soul ; when I think how patiently he laboured at his beautiful art and how little golden praise men gave to him ; when I contrast his gentle life with the strenuous lives of noisier and more prosperous men, it seems strange to think that, at any period of his career, any writer could be found blind enough or hard enough to criticise him adversely. Yet, that cruel things were written of him, and by one who should have looked longer and known better, we all know. He has been called a "fleshly" person, a sensuous, even a sensual poet ; he who, more than perhaps many of his contemporaries, was the least objective, the least earthly, and the most ideal. Not even after his death is the cry suffered to abate ; and a recent writer in a religious review,* takes occasion to repeat at second-hand, for a wiser generation, all the hasty expressions and uninstructed abuse that I published in hot haste ten years ago, and have since, as my readers know, repented. It is so easy to create a nickname that will'stlck; so difficult to write a * The British Quarterly. 154 ^ LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. criticism that will endure ! Perhaps it may be worth while to endeavour, in the short space at my disposal, to show the readers of this book how false a judg- ment it was, how conventional ^d Pharisaic a criti- cism, which chose to dub as "fleshly " the works of this most ethereal and dreamy — in many respects this least carnal and most religious — of modern poets. But let me confess at the outset that, to under- stand poems like these, the reader must bring some- thing of the sympathy he receives. If he approaches in the wrong mood, or in an antipathetic one, the poems may at first repel him. The magnetism is for magnetic people, under what the mediums call "test" conditions. I myself, being then in a non-receptive mood, once regarded Rossetti's work balefully, dis- liked his subjects and his workmanship ; even thought him sensuous in the bad sense, and was capable of " cutting him up " (how easy it is to " cut up " — even a rose or a lily !) when the occasion served. After- wards, reading him again less coldly, I began to understand the purity of his meaning and the delicacy of his art. That art has been called mosaic, and so it is; but it is a mosaic made of precious stones of speech, always radiant, and sometimes exquisitely chosen, forming, indeed, an ornate style sui generisy in which Latinisms are employed with rare felicity. Some people may prefer simpler styles, though it may be said in passing, that Rossetti could be simple enough when he chose, as in his fine reproductions of old ballads ; but that is neither here nor there ; the fact being that Rossetti's style was Jiis ozv?i, and wonderfully adapted to express his sibylline meaning. His method, like that of Jacob Boehmen, was sym- bolic; and he sometimes used a phrase, as Jacob used a flower, to express whole worlds of recondite A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTL 155 mysticism. With such a writer, therefore, to com- plain that he did not call a spade a spade, or carol songs about buttercups and daisies, was to mistake the whole drift of his meaning. He was one of those who found, as many an old necromancer would have found, an infinity of suggestion in the mere sound of " Mesopotamia." So he came to love music for its own sake, finding a luxury of delight in using sweet sibilants, delicate elisions, and musical alliterations. Proceeding further, he constructed a phraseology quaint, archaic, involved, and involuted, yet only so as are flowers, leaves, bells, and blooms, obeying some intricate caprice of nature. A primrose on the water's brim, A yellow primrose was to him, But it was something more ; it was maiden modesty and virgin pallor, a star in the earth's firmament, a letter in the golden Book of Beauty, a symbol, an abstraction of something stranger and fairer than itself. For the man was a magician, of the tribe of Kubla Khan ; and at his bidding there rose a stately pleasure dome, every precious stone of which had a name and a mystery, and, when he entered it to weave his strange verse, he was within his right in using the language of incantation, and in conjuring with such names as " Abracadabra." Those who assert that he loved this Art " for its own sake," know nothing of his method ; he loved it because it ex- pressed the almost inexpressible, and supplied him with an occult terminology. If he was wrong, all the mystics have been wrong ; Boehmen was a blunderer, Richter was a proser, Novalis was no poet. There is room, surely, in the world for Rossetti as well as. Burns, for the poetry of enchanted symbolism as welL 156 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. as for the poetry of kicking up one^s heels and roHing with milkmaids in the hay. The adverse critic has complained that our magician had no humour, was incapable of honest laughter ; in other words, he never grinned through a horse-collar, as even poor Heine could do; but neither did Wordsworth or Shelley, nor many another man whom the world calls great. He knew, in fact, that life was no laughing matter. Yet grave humour, of a celestial kind, he certainly possessed, if we are to trust certain memoranda which have been handed about, but never openly published. It was no fault of his that God intended him for a Wizard ; it was his destiny, and certainly our gain ; for, in these days of garish daylight, of popular science, it needed such a man to show us that geometry is occult as well as simple, that the stars have *' influences" as well as rays to be dissolved in the spectrum, and that the flowers may be put to other uses besides the manufacture of cowslip-wine. Yoil think that speech is current coin, to be passed freely from hand to hand ; he knew that it was magical, and, by a simple arrangement of sounds, could be made to figure forth flowers, stars, and astrological portents. Words of strange colour coiled like snakes about his wand, turned into flowers and leaves, turned again into precious stones, and rained as pearls and emeralds on the grass beneath his feet. He wore neither homespun cloth nor sober black, but a robe wrought with Runic letters and signs of the Zodiac — a wizard's robe, in fact. It was not the sort of dress to please prosy people, or to go junketing in; but it suited his purpose and expressed his extraordinary function. The style is the man ; and, in this case, no style could possibly be better. There are people in the world who imagine that A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTI. 157 poetry should be easy as A B C, and who tell us that it should deal only with the approven facts of life. In this case, Shakespeare was a bad poet, and Hamlet's soliloquy a vile, roundabout business — as, indeed, simple Goldsmith was eager to show on one occasion. It does not seem to me, however, that poetry is neces- sarily either simple or occult ; it either is or is not poetry, and may be as far off in its range as Saturn's ring, or as near to us as cakes and ale. It is surely worth while to strain the eyes a little in gazing at the , heavens, and to listen with some attention if we expect to catch the music in the sea-shell. Those who complain that certain great poets are incompre- hensible, are simply lazy persons, who want to be tickled with a straw — companions, indeed, of our ol^ friend Bottom, who could conceive of no use for Titania's fairies but to scratch his ears. All deep thought is difficult, however expressed — in the crystal-j line phrase of Dante, or in the jargon of Jean Paul -; and there is no easy road to Parnassus. The right question, indeed, to ask in taking up a poet's work, is not whether it is easy, but whether it is difficult enough — whether it awakens that thought which con- cerns the beauty and mystery of life, or whether it goes down like a lollipop, and leaves us none the wiser or the better. A more serious charge against Rossetti's writing, if sustained, would be that it is only of the lollipop or bonbon order — a luscious thing for very young people ; and it is curious that this charge is made by the same critics who complain of its difficulty, its artificiality. The inconsistency is remarkable. If all Rossetti had to tell us was that lollipops are sweet, and sensual pleasure agreeable, and women kissable, why should he have gone in such a roundabout way about it? Why should he < 158 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. have used the language of the spheres, and the machinery of all the necromancers, to express to us the height of foolishness and the depth of apple pie ? In simple fact, he does nothing of the sort. He uses amatory forms and carnal images, just as he uses mere sounds and verbalisms, to express ideas which are purely and remotely spiritual ; and he takes the language of personal love to express his divine yearning, simply because that language is the most exquisite quintessence of human speech. I do not mean to imply that his forms and images represent viere abstractions ; in that case, he would be a sort of mathematician, not a poet. But flesh and blood, in his eyes, are sacramental. Is there any honest man that doubts that Love, even so-called " fleshly Love," is the noblest pleasure that man is permitted to enjoy ; or that the sympathy of woman for man, and of man for woman, is in its essence the sweetest sympathy of which the soul is capable } Only one thing is higher and better than Love's happiness, and that one thing is Love's sorrow, when there comes out of loss and sufl"ering the sense of compensation, of divine gain. Well, Rossetti's poetry expresses at once the pleasure, the sympathy, the happiness and the sorrow, the loss and the gain. It has been called the poetry of personal passion ; but it is more than this — it is passion transfused into religion, into a religion which glorifies grief and peoples the empty heavens with shapes of loveliness and love. Take the opening of what is perhaps his best, and best-known poem : The Blessed Damozel leaned out On the gokl bar of Heaven : Her eyes were stiller than the depths Of waters still'd at even ; She had five lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven ! A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTI. 159 Something vaguer might have contented other poets, but this poet has a necromancer's precision, can count each star and Hly of the vision, with a sense of their individual signification. The result is, we have not merely a poetical image, but a painted picture ; something dreamlike, but with the strange definition only known in dreams. As he goes on, the picture changes, but the realism remains — we see the very hues, and hear the very sound, of heaven ; and at each wave of the grave wizard's wand, at each measured cadence from his lips, the azure seems bursting open further and further, until we see, in an extraordinary image. Time like a pulse shake fierce Thro' all the worlds ! If this be not necromancy, I know none in poetry. Pathos there is also in the poem, as when the Blessed Damozel weeps, and we "hear her tears," a gentle sound of rain on the parched universe. But the magician is too sure of his power, too conscious of the supernatural powers which are shaping the spell, to break down and moan. A poet of the earth, \^^ ,? earthy, may do that, and set us weeping with him — as ^ Burns does when he hears the bird-song from his place in the ploughed field. For pity's sake, sweet bird, nae mair, Or else my heart is broken / But the spiritual poet, with his eyes fixed on so celestial a vision, is master of himself. He knows that his glimpse is real, and that, sooner or later, the enchantment will draw him upward — to the Blessed Damozel^s embrace — as, indeed, it has already done, since such aspirations are truly sent of God. The same mood of perfect vision and grave assu- rance inspires all the best work of Rossetti. He has .V^ i6o A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. no questions to ask, no problems to trouble him ; he is sibylline, not from being- puzzle-headed, but be- cause he has looked behind the curtain of the SibyL He sees the trees walk, he hears the flowers speak, with a sober certainty of waking bliss. When an angel passes him, he can feel the very texture of his robe, and tell the colour of his eyes. He is as sure of Heaven and all its white-robed angels as ordinary men are of each other. Something of this certainty he doubtless learned from Blake, though he lacked Blake's childish simplicity and sweet garrulousness. So he " weaves his spell of strange device " in a way \ bewildering to those who dislike being mesmerised, and who would have sent Paracelsus to prison for fortune-telling. The finest of his finished works is the " House of Life," which the British Qitarterly Reviewer calls a " House of 111 Fame." It is, to a certain extent,, monotonous, and the sacrament of flesh and blood has a constant place in it ; but out of this sacrament rises the ghostly vision of the Host, and ere we have- ended, we hear the voices of all the angels praising the Lord of Heavenly Love. And of this strange texture, of this starry woof, is the so-called " fleshly" poetry. Is it a reproach to this poet that the divinest thing he has seen and known, humanly speaking, is the face and form of a living woman ; that out of Iter eyes, and from her lips, he has learned to understand the processions of the stars and the spheric music of the world which, to so many, is unknown .'' The stairs of the earthly Love reach to the heavens ; he ascends them step by step, that is all, hand in hand with his sweet guide — who is a bright, earthly maiden at the beginning, then a bride, then a shining creature,,, winged and marvellously transfigured ; the rest in A NOTE ON DANTE ROSSETTI. i6i order ; last, an amethyst ! You can transfigure / Love, but you can never transfigure Lust ; this last never made an angel, or inspired a true poem, yet. And sOj when all is said and done, the friendly criticism remains the best and wisest. Those who have read Mr. Swinburne's eulogy of his master, and thought it, perhaps, a little strained, may admit, at least, that it was strained, like all eulogy of love, in the right direction. My own abuse was and is, like all hasty contemporary abuse, nothing. Mr. Swin- burne's honest praise was, and is, like all honest praise, something. The poet of the " House of Life ^' is beyond both ; but his fame will remain, when all detraction is forgotten, as a golden symbol, csre perenyims, of much that was best and brightest in the culture of our time.* ■^ I have given the above as my final and revised opinion on a writer to whom I once stood in strong antipathy. The only suspicious thing I know about some of Rossetti's poetry is the facility with which it can be ijnitated. During a recent com- petition for a prize given by the Pall Mall Gazette, a number of sonnets by various hands was contributed, reproducing in a striking manner the manner, or trick, of Rossetti's verbal style and imagery. Generally speaking, I believe, the merit of a style is in proportion to the difficulty of actual reproduction. Great thought in great language cannot well be imitated. Mannerisms of every kind can. The best of Rossetti's work is beyond the re-rendering of the poetaster. — R. B. M THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. A PERSONAL REMINISCENCE. In tlie neighbourhood of the picturesque village of Chertsey, close to which the Thames winds broad and clear between deep green meadow-flats and quiet woods, still stand the ruins of Newark Abbey. Situated in a lonely field, eight miles from the village, and near to the Weybridge canal, they lie comparatively un- known and little visited ; a mill murmurs close at hand, turned by a small fall ; and all around stretch the level fields and meadows of green Surrey. Here, at the beginning of the present century, when these ruins stood as now, a young man and maiden, be- trothed to each other, were accustomed to meet and ex- change their quiet vows; andhere, half a century after- wards, a gray-haired old man of seventy, beautiful in his age as the old Goethe, would wander musing summer day after summer day. The lovers had been parted ; the maiden had married and died young, while the man had also married and become the father of a household ; but that first dream had never been forgotten by one at least of the pair, and that surviving one was Thomas Love Peacock, known to general English readers as the author of " Headlong Hall." THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 163 With a constancy and a tenderness which many more famous men would have done well to emulate, he clung to the scene of his first and perhaps his only love : a love innocent, like all true love ; and far pre- ferable, to quote his own words, to — " The waveless calm, the slumber of the dead, which weighs on the minds of those who have never loved, or never earnestly/' Looking on the face of Peacock in his old age, and knowing his secret, well might one remember in emotion the beautiful words of Scribe : " II faut avoir aime une fois en sa vie, non pour le moment ou Ton aime, car on n'eprouve alors que des tourmens, des regrets, de la jalousie ; mais peu a peu ces tourmens-la deviennent des souvenirs, qui charment notre arriere-saison. Et quand vous verrez la vieillesse douce, facile, et tolerante, vous puissez dire comme Fontenelle — V mnoiir a passe par-Id ! " Yes, Love had passed that way, and set on the old man his gracious seal, which no other deity can counterfeit ; so that, looking upon the old man's face, one read of gentleness, high-mindedness, toleration, and perfect chivalry. These may seem odd words to apply to one whom the world knew rather as a retro- grade philosopher and satirical pessimist than a lover of human nature, as a scholar rather than a poet, as a country gentleman of the old school rather than a humanitarian of the new ; but they can be justified ; and it may be questioned, moreover, whether he had not learned of the eighteenth century certain modest virtues which the nineteenth century has incontinently forgotten. To children he was gentleness itself, and all children loved him ; and there could be no prettier sight in the world than the picture of him, as I saw him first, and as in M 2 i64 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. my mind's eye I see him now, sitting one summer day, seated on his garden lawn by the river, while a little maiden of sixteen rested on his knees the great quarto Orlando Innavioratooi Bojardo, and, following with her finger the sun-lit lines, read soft and low, corrected ever and anon by his kind voice, the delicate Italian he loved so well. Who that looked at him, then, could fail to perceive, to quote Lord Houghton^s words, ^'that he had gone through the world with happiness and honour"? But the secret of his beautiful benignity lay deeper. '^ L'amour a passe par-la ! " While a student in Scotland, I had known him as the friend of Shelley, and had read his delightful works with pleasure and profit ; until at last I was prompted to write to him, expecting (I remember) to receive but a cold response from one who, to judge him by his works, was too much of a Timon to care for boy's homage. I was agreeably disappointed. The answer came, not savage like a wrap on the knuckles, but cordial as a hand-shake. Afterwards, when I was weary " climbing up the breaking wave '' of London, I thought of my old friend, and determined to seek him out. Mainly with the wish to be near him, I retreated to quiet Chertsey ; and thence past Chertsey Bridge, through miles of green fields basking in the summer sun, and through delightful lanes to Lower Halliford, I went on pilgrimage, youth in my limbs, reverence in my heart, a pipe in my mouth, and the tiny Pickering edition of Catullus (a veritable '^ lepidum libellum,'' but, alas, far from " novum ! '') in my waistcoat pocket. And there, at Lower Halliford, I found him as I had described him, seated on his garden lawn in the sun, with the door of his library open behind him, showing such delicious vistas of THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 165 shady shelves as would have gladdened his own Dr. Opimian, and the little maiden reading from the book upon his knee. Gray-haired and smiling sat the man of many memories, guiding the utterances of one who was herself a pretty two-fold link between the present and the past, being the granddaughter (on the paternal side) of Leigh Hunt, and also the grand- daughter (on the maternal side) of the Williams who was drowned with Shelley. Could a youthful student^s eyes see any sight fairer ? "And did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you ? . . . How strange it seems, and new ! " "^ And this old man had spoken with Shelley, not once, but a thousand times ; and had known well both Harriett Westbrook and Mary Godwin; and had cracked jokes with Hobhouse, and chaffed Proctor's latinity ; and had seen, and actually criticised, Malibran ; and had bought " the vasty version of a new system to perplex the sages,^'t when it first came out, in a bright, new, uncut quarto ; and had dined with Jeremy Bentham ; and had smiled at Disraeli, when, resplendently attired, he stood chatting in Hookham's with the Countess of Blessington ; and had been face to face with that bland Rhadamanthus, Chief Justice Eldon ; and was, in short, such a living chronicle of things past and men dead as filled one's soul with delight and ever-varying wonder. '^ How strange it seemed, and new ! " The portrait prefixed to the collected edition of his works { conveys a very good idea of the man as I * Robert Browning. t Byron's description of Wordsworth's " Excursion." X Peacock's Works, 3 vols. (Bentley, 1875.) i66 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. first saw him — a stately old gentleman with hair as white as snow, a keen, merry eye, and a characteristic chin. His dress was plain black, with white neck- cloth, and low shoes, and on his head he wore a plaited straw hat. One glance at him was enough to reveal his delightful character, that of his own Dr. Opimian. '^ His tastes, in fact, were four : a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks." This was the man who, as a beautiful boy, had been caught up and kissed by Queen Caroline ; who, when he grew up to manhood, had been christened " Greeky Peeky," on account of his acquirement in Greek ; and who had been thus described, in a pas- sage I have not seen quoted before, by Shelley, in the " Letter to Maria Gisborne " : You will see P — , with his mountain Fair"^ Turned into a Flamingo . . . When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo, His best friends hear no more of him ; but you Will see him and will like him, too, I hope. And that snow-white Snowdonian antelope, Marched with the cameo-leopard. His tine wit Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it! Age had mellowed and subdued the " cameq-leopard,'^ but the '^ fine wit,'"' as I very speedily discovered, was as keen as ever. His life had been passed in com- parative peace and retirement. He spoke French with the good old-fashioned English accent, and he had never been to Paris or up the Rhine ; Italy he knew not, nor cared to know ; and much as he loved the sea, he had sailed it little. His four tastes had kept him well anchored all his life. In his youth he had had a fifth, the Italian Opera, but the long modern performances, and the decadence of the * Peacock's wife. THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 167 ballet, had alienated him. He had his "good library," and it zvas a good one — full of books it was a luxury to handle, editions to make a scholar's mouth water, bound completely in the old style in suits as tough as George Fox^s suit of leather. The '^ good dinner ^' came daily. " He liked to dine well, and withal to dine quickly, and to have quiet friends at his table, with whom he could discuss questions which might afford ample room for pleasant conversation, and none for acrimonious dispute.^'* In the "pleasant garden " he was sitting with the clear winding Thames below him and his rowing-boat swinging at the garden steps. And the " rural walks " lay all around him, on the quiet river side, through the green woods of Esher, down the scented lanes to Chertsey, by winding turns to Walton and Weybridge — scenes familiar to him since boyhood and hallowed with the footprints of dead relatives and departed friends. For the old man was, so to speak, alone in the world — his wife and best-loved daughters lay asleep in Shepperton churchyard, his son was somewhere abroad, and the cries of the children around him were not those of his own family. His gifted daughter Rosa, who died in her prime, was gone before, but another daughter, not of the flesh, had risen in her place. Many years before, when she was grieving sorely for the loss of a little child, Margaret, his wife had noticed, on Halli- ford Green, a little girl in its mother's arms, and see- ing in it a strange likeness to her own dead child, had coaxed it into her own house, and dressed it in the dead babe's clothes. Peacock, returning from the India House, looked in through the dining-room win- dow, and seeing the child within was almost stunned *" Gry 11 Grange." i6S A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. by its resemblance to Margaret. This little girl^ Mary Rosewell, had been adopted by the Peacocks ; and now, when all the rest were dead, she remained — a bright, loving foster-daughter, whose baptismal name of " Mary " had long ago been sweetened into "May." I cannot describe her better than in Peacock^s own words when describing Miss Gryll : " The atmosphere of quiet enjoyment in which she had grown up seemed to have steeped her feelings in its own tranquillity ; and still more, the affection which she felt for her foster-father, and the conviction that her departure from his house would be the severest blow that fate could inflict on him, led her to postpone what she knew must be an evil day for him, and might per- adventure not be a good one to her/' She has never married, but she has fulfilled her woman's mission perfectly, and the final years of Peacock owed much of their tranquil sunshine to her tender and pathetic care. Knowing Peacock only from his books, I was not prepared to find in him that delightful bonhomie which was in reality his most personal characteristic, in old age at least ; and when we became acquainted, and read and talked together, I was as much astonished at the sweetness of his disposition as amused and captivated by his quaint erudition. In that green garden, in the lanes of Halliford, on the bright river, in walks and talks such as " brightened the sunshine," I learned to know him, and although he was so much my senior he took pleasure (I am glad to say) in my society, partly because I never worried him with " acrimonious dispute," which he hated above all things. There was for the moment one dark cloud of mis- understanding between us — a cloud of smoke ; for, THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 169 like Hans Andersen's parson,* I ^^ smoked a good deal of tobacco, and bad tobacco," and to Peacock tobacco was poison. He forgave me, however, on one con- dition, that I never smoked within five hundred yards of his house — an arrangement which, I am ashamed to say, I violated, for well I remember one night stealthily opening the bedroom window in the house at Halliford, and " blowing a cloud " out into the summer night. I am not sure that much of his hate of tobacco did not arise from his morbid dread of fire. He would never have any lucifer matches in his house, save one or two which were jealously kept in a tin box in the kitchen. Morning after morning he arose with the sun, lit his own fire in the library, and read till breakfast, laying in material for talk which flowed like Hippocrene — as crystal, and as learned ! His chief, almost his only, correspondent was Lord Broughton, who had been his friend through life. The two old gentlemen interchanged letters and verses, and capped quotations, and doubtless felt like two antediluvian mammoths left stranded, and yet living after the Deluge — that Deluge being typified to them by the submersion of Whig and Tory in one wild wave of Progress, and the long career of Lord Brougham as a sort of political Noah. The old land- marks of society were obliterated. Lord Byron was a dim memory, and the stage-coach was a dream. The poetry of Nature had triumphed, and the poetry of Art had died. Germany had a literature, and it was part of polite education to know German. Beards were worn. Rotten boroughs were no more. The Times, like a colossal Podsnap, dominated journalism, but the Daily Telegraph was stirring the souls of "^ At vcere eller ikke at voere. I70 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. tradesmen to the sublime knowledge of Lempri^re's Dictionary and Bohn's " Index of Quotations." Special correspondents were invented, competitive examina- tion was consecrating mediocrity, and a considerable number of Englishmen drank bad champagne. What was left for an old scholar, but, like the Hudibrastic Mirror of Knighthood_, To cheer himself with ends of verse, And saying of philosophers ! For the rest, the world was in a bad way ; best keep apart, and let it wag. -^v^ov rbv olvov, Awpi ! Quaff a cool cup in the green shade, and drink confusion to Lord Michin Mallecho and the last Reform Bill ! It must be conceded at once that Peacock was no friend to modern progress — the cant of it, hoarsely roared from the throats of journalistic Jews and political Merry Andrews, had sickened him ; and he was not for one moment prepared to admit that the world was one whit wiser and happier than before the advent of the steam-engine. The pessimism which appears everywhere in his books was the daily theme of his talk ; but to understand it rightly we must remember it was purely satiric — that, in truth, Peacock abused human nature because he loved it. Genial at heart as Thackeray, he delighted to con- demn man and society in the abstract. Hence much of his writing must be read between the lines. In the clever little sketch of Peacock, prefixed to the new edition of the works. Lord Houghton errs to some extent in trying to construct Peacock out of his books.* The "unreasoning animosity" Lord * " In the same spirit he clung to the old religious ideas that haunted all early Roman history, and indeed went far into the Empire, and thus Jic liked to read Livy^ and did not like to read Nieduhr.'"—Lo'R.Y) Houghton's Preface. The words in italics THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. 171 Houghton speaks of was purely ironic. For example, so far from having " an indiscriminate repugnance to Scotland and to everything Scotch," he was very fond of Scotchmen, having many correspondents among them ; but he could not spare them for all that, any more than Thackeray could spare the Irish, whom he loved with all his heart. When, in ^^ Gryll Grange," he makes Dr. Opimian say of the Americans : " I have no wish to expedite communication with them. If we could apply the power of electric repul- sion to preserve us from ever hearing any more of them, I should think we had/i?r ^;^2/?2^/r^w2Vr with a black face did not succeed in attracting the masses. He listened in the most well-bred manner to the insinuations of lago, his strongest passions being conveyed by an open mouth, elevated shoulders, and turned out palms ; and when he came to the murder, he did it as gingerly with his pillow as a careful father covering up a baby. It is said that Mr. Irving is going to try the character, and that he does not like Salvini's conception. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Irving in any part demanding powerful physique or mighty passion. His appearance is cadaverous, and his voice is weak. His manners on the stage are dignified without grandeur. His pathos, when he attempts pathos, is chiefly conveyed by a huskiness of the voice and a galvanic quivering of the hands. His success in Hamlet should not mislead him, for Hamlet is a character in which no actor has ever failed, so admirably helped is it at every point by the magnificent structure of the situations.* Mr. Irvingj is an actor of original genius, greater perhaps byl reason of its very limitations than a genius more fluent in adapting itself to character foreign to itself] He would succeed as Richard III. ;" he might succeed * Since the above was printed, Salvini's Ha7nleth2iS startled London. The character so represented becomes what Hamlet might have been, had he been born in Tuscany, during the ducal reign of Francesco de Medici ; it is full-blooded Itahan, and resembles as little the Danish Prince of Shakespeare as the legendary Amleth of Oehlenschlager. T 2 276 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. as Macbeth. I believe he would comparatively fail in Othello, in Coriolanus^ or in other parts characterised by intellectual robustness or predomi- nant passion. Simultaneously with the success of Salvini's pas- sionate idealism, occurred the failure of Mr. Coghlan's mild realism. When first the announcement ap- peared that the management of the Prince of Wales' Theatre were about to produce The Merchant of Vejiice with Mr. Coghlan in the chief character, playgoers expressed a very natural astonishment. The theatre had been the temple of the Robertsonian Muse, and although since the dramatist's death it had despairingly betaken itself to such ghastly pieces as Mr. Wilkie Collins^ Ma7i and Wife, it had re- deemed its own credit by the production of a pretty little trifle by Mr. Gilbert — Sweethearts. Mr. Coghlan was known as the jemte premier of the Robertsonian drama, an excellent actor, with oc- casional exhibitions of strength and insight, but certainly not one from whom was expected any high poetic exhibition. The experiment in the interest of realism has been made, and the failure has been complete. Mr. Coghlan^s quiet, gentlemanly Jew has been voted an impossibility, and worse, a bore. The famous scene between Shylock and Antonio dwindles down into a mild conversation between two courteous merchants : Shy. Signer Antonio, many a time and oft, In the Rialto you have rated me About my moneys and my usances : Still have I borne it with a patient shrug ; For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. You call me " misbeliever, cut-throat dog," And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine ; And all for use of that which is mine own. Well, then, it now appears you need my help : THE MODERN STAGE. 277 Go to, then : you come to me, and you say, " Shylock, we would have moneys : " you say so ; You, that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold. Moneys is your suit : What should I say to you ? Should I not say, *' Hath a dog money ? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats ? " Or Shall I bend low, and in a bondman's key, With bated breath, and with a whispering humbleness, Say this : " Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last ; You spurn'd me such a day ; another time You called me dog ; and for these courtesies ril lend you thus much moneys," Ant. I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too. If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not As to thy friends ; for when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend ? But lend it rather to thine enemy. Who, if he break, thou may'st with better face Exact the penalty. Shy. Why, look you, how you storm ! Mr. Coghlan's conception, that Shylock is gene- rally made too open and snake-like a villain, a mouther and ranter whose every look and word would awaken suspicion, was doubtless right enough ; but something more was wanted than mere negation of old readings to complete the part. It was foolish in the extreme not to perceive that the Muse of Shakespeare and that of Robertson are hopelessly apart. True, even Shakespeare gains by a more natural style of gesture and delivery, such as Mr. Calvert has been en- deavouring to cultivate in his admirable revivals at Manchester ; mouthing and bellowing are always offensive and unsuitable, but one might as well play the Prometheus of ^schylus in gaiters instead of in the cothurnus^ and modern wigs instead of the mask, as deliver the grand style of drama In the easy conversational style of modern comedy. 278 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Of the resuscitation of that drama, I believe there is hope ; if I did not, it would hardly have been worth while to take the above retrospect. Just now the theatre is shunned by the students, scorned more or less by litterateurs, despised entirely by philosophers. We are told on every side that the dramatic Muse is dead, and that she can never rise again. She is dead and gone, lady, She is dead and gone ; At her head a grass green turf, At her heels a stone. And over her stand Mr. Phelps and Mr. Hermann Vezin, in chimney-pot hats, while Mr. Chatterton intones her requiem. But the public know better. The dramatic Muse lives — will live as long as passions stir in men^s hearts, as long as thousands delight in the mimic stage. It is simply absurd for poets and philosophers to glance contemptuously at the theatre — at an art hallowed by the grandest achievements of the human intellect, and glorified by godlike names ; and it is equally insane to lay the blame on modern actors and the modern public, when the real fault lies with the intellectual barrenness of this generation. Let a great dramatist arise, and he will find great actors, and perhaps a great manager. I do not say there would be no difficulties in the way ; but I do aver that the reward and honour of the highest probable dramatic success would be greater than that hitherto achieved by any writer of this generation. Just now, the world, wealthy as it is in feminine and fantastic writers, wants a great masculine dramatist above all things. Such an one would take the stage as it is, with all its deficiencies, and out of given materials evolve a noble series of productions. He would be harassed by miscon- THE MODERN STAGE. 279 ceptions and absurdities ; but so were Euripides and Racine. He would be often badly interpreted; but so were Sophocles and Moliere. His grandest pro- ductions might be misunderstood ; so were those of ^schylus himself. He might even have to " write in ^' inferior matter to tickle the groundlings ; so did Shakespeare habitually. At no time in English history has the drama been recognised as the highest department of literature ; it has always been more or less despised by serious professors ; and this fact has deterred many, as it deterred Milton,* from casting their conceptions in the dramatic form. For this, English criticism is certainly to blame. Many of our poets, such as Coleridge and Byron, have deliberately written " plays for the closet," forgetting that the true home of a play is a theatre, the true destiny of a play to be acted — well or ill, as the case may be. This destiny has been filled by the highest master- pieces, from the Prometheus of ^schylus to the Hamlet of Shakespeare, from the Ornithes of Aristo- phanes to the Tartuffe of Moliere. There are other dramas, like those masterpieces of Mr. Browning, compiled for representation, but not even the highest enthusiast in closet literature could represent any of these as of quite equal calibre. " But,^^ cry the wiseacres, " the public must be amused, and the highest products of the human intellect are not amusing.'^ After this we shall be told that Othello does not draw the masses, and that Le Malade Imaginaire is not funny. " The finest productions of the Elizabethan period, for example, would fail to draw/^ The finest productions do draw. * See some striking particulars under this head in Mr. Masson's admirable study of Milton's life. 28o A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. whenever played ; the inferior productions either fail, because they are ill-constructed and verbose, or are suppressed, because they are grossly indecent in subject and in language. There is an actor who parades the provinces, Mr. Barry Sullivan, a very clever performer of the old school, who succeeds so wonderfully, that a " Barry Sullivan house '^ represents the fullest triumph of the managerial exchequer ; yet Mr. Sullivan's repertoire consists chiefly of Shakespeare ; his leading parts are Hamlet, Richard, and Othello. The late Mr. Charles Kean, though by no means a first-class actor, made a fortune by Shakespeare. Many other obscurer stars do likewise. By his revival of a dull play, Henry V., Mr. Calvert, of Manchester, achieved great successes, both in our provinces and in New York. Shakespeare, then, is amusing, after all. What the public find in Shake- speare, they would find in any writer of kindred endowments. They do not want dull plays written for students by students, by poets for poets; they want the living, breathing drama, whether in the shape of a play by the great master, or a trifle by Robertson ; they want good construction, good situation, fair insight into character, lively dialogue. When a play, with these qualifications, fairly re- presented, fails, it will be time to talk of the indifi"erence of the public. True, as I said at the outset, audiences are uneducated ; it should be the task of dramatists to educate them — to guide their taste, which is on the whole excellent, into regular channels of legitimate enjoyment. THE MODERN STAGE, 281 II. A NOTE IN 1886. Since the preceding notes were written, there has been little or no alteration in the condition and prospects of the modern stage. Two phenomena, however, have occurred, which are likely sooner or later to be noted as more or less historical : (i) The triumphant progress of Mr. Irving, followed somewhat timidly by Mr. Wilson Barrett and others,' under the banner richly scrolled with the words *' poetical'^ and 'legitimate ;^^ and (2) the successful cynicism of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, exhibited in the pro- duction of pieces which are, in the most literal sense, anti-poetical. Of Mr. Irving and his compeers I need say little. They are fighting the good fight, and conquering fresh territory every day. Of Mr. Gilbert I am inclined to say a few words, since there is a large section of the play-going public ready to accept him as the typical playwright of the present period. In the first place, let me observe that Mr. Gilbert, despite all his boasted cynicism, has been on more than one occasion a backslider. In his bewilderment as to what is and is not literature, in his incapacity to perceive that a prettily- acted modern play, like Arrah-na-Pogiie, is better than the best imitation or resuscitation of effete poetical models, he has shown curious misconceptions, among the most pathetic of which is his idea that a drama written in so-called " blank verse " is of necessity an attempt in the right direction. This misconception is curious in a dramatist who is radically unpoetic, and who has no more call to 282 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. write blank verse than a nimble dancer has a call to use wooden legs. Thanks chiefly to such encourage- ment, Mr. Gilbert, who is well known as a grim wag and a most amusing writer of dramatic trifles, set to work the other day to write a play on the subject of Goethe's Faitst, or, to quote his own words, " to remodel, for dramatic purposes, the whole story of Gretchen's downfall." I quite acquit Mr. Gilbert (to quote his own words again) '' of intentional ir- reverence towards the grandest philosophical work of the century.^' Good in his blindness, he in goodness erred. But his blunder was not in attempting to reach the poetical standard, but in falling almost wilfully below it. His Gretchen failed, not because it was literar}^, but because it was dull ; not because it re- sembled Goethe^s Faust, but because it possessed no portion of Goethe^s magic. The first part of Goethe^s Faust has been classed among the great literary successes of the world, not because (as Mr. Gilbert, speaking in the name of the provincial, or theatrical, mind would think) it is "the greatest philosophical work of the century,^' but because it is broadly and simply human, based on the commonest elements of human nature. It is beautiful because it is crystalline; it incarnates the sentiment of humanity, irradiated by the passionate poetical light. As a story it has an appeal to everybody, even to the theatre-goer, and if Mr. Gilbert, instead of tampering with it, had simply arranged its best scenes in their dramatic sequence, he would have certainly succeeded in arousing the public interest and securing the public applause. Rash in his endeavour to justify himself, Mr. Gilbert appealed straight to the literary public by THE MODERN STAGE. 283 publishing his play. Some of his critics seem to have told him that it was too " poetical " to succeed on the modern stage, and failed in consequence of its superiority. This is an error. For once playgoers re- sented a provincial interpretation of a literary master- piece ; they did so^ however^ not because the piece was provincial, but because its provincialism was dreary. In Mr. Gilbert^s play Faust is transformed into a very uninteresting monk, Mephistopheles into a talker of comic journal satire, and Margaret into a mincing young lady who lives and dies the mere echo of a monotone. On his first appearance Mephisto (as Mr. Gilbert calls him) says, with an eye to the gods : You see We devils have our consciences. In vice We can do nearly all that man can do, But not quite all. There are some forms of sin From which we shrink, and that is one of them. I have no stomach for such worldly work, But get a ma7i to help you. This, of course, is thoroughly provincial, thoroughly undevilish, but sure of a guffaw from the gallery. The character of Gretchen is pitched in the same key. Just as Mephisto poses as a dry dog, fond of his joke, does she pose as the incarnation of pretty virginity. She is, in fact, Miss Marion Terry, the very charming but particularly monotonous young lady who created the part, and to whom the published play is dedicated. Throughout the whole drama we never escape into the free air of passion and poetry ; we are encumbered at every step by the mannerisms and platitudes of the boarding-school ideal. Goethe's Marguerite is supremely and essentially a woman. PVom the moment when she tries on the jewels before the glass to the hour when she dies raving 284 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. mad in gaol, she is splendid and sublime by sheer force of typical womanhood. Her strength is that unconscious purity which comes of a soul thoroughly and simply human in all its passions, sorrows, and desires. This other Marguerite, or Gretchen, is a living doll, a thing of self-consciousness, simpers, and sawdust. When she dies in the atmosphere of poetry, with a stage sunrise reddening behind her, she says : Heaven wills that thou should'st live — that I should die — So let us yield ourselves to heaven's will. The provincial mind is as fond of talking about " Heaven^s will/^ as of that other ^Mittle article'^ (as Mr. Toole called it once in a comedy by Mr. Reade), " a father's curse." I have made no quotations from Mr. Gilbert's play, because there are no passages to repay quo- tation. The best speech is one by Mephisto in the third act, where he calls down the curse of hell upon Faust^s head ; but even this is disfigured by con- ventional expressions — "false priest/^ *' lying trade,^^ "*' smug-faced brotherhood,^' ^^ chicken-soul," and other jargon of the theatre. What is most extraordinary in the work, as the production of the dramatist by profession, is its utter negation of all dramatic effect ; even when the situations are good, they are lost by want of technical skill. Mr. Gilbert shines as a writer of theatrical trifles, where dramatic insight is not wanted. He is a wag, and, to a certain extent, a comic poet, and I much like his adaptation to the stage of his own " Bab Ballads." But he has not even mastered the poetic vocabulary, and I trust Gretchen will be his last experiment in what writers call the " modern poetical drama." It has remained for Mr. Irving, in his position of THE MODERN STAGE. 28^ champion extraordinary of the poetical drama, to exhibit before audiences bewildered by Mr. Gilbert,. a play which adumbrates, with all its shortcomings, the true Faust of Goethe, which possesses the soul of poetry, though not its language ; which, when all is said and done, is worth a thousand such futilities as Gretchen ; and which, above all, supplies the one imaginative manager-actor of this generation with a role which absorbs the full resources of his undoubted artistic genius. It is little wonder, therefore, that the critics have taken heart of grace, and talked again hopefully, if mysteriously, of a possible ^^ dramatic revival.'^ Periodically, say every five years, the great English-speaking public is startled by the eager voice of the quidnunc, announcing this prospect. Periodically, the voice dies away among other voices of the crowd, while the dear old moribund drama continues in its corpse-like coma, with spasmodic quickenings of death in life. When Robertson loomed above the horizon, the world prepared for something cosmic, only to discover that what it imagined to be a sun was a sort of gigantic tea-cup. When Boucicault rose radiant out of the sea of Irish woes, there was another portent, but what onlookers at first mistook for a potent magician^s wand, turned out to be only — a shillelah. Meantime, the accomplished author of Pmafore, like a facetious Choragus of Choragi,. has amused himself by poking fun at the Shape that once lived and moved and spoke the tongue of Shakespeare, by ridiculing its sock and buskin, by deriding its antique method, so persistently and so cleverly, with such a touch of Aristophanes-plus- Mr. Guppy and the ** jolly bank-holiday-every-day young man '' — that it has been a dangerous thing 286 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. for any dramatist to view life seriously or sentiment- ally, or to attempt the grand manner so familiar to our fathers. Against the influence of sad wags like Mr. Gilbert, we have to set such phenomena as the beautiful "^ revivals" of Mr. Irving, which have reminded playgoers that after all there is a grand manner, and that it is a little better, when all is said and done, than the manner of the middle-class cynic. But to do Mr. Gilbert justice (and no one is a warmer admirer of his saturnine humour than I am), his influence for good in this generation has, at least, equalled his influence for evil. He might be de- scribed, with some measure of truth, as the Mark Twain of the stage ; for while the American humour- ist has succeeded in disintegrating so much of the shallow enthusiasm and false sentiment of ordinary life, the English one has done the same service in destroying what was false and meretricious in dramatic tradition. True, he has gone to the extreme length in disillusionising the public sentiment as to all the higher dramatic emotions ; but that was inevitable, and the question will adjust itself by-and- hy, since those emotions are practically indestructible. As the matter now stands, any attempt at pure poetry on the stage is very like skating on thin ice. There can be no doubt, nevertheless, that our grandfathers very often took platitude for poetry and heroic pos- turing for the acting of nature. A modern dramatist or actor must now reckon on a public prepared at 'all points to dispute and ridicule his method wherever it conflicts with common-sense. Love is not a passion a la mode, and there is a tendency to "guy" love scenes. Strong exhibitions of emotion are unpopular in real life and equally so in the theatre. At the same time the swift inspiration of genius can conque^^ THE MODERN STAGE. 287 the prejudice against the sentiment of love, or rather against its too maudlin expression, and justify the strongest and wildest of emotions under the right conditions. Besides the revival of poetical drama, real or so- called, there has of late years been a revival of melodrama. Mr. Sims, Mr. Pettitt, and Mr. Jones have produced alone, or in collaboration, a number of bright and panoramic plays of human life. Mr. Sims possesses a true literary talent and a fine vein of workaday humour. Mr. Pettitt stands alone as a dramatic ^^ constructor.^' Mr. Jones appears to have lofty aims and praiseworthy literary pretensions, while openly despising the craft in which he has, sought for popularity. That the critics are eager j to discover literary merit wherever they can is shown? by their lavish praise of the following passage from; the Silver King, put into the mouth of a rehabilitated I drunkard and betting man : ' O God, put back thy universe and give me yesterday ! Curiously enough, what is food for mirth to one generation becomes actual poetry to another, since the passage I have quoted is simply a paraphrase of the famous lines given by Martinus Scriblerus, in the " Art of Sinking in Poetry " : O God, annihilate both space and time, And make two lovers happy ! If it were my wish or my business to find fault with Mr. Jones, I should say that he possesses one serious fault in a dramatist — that of sometimes mistaking , " fine writing " for literature ; but of his earnestness there is no question. Besides the gentlemen I have named, Mr. Sydney Grundy and Mr. Pinero are now diligent 288 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. contributors to public entertainment. Mr. Grundy is a brilliant and an able dramatist, with an unique capacity for writing trenchant dialogue, and it may be confidently predicted that he will take a high place among contemporaries, if ever plays are judged on their merits as literature. Mr. Pinero seems to be a pupil of Mr. Gilbert's, without his master's cunning, but with much of his disagreeable cynicism. Another writer of note, Mr. Clement Scott, though better known as a critic, has done excellent work for the stage, both singly and in collaboration with Mr. B. C. Stephenson. Diplomacy was an admirable piece of rendition, and there was great ingenuity shown in Peril. I have not seen Sister Mary, but I hear it spoken of as a vigorous attempt at purely emotional drama. While the drama remains moribund, the world is full of actors who may fairly be accounted virile. It is no exaggeration to say that the greatest of these actors are Americans. On this side of the water we have no artists, with the exception of Mr. Irving, worthy to rank by the side of Booth, of Jefferson, of Lester Wallack. Even to an Englishman familiar with the finest efforts of Charles Mathews, the acting of the younger Wallack comes with all the force of a revelation. I saw this princely comedian for the first time in The Bachelor of Arts. He had long been to me an illustrious name, one of the few American names known by familiar report on this side, but I had imagined him one of the " old school," in the Gilbertian and invidious sense. Of the old school he is certainly, in so far as his method puts all the eftbrts of the new school to shame ; at once broad,, subtle, swift, and penetrating, it is the method of the born actor, equipped with all the culture of his. THE MODERN STAGE. 289 fascinating- art. Nowadays, I fear, actors are made, not born, and made very badly. Young men flock upon the stage because it has become a lucrative profession. Formerly only those achieved histrionic reputation who possessed by nature a commanding, an interesting, or an amusing personality. Nature, even more than art, created, in their various lines of character, Mrs. Siddons, the Kembles, Macready, Kean, Harley, Robson, Charles Mathews, Buck- stone, Keeley. Compton, Wigan, and Walter Lacy. Not but that the same kind of creation takes place occasionally even now. Nature, far more than art, has given us Ellen Terry. The fact remains, however, that modern actors generally suggest the idea of professionals who have mistaken their profession. Let any one who doubts this go to Wallack^s when the master is acting, and compare him with the ladies and gentlemen who surround him. There are clever people among them, but, with the exception of the tried veteran, John Gilbert, they strike the spectator as people who act to live, not live to act. In companies where there is no star of the first magnitude, the effect, of course, is different. At Daly's, for example, there is a combination so admirable in ensemble, so full of natural talent and acquired fitness, so excellently guided and directed, that it became last summer the talk of London. Nearly every member of the company has been chosen for his natural acting gifts, and from officers to rank and file, the whole regiment is fit for the field, and magnificently manoeuvred. In England nowadays, I regret to say, the ten- dency to what may be called, rather Irishly, pro- fessional amateurism, is much more marked than in America. It began with the Robertsonian successes, u 290 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. which in their excessive and somewhat insipid naturalism called into existence very little first-class talent, but opened the stage door to hundreds of average young men and women. Here and there, but almost by accident, an artist of distinction ap- peared to break the genteel monotony of the per- formances at the Prince of Wales' Theatre ; there were brightness and natural gaiety in Marie Wilton, rich humour in George Honey, a pretty kind of talent for grasping small bits of character, in Mr. Hare. But when the Prince of Wales comedians exhausted Robertson and removed to the large stage of the Haymarket Theatre, it was plain that they were little more than amateurs after all. A cruder exhibition than the performance of Masks and Faces was certainly never seen on the amateur stage; and The Rivals^ as we all know, was even worse. The public yearned for the old methods, and found them not very far off, at the Lyceum. I am far from suggesting, as many do, that the loss of the fine old crusted performer of the past generation, the performer who played half-a-dozen parts a week with more or less incoherence, is a thing to be deplored, or that the inroad of good-looking walking gentlemen has been wholly without its advan- tages. Actors, nowadays, take pains to be natural, they conduct themselves like gentlemen on and off the stage, they dress well and appropriately, they seldom over-act or murder the Queen's English. But all this improvement, consequent on managerial re- cruiting among penniless dukes and impecunious earls, will not compensate for the genius, the natural adaptability, which used to be the actor's distinguish- ing qualification, or for the boldness and fearlessness THE MODERN STAGE. 291 of method, which made tragedy tolerable and comedy- puissant. Turn again to Lester Wallack^ and see him step upon the stage ; then turn to any of our modern interpreters of comedy, and note the dif- ference. The secret of the power and fascination is, that this man is the part he plays ; that nature, in Lester Wallack, created the physical and intel- lectual type fit to wear the idiosyncracy of Charles Courtley, of Harry Jasper, of D'Artagnan, of Don Caesar de Bazan. Ars est celare artem ; the art is not manifest, because Nature herself is potent in estab- lishing the verisimilitude. The finest of all acting, indeed, resolves into another Irishism — that, mt fond^ there is very little acting about it. Fechter in his young days was Armand Duval, Desclee was Camille, Lemaitre was Robert Macaire, Robson was Sampson Burr, Buckstone was Toby Twinkle, Compton was Touchstone, Helen Faucit was Cordelia, and so on all the world over. Natural fitness, plus the many resources and practices of the art, is what constitutes the true actor. In England this fact is understood, perhaps, in only one direction. I have long wondered what quality it is in the English atmosphere, or in the English constitution, which breeds so many genuine "comedians." On the soil of America, so far as I have seen, they do not thrive ; yet in England their name has been and is legion. Harley, Buck- stone, Compton, Robson, Wright, Toole, Righton, Lionel Brough, George Honey, David James, Thomas Thorne, George Barrett, are names that will occur at once to many. The humour of each of these per- formers was, or is, something siti generis^ but there is a family likeness in it all, indeed, a Cockney likeness. In other branches of the business England is not so U 2 292 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. excellent. It is doubtful, for example, if we possess a really first-class "juvenile" performer. Henry Neville — whose first appearance caused Planchd to leap out of his seat and cry, " At last we have an actor ! " — is still perhaps the best, despite his years, which he carries very lightly. Charles Coghlan has great talent, but is unequal and very weak in scenes of passion, where Neville is strong. Kyrle Bellew has shown abundant promise, but is somewhat too self-conscious and artificial ; while Harry Conway, who began as the very weakest of walking gentlemen, has lately shown remarkable earnestness and latent strength. In personal attractiveness, William Terriss is the most endowed of them all. ' The same lack of genius which is the fault of our juvenile actors, is to be found among our actresses. In scenes of power and passion, even Ellen Terry loses much of her charm. Mrs. Kendal is an inimit- able comedieniie, but quite without the pathetic fallacy in romantic and poetical characters, which she has sometimes attempted. Her Pauline, in the Lady of Lyons, is not a high-born beauty in distress, but a liousemaid in a passion ; her Claire, in the Irojwiaster, is strenuously artificial in its pathetic solicitations. In pure comedy, however, Mrs. Kendal is supremely delightful. Much her superior in the higher graces of the art is Madame Modjeska, a somewhat arti- ficial but exquisitely refined actress. Miss Ada Cavendish, though inferior in her method, has really inspired moments. The original freshness and sweet girlish grace of Miss Kate Rorke surpass all the attitudinising of more pretentious actresses. Mrs. Langtry is Venus from foot to forehead. Miss Mary Anderson is stridently juvenile, but splendidly beau- tiful. Passing away from leading ladies, we have THE MODERN STAGE. 293 ingenues by the score, and soitbrettes by the dozen ; one of the brightest of the latter being Miss Lottie Venne, an inimitable actress in her own peculiar line. Glancing downward through the ranks of the profes- sion, we shall discover that the most noticeable artists are those who follow the good old method. There is Mr. Mead, whom I remember playing the whole range of the drama years ago at the Grecian ; Mr. Howe, who graduated in the robustly vigorous Hay- market school; Mr. Willard and Mr. Speakman, both in Wilson Barrett's company ; Mr. Hermann Vezin, perhaps the finest elocutionist living, and consummately excellent when suited ; Mr. Charles Warner, full of electricity and splendid animal spirits; Mr. Fernandez, excellent in everything, but especially excellent in strong, rugged character studies ; and Mr. Odell, who has a quiddity and oddity peculiarly his own. All the artists I have named are to be distinguished from the mob of gentlemen of the new school, who get upon the stage with ease, and act without intellectual conviction. Why is it, then, that, with so many capable artists, and so warm an appreciation of their talents on the part of the public, we have so i^\N virile plays ? Be- cause there are no great dramatic authors, say the critics. Because the managers are uninstructed, say the playwrights. Because the public is a great silly baby, to be pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw, say the managers. It may be quite true that we have no great dramatists, but it is also true that we have among us men capable of splendid dramatic work, if such work were in demand ; not only within the circle of known writers for the stage, but outside of it, are such men to be found. But it is simply impossible to ensure 294 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the production of any drama which is not, to a certain extent, conventional after the known and approved fashions. The enormous outlay necessary in London to mount an important piece, the loss consequent on failure, the apathy of the public to new ideas of any kind, frighten the managers from making experi- ments. When Claiidian was produced in London, everybody anticipated failure because it dealt with an ideal and far-off subject ; and Mr. Barrett, himself, though a most enlightened manager and actor, had so holy a fear of the mere mention of " blank verse," that he caused the piece to be written in a sort of hybrid lingo, neither verse nor good prose, which utterly destroyed its value as literature. At a huge sacrifice of time and money, the play was forced along, till at last its novelty and beauty were recog- nised. . Here, however, the circumstances were very exceptional ; and moreover, Claudian furnished a star part for a manager of ample resources. Under any other conditions, the piece would have been with- drawn within a month. My own experience, which I may cite by way of illustration, is the experience of nearly every dramatic author living. Having an intimate and practical knowledge of stage require- ments, acquired through early connection with the theatre, I find it possible to produce pieces which please the manager, and sometimes the public ; but whenever I have proposed any drama lofty in method or unconventional in form, I have been met with the answer that such productions are inexpedient. Management is too precarious a business for experi- ments of any kind. Then again, it is very difficult indeed to please both the critics and the public, and what pleases one will often repel the other. Nor are critics always THE MODERN STAGE. 295 unanimous. Two plays of mine, produced in London and afterwards repeated successfully in America, met with exactly opposite treatment from the newspapers here and on the other side. Storm-beaten (an adapta- tion of my own novel, "God and the Man^') was received with no little praise by the leading critics of London ; in New York it was roundly slaughtered in several quarters. On the other hand, Lady Clare, which some London critics treated coldly, and which gained its success in London in the face of lukewarm criticism, was praised liberally by the American Press, almost without an exception. It is the custom in London, and often a sheer necessity, to force plays into success by large expendi- tures of money, and in the teeth of disastrous business. For many weeks Pinafore^ the most successful of modern comic operas, played to quite inadequate receipts ; so, I am informed, did the Colleen Bawn. The Private Secretary, when acted at the Prince's Theatre, involved the author in a loss of some thousands of pounds ; but he held firmly on to it, and transferring it to the Globe, reaped a late but abundant harvest Of course this can only be done where the play possesses great vitality in itself, or where the management is unusually sanguine and determined. It is seldom or never, I believe, done in America, where pieces stand or fall by a first night's reception, and by the perfunctory morning criticism. The exceptions are cases where the play is produced with an ultimate eye to the " road,'' rather than with any view of immediately making money. I have touched upon the commercial side of the matter, because, in dramatic work, there is no golden mean between success and failure. A play is con- 296 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. demned absolutely, if it does not prove managerially profitable; no matter what its literary or technical merit, no matter how warm its reception, it is justified or condemned by the amount of money paid by audiences who wish to see it. Now, modern audiences are mixed assemblages of men, women, and even children. When a great drama flourished in England, playgoers were different, ready to respond to any kind of method, however daring, if it was justified by its cleverness; and if a prude sat listening under the rain or sunlight, her blushes were hidden by a mask. Later on, when we had a superb comedy, great in spite of its license, the conditions were the same ; the subjects were selected without tremor, the treatment was slapdash, the speech vehement, reck- less, and bold. It is too late in the day to reproduce these conditions, nor am I suggesting for a moment that their reproduction would be desirable. How far indiscriminate license may degrade and even emascu- late art may be seen any night in Paris at the Palais Royal. But it is obvious at a glance that a dramatist writing for a mixed modern audience, with Mr. and Miss Podsnap in the stalls, must choose his subjects carefully and treat them very gingerly. Were he a very Sophocles, he would have to eschew the story of CEdipus; were he an Euripides, he would have to fight shy of the domestic life of Phaedra. He must, in short, to be listened to at all, avoid all offence against moral and religious prejudices, follow the conventional ethics, humour the popular creeds, use language easily intelligible to immature persons. He must on no account attempt to edify; if he does, he is lost, and catalogued as a bore. THE MODERN STAGE. 2^7 III. THE DRAMA AND THE CENSOR. There comes a time in the history of nearly every great literary movement when it is necessary for some member of the community to protest, in the name of himself and in the name of the class to which he belongs, against vexatious and quasi- providential interference from above. I think that time has come in the history of our modern stage, where some are pleased to perceive the dim dawnings- of a dramatic revival ; and I believe that I can count on the sympathy of readers of this book, if in citing certain experiences of my own I take leave to protest against an authority very much resembling persecution. I must premise, however, by saying that I have no private or personal feeling in the matter. For the present reader and licenser of plays, Mr. Pigott, I have the highest respect and consideration. Such as his spiriting is, he does it gently enough. But the position he holds, and the influence he brings to- bear, are, in my opinion, so fatal to the interests of dramatic art, that it will soon be expedient to inquire into the true nature of his authority, its legality, and the prospects of its limitation, or best of all, its total suspension. There was recently represented at the Adelphi Theatre, a drama from my pen, entitled Storm-beaten^ and almost identical in subject with my novel, " God and the Man." This drama contained (I say it in all humility) a central idea as elevated, as pre-eminently religious, and I may add Christian, as is to be founds perhaps, in any other drama of modern times; an idea indeed embodying and adumbrating the very central 298 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. conception of Christianity. How it was worked out, whatever might be its literary shortcomings, is another matter. My point is that the drama's purpose was the very highest and noblest possible from the spiritual point of view. That it touched the heart of the public, both here and in America, where it is still being represented, is now pretty well known. Now in this drama, as professedly ethical and avowedly religious, the name of " God '^ was used from time to time — never profanely, never being taken in vain ; that name had even been printed upon the playbill ; and in the last act, as the triumph •of Christian love and brotherhood was proclaimed, the lovely Easter Hymn of our Church was sung by the village choir. I do not think any truly religious spectator, whatever his creed, could witness Storni- beatejt, or listen to the holy music of its close, with any feeling of discomfort or sense of incongruity. But the Lord Chamberlain, in the exercise of his traditional authority, thought otherwise. He objected to the mere mention of the name of "God '^ in a stage play, as unnecessarily impious ; he resented the printing of the name of God in a playbill as an •additional outrage ; he denounced the singing of the Easter Hymn on the stage as a needless piece of profanity ; and, finally, he hinted to the management of the theatre that their license was in danger, if these things were not immediately reformed, as, I regret to say, they speedily were. About that time there came to me a letter, written, not by any mere layman or outsider, but by an ordained minister of the Scottish Church, containing the following passage : What a wretched piece of official prudery that was of the Censor regarding your play ! It was good enough for a religious THE MODERN STAGE. 299 magazine, but too good for a playbill. The Censor's objection implies that he is the controller of the Devil's work. God must not be named in the documents with which he has to deal. This sarcasm, though bitter enough, certainly hit the mark. The drama, according to the Lord Chamberlain, must be eternally divorced from the Gospel according to any of the Apostles ; the religion which animates our best literature is to have no influence upon our stage, which is to remain, what it has remained from Shakespeare's time, a mere ex- crescence, a thing for shallow hearts and idle heads, a spectacle for an hour^s passing amusement — the DeviFs pastime, and nothing more ! The same Censor who is outraged at the word "God" in a playbill, \vould have swooned at the face of the " Holy Mother ^^ on a wall ; and Raphael would have been requested not to paint Madonnas. The same Censor who is outraged by the singing of a church hymn on the stage, would have been indignant at the musical description of God creating the world out of chaos, and Haydn would have been asked not to compose any more " Creations.^' Fortunately, however, paint- ing is a free art, and sacred music has no Lord Chamberlain. The question of mine is, I hold, one on which the whole fate of the English drama must depend. If the art of the dramatist is to be measured out to please the whim of a Court.functionary, who condemns the clothing of religious symbols, but approves the nakedness of Gaiety burlesque ; if the insane bigotry of the Church (with its rabid hatred of its hereditary rival, the stage) is to cripple the dramatist's work as it has done from time immemorial, the sooner we cease talking about a dramatic '^ revival '' the better. Thanks to the Lord Chamberlain, the whole marvellous 300 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. psychological drama of the French Empire has been interdicted to us, while there has been no real inter- diction on the nudity of Chatelet spectacle or the ulcerous corruption of the Palais Royal. Thanks to the Lord Chamberlain, great themes of passion are forbidden to the dramatic poet and student of human nature, while the dramatic " Masher " behind the curtain has carte blancJie to cater to the taste of the social '^ Masher " in the stalls. Thanks to the Lord Chamberlain, our drama is no drama, our art is no art, all the intent and purpose of stage performances being to amuse fools and chronicle small beer. But the drama, I trust, has a higher function than to please a modern Petronius and pass away an idle hour. It is the noblest of all arts, and should be the most free ; and it embraces in its scope, not merely its kindred arts of poetry, painting, music, but from the days of yEschylus downwards it has held out the hand to Religion, its grave veiled sister. To para- phrase again the words of George Herbert : A play may find him who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice ! Not that it is foredoomed to the heresy of mere instruction — that doom would be fatal to its claim as art ; but there is no sphere of man's life, no phase of man's religion, with which it might not freely and candidly deal. True, there is a region of mystery, of spiritual sacredness, where it has never ventured since the days of the Greek, and there is no need that it should venture there again. The public is a wise judge, a judge that knows well with what sacred means the drama has a right to deal, and what others it ought to let alone ; and I believe there is no public so sagacious as our English play-going one, THE MODERN STAGE. 301 in resenting inconsistency, mere edification, or idle profanity. But the dramatist should be able, like the poet, like the painter, like the musician, to go direct before his Rhadamanthus, to be condemned or approved, not in the ante-room, or in darkness, but in the broad daylight of the open court of public opinion. I know well what arguments may be adduced by the friends and supporters of the Censor in support of the theory that a censorship of the drama is necessary ; they are the same which have been used, from one dark age to another, to suppress free thought and free speech, and to limit literary activity. But the suppression of literature delayed, from century to century, the spread of natural knowledge, and the suppression of the drama (to compare small things with great) is likely to postpone indefinitely the resuscitation of our Elizabethan mummy, the dramatic Muse — which is not dead, but sleeping, after all. What man of genius would care to write poetry or fiction, If a gentleman In Court livery were placed at his shoulder, pointing out the kind of inspiration he thought expedient .-* What painter would care to produce pictures, what musician to compose music, if his work were to be regulated by the good taste of a special providence, salaried by the State ? Such Intervention would be the death of poetry, painting, and music, as it has been the death or syncope of the drama. But It is with the professors of dramatic art themselves that the remedy lies. The timidity of the old days, when the actor was an outcast, still clings to them ; they are acquiring literary culture, but they still lack spiritual courage, so that we see every day the spectacle of artists cowering before the bottled thunder of Little Bethel, and feebly accepting the patronage which Is 302 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. an insult In lieu of the homage which is a right. Let the truth be uttered : that the Art which ^schylus made religious, which Shakespeare made humane, which Moliere made reformatory, must and shall be free ; that her true place is not at the feet of Religion^ but at her side — sometimes even, during times of folly and superstition, in the empyrean above her head. Abolish the Lord Chamberlain, and we shall soon have virile plays. Free the tied tongue of the stage, and men of genius will soon teach it the divine speech of poetry and passion. But until this thing is done, until dramatists acquire the privileges and exercise the functions of manhood, the prospects of a dramatic revival, so fervently to be wished for, must be in- definitely postponed. Note. — Since the production of Storm-beaten has come the Lyceum production of Fajcst, in which religious forms and expressions are freely and liberally used, and in which the Devil himself is a chief character. I have not heard that the Lord Chamberlain has remonstrated with Mr. Irving on the " blasphemous " nature of his production, or has requested him to cut out any of the christian hymns. So that there is one law for the Adelphi, and another for the Lyceum ; a sanction for Goethe, and no sanction at all for the contemporary dramatist. — R. B. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. I. A NOTE ON EMILE ZOLA. (1886.) As one grows older, one wonders less at the pro- verbial philosophy of contemporary criticism. While the Saturday Review still exists, though toothless. and moribund, a journalistic Dogberry proclaiming the watches of the literary night to a generation still unaware of sunrise and of Mr. Spencer, there will always be a class of readers which takes its opinions, on faith and eagerly echoes the anathemas pronounced' by senile watchmen against " one Deformed '^ and other disturbers of the public peace. We smile at Dogberry, though it is sad to reflect that never once, from the beginning of his official career, has he done a sane or a generous thing, has he recognised a. new thought or a rising reputation, has he ceased to regard all men of genius as malefactors, and all mediocrities as men of genius. Among the great, men of our time who are oftenest ''run in" by the ^"^ old-fashioned literary watch, perhaps the most phleg- matic of all is Emile Zola. Despite a chorus of un-- instructed abuse he goes doggedly on his way, and. ■^•.^ ^^^ 304 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. /even when hauled up before the magistrates he con- tinues to assert his right of private judgment and his complete contempt for critical authority. I con- fess that I admire this stolid attitude, so different to '{that of most revolutionaries. I confess that I like vto see this sublime contempt for Dogberry and jVerges. Poor Thackeray was irritated when told by '^he watch that he was "no gentleman." Dickens was actually angry when informed on the same authority that his " Tale of Two Cities " was idle rubbish. Notis avons change tout cela. We are merely amused when we hear the old cry, '' This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the Prince's name.''' It is only when men who should be wiser join in the ersecution that one's amusement turns into indig- nation. For my own part I am amazed as well as in- dignant when Mr. R. L. Stevenson, who ought to know better, accuses the author of " Une Page d' Amour'' of being possessed by ^'erotic madness!'' Then I •smile again, seeing the good Mr. Howells from Boston, gentle apostle of jnan-millinery, interpose for the defence, and generously affirm that Zola, though a sad offender against good taste, is a severe moralist, land, at the same time, the cleverest Frenchman alive ! ~ " "~ ^ The fact is, Zola is to literature what Schopenhauer is to philosophy — the preacher of a creed of utter despair. No living writer has a stronger and purer sense of the beauty of moral goodness ; no living man finds so little goodness in the world to awaken his faith or enlarge his hope. But if Zola is " erotic," then a demonstrator of morbid anatomy is a sensualist, and a human physiologist is a person of unclean pro- -clivities. True enough, he is conscious, even morbidly FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, 305 conscious, of the great part which the god Priapus plays in modern life, more especially in those phases of life which-are-^arisian. Everywhere he diagnoses disease : Disease and Anguish walking hand in hand The downward slope to death ! Naturally, too, he is a little unhealthy, for the stench of the dissecting-room does not conduce to vigour. But of all men that wield a pen, he is perhaps the least " erotic:^ — At- little ^^ mad ^' he may be, for,l after all, some of us hold pessimism to be scarcely short of madness. His hatred of sensuality, his loathing of vice in all Its forms, amounts to a passion.T He finds, with Schopenhauer, that human nature is corrupt to the very core, but he always remembers, with Schopenhauer, that self-sacrifice and spiritual love, where they exist, are infinitely beautiful and noble. To him, the apples of the Hesperides are merest Dead Sea fruit. To him the god Eros is a corpse, smelling of corruption. To him, nevertheless, purity is a fact — the one grain of salt sprinkled on a putrefying world. As I write, the face of little Jeanne, gazing out of " Une Page d'Amour,^^ rebukes the lie which brands its creator as infamous and unclean ; but even over this divine child bends the Nemesis of Sin, cruel, piteous, and hideous — the same Nemesis that leant over the disease-disfigured coun- tenance of Nana the courtesan, and over the figure of the old woman, paralysed in her chair, whose son married Therese Raquin. " Erotic,'' quotha ! Spirits of mutual admiration, genial souls of the Savile Club, is "this your indictment } Come, Messires Dogberry and Verges, arrest this rogue " Deformed," and haul ' ^ him up for judgment; then, when Zola is sentenced to his fourteen days, go and seize Pasteur in his X 3o6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. /laboratory, suppress Huxley, stifle the physiologist and the philosopher as offenders against public \decency, and put Herbert Spencer into the stocks ! , Grim moralist and stern physiologist as he is, and as such supremely justified, Zola is nevertheless all lyrQUg. To say that, however, is neither to impute nis motive nor to deny his genius. Like all French- men, he is possessed by one overmastering ethical notion, which causes him to sermonise ad nmisemn. Even the French Empire, with all its faults, -was : something more than a subject for morbid anatomy. A man may die of syphilitic caries, yet be a living s'oul. In reading Zola, sane as he is, one has to hold_ /One's nose ; whereas life, real life, smells wholesome, /and it is a very phenomenal city whose existence can / onlyjbe determined by its lupanars and its sewers. Large as is the part which sensualism plays in life, • and which it must play as long as the beast's brain subsists within the man^s, it is merely a minor part after all. To Schopenhauer, the singing of the little birds was only one among many signs of their agony; to Zola, the music even of human love is a discord, ending in despair. Yet only a pessimist believes that the birds are utterly miserable, and that human creatures are completely vile or unhappy. So that, when all is said and done, the charge against Zola amounts to this — that he is a pessimist, and that pessimism is superficially impertinent and funda- mentally wrong. As it is. The subject of Zola's intellectual weakness is too long to discuss in a mere note, but it may be easily grasped by the reader who will refer to Zola's own notes on Proudhon. Proudhon is the philosopher who solves great social and literary problems by the power of generalisation. Zola is the artist who can- FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 307 not generalise. " Une oeuvre d'art est un coin de la creation vu a travers un temperament/' says the artist ; attempting a minor definition which in no way invalidates the philosopher's larger generalisation that temperaments and works of art are the products not merely of individuals, but of the collective temperament of nations and of humanity. Naturally, Zola misconceives Proudhon altogether. Great men, he thinks, are men who permit themselves to possess genius without "consulting humanity/' who say what they have in their *' entrails " (sic)^ and not what lies in the entrails of their ^' imbecile contemporaries." But perhaps no man that ever lived was ever so representative of his contemporaries, 'Mmbecile" or otherwise, as Emile Zola. He is a Frenchman of the Empire, seeing the world a travers the temperaments of all his fellow Frenchmen — not seeing it clearly not seeing it whole, not seeing anything in it but infinite corruption and infinite despair. ^^ En un mot, je suis diametralement oppose a Proudhon : il veut que Tart soit le produit de la nation ; j'exige qu'il soit le produit de I'individu ! " But that Proudhon is right, Zola himself offers the strongest literary demonstration. Despite all this, Zola is an earnest man and a strong writer, and I am glad to be able to say even these few Avords in his justification. X 2 3o8 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. II. CHARLES READE. A SOUVENIR. It was in the summer of 1876 that I first made the acquaintance of Charles Reade, at a Httle dinner given by Mr. John Coleman, then manager of the Queen^s Theatre. The occasion was one especially interesting to me, as the great novelist (for great and in some respects unparalleled he will be found to be, when the time for his due appraisement comes) had expressed a desire to meet my sister-in-law, who, though still a very young girl in her teens, had risen into sudden distinction by the publication of the '' Queen of Connaught ^^ — a work attributed in several quarters to Mr. Reade himself. Pleasant beyond measure was that night's meeting; pleasanter still the friendly intimacy which followed it, and lasted for years ; for of all the many distinguished men that I have met, Charles Reade, when you knew him thoroughly, was one of the gentlest, sincerest, and most sympathetic. With the intellectual strength and bodily height of an Anak, he possessed the quiddity and animal spirits of Tom Thumb. He was learned, but wore his wisdom lightly, as became a true English gentleman of the old school. His manners had the stateliness of the last generation, such manners as I had known in the scholar Peacock, himself a prince of tale-tellers ; and, to women especially, he had the grace and gallantry of the good old band of literary knights. Yet with all his courtly dignity he was as frank-hearted as a boy, and utterly without pretence. What struck me at once FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 309 in him was his supreme veracity. Above all shams and pretences, he talked only of what he knew ; and his knowledge, though limited in range, was large and memorable. At the period of our first acquain- tance he was living at Albert Gate, with the bright and genial Mrs. Seymour as his devoted friend and housekeeper ; and there, surrounded by his books of wonderful memoranda, he was ever happy to hold simple wassail with the few friends he loved. Gastro- nomically, his tastes were juvenile, and his table was generally heaped with sweets and fruits. A magnifi- cent whist and chess player, he would condescend to spend whole evenings at the primitive game of ",squales." In these and all other respects, he was the least bookish, the least literary person that ever used a pen ; indeed, if the truth must be told, his love for merely literary people was small, and he was consequently above all literary affectations. His keen insight went straight into a man^s real acquire- ments and real experience, apart from verbal or artistic clothing, and he was ever illustrating in practice the potent injunction of Goethe — Greift nur hinein in's voile Menschenleben ! Ein jeder lebt's, nicht vielen ist's bekannt, Und wo ihr's packt, da ist's interessant ! His sympathy was for the living world, not for the world of mere ideas ; and as his sympathy so was his religion — not a troubled, problem-haunted, querulous questioning of truths unrealised and unrealisable, but a simple, unpretending, humble, and faithful acqui- escence in those divine laws which are written in the pages of Nature and on the human heart. He read few books, and abominated fine writing. I well remember his impatience when, taking up a novel of Ouida, and being pestered with a certain 3IO A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE, abominable iteration about " an Ariadne," he sent the book flying across the room before he had reached the end of the first chapter. For the literature of pure imagination he cared little or nothing, perhaps not quite enough. Among the letters of his in my possession is one in which, referring to certain con- versations we had had on the subject of poetry, he utters the following dicta, following them up with the charming playfulness which was his most pleasant characteristic : " Even Tennyson, to my mind," he says, " is only a prince of poetasters * (!). I think with the ancients, in whose view the Poetae Majores were versifiers, who could tell a great story in great verse and adorn it with great speeches and fine descriptions ; and the Poetse Minores were versifiers who could do all the rest just as well, but could not tell a great story. In short, I look on poetry as fiction with the music of words. But, divorced from fiction, I do not much value the verbal faculty, nor the verbal music. And I believe this is the popular instinct, too. and that a musical story-teller would achieve an incredible popu- larity. Reflechissez-y ! Would have gone in for this myself long ago, but can only write doggerel. Example : " You and Miss Jay- Hope to see my play : I hope so too. Because — the day You see my play, I shall see you ! "■ Vive la poesie I " Yours ever very truly, " Reade." * This remark must be taken cum grano salis^ and only in reference to the argument which follows. Reade was a warm admirer of the poet Laureate. — R. B. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 311 Here I may appropriately refer to his habit of signing only with his surname those letters which he reserved for intimate friends. In all his personal relations he was completely frank, charming, and gay-hearted. On the back of a photograph before me, taken at Margate, whither he had gone for the benefit of his health, he wrote as follows : "Dear Miss Jay, " I enclose the benevolent Imbecile you say you require. It serves you right for not coming down to see me ! "C. R." " All previous attempts were solidified vinegar. This is the reaction, no doubt ! " * This was written not long before he encountered the great trouble of his later life, when the good and gracious friend who had made his home delightful to all who knew him was suddenly and cruelly taken away. " Seymour," as he used to call her very often, possessed much of his own fine frankness of character, and knew and loved him to the last with beautiful friendship and devotion. From the blow of her loss he never quite rallied. His grief was pitiful to see, in so strong a man ; but from that moment forward he turned his thoughts heavenward, accepting with noble simplicity and humility the full promise of the Christian faith. Fortunately, I think, for him, his intellect had never been speculative in the religious direction; he possessed the wisdom which to so many nowadays is foolishness, and was able, as an old man, to become as a little child. Any personal recollections of Charles Reade would be incomplete without some reference to his connection with the stage. From first to last he followed, with eager pertinacity, the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, descending into the arena to fight 312 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. with wild beasts — among men who, neither in man- hood nor in genius, had any right to be called his equals. Only in his latter days did he reap much pecuniary reward from the theatre, while to the very last he received scant respect from the ephemeral criticism of the day. But his love for the stage amounted to a passion, and more than once have I heard him say that he would rather earn five hundred pounds a year by writing plays than five thousand by writing novels. Unfortunately, he came upon a period when the dramatic art is without honour, and when the only standard of its success is commercial, and in his eagerness to meet halfway an uninstructed public, he had to call in the aid of the low comedian and the master carpenter. But if any reader would perceive how good work in this kind differs from bad, let him compare the literary workmanship of a play like Never Too Late to Mend or The Wandering Heir with any printed specimen of what is called in America the '''nailed-up ^^ drama, or set side by side with that by Charles Reade any other translation or adaptation of the French piece known as The Courier of Lyons. Even in his worst plays Charles Reade was a master of style. Far away from and above his achievements in the acting drama stand the works by which my dear and lamented friend first made his reputation. The time is not yet ripe for a fit judgment on these works ; but I am quite certain that if a poll of living novelists were taken it would be found that a large majority of them recognise Charles Reade, as Walter Besant some time ago nobly and fearlessly recognised him, as their Master. Yet I read in a newspaper the other day that Trollope considered Reade " almost a genius,'' and I am informed by the FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 313 Observer that " to speak of the author of * Never Too Late to Mend ' and ' Hard Cash ^ as a man of genius would be an exaggeration." "O saeclum insipiens et inficetum ! ^' Trollope, whose art was the art of Count Smorltork//?/^ the bathos of vestry-^ dom, Trollope, who could write a book about the West Indies without putting into it one poetical thought or line, passes judgment on a literary giant and pronounces him a genius — ''almost"! The Sunday newspaper, which would doubtless canonise the author of "John Inglesant/^ measures this Colossus, and finds him of "a tall man^s height — no more"! Some of us, on the other hand, who are not to be daunted by bogus reputations, or to be awed by the idiocy of approven literary godhead, hold to our first faith that one man alone in our generation mastered the great craft of Homeric story-telling, and that this same man has created for us a type of womanhood which will live like flesh and blood when the heroines of Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot are relegated to the old curiosity shop of sawdust dolls. For my own part, I would rather have written " The Cloister and the Hearth" than half-a-dozen '^Romolas," and I would rather have been Charles Reade, great, neglected, and misunderstood in his generation, than the pretentious and pedagogic Talent which earned the tinsel crown of contemporary homage, to be speedily dethroned, and, in the good time that is coming for Genius, justly forgotten. 314 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. III. GEORGE ELIOrS LIFE. The new life of George Eliot, by her last husband, Mr. Cross, has been justly praised by some English journals as a model of book-making, consisting, as it does, almost entirely of the lady^s own letters, slightly and somewhat loosely linked together ; but it is, none the less, about as dreary and lugubrious a work as men have met with during the last decade. Without any bold unveiling of the Sibyl, we are made to feel, not for the first time of late, that this biographical habilitation or rehabilitation of dead men and women, is, at best, an unfortunate business; for, though George Eliot is invoked to tell her own story, and tells it fairly well, it all amounts to nothing after all. We get few hints of honest human thought, not to speak of flesh and blood ; we find that the Sibyl is still posing, and will not let us catch one glimpse of her real face. This statement may seem extraordinary to readers who are content to accept as self-revelation a good deal of feminine gossip, much talk about receipts and sales, some remarks on gang- lionic cells, and a few quasi-editorial opinions on the advantages of beneficence. But Posterity, if it should interest itself very much on the subject — which I take leave to doubt — will want something more ; something such as comes to us, with almost Biblical sojemnity, in the terribly pathetic story of poor Carlyle. When I met George Eliot first, over twenty years ago, she was living, with her husband, George Henry Lewes, at the Priory, St. John^s Wood, London, and FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 315 was then a tallj slight, not ungraceful woman, in the prime of life. As every one knows, she had a great reputation, which she had already begun to discount, however, by the production of ^^ poetry/' Every art and device of the experienced litterateur had been used by Lewes, a thorough man of the world, to make that reputation mysterious and sibyl- line ; so that an unanimous press and a confiding public were leagued together in the faith that George Eliot spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Seldom do works of art satisfy both the instructed and the uninstructed classes ; yet " Adam Bede" and "Silas Marner '^ did so, and the author received the daily assurance of completed fame. A few, like my- self, failed to recognise, in some of the author's works, the puissant touch which conveys literary immortality, while discovering in them, amidst so much that was admirable and exquisitely expressed, a distressing taint of intellectual conventionality, foreign to the nature of truly creative genius. What I saw of, George Eliot personally confirmed me in my im- pression that the sibylline business, both publicly and privately, had been overdone. Naturally pas- sionate, aggressive, sceptical yet impulsive, she had sat so long upon the tripod that her genius had become frozen at the fountain, and her character was veneered over with the self-pride of insight ; so that, with all her apprehensiveness, she lacked sympathy, and with all her moral enthusiasm, she was spiritually cold. The life she led was not one favourable to free- dom of character. She saw few people, and those few were Sibyl-worshippers ; her sex debarred her from the knowledge of at least two-thirds of humanity ; her literary prosperity was untroubled by miscon- ceptions or harsh criticisms ; so it is little wonder 3i6 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. that life at last became for her an ingenious physio- logical puzzle, to be pieced together with the assist- ance of M. Comte and Mr. Harrison. The result, I believe, is recorded in literary productions which, with all their brilliancy and subtlety, with all their friendliness of outlook, with all their well-weighed catholicity, became at last, in the worst sense, mechanical, and exchanged for lineaments of flesh and blood the deathly stare and ghastly ineffectiveness of a ** waxwork ^^ * exhibition. A characteristic passage in these letters is the one where George Eliot describes her interest in Wallace's " Malayan Archipelago," and her particular delight in the record of the birth and babyhood of the young orang-outang. Here her sympathy with popular science warmly asserted itself, and, indeed, she was always most thoroughly at home in welcom- ing any suggestion which threw discredit on the superhuman pretensions of human nature. Very early in her career she had laid the spectre of " An- thropomorphism," and discovered that Comte's Grand Eire was a more reasonable person than the Pater Noster of popular superstition. Forthwith it seems to have occurred to her that human types, pos- sessing all the peculiarities of living beings, might be created for the world by a sort of intellectual evo- lution. But alas ! the world has discovered by this time that these types, so scientifically fashioned, were homunculi and simulacra, not human creatures. No such process could have given us Tom and Maggie Tulliver, or Mrs. Poyser, or even Hetty Sorrel ; but it gave us Romolaand Daniel Deronda, and Dorothea Brooke, and the skittish marionette, Fedalma. It is * This epithet of " waxwork " was very happily applied by Mr. Swinburne to "Daniel Deronda." FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 317 a pity, therefore, that George EHot ever learned the vocabulary of science, or heard anything, even at second hand, about ganglionic cells. The radical defect of her mind, or rather of her education, is to be seen in her poetry. Striking novels may be constructed, as we have seen, with much cleverness and little inspiration ; but great poems are all inspiration, from the first flush of thought to the last consecrating touch of form. Not even a con- temporary critic would be rash enough to affirm that George Eliot's poems are much superior to poetic exercises. In only one of them, the series of sonnets called " Brother and Sister,^' is there either the rhyming instinct or the pathetic fallacy. In all she wrote, the editorial leaven is predominant. One instance out of many, serves to illustrate her radical want of imagination. Take, then, the opening lines of the " Legend of Jubal '' : When Cain was driven from Jehovah's land He wandered eastward, seeking some far strand Ruled by kind gods who asked no offerings Save pure field-fruits, as aroiiiaiic things^ To feed the subtler sense of frames divine That lived on fragrance for their food or wine : Wild, joyous gods, who winked at faults and folly, And could be pitiful and melancholy. He never had a doubt that such gods were. He looked withiji and saw them mirrored there. Some think he came at last to Tartary, And some to Ind, etc. Passing over the clumsiness of touch in the fourth line, there is not much fault to be found with the verses until we reach the fifth couplet, when the whole imagery of the poem falls asunder to show the writer's commonplace intellectuality. A poet, having just called up the vision of ^^ wild, joyous gods," could never have paused to explain that Jubal had 3i8 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. no doubt of their existence, because he saw them mirrored in his inner consciousness. Such a sugges- tion, at such a moment, is of the inmost nature of unbeHef, of the very essence of prose. And what we discover here we discover everywhere in the SibyFs later writings ; keen intelligence and culture are predominant, and literary faith is wanting. Quite different is the impression gained on a fresh perusal of "Adam Bede," or the first volume of " Mill on the Floss," or, best of all^ the " Scenes of Clerical Life.^^ Here the emotion is almost poetical, and the insight quite delightful. The beautiful note, first struck in " Amos Barton," died away into a discord with the beginning of *' Romola.^^ A narrow but exquisite experience had been exhausted, and the period of manufacture had begun. George Eliot^s books were full to the last of wise and clever things, her style to the end was that of honest workmanship, as of one who reverenced her art ; but the Heaven that lay around her literary infancy seemed further and further off as her knowledge widened. Her writings reflected, not the lover of humanity, but the superior person. Pure literature is a democracy, however, where no superior persons are tolerated. Hence it is that the most noteworthy woman of this generation, a woman of unexampled cleverness and veracity, has left works which, I believe, will be speedily forgotten, while " Jane Eyre," and " Casa Guidi Windows," and the " Cry of the Children," will be remembered. Indeed, when all is said and done, George Eliot was, not literally and technically, but essentially, a Positivist ; and Positivism is not a creed out of which great imaginative literature is ever likely to spring. Such a Pantheon as Comte suggested, consisting of FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 319 the wise men of the world, and presiding over a cosmos where the rapture of inspiration is exchanged for the miseries of evolution, is a poor exchange far the interregnum of the old gods of fable. It may produce half-hearted singers, but no poets; prodigious talents, but no geniuses of what Goethe called " daimonic ^' power. I am far from deprecating the influence of Science on works of art; indeed, I believe that out of the union of Science and Religion will issue, sooner or later, the supremest literature this world has ever known. But George Eliot was too much occupied with crude contemporary discoveries to grasp the full issues of human life and death. She Studied, not on an observatory, but in a laboratory ; from conception and creation she turned to dissection and vivisection. Her influence was enormous for the time being, precisely because she appealed to an enormous public exercised in the same way, just waking up to the awful discovery that the moon was, not Diana, but green cheese, or magnesium. Of course we have no concern with a writer's creed, save in so far as it determines the quality of workmanship. In George Eliot's case, it changed what had originally been natural, fresh, and charming, into something tiresome, platitudinarian, rectangular. She began as an enthusiast, and ended as a bigot. The full extent of this change may be ascertained by contrasting her early letters, written before success came to her, with the later epistles, written when she was firmly fixed upon the SibyPs tripod. Even when she was taster in ordinary to the propagandist publisher, Mr. John Chapman,, she had not begun to take the literature of revolt too seriously ; indeed, she knew well that it meant " high jinks " generally, and had doubtful credentials ; but when it changed its machinery,^ and became the 320 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. literature of a scientific priesthood, she was mastered by its novel pretensions, and went right over to it, as a ripe convert and eager auxiliary. From that time forth, her genius degenerated. As I have said, the life she led with George Lewes was not favourable to breadth of sympathy, or knowledge of the living world. They were a retired couple, generally in low health ; and their visitors consisted chiefly of men of the new school — e.g,, Bastian, Harrison, etc. George Eliot's female acquaintances might have been counted upon the fingers of one hand. I have been at a gathering in the Priory where there were twenty or thirty gentlemen, and only one lady, the hostess herself Now, George Eliot stood much in need of feminine companionship ; she had a woman's heart under all her learning, and was capable of interesting herself even in feminine frivolities ; and so there was something pathetic in her loneliness. Women, of course, tried to thrust themselves upon her, persons of the strong-minded sort, I imagine; but she rejected all such impertinent overtures. On one occasion, when she had been pestered by the solicitations of some more than usually pertinacious stranger, I heard her exclaim against the folly of troubling one's self to meet " persons with whom one has no sympathy in common." " Don't you agree with me?'' she asked, looking at me with her grave, thoughtful eyes. I answered her in the negative, giving it as my humble impression that all human beings, however morally and intellectually different, had sojnethmg' in common with each other, and that, in any case, it was specially beneficial for literary people to encounter persons with no interest in literature, from whom they might at least discover how small a part mere literature played, after all, on this wonderful and many-featured planet. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 321 Few works of permanent literary value obtain recognition from the criticism that is contemporary, and if George Eliot had been different, she would never have achieved her great popularity. Luckily, in all matters of knowledge, sympathy, and religion, she was well abreast of her time. She was content with the scientific solution of the problem of exist- ence, and one of the best bits of verse she ever wrote was her prayer to join the " choir invisible," who, in the Comtean conception, make music to the great march of Humanity. Her first writings gave promise of a great writer, but, viewed coldly and dispassionately 7iozVj they do not justify the claim of her admirers that even her best work will be a permanent possession. Yet she was a great woman, though a genius manqiic, a striking and commanding contemporary figure, if not a spirit whose labours may defy oblivion. She will be long remembered and always deeply respected ; but her fatal mistake was that of writing as if the last words of wisdom had been spoken. Modern science is neither a hideous farce, as some theologians imagine, nor a thing to be taken, as George Eliot took it, too seriously. It is merely an interesting chapter in the complex philosophy of Human Life. 322 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. IV. EPICTETUS* The translation of Epictetus, executed by a gentle- man who commanded a troop of black soldiers during the great American campaign, is doubtless popular in America, where the fiery breath of war and the wild winds of political change have rapidly dissipated the mists and fogs of transcendentalism, and converted a nation of speculators into a nation of men. The doctrine of fortitude, first growled by Zeno and his disciples at the pigs in the sty of Epicurus, and later still shaken like a lion's mane in the faces of pale emperors with unlimited control over human life — a creed somewhat narrow and practical, allied to the kind of speculation which forms bulwarks against contradiction and christens them moral principles, and expressed in a dialectic terminology as sharp as the whizzing of a cannon-ball — a rule of conduct which makes a fetish of individual "prosperity" (evpoia) and sticks it full of pins — will answer the requirements of the typical Yankee, and even satisfy some of the cravings of the Concord school of philo- sophers. The negro, too, inhaling his new liberty, may glance with pleasure over pages which prove that there was nothing in a state of slavery incon- sistent with high philosophic culture ; and that all one has to do in order to secure the evpoia (or "pump- kin," according to Carlyle) is to fold the hands on the bosom, look calm, and smile at the Infinite. For the * "The Works of Epictetus." A Translation from the Greek, based on that of Elizabeth Carter. By Thomas Went- worth Higginson. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 323 rest, the ** Discourses'^ of Epictetus are pleasant and easy reading for those who like the dialectic method, and they contain a good deal that is wise and eternal. I do not go the extreme length, with Mr. Higginson, of asserting that I am acquainted with no book so replete with high conceptions of the Deity and noble aims for man, or in which the laws of retribution are more grandly stated, with less of merely childish bribery or threatening. So far as I can perceive, Epictetus's devotion to the noblest aim of man, that of religious inquiry, is in the inverse ratio to his assumption of the possibility of personal virtue. And what on earth does Mr. Higginson mean by the " laws of retribution " t And what philosophic connection have such laws with " bribery " or "threatening"? It would have been better to let Epictetus speak for himself than saddle him with such sort of praise — especially as he is made, in this version, to speak very well indeed. The version, it is true, is not altogether faultless, and is perhaps, on the whole, inferior to that of Miss Carter in fidelity and force. The rendering of " office " for apxa\ is better than Miss Carter's " command, '' and there are many similar instances of miimte care ; but " what is right and what is wrong," for rt /xot e^eo-n Ka\ rl ^loi ovk e^ea-TLv, though corrcct in the strict signification of the English words as explained by Home Tooke, does not convey to ordinary readers the sense of " what is and what is not permitted to me.''' Again, " pheno- mena" is improperly given as the equivalent for ({)avTacr[ai, which looks all the more unpardonable when we find oTL (pavraa-ia et, Kai ov navTcos to (paLvo/xevoVj COrrCCtly translated into, "you are but a semblance, and by no means the real thing."" Yet, to do Mr. Higginson justice, in more than one instance, where he is not Y 2 324 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. quite so literal, he is somewhat wiser. "AneXOe npos ^oKpciTi], Koi iSe ctvTov (TvyK.aTaKeLp.evov AXKL^iddrj, Ka\ ^laTraL^ovTa avTov Trjv copav. Here Miss Carter had the boldness to translate literally, while Mr. Higginson converts the horrible 'AXKtlBuidr] into the harmless " his beloved," and thus saves his readers from the merest shiver of a repugnance which is felt too frequently in reading the heathen philosophers. And Epictetus, in spite of all Mr. Higginson may say to the contrary, was as very a heathen as ever set up school in Rome — a fine, rough, self-sufficient type of heathen, practical and vaguely sceptical, even in those creeping moments when the breath felt stale, and the clouds of fantasy fashioned themselves into uncouth forms of Deity. It is in no religious mood that he exclaims, in a sentence which, perhaps, is the keystone of his whole philosophy, "Two rules we should have always ready — that there is nothing good or evil save in the Will [e^w ttjs Trpoaipea-eos] ; and that we are not to lead events, but to follow them." He appears indeed to have held, with the earlier Stoics, that there is one unoriginated, unchangeable, and supreme God, but only such a God as bore the same relation to the world as the human soul is sup- posed to bear to the body, and whose power was limited to the laws of materials out of which things were originally fashioned. He utterly repudiated the doctrine of Chance, and described events as just sufficiently controlled by Law, or Fate, to allow of the freedom of human action. The souls of men he averred, paradoxically, to be parts of the essence of Deity, or the soul of the world — effusions, in a word^ as Spinoza held them to be, but perishable with the body. The reward of goodness is goodness, of evil, evil ; the bribe of heaven, or the threat of hell, as FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 325 Mr. Higginson would express it, is outside the circle of his philosophy ; there is no Hades, no Acheron, no Pyriphlegethon. The business of life concluded, man is resolved into the four elements from which he emanated incarnate, and has no further personal existence. The prospects of felicity do not extend beyond dissolution, but man may be glorious and happy as a god in this world, enjoying perfect tran- quillity of mind in many ways — stretched on the rack, beaten with the lash, or cut piecemeal to glut the pale, bloodthirsty hunger of an emperor. The philosopher, "when beaten, must love those who beat him ^^ — a capital maxim, which Legree might have inscribed on the flogging -post for the edification of Uncle Tom. While holding life endurable under any circumstances, the philosopher was, nevertheless, not severe on suicide. True, Mr. Higginson states that there is one special argument against suicide, but that argument does not state that self-slaughter is wrong, but that it is extremely contradictory and unphilosophic in a man who counts the body as nothing. Suffering, the Stoic said, is no real evil, forgetting how Zeno, the father of the sect, hanged himself when his finger ached. Much of all this becomes intelligible when we reflect that Epictetus speaks invariably in a fictitious character, that of the ideal man, perfectly wise and good. The " Discourses ^' are elaborate protests against human error, and confidential assertions of what ought to be. In more than one place the philo- sopher candidly confesses his own imperfections. " Believe me," he exclaims humbly, " I have not quite yet the powers of a good man," adding that such powers are of sure growth, but slow. Read in this way, and by the light of history, the fantastic 326 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. fortitude prescribed in the " Discourses" seems noble and dignified in the extreme. Had Epictetus invariably held forth in his simpler fashion, without attempting to launch out into the more airy region of abstract metaphysics, he would be more valuable as a teacher. Regarded as the description of a practical ideal, many of his sayings are, as we have suggested, true and eternal — admirable standards of perfection in human conduct. He seldom or never talks enthusiastically ; there is little or no fire in his composition. He has no high theological insight, no white-heat thirst for spiritual food. The nearest approach we find in the remains preserved by Arrian to real grandeur of religious expression is perhaps the lOilOWmg, '2vve-^€(TT€pov voec rov Qeov, 77 avcLTvvet. ; but this is in all probability a spurious fragment. It is not in such a mood that he conceived his golden ideas of human conduct. His true mood was a house- hold mood; he was ill at ease with a great concep- tion, but at home with a sick mourner in an empty house. Cant, humbug, and pretence of all sorts were odious to him. He had a plain man's hate for tinsel. Had he been placed under more modern lights, he might have become a Calvinist ; for he had a low, very low, idea of his fellows^ and clear knowledge how far the average man stood below his ideal man ; but he would never have swung a censer. He had much of the preacher in him, little of the philosopher^ and was quite hard enough in many of his moods to accept a doctrine of downright damnation. It was clear to him that God, or Zeus, or the Spirit of the World, presided over a great deal of evil — that the pure of heart were few, and that the tyranny of circumstances was very terrible— and that the only compromise possible with Zeus was to set up invulnerable laws of FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 327 private fortitude. On the whole, he conceived the vvorid was not worth Hving in, but stubborn will might make it endurable — to a philosopher. Socrates was his great historical model, though he declined to agree with Socrates on many subjects, notably the subject of a future state. He was the toughest bit of slave-flesh that ever power had to deal with. Strength and force could not bind him, though they bound Prometheus; for Epictetus was a commonplace philosopher, no fire-filcher. What others did in theory he did in practice. We read of no other such Stoic in real life. Though many of the anecdotes preserved concerning him are doubtless spurious, there is enough in the bare skeleton of his life to show that he was made of iron stuff, and enough in the records of his disciples to convince us that his influence upon those with whom he came into contact was very extraordinary. If we picture a deformed negro dwelling some- where in South America while slavery still existed, abused, contemned, beaten, yet managing in despite of circumstances to persuade cultivated free people to hearken humbly to his discourses on fate, free-will, and private virtue, we form some idea of the position of Epictetus. We first hear of him as the slave of Epaphroditus, Nero^s freed-man and Master of Re- quests — the same who assisted Nero to kill himself, and was slaughtered by Domitian for having done so. If report be true, the courtier was by no means a gentle master. We have it on the authority of Origen that when Epaphroditus put his leg to the torture, Epictetus, already a Stoic, smiled, saying, " You will certainly break my leg,''"' which accordingly happened, on which the slave continued, still smiling, ' Didn't 1 tell you, you would break it ? " However, 328 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. Simplicius in his commentary expressly states that the lameness of Epictetus was owing to rheumatism. How or when he became free is unknown, but it is evident that by the time when the philosophers were hounded from Rome by Domitian, he had already gained considerable influence as a thinker. On the issue of the decree which turned thin-clad wisdom adrift, Epictetus retired to Nicopolis, and there founded a school, carrying with him in all proba- bility his whole property and stock-in-trade, a bed, a pipkin, and an earthen lamp. Poor almost to star- vation-point, a cripple, uncouth and sharp of speech, he assured the numerous persons of distinction who flocked to hear him talk that he was perfectly happy ; expounded and illustrated, in fact, his whole principle of human fortitude ; and taught that Arrian, soldier and senator, to whom we are indebted for the preser- vation of the " Discourses " and the " Manual." Prac- tical and dogmatic, he, nevertheless, made his school a fashionable lounging-place for the questioning spirits of the unequally balanced Empire. He did all his teaching by word of mouth ; he was no com- poser ; but briskly wielding the club of dialectics, he hammered hard truths into many an unwilling conscience. Instead of flattering, he anatomised his hearers — mocked at those who came for mere idle pleasure — picked out their weaknesses with a grim humour which is sometimes lost in the diffuse and repetitive records of Arrian — and earned, by the sheer force of his practical example, unlimited influ- ence as a portico philosopher. Now, for the first time, men beheld a true Stoic — one whose fortitude no Caesar could bend, and who held unflinchingly by the strength of an invincible will. He taught much by illustration and anecdote, but his daily life was FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 329 the best illustration and anecdote of all. He was, if we may use the word, a reformer. In the very centre of an unhealthy social life, he stood like adamant, erect, smiling, stainless, and indeed, if we mark closely one or two passages in his writings, not altogether ungentle. Perhaps, indeed, he used the terminology of the Stoic school as that best suited for purposes of practical reform, and would not have gone so far in following the merely abstract principles of that school, had he not feared to appear contra- dictory. What men just then wanted, for purposes of reform, was not a philosophic treatise, but a life ; and Epictetus, with that view, gave up his life to them. Under the strong light of our whiter civilisa- tion, such a figure as his may appear rough and rude; but picture the society of the Empire, think of the thousand enormities practised in the name of philosophy, contrast the life of Epictetus with the vagaries and inconsistencies of men like Seneca, and that human figure, uttering its doctrine of fixed prin- ciples and a particular Providence connected with the freedom of the will, seems noble and dignified beyond all the fantasies of metaphysicians and all the hair-splitting homunculi of the schools. To the value of the records of Arrian many fine thinkers have borne testimony. Marcus Antoninus ranks Epictetus with Socrates, Aulus Gellius calls him the greatest of the Stoics, Origen avers that his writings have done more good than Plato's ; and in more recent times, the very different tempers of Pascal and Bishop Butler have found equal delight in him. For my own part, while disagreeing with many of his ideas, I admit that his position as a reformer rendered them necessary, and I believe that the study of his precepts will be beneficial 330 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. even now. Few philosophers are easier reading. The rough egoism, the absolute want of sympathy with the movements of the mass of mankind, the im- practicable elevation of individual will, is at all events quite as wholesome as Carlyle's extravagancies of hero-worship and Goethe^s science of culture. It is not by minds like that of Epictetus that the world progresses, but it is by such minds that it is purified at stationary periods ; and just now England is in a stationary state, and America is pausing after action, and ready to digest new ideas or old ones that are eternal. Much good may the ghost of the old Stoic do us all ! V. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE PRINTER'S DEVIL. The Pall Mall Gazette, in an article called " The Knife in Journalism,^' quoted recently from a book called ^' Oceana '' some uncomplimentary passages concerning Mr. Frederick Harrison and Mr. Robert Buchanan ; for though Mr. J. A. Froude, the author of the book, puts dashes in place of proper names, there can be no doubt as to the identity of the individuals so attacked. The Pall Mall Gazette supplies the blanks, and goes on to say that Mr. Froude's description of the plot of the " worst novel he ever read " applies literally to the '^ New Abelard " — a palpable mistake in so correct a newspaper, seeing that the book referred to is a story, by the same author, called " Foxglove Manor." FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 331 Now^ to be bracketed for condemnation along with so earnest and high-minded a writer as Mr. Harrison is so great a compHment, that I could be well content to let Mr. Froude go stumping the Pacific Islands without one word of protest, if the question raised were a merely personal one. Mr. Froude at the Antipodes is so much more harmless a figure than Mr. Froude at Chelsea, that he might rail there to his hearths content, without darkening my sun- shine. But the fault he finds with me being that I call him the ^^ slipshod Nemesis," or mischief- making and meddling literary lady, who destroyed the reputation of the late Mr. Carlyle, I wish to repeat, here as elsewhere, my opinion that Nemesis in this instance did a service to society, and that, for once in his literary career, Mr. Froude was, uncon- sciously, veracious. Mr. Froude, wishing to know "what manner of man did not admire Carlyle," studied '' Foxglove Manor/^ was shocked at its plot and scandalised at its morality. I, wishing to know what manner of man it is that did admire Carlyle^ and think him the first of human beings, long ago studied Mr. Froude, and was not at all astonished to discover in him the "halting Fury^-* (as he himself expresses it) who was to avenge human nature on the worshipper of brute will and brute force. Ever since I could read and think, Carlyle's teachings, or preaching, or railings, however one chooses to term them, have been my abomination. Twenty years ago I said, as I say now, that the style was worthy of the man, and that both were worthy the admiration of a foolish and uninstructed generation as yet unaware of Mr. Spencer. This, of course, is one of many indications of what the Pall Mall Gazette calls my " fatal bad taste." 332 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. At the same time, I would not have the public think me blind to the infinite pity of Carlyle's biography ; for even Mr. Froude's bungling could not destroy that. Noble and beautiful is the lesson that such a history teaches us ; far more noble and beautiful, to my mind, than all the clamorous trash about laborare est orare, than all the sham of what I have christened the Gospel according to the Printer's Devil. What I gather there is what every man should learn — that literary fame and hard literary work are nothing, if the famous man and the worker, while preaching self-reliance and self-abnegation, for- gets those who love him and makes of his own house a hell. The love or the hate of humanity begins at home, and we are lost or redeemed by the prayers of those near ones whom we, through love or hate, have made happy or unhappy. That the true insight of self- sanctifying affection came to Carlyle at last, we all know now. It came to him when he was a feeble old man, looking for a vanished face in the fire. It never came to him when he was coarsely fulminating against the suffering masses of mankind, drinking tea with Lady Ashburton, and talking platitudes about Work in the name of a God in whom he had never even the glimmer of a living faith. Doubtless, Work is a good thing ; but Carlyle liked his work, was by instinct and habit a literary worker, and found the whole business, in his un- gracious way, pleasant. It would be sheer cant for a busy linendraper or an active bricklayer to make the welkin ring with praises of the dignity of linen- draping and the nobility of laying bricks ; it is even more insufferable cant for the literary man to sound paeans about the self-sacrifice of making books. Carlyle liked his work, got both fame and money FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 333 for it, and was covetous of both. Posterity has now to appraise^ apart from all tall talk and atrabilarious grumbling, what the work was worth. I believe that posterity will decide with me — that it was not worth one solitary hour of domestic misconception, that, cast in the balance, it would all be outweighted by one of Jane Welsh's secret tears. Carlyle's books, indeed, possess all the worst qualities of the lower transcendentalism. The Gospel according to the Printer's Devil was wrought in scorn and bitterness instead of love, and so its literary Messiah took the lineaments of Goethe, and its Apocalypse has been spoken at the gates of Paris by Bismarck. For my own part, I would as soon frame my religion on the scheme of Carlyle's choosing as I would base my ideal of biography on the masterpiece of Mr. Froude. Bogus reputations tumble down like houses of sand. Simple truth and faithful love are things that abide for ever. I respect Mr. Froude for his fidelity to the king his bungling has dethroned, and when he himself has lost his master's scolding trick, I will cheerfully join with him in reverencing the ashes of Thomas Carlyle. VI. "L'EXILEE" IN ENGLISH.* In poetry as well as in personal ornament, filagree is sometimes very charming. The mere ghost of an idea, set to tremulous music, appears more seductive than a substantial reality of the imagination ; while a * " L'Exilee." By Frangois Coppee. Done into English verse by J. O. L. London : Kegan Paul. 334 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. bit of sentiment, slight in itself but capable of being indefinitely beaten out, derives from its very slender- ness a pathos which few can resist. A noticeable member of the filagree school of poets is M. Francois Coppee. Perhaps few writers, even of verse, ever started with so small a capital. Beyond the gift of verbal melody, which he certainly possesses in an unusual degree, and a certain pensive sweetness of mood, he possesses none of the stock-in-trade which forms the natural prerogative of poets : little or no shaping imagination, no great insight, no special love of nature, no passion, and no power. Despite all this, he uses his one advantage so admirably, he fashions his filagree so prettily, that it would be hard to deny him the name of poet. In what is perhaps his most original and coherent work, '' Le Luthier de Cremone,'^ a poem written for the theatre and acted with no little success, he fascinates attention by pure charm and simplicity of manner; while in " Le Passant,^^ another contribution to the stage, in which Mdlle. Agar created a most witching impression, and Sarah Bernhardt played with a certain weird power, he produces, with materials even more slender, the same spiritualising effect. He is, nevertheless, more like the shadow of a singer than a real bard full of the knowledge and tendencies of his time; and his faint little melodies in the minor key win us like ^olian murmurs from Shadow-land. In " L^Exilee,'' perhaps his most popular poem, or series of poems, M. Coppee passes from one dim mood to another with the ease of a melancholy spirit. Each poem is a little sigh, very human, yet curiously insubstantial. The difficulty of translating such pieces seemed to me insuperable, but the present FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 335 translator, with a singular felicity and lightness ot touch, turns French into English filagree most delight- fully. Only a lady, I should fancy, could have done the work with such dexterity — in a man's coarse hand the little book would have been crushed like the nestful of delicate eggs mentioned in " Espoir timide" : Chere enfant, qu'avant tout vos volontes soient faites ! Mais, comme on trouve un nid rempli d'oeufs de fauvettes, Vous avez ramasse mon coeur sur le chemin. Si de I'aneantir vous aviez le caprice, Vous n'auriez qu'a fermer brusquement votre main, — Mais vous ne voudrez pas, j'en suis sur, qu'il perisse ! Here and there, of course^, the necessity of faith- fulness to the original causes awkward turns and involutions, but this was inevitable. Only those who have attempted similar work — who have tried to tackle Heine, for example — know the difficulty of producing such a translation as the following : Nature's Pity. In grief the senses grow more fine ; Alas ! my darling's gone from me ! — And in all Nature, I divine There lurks a secret sympathy. The noisy nests, I half believe. Their bickerings for me restrain, The flowers for my trouble grieve. The stars feel pity for my pain. The linnet almost seems ashamed To sing aloud his joyous song ; The lily knows her fragrance blamed, The stars confess they do me wrong. Within their sweetness I discern Only my sweet, too long away ! And for her breath, eyes, voice, I yearn. Like lily, star, and linnet's lay. This is felicitous, without being positively faultless. 336 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. The original is a mere tender breathing, hardly a lyric, lacking altogether the heart-crushing strength of the wail in "Ye Banks and Braes." When Burns takes Nature into his sympathy he does so like a strong man yielding to overmastering tenderness ; his utterance is a deep-chested groan more than a sigh from the mouth. Even Tannahill is more robust than M. Coppee. In poems like the one I have quoted Coppee shows the influence of Heine more than that of any other poet, except, perhaps, Lamartine. The following piece is very much in Heine^s manner, simple and symbolic : The Three Birds. " Fly over corn-fields," I said to the dove, " And beyond the meadow-land sweet with hay, Pluck me the flower to win her love ! " Said the dove — " 'Tis too far away !" And I said to the eagle — " Mount with speed On soaring pinion — steal from the sky The heavenly fire that perchance I need ! " Said the eagle — " It is too high ! " Then I said to the vulture — " This heart devour, Borne down by its love and its sorrow's weight, Spare only what has escaped the power ! " Said the vulture — "'Tis too late ! " " L'Exilee '^ consists of exactly twenty little poems of this kind, all more or less sentimental, and having for their subject the Fair child with sweet eyes, O Norway's pale rose, mentioned in the dedication. It is in fact merely the chronicle of the attachment of the poet for a young lady " seventeen years " his junior. Her charms are thus explicitly described : Oft musing, with hand on my eyes, I behold Her lithe form and small head, with the pallid gola Of her hair cut short on her forehead white. FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 337 Poet and lady meet on the banks of Lake Leman, and after a formal introduction become acquainted. The progress of the gentleman's feelings is minutely described in the lyrics, which follow each other in thoughtfully devised sequence. In the piece called " Pre-existence " the poet fancies that they have met before in some serene world. And when in thine eyes I mirrored my own, I knew we had Hved in the ages long gone ; And haunted since then by a nameless yearning, To the heavens my dream is ever returning, Our birthland there to discover I try ; And soon as night mounts up the eastern sky My glances seek in the glittering dome The stars that may, whilom, have been our home ! Of all this love nothing serious comes, and the lady passes gently away from the horizon of her admirer, reflecting, perhaps, that it would require even more sentiment than he possesses to get over the disparity of '^ seventeen years." " Then pity me not, though even I die 1 " the poet cries in conclusion. One does not feel much inclined to pity him. His grief is too insubstantial to last, and one feels that he will get over it. As for the poems, they are, as I have said, the veriest filagree or gossamer ; yet as here translated, they are very attractive. The hand that can do such dainty work so well ought not to be idle in the future, and I hope that it will give us more transla- tions. To have succeeded at all with so faint a singer as Coppee is a triumph of literary manipula- tion ; but I should like the translator next time to leave this thin ghost of a poet alone and to touch something more robust. 338 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. VII. THE CHURCH AND THE STAGE. Apropos of a poetical drama from my pen, on the subject of Lady Jane Grey, I was once accused of fostering religious dissension, by representing the Roman Catholic Church in an unfavourable light. Even a friendly foreign journal, V Independance Beige, in criticising the Nine Days Queen, observed : *' Le role de Tdveque de Winchester est sacrifie a I'indig- nation publique, qui, apres avoir applaudi I'acteur, accable de ses sifflets et de ses grognements le personnage antipathique." I am quite willing to admit that the nightly excitement, the applause lavished on the sentiments of Lady Jane Grey, the hisses and groans showered upon her persecutors, did seem to warrant the hypothesis of religious bias; but this hypothesis is only superficial after all, and the same sympathy and antipathy would follow the victim and the persecutor under any circumstances, quite apart from polemical predisposition. That Lady Jane belongs to the " royal army of martyrs," I am aware ; I am aware, too, that Protestantism has indirectly canonised her, in the face of its rejection of all canonisation ; but the great heart of the public yearns to her, not because she held certain dogmatic views, but simply because she was a beautiful and unfortunate human being, almost stainless in a stained and cruel time. Popular audiences care as much about Roman Catholicism and Protestantism as they do about Conservatism and Liberalism. They want interesting characters and dramatic situations ; and, given these, they will sympathise as liberally with one side of the FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 339 question as with the other. For my own part, as the author of this and other plays, I wish to record my complete indifference to religious bias. I have taken a few historical facts, which are indisputable, and tried to make a picturesque and pathetic play out of them ; voila tout. Personally, I feel as much an- tipathy to Lady Jane Grey's bigotry as to that of Mary Tudor. I know that both Catholics and Protestants have torn each other asunder from time immemorial, and that they would be doing so still if modern science and modern free thought — yes, and modern dramatic art ! — had not arisen, to light the dark places of Acheronian controversy. Each side has its martyrs, and all martyrs, all victims of a tyrannical majority, appeal, by virtue of the pathetic fallacy overtaking them, to the tenderness and solici- tude of human nature. But putting aside this partly personal question, I wish to touch upon another point, of larger and deeper interest to society at large. I wish to ask, in the name of common sense, what reason there is that the Stage should spare the Church, seeing that the Church has been, and still remains, the im- placable enemy of the Stage — nay, of Art and Poetry in general ? I wish to demand on what ground the Drama is to hush up the monstrous crimes of Religion, when Religion parades so libellously the veriest follies of the Drama ? I know that it is the opinion of many worthy people that dramatic art would be elevated if it could once conquer the prejudice of the so-called " religious " world ; and we have therefore witnessed, in Church and Stage Guilds, at pious tea-drinkings, where the theatre has been discussed apologetically, a timid desire on the part of the theatrical profession to conciliate the hereditary foes of the theatre. Were z 2 340 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. I the mouthpiece of dramatic Art, however, I should adopt a very different attitude. I should say to the Church : " Before you point out the mote in our eyes, remember the beam in your own. You tell us of the evil that the stage has done, of its tendency to corrupt society. Let us in return tell you what the stage has 7iot done. It has never usurped God's right over the consciences and the souls of men ; it has never falsified documents, perverted facts, prostituted itself in the lust for power ; though it has a long catalogue of martyrs, it has had no Inquisition and no official persecutor ] the record of its bad deeds is not written in the blood of butchered women and children ; it has never burned a Bruno or tortured a Galileo ; it has never hunted down an Adrienne Lecouvreur during life, and refused her decent burial when dead ; it has never, in a word, based its success or failure on the sorrow or the suffering of human nature.^^ Then, if the Church retorted that these things were only of the past, I should explain that, if they are so, if religious intolerance is now reduced to a minimum, thanks are due, not to the Church, but to the Stage — to that art whose immortal teachers, from Shakespeare downwards, have exposed the false perversions and pretensions of other- worldliness. Tartuffe would still be a social possibility if the Stage had not sent society its deliverer, in Moliere. For the rest, I am simple enough to believe that there is often more real religious teaching in the theatre than in the conventicle. I can find a grander spiritual lesson in such a presentation as Mr. Edwin Booth's King Lear than in the columns of the Reco7'd or the preachings of the Rev. Dr. Boanerges ; when I want humour, or humorous pathos, I prefer Mr. Thomas Thorne to the Rev. Dr. Talmage ; and altogether, as FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 341 an unregenerate individual addicted to the excisable liquor of dramatic performances, I hold with pious Mr. Herbert : A verse may catch him who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice ! Be that as it may, I for one shall certainly not avoid a good subject, but shall rather utilise it the more eagerly, because the presentation of certain historical facts is damaging to the Church. When the ^son of sacerdotalism is renewed by the elixir of liberalism, when he casts off its old lendings and recognises the divine brotherhood of all arts and all religions, then, and not till then, it will be time to say : " Let the dead bury its dead ; no good purpose can be served now by recording the crimes and cruelties of the past.'' VIII. THE AMERICAN SOCRATES. I AM very grateful to the Pall Mall Gazette for its kindly suggestion (Christmas, 1886) that English- men should send a little tribute to Walt Whitman, and it is satisfactory to know that there are some Englishmen with the courage, in the face of good and ill report, to express their sympathy with the great American. As usual, when Whitman's name is mentioned, it is strenuously denied that Whitman is either neglected or unfortunate. " We like the old fellow," said Mr. E. C. Stedman to me in New York, " and it is a great mistake to suppose he is unappreciated." This sort of pitying patronising 342 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. praise may be heard everywhere. In the meantime, Whitman gets about as much honest sympathy from the hterary class in America as Socrates did from the elders of the city. He is simply outlawed. I have no hesitation in saying that his little English band of admirers, headed by Mr. William Rossetti, have secured for him what little kindness he has received from his own countrymen. And who wonders ? / When Mr. Stedman can devote his talents to an ornithology of all the singing birds, putting the tomtit in the eagle's cage, and seriously discussing the chirps of the hedge-sparrow, when the ideals of American criticism are Mr. Lowell, Mr. Howells, and Harper's Magazine, when the reading public stupefies itself with the dull Eastern narcotic imported by Mr. Edward Fitzgerald, it is natural enough that Walt Whitman should be let severely alone. Fortunately, his worshippers out there are fit though few. I speedily discovered when in America the beneficent influence of his teachings on young men and maidens of the coming generation. In March, 1885, I was in Philadelphia, bringing out a stupendous melodrama, and one day I found myself crossing the crowded ferry to Camden, on a visit to Walt Whitman. I soon found the house where he dwelt, for every one knew it, and every face brightened at the old man's name ; it is a humble dwelling in a quiet street, very plainly furnished, but not uncomfortable. When I appeared at the door, which was opened to me by a middle-aged, motherly woman, I caught a glimpse along the lobby of a patriarchal figure seated in a back room, and I was informed that Whitman was at dinner, but would join me in the front parlour directly. He soon came in, supported on a stick, and looking rather feeble, FLOTSAM AND JETSAM. 343 his hair and beard long and white as snow, the skin of his face crimson with the influence of sun and wind. I need hardly say that I had a hearty welcome. I had a lady with me, and Whitman was very eager that she should partake of the feast on which he had been regaling — solid American pie, washed down with the strongest of strong tea. Inquiry elicited the fact that pie was the main pabulum of Whitman's life. He eats no meat, or hardly any, and beyond a little drop of whisky at bedtime, takes no stimulants. Year after year he dwells alone, waited on by the kindly woman who is at once his friend, his servant, and his nurse. He goes out daily, seeking generally the most crowded thoroughfares, his favourite amuse- ment being to journey to and fro on the steam ferryboat, making friends with all and sundry. For Whitman's democracy is no mere literary sentiment, but a living instinct. He loves all forms of humanity^ The movement of human life is divine music to him. He is quite happy thus, complains of nothing, girns at nothing, has a loving heart and an open hand for all the world. He has very few books, and these few are mostly gifts from the authors ; one from Mr. J. A. Symonds had just come to him, with a respectful inscription on the fly-leaf. I found him alert and bright as any boy, greatly interested to hear about English authors, especially Tennyson, and very anxious to visit the old country before he died. He took us up to his bedroom on the upper floor, showed us the old arm-chair where he writes, and the old trunks where he keeps his books and papers. All about him was beautifully calm and "restful." I spoke of his detractors, and his blue eye brightened merrily, though he could not deny that some of them, and especially Emerson, had used him cavalierly. But 344 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. what was all that to one who " heard the roar of the ages ^^ ? As might be expected, he cared little or nothing about modern reputations. Wagner, perhaps, was the only personality in Europe that greatly attracted him, as to a sort of equal. But I should convey a wrong impression if I suggested that he was without sympathy for the ideas of his contem- poraries ; on the contrary, every form of literary activity is interesting to him. He simply perceives as a philosopher the littleness of all literature in relation to life. Benignly gentle and universally tolerant, he sits apart, ^^ holding no form of creed, but contemplating all.^' About his poverty there can be no question. The pittance he gets from his books would not equal the wage of an ordinary labourer; the rest of his slender income is made up of loving gifts from people almost as poor as himself. Of course he is not " starving ; '* so long as pie and tea suffice for his nourishment, he can subsist ! But his state is never- theless, from our point of view, pitiful. His physical health is frail, his days cannot be long in the sun- shine, and his necessities are pressing enough to make voluntary help acceptable. In a land of millionaires, in a land of which he will one day be known as the chief literary glory, he is almost utterly neglected. Let there be no question about this ; all denial of it is disingenuous and dishonest. The literary class fights shy of him. The great reading public have been told that he is infamously immoral. There is nothing in his style to attract, everything to repel, the natures which batten on Longfellow's '* Village Blacksmith " and the stories and engravings in the American magazines. Some years ago, when he was asked to contribute to a FLOTSAM AND JETSAM, 345 leading American review, there was an outcry, and the poor editor took fright. Countenance Whitman, hankering, gross, mystical, nude, whom even the good Emerson had abandoned ? The thing was an outrage ! The editor accepted the warning, and any future contribution was "declined with thanks/^ Whitman told me this, with the merriest of twinkles in his blue eye. " I likes to be despised," said Uriah Heep. I don't know that Whitman likes to be outlawed, but he is fully alive to the prodigious humour of the thing. Sympathy, on the other hand, is sweet to him, as to every human being. He spoke with loving gratitude of the Rossettis and his other English friends. When I shook hands with him there, at the door of his little house in Camden, I scarcely realised the great privilege that had been given to me — that of seeing face to face the wisest and noblest, the most truly great, of all modern literary men. I hope yet, if I am spared, to look upon him again, for well I know that the earth holds no such another nature. Nor do I write this with the wild hero-worship of a boy, but as the calm, deliberate judgment of a man who is far beyond all literary predilections or passions. In Walt Whitman I see more than a mere maker of poems, I see a personality worthy to rank even above that of Socrates, akin even, though lower and far distant, to that of Him who is considered, and rightly, the first of men. I know that if that Other were here, his reception in New England might be very much the same. I know, too, that in some day not so remote, humanity will wonder that men could dwell side by side with this colossus, and not realise his proportions. We have other poets, but we have 346 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. no other divine poet. We have a beautiful singer in Tennyson, and some day it will be among Tennyson's highest honours that he was once named kindly and appreciatively by Whitman. When I think of that gray head, gently bowing before the contempt of the literary class in America, when I think that Boston crowns Emerson and turns aside from the spirit potent enough to create a hundred Emersons and leave strength sufficient for the making of the whole Bostonian cosmogony, from Lowell upwards, I for a moment lose patience with a mighty nation ; but only for a moment : the voice of my gentle master sounds in my ear, and I am reminded that if he is great and good, it is because he represents the greatness and goodness of a free and noble people. He would not be Walt Whitman, if he did not love his contemporaries more, not less, for the ingratitude and misconception of the Scribes and Pharisees who have outlawed him. Praise, and fame, and money are of course indifferent to him. He has spoken his message, he has lived his life, and is content. But it is we that honour and love him who are not content, while the gospel of man-millinery is preached in every magazine and every newspaper, and every literary money-changer and poetaster has a stone to throw at the patient old prophet of modern Democracy. FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. In the year 1733 that distinguished and prosperous poet, Mr. Alexander Pope, wonder of his age and envy of his contemporaries, published anonymously the first epistle of his " Essay on Man " ; the second and third epistles followed in rapid succession ; and, finally, twelve months afterwards, the fourth was published, with the poet's name. Pope had from the first been suspected of the authorship of this truly representative and " moral " poem, which was for ever afterwards to bear his superscription. The fame of the " Essay on Man," which, as everybody knows, was a sort of poetical adumbration (and perversion) of the views of Bolingbroke, was widespread and instantaneous. Translations appeared in all lan- guages, and disquisitions, in which the poet's views were advocated or combated, were numerous in our own. Certainly no poem could be more typical of its period, or could represent better the elegant fatalism of that literary and philosophical group of which Pope was the mouthpiece and the ornament. A century passed away. The reign of the distin- guished Mr. Pope was forgotten, nay, almost mythical in its incredibility from the point of view of modern criticism. Soles occidere, et redire possunt, but a literary sun, once thoroughly set, seldom com- 348 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. pletely re-emerges. Mr. Pope was dust, and we were under the reign of Mr. Tennyson. Rather more than a hundred years after the publication of the " Essay on Man '' appeared^ also anonymously, " In Me- moriam.^' The success of this fine poem, in which, as we all know, an elegant literary scepticism is lightly dashed with emotion and carefully spiced with science, was also instantaneous. The work was at once accepted as typical, and as representing the finest tendencies of the time. More than that, it became at once a text-book and a quotation-book. It was just philosophic enough to suit all poetic needs, and just poetic enough to please practical philo- sophers. Its power of supplying apt and memor- able passages at least equalled that of the " Essay on Man.^' Our great-grandfathers, with quivering nostrils and faltering voices, could proclaim in measured cadence the wonders of that Deity, Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurled. And now a bubble burst, and now a world ; and could add, not without solemnity, Know then thyself, presume not God to scan ; The proper study of mankind is man. We, no less fortunate, could speak gently of a God, That God, which ever lives and moves. One God, one law, one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves ; and could add, with a touch of tenderness unknown to our grandfathers, that Merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee. But in either case the fountain of quotation was a FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. 349 poem representative, to use the slang expression, of " the best culture of the time/' and of the time's most typical poet. Doubtless in those days, as in these, there were dissentient voices, voices of a minority which rejected Mr. Pope's elegant fatalism as indignantly as it is possible to reject the refined scepticism of Mr. Tennyson. And in good truth the " Essay on Man " is not much more stimulating than a page of the renowned St. John himself From the point of view ■. of the__period, nevertheless, it was simply sublime, - and was accepted by its generation with a faith as implicit as that which the immortal "poor Indian/* in its own pages, gave to his God. Its very defects hastened this happy consummation. Delightful be- yond measure were its endless twists and turns of a tautological yet pliant metre ; exquisite were its placid truisms, its fine platitudes, its fluent conserva- tion of the popular sentiment. The age was one of moral essays, and this was a moral essay without an equal. Compared with the " Essay on Man," and judged by the standard of a later period, ^^ In ( Memoriam " is, from every point of view, vastly superior; indeed, it is difficult to conceive a period when its finest passages will fail, as Pope's finest passages now fail, to awaken polite enthusiasm. As a piece of workmanship it is singularly beautiful — almost too beautiful, in a certain sense, to be quite satisfying as an intellectual stimulus. In the pro- fundity of its philosophical insight, and the magnifi- cence of its poetical images, moreover, it is as far above Mr. Pope at his best as Pope himself was above the herd he ridiculed in the " Dunciad." To say so much, indeed, is only to say that it is the peculiar outcome of a generation which was saturated 350 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. in its youth with the sublime mysticism of Coleridge and Shelley, and which, a little later on, stood wondering at the " faery tales of Science." But with all this, and despite the charm of an incomparable lyric light, it is quite too fine a piece of work to answer our present speculative needs. Its grief is not moving grief, and its speculation is not kindling speculation. The very structure of the poem, in its laboriously easy monotony, is against its permanence as a poetic force or a great literary stimulus. Readers at the present moment are not wanting who have forgotten its existence altogether, and who, in moments of anxiety and insight, would sooner turn for stimulus to a chapter of the Book of Job, or even a rugged page of the persecuted Walt Whitman. The penalty of such perfection as is easily dis- tinguishable in such widely differing poems as the "Essay on Man " and "In Memoriam," is the penalty which attends typical literary products of all kinds ; for it need scarcely be added that it is not in acqui- escent or explanatory moods, however representative of " the best culture of the time," that great poetical creations are developed. If Mr. Tennyson* were only the philosopher of " In Memoriam," there would be some danger of his being even summarily forgotten. Being what he is, one of the loveliest singers of this time and of all time, and an unique craftsman whose sign manual is sufficient to consecrate almost any piece of work, he need not fear the results of a criticism which must sooner or later leave him among the lyrical and perfecting, instead of among the philo- sophical and creative, singers. What the divine group, which preceded him, left ill-expressed, half- expressed, or only hinted, he has turned into miracles * Now Lord Tennyson. FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. 351 of musical speech. Ideas which the world passed by in the pages of Wordsworth and Shelley, it has hailed with idolatry in the Laureate's stately setting. Truths, which Science carelessly and clumsily re- vealed, have been turned by him into those jewels five words long, Which, on the stretched forefinger of all time, Sparkle for ever. He differs, moreover, from Pope in this, that he is primarily and cardinally the poet of a poetical era, not, strictly speaking, the poetical oracle of the era of essays and essayists now again beginning. Though all that I have said must be self-evident and even commonplace to most advanced students of modern poetry, it was still inevitable that many critics should accept Mr. Tennyson's more meditative utter- ances as a final gospel, and should pass by as irrele- vant the utterances of such of his contemporaries as do not follow his school of literary perfection. In a little work which I have now before me,* it seems laid down as a canon that Mr. Tennyson's method of approaching the great questions of life and death is the only correct method of approach, and that the results of that method are finally and wholly satis- fying. Mr. Selkirk, a man of undeniable cleverness and culture, has attempted in half-a-dozen striking essays to touch a subject which, as it seems to us, often eludes his method of treatment. His style is admirable, his manner finished in the extreme, but his summaries of the leading positions he wishes to establish are at times incorrect and not always con- vincing. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he does not * " Ethics and Esthetics of Modern Poetry." By J. B. Selkirk. London : Smith, Elder, & Co. 352 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. write with a clerical brief, but for all that writes with a religious bias. The general argument to be gathered from his book is that of Pope : " Whatever is, is right/' with this corollary, that an attitude of em.o- tional scepticism is highly admirable, provided it leaves the main problems ope7i and does not infringe too much on the rights of the party in power. This being the case, it may be easily understood that Mr. Selkirk is thoroughly satisfied with Mr. Tennyson's representation of current philosophical problems. His criticisms on Mr. Tennyson's method are quite admirable, while still, as I have suggested, unconvincing. He commends with strict justice the Laureate's " Socratean faculty of seeing both sides of a question with equal power, which has enabled him to become, in so important a sense, the interpreter of the transitional character of the philosophy, religion, and, to some extent, the politics of his time ; his power to stand on the debateable ground on which these questions are discussed, giving strong poetical force to each of the opposing factions, and yet remain himself untouched and untainted by what he would himself call 'The falsehood of extremes.'" But, alas ! it is this very '' Socratean faculty," so much commended by Mr. Selkirk, which absolutely pre- vents Mr. Tennyson, in his philosophical flights, from achieving the very highest poetry. No sublime seer of the human race — call him what we will, Isaiah, Lucretius, Dante, Bunyan, Wordsworth, or Victor Hugo — has astonished his contemporaries by "seeing both sides of a question with equal power" — quite otherwise. The condition of inspiration in these and other great prophetic or prophesying poets has been the power of forgetting that there are two sides of a question at all ! This is equivalent to saying that -HJU FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. 353 every great poet is, in a certain sense, a bigot, and W'*^ that his inspiration is in proportion to his bigotry ; \^^*-*- and, making the necessary deductions, I believe this to be a true statement of the case. Mr. Tennyson himself, who is certainly a great poet, if not of the highest order, is highest and best where his faculty is most fearlessly lyrical and least " Socratean.^^ Mr. Selkirk would doubtless dissent from my classification of Shelley and Hugo among the supreme seers. His treatment of Shelley is not altogether respectful. He tells about his " strangely persistent " denial of Christianity, " and indeed of God," but observes with surprise, nevertheless, that " in his inspired moments, he became the unconscious interpreter of the higher nature, and to a certain extent, became reverential and devout in spite of himself" (page 182). He adds°(and here, for example, we have the clerical bias strongly marked): '^ It is not to be denied, however, that too many of our great poets, fevered by that kind of dithyrambic which so easily besets the genus irritabile vattim, have frequently made attempts to curse what a higher power than theirs has seen fit to bless T It is a very common habit of critics far inferior to Mr. Selkirk to treat all forms of revolt as a sort of " dithyrambic madness," and to rebuke revolters for cursing what a providential dispensation has blessed — generally with the loaves and fishes. But if Mr. Selkirk means to suggest that Shelley in his " inspired moments," when " he became the unconscious interpreter of the higher nature," ever confounded that higher nature with Christianity or Deism, I beg to differ. Shelley was always " reverential and devout " in presence of those divine Mysteries which he declined to approach 2 A 354 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. through the vestibules of any of the creeds ; though certainly, in his inspired moments, he never achieved the " Socratean^^ distinction of seeing "both sides of a question at once." He was a revolter pure and simple, and in his sublimest moods he was pre-emi- nently a revolter. I really dislike this Jesuitical plan of suggesting that such a man as Shelley was com- pelled at times, through providential inflation, to bear witness in favour of the enemy. It is not worthy of a writer so humane as Mr. Selkirk. Then, again, as to Victor Hugo ; in a work devoted to the ethics and aesthetics of modern poetry, one would have expected some slight reference to one who is, with- out exception, the most didactic poet of the time, But Mr. Selkirk trots cheerfully along, as if quite unconscious of any living literary forces outside the Victorian circle. For all that I know, he has never even heard of one whom a few benighted individuals in England esteem the greatest living poetic teacher of all, Walt Whitman. I have already said, and I now take the pains to reiterate, that there is a great deal of wisdom in Mr. Selkirk^s book, but I must explain that it is at times rather old-fashioned wisdom. In spite of innumerable fine things, of many really superb passages, the whole effect is spoiled by the clerical (or conservative) bias, and by the complete absence of any leading or dominant idea. Mr. Selkirk is, in fact, like many others we might name, a microscopic critic ; his minute observations are admirable, but his generalisations too often lack breadth and novelty. In order to sustain this statement with some slight proof, let me return for a moment to his treatment of Mr. Tennyson. Mr. Tennyson is, of course, according to Mr. FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. 355 Selkirk^ the central sun of the Victorian system, the finish beyond which perfection cannot go. Words are insufficient to praise the masterly style in which the Laureate keeps the golden mean. He "beats his music out ^^ to an accompaniment in which neither the sophistries of science nor the casuistries of a half-hearted orthodoxy find any place. '^ For such a task a brave and freedom-loving man was wanted, one that in his own phrase was ready to follow truth in scorn of consequence, and such an one the age has found in the author of 'In Memoriam.' The image of ^ Freedom on her regal seat ^ has ever been one of the great sources of his inspiration, and since the days of Burns we had no more passionate worshipper of the great goddess, and no such divine Promethean scorn of anything in the shape of the quasi-spiritual fetter. Like the friend he consecrates in his immortal elegy, 'he will not leave his judgment blind,' and, speaking of himself, he tells us elsewhere how unendurable life would have been to him except in A land where, girt by friend or foe, A man may speak the thing he will ! " That such a poem as "In Memoriam" " should have presented difficulties to the orthodox mind is perhaps not to be wondered at, and cannot be helped. With-' ' out absolute freedom from the fetters and restrictions of authoritative human codes, poetry of the highest kind is impossible.'^ ' \ Now, surely, if words of praise were wanting for Mr. Tennyson, it was scarcely necessary to find them in so perverse and ridiculous a statement as the one I have just quoted. We may admire the Laureate's supreme philosophic calm, without crediting him with " passionate worship '' of freedom, or with any 2 A 2 356 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. sort of " divine Promethean scorn." I venture to say that there is not, in the whole compass of his writings, a single passage with a more rarefied ethical atmosphere than the one we breathe in the pages of the late Mr. Kingsley, or (greatly to descend the scale of comparison) those of Mr. Thomas Hughes. It is his characteristic,'and it may possibly be his glory, that he is pre-eminently " an English- man," guilty even, once or twice in his life, of actual Anglophobia ; and I know of no single occasion on which his attitude of mind has been one solicitous of martyrdom. Only sheer bigots — and these happily are now in a minority — could find fault with so noble a piece of work as " In Memoriam." The British matron, with all her timid young clustering around her skirts, can find no offence anywhere in the pages of one who utters nothing base; for though he may tell her in sufficiently strong language that she is too fond of money, and that she buys and sells her offspring, he never on any occasion touches roughly on any of her institutions — say, for example, marriage, and the restitution of conjugal rights. Politically, I am so thoroughly at issue with Mr. Tennyson, that I find it difficult to discuss his political writings at all, and to preserve my reverence for a master's name and fame. Yet on more than one occasion, he has written in the purest spirit of '^John Bull/^ has forgotten the divine prerogative of genius, and has sounded the charge for reckless war. That wonderfully fine poem, the " Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington," contains passages which V can scarcely read without a shiver, they are so manifestly beyond the mark even of a funeral eulogy ; and, to conclude this sort of fault-finding, I am quite certain that it would have been better if the FROM POPE TO TENNYSON. 357 ballad on the death of Sir Richard Grenville — in itself one of the finest poems in the language — had never appeared, at the time it did, with the name of Mr. Tennyson. These are positive recriminations, and my admiration of the subject is so great, that I almost shrink from making them. But really after all Mr. Selkirk is to blame, for Mr. Tennyson himself has never pretended to be a revolutionary or revolution- loving poet ; on the contrary, he has held throughout his grand career to the same fine middle-class ideal so much adored by the late Mr. Kingsley. " Through- out all our nineteenth-century British literature,^^ wrote one whom England persecuted because he loved his country,* " there runs a tone of polite, though distant, recognition of Almighty God, as one of the Great Powers ; and though no resident is still maintained at His court, yet British civilisa- tion gives him assurance of friendly relations; and 'our venerable Church' and 'beautiful liturgy' are relied upon as a sort of diplomatic Concordat or Pragmatic Sanction, whereby we, occupied as we are in grave commercial and political pursuits, carrying on our business, selling our altars, and utilising our heathen, bind ourselves to let Him alone, if He lets us alone; — if He will keep looking apart £07itemplatiiig the illustrious maremilkers and blame- less Ethiopians, and never minding us, we will keep up a most respectable Church for Him, and make our lower orders venerate it and pay for it handsomely, and we will suffer no national infidelity, like the horrid French." This, of course, is only a sarcastic and almost brutal statement of the truth. As it * John Mitchell. 358 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. stands, however, it is far nearer to the facts of the Tennysonian ethics than is the extraordinary thesis of Mr. Selkirk. My issue with Mr. Tennyson, if he for a moment assumed to be a great disturbing or creating force, would be that he was far too acquiescent and dispassionate a thinker. Being what he is and professes to be, the perfect singer of his time, he has a right to turn round upon us with : " Lyric poetry is perfect musical speech, and I simply decline the pressure of all disturbing influences. I am a musician, not a prophet ; a great artist, not a great creator. I embody the best tendencies of my time, without aspiring to be beyond my time. It is no affair of mine to carp at Church and State, to reform society, to inspire revolutions. I am no iconoclast ; my mission is to smg'' This would be, and is, quite unanswerable. When the Laureate himself aspires to the position Mr. Selkirk claims for him, that of being the greatest ethical teacher of the time, it will be quite soon enough to discuss his claim to a position so close to moral and literary martyrdom. A LAST LOOK ROUND. I. CIRCUMSPICE! The pursuit of literature has of late years become a lonely business. Beyond the narrow orbits of certain little merry-go-rounds of mutual admiration, few- literary people are to be found who follow bright ideals in company, or exhibit much affection for one another. The great newspapers, with their monstrous machinery, swallow up our young men of talent by the dozen. If here and there a tricksy spirit escapes, it is to degenerate into a fashionable author or a fourth-rate politician. If by any chance a solitary writer attempts to be original and to think for himself, he reaps the privileges of literary martyrdom. Mean- time, if we look quietly round in the world of life and literature, what do we see ? The great waters of Democracy arising to swallow up and cover the last landmarks of individualism ; a few isolated figures standing on ever-narrowing islets, and crying like Canute to the flood ; bogus reputations going down into the angry living tide, volcanic notorieties springing up for a moment and disappearing, like certain earth-eruptions in the Mediterranean ; the Ark of the Church, with a nasty hole in its sides, drifting hither and thither before the storm, with two archbishops, a Catholic and a Protestant, 36o A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. lashed to the rudder ; minor prophets, in cockle- shells of Goethe's building, rowing leisurely out to the Ark's assistance, leaping jauntily on the deck, and offering to pilot the vessel into harbours of culture and light ; and far away on the Mount Ararat of Science, the sun of some new creed dimly shining. Meantime, there is religious and social chaos, marked by a great confusion of tongues. Men no longer know what to believe or whom to believe. Literature is more like a blasted fig-tree than a healthy blooming English oak. Criticism flourishes on the grave of imagination. Encyclopaedias, discursions, cheap manuals for the uninstructed, infantile manuals for lazy adults, take the place of living books. No sooner does one editor issue a series of ancient classics for English readers, than another editor cuts in with a series of manuals to our own classics, which are accessible to everybody in mother-English. The era of completed literary sinfulness is reached when people discuss seriously an article in the Quarterly Review, get up the " Pilgrim's Progress^' out of a manual, and need cicerones to expound to them the beauties of our popular poets. Fiction flourishes like a noxious growth. Meantime, where are we, and whither are we drifting } After the School Board has come the Deluge. Let me take a last look round, and see the forces which are conditioning literature just at present. At the very outset of my inquiry, two forces intrude themselves upon me. I will take them in their natural sequence. A LAST LOOK ROUND, 361 II. FIRST, HEAR THE CARDINAL! ■"Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in reh'gion, but that one creed is as good as another. It is inconsistent with the recognition of any religion as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, as all are matters of opinion. Revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste — not an objective fact, not miraculous ; and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy."" These words, as many of my readers are aware, form part of the speech delivered by Dr. Newman at Rome, when he received the Pope's official message that he had been created a Cardinal. They are very sad words, as embodying the speaker's last farewell of free thought and free progress, and they have been received with a certain measure of respect, due to one of exceptional talents, and undoubted goodness of heart. But falser and more mischievous words were never spoken. True Liberalism in religion does not deny the positive truth of religion, but insists rather upon its relativity ; so far from holding one creed as good as another, it insists that every man's creed is a law unto himself, to be broken at each man's spiritual peril; and because it reverences religion and its place in the human conscience, it preaches toleration in the widest sense to every creed under the sun. Here, as elsewhere, Dr. Newman shows a radical mis- conception of what Liberalism is and implies, for to him it is something abnormal and anarchical, instead of being totally simple and coherent. True, it is based on the assumption that in all matters of faith 362 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the individual conscience forms the last appeal ; and hence, though it long ago pronounced its final opinion on the inspirations of the Vatican and the spirit of the Inquisition, it has enabled Dr. Newman to live his life in peace, and has provided for him at every stage of his career the cloistered shelter of popular esteem. Thanks to true Liberalism in religion, indeed, the author of the "Apologia" has prayed, worked, and spiritually thriven in a land which has formally renounced the thrall and, to some extent, the creed of Rome ; every utterance of his has been circulated by the press, and commented upon in a kindly and a friendly spirit; his character has always been held venerable, and even his delusions have invariably been treated as sacred. And after all this, after years of solemn experience and mellow- ing wisdom. Dr. Newman, standing in the shadow of the Vatican, points his finger at his benefactors, and almost with his last breath abjures Liberty, and proclaims the gospel of intolerance, of torture, and of retrogression. The spectacle, to my mind, is a melancholy one. Not only does the old reason seem to have lost its cunning, but the gentle judgment appears to have become twisted and perverted. Such a definition of Liberalism as I have quoted is cer- tainly unworthy of a divine trained among the free institutions of England. Accept that definition, popularise and legalise it, and we should speedily possess, instead of a free Church in a free State, not one Inquisition, but a dozen. Instead of '^sentiment and taste,^^ to which Dr. Newman has a charac- teristic objection, we should have "objective fact'* — Catholic, Protestant, Positivist, and Materialistic. Dr. Manning would preside over one sort of Star Chamber, the Archbishop of Canterbury over another. A LAST LOOK ROUND. 363 Mr. Frederick Harrison over a third, and Professor Huxley over a fourth. The end might, perhaps, justify the means ; but apostasy would then become a serious business, and quiet thinkers would no longer be left alone, even at Birmingham. Of course what Dr. Newman means is simple enough. He has passed over into a Church which professes to hold the monopoly of objective and spiritual truth, and which has been historically distinguished for carrying the doctrine of protection even into the other world. He wishes to say, and in effect he says, as his Church has always said, that religion is to come from above, not from within, and that no man can be a Christian who denies the miraculous Virgin. The logical outcome of all this is inquisitorial. The creed of Rome is true, not merely relatively, but absolutely. Nay, the good Cardinal goes farther. *^ For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of Liberalism in religion.^' Yet for thirty, forty, fifty years Dr. Newman has been living under the beneficent protection of the Liberalism he has resisted. During all those years his protectress has never troubled him with questions concerning the material facts of his belief, but has left those facts to his own soul, which alone can apprehend them. He has seen every- where around him the spectacle of a free people, eager to open all avenues of progress and of honour to all creeds, regardless of religious difference and tolerant to all opinion. How, and to what extent, has Dr. Newman resisted this Liberalism ? Only, so far as I know, by expounding with strange clearness and beauty the meaning of his own faith, and by casting into the side of Rome all the weight of his private worth and intellectual ability. Such 364 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. resistance, a Liberal would say, is holy and justifiable ; that is to say, honest propagandism is justifiable. Our knowledge of Dr. Newman's life is limited to facts which he himself has made public. Well, there is nothing in these facts to warrant the assumption that he ever really resisted Liberalism ; on the contrary, there is much to prove that he, more than most men, respected the sanctity of private judgment, enjoyed the moral atmosphere of Liberal institutions, and cherished the privilege of passing pensively from one state of edification to another under the safe protection of a free and Christian land. My readers must perfectly understand that I pronounce no opinion on the creed which Dr. ^ Newman holds and has held so long, or that faith ' which is built on miracles and has itself been most miraculously unsuccessful in its application to human needs. My business is not to discuss dogma on one side or another, but to protest against a definition of Liberalism in religion which would ultimately make all private judgment impossible, and render religion itself, in time, a mere afi"air of government from above. Dr. Newman's speech would be equally false and offensive if it came from the mouth of one professing any other form of creed. Suppose, for example, that Professor Haeckel, of Jena, were to say, in as many words, " Liberalism in science is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in science, but that one belief is as good as another. It is incon- sistent with the recognition of any science as true.'' How Dr. Newman and all Churchmen would open their eyes at such a definition. Yet the cases are identical. Positive or absolute truth is one thing, its recognition by the human intellect is quite an- other. Unfortunately for Dr. Newman, the world is A LAST LOOK ROUND, 365 not so certain about the truth as it used to be ; it has been driven to the conclusion that absolute truth is inconceivable, and that there a great many ways of looking at even one order of facts or miracles. So Liberalism says, " In God^s name let all the creeds of God flourish, so long as they do not interfere with the due workings of the State ; let Dr. Newman go to Rome if he pleases, and long may he wear his biretta ; only he must let other men have their way too, and leave a little scope for taste and judgment, even in matters of opinion ! ^' And Liberalism, true Liberalism, may add, with a sigh, " Since I did allow my good son, Newman, to go to Rome, and put no hindrance in his way, he might have remembered his first obligations to me and mine. He should not have abandoned me altogether, even to become a Cardinal." III. THE ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE. I AM no blind admirer of the Professor who is just at present sending forth his saucy scientific prophecies from the University of Jena — indeed, there are many points, especially those affecting the psychological conditions of mankind, on which I am ready to join issue with him. In reading his two principal works,, the " History of Creation ^^ and the " History of Evolution," it is impossible to tell where certainty ends and wild poetical hypothesis begins, and equally useless to speculate to what heights of daring as- sumption the author may be led at any moment by his passion for logical symmetry and his fervour 366 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. for the fancies of his creed. At the same time his power is great and his courage indisputable, while, concerning his mechanical conceptions of creation, this, at least, can be said — that they are a good deal nearer to the truth than the old dreams of theologians or the last romances of super-pious naturalists edu- cated in the school of Cuvier. Fascinated, bewildered even, by the mighty hypothesis of Darwin, Professor Haeckel has pushed that hypothesis to its utmost limits. He has drawn up plans of natural progression which revolutionise all orthodox ideas ; wherever links were wanting he has supplied them, with wonderful visions of the plastidule soul and the potentialities of carbon ; and the result is a chart of Man's place in Nature which may be mistaken, which is certainly highly conjectural, but which, however false in detail, is in every way fascinating as a generalisation. As might have been expected, how- ever, Haeckel's calm apotheosis of Darwinism has not been witnessed without protest, even from natural philosophers ; and every one remembers with what warmth the orthodox party exulted, when Professor Virchow delivered his address on the '^ Freedom of Science in the Modern State,'' and held up to especial ridicule the evolutionary explanations of Haeckel. The name of Virchow, of course, carried extraordinary weight. " A Daniel, a Daniel, come to judgment!" cried the Churches and the journals ; and the old Professor's words were flashed by the party of reaction all over the civilised world. The reductio ad absurdum came when the Prussian Kreuz- Zeitiing bracketed Darwinism and Democracy to- gether, and made the theory of descent responsible for the wicked attempts of Hodel and Nobiling ! The issue between the two Professors is very A LAST LOOK ROUND. 367 simple, and may be briefly explained. Virchow condemns the precipitation of Haeckel, accuses him of assuming as certain what is not verifiable, and insists that public teaching should be limited to the statement and illustration of facts which are actually conquered and firmly established. Haeckel, on the other hand, censures the retrogression of Virchow, avers that all human knowledge is subjective, and shows — I think with considerable success — that the mission of science embraces illimitable conjecture. Even those " axioms," which are the basis of the teaching of mathematics, are incapable of absolute proof. Conjectural in every way is all we know of Matter, or Force ; and even gravitation is hypo- thetical. The undulatory theory of Light, which we accept now as the indispensable basis of optics, rests on an unproved hypothesis, on the subjective assumption of an ethereal medium, whose existence no one is in a position to prove in any way. Again, the whole theoretical side of Chemistry is an airy structure of hypotheses, the common basis of chemical theories — viz., the atomic theory — being perfectly unprovable, since no chemist has ever seen an atom. In all this, perhaps. Professor Haeckel is perhaps a little ingenuous. He knows as well as any one that he is not fairly crossing swords with Virchow, but enveloping him in a cloud of verbal dust. The real matter at issue is not what every modern philosopher has already answered affirmatively to the public satisfaction, i.e., whether hypothesis is admissible in science ; but whether evolutionists, in using hypo- thesis wholesale and without due caution, and in mingling together material facts and subjective dreams, are not misleading both themselves and the public. Haeckel, for example, is a materialist pure 368 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. and simple. Not content with leaving the evolution- hypothesis to illustrate itself and to point its own moral, he uses it as heavy artillery against the Cloud- Cuckoo-Town of popular Deism. He is eager at every step to show that Matter is everything, that Deity is impossible. He is never tired of ridiculing the religion which attributes, as he expresses it, " a dualistic existence to the psyche," his own certainty being that Matter and Spirit are identical ; and he reminds his opponent that he too at one time expressed the same materialistic views. " He (Virchow) formerly supported with a clear conscience and with his utmost energy, in psychology as in the other collected de- partments of physiology {sic), that very mechanical standpoint which we to-day accept as the essential base of our monism, and which stands in irreconcilable antagonism to the dualism of the vitalistic doctrine. . . .. He led me to the clear recognition of the fact that the nature of man, like every other organism, can only be rightly understood as an united whole, that this spiritual and corporeal being are inseparable, and that the phenomena of the soul-life depend, like all other vital phenomena, on material motio7i only — ow mechajiical [or physico-chemical) modificatiojis of cells!' The italics are mine, not Haeckel^s. It seems to me that such language fully justifies Virchow's ad- juration of '^ Restringamur.'^ Haeckel not only exaggerates the monistic ideas formerly held by Virchow, but here, as elsewhere, he almost exagge- rates his own conception of the theory. To assert that psychical or spiritual life is primarily or ultimately a material motion only, a mechanical modification of cells^ is to use the language of wild hyperbole. It may or may not be true that such is the case, just as it may or may not be true that the moon is made of A LAST LOOK ROUND. 369 green cheese, but there is not the slightest evidence to justify the hypothesis. And the hypothesis itself is so charmingly easy and off-hand ! What has puzzled philosophy since man began to think, what has eluded every kind of inquiry and research, all that wondrously complicated phenomenon which to this hour is the despair of physiology and the drunkenness of metaphysics, is only — mark the " only " — a mechanical modification of " cells." Why, this is no more than to say that to think is — to use the brain, and that the basis of life is physiological. Thought may be a mode of motion, as heat is, as electricity is supposed to be ; but what then .-* Does that bring us an inch nearer to the central mystery, how cellular change, when such takes place, can possibly evolve psychic force ? HaeckeFs explanation, in fact, is no explanation whatever. It is a mere vision of a mysterious mechanism which no man has yet been able to explain. And when the Professor goes further and asserts that the me- chanical nature of Matter and Spirit negates the idea of God, I cry again, with Virchow, " Restringa- mur ! " How does the identity of Matter and Spirit affect the idea of God one way or another } Because we know how a monkey wags its tail, or how the mind of man receives its impressions and redelivers them, have we solved the riddle of the Universe? Quite the contrary, says Virchow ; so do not let us be vainglorious. Here, certainly, Virchow is right. But where Haeckel has his opponent on the hip is in his repudiation of the politico-theological as- sertion that the doctrine of descent leads to social anarchy, and supports the " Socialist theory."'^ " What in the world,'' Haeckel naturally asks, '' has the doctrine of descent to do with Socialism .'' " He 2 B 370 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. proceeds to demonstrate, however, that Darwinism, at least, is the reverse of democratic, since it teaches the cheerful creed that " in human life, as in animal and plant life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve and perish miserably, and more or less prematurely." I cordially agree with him in his protest against Virchow's attempt to darken the discussion by awakening a political bias. I agree with him, moreover, whenever he takes his stand on the right of private judgment, and on the freedom of the truth. Yet this tract — with all its justice of polemics in certain particulars — forces upon us more than ever the fact that Virchow's protest was well-timed, and that pure scientists should clip their wings and lessen their fanciful flights, in which they try to rival theologians. Haeckel is a clever man haunted by one great truth, which casts a thousand delusive shadows. He seems utterly incompetent to give a philosophical opinion on the higher issues of the great religious controversy which his charts of facts and fancies illustrate so amusingly and so well ; and he will leave the world where Aristotle found it, darkened by the shadow of its own doubt, and face to face with the everlasting Sphynx. IV. MINOR RESULTS AND INFLUENCES. These are the two great forces which stand opposed to each other — authority and superstition, as personi- fied in such men as Cardinal Newman ; extreme scientific Radicalism, as personified in such men as A LAST LOOK ROUND. 371 Professor Haeckel. The first still persists, to the great joy of many thousands of people, in affirming that two and two make five ; the second, elated with the discovery that two and two make four, encroaches so far as to deny the existence of any unknown quantity. Midway between the two forces, and full of a prescience and a sanity unique in this generation, stands Mr, Herbert Spencer, uttering supreme words / of wisdom and of warning, but sadly disappointing' those who crave for some creed of absolute certainty. While all other teachers of the age may easily be classed, while Mr. Mill, for example, may safely be relegated to the army of the intellectual revolt, while Messrs. Carlyle and Ruskin, despite all their divergencies, may as certainly be claimed by the leaders of the army of authority, Mr. Spencer alone confronts the problem of the universe, and while indefinitely enlarging the area of human knowledge, : frankly postulates the Unknowable. His width of\ view, his catholicity of sympathy, his fearlessness in investigation, his faculty of crystalline exposition, appear to me almost superhuman. One sweep of his majestic vision has unveiled the whole mystery of human responsibility, one touch of his little finger has annihilated dozens of dilettante prophets — e.g. Mr. Matthew Arnold. Yet for all this he is solitary and scarcely happy, since, unlike the Cardinal, and unlike the Professor, he stops short at verification. His supreme proof is a supreme disappointment. His last word is, " Wait ! " Fortunately, he closes no one gate of the universe, but leaves all wide open, while we stand awestricken at the dazzling vistas- ^ which open out beyond them all. Below the sphere occupied by these greater forces quietly conditioning literature, work those innumerable 2 B 2 372 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. minorinfluences to which we give, collectively, the name of criticism. Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Mallock, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Huxley, Mr. Tyndall, Mr. Frederick Harrison, Miss Frances Cobbe, Mr. Picton, Mr. Greg, and many others, devote their powers, each in his or her own way, to the criticism of the " situation." From every great review, from every journal or news- paper, their voices are sounding. According to Mr. Arnold, here as elsewhere echoing Goethe, literature is merely a criticism of life. According to Mr. Mallock, literature is a criticism of religion, and the highest truth rests where it began, at the Empire Roman city. According to Mr. Morley, the criterion of progress is still to be found in the French encyclo- paedia. According to Messrs. Huxley and Tyndall, science now and for ever dispossesses imagination as well as religion. According to Mr. Harrison, there is no god but the Grand Eire, and Comte is his prophet. And so on, through all the long catalogue of popular essayists. The whole matter, so far as it affects the literary calling, resolves itself into this. The imaginative creator must now, to use an American vulgarism, take a back seat, while criticism, with stern and pertinacious countenance, faces the religio-scientific sphynx. The world is tired of imagination ; it solicits exposition, verifi- cation. All imaginative revolt is simple Philistinism. The Philistine novelist, the Philistine philosopher, the Philistine poet, and the Philistine journalist are told that their occupation is gone for ever. The Philistine novelist is Victor Hugo. The anti- dote to his influence is the critical novelist-essayist loved by the critical journalist, Thackeray. Thackeray looked at life from the windows of the clubs, made silly Laura Pendennis the ideal of English woman- A LAST LOOK ROUND. 373 hood, fought and wrought with criticism on his side till he based a splendid reputation on the theory of suckling fools and chronicling small beer. Thackeray was to literature what Major Pendennis was to society — a delightful fidneur^ a charming exponent of the philosophy of laissez faire. Thackeray " trusted to Heaven (^.^.) that German art and religion would take no hold in our country, where there is a fund of roast beef that will expel any such Jmmhig in the end." Thackeray protested, apropos of George Sand, against " women who step down to the people with stately step and voice of authority, and deliver their twopenny tablets, as if there were some Divine authority for the wretched nonsense written there." Thackeray, in his hatred of all imaginative revolt, belonged to the party of the Cardinal. The Philistine poet is Walt Whitman. Against his influence, such as it is, may be set the influence of the critical poet loved by the critical journalist ; for example, Mr. Matthew Arnold. There must be a certain charm in the didactic verse of this writer, for it has been liberally praised and widely read. I have, nevertheless, to record my impression that Mr. Arnold is not, in the strict sense of the word, a poet at all, and that, even where the form of his thought appears poetical, its primary inspiration is crudely intellectual. In saying so much 1 do not deny that this writer has written charm- ing verses, and has attained poetical credentials ; all I mean to convey is that he is not an inspired writer, in the sense that certain of his contemporaries are inspired writers, as Mr. Swinburne for example is inspired, and that his verses lie on the wrong side of the border-line which separates true poetry from eloquent prose. As a prose writer, whether 374 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. he is writing verse or not, he is invariably self- collected, sagacious, and sane, but he is at all times a prose writer, never a poet, either " born '' or '^ made." For the besetting sin of his style I should say that his master, Goethe, was responsible. That sin is didacticism. Where he reaches the highest level of his attainment, as in the verses to Obermann, he is didactic in the best mood of our contemplative essayists ; where he sinks to his lowest level, he is didactic in the manner of a leader writer in the Daily News ; but in either case his object is not poetry but criticism. He offers to our eyes that strangest of all spectacles, an inquirer who keeps his temper, who never gets angry, but who is calmly and insinuating!}?- irritating in all his moods. After a careful study of his verses, I can quite understand how he came to utter the dictum that Shelley^s prose would be remembered when all Shelley's verses were forgotten. A writer who finds nothing better in verse to say of Heine than that the world smiled, and " that smile was Heine,^^ was never born among the laurel-bushes of Parnassus. The Philistine philosopher, for all practical pur- poses, is Thoreau. People who pass him by with indifference turn with rapture to Mr. Mallock or Mr. Percy Greg. V. THE NEW GIRONDE. Meantime, in the dearth or the neglect of literary individualism, we have witnessed for a short season the apotheosis of the dilettante. The writers and critics to whom I am about to allude may be called the Girondists of contemporary A LAST LOOK ROUND. 375 literature. Being called to power some few years ago^ at a period of literary depression^ they have had their opportunity — and lost it ; because, like their namesakes, they have had nothing to offer mankind but a dainty scepticism, an enervating aestheticism, an elegant theory of Art pour Art, founded on a foolish indifference to the great facts of religion and life. Their overthrow was certain from the first. Totem- worshippers, they carved their own images on pieces of wood, and when the hour of trial came, they were found without a living faith. They are liberals, I know, but that is all ; their liberalism is not vital. In the meantime, that other liberal party in literature, which may be compared to the Jacobins, have under- gone no little persecution. Combining with their advanced religious views and scientific sympathies a vital belief in God, that is to say, in the supreme Moral Power which guides the universe, they have been branded as sentimental and transcendental ; nor could they hope for any assistance from the exponents of popular creeds, seeing that like their great prototype, Rousseau, they reject all dogmatic solutions of the dark problem of life. But should they ever be called upon to govern, as is not impossible, it will perhaps be found that their faith is not dead but living, that they understand mankind, and that their programme includes a method by which Religion, Science, and Art may be reconciled. It is a favourite assertion of the gifted leaders of the English Gironde that Art itself is all-sufhcing and that literature, to be acceptable to the dilettante, must be destitute of any kind of edification. For the artist, no theory of life is necessary, no philosophy, no moral aspirations, no religion ; his nature may exhaust itself in triumphs of mere reproduction, with 376 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. the most satisfactory literary results ; his world may be Bedford Park, his culture need not extend beyond the literature of poetic terms, his outlook on life may be, and indeed had better be, confined to the tea- roses in his own back garden. Unfortunately, just at the present moment, something more is wanted in literature than this kind of teaching. Poetry founded on elegant indifference to the great problems of life may be very well suited for schoolboys and their tutors, but it is of little or no value in times of great revolution, such as that through which we are now passing. My friends of the Gironde have reigned for a few days, and fallen under the derision of the very citizens who were at first eager for them to govern. Nor have they fallen merely through negative incapacity to grapple with the difficulties of the situation ; they have committed positive sins against literature and against society. The predominant vices of the age are its lust for worldly success, its love of mere amusement, its indifference to moral sanctions, its mindless pietism on the one hand and its dapper scepticism on the other, its irreverence, its contempt for emotion ; in one word, its materialism. All these vices have been approved, tacitly or openly, by the party to which we Jacobins of the new Republic are in opposition. Members of this party have long contended that this world is all-sufficing, that mere pleasure is the end of Art, that morality is a mere matter of opinion, that orthodox religion is im- becile and scientific religion irrelevant, that sentiment is preposterous, that the true basis of belief is, in the worst sense, materialistic. Life is an " empty day,'' and that is all. Well, our friends have been heard, have been honoured, have said their say, have reigned, have fallen. They still command several of the A LAST LOOK ROUND. 377 bastions of criticism, but every day their fire grows Aveaker and more straggling, and soon, I have no doubt, it will be silenced for ever. The strife between them and the party at present called Philistine is the everlasting strife between moral enthusiasm and artistic indifferentism, between spiritualism and materialism, between Art for Religion's sake and Art for its own sake, between idealism and realism — in a word, between Jacobinism and the Gironde. VI. THE OUTCOME IN SOCIETY. While religion is waning, while literature is failing, 1 while the dilettante still survives in the shadow of ; the busy man of science, how is Society progressing } \ According to the evidence of many who speak with authority, very badly. There is no smoke without fire; and although modern society may not be quite as bad as its own scribes represent it to be, although virtue may still be a moral factor even in fashionable circles, there can be no doubt that the progress for the last decade has been a progress downward. In politics, in social affairs, in literature, art, and the drama, as well as in the mere records of the Divorce Court and the milliners' shops, we read the same dark truth — that luxury has increased in proportion to the decline of domestic ideals, and that all standards, even the merely commercial one, have been lowered in answer to the popular demand for wild mental or moral stimulants. It is no task of mine to preach a sermon 378 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. on this old theme, or to play Cassandra in the manner familiar to students of reviews. No words of mine can change the condition of things. Time and patience alone can effect any reformation, for the day is long past when any single utterance, however prophetic, could have much effect in guiding the popular mind. And yet it has been repeatedly forced upon me of late that, of all things wanted by the present generation, a Satirist is wanted most ; one who would tell the world its sins and foibles, not with the sneaking snigger or familiar wink of a Society journalist, but with a voice loud and clear enough to reverberate from Land's End to John o' Groats. It would matter little where this voice was first heard. It might be in the pulpit, it might be on the stage. It might sound as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, or it might be heard, as more than once heretofore, from the very heart of the crowd. Since Dickens dropped the scourge, satire has been sadly at a discount, and we are in reality worse off for censores moruin than were our prototypes, the prosperous bourgeoisie of the Second Empire. So closely do our present social conditions re- semble that of the botirgeoisie alluded to, that even a course of the comedy of the Empire would do us nothing but good ; but, unfortunately, instead of a real we have a spurious censor morum, and the in- struction from abroad is interdicted. The late Licenser of Plays, animated by a too blind enthusiasm of morality, thought he was doing a wise thing when he forbade the performance in this country of the masterpieces of Dumas Fils and Sardou; and the present Licenser, though a man of more liberal instincts, still sets an adamantine countenance against the innovation. True, dramas of this sort, though, A LAST LOOK ROUND, 379 doubtless, open to the criticism which has been lavished upon them, and which has caused them to be classed in France under '' VEcole Brtitale" are, m the best sense, works of art. They are, moreover, fiery social satires — and true satire is never quite unwholesome. Under the foul rule of the French ' Empire society grew luxurious, reckless, libidinous, and rotten ; extravagance in dress, in manners and customs, in conduct, became the fashion ; it was the epoch in real life of the " Faux Bonhommes " and " Madame Bovary." As a bitter comment on this ^ state of things came the so-called " comedy " of the Empire. Dumas Fils, a melancholy man, began by picturing the pathetic side of the life of courtesans, and continued by preparing for Parisian acceptance an entire system of theatrical ethics — or rather, as a critic of the period called it, " la logique appliquee au theatre.^^ And what, after all, was the sum total of his philosophy ? " Se marier, quand on est jeune et sain, choisir, dans n^importe quelle classe, une bonne fille franche et saine, I'aimer de toute son ame et de toutes ses forces, en faire une compagne sure et une mere feconde, travailler pour elever ses enfants et leur laisser en mourant Fexemple de sa vie : voila la verite — le reste n'est qu'une erreur, crime, ou folie.'^ If, sooner or later, this good girl becomes like the " Femme de Claude," shoot her ; if she forms a grand passion, like " Diane de Lys," and it is encouraged, after due warning, by its object, kill him. Horrible morality, doubtless, but grimly appropriate notwith- standing. The comedies of M. Dumas are a series of propositions on the theme of the married state, but their moral is unmistakable ; it is the moral of all plays, from Scribe's Treyite Ans dafis la Vie d'lme Femme downwards, viz., that to become 38o A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. adulterous is natural, but inexpedient. Sardou, another melancholy man, preaches the same lesson. The French comedy of the Empire, so far from being an incentive to vicious living, is subacid, platitu- dinous, rectangular — -on the whole not very enter- taining, but edifying as a social study. It was, at any rate, the nearest approach to Juvenars terrible manner that the Empire could furnish ; and though it was Dead Sea fruit enough, many who devoured it were healed perhaps of a portion of their disease. I am not defending the comedy of the Empire, though I infinitely prefer it to the vile importations in which what, in the stage directions of Goethe's Faust, is called an ''obscene gesture" supplies the place of all moral teaching or rational meaning. He who accepts La Marjolaine and rejects La Femnie de Claude must be either a roue or an ignoramus. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that we here in England would be the better if some one would hold the mirror up to our follies, even to our vices. It is useless to look for such a satirist in the direction of the stage; the whole drama is usurped by the spectre of that British matron who in the flesh never patronises the drama at all. Our novelists are pig- Anies, clinging to the cast-off coat-tails of departed j giants, and their social satire, when they do attempt social satire, is at once timid and verbose. Our poets 1 are dilettanti, with each other for a public, and Mr. Tennyson's mildest verses for a precedent. In all the lower departments of art and literature a sad, unsocial diffidence embarrasses the speech of genius, and instead of " human nature's daily food " we get mannerism, aff"ectation, and the cynicism of complete indifference to practical social problems. Meantime Society, moenad-like, twines flowers in A LAST LOOK ROUND. 381 her hair, and goes from bad to worse. The only individuals who tell her of her vices are those who flourish through them, and the cue of these is to lament over the ideals they first overthrow, and to pretend that goodness is useless, since there is no power but evil left. Well, even a comedy of the Empire would be better than this ; better than a journalism which degrades the social standard with every quip and turn characteristic of blind snobbery ; better than a literature which hushes up every vital question, covers up every social sore, reduces life and thought to the "prunes and prism" insisted on by/ Mr. Mudie ; better than a stage which is either uncleai/ and corybantic or pure and prurient to the verge c/f imbecility. The only straightforward and trutli- telling force at present at work is modern Science, biat it is not sufficiently aggressive in the social sphere to be of much avail. So the feast goes on, so the soothe sayer is put aside, and the voice of the prophet is unheard. Some fine day, nevertheless, there will be a revelation — the handwriting will be seen on the wall in the colossal cypher of some supreme Satirist. How much of our present effulgent civilisation will last till then t How much will not perish without any aid from without, by virtue of its own inherent folly and dry rot } Meantime, even a temporary revelation would be thankfully accepted. Such satire as Churchill suddenly lavished upon the stage would be of service to Society just now. Even satire as wicked as that with which Byron deluged the " piggish domestic virtues" of the Georges would not be alto- gether amiss. Only, it must come in simple speech, not in such mystic dress as that worn by St. Thomas of Chelsea when he gave forth his memorable sartorial prophesies. 382 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. VII. CONCLUSION. What, then, is the status quo of our literature just at present? Too much intellectual activity, and too little ; too many teachers, and too few ; too few creative books, and a plethora of " criticisms." For- tunately, great stars still shine in the literary heavens. The fame of Spencer, of Tennyson, of Browning, of =^ Whitman, of Hugo, lends us assurance that the god- \ ilike mood is still possible, that the godlike speech ^may still be heard. But against such divine in- fluences must be set those of men, of cicerones, of ^newspaper columns. Authorised critics abound. It is an authorised critic who tells us, as Mr. Arnold, that Shelley's prose is likely to be remembered when his verse is forgotten ; it is an authorised critic who informs us, wuth Mr. Lowell, that Thoreau is a thoroughly unauthorised and almost offensive person. Mr. Arnold and Mr. Lowell are cultivated men, who speak with authority ; their temper fascinates the spirit of mediocrity, and their culture is in perfect harmony with the culture of the period. Open any newspaper, and we shall find that these are the leaders /of critical opinion who are honoured in their own country and whose dicta are accepted at second hand. I pass these cicerones politely by. Their message is not to me, their inspiration is not mine. I have refused to listen to their master and inspirer, Goethe, and I shall certainly not spend my time with any of his disciples. What, then, some may ask, does the world want, since neither mere science, nor dilettantism, A LAST LOOK ROUND. z'^Z nor--€«lture, nor bogus reputations^ will serve irs turn ? It wants poetry, and not criticism ; it wants\ earnest thought and life, and not a philosophy of thel .^ schoolroom ; it wants fearless truth and imagination, : applied to all the great phenomena of creation ; it I wants, in one word, a living creed, not a rehabilitation of creeds that are indeterminate. Much of Carlylc'sj early teaching was beautiful ; we believed when he/ taught us that manly dignity and independence, that honest work, were bet^^rtnan worldly honours. Part of Goethe's t^^cning is wise, that there is a law which mak^.g for righteousness, independently of all dogmas^ ''W\\\ was sane in his generation, while Comte vjas eyen saner in his. But what all these "^^^ ^xave missed is the great truth that literature is / "^t a criticism of life, but only one of its pheno-{ "^leha ; that manly dignity and belief in culture, and ^he belief in the utility of culture, are not personal P|ossessions differentiating men from each other, but F)art of the universal privileges of humanity ; that "goodness" and "badness" are terms of mere rela4 ^ ion, applied to certain incidents of human action, or ^•a'pplied to living books, but possessing no absolute truth whatever; that Love and Love's sorrow alondj •te true, and, being so, are^th^ Indisputable posses- felon of the noblest hero and the lowest criminal unde" the sun. A creed of this sort has been calle optimism, or cosmopolitanism, and what not ; it ha been confronted of late years with the arid creed o pessimism, which has one merit, that of perfect, logical symmetry. It has been described by the| contemporary satirist as the creed which ^^ proves wrong is as good as right, you know, and one man as good as another.^' Well, those who hold it are quite willing to accept all these definitions. Their 384 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. faith is that God will be justified, even to the ver>r lowest and least of His children. _^ As poets, the>r believe in all the gods, from Jesus to Josh. "\T hey believe in Professor Haeckel and they believe in the Cardinal. As men of the world, they turn their ears of sympathy to everything human. As students of literature, they decline to accept any work as supremely creative or authoritative which does not take count of allth^ forces which condition the moral itrimortaliTy ofifee'Kuma^^-race. Brought down to the low^st-f l^tform of modern expediency, what does this creed irVlf'v ^^ letters . The rejection of all dilettantism, the apo&^°^^^ ^^ ^^^ highest and triithfullest of human teachers/^ .'^ dead or contemporary, the recognition of everj^-- of noble effort, whether in the region of the lowi? " cakes and ale ^^ or the highest sphere of the ideai." Above all, it implies distrust of individual judg- ments or "criticisms," and faith in the all-embracing catholicity of the laws of life and literature. Literature cannot be divorced from life, any more than poetry can be divorced from religion. The two are one. A man is great or wise, not because by humouring his reputation he succeeds in hocussing the world into an opinion of his greatness or wisdom, not because he is corroborated by the folly of his inferiors — as Napoleon was, as Goethe is ; but because, like Lincoln, like Whitman, he is saner than his fellows J in the purest sanity of goodness and love. A book is ' great, not on account of its cleverness, its brilliance, its literary pretences, but on account of that integral wisdom which discharges cleverness, and brilliance, and even pyrotechny, through the magical chemistry of style; the style which is neither superficially effective nor openly meretricious, but which unites A LAST LOOK ROUND. 385 perfect harmony of meaning with sanity of expres- sion. Words are the merest counters, apart from what they are used to represent. Books are the 'merest waste of force, unless they tell us something new, or lend a new significance of beauty to something that is old. Judged in this way, not one book in a thousand has a right to live. ^i All this proves only that criticism is really a/ series of private judgments, more or less fallible, and that the value of a man's life and work can only be estimated after a very long period of probation. Meantime, all one can do is to record impressio7is as honestly as he can. I can advance no scientific; reason for seeing a great genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces scientifically, but not I a living soul. I might prove the absurdity of the 1 wrlterv^ho calls herself Ouida, but I could not prove the absurdity of any honest original thinker, however low in the intellectual scale. I am helpless before Mr. Swinburne or any authentic poet, while quite at my ease before Macaulay and Professor Aytoun. Finally, it must not be understood that a reader ^ has a right to judge a thinker by the nature of his opitiions — in other words, by the points of his agree- ment or disagreement with one's own philosophy of life. This would be to say that I could not enjoy Thackeray, because I thought him au fond narrow- / minded, or appreciate Sterne, because I knew him to be a sham sentimentalist. A writer may be very provincial yet very delightful ; in that case, however, though his scope of view and his sympathies may be 2 c 386 A LOOK ROUND LITERATURE. narrow, his spirit must be faithful and completely- sane within its range. At the same time, the greatest writers are those who possess, in combination with technical gifts, the grandest and most all-embracing power of sympathetic vision. No^^writer can be trjjly gi-eat who believes, like Carlyle, that God Almighty intended the negro to be a servant, who avows, like Lamb, that he is miserable anywhere beyond a London street, or who upholds, like Zola, that the /world is a sink of sensual corruption. For great writing is great wisdom, and great wisdom means I great goodness, that is, love for and sympathy with all created things, animate and inanimate. Judged by this standard, great writers are very few, and when they appear, are, for a long time, dimly guessed. THE END. CHARLES DICKENS AND BVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. Apr'i4S M 9>£P 19 1979 REC'D i_t.. INTER-LIBRARY it> '64-^ MAY 1 3 1967 3 RECElVfcJ MAY V '1-7 -,3 ? 1 LOAM DEP"'". 0EC18 t9@7 8t -.^ RECEIVED.. m fiEC. CIR. 9 ' V--) LD 21A-40m-4,'63 (D647]sl0)476B General Library University of California Berkeley U.C, BERKELEY LIBRARIES CQ353DbMfib "v.