GIFT OF 
 MICHAEL REESE 
 
New Essays to- 
 wards a Critical 
 
 Method 
 
 "^w ^Irw '^If^ 
 
 "By 
 
 John Mackinnon Robertson 
 
 John Lane, T/ie Bodley Head 
 London £5? New York 1897 
 
7 /6-Sf 
 
 Printed by Ballantvne, Hanson 6f Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press 
 
TRAIT'S 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Of the following essays, those on Poe, Shelley, Clough, 
 and the art of Keats and Burns, were written before the 
 idea of a general ** Critical Method" had been at all 
 formally developed by the author. Each was a spon- 
 taneous attempt, made over ten years ago, to arrive by 
 comparison and inference at a reasoned opinion on a 
 critical issue over which there had been much dispute ; 
 and they are now revised and collected in the hope that, 
 though in the past ten years our critical disputes have 
 mostly turned on other topics, these discussions may 
 still have an interest for readers who have not yet 
 satisfied themselves that the old questions are disposed 
 of. The principles involved are a permanent ground of 
 discussion, and doubtless the poets of the past will yet 
 be disputed over afresh. 
 
 It will readily be seen that no one of the studies 
 named, except perhaps that on Poe, comes near apply- 
 ing all the tests mentioned in the preliminary essay on 
 The Theory and Practice of Criticism as proper to a 
 critical inquiry. They rather represent detached in- 
 vestigations in which a view of the nature of the 
 necessary tests is arrived at. Thus the paper on Shelley 
 
PREFACE 
 
 luuj Poc/ry is an attempt to discriminate argumentatively 
 the values of Shelley's verse on its strict aesthetic merits, 
 with little or no explanatory recourse to a study of his 
 personality and its physical basis. And though that is 
 a method more pleasing to critical youth (when it 
 resists convention) than to maturer judgment, which 
 seeks a more synthetic estimate, it is so far valid and 
 useful that I let the essay stand with only the comment 
 that were I now to set about judging Shelley I should 
 describe his work in the light of a sympathetic study of 
 his temperament and physique. In the essays on 
 Keats and Burns, though they were written before that 
 on Shelley, there is a measure of this duality of view ; 
 and the Shelley essay probably lacked it because in that 
 case I was specially concerned to characterise a mass of 
 technically bad work and resist extravagant over- 
 estimate. The latest essay of all, that entitled Stevensoti 
 on BurnSy is a final attempt, made on an interesting 
 provocation, to reach a just verdict on Burns the man 
 in terms of a revised ethic, relating the poet's life to his 
 work with aforethought. 
 
 In the essay on Coleridge, again, the demonstration, 
 such as it is, proceeds largely on a special study of the 
 physiology and psychology of the subject, so that it is 
 either more broadly wrong or more broadly right than 
 that of the essay on Shelley, the question of aesthetic 
 values being much more summarily disposed of, on the 
 principles laid down in the earlier essay. 
 
 Lastly, in the study of Clough, which claims for him 
 a status and a kind of recognition that have not latterly 
 been given him, I have attempted to relate the criticism 
 of the writing, as is fitting, to a view of the organism 
 
 vi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 and surroundings of the writer. I am aware that such 
 inquiries, though often incidentally set up by past critics, 
 are reprobated by some to-day when systematically 
 dwelt upon. I wish the more emphatically to say that 
 I hold them to be part of the business of serious 
 criticism, and I count it a shortcoming in any of the 
 following studies to have omitted them. 
 
 Another shortcoming, from their own point of view, 
 is the incompleteness of the collation of critical opinions 
 on the various points discussed. It is the more neces- 
 sary to urge here that such comparison of critical 
 judgments, with some reasoned explanation of their 
 conflict, must be made if criticism is to be raised from 
 the level of random self-expression to that of a scientific 
 procedure. I have sought by annotations to make good 
 to some extent the original deficiencies of the essays. 
 
 It is probable that some of them would not have been 
 written had some later books and essays by other writers 
 been earlier published. Thus the essay on Keats would 
 hardly have been undertaken had Mr. Colvin's admirable 
 monograph been in existence in 1884; and that on Poe,* 
 as it avows, might not have been ventured on had I 
 seen the essay of Hennequin sooner ; though I think I 
 should after all have been moved to attempt a critical 
 plea for Poe as against many of the findings of Mr. 
 E. C. Stedman, who, in the criticisms contributed by 
 him to the recent complete edition of Poe's works, has 
 passed from his older attitude of sympathy to that of a 
 pseudo-judicial animus, still so common in the United 
 States in regard to Poe. 
 
 * Published in three successive parts of the magazine Our Corner, 
 in 1885. 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In any case, each essay says in its own way something 
 that had seemed to me to need saying, and to which I 
 am disposed to stand ; and therefore it is that they 
 are here reprinted. 
 
 Finally I would anticipate the comment of critical 
 readers that the essay on Poe, dealing with his morbid 
 psychology as well as with his art, is in the main 
 friendly, while that on Coleridge, with the same method, 
 and dealing likewise with a pathological case, is In com- 
 parison at times hostile in tone. I trust that in the one 
 case as in the other I have given due force to the 
 physiological plea, though It fell to be made more 
 strongly In the case of Poe, who clearly suffered from a 
 progressive lesion of the brain. To any one who reflects 
 on what this means, it must be grievous to see still 
 going on in America the old process of malevolent 
 insistence on the stumbles of the stricken man, with as 
 little regard as may be to the abundant witness borne 
 to his moral merit when free of active disease. Doubt- 
 less there Is no final ethical line to be drawn between 
 brain-malady and conformation of brain as sources of 
 bad conduct ; and for purposes of philosophy we ought 
 no doubt to think of Griswold as uncensoriously as of 
 Poe. But in a world in which moral judgment is only 
 beginning to be scientific among even educated men, 
 while it is vain to ask for a merely bad nature the com- 
 passion that many are ready to feel for a nature in part 
 chronically mad, it is surely not too much to ask that 
 in the latter case plain proofs should be treated as such, 
 and not made ground for a kind of censure which in the 
 case of a person of unquestioned insanity would be 
 revolting to every one. It may be said that in the case 
 
 viii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 of Coleridge I have not been consistently compassionate, 
 since I do at times speak with some asperity of 
 intellectual vices which after all were rooted in flaws of 
 physique, and in part contend rather against praise 
 than against dispraise. Perhaps, indeed, such a 
 difference of treatment is an illustration of that specific 
 bent on the part of the critic which is described in the 
 preliminary essay as a possible cause of deflection in 
 his as in all men's judgment. The opening essay is 
 expressly framed to point to the ideal tests for the rest 
 of the volume, as for all criticism. As regards the 
 cases in question I was of opinion that the doctrinal 
 influence of Coleridge was in certain ways harmful, and 
 needed to be gainsaid, while the general credit of Poe 
 had not been justly maintained. The latter view is 
 pretty fully defended in the essay on Poe ; the former 
 is partly justified in the essay on Coleridge, but partly 
 depends for its acceptation on a variety of considera- 
 tions which to state fully would heavily overload the 
 essay as an estimate of one man and his work. They 
 would lead us into a logical and a sociological estimate 
 of religion for one thing. Such are some of the 
 "artistic" difficulties in the way of scientific criticism. 
 I can but desire that the reader will not think they have 
 been overlooked or evaded. 
 
 IX 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 ^^/^OE 
 
 coleridge . 
 ^shelley and poetry 
 -^the art of keats 
 —the art of burns 
 
 stevenson on burns 
 .Plough . 
 
 appendix: ACCENT, QUANTITY, AND FEET 
 
 I 
 
 55 
 
 ill 
 
 191 
 
 f37 
 259 
 273 
 301 
 
 333 
 
\6 
 
 - 1 
 
 \j 
 
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE 
 OF CRITICISM 
 
 I 
 
 The practice of criticism as a minor branch of fine 
 letters, and the special connection of the name with 
 that limited activity, have brought upon both iiahivv Jjnd 
 function certain reproachful associations. .Criticism, and, 
 ''the critical spirit " are jointly or severally impeach-eti' 
 as if they were, or stood for, something out of the 
 common way of life, something, of which rightly 
 constituted or normal people are not guilty. Seeing, 
 however, that the censure is itself criticism, the protest 
 must rank as one of the paralogisms set up by the 
 random use of words. Criticism is obviously_en_ough 
 the expression of the most general and the most funda- 
 mental form of mental activity, indeed of the essence of 
 all activity, the play of attraction and repulsion, liking 
 and dislike. Even if the word be limited to the naming of 
 a process of strife, it points to what the ancient thinker 
 saw to be ''the parent of things." The serenest and 
 the dullest of us must needs criticise : there is no 
 respite from the function while we live and think. That 
 we are all critics is even more true than that we are all 
 (necessarily) Socialists. 
 
 I A 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 But it is in the nature of things that words which 
 properly stand for a general activity, come to stand in 
 practice for a special form of that activity, so that as 
 the maker of verse came of all makers to bear the 
 name of maker or poet, and as among us in England 
 the artist in colour came specially to bear the name of 
 artist, in like manner the critic of fine letters has come 
 specially to bear the name of critic. We do not speak 
 of Mill and Mr. Samuel Butler and Mr. A. J. Balfour as 
 ''critics," though they have systematically played the 
 part, one in philosophy, one in biology, and one in 
 politics. The whole stress of the title falls on the 
 gentlemen who argue or adjudicate on poetry and 
 ** style" and fiction. And, as must happen where any 
 proclivity is specially cultivated, and so marked off from 
 average 'jonduct, the result is a considerable sho wing-up 
 of infirmity, which is henceforth associated in average 
 comment' with the special pursuit. To judge from a 
 good deal of modern talk, whereas writers in general 
 are held to be irritable, and actors vain, and politicians 
 untruthful, and priests intolerant, so it is held to be the 
 characteristic of critics to be wrong. And in a sense it 
 must needs be so, inasmuch as in the mass they express 
 attractions and repulsions, and the mass of attractions 
 and repulsions go far to cancel each other. But, at 
 least, that implies that the critic of criticism runs his 
 risks like the rest, and that, .in short, the critic is only 
 wrong as other men are wrong. Even the typical black 
 sheep of the species, the trifling and snapping Zoilus of 
 all ages, is plainly a man and a brother. He is unwise 
 with the unwisdom which is the heritage of the species, 
 and does but chance to find a printer for such levities 
 and imbecilities of judgment as pass current at every 
 picture gallery, and in every parlour in which two or 
 three are assembled together to talk of the weather and 
 
 z 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 the last '* sex" novel. There is thus no reason, so far 
 as mere bad criticism goes, for despair over the possi- 
 bilities ofjcndcal science. It is the better criticism, the 
 criticism of the intelligent, the witty, and the learned, 
 thai j:hronically sets up among cultured people, by 
 force of its conflicts of judgment, discussions as to 
 whether criticism can be in any true sense scientific, 
 
 and even — the old paradox — whether it is worth 
 doing. ^ -^,..w„-^-.^-=.— -^— ^ 
 
 The last question we must just dismiss, as we do that, 
 other, as to whether life is worth living. Whatever be 
 the truth about the poet's singing, we do every one of 
 us criticise because we must : the trouble is only too 
 clearly that as a rule we pipe but as the linnets sing^ 
 The decisive proof of this is that those writers wht - 
 expressly set out to veto judicial criticism^to restri^ 
 criticism to a mere process of descriptive cataloguing, 
 always end by practising judicial criticism like other 
 people. M._TaLme, for instance, as has been noted by 
 M.^ Brunetiere, proposed at first to set up a criticism 
 which should '' neither proscribe nor pardon," which 
 should merely describe and classify, ** marking char- 
 acters and tracing causes," as is done in botany. But 
 from this attitude M. Talne entirely departed In practice, 
 where he proscribed and pardoned like the rest of us, 
 and that avowedly.* So Mr. Howells, after demanding 
 on his own account that criticism should be merely 
 descriptive, goes on criticising judicially — or otherwise. t 
 Whether the literary practice of criticism is worth the 
 while of any given writer is of course another question, 
 the answer to which may be framed in view either of 
 
 ■ * Brunetiere, UEvolution de la Critique, pp. 250, 273. 
 
 t See the point discussed in Essays Towards a Critical Method, 
 First Series, pp. 122-128, 143 ; and in the Section (II.) on " Recent 
 Nihilism." 
 
 3 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 the income he can make by the craft or of an opinion as 
 
 to his capacity for it, and the possibilities of influence or 
 
 fame it offers. And these latter issues finally turn on 
 
 ^ that as to the possibility of a criticism that shall be 
 
 \';. really scientific — that is, capable of persuading and 
 
 1 convincing men by a consistent drawing of conclusions 
 
 from premisses. To this issue, as I have said, critical 
 
 people are always returning. 
 
 It is, however, the fact that those who have most 
 systematically discussed canons and methods of criti- 
 cism have almost never been eminent or industrious 
 critics. The circumstance is singular, and not very 
 encouraging. If we set aside the case of Lessing, and 
 the later cases of Taine and Hennequin, we find that 
 the leading practitioners in literary criticism have not 
 concerned themselves greatly about a science of criti- 
 cism, and that those who strove to attain a science of 
 criticism have either not tried to pass much special 
 criticism or have not succeeded in it. 
 
 I do not mean that we have not had principled and 
 consistent criticism from eminent critics so-called. 
 From Lamb to Lowell, from Hallam to Minto, from 
 Lessing to Brandes, and from La Harpe to Lemaitre, we 
 may count scores of able practical critics who reason 
 their judgments, and who impress critical readers as 
 fitted to judge of merit and demerit."^ It is the getting 
 behind spontaneous judgment, the ascertaining how 
 and why we differ in our judgments, that the critics 
 so-called have mostly left unattempted. And as this 
 getting behind practice is strictly a philosophical pro- 
 cess, they are indeed not to be blamed, as critics, for not 
 attempting it ; mental philosophy being one thing and 
 literary and humanistic judgment another. But, for 
 
 * The phenomena of the historic evolution of criticism, and the 
 conditions of these phenomena, I leave for separate treatment. 
 
 4 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 one thing, the attempt must be made by somebody, and 
 one would fain see an experienced critic do it ; and for 
 another, the study of criticism cannot be finally satis- 
 factory to people of philosophic mind unless it be 
 relatable to philosophy like other human activities. In 
 philosophy, as we seek the *' knowledge of knowledge," 
 so we must aim at the criticism of criticism. And as 
 we are all philosophers, in the sense in which we are all 
 critics, we are all, by rights, concerned in the inquiry. 
 A philosophy which does not contain a criticism of -< 
 criticism is a faulty philosophy. i 
 
 II 
 
 Still, in this as in other matters our philosophy need 
 not be *' harsh and crabbed," though it cannot be as 
 the strains of Apollo's lute. After all, we simply want 
 to understand thoroughly what we are about, in fine 
 letters as in the useful arts. Our best critics, passing 
 judgment on books, are found at tirnes to clash with 
 each other, as they at times clash with their readers' 
 opinions ; and it need not be a more repellent business 
 to analyse these discords than to listen to them. As it 
 happens, the most considerable English treatise yet 
 penned on the philosophy of criticism is entitled The 
 Gay Science.^ It was published over. thirty years ago, 
 and it may be that its very title, fantastic though 
 ingeniously justified, has since served to conceal it from 
 those most interested In its theme. Hennequin appar- 
 ently knew nothing of it when he wrote La Critique 
 Scientifique ^ though Mr. Dallas attempted, so far as he 
 
 "" By E. S. Dallas (Chapman and Hall, 2 vols., 1866). This work 
 re-states and expands some of the ideas of its author's earlier work 
 entitled Poetics (Edinburgh, 1858). 
 
 s 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 went, to lay scientific bases for criticism, and went 
 about the task with much skill, much knowledge, and 
 much brilliancy. He called his theme *' the gay science " 
 because he thought that title, given of old by the 
 troubadours to their pleasure-giving art, better fits the 
 science which shall co-ordinate all the pleasure-giving 
 arts ; that is to say, the fine arts and fine letters. 
 "Whatever we do," he remarks, in the course of an 
 alwa3\s lucid and often luminous argument, *Mias happi- 
 ness for its last end ; but with art it is the first as well 
 as the last."* With the ancients and most moderns he 
 decides " that science is for knowledge, and that art is 
 for pleasure, "t But whereas the Greeks, holding this, 
 decided that the pleasure sought and given is that of 
 ''Imitation," and that therefore all that criticism has to 
 do is to study the ways of Imitation ; and whereas " the 
 Germans," deciding that the pleasure given and sought 
 is that of the beautiful, held that therefore all that criti- 
 cism has to do is to comprehend the beautiful, Mr. 
 Dallas protests that the business of criticism is clearly 
 just *' the science of pleasure." 
 
 It is a symmetrical and attractive argument. Soon, 
 however, It strikes the wary reader that the scheme is 
 enormously difiicult ; and In point of fact, Dallas's own 
 treatment proves it to be so ; for though he fills two 
 volumes with the steps of his exposition (to wit, chapters 
 on *' Imagination," ''The Hidden Soul," "The Play of 
 Thought," "The Secrecy of Art," "Pleasure," "Mixed 
 Pleasure," " Pure Pleasure," " Hidden Pleasure," "The 
 Ethics of Art," " The Pursuit of Pleasure," "The World 
 of Fiction," and "The Ethical Current"), he finally 
 leaves his work unfinished. The two volumes were to 
 have been followed by two more, but these never came. 
 
 * Vol. i. 89. t //'/(/. p. 91. 
 

 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF .CRITICISM 
 
 And without seeking to check his reasoning through the 
 too discursive chapters actually written, which certainly 
 serve to prove him at several points an original and 
 acute thinker, we may at once decide that not only is a 
 complete "science of pleasure," even of intellectual 
 pleasure, an extremely complicated and difficult under- 
 taking, amounting to the main part of a system of 
 psychology, but even an elaborate presentment of it will 
 leave us facing the fundamental fact that " tastes differ," 
 that different things give different degrees of pleasure, 
 or give respectively pleasure and pain, to different |^ 
 people, or to the same people at different times. This 
 fact it is that constitutes for many a fatal hindrance . to 
 the framing of any '* science " of criticism. 
 
 If, however, we consider that the word at issue 'f?" 
 allowed without question to be used of 'the systematic 
 discussion of morals, and that '* moral science" and 
 *'the science of ethics" are phrases in unchallenged 
 use, it will appear that there is a sense in which pro- 
 cesses of literary and aesthetic judgment may be put 
 under a scientific treatment. The sense of right and 
 wrong in conduct is clearly as relative, as variable, as 
 the sense of good and bad in literature and art. It 
 varies with periods, with countries, with persons, with 
 times of life. Mr. Spencer's distinction between "abso- 
 lute ethics" and "relative ethics" does not stand 
 analysis : all that holds is the fact of degrees of peremp- 
 toriness in ethical judgment. It is the same with what 
 we call " critical" judgment — the judgment of literary 
 quality, of merit in literature and in literary men. But 
 if in theJield_ of ethi cal Judgment there can be science, 
 that is, ordered and concatenated reas oning, co nsistent 
 inference, coherent explanation, the same is possible in_ 
 
 the^TeM~oT~ literary judgment. QFjil_ive— call— moraP 
 scTence the science of expediency Tii conduct — an empiri- 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRTTTCTSM 
 
 cal and, to my thinking", fallacious way of speaking — 
 we may equally call critical science the science of 
 expediency In literary method or performance. 
 
 On this view, of course, our ** science" Is conceived 
 in a different way from Mr. Dallas's. And It will be 
 found, I think, that his formula will even have to be 
 set aside if the province of criticism Is not to be Injuri- 
 ously narrowed or imperfectly surveyed. The doctrin^' 
 that th e end of a ll fine art is to give pleasure Is a sound 
 one ; and the doctrine that whereas art aims at pleasure 
 scjence-amis^t knowledge Is equally snurid^ taken as a 
 general discrimination of the main activities of the 
 artist and the scientist. B^ut the twoj ormulas. between 
 t hem, miss m ention of one of the main truths of the 
 mental life, namely,jthat^rt^iT5^|science, pleasure^atid 
 knowledge, are always tending to overlap andjcqmblne. 
 Ihis may^e^seen (i) in an elementary way by merely 
 noting that the man of^clence may^jirLat literar^_effect 
 In his exposition, and that the artist, with out being at 
 alPfa lseH Eo^iis^ function of givi ng pleas ure, may, and 
 do es, conv ex^nowledge-rknoMgdge of persons, of 
 places, o £ events, of costum es, of nature.* And the 
 extensive study of art as art is clearly an acquiring of 
 knowledge. But that is not all. There Isj2) a pro- 
 cess of scien£e^odLa4ialysis^ of study and measurement, 
 behind the artist's art ; and there Is (3) a process,, of 
 constructive art, as apart f rom m ere detailed literary 
 expression, in every completed scientific d emonstra tion. 
 '* Ideal construction " is Mr, Lewes's name for the com- 
 
 * He may even be said to do more when he is a novelist, or a 
 dramatist, or even a lyrist, inasmuch as in a spnse he conveys know- 
 ledge of character. Mill's definition: "The truth of poetry is to 
 paint the human soul truly : the truth of fiction is to give a true 
 picture of life," is not strictly accurate, but it rightly points to kinds 
 of knowledge which poetry and fiction may convey (Dissertations and 
 Discussions, i. 67). 
 
 8 
 
IpxfV-^^ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 pleted process of knowledge of any kind ; and his 
 formula squares with the statement of some of the 
 latest specialism.* Now, this 'Mdeal construction," 
 this attainment of a mental sequence which is held to 
 , symbolise a sequence of phenomena, is essentially an 
 artistic process. If any ovlq. has a difficulty in admitting- 
 so much, let him think out for himself, first, the analogy 
 between the work of a critical historian and that of a 
 
 novelist. The work of the novelist is admittedly an 
 
 • 1 
 artistic process. But it is only m non-essentials, m 
 
 respect of data and limitations, that it is psychologically 
 different from the historian's. The novelist, giving a 
 voluntary definiteness to certain general conceptions of 
 human nature, imagining certain types of person cor- 
 responding more or less to people he has seen, puts 
 them in certain situations, and conducts them to a 
 
 certain end. The historian, getting his data from the 
 documents, is certainly tied down as to his end and his 
 action ; but that the task of arranging the narrative, of 
 explaining connections, of making the facts group and 
 flow and unify, is strictly a process of imagination , any 
 one may satisfy himself who will try to compose a con- 
 nected and interesting and explanatory narrative of 
 any historic episode or series of events of which he has 
 the bare facts separately set down for him. And if the 
 explanatory historian is thus, in his own way, a con- 
 structive artist,! no less, or little less, is the economist 
 
 * See Professor Pearson's Grannnar of Sdeuce, passim. Compare 
 the contention of Professor Sylvester that there are many mathe 
 matical processes which "really belong to a sort of artistic and 
 constructive faculty" [The Lavs of Verse, p. 123 and passim.). 
 Professor Sylvester seems to distinguish these processes from those 
 of " demonstration." I venture to say that in demonstration itself 
 there is an artistic process. 
 
 + When I wrote the above I did not know that the proposition 
 had been in part laid down by such an eminent orthodox practitioner 
 
 9 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 or the sociologist, inasmuch as each has to go through 
 a process of creative grouping of manifold data to the 
 end of getting a reasoned whole out of a chaos of 
 unexplained or irrelated facts. It is only a question 
 of detail to carry the principle further, and show the 
 artistic element in its degree in every science, down to 
 mathematics. In fine, there is knowledge and_know-^ 
 ledge ; and all knowledge that is complex,.jtliat-con si sl&- 
 of data connected by reasoning, is knowledge obviously 
 resulting from an artist ic or const ructive mental pro- 
 "cess. But the great literary department of history, in 
 particular, amounts in the end to a process of ideal 
 arrangement, at once interpretative and representative 
 of the given facts, which compares very plainly with the 
 
 in history as Bishop Stubbs. It is in his lectures on Medieval and 
 Modern History that the Bishop writes : " Whether there is or is not 
 a science of history . . . there is, I am sure, an art of writing 
 history. . . . It is necessary (for the historian) to look at his subject 
 all round, to finish it off completely at every point and, while 
 seeking for statuesque unity and perfection, to make truth and 
 reahty the first object. . . . The result will, if the writer has chosen 
 his subject well, and with a due estimate of his own powers, be an 
 artistic unity, a perfect image. . . . The second form of our art is 
 analogous to painting, and its result to a picture ... it requires a 
 background and a foreground, scenery and perspective, as well as 
 unity and symmetry" (pp. 97-98). Compare Professor Gardiner: 
 " The statesman uses his imagination to predict the result of 
 changes to be produced in the actually existing state of society, 
 either by the natural forces which govern it, or by his own action. 
 The historian uses his imagination in tracing out the causes which 
 produced that existing state of society" (History of England, i6oj- 
 164.2, ed. 1894, X" pref. p. vii.). It may be remarked that when 
 Mr. Birrell [Obiter Dicta, p. 33) says of Bishop Stubbs that he and 
 Freeman " are historical artisans : artists they are not," the criti- 
 cism does not apply in the sense given above to the word artist. 
 Mr. Birrell means that the Bishop and Freeman are inferior literary 
 artists, which is at least true of Freeman. But that does not alter 
 the fact that the writing of history is necessarily a process of 
 imaginative construction. 
 
 10 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 processes of plastic and imitative art and so-called 
 fiction. 
 
 Still, even this is not the whole of the rebuttal of Mr. 
 Dallas's proposition that criticism is properly '* the 
 science of pleasure." It i s qui te impossible in practice j 
 
 to separa je_the__criticisni__of_mere^ literary^ effect, of 
 
 poetry and style, ofjwntijogi^whLch specifically aims at 
 *^leasTng," from the criticism of testimony, of theory, 
 oflnethod, of moral tone, of conductTo'f " criticistrTof 
 life," of literary criticism itself. We only need to turn 
 to the work of the greatest critics to see that they will 
 not let themselves be restricted tp mere discrimination 
 of artistic ''pleasure," in Mr. Dallas's sense of the 
 term. They show, in fact, displeasure at errors of 
 assertion, and pleasure over expressions of opinion as 
 such. A great critic, a Sainte Beuye, or a Lessing, ori . j, \ 
 
 . ...... j ^l"V4i trt u 
 
 a Tame, discusses conduct, theory, politics, institutions,! i 
 
 points of history , ch aracters , and otherl^en^scriticismsJ ^ "y^ 
 as well as / style and poetry, and ''the b eautif ul. 'j/ H ^^ 
 Now, although we are loosely agreed to restrict in /^^ ^^^^ 
 practice the name of criticism to the criticism of the 
 fine arts and fine letters (excluding the separate criticism 
 of th eory and practice in the sciences, philosophy, the 
 useful arts, and the arts of conduct), we cannot hindel 
 that a critic in the course of his work shall pass judg4 
 ment on opinions, on conduct, on institutions, and oni 
 characters ; and we cannot hinder that this passing ofl 
 judgment shall rank as criticism, and affect readers 
 substantially as the rest of his criticism does. So that^^ 
 we are finally led to describe and define criticism in \ 
 general and in particular as simply a way of teaching" ~ \ 
 a means of propaganda, a method of trying to persuade | 
 other people to think as we do, whereof the science 
 will consist, not in our literary estimates in themselves, ♦ 
 but in our way of relating them to each other, and to 
 
 1 1 
 
JV- 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRTTICTSM 
 
 ijSjther judgments in general. That is to say, criticism 
 may or may not be scientifically done. We may be 
 concerned only to have men share our view on poetry 
 and fiction, or on this or that '' school " of art ; or we 
 may seek also to have them, look at life in general as 
 f \ we do, and share our religious convictions, our personal 
 : ! likes and dislikes, our standards of character and 
 !^ conduct, our anthropological theories. All expression 
 Sof opinion on these matters by way of discussion of 
 I* books and writers is criticism. And in the end, whether 
 « we speak only of poetry and style or take up all the 
 subjects of a writer's art as well as his treatment of 
 them, there is but one general way of justifying our 
 view and logically persuading others to take it. That 
 • way is simply the proceeding from points agreed on to 
 points in dispute, and showing that consistency involves 
 ,; one view as following on another. The "simply" 
 here is indeed not to be taken as implying that it is as 
 a rule a simple thing to establish a proposition of con- 
 sistency in a matter of Intellectual or moral dispute. 
 Perhaps the bulk of all criticism, the mass of discussion 
 in all grades, consists in our disputing over each 
 other's Inconsistencies of action, feeling, speech, or 
 belief. But difficult as the business is, there is no 
 evading it ; and progress in criticism, science in 
 criticism, consists irL having . a more intelligent regard 
 to consistency, alike in the theory and in the practice 
 of judgment. There is no other way. A man. who 
 refuses to accept the test of consistency as a criterion 
 of truth is either confused by words or confused in the 
 very faculty of judgment. In the former case he is a 
 doubtful subject for enlightenment : in the latter, he is 
 impossible. He may keep out of legal trouble ; he may 
 even be the most amiable of men ; but he is not to be 
 argued with. 
 
 It 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 III 
 
 This much may be admitted by some who still argue 
 that there can be no such test for literary effect as for 
 propositions of fact, historical or scientific. Consis- 
 tency, it may be argued, holds of actions or propositions 
 of fact, not of appreciations or propositions of aesthetic 
 judgment. This demurrer may be held to underlie the 
 brilliant argumentation of Professor Edouard Droz, in 
 his brochure on the subject,* a propos of the work of 
 M. Bruneti^re on the evolution of criticism in France. 
 Of this essay the ostensible thesis is that "literary 
 criticism, in so far as it sets itself to judge the beauty 
 of works, is not a science." A confusion here arises, I 
 think, between the ideas of '* science " and '' a science," 
 the ideas of accepted facts and the explanation of facts. 
 ''The beautiful," says M. Droz,t "is always under 
 discussion ; and the true always ends by imposing 
 itself, when there are not too many interests involved," 
 But what truth does this ? M. Droz admits . that 
 interests affect the establishment of some truths. 
 Then there are some alleged truths which are Jiot true 
 for all of us. The truths which finally impose them- 
 selves are, let us say, doctrines of physical scie.nce, of 
 the movement of suns and stars, of the action of 
 chemicals, and the laws of heat, light, sound, and so 
 forth. When we come to other provinces of science, 
 to geology and zoology, there is found to be dissidence 
 over important propositions — by reason, let us say 
 with M. Droz, of the interests involved. These 
 interests are partly economic, as in the case of teachers 
 
 * La Critique Litteraire et la Science, 1893. Etude lue a la Seance 
 de rentree des Facultes de Besan^on, Nov. 1891. 
 t Ibid. p. 8. 
 
 13 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 and priesthoods ; partly personal or psychological, as 
 where men simply recoil from an innovating doctrine, 
 or from a disruption of their old theory of life. Now, 
 we may fairly say that it is interests of the latter sort 
 that check our acceptance of new literary forms, or our 
 dismissal of old. We go by habit, and are loth to 
 admit our past taste to have been bad, or the new taste 
 to be better. Even where there is dispute over some 
 works of an author as to whose other works the 
 disputants agree, habits of feeling are at the bottom of 
 the dispute. Is it to be said, then, that there is no 
 science where there is such dispute ? If so, there is no 
 science where there is dispute in matters zoological and 
 geological ; and Darwinism is not science while pietists 
 reject it. Surely M. Droz must modify his definition. 
 Surely the argumentation of the Origin of Species was 
 scientific, even when the majority derided it. If the 
 proposition is merely to be this, that "science is 
 universally accepted truth," or doctrine held true by all 
 who make it their business to study the subject matter, 
 we certainly close the discussion, summarily enough. 
 But in doing this we merely set up a new and worse 
 difficulty, for on that view the geocentric theory in astro- 
 nomy, and the creational theory in zoology, were once 
 "truth." It cannot be that M. Droz means. this. Re- 
 marking on the classic exploit of Hegel, w^ho just before 
 the discovery pf Ceres, said there was no use in looking 
 for a planet between Mars and Jupiter, he admits that 
 " men of science indeed are no more exempt from these 
 aberrations than philosophers and critics."* Then, 
 when he insists that "literary criticism, in so far as it 
 sets itself to judge the beauty of works, is not a 
 science," he merely means that an arbitrary literary 
 
 * As cited, p. 21. 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 estimate — such as, ^''Eugenie Grandet is Balzac's best 
 work," or, ''Hugo is a greater poet than Browning" — 
 is not an established truth. But who ever thought 
 anything of the sort ? On the other hand, if the pro- 
 position be: "Flaubert is a greater artist than 
 Feydeau,"or, '' Maupassant writes better than Malot," 
 does not M. Droz admit that we are approaching a 
 kind of proposition of which it may be scientifically 
 said that its acceptance or rejection is to be explained 
 in terms of greater or less psychological development \ 
 or culture — this scientific view being, however, admitted 
 to be acceptable as a rule only to those who accept the 
 special propositions, just as a rationalistic view of 
 Mohammed is acceptable only to non-Mohammedans ? r 
 In fine, whsjiJnstead of merely passing a judgment on 
 a literary performance we reason that a given literary 
 effect is reached by a certain process, or that a given 
 literary appreciation is to be traced to certain limitations 
 or developments in the appreciator, are we not bringing 
 scientific method into the task of criticism ? 
 
 In the end, as it seems to me, M. Droz makes this 
 admission unreservedly; and his preliminary negation is 
 rather an expression of his sense of the miscarriages of 
 M. Taine and M. Bruneti^re in their particular attempts 
 at the reduction of criticism to science, than a circum- 
 spect thesis as to the possibilities of the case. After a 
 sharply effective attack on Taine's fashion of reaching a 
 generalisation, he pronounces that "in this psychology 
 of M. Taine, what obtrudes itself Js yiejgve_ of formula 
 and the contempt of fact, which is also the contempt of 
 science and of the scientific spirit — it is to that that I 
 want to come."* Well, the concrete criticism was 
 unanswerable ; and we must agree with M. Droz that 
 Taine often generalises recklessly and fallaciously. But 
 
 * As cited, p. 21. 
 IS 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 ag-ain, surely M. Droz goes too far in charging him 
 with a ^^ contempt (mcpr is) oi facts" amounting to a 
 scorn of science ? Was it not simply that Taine was 
 too hasty in positing facts, too headlong in framing his 
 formulas? It is quite true that " M. Taine has the 
 taste for syntheses (ensembles)^ but it is for those 
 he has framed : as for those which nature and history 
 present to him, he has scarcely glimpsed more than 
 parts."* But is not this kind of prematureness and 
 V^^ incompleteness just the usual fault of the pioneers of all 
 ^ 1 science, or, let us say, of minds in the half-way stage 
 between traditional apriorism and scientific positivism ? 
 Is it not really a way of seeking for science ? 
 
 To that estimate, I think, we must come. It leaves 
 us conceiving of a scientific criticism, while admitting 
 / that certain attempts at it are partly failures, and 
 further that, as M. Droz contends, it is not framable by 
 mere parody of the processes of the natural sciences — a 
 kind of miscalculation to which we shall have to recur 
 later. We must say with M. Droz that **the resort to 
 the methods of the sciences, or, more exactly, the 
 misunderstood outlines of the sciences, has in our time 
 served the literary critics badly ; " but we also go on to 
 say with him that, '*in compensation, that which is hest^ 
 in sciencQy the scientific spirit, has penetrated literary I 
 . and moral studies ; whence it is that M. Taine " — even f 
 M. Taine — '* despite his faults, has aided the advance-, 
 /ment of his art." 3^^ -this exercise of the scientific 
 yC I spirit, finally, consists in ^^ disciplining our tastes, in , 
 teaching us to reason them out, to extend them, to,! 
 increase their fineness and sensibility, and to augment 1 . 
 also the pleasures they yield, "t 
 
 In other words, we decide that there are canons or - , 
 itests of consistency in criticism ; and that just as con- 
 
 * As cited, p. 23. f Pp. 30, 31. 
 
 16 
 
(j/yi^oc^94<-'^^^ y 
 
 t 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 sistency in propositions is the test of truth, just as 
 relatedness or harmony in things or aspects is the 
 source and criterion of visible beauty, so a twofold 
 rnnsistpnry, Incrirnl qnd ^psjthptjr j is the test nf rrghtn ess 
 i n criticisjn ; t he starting-point in the one case as in t he 
 other bei ng, not any absolute theory of truth or beauty , 
 but just a cert ain measure of common om xd&ft. About 
 this there is no difficulty ; for when all is said about the 
 arbitrariness of taste, there is as general an agreement 
 on a few primordial points of literary judgment, among 
 the members of any one civilisation or culture-sphere, 
 as on the primordial propositions of natural science ; the 
 latter being, indeed, more apt to be obscured by a 
 certain perverse metaphysic than the former. 
 
 To accept the test, of course, is one thing, and to 
 conform to it, even when the application is clear, is 
 another. To be human is to be inconsistent ; and we 
 can all peaceably assent to Voltaire's view of '*the 
 insane project of being perfectly wise." But that recog- 
 nition, let us say once for all, is no more a stop to 
 judgment in literature than to judgment in morals and 
 in appetites. We must dree our weird. 
 
 IV 
 
 We might almost describe our critical science, ihen^^^ij^ 
 as the science of consistencxjn appreciation, since thS"**^ 
 science oTthat^Wbtrtmnvolve the systematic study of all 
 the causes — in ourselves, in a book, and in an author — j 
 
 which go tcTHetermine our individual judgments. But 
 seeing that the bare formula would seem in itself to 
 exclude such systematic following lip of the bases of 
 appreciation, let us be content thus to indicate the scope 
 of scientific criticism, without staking all on a formal 
 
 17 B 
 
/ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 definition. The business becomes quite formal enough 
 as we go on. 
 
 Taken progressively, however, the steps are not in 
 themselves abstruse. The first requisite, clearly, for a 
 reduction of criticism to order, is a comparison of judg- 
 rnents. This, the preliminary to all progress in the 
 influence of sciences commonly so-called, has been 
 neglected in the practice of criticism to a surprising 
 extent ; and Mr. Dallas rightly stipulated for a reform 
 on this head. It will be found that none of the 
 ** methods" yet put forward can dispense with it. A 
 "science of pleasure," obviously, must set out with a 
 recognition of the relativity of pleasure. Salnte-Beuve, 
 who remains on the whole the typical critic in respect of 
 versatility of appreciation, does actually resort the 
 oftenest to the course of comparing judgments ; and 
 where his criticisms remain unsatisfactory they are so 
 partly because he neglected this check on the personal 
 equation. The method of Taine, again, after its 
 complete application to any one case, leaves unmet the 
 main question, since the critic's judgment may still 
 seem arbitrary and wrong. Taine's method is, it will 
 be remembered, to study every work as a product of 
 three causal forces, the race, the social and physical 
 environment, the ** moment" or special influence of the 
 time. It is, as a method, a valuable step to the right 
 conception of a writer as being like every one else an 
 organism in an environment, conditioned by that as 
 well as affecting it. But it is plain. that the estimating 
 of every one of the factors specified is itself a process of 
 judgment, open to fallacy and prejudice ; and that the 
 critic's view of every one of them is as much in need of 
 scientific checking as the estimate which other critics 
 may form of a writer or a book taken as z'n vacuo. 
 Taine was taking for granted a number of sociological 
 
 i8 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM . 
 
 propositions which were themselves in the stage of 
 tentative science, and which were thus a bad foundation 
 for detailed judgments. 
 
 Let us put the case concretely. The old superficial 
 French way of criticising Shakspere, say, and the not 
 very old superficial English way of criticising Corneille, 
 was to say that Shakspere had great passion and 
 imagination but little judgment in the use of incident, 
 and that Corneille is stiff and formal and declamatory. 
 Taine's better way, as regards Shakspere, is to look 
 to the characteristics of the robust audience for which 
 Shakspere wrote, the methods in use on the stage, and 
 the literary taste of the time ; to describe all these 
 vivaciously and, so far as may be, without animus, 
 laying stress on the life and energy of the whole ; 
 and to make the gist of the criticism lie in the present- 
 ment of Shakspere as an extraordinary imagination or 
 sensitive system, reacting or functioning in that stormy 
 environment in virtue of his power of sensating an( 
 expressing it. Here we have clearly a deeper and more 
 comprehensive process of thought, or at least of state- 
 ment, than that of the old critic who merely *Vtried 
 Shakspere by "the rules." The old critic, indeed, was' 
 not wholly blind to all these considerations, but the 
 ideas remained latent in him, so to speak. It was well 
 done to bring them out ; and equally the English critic 
 will do well to think of Corneille as a dramatist with a 
 given culture and literary tradition, writing specially for 
 a courtly audience, in a literary form determined by its 
 taste and culture and the genius of the language as thus 
 far developed. In this way the real power at play can 
 be sympathetically estimated. Taine's method is in^ 
 fact a method of historical conception, involving judg- 
 ments on a dozen points besides those of literary effect 
 considered in vactw, or the abstract merit of a tragedy 
 
 19 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 as such ; and the widening of the survey is almost sure 
 to purge the student's mind of some of the prejudice 
 which sets uncultured or narrow-minded people gibing 
 against whatever in an alien product is specially strange 
 to them. Yet not only does this widening of the survey 
 still leave room for dispute on the original issue of the 
 aesthetic merit of the given work, but it opens up new 
 ground of dispute as regards the critic's view of the 
 " race," his picture of the environment, and his account 
 of the prevailing influence or '* moment." On all of 
 these heads he may be prejudiced, hasty, or arbitrary. 
 He may falsely simplify his task by slumping the race 
 in terms of a few of many characteristics, a few of many 
 types ; he may give a mere section of the environment 
 as showing the whole, and he may be equally arbitrary 
 as regards the "moment." Some of us think Taine 
 has at times done all these things. Finally, on his own 
 showing, we have to consider the author as a special 
 psychological case, cons tituting, it m ay be, a notable 
 variatioriirrthe race, reacting newly onthe environment, 
 and as much makmg as^made by '"^^e moment."* In 
 such a case, much of the premisses about the race and 
 all the rest of it goes by the board : we have to deal 
 with a problem in variation, to which these explanations 
 are irrelevant as such. 
 
 The scientific criticism of Shakspere, then, even from 
 the French point of view, would have to be carried yet 
 further. On the point of the total aesthetic product, it 
 would have to enter into those questions of text, of real/ 
 authorship, of imitation and adaptation, which have 
 been so little studied by our own essayists on Shakspere ; 
 while on the points of Shakspere's style and command 
 of language it would listen carefully to all the leading 
 
 * Compare, however, Bagehot {Physics and PoUiics, pp. 32-3C), 
 who is more explicit than Taine. 
 
 20 
 
Hs'i 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 English critics, those who charge faults as well as those 
 who insist most on Shakspere's supremacy. It would 
 further go into the question of Shakspere's personality, 
 his own physiology and psychology, as being more to 
 the purpose than generalisations about the English race. 
 It would further listen patiently to the German theories 
 of Shakspere's didactic purpose, as well as the German 
 anti-Shaksperean polemic ; and on both heads it would 
 rectify the German extravagance, or hold the balance 
 between two German extremes, by the native good 
 sense and practical logic which (without crediting it to 
 "race") we have come to recognise as a common 
 development of French literary life. It would thus 
 supply an all-round estimate of Shakspere, to which all 
 men might turn with profit, and from which Englishmei 
 in particular, half hypnotised as they are by the mere' 
 prestige of Shakspere's name, might learn very much 
 indeed. 
 
 Even thus, of course, we should have settled nothing 
 once for all as, say, the law of gravitation is settl 
 We should only have carried out a process of circum"H 
 spect persuasion, of reasoning from a common grounc 
 to a new ground, on a basis of fairly proved facts, and 
 set up a basis for a certain amount of rational agree- 
 ment among a certain number of educated people of 
 different countries, interested in such a question of 
 humanism ; which agreement would in turn become, so 
 far as it might avail, a force in fresh criticism and in 
 fresh literary production. This is, broadly, the kind of 
 influence scientific criticism can exercise. And It will 
 perhaps not be disputed, even by outsiders, that It is as 
 well worth exercising as the function of a lawyer or a 
 soldier or a priest. 
 
 21 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 V 
 
 This, however, Is only a very general outline of 
 the task of systematising or ** scientising-" criticism. 
 Taine, after all, did but widen the critical outlook, or 
 rather he methodised where the much-scrutinising 
 Sainte-Beuve had freely gone before. He himself ad- 
 mitted * that while Sainte-Beuve ** feared to crush the 
 truth by enclosing it in formulas," it is yet possible to 
 ** extract a complete system from his writings," and 
 this system is, on Taine's showing, the essence of 
 Taine's.f But since a criticism proper, a judgment, is 
 * always at last an equation between the critic and his 
 I theme, the most methodic survey, we say, yields us not 
 an objective fact but a subjective one, a phase of opinion, 
 a teaching ; and just in so far as that teaching or 
 opinion strikes any one of us as arbitrary or fallacious, 
 it fails of Its purpose so far as we are concerned. There 
 arises the old dispute, which can only be settled, if at 
 all, by an appeal to consistency of fact, of reasoning, of 
 decision. To guard against such disputes, to avoid 
 giving ground for challenge, or, since there must be 
 strife, to prepare the answer where a challenge is likely 
 to come, is therefore the great strategic or systematic 
 concern of the careful critic. His aim, if he be not a 
 mQYQ frondeur, and even then if he is a siv ong frondeur^ 
 is to persuade and convince, and to persuade and con- 
 vince the judicious. 
 
 How then shall he best bear himself? His faculty, 
 be it great or small, is to begin with a faculty of com- 
 parison ;_^he must therefore, as we said, do much 
 ! comparing — comparing of works, of men, of judgments 
 on these. If he does but rise above being satisfied with 
 
 * Demiers Essais, p. 53. f Ihid. pp. 58-59, 
 
 22 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 firing his squib or his arrow, with ** having his say " in 
 the general outcry, he must see that the ostensible 
 chaos of opinion is open to some simple explanations 
 which classify its forms. Writers and readers equally 
 resolve into temperamental types, with specific preju- 
 dices or leanings of training, and certain kinds or 
 degrees of culture. These lines of variation on both 
 sides are the main conflicting forces in the stru ggle of 
 literary action and opinion. The critic, then, must re^' 
 cognise that he can in general expect to appeal only to 
 people largely or partially of his own cast of thought 
 and feeling, people who have something of his kind of 
 culture, something of his kind of '* aesthopsychology," 
 to use the cumbrous but useful term of M. Hennequin. 
 The community of thought may be partial or extensive : 
 it may extend only to matters of sociological or ethical 
 judgment, or only to matters of technical literary appre- 
 ciation, or only to matters of religion or philosophy ; 
 or it may reach over several or all of these departments. 
 Whether, then, as regards any one or as regards, all, \ 
 his business is to aim at consistency, at carrying, his \\ ^ 
 readers with him from a common ground to a new ! 
 agreement, to guard against inconsistency of apprecia- 
 tion alike on their part and on his own. 
 
 Disputes, however, are constantly arising which 
 seem to turn not so much on inconsistency as on limi- 
 tation ; and the scientific side of criticism is as much 
 concerned with these disputes as with any. A gooii/ 
 critic, in our sense of a man with many forms of interest^* 
 with a manifold outlook on life, is by implicatiort^ 
 capable of appreciating many kinds of literary perform^' 
 ance. He must be vowed to no artistic school, but 
 open to the most diverse ; and, if he have predilections f^^^* 
 he must not insist on them to the disregard of excel- 
 lences which come less closely home to him. But all 
 
 23 
 
 hf^^ 
 
\ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 this, of course, is the counsel of perfection ; and as a 
 matter of fact the critic, in the degree of his fitness, is 
 like the "author" and the reader a type with a tem- 
 perament, with prejudices or leanings of education, with 
 more or less of expert culture in the different matters 
 with which he deals. He is thus sure sometimes to ex- 
 press a prejudice, or a limitation of sympathy, or an 
 inexpert opinion ; and like everybody else he is liable 
 to variation of mood, which adds to the possibilities of 
 inconsistency. Against these various snares he may 
 guard with various degrees of success. Against the 
 worst results of variation of mood he may guard by 
 cultivatiftff-4iieLiiablt.X>LcQmparing hi mself with Jiimself, 
 of criticising his own work. But as regards hisjimita- 
 tions and his antipathies he can only partially take pre- 
 caution, and this only by a kind of discipline which few 
 are ready to practise. In sum,,iL_iLCLasjsts_ in carefully 
 studying all the cases pf wide appreciation in which he 
 cannot feel with the many, and carefully estimating the 
 calibre of the judgments with which he cannot agree. 
 Suppose it be that he does not readily enjoy or admire 
 Cervantes, or Calderon, or Schiller, or Hugo, or Brown- 
 ing, or Dickens, or Tolstoy, each of whom has won 
 very high, and some very general praise, it is his busi- 
 ness as a scrupulous and scientific critic to consider 
 closely that praise, to ask himself narrowly whether he 
 has missed the excellences on which it dwells, to con- 
 sider the training, the bias, the cast of mind of those 
 who bestow it, and then, if he thinks he fairly can, to 
 explain it in terms of the prejudice, or limitation, or 
 deficient culture of the admirers ; or. If he cannot, to 
 seek objectively for the merits which delight them, and 
 to note these as forms of effect to which he is but slightly 
 susceptible. 
 
 In fine, the perfect scientific critic, the critic of the 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 future perhaps, might be conceived as prefacing his y 
 every judgment — or the body of his judgrnents — with a •; 
 confession of faith, bias, temperament, and training, i 
 As thus r ^ 
 
 "I have a leaning to what is called "exact" \or 
 religious or mystical] thought, with \or without] a 
 tenderness for certain forms of arbitrary \or spiritual] 
 sentiment which prevail among many people I know 
 and like. I value poetry as a stimulus to sympathy and 
 moral zeal \or^ as the beautiful expression of any species 
 of feeling], caring little \or much] for cadence and phrase 
 as such ; accordingly I value Browning and Dante and 
 Hugo above Heine and Musset and Tennyson [or vice 
 versa]. Regarding literature and the arts as the crown 
 of life, and fine letters as the flower of literature, I set 
 the poets highest in the hierarchy of eminence [or, I 
 seek to measure performers in the same line by their 
 relative total intellectuality, so far as may be, and to 
 compare performers in different lines by their relative 
 reach and depth and energy in their own departments], 
 I am reverent^ [6>;' irreverent] of august tradition and 
 social propriety ; ^nd I have little taste [or I care above 
 all things], in imaginative literature, for those forms 
 called realistic, as aiming at a close fidelity to everyday 
 fact [or for those exercises of invention which carry me 
 most completely out of my normal relation to my 
 surroundings]. I am a Unitarian [or a Baptist, or a 
 Catholic, or an Agnostic], having been brought up in 
 that persuasion [or having come to that way of thinking 
 in mature life]. In politics I am . My main physi- 
 cal diathesis is . Finally, I am years of age in 
 
 this year . The dates of my essays will thus let the 
 
 reader know how old I was when I wrote them."* 
 
 * Since this was penned I have found a very unexpected support 
 for my suggestion in a passage of the exordium of the Duke of 
 
 25 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 Happily, though no such confession has ever been 
 categorically made, it is possible for the critical reader 
 of criticism to draw up for himself a statement of every 
 leading critic's idiosyncrasy, and thus to frame his own 
 diagnosis and explanation of what he feels to be perver- 
 sities or monstrosities of judgment, in respect of his 
 own possibly fuller knowledge or expertness, or different 
 education, or bias. Beyond that, I do not know that 
 the errors of criticism can be rectified. That is to say, 
 the critic, as likewise his critic, is finally on all fours 
 with judges and doctors, in that he may make irretriev- 
 able mistakes. His one advantage is that they can 
 hardly ever be homicidal. He may, given rope enough, 
 hang himself ; and he may bury himself. Other people 
 he can at worst irritate or injure. 
 
 VI 
 
 If on this general presentment the task of criticism is 
 still denied to be capable of being raised to a scientific 
 status, I fear no further elaboration of the thesis will 
 eff'ect persuasion. But if it be now granted that the 
 spirit of science may come into play in the work of 
 
 Argyll's Unseen Fotmdations of Society. It runs: "There is . . . 
 even in the exact sciences an element known as ' the personal equa- 
 tion,' which has always to be taken into account ; and this it is the 
 business of every writer — even at the risk of some apparent egoism 
 — to supply to those who read him. He can best do so by giving 
 some indication of the direction from which he comes, and of the 
 avenues of approach along which he has been led in dealing with 
 his subject. Our reasoning may be the purest logic, and our 
 opinions may be the plainest truth, and yet it may always be 
 relevant to explain how we have come to hold them " {The Unseen 
 Foundations of Society, preface). Of course the Duke does not offer 
 just such a conspectus of his personal equation in political matters, 
 as I have suggested in regard to criticism, or as others might propose 
 to frame for him. 
 
 26 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 criticism as truly and as helpfully as in the studies of 
 jurisprudence and medicine and ethics, it may be of 
 interest to follow out a few of the lines of analysis and 
 synthesis on which critical method has been carried, or 
 proposed to be carried. I have said that the broadening 
 of the outlook insisted on by Taine (and independently 
 practised by some of our own best critics, as Arnold and 
 Minto and Lowell) raises new possibilities of demur and 
 dispute, since the critic has now more ways of going 
 wrong. But on the other hand he has more ways of 
 persuasion, and more ways of making his own artistic 
 or constructive impression. For he too, like the 
 novelist and the historian and the biologist, has his 
 artistic side, his work of Ideal Cofistructw7i, his task of 
 making an intellectual whole to his own satisfaction out 
 of his data, be they of character or performance or 
 both. He may be only a bad artist in caricature, like 
 the Tory reviewers who figured a *' Johnny Keats" by 
 way of damaging all who consorted with Radicals, or 
 like a typical Saturday reviewer of the old sort, angry 
 with his countrymen for admiring Ibsen ; but an artist, 
 good or bad, high or low, he remains, in so far as he 
 rises above the primary function of scissors and paste. 
 And if he be Lowell figuring for himself Lessing, he 
 becomes an artist of much value to culture ; and if he 
 be Hennequin dissecting Flaubert, he ranks with the 
 most penetrating of all the painters who have helped us 
 to see in the flesh, in the harmonious unity of perception 
 and presentment, remarkable human beings outside of 
 our immediate ken. 
 
 It is hard to say whether Hennequin did any of his 
 concrete studies deliberately on the lines laid down in 
 his treatise La Critique Scientijiqtie. A given critical 
 study tends to be shaped by special artistic considera- 
 tions. But Hennequin's method is easily applicable to 
 
 27 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 any critical case ; and in his skeleton or outline analysis 
 of the work of Victor Hugo"*^ he has suited the action to 
 the thesis very exactly and instructively. The thesis is, 
 in brief, that criticism to be scientific must proceed on 
 three sorts of analysis, and arrive at three corresponding 
 syntheses. The analyses are : (i) aesthetic, (2) psycho- 
 logic, (3) sociologic. To put it in detail, an all-round 
 survey of a work of literature or art must involve (i) a 
 careful study of the book (or picture) to the end of 
 noting the way in which the writer or artist makes his 
 technical effect — that is to say (in the case of a writer) 
 of his vocabulary, his cadences, his way of framing and 
 tying sentences and paragraphs, his very punctuation, 
 his tone or pitch of expression, his ways of picturing 
 and describing, his choice of subjects, scenes, times, 
 personages, characters, and abstract themes, and the 
 nature of his effects, in terms of syntax, colour, meta- 
 phor, tone, TTS^eCrf^ association ; (2) a similar analysis of 
 the author's personality, by way of an explanatory 
 hypothesis or statement of his characteristics, squaring 
 these with their results as seen in his book; (3) a survey 
 of the relation of public to author, noting the types of 
 his admirers in the different classes (whether lettered or 
 unlettered, old or young, expert or inexpert), with 
 special reference to the different classes of his works. 
 Each analysis ends in a synthesis ; the author is shown 
 to work with certain tools in certain ways ; to have 
 certain psychological peculiarities, which constitute his 
 gifts and his weaknesses ; and to have certain kinds of 1 
 admirers for certain parts or all of his work, in virtue of 
 
 * He had previously produced a rounded and masterly essay on 
 Hugo (reprinted in his Quelqucs A'crivains Fran^ais) which substan- 
 tially conforms to the scheme of analysis in La Critique Scientifique, 
 but not in all the details. The formal treatise therefore seems to 
 have been thought out after the critic's concrete work was done. 
 
 28 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 correspondences between him, as a product of faculty 
 and training, and them, as a product of bias and 
 previous literary culture. 
 
 In the special case of Victor Hugo, the analyses and 
 syntheses work out somewhat thus r 
 
 I. Esthetic Analysis. 
 
 I. Means. 
 
 a. External Means: (i) Great vocabulary, with predominance of 
 indefinite terms ; (2) Loose, abrupt, and elliptic syntax ; 
 (3) Repetitive composition, saying things over in different 
 ways, use of equivalent sets of antitheses ; (4) Prophetic and 
 inflated tone ; (5) Repetitive and antithetic description of 
 places and persons ; direct description of characters by expli- 
 cation ; metaphorical way of setting forth abstract ideas. 
 
 h. Internal Means, : (6) Choice of epochs (Middle Ages, oriental 
 antiquity, picturesque or hideous modern phases) ; of places 
 (sea and forest, large towns, cathedral, castle — the mysterious, 
 the infinite, the coloured, the vague) ; of times (night, evening, 
 shade, crises, trouble) ; of personages (beautiful or ugly, of 
 sinister beauty or good ugliness, picturesque even if ragged 
 costumes ; simple minds doing one thing, minds doing antithe- 
 tical things, such minds making right-about-face) ; of abstract 
 subjects (meaningless talk, variousness of theme, use of common- 
 place, philanthropy, optimism, socialism, vague idealism and 
 • pantheism, use of the grandiose, the mysterious, of legend, of 
 history, of universal life). 
 
 II. Effect.s (Synthesis of Means). 
 
 a. General Effect, "exalting," by (i) Richness and vividness of 
 style ; (2) Surprise of syntax ; (3) Of metaphors, and their 
 clearness ; (4) Violent colouring of epochs and places ; (5) Sim- 
 plicity of personages ; (6) Optimisic humanitarianism and 
 deism ; (7) Exaltation of tone ; (8) Projection of objects by 
 antithesis. 
 
 b. " Amplifying Grandiosity,'" by (i) Processes of repetition ; (2) Ab- 
 sence of detail ; (3) Distance of epochs ; (4) Chiaroscuro of 
 places ; (5) Simplicity of personages ; (6) Tone ; (7) Subjects. 
 
 c. Mystery, by (i) Indefinite words ; (2) Ellipses ; (3) Immediate, 
 total, and vague presentment ; (4) Distance of epochs and 
 
 29 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 subjects ; (5) Vague metaphysic ; (6) Obscurity of places ; 
 (7) Tone ; (8) In general, leaning to the limitless, the poetic. 
 
 d. Redundance, Emptiness, Unrealism, by (1) Vocabulary ; (2) Repeti- 
 tions and verbal antitheses ; (3) Simplicity of types ; (4) Vague- 
 ness of epochs and places ; (5) Frequent nullity of subjects ; 
 (6) General predominance of expression over purport. 
 
 e. General emotion 0/ suspense and surprise, by (i) General antithetism ; 
 
 (2) Pursuit of strangeness. 
 /. Accidental and negligible emotions of realism. 
 
 2. Psychologic Analysis. 
 
 I. Causes. 
 
 Resume of the aesthetic analysis and synthesis. Prevalence of the 
 
 element of word over the element of idea. 
 Explanatory Hypothesis. Existence in Hugo of a superabundance of 
 words, restraining the number of ideas, of percepts, and creating 
 verbal ideas and conceptions. This would explain, (i) as 
 regards the superabundance of the word, 
 
 The vocabulary. 
 
 Repetition of words and actions. 
 
 Variations on empty subjects. 
 
 Exalting effect — grandiosity, redundance. 
 
 The tone. 
 
 (2) As regards the absolute character of words. 
 
 The antithetism. 
 The syntax, the tone. 
 
 (3) As regards the limited character of words, 
 
 Immediate apperception of things without detail. 
 Simplicity of personages. 
 Humanitarianism and optimistic ideahsm. 
 Epochs and places known only verbally. 
 Verbal subjects and developments. 
 Grandiosity. 
 Inadequate unrealism. 
 
 (4) As regards character of words as mere signs, 
 
 Abundance of indefinite words. 
 
 Ellipses. 
 
 Metaphors. 
 
 Vague metaphysic. 
 
 (5) As regards the exaggerating character of words, 
 
 The exalting effect. 
 The tone. 
 
 30 
 
 i 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 The grandiosity. 
 Simplicity of beings. 
 Beauty of places and things. 
 Ascendant developments. 
 General tension. 
 Indifference as to subject. 
 (6) As regards the fact that verbal quality is strongest where no 
 experiential limitation exists, 
 The tone. 
 
 Gloom and distance of places, epochs, subjects. 
 Mystery. 
 Grandiosity. 
 
 Physiological Interpretation. 
 
 Probable predominance, in the cerebral organisation of Hugo, of 
 the elements of language, and of the third frontal convolution.* 
 
 3. Sociological Analysis. 
 
 I. Fixing of Categories of Admirers. 
 (France, 1830-1888.) 
 
 For the Poems : men of letters, general readers. 
 
 Among the men of letters: all the "romantics," all the 
 
 "Parnassians," some " Naturalists," few idealistic novelists, 
 
 no notable critic, journalists. 
 Among the general readers : a large proportion of the instructed 
 
 youth. 
 Sale : medium, relatively to the author's novels ; considerable, 
 
 for poems. 
 Foy the dramas : Men of letters, readers, men of the world. 
 
 Among the men of letters : the romantics, fewer Parnassians, 
 
 no Naturalists, some idealistic novelists, no critics, most of 
 
 the theatrical notice-writers and journalists. 
 Among the readers : a small proportion of the instructed youth. 
 
 Among the men of the world ; the less inapt to literary 
 
 pleasures, Parisian theatre-goers. 
 Performances with declining success. 
 For the Novels : Men of letters ; general readers. 
 
 Among the men of letters, the romantics, the Parnassians, some 
 
 Naturalists, most of the idealistic novelists, all the newspaper 
 
 novelists, some critics, the journalists. 
 
 * See Quelques Ecrivains Fran^ais, p. 152, for a note on this point. 
 
 31 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 Among readers : the generality ; chiefly the women ; the people. 
 Sale enormous : persistent for L^s Miscrabks among the people, 
 for L'Homme qui rit among the educated public. 
 
 (Abroad, 1S30-1888.) 
 
 Insuccesses and general inappreciation, save in England, where 
 one pupil, Swinburne ; and in Italy. Success limited even in these 
 two countries. 
 
 Then we have a categorical application, for each of the 
 classes of Hugo's work, of the foregoing conclusions, 
 with the effect of showing that in each case the admirers 
 share those characteristics of Hugo which specially 
 belong to the works In question — verbalism, exaggera- 
 tion, simple-mindedness, lack of Ideas, Impracticality, 
 humanitarian optimism and socialism, random realism. 
 Thus we get a conception, through the case of Hugo 
 and his public, of the intellectual peculiarities and 
 defects of the French people in general, and of the 
 literary classes in particular, from 1830 to 1886. 
 ''These psychological facts," says Hennequin, ''are 
 national. It would be easy to demonstrate as much by 
 the social and historical facts of the present time : they 
 are expressed notably by the political incapacity of the 
 working people, by the intellectual abasement of the 
 well-to-do classes ; by the more or less pronounced 
 romanticism of all the notable French literature of the 
 present day." And in a threefold synthesis, artistic, 
 biographic, and sociological, of all these analyses, he 
 would sum up the scientific criticism of the case of 
 Hugo. 
 
 It seems hardly possible to carry vigilance and exact- 
 ness of method further ;* and the whole scheme, in its 
 
 * It will be found instructive, however, to compare Hennequin's 
 scheme with that of Mr. Arthur Lynch in his Modern A iithoys, a quite 
 independent performance. Mr. Lynch's analytical plan divides into 
 studies of each author's (i) Emotional Calibre ; (2) Intellectual 
 
 32 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 way, seems to me a masterpiece of critical analysis. It 
 improves in a measure on the method of Taine. It f 
 substitutes for a vag^ue and largely arbitrary premiss of | 
 *' race " characteristics an exact study of the character- I 
 istics of the author in hand, as gathered from his works \ 
 themselves ; it shows how special, how individual, was 
 Hugo's literary bias ; how he evoked applause in respect 
 that many of those around him had his characteristics 
 in a minor degree. On these heads Hennequin had 
 previously shown the arbitrariness of Taine's implica- 
 tions as to race and environment, in that one race 
 yields such divergent types, and one environment, one 
 ^'moment," such differences of theme, predilection, and 
 method. And yet Hennequin's own conclusions as to 
 Hugo rather corroborate than confute Taine, for, as we 
 see, he makes out Hugo's characteristics to be specially 
 French ; and if he were challenged as to the clear 
 decline in Hugo's prestige, the triumph over his of 
 methods alien to his, it is not easy to see how 
 Hennequin could have denied that the ' ' moment, " though 
 it did not make the artist, yet went far to make his 
 success. For the characteristics of Zola and Daudet 
 and Maupassant, for instance, are only in a small 
 degree those of Hugo ; and though a critic of scientific 
 training in psychology, like Hennequin, might charge 
 contemporary novelists with '* romanticism," he could 
 not well make out that any of those named, to say 
 nothing of Huysmans, Is lawless and fantastic and 
 verbalist to the point of recalling Hugo. Can it be 
 that, after rejecting as inexact and arbitrary Taine's 
 
 Grasp ; (3) Knowledge of the Field ; (4) Moral Power. The analysis 
 is hardly complete, and the exposition is avowedly offered as a mere 
 set of hints to a method ; but it has so much merit that it only 
 needed a more connected elaboration to make it an important critical 
 treatise. 
 
 33 c 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 V 
 
 way of summarising the qualities of a race, Hennequin 
 himself, in an access of pessimism, fell into Taine's 
 error, and summed up the French nation without any 
 attempt at discrimination as to what characteristics are 
 specially French, and what common to most European 
 nations? It would seem so. His own study of Dickens, 
 who has had such popularity in England, sets forth 
 justly enough that "with Dickens, ideas are rare and 
 feeble,"* that the verbal faculty in him predominates 
 over the reflective, that he idealises, that he misrepre- 
 sented human nature, simplifying and twisting it, in his 
 way, as much as did Hugo. It ought to follow, then, 
 that Dickens had his English popularity in virtue of the 
 commonness of his intellectual peculiarities and defects 
 among the English nation ; that his characteristics are 
 *' national." And seeing, further, that Dickens is to 
 this day extremely popular in Germany, far more so 
 than in France, it would follow that his peculiarities 
 and defects, his vivacity and fantasy and humour and 
 psychological superficiality, are in a high degree German 
 characteristics. But Hennequin's essay, masterly so far 
 as it goes, of course does not attempt to affirm these 
 things, though in consistency it clearly ought. So that 
 there would seem to be something wrong, something 
 imperfect, in the sociological analysis and synthesis of 
 the case of Hugo. 
 
 Yet again, we have only to turn to the able study of 
 Victor Hugo's poetry by M. Charles Renouvier t to see 
 that the aesthetic analysis of Hennequin may profitably 
 be supplemented by a study of Hugo as an innovator in 
 poetic technique, doing great things for French poetry 
 In virtue of the elemental energy and egoism which 
 
 * Quelqnes A'crivains Francises, p, 49. 
 volumes have been posthumously published, 
 t Victor Hvgo: kpocte. Collin ct Cie. 
 
 34 
 
 (All of Hennequin's 
 He died in 1S89.) 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 were perhaps the more puissant in him by reason of 
 the very imperfectness of his culture. To Hennequin's 
 psychological analysis, further, M. Renouvier adds * an 
 important detail which Hennequin does not specify, 
 namely, the extraordinary proclivity of Hugo to the 
 personalising of everything inanimate and every abstract 
 conception — a proclivity which is clearly to be explained 
 in connection with Hennequin's view of his predomi- 
 nating verbal faculty. And though the treatise of 
 M. Renouvier is not to be set above the scheme of 
 Hennequin as a display of intellectual power, it may be 
 that in respect of its more humanistic method, and pf 
 its avoidance of the snares of sociological generalisation, w 
 
 it gives finally the more satisfying because the more 
 mellow presentment of Huga's mind. It is not at all 
 idolatrous : it freely exposes his faults : it has a chapter 
 on his *' Ignorance and Absurdity" : the critic is con- 
 tent calmly to present the poet as he was, a mixture of 
 great powers and astonishing weaknesses, without 
 framing the picture in pessimism. Where Hennequin 
 insists on getting his whole aesthetic and psychological 
 knowledge of Hugo from Hugo's works, t M. Renouvier- 
 gets most valuable light from outside .biographic 
 testimony. It all goes to help him to convince us, to 
 satisfy us, to shape our belief. And it all goes, further, X 
 
 to maintainjhe title of France to supremacy in literary 
 criticisni^^^When we read such works of penetrating 
 judgment and just and original reasoning as those of 
 M. Hennequin and M. Renouvier, how can we possibly 
 accept the stern judgment of the former, prematurely 
 
 * His study appeared in sections in La Critique PJiilosophiqiie, in 
 1889 ; Hennequin's book in 1888. But it is quite an independent 
 inquiry. 
 
 t Cp. La Critique Scieniifique, p. 65. Yet in his study of Poe he 
 makes good use of biographical detail. 
 
 35 
 
/ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 exhausted as he was with his unrelenting studies,* that 
 his nation is in the mass given to verbalism, to rhetoric, 
 to random and visionary ideas ? No current literature 
 can show two such studies of any of its leading writers 
 as those we have just been considering. 
 
 And yet, after all, we find M. Renouvier, in a series 
 of mostly wise and discriminating estimates of Hugo's 
 generally extravagant criticisms, pronouncing him to 
 have said '' the last word " on Hamlet in his pyrotechnic 
 pages on that drama. Here M. Renouvier applies none 
 of the practical tests by which he makes such short 
 work of the generalisations of Madame de Stael on 
 romanticism and classicism, and of the hardly less rash 
 generalisations of Sainte-Beuve on the technical develop- 
 ments of Ch^nier and Hugo, It would seem that M. 
 j Renouvier in his turn has his amateur or inexpert or 
 \ uncritical side, his '* blind spot": and it is in the 
 direction of English literature,t of Shakspere and 
 Hamlet, There he is merely adoring, not analytic. 
 
 From all which, let us draw not a pessimistic or a 
 nihilistic conclusion as regards criticism, any more than 
 we do so in view of the strifes and readjustments of 
 other sciences, but simply this, that as art is long so 
 is criticism ; and that in its province are many 
 mansions. 
 
 VII 
 
 If we come to such an attitude of compromise over 
 powerful and vigilant and expert criticism, of course, 
 we can have little to say in deprecation of hard words 
 
 * He died suddenly at 29, of a congestion, in the act of bathing in 
 the open in spring weather. 
 
 t Cp. his pronounced praise (p. 31) of the "realism " of George 
 Eliot, Thackeray, and Trollope, as compared with that of the French 
 novelists. 
 
 36 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 applied to the ordinary run ot hand-to-mouth performers, 
 at least among ourselves. There seems to be almost 
 no such thing in England as the earning a steady 
 income by the practice of pure criticism, as has been 
 done in France by Salnte-Beuve, and by many lesser 
 men. The function is, perhaps by consequence, little 
 esteemed with us. And certainly the kind of work 
 generally done in our journals, though it contains 
 touches of wit and wisdom worthy of a more enduring 
 framework, is not such as to win respect for the pro- 
 fession of critic. It mostly lacks not only intellectual 
 weight but conscientiousness ; and this almost inevitably, • 
 because the public appetite for good criticism is toe 
 small to induce the ordinary journals to pay fairly for it.l 
 Thus able and scrupulous men tend more and more to 
 be repelled from the pursuit. As a matter of simple 
 commerce, it is to be noted that a journalist is usually 
 paid no more for a book review than for a leading 
 article of equal length, though the careful reading of 
 the book reviewed might be a week's work. So of 
 course the work is scamped ; much of it being done on 
 time wages, like reporting and type-setting. Even 
 where it is better paid for, and the critic is willing to 
 take trouble, it is greatly hampered by the need of 
 consulting popular prejudices, and even by the need of 
 securing publishers' advertisements. '* Critics," says a 
 recent writer, ''are the serfs of literature." Those 
 who work for the journals are certainly at the mercy of 
 the market. And over and above the evil economic 
 and other conditions, whether by reason of them or 
 by reason of our general backwardness in intellectual 
 ethics, there seems to be a lack of the sense of 
 responsibility among our average practitioners. 
 Doubtless it is the old story of the serf developing a 
 servile ethic, of the hack becoming callous. The 
 
 37 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 function is surely responsible enough. The critic is 
 free to deal out, as a rule anonymously, not only praise 
 and blame but insult, misrepresentation, opprobrium, 
 ridicule ; and the extent to which he will pervert facts, 
 words and principles, to gratify a prejudice or a resent- 
 ment, is an ugly thing to see when it does not rather, 
 as often happens, set up an impression of mere childish- 
 ness. A judge on the bench is expected to put away, 
 and generally does put away, the methods of his 
 barrister days, and to set up for himself an ideal of 
 decent impartiality. It is scarcely so with the average 
 anonymous critic. It must be confessed that he does 
 not even take much trouble to speak the truth, though 
 false witness on his part may do incurable injustice. 
 All that Mr. Howells has said of his unscrupulousness 
 is broadly true. '* The difficulty is," said one ingenuous 
 author of some of the criticisms on his book, '* to know 
 whether you are dealing with blunderers or with cheats. 
 It is often not a question of fairness or competence : it 
 is a question of telling a flat falsehood." It is often 
 apt to seem so to the scribe assailed. And it is finally 
 true that few men are capable of using without abusing 
 the power of mischief and offence, of insult and injustice, 
 which the institution of anonymous journalism puts in 
 the hands of thousands, enablingthem as it does to 
 say what they will, from the coward's castle of the 
 '*we," against men outside who cannot bring an 
 injustice home to the doer, and who in general cannot 
 even get a hearing for a rejoinder. Where there is not 
 malice and perversity, mere carelessness may work un- 
 told iniquity. 
 
 In this matter, as in others, they do better in France. 
 The great Sainte-Beuve is little open to blame in the 
 matter of conscientiousness, save in certain cases where 
 personal ill-will affected his spoken judgment. Here he 
 
 38 
 
 / 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 is charged, even by admirers, with canaillerie ; and on 
 the other hand he was at times swayed by private 
 friendship or social pressure. Still, the mass of his 
 work is sound, and his general urbanity and painstaking 
 with all manner of subjects and all manner of writers 
 supply a model to all of his craft. When the young 
 Taine came forward with his first books, Sainte-Beuve 
 discussed them with a courteous and complimentary 
 seriousness which, in England, no critic of his standing 
 would have given to the work of an obscure youth. 
 With us, Taine would have been satirised, sneered at, 
 snubbed, being indeed very open to censure. And 
 Sainte-Beuve, we can see, went through life constantly 
 learning, constantly studying afresh for the express 
 purpose of estimating rightly the new literature that 
 challenged his judgment. He was "always opening 
 new windows," as Mr. James testifies. And though a 
 critic cannot add a cubit to his stature by such self- 
 discipline, although he will not so make broad a mind 
 which is cast in a narrow mould, or make generous a 
 temper which is innately ungenerous, he may add rangei, 
 of vision and refinements of the sense of iustice to ai 
 fair faculty. Indeed, without a deliberate and constant 
 attempt to enlarge his own culture, no natural fairness 
 of disposition can make him habitually discriminate well I 
 in one department of writing, much less deal propor- 1 
 tionately with different departments. Even the bellet- ' 
 trist criticism of men of merely bellettrist culture tends 
 to become insensitive on certaifTsToes, since the crafts 
 of poetry and fiction, to be duly progressive, must be 
 coloured by the surrounding play of thought of all 
 kinds ; and apathy or ignorance on these other matters 
 will leave the critic incompetent to appraise the work he 
 deals with. Progress in criticism may be roughly said 
 to arise in respect of the perception of new significances, 
 
 39 
 
 \ 
 
*v 
 
 > = ■ ,,^^^ ^ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 new relations, new ''connotations," as the philosophic 
 term goes, in pieces of literature which have hitherto 
 been read with a half-seeing- eye, in the fashion in which 
 people know classic phrases without any sense of their 
 real purport or felicity. This is, indeed, the general 
 law of all progress in civilisation or in intelligence : 
 cross-fertilisation of cultures, contacts of diverse know- 
 ledges and methods, are the sources of new thought 
 and mental effort in a society or in an individual ; and 
 ^e_have seen t hat right criticism issbut an orderly plav 
 of judgment^ with a search for tests, to the end of con- 
 sjstency of opinion.: Now it is obvious that, given a 
 faculty for literary appreciation, every form of culture 
 in addition to literary culture so-called, tends to throw 
 a side-light or reveal a clue where the eye not so cul- 
 tured would be apt to see nothing. 
 
 It is possible, indeed, to overrate the possible fructi- 
 fication of literary criticism by non-literary preparation^. 
 A critic of great original gifts, the Rev. Mr. Fleay, in 
 his valuable Shakspere Manual^ seems to imply that he 
 owes the special results there set forth to his training 
 in the physical sciences. Speaking of the metrical tests 
 he so ably employs, he writes that ''The great need 
 for any critic who attempts to use these tests is to have 
 had a thorough training in the natural sciences, espe- 
 cially in mineralogy, classificatory botany, and, above 
 all, in chemical analysis."* He goes even further than 
 this in his paper On Troy his and Cressida : 
 
 " We must accept every scientific method from other sciences 
 applicable to our ends. From the mineralogist we must learn by 
 long study to recognise a chip of rock at once from its general 
 appearance ; from the chemist, to apply systematic tabulated tests 
 to confirm our conclusions ; from both, to use varied tests — tests as 
 to form, as for crystals — tests as to materials, as for compounds ; 
 
 * Work cited, ch. xii. p. io8. 
 40 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 from the botanist we must learn to classify, not in an empirical 
 way, but by essential characters arranged in due subordination ; 
 finally, from the biologist we must learn to take into account not 
 only the state of any writer's mind at some one epoch, but to trace 
 its organic growth from beginning to end of his period of work • 
 remembering that we have often only fossils, and even fragments of 
 fossils, to work from, when our object is to restore the whole living 
 animal. When these things are done systematically and thoroughly, 
 then, and then only, may we expect to have a criticism that shall be 
 free from shallow notions taken up to please individual eccentrici- 
 ties : a criticism that shall differ from what now too often goes 
 under that name, as much as the notions on the determining causes 
 ©f the relations between wages and capital differ in the mind of a 
 Stuart Mill and that of a Trades-Union delegate."* 
 
 I venture to say that this is a hasty and overstrained 
 way of putting- the case for the advantage to literarv 
 criticism from a hold on physical science. Mr. Fleayl 
 confounds the indirect effect of mental habit and expan- \ 
 sion with a direct process of imitation ; and his special » 
 parallels will not stand the two great scientific tests 
 which he has so oddly omitted from his list — those of 
 logic and psychology. For the capacity to recognise a 
 given specimen of anything is not at all peculiar to the 
 mineralogist. It is common not only to the chemist 
 and the biologist but to the grocer, the butcher, the 
 baker, the publican, the tailor, and the shoemaker, being 
 simply a development of special knowledge. The 
 method in each case is special. The grocer, for in- 
 stance, tests his tea by taste and smell, and the tailor 
 his fabric by a magnifying glass, as does the mineral- 
 ogist with his rock ; though all alike may in many cases 
 judge of a substance at a single glance. And as every 
 one of these can do his own work perfectly well without 
 first learning the business of the others, so the literary 
 critic may apply literary tests perfectly well without 
 knowing gneiss from schist. Neither is biological 
 
 * Work cited, pp. 243-244. 
 
 - \ .a_e^ 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 preparation in itself any qualification for the apprehen- 
 sion of what is essentially a psychological process, the 
 inference of a man's states of mind from his work, or the 
 inference of his general capacity from a fragment of his 
 writing. Hallam applied to Shakspere's case the prin- 
 ciple of allowing for states of mind, though Hallam 
 seems to have had no biological knowledge. What is 
 perfectly true is that the practice of a physical science 
 may suggest to a student a new analytical test in 
 literature ; but then the same test may occur to a 
 student who has never meddled with that science at all. 
 The new school of art experts, which claims to settle 
 by exact tests the authorship of old pictures, as the 
 users of the metrical test claim to clear up the author- 
 ship of old plays, was I believe founded by a man of 
 scientific training ; but his method is applied by men 
 of a different training, perhaps more scientifically.* 
 Mr. Fleay himself does not dispute that metrical tests 
 were applied to the plays of Shakspere by other critics, 
 for whom he does not claim any skill in mineralogy and 
 palaeontology, or even in meteorology — a science which ^ 
 might be supposed to offer points of analogy like 
 another. The truth is, there is a right method, an 
 exact and logical method, in reasoning about criticism, 
 as there is in the application of metrical tests or the 
 analysis of substances, and that exact method has not 
 been here observed by Mr. Fleay ; who, I do not hesitate 
 to say, might very well have arrived at his metrical 
 tests without any previous lessoning in physics and 
 botany. On the other hand a man crammed with all 
 the sciences might read Shakspere all his life without 
 dreaming of metrical tests. The real gain to the 
 literary critic from scientific knowledge, then, is not in 
 
 * See the recent work of Mr. Bernhard Berenson on Lorenzo Lotto 
 fPutnams). 
 
 42 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 the deliberate application or Imitation of the investi- 
 gatory process of any or all of the sciences. That would 
 be a much vainer undertaking than Bacon's plan of 
 arriving at natural laws by merely ledgering data. 
 Indeed, there obviously can be no such imitation as is 
 . proposed, since neither microscope nor scalpel, neither 
 re-agent nor hammer, can be applied to literary problems. 
 Here we can understand the protest of M. Droz, above 
 considered. The real gain in the matter, as we agreed 
 /\ with him, is likely to be, fijrst, in the mere habit of ., 
 ^ -^ exactitude, the^avoidance of inconsistency, the sense of X 
 J t he importance of_jproofs ; secon darily , in tke probable > 
 stimulus to speculative or theorising thought ; and 
 ultirnate.ly in the probable widening of philosophic view 
 in general, and of estimate of human capacity in par- 
 ticular. In the way of direct enlightenment bearing on 
 his work as a critic, the literary man may really gain 
 far^ more from human physiology and pathology than 
 from any of the sciences Mr. Fleay specifies. 
 
 It is again fallacious, I think, to say as Mr Fleay 
 does that 
 
 "•Mathematical deductions from the doctrine of chances, and 
 inferences from one set of numerical results to another, are mosT 
 valuable, and to be applied whenever possible. For instance, Dr. 
 Abbott's deduction from Mr. Simpson's numerical statement, that 
 2700 words in Shakspere occur in two plays each and in no others 
 — to the effect that four words only are to be expected as peculiar 
 to any given pair of plays — is most valuable as well as ingenious,' ' * 
 
 We need not discuss here whether in the particular 
 case put any good results have been derived from the 
 theorem, or v^'hether Mr. Fleay has done any the better, 
 as he supposes, in assigning the elements oi Hetiry VI., 
 by reason of the formula of Dr. Abbott. What is safe 
 to say is that such a theorem is not logically valid as a 
 
 •^ P. 243. 
 43 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 test, because the '' doctrine of chances " in any form is 
 a mere mode of hypothesis, and can establish no truth 
 whatever ; and because Dr. Abbott's deduction does not 
 really follow on Mr. Simpson's statement. In another 
 passage,* Mr. Fleay tells us that the "chances" are 
 20,030,010 to one against the selection by rhyme-test of 
 the same ten out of Shakspere's 30 undoubted plays as 
 are specified by Meres for a given period ; and that 
 therefore when it does make that selection the value of 
 the rhyme test is conclusively proved ''to a mind accus- 
 tomed to the exact sciences." Now, the doctrine of 
 chances is not a process proper to any of the exact 
 sciences ; it is emphatically a speculative and inexact 
 process, which only seems exact because it is in terms 
 of figures. The figures given represent no exact or 
 other truth whatever, since it is not denied that even 
 with " twenty million chances to one against" some- 
 thing happening, it may actually happen. 
 
 But even if all this were not so, it is obvious that 
 the calculus of chances can only be applied, even on 
 Mr. Fleay's lines, to a very few of the questions with 
 which literary criticism has to deal ; and his array of 
 scientific methods which were to be applicable to 
 criticism in general is in no better case than before. 
 When the real authorship of the plays attributed to 
 Shakspere is settled — a thing certainly well worth 
 doing, and strangely neglected by many editors of what 
 are lumped together for the public as "Shakspere's 
 Works " — the main tasks of Shakspere-criticism are 
 still to do. Mr. Fleay rightly declines to offer 
 "aesthetic " criticism in his manual ; but he will hardly 
 dispute that such criticism is inevitable, or that it is 
 desirable. Indeed, when he comes to the task of 
 
 * P. 134. 
 44 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 sifting out the non-Shaksperean matter from Macbeth, 
 he necessarily resorts to aesthetic tests ; and he does so 
 without even an attempt at scientific methodism, since 
 no physical science offers a plausible analogy to the 
 psychological process involved. So with twenty other 
 problems. The question of the fitness of Shakspere's 
 work in any play or scene may at any time be raised ; 
 and here the calculus of chances and the methods of the 
 mineralogist are of no avail. We must just fall back 
 on general processes of reasoning, special to no science, 
 with the special help, perhaps, of data from physiology 
 and psychology, and the general help, it is to be hoped, 
 of that ratiocinative cast of thought which all science 
 tends to develop. 
 
 VIII 
 
 But even the help of physiology may be misused if it 
 be not resorted to in a truly scientific spirit. Such mis- 
 use occurs in the remarkable work of Dr. Max Nordau 
 on Degeneration, so much discussed of late in the 
 literary world. Dr. Nordau claims to have produced 
 in that treatise a work of critical science. ''This 
 book," he declares in his dedicatory preface to Professor 
 Lombroso, " is an essay in a really scientific criticism, 
 which does not judge a work by the emotions it arouses 
 — emotions very contingent, capricious, and variable, 
 according to the temperament and disposition of mind 
 of each reader, but by the psycho-physiological elements 
 which have produced it ; and it seeks at the same time 
 to fill a lacuna which still exists in your puissant 
 system." Now, whether or not Dr. Nordau's book 
 fills a blank in Professor Lombroso's system, it is 
 obvious that on the one hand it does not abstain from 
 "judging a work according to the emotions it arouses," 
 
 45 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 and that, on the other hand, only in a lax and capricious 
 way does it judge works by the psycho-physiological 
 elements involved in their production. What Dr. Nordau 
 does again and again is to deride and denounce literary 
 performances on the score of the emotions they arouse 
 in him in particular, and then to proceed to show that 
 they have certain characteristics in common with the 
 talk of imbeciles, lunatics, or maniacs. He does not 
 get at the psycho-physiological symptoms of his authors 
 by way of throwing light on their works ; he usually 
 infers the characteristics from the works ; and his 
 plentiful epithets show him to be as much under the 
 sway of his primary literary impression or emotion as 
 any one else. It is not to be disputed that he is right 
 in some of his judgments. Rossetti, for instance, was 
 certainly a neurotic ; and his works are found to appeal 
 to neurotics ; but there is only a beginning of scientific 
 criticism in noting these facts. They do not settle the 
 
 } question of the merit of the neurotic's work : they do 
 but give one cue for the literary estimate. Dr. Nordau 
 seems to suppose that he has settled the whole critical 
 problem when he calls a writer a degenerate, with some 
 contumelious adjectives thrown in. But we may agree 
 that Swift, Byron, Kleist, Pascal, Leopardi, de Musset, 
 Lamb, Heine, Poe, Coleridge, Dostoievsky, and Huys- 
 
 I mans are all degenerates in the sense of having some 
 Torm of neurosis, and yet reckon nearly every one of 
 them a man of wonderful special gift or genius, much 
 better worth studying than most writers of quite sound 
 
 'nervous structure. Nay, if we are to follow Dr. 
 Nordau's master, Signor Lombroso, all men of genius 
 without exception are to be labelled degenerates ; and 
 it is to be laid down that if they themselves live to a 
 good old age the collapse occurs in their children — as 
 in the case of Goethe and perhaps Shakspere. The 
 
 46 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 sweeping theory of Professor Lombroso might be 
 thought sufficient in itself to suggest to Dr. Nordau 
 that the main business of psycho-physiological criticism 
 is to ascertain the elements belonging in covnnon to 
 genius, normality, and neurosis, and to measure dis- 
 passionately the deviations from the norm, with a view 
 to a theory of cerebral variation. But he falls into 
 exactly the error committed by Signor Lombroso in his 
 diagnosis of the criminal type. The Professor finds 
 certain moral and physical phenomena among criminals, 
 and straightway decides that these phenomena all con- 
 note criminality ; whereas more circumspect observers 
 can show that they abound among non-criminals. Dr. 
 Nordau loads his dice in the same fashion, setting down 
 as specifically degenerate certain tendencies which can 
 be shown to exist in men whom he passes as perfectly 
 sane. Discussing Mr. Swinburne, he writes that in 
 that; poet's verse *^the world changes its aspect accord- 
 ing to the character of the event which is occurring : it 
 accompanies, like an orchestra, all the events which 
 
 occur at a place Here we have an idea purely 
 
 delirious. It corresponds in art and poetry to halluci- 
 nation and madness. It is a form of mysticism which we 
 meet in all the degenerates."* And he goes on to 
 diagnose this symptom in Ibsen and in Zola. Now, the 
 slightest general knowledge of literature suffices to 
 show that this ^* pathetic fallacy " (so described by Mr. 
 Ruskin, another degenerate !) is an almost universal 
 literary artifice or psychological proclivity. It would be 
 difficult to find a poet who has not exemplified it. 
 Milton does, in his account of the fall of Adam and Eve. 
 Shakspere does, again and again, in his sonnets as well 
 as in his plays. Schiller does, in Wilhehn Tell. Heine 
 
 * Degenerescefice, trad. Frang. i. 172-173. 
 47 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 carries the process further still, as in his lyric of the 
 palm and the pine. Hugo does it continually. But Dr. 
 Nordau's thesis may be disposed of once for all by 
 collating his own verdicts. " If to-day English poetry 
 all round is not unmitigatedly pre-Raphaelite," he de- 
 clares, **it is solely due to the happy chance of having 
 possessed, simultaneously with the pre-Raphaelites, a 
 poet so healthy as Tennyson."* Now, not only was 
 Tennyson unquestionably one of the pre-Raphaelites ; 
 not only did he freely resort to the use of the refrain, 
 and to what Dr. Nordau calls '' echolalia,"t but he 
 supplies one of the most striking examples of the 
 notion of sympathy in nature and mood in his early 
 poem The Sisters, not to speak of Claribel, The Lotos 
 Eaters, The Last Tournament, Move Eastward Happy 
 Earthy and a number of the lyrics in Maud. What 
 then are we to say of the science which marks off 
 Tennyson as perfectly healthy and convicts Rossetti 
 and Mr. Swinburne of degeneracy on the strength of 
 symptoms which he abundantly exhibits ? What has 
 happened in this miscarriage is not a carrying of science 
 too far, but a failure to carry it far enough. Science 
 
 \ implies precision and consistency : Dr. Nordau has here 
 missed both. A little comparison will show that what 
 
 1 he takes for specifically morbid symptoms are phases of 
 the primal instinct of song, recognisable as such in the 
 
 * D'cgenhescence, i. p. 177. 
 
 t E.g., the lyrics " Late, late, so late; " "Low my lute, breathe 
 low my lute; " " Turn, fortune, turn thy wheel ; " " Sweet and low, 
 sweet and low," with the further line, " Low, low, breathe and 
 blow;" " Break, break, break ;" " Sun, rain, and sun." Dr. Nordau 
 points to Rossetti's " Forgot it not, nay, but got it not" (Beauty), as 
 a sample of echolalia. But Tennyson has " Regret me not, forget 
 me not" (song in first version of The Miller's Daughter). And 
 Tennyson resorts as often as any poet to alliteration, which for Dr 
 Nordau spells degeneration. 
 
 48 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 songs of children and savages. He falls into the ele- 
 mentary fallacy of ctim hocy ergo propter hoc; and his 
 ascription of normal literary expedients to malady when 
 found with malady is on all fours with Signor Lombroso's 
 assumption that, inasmuch as genius has been seen to run 
 special risks of brain degeneration (even as gunners run 
 special risks of deafness), therefore genius is a phase of 
 degeneration. Many of the fashions and mannerisms to 
 which Dr. Nordau points are affected by people with 
 neither neurosis nor genius. And he is otherwise hap- 
 hazard in his judgments. Mr. William Morris he describes 
 as **much more sane intellectually than Rossetti and 
 Swinburne," and as showing a "swing past equili- 
 brium" only in his "lack of originality and the ex- 
 aggerated instinct of imitation."* But Mr. Morris, as 
 Dr. Nordau avows, commits echolalia ; and he does it far 
 oftener than Dr. Nordau seems to be aware of ; while, on 
 the other hand, the "instinct of imitation" and the "lack 
 of originality " are the most marked intellectual symp- 
 toms of savages and children in general, and of stolid 
 Christian citizens in mass. The whole theorem is 
 astray. A degenerate must have some qualities in 
 common with his normal or undegenerate neighbours. 
 The business of psycho-physiological criticism is to 
 ascertain whether special developments of any qualities 
 are or are not necessarily phases of degeneration ; and 
 even when the point is ascertained we have not reduced 
 the flawed poet, as Dr. Nordau apparently supposes, to 
 the status of a madhouse patient. 
 
 I should be sorry to see Dr. Nordau meet these 
 criticisms by applying the proposition he throws out in 
 his preface — that literary men are sure to attack him 
 because he has shown them up. That way of arguing, 
 
 * Dcgcnerescence, i. p. 175. 
 
 '1-9 D 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 even If accurate, seems to be unprofitable, as It leaves 
 it open to the literary men to say (what some of them 
 do say) that Dr. Nordau himself has the symptoms of a 
 neurotic, raging as he does at every eccentricity, and 
 breaking out as he frequently does into vituperation of 
 people whom on his own showing he should treat as 
 invalids. Instead of meeting him in that fashion, I 
 desire merely to express my regret that his unscientific 
 use of his great powers of colligation and surmise, and 
 his no less unscientific resort to the merest phillstlnism 
 for sanction of his attacks on all manner of innovating 
 thought, good, bad, and indifferent,* should tend to 
 discredit scientific method among non-scientific people. 
 I quite agree with Dr. Nordau that It is important to 
 recognise the pathological element in such writers as 
 Rossetti and Tolstoy ; but the business of critical science 
 in this direction seems to me to have only begun 
 where in the hands of Dr. Nordau it ends. When we 
 have settled, say, the bearing of Heine's spinal disease 
 on his art and his ethics, we have but collated an effect 
 iwith one of its casual conditions ; we have so far 
 leither discredited Heine nor disposed of his work, 
 ^hlch remains Incomparably more valuable than the 
 work of the well-balanced Klopstock. Bare consistency 
 { dictates that, after finding moral and artistic perversity 
 I and intellectual fallacy in the work of degenerates, we 
 I proceed to recognise moral and artistic and logical 
 I imbecility in the work of the physically sane, and to 
 i philosophise accordingly. A writer whom Dr. Nordau 
 
 I * For instance, he must needs maintain, as against all innovators, 
 
 I what he calls " an order of things which, during a long series of 
 ages, has satisfied logic, subdued perversity, and ripened the beautiful 
 in all the arts" (Trans, cited, i. ii). In such an endorsement of all 
 use and wont, such an implicit faith that "whatever is, is right," 
 science has no part. The attitude is indeed the very negation of 
 I the scientific spirit. 
 
 ' 50 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 seems to accept as scientific, Dr. Maudsley, has 
 affirmed that results of immeasurable value have 
 accrued to the human race from diseased conditions of \ 
 body and brain In certain cases. To denounce the 
 disease is surely the method of the typical unscientific 
 literary man rather than that of the scientific man 
 turned critic. Once more, error comes of too little 
 science, not of too much ; but it takes a little scientific 
 bent to see this ; and many literary men will put the 
 case quite otherwise. 
 
 IX 
 
 The danger, then, of Mr. Fleay's excessive way of 
 putting" things, and of Dr. Nordau's way, excessive 
 with a diff"erence, is that it may merely confirm some 
 literary specialists in aversion to science of all sorts.* 
 But .of course Mr. Fleay is not to be charged with 
 setting up a habit which flourishes in virtue of average 
 egoism, ignorance, and arrogance. Those who fall 
 Into it pay the penalty in the restriction of their own 
 powers. Thus we constantly hear petulant protests 
 against the inevitable artistic effects of new ethical and 
 scientific ideas, as well as against the modifications of 
 language inevitably set up by the same forces. Men 
 living in a close of mere literary technique and amateur 
 reflection, however carefully it be gardened, and how-/ 
 ever choice be the flowers and fruits, are sure to pass* 
 some Chinese judgments on the world beyond, and to 
 make provincial estimates of the relative stature of the 
 
 * The same may perhaps be said of Professor Sylvester's assump- 
 tion of having formulated important "laws of verse" in what he 
 calls "phonetic syzygy " or ''syraptosis" and "anastomosis." 
 His idea that on these lines the technical criticism of lyric verse 
 may be reduced to definiteness {Laws of Verse, p. 12), seems to me to 
 be visionary — at least, as regards " Syzygy " and " Synectic." 
 
 51 
 
\ 
 
 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 men of their way of life and the men of other ways of 
 h'fe. And one of the sure signs of this atrophy and 
 hypertrophy of the literary senses is the spontaneous 
 anger which so many literary men show at the 
 sug-g-estion that literary judgment can be made subject 
 to the method of science, even in the most general 
 sense. There is here involved, indeed, one of the last 
 problems of critical science, the problem of deciding 
 when a specialty shall be held to have overbalanced an 
 intellectual life. Even as the highest capacity runs the 
 greater risk of collapsing into insanity, though it 
 certainly is not insanity, the expert pursuit of any one 
 art or activity runs the risk of subordinating many 
 forms of mental activity to that one ; so that the poet, 
 going beyond the main region of his art, tends to see 
 and express all his ideas in poetry, and the musician, 
 equally, all in music ; till the person of balanced and 
 distributed culture is jarred and repelled by finding 
 propositions which are properly of philosophy and 
 casuistry and history and special psychology set down 
 or swathed up in verse and music, which, by reason of 
 the forcing of one method on disparate processes of 
 thought, become for him bad as verse and music. The 
 specialist may retort that the objector is but a dilettant ; 
 that music and poetry are fit to express all things for 
 those sufficiently deep in music and poetry ; and that 
 only these higher developments are great or admirable. 
 In strictness, such a dispute is insoluble, in the way in 
 which deep temperamental oppositions of mind and 
 bias are irreconcilable. But the critic may find a not 
 unprofitable or thankless part of his work in framing a 
 working ideal of culture and fitness as between diverg^^f 
 ing fanaticisms of taste, and so retaining for mankind 
 the provinces that are in danger of being overrun and 
 walled-in by the one-idea'd. 
 
 52 
 
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CRITICISM 
 
 With such tasks, such possibilities, and such duties, 
 he has surely enough to do, as beside any brain-worker 
 whatever. That there is for him no finality, no *Mast J 
 word," no objective fixity of result, such as men are i 
 wont loosely to connect with the idea of "science," l\ 
 will be made a reproach to him only by those who do / 
 riat.distinguish between the spirit and purpose of science , \ 
 and certain of its data. And that he is finally a pro-'"^~" 
 pagand[st, an artist in judgment, so to speak, will be i 
 held to mark him off from scientific function only by j 
 ""those who miss the very plain truth that all scientific I 
 ^teaching commonly so called is at bottom propaganda \ 
 and the expression of an intellectual bias. At a time 
 when it is zealously sought to turn this truth against all 
 science, in the interest of Irrationalism, which is 
 intellectual Anarchism, its use in the service of reason 
 and science may perhaps be the more readily agreed to. 
 ^nd to the critic, finally, the certainty that, do what he 
 may, he will leave inconsistency and oversight and 
 fallacy in his work for the children of his tribe to detect, 
 need be no more paralysing a thought than the general 
 certainty of the mutation of all things. He plays his 
 part like another. In the struggle of opinions for 
 survival he takes his chance as all opinion-makers 
 must. \ 
 
 -^ 
 
 53 
 
P OE 
 
 (1885) 
 
 I 
 
 Since all literary cases must be periodically rejudged, 
 \each generation's opinions on any phase of the past being 
 part of its special relation to things, it is ^strictly as 
 needless to justify the plea for a fresh trial in any one 
 case as it is vain to deny it. Demurrers have been too 
 often made to leave any difficulty about their rebuttal. 
 Evolution is become a name potent to put down the 
 most obstreperous conservative in criticism. It is 
 involved in that law, however, that we shall all of us 
 continue to have our particular leanings, and that some 
 problems will peculiarly appeal to the general mind at 
 given junctures. And while it is part of the here-ensuing 
 argument that less than due hearing as well as less 
 than justice has been granted in the case of Edgar Allan 
 Poe, it is probably true that to-day even more than ever 
 men feel the fascination of the general problem falling 
 under his name. 
 
 Just because of its fascination, indeed, the Poe 
 problem has been less methodically handled than most. 
 Its aspects are so bizarre that critics have been more 
 concerned to declare as much than to sum them up with 
 
 55 
 
POE 
 
 scientific exactitude. First the ear of the world was 
 won with a biography unparalleled in literature for its 
 calculated calumny, a slander so comprehensive and so 
 circumstantial that to this day perhaps most people who 
 have heard of Poe regard him as what he himself called 
 "that monstrum horrendum^ an unprincipled man of 
 genius," with almost no moral virtue and lacking 
 almost no vice. It was an ex-clergyman, Griswold, 
 who launched the legend ; and another clergyman, 
 GilfiUan, improved on it to the extent of suggesting that 
 the poet broke his wife's heart so as to be able to write 
 a poem about her. The average mind being, however, 
 a little less ready than the clerical to believe and utter 
 evil, there at length grew up a body of vindication 
 which for instructed readers has displaced the sinister 
 myth of the early records. Vindication, as it happened, 
 began immediately on the publication of Griswold's 
 memoir ; only, the slander had the prestige of book 
 form, and of the copyright edition of Poe's works, while 
 the defence was at first confined to newspapers ; hence 
 an immense start for the former : but at length generous 
 zeal triumphed to the extent of creating an almost 
 stainless effigy of the poet — stainless save for the 
 constitutional flaw which was confessed only to claim 
 for it a human pity, and the faults of tone and temper 
 which came of nervous malady and undue toil. Then 
 there came a reaction, the facts were more closely 
 studied and more unsympathetically pronounced upon ; 
 the unsleeping ill-will towards the poet's name in his 
 own country still had the literary field and favour, and 
 the last and most ambitious edition of his works is 
 supervised by a none too friendly critic* Good and 
 temperate criticism has been forthcoming between 
 
 * This holds true, unfortunately, of the still later complete 
 edition, by Messrs. Stedman and Woodberry. 
 
 56 
 
POE 
 
 whiles ; but there is still room, one fancies, for an 
 impartial re-statement of the facts. 
 
 *' It would seem," writes Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, 
 the American poetess, sometime the Jia?icee of Poe, and 
 one of the vindicators of his memory, ''it would seem 
 that the true point of view from which his genius should 
 be regarded has yet to be sought."* The full force of 
 that observation, perhaps, cannot be felt unless it be 
 read in context with some of the sentences in which 
 Mrs. Whitman sets forth her own point of view : — 
 
 " Wanting in that supreme central force or faculty of the mind, 
 whose function is a God-conscious and God-adoring faith, Edgar 
 Poe sought earnestly and conscientiously for such solution of the 
 great problems of thought as were alone attainable to an intellect 
 hurled from its balance by the abnormal preponderance of the 
 analytical and imaginative faculties." 
 
 " These far-wandering comets, not less than ' the regular, calm 
 stars,' obey a law and follow a pathway that has been marked out 
 for them by infinite Wisdom and essential Love." f 
 
 The theism exemplified in these passages appears to 
 be the reigning religion in the United States, and is 
 doubtless common enough everywhere else ; and it 
 certainly seems sufficiently clear that for people whose 
 minds oscillate between conceptions of Poe's intellect as 
 hurled from its balance and as wisely guided by a loving 
 God who deprived it of the faculty of God-consciousness 
 — for such people the "true point of view from which 
 his genius should be regarded " must indeed be far to 
 seek. That point of view can hardly be one from which 
 you explain the infinite while perplexed by the finite ; it 
 is to be attained not a priori but a posteriori ; that is to 
 say, Poe's life and his works have to be studied with an 
 eye, not to discovering a scheme of infinite wisdom, or 
 even to finding a "point of view," but simply to the 
 
 * Edgar Poe and his Critics, p. 59. 
 t Ibid. pp. 33-4, 60. 
 
 57 
 
POE 
 
 noting of the facts and the arranging of them. The true 
 point of view is surely that from which you see things. 
 Much, of course, depends on methods of observation. 
 At the outset, we are confronted by the facts that Poe's 
 father married imprudently at eighteen, and that the 
 lady was an actress. That is either a mere romantic 
 detail or a very important fact, according as Poe is 
 regarded as an organism or as an immortal soul. Here 
 indeed, the point of view means the seeing or the not 
 seeing of certain facts ; but as most people to-day have 
 some little faith in the operation of heredity, it may be 
 assumed that the significance of Poe's parentage is 
 admitted when it is mentioned. Recent investigators 
 have come to the conclusion that David Poe was not 
 merely romantic and reckless, but given to the hard 
 drinking which was so common in the Southern States 
 in his time ; and thus, coming of a father of intem- 
 perate habits and headlong impulses, and of a mother 
 whose very profession meant excitement and shaken 
 nerves, Poe had before him tremendous probabilities of 
 an erratic career. As fate would have it, the man who 
 adopted the little Edgar on the death of the young 
 parents (they both died of consumption) did everything 
 to aggravate and nothing to counteract the tempera- 
 mental flaws of the life he took in charge. We know 
 that Edgar's brother William Henry, who may or may 
 not have been equally ill-managed by the friend who 
 adopted him, turned out a clever scapegrace and died 
 young ; but certain it is that Mr. Allan was no wise 
 guardian to Edgar. The habits of the house were 
 Southern and convivial ; the clever child was petted, 
 flattered, and spoiled ; and it seems that Poe might 
 have been made a toper by his surroundings even if he 
 had no bias that way. Again, Mr. Allan was rich, and 
 Poe had no prospective necessities of labour, no sense 
 
 58 
 
POE 
 
 of obligation to be methodical ; which makes it the more 
 natural that his later life should be a failure financially, 
 and the more remarkable that he should exhibit unusual 
 powers of close and orderly thought. Finally, the boy's 
 shifting life ; his four years' schooling in England (where 
 in the opinion of his teacher, his guardian did him 
 serious harm by giving him too much pocket-money), 
 and later at Richmond ; his brief military cadetship at 
 West Point, his headlong trip to Europe, and his year's 
 stay there, of which nothing seems to be now known, 
 and his studentship at the Virginia University — all 
 tended to deprive him of the benefits of habit, which 
 might conceivably have been some safeguard against 
 his hereditary instability ; and at the same time his 
 training tended to develop, though inadequately and at 
 random, his purely intellectual powers, while supplying 
 him with no moral guidance worth mentioning. Such 
 a character required the very wisest management: it 
 had either bad management or none. It was therefore 
 only too natural that the youth should be self-willed and 
 insubordinate at West Point, and much given to 
 gambling at college. 
 
 The other side of the picture, however, must be kept 
 in view. While apparently loosely related to life in 
 respect of the normal aff"ections (he seems to have had 
 little communication with his brother, no very strong 
 attachment to his sister, and no attachment to Mr. 
 Allan), he was very far from being the unfeeling and 
 loveless creature he was so long believed to be. He 
 seems to have described himself accurately when he 
 wrote of his uncommon and invariable tenderness to 
 animals ; and the intensity of his affections where they 
 were really called out is revealed by the story of his 
 passionate grief on the death of the lady, the mother of 
 one ol his comrades, who befriended him in schoolboy- 
 
 59 
 
POE 
 
 hood. Abnormal in his grief as in the play of all his 
 faculties, and blindly bent even then on piercing the 
 mystery of the sepulchre, the boy passed long night 
 vigils on her grave, clinging, beyond death, to the first 
 being he had learned utterly to love. And an important 
 statement is made as to the manner of his marriage by 
 a lady w^ho knew him and his connections well.* The 
 majority of respectable readers, probably, have regarded 
 Poe's marriage to his beautiful and penniless young 
 cousin as one of his acts of culpable recklessness ; but 
 according to the account in question, it was rather a 
 deed of generous devotion. He had acted as a boy 
 tutor to Virginia Clemm in her early childhood, and 
 when, after his final rupture with Mr. Allan, he went to 
 reside with his aunt,t the young girl acquired a worship 
 for him. According to this story it was on Mrs. 
 Clemm's impressing on him, when he contemplated 
 leaving her house after being an inmate for two years, 
 the absolute absorption of the girl in his existence, that 
 he proposed the marriage. She was hardly fourteen, 
 poor child, but she was of the precocious Southern 
 blood, and her youth seems to have made her mother 
 only the more fearful of the effect of separation from 
 her adored cousin. Poe's marriage was on this view 
 an act not of free choice but of prompt generosity. 
 Whatever the truth may be, he was a very good hus- 
 band. Devoted as she was up to her death, Virginia 
 never gave him the full intellectual companionship he 
 would have sought in a wife ; but there is now no pre- 
 
 * Art. "Last Days of E. A. Poe," in Scrihner's Magazine, March 
 1878. 
 
 t Mr, Ingram says {Life, i. 106-7) that Mrs. Clemm " never did 
 know " where Poe went after the rupture (1831) ; and that " extant 
 correspondence proves " that Poe did not Hve with her in 1831-2, 
 " and, apparently, that he never lived with her until after his 
 marriage." 
 
 60 
 
POE 
 
 tence that he ever showed her the shadow of unkindness, 
 and it is admitted that in her last days he was tender- 
 ness itself. All which is a fair certificate of good 
 domestic disposition, as men and poets go. 
 
 What then was there in Poe's life as a whole to 
 justify detraction ? When the testimony is fully sifted 
 the discreditable charges are found to be : first and 
 chiefly, that he repeatedly gave way to his hereditary 
 vice of alcoholism ; secondly, that he committed one 
 lapse from literary integrity ; thirdly, that he was often 
 splenetic and sometimes unjust as a critic ; fourthly, 
 that he showed ingratitude and enmity to some who 
 befriended him. Setting aside his youthful passionate- 
 ness and prodigality, that is now the whole serious 
 moral indictment against him. The insinuations and 
 assertions of Griswold, to the effect that he committed 
 more than one gross outrage, are found to be either 
 proven false or wholly without proof ; and many of the 
 biographer's aspersions on his disposition have been in- 
 dignantly repudiated by those who knew him well — as 
 Mr. G. R. Graham and Mr. N. P. Willis, both of whom 
 employed him. As for the alleged ingratitude to un- 
 named friends, it seems only fair to ask whether any 
 such faults, if real, may not be attributed to the havoc 
 ultimately wrought in Poe's delicately balanced temper- 
 ment by fits oi" drinking.* Mr. R. H. Stoddard f has 
 given an account of some very singular ill-treatment he 
 received from Poe while the latter edited the Broadway 
 Journal — treatment which at once suggests some degree 
 of cerebral derangement on Poe's part ; and a story 
 
 * In the memoir prefixed to the last edition of Poe's works, it is 
 stated that he resorted at times to opium as well as to alcohol ; and 
 this seems likely enough. In that case there would be all the more 
 risk of bad effects on character. 
 
 t In his memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, 1880. 
 
 61 
 
POE 
 
 told of his resenting a home-thrust of criticism by a 
 torrent of curses, goes to create the same impression. 
 This was in his latter years, at a time when a thimbleful 
 V. of sherry could excite him almost to frenzy, and when, 
 according to one hostile writer, he had developed incur- 
 able cerebral disease. Setting aside the question of his 
 fairness as a critic, which will be discussed further on, 
 there remains to be considered his one alleged deflection 
 from literary honesty. He did publish under his own 
 name a manual of Conchology which apparently incor- 
 porated, without acknowledgment, passages from a 
 work by Captain Brown published in Glasgow ; and it 
 is alleged by Griswold, and implied by Mr. Stoddard, 
 that the American book is substantially based on Brown's. 
 But there is really no proof of anything like important 
 plagiarism, and the slightness of the evidence is very 
 suggestive of a weak case. Mr. Stoddard, who exhibits 
 a distinct and not altogether unnatural bias against his 
 subject, prints parallel passages which do seemingly 
 amount to ** conveyance " ; but he unjustifiably omits 
 to answer the statement on the other side, that the 
 Manual of Conchology was compiled under the super- 
 vision of Professor Wyatt ; that Poe contributed 
 largely to it ; that the publishers accordingly wished to 
 use his popular name on the title-page ; and that, finally, 
 the book, though corresponding in part to Brown's 
 because avowedly based, like that, on the system of 
 Lamarck, is essentially an independent compilation. 
 Such is the statement of Professor Wyatt, and the 
 matter ought to be easily settled.* What Mr. Stoddard 
 does is to convey the impression that Poe copied whole- 
 
 * See, on this and all other matters concerning Poe, the Life by 
 John H. Ingram, a work of painstaking vindication which earns the 
 gratitude of every one interested in Poe. The American L//>, by 
 W. Gill, is mainly compiled from it. 
 
 62 
 
POE 
 
 sale, though only a few appropriations are cited. Now, 
 whereas naked appropriation of another man's ideas in 
 his own wording*, in a work of ostensibly original rea- 
 soning or imagination, must be pronounced a serious 
 act of literary dishonesty, the incorporation of some 
 one else's paragraphs or sentences is so common a prac- 
 tice among scientific and other compilers, that it may 
 reasonably be classed as a conventionally innocent pro- 
 ceeding, not even to be likened to those innumerable 
 acts of lax morality in commerce for which it is almost 
 idle to denounce any offender singly. In any case, Poe 
 never pretended to be doing anything more than a com- 
 pilation, and he had a colleague in the work. For the 
 rest, there is ample evidence as to his scrupulous honesty 
 and fidelity in his relations with his literary employers ; 
 and it is not recorded that he ever inflicted loss on any 
 man, any more than unkindness on those about him. 
 We sum up, then, that Poe's mental and moral balance, 
 delicate by inheritance, was injured by the drinking 
 habits into which he repeatedly relapsed ; but that his 
 constitution was such that what was to others extremely 
 moderate indulgence could be for him disastrous 
 excess. 
 
 Now, it might be argued with almost irresistible force 
 that such a case as this is one for pity and not for 
 blame — that a man of Poe's heredity and obvious 
 predisposition to brain disease is to be looked on in 
 the same spirit as is one who suffers from downright 
 hereditary insanity. But, seeing it may be replied that 
 all vices are similarly the result of hereditary and brain 
 conditions, and that we should either blame all offenders 
 to whom we allow freedom of action, or none, I am 
 inclined to rest the defence of Poe on a somewhat 
 different basis ; and to substitute for a deprecatory ^ 
 account of his moral disadvantages the assertion that \ 
 
 63 ^ 
 
J 
 
 POE 
 
 morally he compares favourably with the majority of 
 his fellow creatures. Whether that is either a vain 
 paradox or a piece of cynicism let the reader judge. 
 
 It is, one sees, the habit of most people, in judging* 
 of any character in favour of which they are not pre- 
 judiced, to try it by the standard of an imaginary 
 personage who is without any serious fault. The 
 strength of this disposition can be seen at any perform- 
 ance of a melodrama in a theatre, the great body of the 
 audience being obviously in strong sympathy with 
 virtues of which there is reason to doubt their own 
 general possession ; and strongly hostile even to vices 
 which they may fairly be presumed in many cases to 
 share. In the phrase of Montesquieu, ^'mankind, 
 although reprobates in detail, are always moralists in 
 gross." As for the general disposition to condemn the 
 vices we are not inclined to, that may be dismissed as a 
 commonplace. And yet it is one of the rarest things to 
 find these facts recognised in conduct. A rational moral 
 code is hardly ever to be met with. Intemperance — to 
 bring the question to the concrete — may be reduced in 
 common with most other vices to an admitted lack 
 of self-control ; but it is clearly blamed for some other 
 reason than that it evidences such a defect. If a man 
 or woman falls hopelessly in love, however abject be the 
 loss of self-command, the average outsider never thinks 
 of calling the enamoured one vicious merely on account 
 of the extremity of the passion. That, on the contrary, 
 is regarded by many people as rather a fine thing. If, 
 again, a man is either extremely selfish or extremely 
 prodigal, while he may be censured for his fault, he is 
 still held to be less blamable than the mere intemperate 
 drinker. Sometimes the censure passed on the latter is 
 justified on the score that his vice impoverishes others ; 
 but this is not always so ; and in any case the selfish or 
 
 64 
 
 1 
 
POE 
 
 ill-natured man and the spendthrift may do equal injury 
 to the happiness of others. The truth is that the 
 revulsion against the drunkard's vice arises from a keen 
 sense of the physical degradation it works in its sub- 
 ject ; and how strong and how instinctive this is can be 
 told by many men who have contemplated in helpless 
 fury the excesses of relatives or dear friends. In these 
 cases severe blame may be justified by the feeling that 
 the keenest reprobation is necessary to sting the 
 drunkard into moral reaction ; but it would be difficult 
 to show that when a man is dead it is equitable or 
 reasonable to apply the same degree of blame to him in 
 reckoning his relation to his fellows. All criticism of 
 dead celebrities should be regulated by two^consider- 
 ations : first, the risk or absence of risk that omission 
 to censure for certain faults may encourage the living to 
 repeat them ; second, the need or otherwise for resist- 
 ing any tendency to blame certain faults unduly. I 
 confess I can see no other safe or rational principle on 
 which to apply, in moral critixdsm— ^--t^ie— dead, the 
 , general law^^that men's actions are the outcome of their 
 antecedents and environment. If so much be conceded, 
 it must be allowed that there is no more need to-day to 
 denounce Poe for his unhappy vice than to asperse 
 Charles Lamb — which Carlyle, however, has done 
 with the self-righteousness of the chief of Pharisees. 
 Nobody is likely to be encouraged in tippling by 
 the fact that we speak with tender pity of Lamb's 
 failing. The query — 
 
 Who wouldn't take to drink if drink'll 
 Make a man like Rip Van Winkle ? 
 
 is not serious. 
 
 No one in these days, indeed, does think it necessary 
 
 65 E 
 
POE 
 
 to pass damnatory sentence on Lamb ; * and the differ- 
 ence between the ordinary judgments on Lamb and Poe 
 is a striking sample of the capriciousness of average mo- 
 rality. Lamb's weakness for gin is regarded as morally 
 i on a level with his poor sister's chronic homicidal mania ; 
 [ and of course, strictly speaking, his misfortune was as 
 I much a matter of cerebral constitution as hers. But 
 I surely if Mary Lamb is to be spoken of with pure pity 
 I for that during a fit of madness she caused the death of 
 I her beloved mother, and certainly if Charles is to be 
 \ similarly pitied, we are committed to speaking gently of 
 ^ such a case as Poe's. Yet people whose feeling for 
 \ Lamb is entirely affectionate speak of Poe with austere 
 ' disapproval ; and I cannot but think that the explanation 
 of this and much other asperity towards Poe's memory 
 is the singular quality of his literary work, especially of 
 his tales. It has been remarked a hundred times that 
 I these are unique in literature in their almost complete 
 destitution in the moral element, commonly so-called. 
 They are one and all studies either of peculiar incident, 
 intellectual processes, or strange idiosyncrasy ; and the 
 ordinary reader, accustomed in fiction to a congenial 
 atmosphere of moral feeling, and to judicial contrasts 
 of character such as he sees and makes in actual life, 
 
 4 becomes chilled and daunted in the eerie regions to 
 which Poe carries him. The common result seems to 
 j be the conclusion that the story-teller was lacking in 
 moral feeling ; and though every one does not give 
 effect to his conclusion as the Rev. Mr. Gilfillan did, 
 such a conviction is of course not compatible with 
 sympathy. How crudely and cruelly people can act on 
 
 * Mr. Birrell, in his essay on Charles Lamb {Obiter Dicta, 2nd 
 series, p. 229), generously exclaims against some who do bestow on 
 Lamb an odious pity. Save in the case of Carlyle, I had not before 
 seen any trace of this. 
 
 66 
 
POE 
 
 such seml-instlnctlve and unreasc3ned judgments is 
 shown In the correspondence between Mrs. Whitman 
 and Poe during the period of their engagement. 1 
 *'You do not love me," writes Poe passionately, ''or 
 you would have felt too thorough a sympathy with 
 the sensitiveness of my nature to have so wounded me 
 as you have done with this terrible passage of your 
 letter — ' How often I have heard it said of you. He has 
 great intellectual power, but no principle — no moralj 
 sense'." One is disposed to echo the first clause ; but 
 the blow which Poe feels so acutely Is only one of those 
 moral stupidities of which naturally tender-hearted 
 women are capable precisely because their moral and 
 affectlonal sensibilities at times overbalance their 
 common sense. Nothing could be more witlessly and 
 Inexcusably cruel, and at the same time nothing could 
 be more absurd ; for If Poe really were without principle 
 any protests of his to the contrary could be worth 
 nothing ; and if the accusation were false he had been 
 ruthlessly Insulted to no purpose ; but the cruelty was 
 probably unconscious, or nearly so. Poor Mrs. 
 Whitman wrote, as lovers will, to extract an assurance 
 which could have no value In the eye of reason, but 
 which emotion craved ; for the moment half believing 
 what she said, but wishing to be disabused of her 
 suspicion by a passionate denial. That she obtained. 
 The most fortunate thing for a man so Impeached 
 would be the possession of a strong sense of humour^ 
 though that might Involve a coolness of head which 
 would jeopardise the amour. But poor Poe, wounded^ 
 as he was, took God to witness that "With the excep- 
 tion of some follies and excesses, which I bitterly 
 lament, but to which I have been driven by intolerable 
 sorrow, and which are hourly committed by others 
 without attracting any notice whatever, I can call to 
 
 67 
 
POE 
 
 mind no act of my life which would bring- a blush to my 
 cheek — or to yours." And after alluding- to the malig- 
 nant attacks that had been made on him, for one of 
 which he brought a successful libel action, and the 
 enmity he had set up by his uncompromising criticisms, 
 he cries : "And you know all this— yoic ask 7v/iy I have 
 enemies. . . . Forgive me if there be bitterness in my 
 tone." On which Mr. Ingram warmly comments that 
 the man who wrote so must have been sincere. It is 
 hardly necessary to urge it. Mrs. Whitman did but 
 echo the idle verdict of conventional minds on an 
 abnormal nature. With fuller knowledge she wrote 
 after his death that, ''so far from being selfish or heart- 
 less, his devotional fidelity to the memory of those he 
 loved would by the world be regarded as fanatical ; " * 
 and all the evidence goes to show that, whatever were 
 his faults of taste as a critic, his moral attitude to his 
 fellow creatures was that of one who was, as he claims 
 for himself, quixotically high-minded. The truth is, an 
 extensive fallacy underlies the aversion which many 
 people have for Poe — the fallacy, namely, of assuming 
 that a large share of what is vaguely called moral or 
 human sentiment, in an author or in any one else, 
 implies a security for right feeling or conduct ; and that 
 the absence of such sentiment from an author's fiction, 
 or from any one's talk, implies a tendency to wrong- 
 doing. And the same fallacy, I think, lurks under the 
 observation that Poe's mind, if not immoral, was 
 non-moral. The assumption in question is a senti- 
 mentality that is discredited by accurate observation of 
 life. We know, as a matter of fact, that Poe's 
 attachments, once formed, were deep and intensely 
 faithful ; nothing, for instance, could be closer or 
 
 * Edgar Foe and his Critics, p. 48. 
 68 
 
POE 
 
 lovelier than the tie between him and Mrs. Clemm : and 
 his sensitiveness was extreme where his affections were 
 concerned, though his friendly employer Willis speaks 
 of him as a man who in his business life " never smiled 
 or spoke a propitiatory or deprecating word." In fact, 
 if Poe's private life be compared with that of Hawthorne 
 before the latter's marriage, Poe will seem the man of 
 domestic and sociable tendencies, and the other a 
 loveless egoist. His son-in-law tells us that Hawthorne 
 had very little intercourse with his mother and sisters 
 while living in the same house with them, and that he 
 frequently had his meals left for him at his locked 
 door.* Southey, too, saw little of his family. Yet no 
 one shivers over Hawthorne and Southey as minds 
 without hearts. 
 
 To return, in a perfectly dispassionate spirit, to 
 Lamb, we see that his wealth of kindly sympathy did 
 not save him from alcoholism ; and it could easily be 
 shown that a great many moralists have been either 
 gravely immoral characters or unamiable and variously 
 objectionable. Many of us have never been able to 
 regard Dante as a satisfactory personality, with his 
 irrational and capriciously cruel code and his general 
 inhumanity ; and a good many will agree that Carlyle, 
 who was always moralising, was prone to gross injustice, 
 and presents a rather mixed moral spectacle in his own 
 life. The slight on Poe's moral nature was first published 
 by the sentimental Griswold, who is proved to have 
 been a peculiarly mean and malignant slanderer ; f and 
 
 " Mr. Henry James's Haivthorne, p. 38, citing Mr. Lathrop. 
 
 t Of Griswold Mr. Ingram writes {Academy, Oct. 13, 1883) that 
 he "bore too unsavoury a character for public examination; but 
 those interested in the subject may be referred to his own account 
 (in the British Museum) why he repudiated his second wife. 
 Thackeray, having proved him a liar, told him so publicly, and 
 would not touch hi proffered hand ; while Dickens convicted him 
 
 69 
 
POE 
 
 the moral Mr. Gilfillan Invented a gross calumny. 
 Run down the list of men of genius of modern times 
 who have discussed conduct and human nature, and you 
 will find an extremely large proportion against whom 
 could be charged blemishes of character and conduct 
 from which Poe was free. The ferocity and fanaticism of 
 Dante, the grossness of Chaucer, the hard marital selfish- 
 ness of Milton, the brutality of Luther, the boorishness of 
 Johnson, the ripe self-love of Wordsworth, the malice of 
 Pope, the egoism of Goethe, the murky and selfish spleen 
 ^ of Carlyle, the bigotry of Southey — all these are re- 
 / pellent and anti-social qualities which cannot be charged 
 against Edgar Poe. In short, the ideal man of lively 
 moral feeling and entirely beneficent conduct, by contrast 
 with whom Poe is seen to be an incomplete human being, 
 has never existed In flesh and blood ; and if we take the 
 rational course of striking an average of poor humanity 
 we shall find, as before submitted, that our subject does 
 not fall below It. We may even go further. In regard 
 to the widespread and false notion that Poe was a 
 libertine, we may endorse the assertion of Mr. Stedman 
 ''that professional men and artists, in spite of a vulgar 
 belief to the contrary, are purity itself compared with 
 men engaged in business, and Idle men of the world."* 
 Let us In fairness confess that the average man or 
 woman Is likely to be one or other of these things — 
 narrow, or bigoted, or cowardly, or fickle, or mean, or 
 gross, or faithless, or coldly selfish, or disingenuous, or 
 hard, or slanderous, or recklessly unjust ; though one 
 
 of fraud, and made his employers pay for it." Poe's review of 
 Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America shows (imprudently enough) 
 the small esteem in which he held his future biographer, who seems 
 to have made or kept up his acquaintance in order to retaliate for 
 the critique in question. 
 * Ed f^ar Allan Poe, p. 92, 
 
 70 
 
POE 
 
 or other of these qualities may co-exist with generosity, 
 or philanthropy, or probity. If we recognise so much, 
 we shall cease to sermonise on Poe's failings ; and 
 proceed rather to consider how rare and how fine his 
 work was. 
 
 Yet another fallacy, however — to call it by no worse 
 name — blocks for some the way to a sound appreciation. 
 One American critic,* appealing to the prevaiHng dislike 
 of Poe in the States, has grounded a sweeping deprecia- 
 tion of his work on the proposition that he was subject 
 to brain epilepsy. On that head, clearly, there is no 
 need for friendlier people to wish to make out a negative. 
 To begin with, there is independent and unprejudiced 
 testimony that Poe suffered from a brain trouble ; and 
 whether or not that trouble was cerebral epilepsy is 
 a question of detail chiefly important to thoughtful 
 specialists. During the serious illness which fell on 
 Poe after his wife's death, Mrs. Clemm's nursing labours 
 were shared by a true and valued friend of the little 
 family, Mrs. Marie Louise Shew, who was a doctor's 
 only daughter, and had received a medical education ; 
 and this lady has written as follows : — 
 
 " I made my diagnosis, and went to the great Dr. Mott with it. I / 
 told him that at best, when Mr. Poe was well, his pulse beat only 
 ten regular beats, after which it suspended, or intermitted (as 
 doctors say). I decided that in his best health he had lesion of one 
 side of the brain, and as he could not bear stimulants or tonics, 
 without producing insanity, I did not feel much hope that he could 
 be raised up from brain fever brought on by extreme suffering of 
 mind and body — actual want and hunger and cold having been 
 borne by this heroic husband in order to supply food, medicine, and 
 comforts to his dying wife — until exhaustion and lifelessness were so 
 near at every reaction of the fever that even sedatives had to be j 
 administered with extreme caution." f 
 
 * Writing in Scribney's Magazine, vol. X. 1875. -^ 
 
 t Ingram's Life of Poe, ii. 115. 
 
 71 
 
POE 
 
 The latter details may be noted as telling us some- 
 thing of Poe's moral nature ; the diagnosis as a fairly 
 decisive deliverance on the brain question, especially 
 when taken in connection with other medical evidence, 
 and testimonies as to the startling effect of a mouthful 
 of sherry or even a glass of beer on Poe at times. There 
 is altogether good reason to hold that his brain was 
 diseased. But what then ? To say nothing of the well- 
 worn saw that great wits have their place near the 
 region of madness, biologists'^ have told us that 
 cerebral and other disease may intelligibly be and has 
 actually been a cause of exceptional intellectual 
 capacity f What of Cuvier's hydrocephalus and Keats's 
 precocious maturity ? Even scrofula, and worse 
 affections than that, have been maintained or surmised 
 to promote cerebration : the formula being that certain 
 conditions which are pathologically classed as morbid are 
 psychologically important though impermanent varia- 
 tions. Cromwell's inner life has phenomena in some 
 points analogous to Poe's ; and if it comes to epilepsy, 
 we have to reckon with a confident classification of 
 Mahomet ainong that order of sufferers. Lamb was 
 for a time in his youth actually insane. But why 
 multiply cases ? Tn what other instance has it been 
 proposed to make light of a man's mental achievements 
 because his brain is known to have been flawed ? I am 
 not aware that any deliberate attempt was ever made 
 to belittle what merits Cowper has, because of his 
 
 " This was written before the thesis of " the insanity of genius " 
 had become popular. 
 
 t The assailant knows as much, for he cites Dr. Maudsley as 
 " very positive in his opinion that the world is indebted for a great 
 part of its originality, and for certain special forms of intellect, to 
 individuals who .... have sprung from families in which there is 
 some predisposition to epileptic insanity." But the attack is as 
 destitute of coherence as of justice and fatness of tone. 
 
 72 
 
POE 
 
 affliction ; or that Comte's serious antagonists have 
 ever given countenance to a condemnation of his 
 philosophy as a whole on the strength of his fit of 
 alienation, even though mad enough passages can 
 easily be cited from his works. It has been left for an 
 American, writing almost unchallenged by the literary 
 class in Poe's native land, to proceed from an argument 
 that Poe was an epileptic to a monstrous corollary of 
 unmeasured detraction from almost every species of 
 credit he has ever received.* Baudelaire, discussing 
 Griswold's biography, asked whether in America they \ 
 have no law against letting curs into the cemeteries : ^ 
 and it is hardly going too far to say that this latest 
 attack on a great memory would never have had even a 
 hearing in a well-ordered literary republic. To discuss 
 it in detail would be to concede too much ; but I have 
 
 * To show how far malice may go astray in reasoning from 
 misfortune to demerit, it may be worth while to point to the 
 absolute failure of this writer's attempt to make Poe's brain trouble 
 a means of discrediting his work. Poe, he tells us, passed through 
 three psychological periods: the first, one in which he " seems to 
 depend for artistic effect on minuteness of detail," as in the Descent 
 into the Maelstrom, The Gold Bug, the Case of Monsieur Valdemar, and 
 Hans Pfaall (" imitated," says the writer, with his usual culpable 
 inaccuracy, "from the Moon Hoax''); the second, a time of pre- 
 dilection for minute analysis, such as is shown in The Mystery of 
 Marie Roget ; and the third, a spell of morbid introspection, pro- 
 ducing such tales as The Fall of the House of Usher. Now, what are 
 the facts ? The last mentioned story was published in 1839 ; Ligeia 
 — a story in the same "morbid" taste — in 1838; Berenice, Morella, 
 and Shadoiv, all productions of the weird order, in 1835 5 Silence in 
 1838 ; and the eminently introspective tale of William Wilson in 
 1839 ; while The Facts in the Case of M . Valdemar appeared in 1845 ; 
 The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, and Marie Roget in 1842. 
 Thus we have the works of "morbid introspection" before the 
 specifically cited studies in minute detail and minute analysis — the 
 Usher story before the Marie Roget and the Valdemar; and such a 
 production as Morella almost contemporary with Hans Pfaall. The 
 theory of development breaks down at every point, 
 
 73 
 
POE 
 
 thought it well to cite the attack with the note that not 
 only has no adequate recognition been given in America 
 to Poe's intellectual eminence (I exclude the friendly 
 memoirs and vindications), but this extravagantly 
 wrong-headed denial of it secures the vogue due to a 
 true estimate. 
 
 The ill-meant aspersion, let us hope, will after all 
 make for a kindlier feeling, among those at least whose 
 goodwill a man of letters need wish to have for his 
 memory. In any case, it is incredible that anyJiterary. 
 reputation should be for ever measured .oji_.s.uch 
 principles as those above glanced at. Whatever be 
 
 '7 the whole explanation of the treatment Poe has 
 received in his own country, whether it be his small 
 affinity to the national life or the abundance of the ill- 
 will he aroused by pitiless criticism of small celebrities, 
 criticism in the States must needs come in time to the 
 temperate study of his work and his endowment on 
 their merits. What follows is an attempt in that 
 
 \ direction. 
 
 II 
 
 It is worthy of note that fully nine-tenths of the 
 criticism passed on Poe, appreciative and otherwise, 
 has been directed to his small body of poetry. The 
 fact serves at once to prove the one-sidedness of the 
 average literary man and the range of Poe's power. 
 He had a working knowledge of astronomy, of naviga- 
 tion, of mechanics, and of physics ; he certainly com- 
 piled a manual of conchology, and had at least dipped 
 into entomology ; he could work out cyphers in half a 
 dozen languages ; he delighted in progressions of close 
 and sustained reasoning ; he had a decided capacity for 
 logic and philosophy ; he eagerly followed and easily 
 
 74 
 
POE 
 
 assimilated, or even in part anticipated, the modern 
 physical theories of the universe ; he was a keen and 
 scientific literary critic j and in addition to all this hel 
 produced some of the ^ most remarkable imaginative | 
 writing and some of the finest poetry of the centur^( 
 But his critics have been, with very few exceptions, 
 men of purely literary equipment ; verse- writers and 
 bellettrists and story-tellers, who judge only verse and 
 prose'and character. Sharing their deprivations, I 
 have gone through most of their writings on the watch 
 for an estimate of the scientific and constructive capacity 
 shown^in certain of the Tales, and have found an almost 
 unanimous and doubtless judicious silence on the sub- 
 ject. An occasional non-committal phrase about the 
 Eureka, and a few generalities on the scientific element 
 in the Tales, represent the critical commentary on the 
 ratiocinative side of Poe's intellect. Now, to treat his) 
 verse as his most significant product is to ignore half^ 
 his remarkableness, and to miss those kinds of strength 
 and eminence in his mind which~most effectively out-. 
 \veigh the flaws of his character and ^ the occasional 
 exorbitances of his judgment. Save in his own country, 
 indeed, the Tales have had popular recognition enough. 
 Poe's countrymen never bought up Griswold's edition 
 of his works, and have till quite recently been without 
 a complete collection of them ; but Mr. Gill has calcu- 
 lated that while the poems are five-fold more popular in 
 England than in America, the stories are even more 
 widely admired among us; and they have been thoroughly 
 naturalised in France in a complete and admirable 
 translation, chiefly by Baudelaire ; besides being repro- 
 duced to a greater or less extent in nearly every other 
 European language. Seeing that they were eagerly 
 read on their first appearance in America, it must be 
 assumed that, as Mr. Gill suggests, the public there 
 
 75 
 
POE 
 
 were scared off by Griswold's slanders and the con- 
 sequent myth. But if, with all this European vogue for 
 the Tales, critics continue to descant chiefly on the 
 poetry, the inference as to its impressive quality is 
 irresistible. 
 
 Perhaps by reason of the sub-rational tendency to 
 disparag-e specially an author of one's own country 
 who is loudly praised by foreigners, some living 
 American writers have spoken with absolute contempt 
 of Poe's poetry. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has 
 a strange phrase about his "very valueless verses;"* 
 and Mr. Stoddart's strongest feeling in the matter 
 appears to be an aversion to the refrains — perhaps not 
 an unnatural attitude towards Poe on the part of. a 
 critic who believes a poet may have too much art. In 
 these circumstances it may still be expedient to follow 
 Mr. Stedman in bearing witness to the quality of Poe's 
 poetry. It is perhaps true, as has been said by Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes, that there is almost no poet between 
 whose best and worst verse there is a wider disparity ; 
 but that is rather by reason of the fineness of the good 
 than of the badness of the bad ; and the latter, in any 
 case, consists simply of the long poems of Poe's youth 
 — Al Aaraaf, Ta7nerla7ie, and the Scenes frovi Politian, 
 Mr. Lang, in editing the whole, has not scrupled to 
 indicate his feeling that these are hardly worth reading; 
 and while one feels that in that view perhaps the proper 
 course were not to edit them, so much may be conceded. 
 
 * In the essay on Baudelaire in the volume French Poets and 
 Novelists, ed. 1878, p. 76. Since this essay was first printed I find 
 that in the Tauchnitz edition of his book Mr. James has altered 
 " valueless " to " superficial." I let my criticism [infra) stand as it 
 was written, only pointing out that the change of epithet is significant 
 of weakness of ground, and that the second form is e^'en worse than 
 ;he first. When was verse so aspersed before ? 
 
 76 
 
POE 
 
 In regard to some of the successful poems, again, there 
 is to be reckoned with the disenchanting effect of 
 extreme popularity ; an influence of the most baffling 
 sort, often blurring one's critical impression in a way 
 for which there is hardly any remedy. The choicest 
 air, as it had once seemed, may be made to acquire 
 associations of the barrel organ ; and it may ultimately,^ 
 become a fine question whether it was not a vice in it to 
 be'so associable. One may brazen out one's early 
 attachment, as, I fancy, Mr. Arnold did when he lately 
 insisted that Lucy Gray was a " beautiful success ; " but 
 when loyalty to an old opinion is justified merely by its 
 survival, criticism is turned out of doors. So that, lest 
 we are insidiously led into committing the unpardonable 
 critical sin of certificating popular poetry by its popu- 
 larity, it will bejvell to consider briefly in the concrete 
 the^ merits oi The Raven.. Many of us, I suspect, have 
 at one time developed a suspicion that that much-recited 
 work is not poetry of the first order ; and the suspicion 
 is deepened when we reflect that the distinction of 
 learning it by heart in our youth was conferred on it in 
 common with other works as to which there can now be 
 no critical dubiety. It is difficult to gainsay Mr. Lang 
 when he impugns its right, and that of Lenore, to the 
 highest poetical honours : both poems, like The Bells, 
 have a certain smell of the lamp, an air of compilation, 
 a suspicion of the inorganic. And yet a studious re- 
 reading of The Raven may awaken some remorse for 
 such detractions. Not only has it that impressiveness 
 of central conception which is never lacking in Poe's 
 serious work, but it is really a memorable piece of 
 technique. It is hardly possible to say where inspira- 
 tion lacks and mechanism intervenes : the poem is an 
 effective unity. Some hold that the touches of plagia-, 
 rism— the "uncertain" sound of the "purple curtain,'" 
 
 11 
 
POE 
 
 and the collocation of '' desolate " and "desert land/' 
 both echoes from Mrs. Browning's Lady Geraldiiie — * 
 serve to discredit the whole ; but that is surely false 
 criticism. The problem is, whether the appropriations 
 are assimilated ; and they clearly are. Mrs. Browning 
 herself expressed the commanding individuality of the 
 work in the phrase '*this power which is felt." The 
 poem has that distinctive attribute of most of Poe's 
 writing, the pregnancy of idea, the compulsive imagina- 
 tion which fascinates and dominates the reader. One 
 feels behind it a creative and sustaining power, a power 
 as of absolute intellect. To feel specifically the impact 
 of this influence, let the reader compare the poem as a 
 whole with Lady Gcraldine's Courtships and note how, 
 ample as is the poetess's gift of speech, choice as are 
 her harmonies, and fortunate as are many of her lines, 
 there is yet a something spasmodic and convulsive 
 pervading the whole, a tone of passionate weakness, in 
 full keeping with the hysterical character of the girlish 
 hero, which gives a quite fatal emphasis to the frequent 
 lapses of expression, these seeming to belong to weak- 
 ness and slovenliness; while in reading The Raven there 
 is hardly for a moment room for a disrespectful sensa- 
 tion. The imperious brain of the '' maker," as the old 
 vernacular would straightforwardly name him, stamps 
 its authority on every line ; and the subtle sense 
 of the artist's puissance remains unaffected by the 
 despairing avowal of the conclusion. The speaker may 
 sink prostrate, but the poem is never shaken in its 
 
 * One of the disputed points as to which there should never have 
 been any dispute is the question of priority in these passages. One 
 critic, who imputes plagiarisms to Poe, brusquely asserts that Mrs. 
 Browning was the imitator. The plain facts are that her poem 
 was published in 1844, ^-^^d Poe's in 1845, and that Poe admired 
 her poetry greatly. 
 
 78 
 
POE 
 
 serene movement and marble firmness of front. It has 
 ** cette extraordinaire Elevation, cette exquise delicatesse, 
 cet accent d'immortalit^ qu' Edgar Poe exige de la 
 Muse," remarked on by Baudelaire ; and nothing in the 
 poem is more remarkable than the Apollonian impunity 
 with which the poet is able to relax and colloquialise hist-^ ^ 
 phraseology. Mrs. Browning could not venture without 
 disaster on such an infusion of realism into idealism as 
 the ^'Sir, said I, or Madam," and "the fact is, I was 
 napping : " her Pegasus, in view of his habitual weak- 
 ness of knee, would be felt to have stumbled in such a 
 line as 
 
 Though its answer little meaning, little yelcvancy hove " — 
 
 where Poe sweeps us over by his sheer unswerving 
 intentness on his theme. The explanation seems to be ■csj^*' 
 that the writer himself is without apparent conscious- • >?>^ 
 ness of artistic fallibility — that he is pure intellect 
 addressing an abstract reader ; and that, as he never 
 seems to strain after words, he has a regal air of 
 having said precisely what should be said; so that when 
 we read of " a stately raven of the saintly days of yore," -a^^^ 
 we hesitate to impugn the fitness of the term. What, ^'^ *•' 
 then, is it in The Raven that takes it out of the first 
 
 <rank of poetry? Well then, first, the"iadmixture of 
 simple oddity, which is disallowed by Poe's own law 
 that poetry is the ''rhythmical creation of beauty;" 
 and, second, the decomposability of the structure at 
 two points, namely, the factitious rustling of the cur- 
 tains, which have no business to rustle, and the falling 
 of the shadow, which has no right to fall.* These 
 
 * Poe, in a letter given by Mr. Ingram {Life, i. 275), says his idea 
 about the light was " the bracket candelabrum affixed against the 
 wall, high up above the door and bust, as is often seen in the EngUsh 
 palaces (!), and even in some of the better houses of New York." 
 It will not do. 
 
 79 
 
POE 
 
 
 touches are ** willed;" and, on reflection, have the effect 
 / of obtruding their art upon us ; whereas the perfect 
 ^ poem must seem homogeneous and inevitably what it is. 
 It is sometimes argued that the very continuity and 
 clearness of the tale in themselves vitiate the work, as 
 dispelling true glamour ; and assuredly, though it is 
 made apparently certain by Poe's own avowal that The 
 Genesis of tlie Raven was a hoax,* there can be little 
 doubt that the poem was most carefully put together. 
 But to depreciate a work of art on such a ground as 
 . that is a quite illicit proceeding. Results must be judged 
 on their merits. And, indeed, the mere flaws in the 
 rationale of the piece, scarcely perceptible as they are, 
 would not in themselves suffice to invalidate it, any 
 more than the clear flaw in the logic of the second-last 
 stanza of Keats's Ode to the Nightingale discredits that : 
 they do but accentuate the force of the objection to the 
 un-elevated though still dignified tone of the stanzas 
 and the consequent narrative stamp on the whole. But 
 even in making these admissions, the lover of verse 
 must insist on the singular power of the composition ; 
 which remains more extraordinary than much other work 
 that is more strictly successful. Poe's second-best verse 
 has a distinction of its own. 
 
 If, then, The Raven is thus dismissed ; and if, as must 
 needs be, Lenore is pronounced a piece of brilliant 
 mosaic, and The Bells is classed as a fine piece of 
 literary architecture rather than a poetic creation, we 
 shall have left but a small body of work from which to 
 choose our specimens of Poe's fine poetry. But what 
 remains will serve. Poe never professed to make 
 poetry his main aim, or even an aim at all : it was his 
 
 / - 
 
 * Professor Minto, however, declined to believe that it really 
 was so. 
 
 80 
 
POE 
 
 "passion" ; and what is here contended is that, many- 
 sided as he was, he had a poetic faculty of the highest 
 kind, among other powers which few or no other poets 
 have possessed. The decisive credentials of perfecr\ 3^ 
 poetry are an organic oneness of substance, that/ J\ 
 
 substance being of a purer essence than ordinary y,-—-* 
 speech; a quality of meaning which pierces to the N .* 
 sense without the methodic specification of prose ; and J 
 a charm of rhythm and phrase which is a boon in itself, ' 
 permanently recognisable as such apart from any truth 
 enclosed. These, broadly speaking, are the ''values" 
 of poetry ; and he who says Poe's verse is valueless 
 must, I think, be adjudged to be without the poetic 
 sense. Mr. James must presumably have meant one of 
 two things : -^ith^iULhat- Boe's poetry conveys no moral 
 teachings or descriptions of life and scenery — these 
 constituting the '' valuable " element in poetry for those 
 to whom its special qualities do not appeal — or that its 
 art is commonplace. The first objection need only be 
 conceived to be dismissed ; the second, supposing it to 
 have been that intended, which I doubt, would need no 
 answer beyond a few quotations. Among Poe's early 
 poems is one To Helen^ which he is said to have repre- 
 sented as being composed when he was fourteen, the 
 Heleiiy on that view, being supposed to be the lady, 
 mother of his school friend, who was kind to the boy, 
 and whose death he so passionately mourned. In view 
 at once of Poe's habit of mystification and of the nature 
 of the poem, I cannot believe that is the true account of 
 the matter. The verses are not those of a boy of 
 fourteen. But they were undoubtedly written in Poe's 
 teens, and I cite them as constituting one of the most 
 ripely perfect and spiritually charming poems ever 
 written at that or any age : — 
 
POE 
 
 " Helen, thy beauty is to me 
 
 Like those Nicaean barks of yore 
 Which gently, o'er a perfumed sea. 
 The weary, way-worn wanderer bore 
 To his own native shore. 
 
 " On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
 Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 
 
 Thy Naiad airs have brought me home, 
 To the glory that was Greece, 
 
 And * the grandeur that was Rome. 
 
 " Lo ! in yon brilliant window niche. 
 How statue-like I see thee stand. 
 Thy agate lamp within thy hand — 
 Ah, Psyche ! from the regions which 
 Are Holy Land ! " 
 
 Merely to credit these verses with **Horatian elegance," 
 as some admiring critics have done, is to render them 
 scant justice. They have not only Horace's fastidious- 
 ness of touch (with perhaps the single reservation of 
 the unluckily hackneyed ''classic face") but the trans- 
 figuring aerial charm of pure poetry, which is nof'Tfr 
 Horace's line. The two closing lines of the middle 
 stanza have passed into the body of choice distillations 
 of language reserved for immortality ; and there is 
 assuredly nothing more exquisite in its kind in English 
 literature than the last stanza. To have written such 
 verses is to have done a perfect thing. Turn next to 
 The Haunted Palace y an experiment in the perilous field 
 
 * Some editions read "To the grandeur." I simply follow that 
 reading which best pleases me. It is interesting to know, by the 
 way, that these famous lines, in the edition of 1831, ran thus : 
 
 " To the beauty of fair Greece 
 And the grandeur of old Rome." 
 
 What a transmutation ! 
 
 82 
 
POE 
 
 of poetic allegory. What poet had before essayed that 
 with perfect success ? I will not venture to say that no 
 one has ; but I can call to mind no instance. According" 
 to Griswold, The Haunted Palace is a plagiarism from 
 Longfellow's Beleaguered City^^ a futile imputation, 
 which only serves to help us to a fuller recognition of 
 Poe's success. Personally, I have a certain tenderness 
 for The Beleaguered City as being one of the first 
 imaginative poems that impressed my boyhood ; but no 
 prejudice of that sort can hinder any one from seeing 
 that the poem is vitiated by its nugatory didacticism — 
 the fatal snare of the allegorist. Mr. James, in his 
 Hawthorne^ appears' to think (though this is not clear) 
 that he has caught Poe condemning himself in a critical 
 declaration against allegory ; but I suspect the incon- 
 sistency is more apparent than real. Poe almost never, 
 so far as I can see, uses allegory for the purpose of 
 sustaining a thesis, which is the thing he objects to. 
 The generic difference between the allegory of The 
 Haunted Palace and that of The Beleagured City is that 
 the latter is a kind of confused sermon, while the other 
 is a pure artistic creation — a changing vision projected 1 , ^ 
 For its own sake and yoked to no "moral." Didactic "^'-^ 4_ \ 
 poetry there may be, in a happy imposition of poetic j .^'■^^^ 
 quality on a moral truth, which ordinarily gravitates' '"^7" 
 towards prose ; but to make allegory pointedly didactic 
 is deliberately to impose prose on the poetic, and this|-- 
 Poe never does in his poetry proper. He simply limnsl 
 his image and leaves it, a thing of uncontaminated art^' . 
 The Haunted Palace is the allegory of a brain once of 
 royal power, shrined in noble features, but at length 
 become a haunt of madness — a half-conscious allusion, 
 
 * The Palace, appeared first, April 1839 ; the City in November 
 (Ingram's Life, i. 160). And Poe accused Longfellow of imitating 
 him ! 
 
 83 
 
POE 
 
 perhaps, to the poet's own dark destiny ; but there is 
 no precept, not even a hint of the ethical : the strange 
 imagination is unrolled in its terrible beauty, and that 
 ^ 1 is all. The singer is a *' maker," not a commen- 
 y-Mtator. And then the melody and surprise of the 
 verse ! 
 
 " Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 
 
 On its roof did float and flow, 
 (This — all this — was in the olden 
 
 Time, long ago) ; 
 And every gentle air that dallied, 
 
 In that sweet day, 
 Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, 
 
 A winged Odour went away." 
 
 Longfellow could do some things in rhyme and rhythm, 
 but his genial talent did not accomplish such singing as 
 this, and as little could he compass the serene height of 
 strain which Poe maintains with such certainty. 
 
 Every charge of poetic plagiarism against Poe does 
 but establish more clearly his utter originality of 
 method.* Mrs. Browning and Longfellow, whom he is 
 charged with imitating, are themselves facile imitators, 
 who, somehow, do not contrive to improve on their 
 originals ; but Poe, in the one or two cases in which he 
 really copied in his adult period, lent a new value to 
 what he took. Where he seems to have adopted ideas 
 from others the transmutation is still more striking. 
 A writer already referred to, who Is as far astray in 
 
 * There is a certain air of Nemesis in these charges against Poe, 
 who was apt to be fanatical in imputing plagiarism to others. But 
 it is remarkable that no one has ever pointed out that Poe's own 
 excellent definition of poetry, " the rhythmical creation of beauty" 
 (Essay on The Poetic Principle), is a condensation of a sentence by 
 (of all men) Griswold. See Poe's notice of Griswold's Poets and Poetry 
 of America (Ingram's ed. of Works, iv. 315). It may be noted that 
 
 84 
 
 L- 
 
POE 
 
 laying as In denying charges of plagiarism against Poe, 
 declares that his Dreamland "palpably paraphrases 
 Lucian's Isla^id of Sleep " — meaning, I suppose, the 
 description of the Island of Dreams in the True History \ 
 and the statement is so far true that in Lucian there is 
 a Temple of Night in the Island, and that the categories 
 of the dreams include visions of old friends ; but to call 
 the poem a paraphrase is absurd. There is all the 
 difference of seventeen hundred years of art between the 
 Greek's semi-serious fantasy and the profound and 
 magical note of Poe's poem : 
 
 " By a route obscure and lonely, 
 Haunted by ill angels only, 
 Where an Eidolon, named Night, 
 On a black throne reigns upright, 
 I have reached these lands but newly 
 From an ultimate dim Thule — 
 From a wild, weird clime that lieth sublime. 
 Out of Space — out of Time." 
 
 Genius, Mr. Arnold has well said, is mainly an affair! 
 of energy ; and the definition would hold for all the 
 work of Poe, whose creations, in the last analysis, are 
 found to draw their power from the extraordinary 
 
 . intensity which belonged to his every mental operation 
 — an intensity perfectly free of violence. Be his fancy 
 ever so shadowy in its inception, he informs it with the 
 impalpable force of intellect till it becomes a vision 
 
 "more enduring than brass. There is no poet who can 
 so ''give to aery nothing a local habitation and a 
 name." It was perhaps not so wonderful after all that 
 commonplace people should shun, as hardly belonging 
 
 Poe's treatment of Griswold in this notice is remarkably friendly ; 
 and whatever of offence he may have given his future biographer in 
 his lecture on the same subject, the latter must have been a malig- 
 nant soul indeed to seek for it, in the face of such amends, the vile 
 revenge he subsequently took. 
 
POE 
 
 to human clay, the personality which brooded out such 
 visions as these :* 
 
 " Lo ! Death has reared himself a throne 
 In a strange city, lying alone 
 Far down within the dim West . . . 
 
 " No rays from the Holy Heaven come down 
 On the long night-time of that town ; 
 But light from out the lurid sea 
 Streams up the turrets silently — 
 Gleams up the pinnacles far and free — 
 Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls — 
 Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls — 
 Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers 
 Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers — 
 Up many and many a marvellous shrine 
 Whose wreathed friezes intertwine 
 The viol, the violet, and the vine, 
 
 " Resignedly beneath the sky 
 The melancholy waters lie. 
 So blend the turrets and shadows there 
 That all seems pendulous in air, 
 While, from a proud tower in the town, 
 Death looks gigantically down . , . 
 
 " No swellings tell that winds may be 
 Upon some far-off happier sea — 
 No heavings hint that winds have been 
 On seas less hideously serene." 
 
 With unwaning vividness the unearthly vision burns 
 itself tremorless upon the void, till it is almost with a 
 shudder of relief that the spell-bound reader cons the 
 
 close : 
 
 " And when, amid no earthly moans, 
 
 Down, down that town shall settle hence. 
 Hell, rising from a thousand thrones. 
 Shall do it reverence." 
 
 * In such poems, and in some of the tales, it may very well be 
 that opium has had some part, as it so clearly had in the happiest 
 inspirations of Coleridge. 
 
 86 
 
POE 
 
 Perhaps such terrific imaginings can never betaken into 
 ^mmon favour with healthy dwellers in the sunlit 
 world ; but it is hard to understand how any, having 
 studied them, can find them forgettable. It cannot for 
 a moment be pretended of these verses, even by the 
 sciolists of criticism, that they lack *' inspiration " and 
 spontaneity of movement ; detraction must seek other 
 ground. We find, consequently, that the stress of the 
 hostile attack is turned mainly on one poem, in which 
 the poet's customary intension of Jdea appears to lose 
 itself more or less in a dilettantist_ringing of changes on 
 sound. I have no desire to seem in the least degree to 
 stake Poe's reputation on Ulahi7ne^ which trenches too 
 far on pure mysticism for entire artistic success, and at 
 the same time is marked by an undue subordination of 
 meaning to music ; but I cannot help thinking that the 
 dead set made at that piece is unjustifiable. Mr. R. H. 
 Stoddard is exceptionally acrid on the subject. 
 
 " I can perceive," he writes, in a memoir of Poe, " no touch of 
 grief in Ulalume, no intellectual sincerity, but a diseased determina- 
 tion to create the strange, the remote, and the terrible, and to 
 exhaust ingenuity in order to do so. No healthy mind was ever 
 impressed by Ulalume, and no musical sense was ever gratified with 
 its measure, which is little beyond a jingle ; and with its repetitions, / 
 which add to its length without increasing its general effect, and| 
 which show more conclusively than anything else in the language' 
 the absurdity of the refrain when it is allowed to run riot, as it does 
 here." * 
 
 Now, this censure is fatally overdone. Mr. Stoddard 
 had on the very page before admitted that Ulalume 
 was, *'all things considered, the most singular poem 
 that [Poe] ever produced, if not, indeed, the most 
 singular poem that anybody ever produced, in com- 
 memoration of a dead woman." A critic should know 
 his own mind before he begins to write out a judgment. 
 
 * Memoir in Widdleton's ed. of Poe, p. 130. 
 87 . 
 
POE 
 
 Here we have an explicit admission of the extreme' 
 remarkableness of a given poem ; then a denial that it 
 ever " impressed a healthy mind ; " then an unmeasured 
 allegation that ** no musical sense was ever gratified" 
 with its musical elements. Let one stanza answer — the 
 praise of the star Astarte : — 
 
 " And I said : ' She is warmer than Dian : 
 
 She rolls through an ether of sighs — 
 
 She revels in a region of sighs : 
 She has seen that the tears are not dry on 
 
 Those cheeks, where the worm never dies, 
 And has come past the stars of the Lion 
 
 To point us the path to the skies — 
 
 To the Lethean peace of the skies- 
 Come up, in despite of the Lion, 
 
 To shine on us with her bright eyes — 
 Come tip through the lair of the Lion, 
 
 With love in her luminous eyes.'' 
 
 Mr. Stoddard must be told that there are some of us 
 who do not wish any of these repetitions away, and who 
 think the culminating music is closely analogous to 
 effects produced a hundred times by Mozart and 
 Schubert and Beethoven, who had all some little gift 
 of melody, and were considerably given to the "re- 
 petend," as Mr. Stedman happily re-christens the so- 
 ., called refrain. The above-quoted stanza is the best, no 
 ^, doubt, and there is one flaw in it, namely, the '*dry 
 
 ■** Jf* ^")" which is truly an exhaustion of ingenuity; but 
 '^ 5 ^ven here one is struck by the imperial way in which 
 -^ 1 [Pos buttresses his lapse with the whole serene muster 
 ? 3^ J of his stanza — so curiously different a procedure from 
 vtj^ " the fashion in which Mr. Swinburne, for instance, or 
 even Mr. Browning, scoops a rhyme-born figure into 
 his verse and, consciously hurrying on, leaves it, in its 
 p^laring irrelevance, to put the whole out of countenance. 
 Poe's few deflections from purity of style are dominated 
 
POE 
 
 by his habitual severity of form. As for the charge of 
 insincerity, it is enough to say that it has been brought 
 against every poet who has artistically expressed a 
 grief; it being impossible for some people to realise 
 that art feeds on deep feeHngs, not at the moment of 
 their first freshness, but when revived in memory. A 
 more reasonable objection is brought against Ulalume 
 on the score of its obscurity ; but that too is ex- 
 aggerated ; and the announcement of one critic that it 
 is a '' vagary of mere words," of an "elaborate empti- 
 ness," is an avowal of defective intelligence. The 
 meaning of the poem is this : the poet has fallen into 
 a reverie in the darkness ; and his brain — the critic says 
 it was then a tottering brain — is carrying on a kind of 
 dual consciousness, compounded of a perception of the 
 blessed peace of the night and a vague, heavy sense of 
 his abiding grief, which has for the moment drifted into 
 the background. In this condition he does what pro- 
 bably most of us have done in connection with a minor 
 trouble — dreamily asks himself, " What was the shadow 
 that was brooding on my mind, just a little while ago?" 
 and then muses, '' If I have forgotten it, why should I 
 wilfully revive my pain, instead of inhaling peace while 
 I may?" This, I maintain, is a not uncommon experi- 
 ence in fatigued states of the brain ; the specialty in 
 Poe's case being that the temporarily suspended ache is 
 the woe of a bereavement — a kind of woe which, after 
 a certain time, however sincere, ceases to be constant, 
 and begins to be intermittent. The Psyche is the 
 obscure whisper of the tired heart, the suspended 
 memory, that will not be wholly appeased with the 
 beauty of the night and the stars ; and the poet has but 
 cast into a mystical dialogue the interplay of the 
 waking and the half-sleeping sense, which goes on till 
 some cypress, some symbol of the grave, flashes its 
 
 89 
 
POE 
 
 deadly message on the shrinking soul, and grief leaps 
 into full supremacy. Supposing Poe's brain to have 
 been undergoing a worsening disease in his later days, 
 this its last melody has even a more deeply pathetic 
 interest than belongs to the theme. 
 
 Take finally, as still further test of Poe's poetic gift, 
 the poems El Dorado^ Annabel Lee^ and For Annie. 
 The first is a brief allegory, with something of a moral, 
 but a moral too pessimistic to have any ethically utili- 
 tarian quality ; the second a lovely ballad enshrining 
 the memory of his married life ; the third a strange 
 song, impersonally addressed to one of the women to 
 whom he transiently turned in his lonesome latter years 
 — a wonderful lullaby in which a dead man is made 
 placidly to exult in his release from life and pain, and 
 in the single remaining thought of the presence of his 
 beloved. In these poems we have the final proof of the 
 inborn singing faculty of Poe. Some of his pieces, as 
 has been already admitted, are works of constructive 
 skill rather than outpourings of lyric fulness ; and such 
 a musical stanza as this — 
 
 " And all my days are trances, 
 
 And all my nightly dreams 
 Are where thy dark eye glances, 
 
 And where thy footstep gleams — 
 In what ethereal dances ! 
 
 By what eternal streams ! " — 
 
 has perhaps a certain stamp of compilation. But no 
 unprejudiced reader, I think, will fail to discern in the 
 three poems last named a quite unsurpassable Hmpidity 
 of expression. They evolve as if of their own accord. 
 In El Dorado the one central rhyme is reiterated with a 
 perfect simplicity ; Annabel Lee is almost careless in its 
 childlike directness of phrase ; and For Annie is almost 
 
 90 
 
POE 
 
 bald In Its beginning. But I know little In the way of 
 easeful word music that will compare with this : 
 
 " And oh ! of all tortures 
 
 That torture the worst 
 Has abated — the terrible 
 
 Torture of thirst, 
 For the napthaline river 
 
 Of Passion accurst : 
 I have drunk of a water 
 
 That quenches all thirst : 
 
 " Of a water that flows, 
 
 With a lullaby sound, 
 From a spring but a very few 
 
 Feet under ground — 
 From a cavern not very far 
 
 Down under ground, 
 
 " And ah ! let it never 
 
 Be foolishly said 
 That my room it is gloomy, 
 
 And narrow my bed ; 
 For man never slept 
 
 In a different bed ; 
 And to sleep, you must slumber 
 
 In just such a bed. 
 
 " My tantalised spirit , 
 
 Here blandly reposes | 
 
 Forgetting, or never 
 Regretting its roses — 
 
 Its old agitations 
 
 Of myrtles and roses : 
 
 " For now, while so quietly 
 
 Lying, it fancies 
 A holier odour 
 
 About it, of pansies — 
 A rosemary odour 
 
 Commingled with pansies — 
 With rue and the bemUiful 
 
 Puritan pansies.'" 
 
 91 
 
POE 
 
 ^Isthere not here that_cro_wning quality of emo jional 
 plenitude which, with perfection of form, makes great 
 poetry as distinguished from fine verse : are there not 
 here, In another guise, the urgent throb and brooding 
 pregnancy which give to an andante of Beethoven its 
 deep constraining power ? We have all certain pas- 
 sional or sub-judicial preferences in our favourite poetry, 
 setting one masterpiece above others for some subtle 
 magnetism it works on us, we do not quite know how 
 Of why. "Huysmans," says a writer of ardently 
 eclectic taste, "goes to my soul like a gold ornament 
 of Byzantine workmanship."* Somewhat so might one 
 express the mastering charm of those incomparably 
 pimple yet flawlessly rhythrnical lines. 
 
 Ill 
 
 These few extracts are enough to show that as a poet 
 Poe has a commanding distinction ; but if we find him 
 remarkable in that regard, what shall we say of the 
 range and calibre of the mind which produced the mani- 
 fold achievement of his prose ? The more one wanders 
 through that, out of all comparison the more extensive 
 part of his work, the more singular appear those esti- 
 mates of the man which treat him merely as a poet of 
 unhappy life and morbid imagination. Perhaps It is 
 that in all seriousness the literary world Inclines to Mr. 
 Swinburne's conviction that poets as such are the guar- 
 dian angels of mankind, and all other mind-workers 
 their mere satellites ; perhaps that, despite Goethe's 
 services to biology. It has a hereditary difficulty in con- 
 ceiving a poet as an effective Intelligence in any other 
 walk than that of his art, and accordingly excludes in- 
 
 ■" Mr. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, p. 299, 
 
 92 
 
POE 
 
 stinctively from view whatever tends to raise the point. 
 Or is it that the sense of the abnormality of feeUng in i 
 Poe's verse, and in his best-known stories, gives rise to I 
 a vague notion that his performances in the line of j 
 normal thought can be of no serious account ? It is 
 difficult to decide ; but certain it is that most of his 
 critics have either by restrictedness of view or positive 
 misjudgment done him serious wrong. 
 
 It is Mr. Henry James who, in a passage already 
 quoted from, makes the remark : '* With all due respect 
 to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of 
 Mystery^ it seems to me that to take him with more than 
 a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness 
 oneself. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a de- 
 cidedly primitive stage of reflection. " One cannot guess 
 with any confidence as to the precise '* degree of serious- 
 ness " which Mr. James would concede ; or how much 
 seriousness he brings to bear on any of his own attach- 
 ments ; or what the stage of reflection was at which he 
 cultivated an enthusiasm for, say, Theophile Gautier. 
 One therefore hesitates to put oneself in competition 
 with Mr. James in the matter of seriousness of character. 
 But one may venture to suggest that the above passage 
 throws some light on the rather puzzling habit of de- 
 preciation of Poe among American men of letters. 
 Themselves given mainly to the study of modern fiction, 
 they seem to measure Poe only as a fictionist ; and, 
 even then, instead of fairly weighing his work on its 
 jnerits, they test it by the calibre of the people who pre- 
 fer the Tales of Mystery to novels of character. Remem- 
 bering that as boys they enjoyed Poe when they did not 
 enjoy the novel of character, they decide that the writer I 
 who thus appeals to boyish minds can be of no great 
 intellectual account. This is a very fallacious line of 
 reasoning. It would make out Defoe to be an artist 
 
 93 
 
I 
 
 POE 
 
 of the smallest account, though Mr. James has a way 
 of connecting intellectual triviality with '* very original 
 genius," which somewhat confuses the process of in- 
 ference. It would relegate Swift to a rather low stand- 
 ing, because boys notoriously enjoy Gulliver's Travels, 
 That result would surely not do. It surely does not 
 follow that Mr. Stevenson is intellectually inferior to 
 Mr. Howells because the former wrote Treasure Islandy 
 beloved of boys, while Mr. Howells' books appeal only 
 to people who know something of life. The fair, not to 
 say the scientific method, surely, is to take an author's 
 total performance, and estimate from that his total 
 powers. This, Mr. James has not done, I think, as 
 regards Poe, or he would not have written as he has 
 done about '* seriousness ; " and, if one may say such 
 a thing without impertinence, the kind of culture spe- 
 cially affected by Mr. James is too much in the ascen- 
 dant among the very intelligent reading public of the 
 States. These white-handed students of the modern 
 novel are not exactly the people to estimate an endow- 
 ment such as Poe's.* 
 
 If one critical Impression can be said to be predominant 
 for an attentive reader of Poe's prose, it is perhaps a 
 wondering sense of the perfection which may belong to 
 what Lamb called ** the sanity of true genius," even 
 where the genius borders on the formless clime we 
 name insanity. This is no idle paradox. What I say 
 is that while Poe's work again and again gives evidence 
 of a mind tending to alienation, it yet includes a hundred 
 
 * Mr. Howells, it may be remembered, has followed Mr. James 
 in speaking slightingly of Poe ; and, indeed, the general current of 
 American criticism is still in that direction. In face of these judg- 
 ments, which dispose not only of performance but of calibre, one is 
 driven to wonder how the writers estimate their own total powers, 
 as against Poe's. 
 
 94 
 
POE 
 
 1 
 triumphs of impeccable reason ; and that for the most 
 
 part his intellectual faculty is sanity itself. It opens 
 up a curious view of things to compare the opaque, 
 letharg-ic, chaotic state of mind which in respectable 
 society so securely passes for sanity, with the pure 
 electric light, the cloudless clearness, of Poe's intelli- 
 gence in its normal state ) and to reflect that he has 
 been called mad, and is sometimes described as a 
 charlatan. How would his detractors, for instance, 
 have compared with Poe in thinking power if they had 
 had to deal with such a problem as that of the prima 
 facie credibility of the " Moon Hoax," which Poe is 
 falsely accused of imitating ? The Moon Hoax was a 
 celebrated narrative, the work of Mr. Richard Adams 
 Locke, which appeared in the New York Sun some three 
 weeks after Poe's Hans Pfaall had been published in 
 the Southern Literary Messenger^ and which made a 
 great sensation at the time. The Moon Story gravely 
 professed to describe the inhabitants, animals, vegeta- 
 tion, and scenery of the moon, as having been lately 
 made out by Sir John Herschel with a new telescope ; 
 while Poe gave a minute narrative, touched at points 
 with banter, of a balloon journey to the same orb ; but 
 there was little detailed resemblance in the narratives, 
 and Poe accepted Mr. Locke's declaration that he had 
 not seen the Adventure when he concocted his hoax. 
 The point of interest for us here is that the hoax was 
 very widely successful ; and that Poe found it worth 
 while afterwards to show in detail how obvious was the 
 imposition, and how easily it should have been seen 
 through by intelligent readers. *' Not one person in 
 ten," he records, '* discredited it, and the doubters 
 were chiefly those who doubted without being able to 
 say why — the ignorant, those uninformed in astronomy 
 — people who would not believe because the thing was 
 
 95 
 
POE 
 
 u 
 
 r 
 
 so novel, so entirely ' out of the usual way.' A grave 
 professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told 
 me seriously that he had ?io doubt of the truth of the 
 whole affair ! " Accordingly, Poe appended to his Hans 
 Pfaall story, on republishing it, an analysis of the other 
 story, than which there could not be a more luminous 
 exercise of psychological logic. His scientific and 
 other knowledge, and his power of scrutiny, enabled 
 him to detect a dozen blunders and clumsinesses ; but 
 perhaps the most characteristic touch is his remark on 
 the entire absence from the narrative of any expression 
 of surprise at a phenomenon which, on the assumptions 
 made, must have been part of the discoverer's vision — 
 namely, the curious appearance presented by the moon's 
 alleged inhabitants, in that their heads would be to- 
 wards the terrestrial gazer, and that they would appear 
 to hang to the moon by their feet. The demand for an 
 expression of astonishment at this was that of an 
 intelligence which had carried the action of imagination 
 to a high pitch of methodic perfection. The processes 
 of sub-conscious inference which initiate conviction, the 
 polarity of average thinking, the elements of evidence, 
 all had been pondered and perceived by Poe with an 
 acumen that is as singular as most forms of genius. 
 And the result of the demonstration was no mere pro- 
 traction of subtle introspection, but the masterly solu- 
 tion of an abstruse concrete problem. His facility in 
 the explication of cypher-writing was astounding : 
 witness his triumph over all challengers when he dealt 
 with the subject in a Philadelphia journal and in 
 Graham'' s Magazine ; his unravelling of a cryptograph 
 in which were employed seven alphabets, without 
 intervals between the words or even between the lines ; 
 and his crowning conquest of a cypher so elaborate 
 that no outsider succeeded in solving it with the key 
 
 96 
 
POE 
 
 when Poe offered a reward as an inducement. Take, 
 again, the essay on '' Maelzel's Chess Player," in which 
 he bends his mind on the question whether that was or 
 was not an automaton ; examines with an eye Hke a 
 microscope the features of the object ; passes in review 
 previous attempts at explanation ; and evolves with 
 rigorous logic an irresistible demonstration that the 
 machine was worked by a man, and of the manner of 
 the working. The power to work such a demonstration 
 is as rare, as remarkable, as almost any species of 
 faculty that can be named. It is sanity raised to a 
 higher power. Such performances, to say nothing of 
 -liis prediction of the plot of Baryiahy Rudge from the 
 opening chapters, should give pause to those who 
 incline to the view, endorsed by some respectable critics, 
 that there was nothing extraordinary in Poe's feats of 
 analytic fiction, seeing that he himself tied the knots he 
 untied. But that criticism is invalid on the face of it. 
 Why is Poe so unrivalled in his peculiar line if it is so 
 easy to tie and untie complex knots of incident, and to 
 forge chains of causation in narrative ? Does any one 
 ever dream of denying skill in plot-construction to 
 Scribe and Sardou because they deliberately lead up to 
 their denoihne?i^s P Is it the tyro who propounds deep 
 problems in chess, or the schoolboy who imagines new 
 theorems in geometry ? The matter is hardly worth 
 discussing. That the author of The Murders in the Rice 
 Morgue^ The Adventure of Hans Pfaall, and The Mystery 
 of Marie Roget could be a mere intellectual charlatan, 
 differing only from his fellows in power of make- 
 believe, is what De Quincey would call a ** fierce 
 impossibility." 
 
 As a narrator and as a thinker Poe has half a dozen 
 excellences any one of which would entitle him to fame. 
 The general mind of Europe has been fascinated by his 
 
 97 G 
 
 f 
 

 ^ 
 
 A 
 
 POE 
 
 4 
 
 tales ; but how far has it realised the quality of the 
 work in them ? It has for the most part read Poe as 
 it has read Alexandre Dumas. Poe, indeed, wrote to 
 interest the reading public, and he was far too capable 
 an artist not to manage what he wanted ; but it was 
 not in his nature to produce work merely adequate to 
 the popular demand. Hundreds of popular stories 
 are produced and are forgotten, for the plain reason 
 that while the writer has somehow succeeded in in- 
 terestinof a number of his contemporaries, his work 
 lacks the; intellectual salt necessary for its preservation 
 to future times. Posterity reads it and finds nothing 
 to respect ; neither mastery of style nor subtlety nor 
 « closeness of thought. But Poe's best stories have a 
 quality of pure mind, an intensity of intelligised imagina- 
 tion, that seems likely to impress men centuries hence 
 as much as it did his more competent readers in his 
 own day. Even at the present moment, when his genre 
 is almost entirely uncultivated, such a hard-headed 
 critic as Professor Minto sums up that ''there are few 
 English writers of this century whose fame is likely to 
 be more enduring. The feelings to which he appeals 
 are simple but universal, and he appeals to them with 
 a force that has never been surpassed." To that 
 generously just verdict I am disposed, however, to offer 
 a partial demurrer, in the shape of a suggestion that it 
 is not so much in the universality of the '* feelings " to 
 which he appeals as in the manifest and consummate 
 faculty with which he is seen to frame his appeal, that 
 Poe's security of renown really lies. Doubtless many 
 readers will, as hitherto, see the narrative and that 
 only; just as Poe himself points out that "not one 
 person in ten — nay, not one person in five hundred — 
 has, during the perusal of Robinson Crusoe^ the most 
 remote conception that any particle of genius, or even 
 
 98 
 
POE 
 
 of common talent, has been employed in Its creation. 
 Men do not look upon It In the light of a literary- 
 performance. " But one fancies that the age of critical 
 reading is evolving, In which, notwithstanding a random 
 saying of Poe's own to the contrary, men will combine 
 ^delight in the artist's skill with due susceptibility to the 
 result. 
 
 Even among those w^ho perceive the Immense 
 importance of naturalism In fiction, there are, it is to 
 be feared, some who are so narrow as to see no value In 
 any work of which the naturalism is not that species of 
 absolute realism that, selection apart, Is substantially 
 contended for by M. Zola, and Is variously exemplified 
 in his and other modern novels of different countries 
 and correspondingly different flavours. Now, the 
 effective vindication of Poe, to my mind, Is that, weird 
 and bizarre and abnormal as are the themes he affected, I C"' 
 he is essentially a realist in his method. Granted that f 
 he turns away from experience, ordinary or otherwise, 
 for his subjects, what could be more perfect than the ^ 
 circumspection with which he uses every device of 
 arrangement and tone, of omission and suggestion, 
 tJtp give his fiction the air of actualltj^ ? Take his Hans 
 Pfaall. Hardly any critic, save Dr. Landa in his 
 preface to his Spanish translation of some of the Tales, 
 has done justice to the exactitude and verisimilitude 
 with which Poe has there touched in his astronomical, 
 physical, and physiological details ; and employed them 
 tp the point of carrying illusion to its possible limit even 
 while he has artistically guarded himself from the down- 
 right pretence by the fantastic fashion of his introduc- | 
 tlon. There Is realism and realism. It was Poe's 
 idiosyncrasy as a fictionlst to examine, not the interplay 
 of the primary human and social emotions either in the 
 open or in half lights, not to be either a Thackeray or a 
 
 99 
 
 i 
 

 POE 
 
 Hawthorne, but to trace the sequences and action of 
 the thinking faculty in its relation to the leading instincts 
 and feelings of the individual ; and this he does partly 
 by studying himself and partly by comparing himself 
 with others — precisely the method of ordinary humanist 
 fiction. He is always an observer in this direction. His 
 objection to the " Moon Hoax " was that it not merely 
 showed ignorant blundering in its details but was want- 
 ing in proper calculation of the attitude of good 
 observers ; so in his paper on '' Maelzel's Chess Player " 
 he unhesitatingly rejects one of Brewster's explanations 
 as assuming too commonplace a stratagem ; so, in easily 
 unravelling a friend's cypher, he laughs at the *' shallow 
 artifice " he sees in it ; and so in his Parisian stories he 
 derides, in the police officer, the cunning which he finds 
 so inferior to true sagacity. 
 
 Even the story of The Black Cat is realistic — realistic 
 In the very wildness of its action. Any one in reading 
 Poe can see how he consciously constructed tales by 
 letting his creative faculty follow the line of one of 
 those morbid fancies that probably in some degree 
 occur at times to all of us, and of which, alas ! he must 
 have had a tremendous share ; giving the recapitulation 
 a gruesome lifelikeness by vigilant embodiment of the 
 details he had noted in following the track of the 
 sinister caprice. And so The Tell-Tale Hearty and 
 William Wilson^ and The Cask of Amontillado are 
 realistic — realistic in the sense that they have had a 
 psychologic basis in the perversities of a disturbed imagi- 
 nation : hence the uncanny fascination of these and other 
 stories of his in a similar taste.* Whether that parti- 
 
 * See the Saturday Review of Nov. 28, 1885, for a well-expressed 
 criticism to the same effect, published a few weeks after the fore- 
 going, but doubtless by a writer who had never seen that. Cp. 
 Hennequin, Ecrivains Francises, pp. 120-130. 
 
 100 
 
POE 
 
 cular species of fiction will retain a hold on men is a 
 matter on which it would be rash to prophesy ; and 
 indeed it may be that not only this but another class of 
 Poe's productions — that which includes The Fall of the 
 House of Usher ^ Ligeia^ The Masque of the Red Deaths 
 The Assignation^ and Berenice — may, as mankind pro- 
 gresses in rational culture, lose that peculiar impres- 
 siveness they have for so many readers to-day. These 
 strange creations, whelmed in shade, seem to belong 
 to some wild region, .out Q.f ^e main road of human ' 
 eyolutiori/'Trq^ my own taste, I confess, they are less 
 decisively and permanently impressive than such feats 
 of daylight imagination, so to speak, as Arthur Gordon 
 Py7n, Hans Pfaall, The Pit and the Penduluniy or even 
 The Murders in the Rue Morgue^ and The 'Ftcrloined 
 Letter; but there is no overlooking the ' element of 
 power, the intension of idea, which, makes itself 'felt > 
 in the twilight studies as in the others. Like eVery 
 man who has to live by steady pen-work, Poe produced 
 some inferior stuff and some downright trash ; but 
 wherever his faculty comes at all fully into play it puts 
 a unique stamp of intellect on its product, a stamp not 
 consisting in mere force or beauty of style, though 
 these are involved, but In a steady, unfaltering pressure 
 of the writer's thought on the attention of his reader. 
 And when we recognise this pregnancy and intensity, 
 and take note that such a critic as Mr. Lowell was so 
 impressed by the *' serene and sombre beauty" oi The 
 Fall of the House of Usher as to pronounce it sufficient 
 by Itself to prove Poe a man of genius and the master 
 of a classic style, we shall see cause to doubt whether 
 any considerable portion of Poe's imaginative work 1 
 belongs to the perishable order of literature. 
 
 As for the group of tales of the saner type, with their 
 bla?ing.jyxvidnes^ and tense compactness of substance — 
 
 loi 
 
POE 
 
 beyond Insisting on the importance of tiie capacity 
 implied in these results, and the essential realism of the 
 stories within the limits of their species, there can be 
 little need to claim for them either attention or praise. 
 Their fascination as narratives is felt by all : the only 
 drawback is the tendency to argue that, because the 
 non-realistic novel Is potentially inferior to the realistic, 
 this class of story is inferior to the realistic novel or 
 story of ordinary life. To reason so Is to confuse types. 
 ■Lytton Is a worse novelist than Thackeray because, 
 professing both explicitly and implicitly to portray 
 character and society, he Is less true in every respect ; 
 and the Idealistic element in George Eliot is of less 
 value than her work of observation because it claims 
 . ; . acceptaiice 0)i the same footing while Its title isi^jnjthe 
 
 ^' ^'^ terms of the case, awantlng. _He£e^ we are dealing with 
 ^^fc^: comparable things', with performances to be judged in 
 
 «»^^ relation to each other. But in Poe we deal with quite 
 a different species of art. That familiar objection to 
 his tales on the score of their lack of human or moral 
 colour, expressed by Mr. Lowell, In his Fable for Critics^ 
 in the phrase '* somehow the heart seems squeezed 
 V--- out by the mind," is the extension of the confusion into 
 downright Injustice. It lies on the face of his work 
 that Poe never aims at reproducing every-day life and 
 society, with its multitude of minute character-pheno- 
 mena forming wholes for artistic contemplation, but — 
 to put it formally — at working out certam applications 
 and phases of the faculties of reflection and volition, as 
 conditioning and conditioned by abnormal tendencies 
 and incidents. He does not seek or profess to draw 
 ''character" in the sense in which Dickens or Balzac 
 does ; he has almost nothing to do with local colour or 
 Sub-divisions of type ; his fisherman in The Descefit into 
 the Maelstrom Is an unspecialised intelligent person ; 
 
 1 02 
 
POE 
 
 Arthur Gordon Pym similarly is simply an observing, 
 reasoning-, and energising individual who goes through 
 and notes certain experiences : in short, these person- 
 ages are abstractions of one aspect of Poe.* On the 
 other hand Usher and the speakers in The Black Cat 
 and The Imp of the Perverse merely represent a reversal 
 of the formula ; peculiar idiosyncrasy in their case 
 being made the basis of incident, whereas in the others 
 jpure incident or mystery was made the motive. No 
 matter which element predominates, normal character 
 study is excluded ; Foe's bias, as we said, being toward 
 analysis or synthesis of processes of applied reason and 
 psychal idiosyncrasy, not to reproduction of the light 
 and shade of life pitched on the everyday plane. It was 
 not that he was without eye for that. On the contrary, 
 his criticisms show he had a sound taste in the novel 
 proper ; and we find him rather critically alert than 
 otherwise in his social relation to the personalities 
 about him. Itjvas^^hat his artistic bent lay in another 
 direction. — ^-,~_ 
 
 As a tale-teller, then, he is to be summed up as having 
 wgrked in his special line with the same extraordinary 
 creative energy and intellectual mastery as distinguish 
 his verse; giving us narratives ''of imagination all 
 compact," yet instinct with life in every detail and 
 jparticle^ no matter how strange, how aloof from com- 
 mon things, may be the theme. As Dr. Landa remarks, 
 he has been the. first story-writer to exploit the field of 
 science in the department of the marvellous ; and he 
 has further been the first to exploit the marvellous in 
 morbid psychology with scientific art. These are achieve- 
 
 * The unfinished Journal of Julius Rodman (published in Mr. 
 Ingram's edition de luxe of the tales and poems) presents us with a 
 somewhat more individualised type, but there too the interest centres 
 in the incidents. 
 
 103 
 
ments as commanding, as significant of genius, as the 
 most distinguished success in any of the commoner 
 walks of fiction ; and a contrary view is reasonably to 
 be described as a fanatical development of an artistic 
 doctrine perfectly sound and of vital importance in its 
 right application, but liable, like other cults, to incur 
 reaction when carried to extremes. After The Idiot Boy 
 and The Prelude came The Lady of Slialott and the 
 Idylls of the King ; after Trollope came King Romance 
 again ; and even if Poe were eclipsed for a time, posterity 
 would still be to reckon with. 
 
 IV 
 
 There is still to be considered, if we would measure 
 Poe completely, his work in the fields of abstract 
 aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy; and to some of us 
 that aspect of him is not less remarkable than his 
 artistic expression of himself in verse and fiction. Even 
 among his admirers, however, this is not the prevailing 
 attitude. Thus Mr. Ingram, to whose untiring and 
 devoted labour is mainly due the vindication of Poe's 
 memory, considers that criticism was ** hardly his 
 forte ; " and Dr. William Hand Browne, who, in his 
 article in the Baltimore New Eclectic Magazine on *' Poe's 
 Eureka and Recent Scientific Speculations," has been the 
 first bearer of testimony to the poet's capacity as a 
 thinker — even this independent eulogist thinks it neces- 
 sary to declare that in Poe's Rationale of VersCy **in 
 connection with just and original remarks on English 
 versification, of which he was a master, we find a tissue 
 of the merest absurdity about the classical measures, of 
 which he knew nothing." I cannot agree to the impli- 
 cations of Mr. Ingram's phrase, and I cannot but think 
 
 104 
 
POE 
 
 that Dr. Browne has spoken recklessly as to Poe's 
 knowledge and criticism of the so-called *' classical 
 measures," treating that question very much as other 
 critics have treated the Eureka. That Poe in his school- 
 days was a good Latinist we know from one of his 
 schoolfellows, who dwells especially on the delight with 
 which he used to listen to Poe's conning of his favourite 
 pieces in Horace. 
 
 The school in question was strong on the Latin side, 
 and it is hardly possible that Poe, whatever he might do 
 in Greek, could be otherwise than familiar with the 
 orthodox scansions of the classic poets, ranking, as he 
 did, as joint dux of the school.* In point of fact, he 
 won distinctions in both Latin and French at the 
 University of Virginia, which must surely count for 
 something. 
 
 It requires, indeed, little scholarship to gather from 
 the ordinary editions the received metres of Horace and 
 the established scansions of the hexameter, which are 
 what Poe puts in evidence in so far as he challenges the 
 academic theory of classic verse. These are given with 
 strict accuracy. The whole question raised is whether 
 they stand by a scientific or by a merely traditional 
 authority; and it is surely a device worthy of a mediaeval 
 
 ""■ That Poe's general culture was wide and effective it seems un- 
 necessary to contend here, though some of his critics deny him such 
 credit. His works must speak for themselves. It has indeed been 
 pointed out by one critic that the nature of his reference to Cresset's 
 Ver-Vert, in The Fall of the House of Usher, shows him to have used 
 the title without knowing the poem ; and Mrs. Whitman's merely 
 forensic rejoinder only shows that she had not read it either. I 
 fancy he may have dipped into the poem and noticed such a phrase 
 as " le saint oiseau " or the concluding lines, and so entirely missed 
 the nature of the narrative. His " stately raven of the saintly days 
 of yore " suggests the same chance. But one such miscarriage, 
 whatever be the explanation, cannot destroy the general testimony 
 of his so various writings. 
 
POE 
 
 schoolman to evade the inquiry by a sweeping charge of 
 ignorance.* 
 
 In just this superciHous fashion have avowedly un- 
 friendly critics disparaged Poe on other grounds, passing 
 judgment without offering a jot of evidence. One is led 
 to suspect that, while thinking for himself on science, 
 
 V- \ 
 
 /Dr. Browne treated questions of classic metre with the 
 
 unquestioning faith which other people give to the pro- 
 positions of religion. Those who have looked with 
 independent interest into the dogmas of classic prosody 
 know that, whether right or wrong, Poe was dealing 
 with a subject on which even reputedly "orthodox" 
 opinion is hopelessly confused ; and that the off-hand 
 language of Dr. Browne pretends a certainty of expert 
 / authority which does not exist. Certain rules for 
 scanning Greek and Latin verse pass current ; but 
 save in respect of nominal adherence to the arbitrary 
 rules of a given text-book, there is no agreement among 
 scholars ; and it is safe to say that the traditional lore 
 of the schools is a mass of uncomprehended shibboleths, 
 framed without understanding and accepted on the same 
 basis. Poe must have heard at school and university 
 the ordinary directions for the scanning of classic verse. 
 He was singular enough to think them out for his own 
 
 * The late Sidney Lanier wrote that "the trouble with Poe was, 
 he did not /^noiv enough. He needed to know a good many more 
 things in order to be a great poet." Alas, that is the trouble with 
 all of us, small and great ; and in more ways than one, in the subtler 
 sense rather than in the simpler, it holds true of Lanier himself, to 
 ' the point of the statement that he fell ever further short of being a 
 great poet in the ratio of the growth of his conviction that he was 
 one, and that his poetry was an expression of knowledge. Man of 
 genius as he was, he did not finally succeed even in fulfilling his own 
 law of severance between Art and Cleverness. Poe remains the 
 r" greater poet because he /ciicw better the function of poetry and its 
 
 relation to truth. 
 
 io6 
 
POE 
 
 satisfaction, and he thus found there was no satisfaction 
 to be had from them. 
 
 What Poe urged on that head Is, I venture to think, 
 broadly just and well-timed. As he truly said, "there 
 is something in ' scholarship ' which seduces us into 
 blind worship of Bacon's Idol of the Theatre-Arxto- 
 v lrratlona Lijeference to antiquity ; " * and as a matter of 
 fact the prosody of the schools had never any better 
 basis than one of Talmudic deduction from verse never 
 scientifically studied. The Iliadj as Poe again says, 
 *' being taken as a starting-point, was made to stand 
 instead of Nature and common sense. Upon this poem, 
 in place of facts and deduction from fact, or from 
 natural law, were built systems of feet, metres, rhythms, 
 rules — rules that contradict each other every five 
 minutes, and for nearly all of which there may be found 
 nearly twice as many exceptions as examples." The 
 notorious want of hearty enjoyment of ancient verse, 
 qua verse, among those who study It, and the naked 
 and unashamed unnaturalness of our own enunciation 
 of It, are suflficlent to support Poe's protest against any 
 mere dogmatic retort from the pedants ; and I appre- 
 hend that no open-minded reader of his essay wiirfiave 
 any difiiculty in deciding whether the analytic poet or 
 the ordinary scholastic Is the better fitted to arrive at 
 what the principles of rhythm really are. Poe seems to 
 have had the eccentric taste to try to enjoy his Horace 
 as he enjoyed his Tennyson. But to say this Is to say 
 that he undertook an almost hopelessly difficult task, 
 and it would be going too far to say that he has suc- 
 ceeded as he thought he did. A full examination of the 
 matter must be left to an appendix ; but it may here be 
 
 * In this connection note the recent challenge to the traditionist 
 grammarians by Mr. Gavin Hamilton in his treatise on the Sub- 
 junctive. Edinburgh : Oliver and Boyd, 1889. 
 
 107 
 
POE 
 
 said that in the very act of coming" to the conclusion 
 that Poe's simpHfied system of feet in turn breaks down 
 like the old and complex one as an anatomy of verse, 
 we are led to acknowledge anew the singular originality 
 and energy of his mind. It is no extravagance to say 
 that in this matter it is better to err with Poe than to 
 be '* right " with Dr. Browne, for Poe's error is a bril- 
 liant effort to make a new system out of the wreck of 
 one which he has rightly discarded, and he offers vivid 
 argumentative exposition where academic orthodoxy 
 offers inert and unreasoned rules. In every respect 
 save the crowning point of scientific Tightness it is a 
 masterly critical performance.* 
 
 V 
 
 The close of the Rationale raises a question which has 
 been generally decided against Poe — that as to whether 
 he had any humour. Humour of the kind in which 
 American literature is specially rich he clearly had not. 
 Such attempts as his X-ing a Paragrah have none of the 
 hilarious fun of those grotesque exaggerations which 
 form one of the two main features of American humour ; 
 
 * Mr. Stedman, in editing the recent complete edition of Poe's 
 works, has seen fit to say that "the Rationale of Verse is a curious 
 discussion of mechanics now well enough understood " (Introd. to 
 vol. vi., p. xiv.). As very few of us are conscious of Mr. Stedman's 
 sense of mastery, which he does not give us the means of sharing, I 
 leave my Appendix on Accent, Quantity and Feet to exhibit other 
 people's difficulties. And when Mr. Stedman further pronounces 
 (p. XV.) that " one can rarely draw a better contrast between the 
 faulty and the masterly treatment of a literary topic than by citing 
 The Rationale of Verse and [Arnold's] three lectures On Translating 
 Homer,'' I must take leave to say that he does but give us an un- 
 critical endorsement of a prestige. Arnold's book is really a failure 
 as a technical treatise. 
 
 io8 
 
POE 
 
 and of its other constituent of subtle, kindly drollery, 
 unembittered jesting at the incongruous in morals or in 
 incidents, he can offer us almost as little. The explana- 
 tion is that in respect of temperament he was too un- 
 happily related to American society to have any cordial 
 satisfaction in studying it ; a nd that hi s sense of the 
 comic had the warmthlessness and colourlessness of 
 unmitigated reason. X)he sometimes finds him even 
 pungently humorous, but it is always in a generalisa- 
 tion, or in derision of a fallacy or a fatuity ; ajways In 
 a flash of the reason, never in a twinkle of the temper- 
 ament ; and only those who are capable of what George 
 Eliot once delightedly spoke of as the laughter which 
 comes of a satisfaction of the understanding, will per- 
 ceive that he possesses humour at all. His satire, 
 indeed, is strictly in keeping with his criticism in 
 general. The peculiar quality of that, which for some 
 readers makes it unsuccessful, l ies in this__ab sQlute 
 supremacy of judgment. The apparent or rather the 
 virtual ruthlessness of much of his critical writing is the 
 outcome of the two facts that he had an extremely keen 
 critical sense and that, in applying it, save wlienTiii 
 emotional side was stimulated, as it generally was when 
 he was criticising women,* he was sheer, implacable 
 intellect. To him the discrimination of good~ and^bad 
 in literature was a matter of the intensest seriousness : 
 of the faculty for doing mere '* notices " of the mechani- 
 cally inept and insincere sort turned out by so many of 
 the criticasters who moralise about his lack of the moral 
 sense — of that convenient aptitude he was quite desti- 
 tute. To represent him, however, in the way Mr. 
 Stoddard does, as a kind of literary Red Indian, delight- 
 
 * See Mr. Stoddard's memoir in Widdleton's edition of Poe, p. 165. 
 "I cannot point an arrow against any woman," was one of Poe's 
 private avowals. Still, he wrote contemptuously of Margaret Fuller, 
 
 109 
 
,^^ 
 
 POE 
 
 ing In the use of the tomahawk for its own sake, is but 
 to add to the darkening of critical counsel about Poe. 
 The prejudiced critic in question speaks as follows : 
 
 " Like lago, he was nothing if not critical, and the motto of his 
 self-sufficient spirit was Nil admirari. ... It is a weakness incident 
 to youth and ambition. ... I do not think that Poe ever outgrew 
 it, or sought to outgrow it. He believed that his readers loved 
 havoc ; Mr. Burton, on the contrary, believed that they loved justice. 
 And he was right, as the criticisms of Poe have proved, for they have 
 failed to commend themselves to the good sense of his countrymen. 
 His narrow but acute mind enabled him to detect the verbal faults 
 of those whom he criticised, but it disqualified him from perceiving 
 their mental qualities. He mastered the letter, but the spirit es- 
 caped him. He advanced no critical principle which he established ; 
 he attacked no critical principle which he overthrew. He broke a 
 few butterflies on his wheel ; but he destroyed no reputation. He 
 was a powerless iconoclast."* 
 
 I quote this as the most close-packed, comprehensive, 
 and consistent piece of aggressively bad criticism by a 
 not incompetent critic that I remember to have seen. 
 From the malicious, not to say malignant, " Like lago 7 
 to the overstrained depreciation of the ^'powerless 
 iconoclast," all is unfair and untrue. The remark about 
 '' havoc " and Mr. Burton refers to a jesting answer 
 made by Mr. Poe to one of his employers who depre- 
 cated his severity ; an answer which to take as an 
 expression of Poe's critical creed is discreditably unjust. 
 He thought the severity complained of was deserved, 
 and he merely made the light answer by way of soothing 
 the uneasiness or silencing the objections of an employer 
 for whose judgment he had no respect. To take 
 seriously a phrase so uttered is to show either moral 
 pedantry or prejudice. As to the view taken of Poe as 
 
 whom he disliked on both personal and literary grounds, as did Mr. 
 Lowell. 
 * Memoir in Widdleton's ed., p. 89. 
 
 IIO 
 
POE 
 
 a critic by the ''good sense" of his countrymen, that 
 must be left to the decision of the tribunal In question, 
 if it can be got at ; and the proposition that Poe's mind 
 was narrow may profitably be left alone ; while the 
 other dicta may be best disposed of by laying down 
 truer ones. 
 
 What may fairly be said against Poe's criticisms is 
 that they have not the absolute artistic balance and 
 completeness, the perfection of "form" which belongs 
 to his tales and best poems. Criticism was not with 
 him, as it has been said to be v/ith Mr. Lowell and 
 Mr. Arnold, a " fine art " ; jt was rather a science ; and 
 his critiques accordingly are processes of scientific 
 analysis and summing-up, almost always restricted in a 
 business-like manner to the subject in hand. What he 
 might have done if he had had the opportunities of the 
 two writers named, if he had had academic leisure and 
 good media, is a matter for speculation ; but what we 
 do know is that he has left a body of widely various 
 criticism which, as such, will better stand critical 
 examination to-day than any similar work produced in 
 England or America in his time. Mr. James, half- 
 sharing the normal American hostility to Poe, thinks 
 that his critical product " is probably the most complete 
 specimen of provijicialism ever prepared for the edifica- 
 tion of men ; " though he admits that there is mixed In 
 it a great deal of sense and discrimination ; and that 
 "here and there, sometimes at frequent Intervals {sic)^ 
 we find a phrase of happy insight embedded in a patch 
 of the most fatuous pedantry."* Well, provincialism 
 is a very incalculable thing : so Protean and subtle that 
 some people find some of the essence of it actually In 
 the very full-blown cosmopolitanism of Mr. James, 
 
 * Haivthorne, p. 64. 
 Ill 
 
POE 
 
 whose delicate narrative art is so much occupied with 
 the delineation of aspects of the life of idle Americans 
 in Europe and idle Europeans in America, and so 
 admirably detached from all grosser things. Putting 
 that out of the question, and assuming that Mr. James 
 is as qualified a critic of criticism in general as he has 
 undoubtedly proved himself to be of the novel, we must 
 in any case hold that he did not sufficiently consider the 
 general conditions of criticism in Poe's day when he 
 penned his aspersion. When we remember how matters 
 stood in England, with Christopher North and the 
 youthful Thackeray and Macaulay and the Quarterlies 
 representing the critical spirit ; * when we note how 
 Carlyle, studying Blackwood and Frazer in those days, 
 decides that ''the grand requisite seems to be impu- 
 dence, and a fearless committing of yourself to talk in 
 your drink " ; and when we try to reckon up what of 
 insight and real breadth of view there was in all these, 
 we shall find it difficult to accept Mr. James's standard. 
 Provincialism is a matter of comparison. If it be 
 decided that to deal as minutely as Poe did with the 
 contemporary literature and writers of one's own 
 
 . country is unwise, the provincialism of the proceeding 
 will still be to prove ; and in the end a number of things 
 in Poe's critical remains go some way to explode the 
 
 i/ detractions we have been considering. Particular 
 judgments apart, there is a general pressure of reason- 
 i ^^Z power in his critical writing which is really not to 
 be found in the works of later men, English and 
 American, whose title is taken for granted by some of 
 those who make light of Poe on this side. The reason- 
 
 * "Macaulay and Dilke and one or two others excepted," writes 
 Poe {Marginalia, vii.), *' there is not in Great Britain a critic who 
 ^ can fairly be considered worthy the name." 
 
 I 12 
 
 ^ 
 
POE 
 
 ing of Mr. Lowell, outside of the field of pure literature 
 or literary art, is always precarious and not seldom 
 quite puerile : that of Mr. Arnold, even on points of 
 literary effect, is too often trivially and cheaply falla- 
 cious ; but in Eoe, though we may find critical caprice 
 and extravagance, the standard of ratiocination, the 
 ruling quality of the logic, is always high an^fajL asculjne. ^ 
 And against a few extravagances of praise and dis- 
 praise, there are a hundred sure and true verdicts, 
 given long in advance of general appreciation. When 
 we look to see what line he takes as a critic, we find 
 him delightedly extolling Tennyson as a great poet 
 when men were still worshipping devoutly at the shrine 
 of Wordsworth ; insisting from the first that the 
 obscure Hawthorne was a genius of a far higher order 
 than Longfellow ; welcoming Dickens as a great artist 
 in the humours of character, but warning him that he 
 had no gift of construction ; heartily eulogising Hood ; 
 giving generous praise to Mr. Home's Orion; denying 
 merit to the popular Lever ; pointing out that the still 
 more popular Valentine Vox was not literature ; stand- 
 ing up for fair play to Moore ; keenly scrutinising 
 Macaulay ; doing homage to Mrs. Browning ; paying 
 the fullest admiring tribute to the memory of Lamb ; 
 coolly and impartially analysing Cooper — always quick 
 to give honour where honour was due, and to protest 
 against critical injustice ; ^ver once pandering to com- 
 mercialism or tolerating the puffery of the undeserving ; 
 never weighting his scales for the benefit of any, save 
 perhaps - when his idiosyncrasy made him exagger- 
 ate the merits of some women-poets. As for the 
 pedantry, one may suggest that there are departments 
 of criticism to which Mr. James, admirable critic as he 
 is, may be a stranger ; and that it is yet not pedantry 
 to be at home in these. 
 
 113 H 
 
 \ 
 
POE 
 
 Letusglose nothing : let us admit that in discussing 
 the commonplace quality of Lever, Poe becomes so 
 extravagant in his esteem of the kind of fiction .to-wliich 
 his own faculty pointed as to say that " for one Fouqu^ 
 there are fifty Molicres," and to declare that '' Mr. 
 Dickens has no more business with the rabble than a 
 seraph with a chapcau de bras " — here stultifying a pre- 
 vious utterance. There is nothing to be said for such 
 deliration as that, of course : we can but set it down to 
 the brain-flaw. Nor can it be denied that the temper of 
 his writing is often faulty ; that he shows '' bad form " 
 enough to justify M. Hennequin's use of the word 
 ''littlenesses." The note, in fact, is often sharply 
 neurotic. But at the risk of being charged with neck- 
 or-nothing partisanship, I venture hereanent to indorse 
 the phrase of the friendly reviewer who pronounced 
 Poe "potentially" one of the greatest of critics. It is 
 a perfectly fair distinction. One finds that Poe's critical 
 judgment was generally unerring; and that he invariably 
 knew and told how and why he reached his verdict ; 
 and one finds in an utterly preposterous misjudgment 
 on his part only a sign of momentary distraction. 
 For the comparative bareness of the critical part of his 
 work is no argument against his being a great critic. 
 Indeed the very faults that are most flagrant in his 
 critical work, the stress of temper over small matters 
 and small writers, and the pedantic-looking persistence 
 in theoretic analysis, clearly come of the spontaneous 
 play of his critical faculty through the medium of a 
 flawed nervous system, without check from the other 
 faculties of character. Hence the air of "littleness," 
 even of moral defect. It was not that, as the wiseacres 
 said, he was without character ; but that in him certain 
 intellectual faculties vv^ere so developed as to go to work 
 without control from the character, at least in his 
 
 114 
 
POE 
 
 excited moods. And It was his hard fate that, as a 
 hack journalist, he had to write in all moods, and on 
 matters of journalistic attraction — a simple economic 
 fact which is strangely disregarded by his gainsayers.* 
 When he was not nervously excited, agairij^ the very^ 
 strength of his critical faculty tended to. make him 
 pronounce rigorously technical and unadorned decisions 
 where other men would turn out polished and charming 
 essays ; but in the terms of the case his work is more 
 triily critical than theirs. The truth is that in our 
 literature pure criticism is very scarce. Some of our 
 most popular and charming critics, so-called, are rather 
 essayists than methodical judges of literature : they 
 write a propos of books and authors, giving us in so 
 doing a finished expression of their own sentiments and '; 
 their own philosophy, often laying down sound literary 
 opinions and displaying a fine taste ; but leaving us \ 
 rather to echo their conclusions out of esteem for their ^ 
 authority than guiding us to any science of discrimi- 
 nation on our own account. Writing as critics, they are j 
 adding to literature rather than effectively analysing itr**^ 
 With Poe it is altogether different. We read his criti- 
 cisms not for their own literary quality but for their 
 judicial value and their service to critical science ; and 
 thoug^h it follows that they can never be widely known, 
 it is not unsafe to preHTct for them recognition and 
 interest at a time when a great deal of the more 
 
 t. 
 
 V-^ 
 
 
 ^' We have his own anxious avowal in his masterly critique of 
 Barnaby Rudge : " From what we have here said, and perhaps said 
 without due deliberation (for, alas ! the hurried duties of the journa- 
 list preclude it). . . ." The same explanation will account for the 
 inconsistencies of phrase in the critique on Hawthorne. And some 
 of the worst exhibitions in the Broadway Journal are to be set down 
 to the fact, noted by Mr. Ingram, that Poe had at times to manu- 
 facture most of the matter for an issue, this when his physique was 
 rapidly running down. 
 
POE 
 
 ** readable" products of modern critics are forgotten. 
 Certainly Poe was in advance of his time in the rigour 
 of his critical principles. The unrealised ambition of 
 his literary life, the foundation of a critical journal which 
 should be absolutely honest and be written by none but 
 competent critics, giving the reasons for all their judg- 
 ments, was utterly Utopian. Neither the required critics 
 nor fit readers then existed or yet exist in America, or 
 for that matter in England. Now, as in Poe's day, it 
 may be that the qualified craftsmen in the States have 
 to waste their strength in miscellaneity ; but however 
 that may be it is certain that American criticism, like 
 English, makes but a poor show beside the critical 
 literature of France. For illustration, it must suffice 
 here to suggest a comparison of the graceful and genial 
 essay of Mr. Stedman, the best American estimate of 
 Poe, with the article by M. Emile Hennequin in the 
 Revue Contemporaine ;'^ an analytical study which, 
 reading it as I do when my own essay is as good as 
 written, makes me feel as if my labour were mostly 
 thrown away. M. Hennequin, perhaps, would not 
 resent t the inference that he has learned some lessons 
 of analysis from Poe ; who, by the way, performed as 
 remarkable a feat of analysis in his criticism of Barnahy 
 Riidge as in any of his other productions. The decom- 
 position of that story, the revelation of the writer's 
 mental processes, and the deduction of the plot from 
 the opening chapters, drawing as they did from Dickens 
 an inquiry whether his critic had dealings with the 
 devil, are things to be remembered in the history of 
 literature. But if there were no such achievement to 
 Poe's credit, and if he had not written his essay on the 
 
 * January 1885 ; reprinted in the volume Ecrivains Francises. 
 t M. Hennequin, alas! died suddenly in the summer of 1888, in 
 his prime. 
 
 116 
 
POE 
 
 American Drama, one of the ablest dramatic criticisms 
 ever penned, that body of multifold criticism which 
 stands in his works under the title Margitialia would 
 alone suffice, to my thinking, to prove him a born critic. 
 Barring some follies, some pretentiousness, some in- 
 tended nonsense, and some inexplicable contradictions, 
 which suggest either deliberate mystification or mixed 
 authorship, that miscellany of paragraphs and essaylets 
 is a perpetual sparkle of clear thought, into which one 
 dives time after time, always finding stimulus, even if it 
 be of provocation, always buoyantly upborne by the 
 masterful mind. 
 
 But while we find Poe even in his college days 
 making curious attempts to '^ divide his mind" by doing 
 two things at once, and in later life musing intently on 
 **the power of words," his thinking faculty was not 
 limited to analysis and criticism. It so happens that he 
 has given us, in addition to all his artistic and critical 
 work, one of the most extraordinary productions of 
 imaginative philosophic synthesis in literature. The 
 Eureka has, indeed, no sociological bearing, save in so 
 far as it incidentally throws out the suggestion that as 
 ''the Importance of the development of the terrestrial 
 vitality proceeds equally with the terrestrial conden- 
 sation," we may surmise the stages of the evolution of 
 life to be in terms of the variations of the solar influence 
 on the earth, and that the discharge of a new planet. 
 Inferior to Mercury, might freshly modify the terrestrial 
 surface so as to produce ''a race both materially and 
 spiritually superior to Man." The speculation is inter- 
 esting, but remote from everyday interests. A remark- 
 able detail in Poe's life and character \% that he rarely 
 touches on things political ; whence, perhaps, an im- 
 pression that he had no sympathy with social movement 
 and aspiration in general. On the strength, presumably, 
 
 117 
 
POE 
 
 of the allusion to mob rule in Some Words tmth a Mummy ^ 
 and of some sentences in the Colloquy of Monos and U7ia^ 
 Mr. Lang* confusedly decides that '* If democratic 
 ecstasies are a tissue of historical errors and self- 
 complacent content with the commonplace, no one saw- 
 that more clearly than Poe." But the school of languid 
 anti-democrats cannot rightfully claim Poe as being on 
 their side. If they will read chap. vii. of the Marginalia 
 they will find him expressing democratic sentiments in 
 his own person ; and in his Fifty Suggestions (not a very 
 satisfactory compilation) they will find a remarkable 
 prophetic judgment as to the revolutionary spirit in 
 Europe. If further proof is wanted of Poe's essential 
 democratism, I would cite the circumstance, not gener- 
 ally known, that in the Broadway Journal there appeared, 
 while he was sole editor, an article entitled ''Art 
 Singing and Heart Singing," signed "Walter Whit- 
 man," in which are suggested for apparently the first 
 time those doctrines as to democratic culture which 
 have since become so familiar ; and that there is the 
 editorial note "It is scarcely necessary to add that we 
 agree with our correspondent throughout." The fact 
 remains, however, that Poe made no attempt at a 
 sociological synthesis. Setting aside the constructive 
 element in his tales, it is in his cosmogonic philosophy 
 that we must look for the synthetic side of his mind. ^ 
 
 VI 
 
 It resulted from the insistence of the "reasoning 
 reason " in Poe that the train of thought which evolved 
 the Eureka found expression also in his artistic work, 
 while at the same time the growing insurgence of 
 temperament gave an emotional cast to his philosophy. 
 
 * In the preface to the " Parchment " edition of Poe's poems. 
 
 ii8 
 
POE 
 
 To say nothing of his psychological tales, we have the 
 Colloquy of Moiios and Una (as to the alleged plagiarising 
 in which there is not a shadow of evidence) where two 
 souls in heaven look back on the finished course of 
 humanity ; the Conversation of Eiros and Charmian^ in 
 which similarly one spirit tells another of how the race 
 was destroyed ; and The Power of Words, in which yet 
 again two immortals talk of transcendental things. In 
 this last dialogue there is a touch which for vastitude 
 of imagination is perhaps unmatchable. ** Come," says 
 the spirit Agathos to Oinos, who is '* new-fledged with 
 immortality" — "Come! we will leave to the left the 
 loud harmony of the Pleiades, and sweep outward from 
 the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, 
 where, for pansies and violets and heart's-ease, are the 
 beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns." In the 
 way of " brave translunary things " it will not be easy 
 to beat that. This is indeed poiesis ; audit was perhaps 
 with a true instinct that Poe, flatly contradicting his 
 own rule that a poem must be short to be truly poetic, 
 recorded his desire that the Eureka, with all its logic 
 and criticism, should be regarded as a poem. It is a 
 great, impassioned, imaginative projection, beginning 
 in just some such elemental swell of ideal emotion as 
 gives birth to poetry. But there could be no greater 
 mistake than to regard the Eureka, with its vast 
 cosmogonic sweep, as a mere rhapsody. Dr. William 
 Hand Browne, who has made it the subject of a 
 sufficiently practical article, finds that its author 
 ppssessed, *'in remarkable excellence, the scientific 
 mind."* Recognising this, Dr. Browne remarks that it 
 
 * It is one of the mistakes of Dr. Nordau to exclaim vociferously 
 at M. Morice for naming Poe in the same group with Spencer and 
 Claude Bernard {Degenerescence, French trans, i. 242). Dr. Nordau 
 evidently knows very little about Poe's performance. 
 
 "9 ^^0^'i!^'^'fy\ 
 
 TJNIVT: "T 'T 
 
POE 
 
 has been Poe's peculiarly hard fortune to be not only 
 persistently maligned by his enemies but imperfectly 
 estimated by his friends ; a truth which Dr. Browne 
 goes on unconsciously to illustrate by denying Poe 
 credit for The Gold Bug and The Murders in the Rue 
 Morgue^ and, as we have seen, by charging him with 
 writing absurdly and ignorantly on the classical 
 measures. These Injustices, however, perhaps give 
 only the more weight to Dr. Browne's eulogy when he 
 attributes to Poe '' the power of expressing his thoughts, 
 however involved, subtle, or profound, with such 
 precision, such lucidity, and withal with such simplicity 
 of style, that we hardly know where to look for his 
 equal : certainly nowhere among American writers." 
 That seems to me quite true ; and there could be no 
 better evidence In support than the Eureka, which only 
 needs to be separately reprinted without its worrying 
 dashes and without italics to rank as the most luminous 
 and the most original theistic treatise In the language. 
 This verdict may perhaps incur the more suspicion 
 when I avow that I pass it In the conviction that Poe's 
 reasoning breaks down, like all other theistic reasoning, 
 when Its conclusion Is applied to the primary problem. 
 It Is the way in which he reasons up to a conclusion 
 subversive of Itself and of all other theisms, that makes 
 this treatise unique In philosophy. It is plain, indeed, 
 that Poe on his way reasoned himself out of his primary 
 theism Into an entirely new poly-pantheism ; and of 
 course it is a plain proof of mental disturbance thus to 
 wander on the path of an inquiry.* But let the mental 
 
 * It would seem indeed that only in his last years did he begin to 
 pay much attention to religious problems. His previous attitude 
 seems to have been conventionally, sometimes even vulgarly, 
 orthodox — a surprising thing in the case of such a critical in- 
 telligence. 
 
 I20 
 
POE 
 
 overpoise be taken for granted, and the intellectual 
 interest of the performance remains. 
 
 At the outset he decides with the most absolute 
 arbitrariness that there is a finite *' universe of stars," 
 and an infinite ''universe of space" — a proposition 
 which certainly testifies to his failure to get behind the 
 common illusion of space as the antithesis of existence. 
 No less arbitrarily does he assume Deity, making none 
 of the popular pretences to reach that hypothesis by 
 way of elimination. ''As our starting-point, then," he 
 writes, " let us adopt the Godhead. Of this Godhead 
 in itself, he alone is not imbecile, he alone is not 
 impious, who propounds — nothing."* But, following 
 the familiar, the fatal path of all theology, he will not 
 admit that the inconceivable will be for ever uncon- 
 ceived, and, having to begin with affirmed its volition, 
 he immediately after affirms that he has something else 
 to propound concerning it : 
 
 " An intuition altogether irresistible, although inexpressible, forces 
 me to the conclusion that what God originally created — that that 
 Matter, which, by dint of his Volition, he first made from his spirit, 
 or from Nihility (!) cotild have been nothing but matter in its utmost 
 conceivable state of — what ? — of Simplicity. This will be found the 
 sole absolute assumption of my Discourse.'" f 
 
 In other words, " Ojieness is all that I predicate 
 of the originally created Matter." But " the assump- 
 tion of absolute Unity in the primordial Particle includes 
 that of infinite divisibility," so that we yet further 
 assume attraction and repulsion as primal character- 
 istics of the universe, the first being its material 
 and the second its spiritual principle. t " I feel, 
 in a word, that here the God has interposed, and 
 here only, because here and here only the knot 
 
 * Works, Ingram's ed., iii. 107. f P. lo^- + P- 114. 
 
 121 
 
POE 
 
 demanded the interposition of the God."* ''Attraction 
 and repulsion are matter." Then comes many pages of 
 impassioned brooding* on the conceptions thus set out 
 with, and of quasi-mathematical extension of the 
 premises, all leading up anew to the thing assumed at 
 the outset — the finitude of the ''universe of stars." 
 "Gravity exists on account of Matter's having been 
 irradiated, at its origin, atomically, into a lifnitcd sphere 
 of space, from one, individual, unconditional, irrelative 
 and absolute Particle Proper. . . ." f Thus we get rid 
 of " the impossible conception of an infinite extension 
 of Matter," and set up the other conception of an 
 " illimitable Universe of Vacancy beyond."! 
 
 But here the poet flinches, as well he might, and we 
 have this confession : 
 
 " Let me declare only that, as an individual, I myself feel impelled 
 to fancy, without daring to call it more — that there does exist a 
 limitless succession of Universes, more or less similar to that of 
 which we have cognisance — to that of which alone we shall ever have 
 cognisance — at the very least until the return of our own particular 
 Universe into Unity, //such clusters of clusters exist, however — 
 and they do — it is abundantly clear that having no part in our origin, 
 they have no portion in our laws. They neither attract us, nor we 
 them. Their material, their spirit is not ours, is not that which 
 obtains in any part of our Universe. They could not impress our 
 senses or our souls. . . . Each exists, apart and independently, »/ the 
 bosom of its proper and particular God." § 
 
 And in the end the proposition is, on the one hand 
 
 " That each soul is, in part, its own God, its own Creator ; in a word, 
 that God — noiv exists solely in the diffused matter and Spirit of the 
 Universe; and that the regathering of this diftused Matter and 
 Spirit will be but the reconstitution of the purely Spiritual and Indi- 
 vidual God ; " 
 
 while, on the other hand, this God is " one of an abso- 
 lutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the 
 
 * Works, iii. 113. t P. 137- + P. 163. 
 
 § P. 164 ; italics Poe's. 
 
 )22 
 
POE 
 
 absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite 
 space."* And yet he had earlier insisted, in the spirit of 
 modern Monism, on '' the condensation of Imvs into law," 
 and the conclusion that *' each law of Nature is depen- 
 dent at all points upon all other laws,"t a maxim which 
 quashes his infinity of irrelated universes and Gods ; 
 and again he insisted : '*That Nature and the God of 
 Nature are distinct, no thinking being can doubt "t — a 
 doctrine which quashes his unitary Pantheism. Thus, 
 on his own principle that *'a perfect consistency can 
 be nothing but an absolute truth," § he has definitely 
 missed truth. It is the fate of all theosophies. And sttlH 
 his failure, in virtue of the mere energy and sustained 
 imaginativeness ^f its reasoning, is a permanently 
 notable philosophical document — this though his neuro- 
 sis was visibly worsening at the time of the composition 
 to the point of affecting its whole tone, and much of the 
 reasoning. Capacity in this kind must be rneasuredi^,,.^^^'" 
 comparatively ; and it needs neither dissent nor agree-' ''"^^ 
 ment, but simply acquaintance with the average run of | \ 
 theistic and cosmological reasoning, to come to the 
 opinion that Poe is in these matters as abnormal, as 
 intensely intellectual, as he is in everything else.H The 
 
 * Works, iii. 194. f P. 147. J Ibid. § P. 100. 
 
 II The very hostile critique of the Eureka by Professor Irving 
 Stringham, reprinted in the notes to vol. ix. of Messrs. Stedman and 
 Woodberry's edition, really concedes all that is above claimed for 
 the treatise as an exhibition of intellectual power, though denying it 
 all scientific originality and pronouncing the philosophical argument 
 the "degrading self-delusion of an arrogant and fatuous mind." 
 This is a sample of the language constantly used by American writers 
 towards a man in whom brain disease can be diagnosed with moral 
 certainty. Everything Poe wrote, in his final and swiftly failing 
 years, is discussed by most of his detractors without a suggestion 
 that it comes from a shaken reason. The note of malice is normal. 
 Professor Stringham takes as absolutely certain the story that Poe 
 once said : " My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there 
 
 123 
 
POE 
 
 book — for it is a book in itself — has, indeed, some bad 
 passages, where he essays to be humorous ; but as 
 against this, it exhibits a competence in matters of 
 abstract science, and a hold of scientific cosmic theory, 
 that no English man of letters of that day possessed. 
 Much subsequent scientific thinking is anticipated here; 
 Mr. Spencer, in particular, might have drawn from it his 
 fundamental principle of the correlation of progress and 
 heterogeneity ; and the poet is here found triumphantly 
 
 is any Being in the universe superior to myself." Now, that story 
 (see it in Ingram's Life, ch. xviii.)hasa most dubious aspect, coming 
 as it does from a rather fanatical theist ; and I confess I have always 
 doubted its truth. If it ivere true, it would to a candid critic suggest 
 incipient mania. On the other hand, it is essentially unjust so to 
 discuss Poe's essay as to convey the idea that it ranks low among 
 similar treatises. Professor Stringham calls it worthless, and a 
 waste of time. If the same thing be said of the philosophies of 
 Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel— as it might just as well be— the dis- 
 paragement of Poe would be somewhat discounted. But the candour 
 of the current American criticism of Poe may be gathered from 
 a comparison of the language held towards his fallacies with that 
 used in regard to the merely childish theism of Mr. Lowell and Mr. 
 Lanier, and the random pantheism of Emerson. On this head it 
 may be added that Professor Stringham 's criticism of Poe breaks 
 down even on some scientific issues. He affirms of Poe's doctrine 
 that the universe is in a state of ever-swifter collapse: "than this, 
 nothing could be more at variance with the great law of the conser- 
 vation of energy." There is no such contradiction in the case ; and 
 if there were, it would be equally chargeable against Mr. Spencer's 
 theory of rhythmal disintegration and reintegration. Again, Pro- 
 fessor Stringham charges Poe with showing " fundamental ignorance 
 of astronomy " in saying that " the planets rotate (on their own axes) 
 in elliptical orbits," without noting the need for a source of attrac- 
 tion at the foci of the ellipse. Yet Poe had expressly said in his 
 Addenda to the Eureka (printed before Professor Stringham's critique 
 in the new edition) that the sun's axis of rotation was "not the 
 centre of his figure," and in the main treatise he had cited Lagrange's 
 doctrine as to a variation of the orbits of the spheroids from circle 
 to ellipse, and back again, by reason of variation in their axes. I 
 do not undertake to say that Poe's conception is sound ; but I do 
 say that Professor Stringham has misrepresented him. 
 
 124 
 
POE 
 
 and independently defending the Nebular Hypothesis at 
 a time when former exponents of It had wavered and 
 proposed to abandon It. 
 
 To Dr. Browne's Important commentary It might be 
 added that In the preliminary section Poe emphatically 
 forestalls some of the strongest recent declarations 
 against the absolute Baconian theory of discovery,* that 
 with two sweeps of his blade he demolishes a position 
 which Mr. Balfour has only been able to take by labori- 
 ous assault in his Defence of Philosophic Dotibt ; that he 
 estimates Laplace with the confident discrimination of 
 an expert ; and that he speaks with intelligence on 
 questions of astronomy which all but experts shun. 
 Such is his measure of success, of Impresslveness, in an 
 undertaking in which he finally fails. 
 
 VII 
 
 When, after thus discursively scanning the achieve- 
 ment of Poe, we return to the contemplation of him as 
 a personality, there arises a feeling of absorbing wonder- 
 ment at the strange paradox of his being ; the extra- 
 ordinary union of this regnant Intellect with that ill- 
 starred temperament ; the weakness of the man foiling 
 the' strength of the mind. The facts are plain. While 
 he was writing his most rigorous criticisms, and building 
 up his cosmogony In the white light and dry air of the 
 altitudes of his reasoning Imagination, the man was not 
 merely stumbling under the burden of his constitutional 
 vice as if smitten by sorcery, but was living an emotional 
 life of passionate yearnings and rending griefs. It was 
 
 * Compare Mill, System of Logic, B. vi., ch. 5, § 5 ; Je\'ons, Princi- 
 ples of Science, p. 576 ; Tyndall, Scientific Use of the Imagination and 
 Other Essays, 3rd ed., pp. 4, 8-9, 42-3 ; and Bagehot, Postulates of 
 English Political Economy, Student's ed,, pp. 17-19. 
 
 12c; 
 
POE 
 
 a lamentable life. After his stormy youth, in the latter 
 part of which we find him attacked by the most crushing 
 hypochondria, there came the cruel train of pangs repre- 
 sented by the illness of his wife, who seems to have truly 
 '' died a hundred deaths " before the release came ; and 
 in this period it was, on his own account, that in a state 
 of absolute frenzy between his woe and his bitter 
 poverty,* which seemed to league itself with disease 
 against the young victim, he first gave way to delirious 
 alcoholism. His wife's death left him heart-shaken, the 
 long agony of her decline having deepened his feeling 
 for her into a passion of pitying worship. As years 
 passed on, the unstrung emotionalism of the man made 
 him turn first to one and then to another woman for 
 f sympathy and love — this while he maintained to the 
 outside world, save in his lapses, his grave, lofty, high- 
 bred calm of manner ; and bated no jot of skill or 
 thoroughness in his artistic work. While he makes 
 distracted love to Mrs. Whitman, he never slackens in 
 his keen derision of the transcendentalists, whose cloudy 
 philosophy he could not abide. He writes his story of 
 Hop Frog with his old impassable artistic aloofness, and 
 
 * In an article in Harper's Magazine for May 1887, entitled " The 
 Recent Movement in Southern Literature," the writer, Mr. Charles 
 W. Coleman, jun., says he has before him a series of letters written 
 by Poe's employer on the Richmond Literary Messenger, in which it 
 is complained that Poe " is continually after me for money. I am 
 as sick of his writings as I am of him, and am rather more than half 
 inclined to send him up another dozen dollars, and along with them 
 all his unpublished MSS.," most of which are called " stuff." For 
 his Pym story Poe asks three dollars a page. " In reality," says the 
 employer, "it has cost me twenty dollars per page " — a statement 
 which is not explained. At last comes this: " Highly as I really 
 think of Mr. Poe's talents, I shall be forced to give him notice in a 
 week or so at the furthest, that I can no longer recognise him as 
 editor of the Messenger." One is not highly impressed by the tone 
 of the writer ; but Poe's neediness seems clear. 
 
 126 
 
POE 
 
 writes about it to '* Annie" in a letter touched with 
 hysteria. ''Forced, unnatural, false," "strained, ex- 
 aggerated, and unnatural," are the terms Mr. Stoddard 
 applies to these love-letters and letters of ecstatic 
 friendship ; and we cannot gainsay him here, save in 
 so far as he imputes falsity. The case is one which Mr. 
 Stoddard's primitive scalpel cannot dissect: what seems 
 to him bad acting is neurosis. On the side of the affec- 
 tions Poe's sensitiveness becomes absolute disease ; till 
 the man who was accused of having no heart is wrecked 
 by his heart's vibrations. But the intellect is never 
 really subjected : it is shaken and dethroned at times by 
 the breaking temperament ; but it is unconquered to 
 the last. He becomes almost insane when his engage- 
 ment with Mrs. Whitman is broken : but he aeain 
 collects himself, and he goes his way in silence. It is 
 eminently significant that, as Mr. Ingram notes, he 
 shows no resentment at being charged with aspiring to 
 be a "glorious devil," all mind and no heart,* as he 
 
 * Mr. Stedman in his latest criticism of Foe (Introd. to vol. vi. of 
 new ed. of IVoi'ks, p. 24) says of him, more in the manner of Gris- 
 wold than in that of Mr. Stedman's earlier essay: "A speck of 
 reservation spoiled for him the fullest cup of esteem, even when 
 tendered by the most knightly and authoritative hands. Lowell's 
 A Fable for Critics, declaring 'three-fifths of him genius,' gave him 
 an award which ought to content even an unreasonable man. As it 
 was, the good-natured thrusts of one whose scholarship was un- 
 assailable, at his metrical and other hobbies, drew from him a some- 
 what coarse and vindictive review of the whole satire." It is true 
 that Poe's review is bad in tone ; but that does not put Mr. Stedman 
 in the right, or bear out his zealous panegyric of Mr. Lowell. He 
 oddly omits to cite the " two-fifths sheer fudge," though he seems to 
 think that Poe ought to have welcomed Mr. Lowell's kicks for the 
 sake of his sixpences. As against this addition to the countless one- 
 sided verdicts on Poe, I must point out, (i) that Poe in his critique 
 exhibits anger only over Mr. Lowell's very coarse attack on Southern 
 slaveholders in general ; (2) that though Mr. Lowell's lines on Poe were 
 sufficiently impertinent he makes no protest on that head ; (3) that 
 
 127 
 
POE 
 
 was by some of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. 
 The explanation, I think, clearly is that while he was 
 conscious of his tendency to turn emotions into reason- 
 ings, he also knew his danger from his malady, ah(3 was 
 eager to have it overlooked. " In the strange anomaly 
 of my existence," says the narrator in Berenice — a 
 story which offers abundant data for the '^epilepsy" 
 theory — " feelings with me had never been of the heart, 
 and my passions always were of the mind ; " and here 
 there is a certain touch of self-study ; but we must not 
 be misled by the phrase. Passionately quick, on the 
 one hand, to resent moral aspersions, and extravagant 
 in his emotional outbursts, he had the pride of intellect 
 in a sufficient degree to wish, in his normal condition, 
 to be regarded as above emotional weakness. One who 
 knew him in his latter days thought there was to be 
 detected in him a constant effort for self-control. 
 
 Looking back on his hapless career, and contrasting 
 his deserts with his lot, and with his reputation, one 
 realises with new certainty the worthlessness of most 
 contemporary judgments. There are stories of his 
 scrupulous conscientiousness and of his social consider- 
 ateness such as could be told of few of his detractors ; 
 and yet we find one of his women friends resorting to 
 inaccurate phrenology to account for the defects she 
 
 Mr. Lowell's versification, on which Poe spends most of his blame, 
 was really excessively bad, whatever his "scholarship" may have 
 been, and cried aloud for a retort from the assailed metricist ; and 
 (4) that Foe's show of vindictiveness is as nothing compared with the 
 passionate resentment exhibited in one of Mr. Lowell's letters, 
 recently published (vol. i. p. 109), on the scoreof Poe' shaving charged 
 him with a plagiarism. An obvious blunder in Poe's citation of the 
 passage imitated, he actuall}' declares to have been a wilful perver- 
 sion, though the easy exposure of it would at once tend to discredit 
 Poe's charge. For the rest, Mr. Lowell's critical treatment of 
 Thoreau makes it difficult for some of us to see in him the " knightly 
 and authoritative" critical paragon of Mr. Stedman's worship. 
 
 128 
 
POE 
 
 Inferred in his moral nature. Absolutely innocent in 
 his relations with women, though his unworldly 
 romanticism in their regard carried him into some 
 miserable embroilments, he came to be reputed an 
 extreme libertine ; and his one fatal failing lost him 
 some of the friendships he most needed ; virtue and 
 goodness being not always as merciful as might be — 
 not to say a trifle stupid. One of the most intensely 
 concentrative and painstaking of writers, he has been ..xa-^s*** 
 stigmatised as indolent and spendthrift. To quote once ^.^ 
 more from the judgment of Professor Minto in the 
 Encyclopcedia Brita?niica, a vindication which, it is to 
 be hoped, will set the current* of a true appreciation of 
 the man : — '' Poe failed to make a living by literature, 
 not because he was an Irregular profligate In the vulgar 
 sense, but because he did ten times as much work as he 
 was paid to do — a species of profligacy perhaps, but 
 not quite the same in kind as that with which he was 
 charged by his biographer." Pity and praise, we repeat 
 finally, are far more his due than blame. Morally he 
 lives for us as the high-strung, birth-stricken, suff'ering 
 man, **whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and 
 followed faster," till, instead of the proud, noble 
 countenance of the earlier days, we see in his latest 
 portrait, as M. Hennequin describes it in his vivid 
 French way, a ''face as of an old woman, white and 
 haggard, hollowed, relaxed, ploughed with all the lines 
 of grief and of the shaken reason ; where over the 
 sunken eyes, dimmed and dolorous and far-gazing, 
 there is throned the one feature unblemished still, the 
 
 * In the dearth of adequate estimates of Poe, it is much to be able 
 to add to Mr. Minto's that of Lord Tennyson, published after this 
 essay was first written. According to the newspaper report, the 
 Laureate in conversation or correspondence ranked Poe highest 
 among American men of letters, describing some more popular 
 writers as " pygmies " beside him. 
 
 129 I 
 
POE 
 
 superb forehead, high and firm, behind which his soul 
 is expiring." T'' j pity of it all, and of the inexpressibly 
 tragic conclusion, is too profound to be outweighed by 
 the remembrance that the " delicate and splendid 
 ! cerebral mechanism " remained, for its ratiocinative 
 i purposes, almost intact to the end. But it is by that 
 I magnificent endowment that the world is bound to 
 j remember him. Among the crowd of men of one or of 
 a few capacities, winning distinction by giving their 
 whole strength to this pursuit or that, and living with 
 hardly any other intellectual interest, he stands forth as 
 an intelligence of singularly various equipment and 
 faculty. Science was not too dry for him ; the analysis 
 of style not too subtle or frivolous : he could frame 
 exquisite verse and stringent logic with equal mastery 
 and equal zeal. As a boy he had a turn for swimming 
 such as would have led many men into a career of sheer 
 athletics ; in a paper on The Philosophy of Furniture 
 he embodies a passion for minor aesthetics such as can 
 serve some men for a life's mission. For him there 
 were no parochial boundaries in the world of the 
 intellect : he was free of all provinces ; over proud of 
 his range, perhaps, but with an unusual title to be 
 proud. And thus it is that we are fain to think of him 
 as more than a poet, more than a critic, more than an 
 aesthete, more than a tale-teller, more than a scientific 
 thinker ; a strange combination not seen in every age, 
 and lastingly remarkable as such. He was a great 
 brain. 
 
 130 
 

 ^^^r- 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 (1893) 
 
 I 
 
 In the best known passage of his Life of Sterling", 
 Carlyle describes Coleridge as fascinating the younger 
 spirits of his latter day by reason, above all things, of 
 his philosophic orthodoxy. 
 
 " He was thought to hold — he alone in England — the key of 
 German and other transcendentalisms ; knew the sublime secret of 
 believing by the ' reason ' what the ' understanding ' had been 
 obliged to fling out as incredible ; and could still, after Hume and 
 Voltaire had done their best and worst with him, profess himself 
 an orthodox Christian. . . . To the rising spirits of the young 
 generation he had this dusky sublime character. ..." 
 
 Of the character of this whilom pillar of the faith, 
 Carlyle's own famous portrait has served most English- 
 men as an estimate, marked as it is by all his mastery 
 of light and shade. And inasmuch as portrait-drawing 
 was really the work in which Carlyle excelled, his 
 picture of Coleridge, whom he had seen and listened to, 
 remains one of the documents for a future estimate of 
 the man. But all of Carlyle's portraits are at once 
 dramatic and didactic ; and he is as far from explaining 
 Coleridge as he is from explaining the French Revo- 
 
 131 
 
(^' COLERIDGE 
 
 tution. He is above all things a preacher, even in 
 portrait-painting ; and the end of his performance here 
 is to hold up his subject to the pitying censure of the 
 reader, as being so sadly lacking in those qualities of 
 decision and industry which the critic so highly 
 esteemed in others, though for his own part he was 
 never equal to packing his own portmanteau, and was 
 in his way only less dilatory a worker than Coleridge. 
 The passion for moralising on character, however, is 
 not quite so strong to-day as it was in Carlyle's time, 
 being in part superseded by the desire to understand 
 it ; and now that Coleridge's weakness has been 
 , sufficiently preached upon, it may be possible to get a 
 Hittle fresh profit from a simple study of his organism, 
 iin itself and In relation to its environment. 
 
 II 
 
 The study is now much facilitated by three books — 
 the able critical biography of Mr. H. D. Traill (1884) ; 
 the copious Life by Professor Brandl (1886), which 
 although faulty and at times pedantically ill-judging, 
 is helpful ; and the very full and careful memoir pre- 
 fixed by Mr. Dykes Campbell to his recent (1893) 
 admirable edition of the poetical works.* In these 
 Coleridge becomes fully perceptible as an organism 
 and not merely as a moral warning, or an erring soul 
 in vacuo. He begins to be at once intelligible In his 
 heredity, son as he was of *' a perfect Parson Adams," 
 a cleric and pedagogue of an extreme absent-minded- 
 ness and unambitiousness, that is to say, a brain an d 
 body lacking in certain of the nervous correlations 
 
 * Another Life, by the poet's grandson (Macmillan and Co.), 
 is mentioned by Mr. Campbell as being in preparation. 
 
 132 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 which make for efficiency in life and conduct.* On the 
 side of judgment, the Rev. John Coleridge was capable 
 of quoting Hebrew, as being '^the immediate language 
 of the Holy Ghost," to his rustic congregation at Ottery 
 St. Mary ; on the side of physique, he suffered from 
 gout ; and of his thirteen children, by two marriages, 
 five died before Samuel, the youngest, reached man- 
 hood, while only four of the nine sons outlived the 
 eighteenth century. t The little Samuel (born 1772), 
 on his own telling, grew up "fretful, timorous, and a 
 tell-tale," characteristics which he attributes to domestic 
 mismanagement, but which no management could have ? 
 wholly prevented. His early traits, his sensitive dream- 
 ing, his fretfulness, fitfulness, apprehensiveness, ill- 
 health, and alternate woes and ecstasies, clearly mark 
 a specific temperament, and carry in them the promise 
 of all he is to be. Certainly he was as ill-managed as 
 such a child could be, with a commonplace and un- 
 educated mother, a wool-gathering father, a jealous 
 nurse, an average infant-schooling, and a free run 
 in all sorts of imaginative juvenile literature ; all 
 tBTs" being followed later by months of strangely 
 precocious tavern-haunting with an injudicious uncle, 
 and then by the years of often unhappy schoolboyhood 
 at Christ's Hospital, which were on the whole no better 
 and no worse for him than the rest of his preparation. 
 At no stage were his weaknesses corrected by kindly 
 discipline. Always he was precociously intellectual, 
 never sturdy or prudent ; always excessive in sentiment, 
 lacking anchorage, judgment, and organic tenacity. 
 Yet all along, from the schoolboy days to the last years 
 
 * Coleridge's friend, physician, and biographer, Dr. Gillman, 
 insists on the close resemblance between his temperament and his 
 father's {Life of Coleridge, 1838, p. 3). 
 
 f The father was fifty-five at Samuel's birth, and the boy was his 
 mother's tenth child. 
 
 133 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 of grievous rest, when the battle of life was lost, he 
 had for his associates a subtle and singular charm, a 
 charm at once physical and Intellectual, leaving men in 
 doubt whether they were fascinated by the ever musical 
 monologuing voice or by the strange stream of thought 
 it translated. We might not ill picture his Intellectual 
 life to ourselves as a long fragile tissue of musical 
 speech, attaining here and there to a wondrous irides- 
 cence, and always touched with an obscure pathos of 
 frustration. To this speech boys and men listened with 
 wonder, with pity, with derision, with perplexity ; but 
 they listened always. 
 
 His leading intellectual traits from the first were this 
 abnormal facility of discourse and an equally abnormal^ 
 fluidity of mind. At school he swam in medicine, meta- 
 physics, theology, and the Philosophical Dictionary ; 
 " sported Infidel," according to his own later account — 
 that is to say, rejected with Voltaire the Biblical narra- 
 tives and dogmas ; and at the same time read in the 
 Neo-Platonlsts — in Taylor's English translation, his 
 most trustworthy biographer thinks. At the same time, 
 the physical ill-luck of his early years continued, and a 
 physique which was low on the vascular side to begin 
 with, and had acquired ague in infancy, now caught 
 rheumatic fever, a sufficiently bad preparation for the 
 struggle of existence. 
 
 On his artistic side, again, his plasticity kept him In 
 the imitative stage as long as most beginners ; and his 
 most notable early record Is his lavish enthusiasm for 
 the sonnets of Bowles, then winning a success of mood 
 and mode. It would be hard to try a man's constancy 
 by the test of his persistence in his boyish loves ; but 
 there is something instructive In the nature of Cole- 
 ridge's first literary devotion, and the fact of his later 
 ridicule of its fruits and his still later justification of it. 
 
 134 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 At seventeen he was making countless copies of Bowles 
 for his friends ; at twenty-five he was writing the three 
 ''Nehemiah Higginbottom " sonnets, burlesquing the 
 Bowles manner, as copied by himself and his friends 
 Lamb and Lloyd. Writing his "literary biography," 
 so-called, he apparently comes back to a sympathetic 
 view of Bowles, and as to his own practice confusedly 
 suggests that out of diffidence of his powers he had 
 written in a style which he at the time felt to be inferior ; 
 this without making it clear whether he thinks this 
 style was that of Bowles or another. The changes and 
 the pretence of harmonising them are alike Coleridgean. 
 The explanation off'ered by himself, as Mr. Campbell 
 says, is *'what he was then willing to believe were his 
 reasons for writing the parodies." What is of import- 
 ance to notice is that in his youth Coleridge shows 
 neither much verbal felicity in his own verse (with per- 
 haps the exception of the boyish Genevieve lines),* nor 
 much sense of verbal felicity in others ; for Bowles 
 never attains to more than a feeble tunefulness ; and 
 there lay to the boy's hand in English literature many 
 more delightful performances, which might have been 
 expected to appeal to such an artist as he was one day 
 to"show himself. All that is at all novel or individual 
 in Bowles is the pensive mood ; he in a manner revives 
 the sonnet ; but the technique is quite unoriginal, save 
 for a leaning to new adjectives ending in ''y." Cole- 
 ridge's Sonnet to the Autumnal Moo7i, dated in his six- 
 teenth year, has indeed some strength and melody of 
 flow ; t but these qualities are little developed in his 
 
 * That is, those so entitled, not the poem Love, which Christopher 
 North seems to have had in mind in extolling Genevieve. 
 
 t The Advent of Love stanza, ascribed by himself to his fifteenth 
 year, seems to have been written much later. See Mr. Campbell's 
 note in his edition, p. 641. 
 
 135 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 later verses up to the brief great period, of which the 
 suddenness, the unconnectedness, is as remarkable as 
 the beauty of its fruits. 
 
 In part, no doubt, the lateness of the development of 
 Coleridge's sense of poetic beauty Is to be attributed to 
 the general lack of any such sense In his pastors and 
 masters. It was still the day of mechanical scansion 
 and didactic appreciation. So uncritically had he been 
 taught English that at twenty we find him writing the 
 phrase ''beneath the studious cloisters pale," thus 
 showing that he read Milton's ''cloister's pale" as = 
 "pale cloisters." Headmaster Boyer certainly took 
 special pains to introduce English literature into the 
 studies of the School, beginning In 1784 with English 
 grammar, till then untaught, and later Introducing the 
 accepted poetic classics ; but these did not then include 
 Spenser ; * and not from Boyer would a pupil learn the 
 magic of Milton'st and Shakspere's rhythms. J All the 
 same, the cases of many young poets — Milton, Pope, 
 Keats, Shelley, Poe, Browning, Tennyson — lead us to 
 expect that a great faculty for verse of any kind will 
 
 * Brandl's Life of Coleridge, Eng. trans., p, 17. Cp. the Biographia 
 Literana, ch. i. 
 
 t " The solemn lordliness of Milton " is all Coleridge recognises 
 at twenty-four. (Letter cited in Mr. Campbell's Memoir, p. xxx.) 
 Brandl {Life of Coleridge, Eng. trans., p. 33) speaks of him as 
 imitating Lycidas in the early Monody on the Death of Chatterton ; but 
 the passage on frost and canker-worm to which Brandl refers is only 
 in the later version of the poem, not in the earlier. See both in 
 Mr. Campbell's edition, pp. 8, 61. The echoes of II Penseroso and 
 Comus, which Brandl (p. 46) believes he detects in the Autumnal 
 Moon sonnet, will not bear examination. Only the word " fleecy " 
 is used by both poets. 
 
 X Though Boyer, according to Coleridge's note on Dura Navis 
 (Campbell's ed., p. 2) and his account in the Biographia Literaria, 
 insisted on the value of simplicity of style, and derided the " O 
 thou's " to which Coleridge was always resorting. 
 
 136 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 show itself early, at least to some extent ; and it be- 
 comes a puzzling question^ how Coleridge could go on 
 composing Religious Mtisings and other Sihylline Leaves 
 up till his twenty-fourth year, attaining at most a 
 rhetorical impressiveness and an odic emphasis,* and 
 should then suddenly irradiate in the musical splendours 
 oi Ktchla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner^ 
 and the ethereal harpings of the first part of Christahel. 
 These three masterpieces were begun or done in i797>> 
 his twenty-fifth year. Just after that again there are 
 some successes, such as Loi^e (i 798-99)= <and The Ballad 
 of the Dark Ladie (1798) ; but thenceforth, with very few 
 exceptions, t we have the merely respectable perform- 
 ances of the earlier academic manner ; and to the last 
 Coleridge figures for us as a poet with some magical 
 moments, never quite regained. The why of this is a # j 
 problem that has not even been recognised, much less 
 solved, I and it must surely be worth solving. 
 
 * LewH, or the Circassian Love Chant, which, in Mr. Campbell's 
 edition, is dated 1794, is certainly a lyrical success ; but its real date 
 seems to be 1798. See Brandl, p. 190, and Mr. Campbell's note, 
 p. 567. The poem was first published in the Morning Post, in 1798, 
 and it has much of the quality of the great poems of 1797-98. 
 
 t Among these should be noted the fine poem Dejection, belonging 
 to 1802, and The Snowdrop, a fragment printed for the first time in 
 Mr. Campbell's edition, which has some exquisite lines. The Pains 
 of Sleep (1803) marks clearly the now malefic results of the opium 
 habit, but has much of the drug's inspiration. From this time 
 onward the best of Coleridge's pieces are those which express his 
 penitence and despair, as The Blossoming of the Solitary Date Tree 
 (1805), the blank verse lines (1807) To a Gentleman (Wordsworth), 
 and The Pang More Sharp than All. The musical Day-Dream (? 1807) 
 has bad lapses of technique. 
 
 X Mr. Traill (ch. iii.) fully recognises the isolated character of 
 Coleridge's best poetry, in time and character, but does not attempt 
 to explain the singularity ; and even fixes 1800-4 as the period of a 
 "fatal change of constitution, temperament, and habit," as if 
 Coleridge had been a success at the outset. Mr. Traill speaks as 
 
 137 
 
 ( 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 III 
 
 It may seem an extravagant thing to say, but I can- 
 not doubt that the special quality of this felicitous work 
 is to be attributed to its being all conceived and com- 
 posed under the influence of opium in the first stages of 
 the indulgence — the stages, that is, in which he himself 
 felt as if new-born, before the new appetite itself proved 
 to be a disease.* There is a difficulty about the dating 
 of Kuhla Kha?i, which Coleridge himself attributed to 
 1797, but which Mr. Campbell thinks may belong to 1798. 
 In any case, the particular opium-eating which produced 
 Kuhla Kha?iy declared by Coleridge to have been his 
 first indulgence, is known not to have been the very 
 first ;t and the psychological peculiarity of the shorter 
 
 if Coleridge had caused no distress to friends and kinsmen before 
 1800, whereas he had accumulated a great burden of despair as 
 early as 1796. See the letter to Poole in Mrs. Sandford's Thomas 
 Poole and his Friends, i. 184-193, 
 
 * Since this essay was first published, I find that though practi- 
 cally everybody else had regarded opium as the ruin and not the 
 inspiration of Coleridge as a poet, the shrewd Whately long ago said 
 that the great poems impressed him as the opium dreams of a man 
 of genius. See his Life (abridged ed.), p. 416. 
 
 t He may before have taken it only for physical trouble ; now he 
 took it for mental. {See Mr. Campbell's Memoir, p. x\i\.,note. Cp. 
 Brandl, p. 182.) Mr. Traill, after citing at length (p. 61) Coleridge's 
 own well-known statement, prefixed to the poem, that he had the 
 Kuhla Khan dream after taking an " anodyne," strangely allows 
 (p. 96, note) another of Coleridge's statements to cancel the surmise 
 that the poem was an opium product. He finally decides (p. 100) 
 that the opium-eating "may conceivably have begun" about 1801. 
 But Coleridge himself, in a letter of 17th May, 1801, speaks of 
 having taken laudanum in an illness, and he does not speak of it as 
 a new thing. (See the passage in Mr. Campbell's Memoir, p. Ivii.) 
 It is practically certain that he had taken opium years before. See 
 Mr. W. A. Wright's letter of February 20, 1894, in the Academy, 
 which carries the date to 1796, on the testimony of an unpublished 
 letter of Coleridge. 
 
 138 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 i"^' 
 
 !».*^ 
 
 poem is essentially that of the longer. They are both 
 abnormal to his whole previous technique, which ran to 
 rhetoric and involution, turning thought and feeling to 
 abstraction,* whereas the uniqueness of the new work 
 consists in the extreme concrete simplicity given to 
 visions far aloof from experience. Though both methods 
 are essentially subjective, there has been a psychological 
 inversion ; and though at the time Coleridge had been 
 Intellectually much influenced by the society of Words- 
 worth, and perhaps even more, as Mr. Campbell thinks, 
 by that of Dora Wordsworth, It is clear that something 
 more than these influences came into play. The Rime 
 was projected by Coleridge, on the basis of a dream by 
 his friend Cruikshank ; and Wordsworth did almost 
 nothing to It beyond, as he stated later, suggesting 
 part of the machinery ; his own account being that he 
 withdrew from his preliminary co-operation on it 
 because, as he said, *^our respective manners proved so 
 widely diff'erent that it would have been quite pre- 
 sumptuous in me to do anything but withdraw from 
 an undertaking upon which I could only have been a 
 clog." It was quite in Coleridge's nature thus to be 
 inspired first by his friend's dream and further by 
 Wordsworth's data ; but the artistic evolution is his 
 own, the development being quite un-Wordsworthian : 
 and we know from Wordsworth's characteristically 
 patronising note on the poem in the second edition of 
 the Lyrical Ballads that he disapproved of Its scheme, 
 and thought the Mariner too unsubstantial. We can 
 
 * Mr. Lowell, without suggesting any explanation, pointed out 
 that the " felicity of speech in Coleridge's best verse is the more 
 remarkable because it was an acquisition. His earlier poems are apt 
 to be turgid, and in his prose there is too often a languor of pro- 
 fuseness ..." (Address on the unveiling of Coleridge's bust at 
 Westminster Abbey, May 7th, 1885.) 
 
 139 
 
\ 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 guess, with Lamb, how Wordsworth would have given 
 him a local habitation and a name, a means of livelihood, 
 and a theological system. Coleridge, on the other hand, 
 met the criticism of the didactic Mrs. Barbauld by saying 
 that the poem had too much instead of too little moral — 
 what moral there was having no doubt been suggested by 
 Wordsworth. But Coleridge's poetic bent hitherto had 
 been almost wholly didactic or reflective ; and though his 
 early fancifulness or "shaping spirit of imagination" 
 implied the gift on which the drug worked, it is only as 
 a result of abnormal brain-states that the hew and gfreat 
 performance becomes intelligible. So that what men 
 regard as his mere bane, the drug to which he resorted 
 as a relief from suffering, and which De Quincey declared 
 to have '' killed Coleridge as a poet," is rather, by reason 
 of its first magical effects, the special source of his 
 literary immortality. 
 
 What Coleridge would tend to under the mere in- 
 fluence of Wordsworth is to be seen in The Three 
 Graves: a Fragment of a Sexton's Taley a doggerel 
 narrative of which the management is almost as inept 
 as the versification. Seldom has a striking theme been 
 so lamely handled; and seldom did Wordsworth himself 
 reach worse depths of bathos than Coleridge here 
 flounders-in through scores of stanzas. Such imbecilities 
 as this : 
 
 " It happened then ('twas in the bower 
 A furlong up the wood ; 
 Perhaps you know the place, and yet 
 I scarce know how you should) ' ' 
 
 and this 
 
 ' Well ! it passed off! the gentle Ellen 
 
 Did well nigh dote on Mary ; 
 And she went oftener than before, 
 And Mary loved her more and more : 
 She managed all the dairy," 
 
 14JO 
 
fv 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 represent the serious application of the professed 
 Wordsworthian principles of style to narrative verse by 
 the author of Ktihla Khan, And years after the fourth 
 part of this lamentable ballad had been mercifully 
 closed, we find him penning- the penitent note : — 
 ** Carmen reliqutwt in futurum tempus relegatum. To- 
 morrow ! and to-morrow! and to-morrow ! " If none of 
 his repentances had been better motived, his case had 
 been happier. That he could produce such work after 
 accomplishing the Ancient Mariner"^ is only to be 
 explained on the view that his opium ^tTTmesr^trans- 
 figfured and enskied him, and that in his intervals, as 
 far as art went, he was only an imitative performer of 
 unstable judgment, at times sinking to an artistic abjec- 
 tion on a par with his temperamental collapse. 
 
 Of course, seeing that he took opium more or less to 
 the end, it will not do to say that even for him, with his 
 special gift and constitution, the drug could at any time 
 make all the difference between inspiration and failure. 
 It was the early effects only that seem to have availed 
 for poetry. The anodyne soon wrought him more of 
 mental as well as bodily harm than it could do of good ; 
 and on the other hand it is clear that he set out in life 
 with extraordinary gifts. Lamb's account of his re- 
 markableness at school and in youth is supported by 
 many other testimonies. Including that of Hazlitt, who 
 later in life became his political and personal assailant ; 
 _and he m ade a deep Impression on Wordsworth and 
 -others by his talk long before he could be charged with 
 regular opium-eating. But it remains true, for one 
 thing, that his poetry exhibits the immense differences 
 
 * Such is the dating of Mr. Campbell. One suspects that it 
 represents an earHer imitation of Wordsworth, made before the 
 physiological experience which carried him past at once the theory 
 and the practice of Wordsworth. 
 
 141 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 above set forth ; and for another thing there is some- 
 thing in his whole Hfe and cast of character that squares 
 with the view of him as a strangely compounded crea- 
 ture, capable, under special conditions, of performances 
 quite incommensurable with his average work. He 
 was emphatically a man moved by others, leaning on 
 friends, drifting rudderless before winds of sympathy or 
 necessity, taking shape and colour from anything rather 
 than a central purpose. Opium was for him one more 
 determinant ; and in the first stage, before his fibre was 
 sodden or degenerate with it, it might well be the most 
 marvellous of all the influences he underwent. And it 
 ought surely to be rather a comfort than otherwise thus 
 to find a soul of goodness in the evil thing, to see a 
 compensation in his weakness rather than merely to 
 deplore and denounce it. 
 
 IV 
 
 However that may be, it is clear that if he had never 
 tasted opium, Coleridge's life would have been" no less 
 a failure. Whether or not he might have been cured 
 of his craving or his complaint in a fortnight, as Dr. 
 Brandl thinks, by means of coffee and cognac, he was 
 constitutionally lame in the will ; and the will, considered 
 as a faculty for steady action, is a bodily function to 
 be studied like another. The case may now be past 
 confident diagnosis In detail, but it is broadly clear. 
 Cardiac disease, of which he died, is Indeed early 
 implied in Hazlitt's description of the *' purple tinge" of 
 his complexion ; and whatever were his diathesis there 
 can be no question of the frailty of his temperament. 
 Carlyle's idealistic formula in its unexplalning way 
 covers the fact : Coleridge was a combination of great 
 
 142 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 faculties with a feeble personality. Hence, to begin 
 with, the dazzling- impression which his talk so gene- 
 rally made ; for he had so little of personal poise and 
 self-sufficing character that all his powers and ideas 
 played freely for any society in which he found himself, 
 just as they did in his pencillings on the margin of any 
 book he read. His mind was as a great lamp in the 1 
 hands of a child : there was no temperamental sense of ] 
 dignity, no ordered and conscious and purposive relation 1 
 to life, such as should make a man discriminate in his j 
 activities and confidences ; his way of getting in touch i 
 with the people he met was of a piece with his way of 
 taking shape from his chance circumstances. Southey 
 put it on record that in Coleridge's talk in youth he 
 *' heard the same things repeated to every fresh com- 
 pany, seven times in the week if it were in seven 
 parties," and a clerk at Malta* noted the same habit, 
 which comes out also in the prose writings. He was 
 reminiscent and repetitive without being stable or self- 
 poised — ^nay, because he was not stable or self-poised. 
 It belongs to such a nature to be at once capricious and 
 plastic ; its rare acts of spontaneous volition relate to 
 no general aim, and so have the momentary air of 
 coming of self-will ; while in its normal action it is help- 
 lessly servile to its surroundings. 
 
 And this radical unfittedness, while it brings the 
 natural fineness of the ill-shrined faculties into hig-h 
 relief, must needs affect the play of the faculties them- 
 selves. A greatly efficient mind is one in which great? 
 powers are bent by a strong character to great purposes : 
 and a fine mind whose temperamental spine, so to 
 speak, is feeble, must needs sink into a hundred intel- 
 lectual frailties. A man from the first sees life and the 
 
 * Campbell's Memoir, p. xxv. 
 H3 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 ) problems of life through his temperament, his character, 
 ' as well as through his arguing or talking powers ; and 
 if the temperament be viscous and pliable to others,* 
 his views will tend to be transient, one effacing another 
 till by sheer drifting he has found some final and fixed 
 environment. Thus it is that Coleridge goes on 
 changing and changing in opinion: an "infidel" at 
 school ; a Unitarian and a Radical in youth ; a 
 IHartleyan before his standing is discredited ; an anti- 
 Pittite while his near friends are so ; a Tory reactionist 
 with the majority ; a Kantian, a Fichtean, and a 
 Schellingite in turn ; an orthodox pietist and Church- 
 of-England man when he is unalterably dependent on 
 protection and sustenance, and is no longer capable of 
 fronting" the world on his own feet. Of course the 
 opinions so drifted into are all scientifically worthless ; 
 the final pietism is really more uncritical than the first 
 boyish scepticism can have been. The reasoning and 
 verbalising faculty functions for all views in turn, as it 
 is swayed this way and that, on the flaccid stem of 
 temperament, by this and that wind of contemporary 
 doctrine. In the last refuge, where the winds are 
 mostly tempered to the failing organism, the closing 
 droop is that determined by the inherent weakness — 
 the need to rest on a tradition with a prestige, the 
 reflex clutch at the most august and unconditional 
 > doctrine of salvation. The aging intelligence pays its 
 
 ■ tearful tribute of faith at the behest of the tottering 
 
 i staff on which it leans. 
 
 " •* Coleridge's main change of opinions, then, is a result 
 \ of his mere sense of moral helplessness, his sense of 
 
 [ openness to harsh criticism, his need of a stay on some 
 
 \ 
 
 * He confessed to " the lamentable difficulty I always experienced 
 in . . . abstaining from what the people about me were doing" 
 [Biogyaphia Literaria, ch. x., Bohn ed. p. 83). 
 
 144. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 broad basis of established opinion, after so many specu- 
 lative changes. His later clinging to faith is very much 
 of the nature of his pathetic clinging to the helpful 
 friendship of Poole. There was no ** stalk of carl 
 hemp " in him to keep him up to his theoretic standards. 
 He could criticise unanswerably Wordsworth's canons 
 of poetry, the sudden lift in his own practice having 
 involved the critical perception of Wordsworth's errors 
 of reasoning and of art ; but while he had been with 
 Wordsworth he had been swayed to adopt them ; and \ 
 at all times he w as a kind of intellectual ',vyj needing | 
 some kind and stable housemate to cling to. He left I 
 his wife because she needed that he should support her, 
 temperamentally as well as financially — in the former 
 sense when he failed in the latter. Dorothy Words- 
 worth, who as it was gave up her life to her brother, 
 and to whom Coleridge seems to have been at one time 
 attached, might conceivably have made his life very 
 different had she been his wife, though she would have 
 had a sore handful. It is instructive to see how much 
 more steadily he worked when he was cared for by wise 
 friends, as the Clarksons, the Morgans, and the Gill- 
 mans, who checked his laudanum, the once magical 
 servant which had grown to be so dreadful a master. 
 Thus weak, and needing inward as well as outward 
 support, he could at times seek to win social credit by 
 commonplace abuse of opinions with which at other 
 times he admittedly sympathised. He speaks of being 
 *' disgusted " with the '' infidelity " of men more stead- 
 fast and single-minded than him.self; and in his later 
 years he invariably speaks of Frenchmen with the 
 silliness of an ignorant Cockney.* It is instructive to 
 contrast two of his utterances on Atheism, one in his 
 
 * See the Biog. Lit., ch. x. (Bohn ed., p. 85) ; Ashe's ed. of Mis- 
 ceUanics, pp. 21, 56 ; and Table Talk, Ashe's ed., per index. 
 
 145 K 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 operose hostile critique on the trivial tragedy Bertram^ 
 a critique later included in the Biographia Literaria ; the 
 other in intercourse with his friend and disciple AUsop. 
 The written passage declares that it cannot 
 
 "be denied without wilful blindness that the so-called system of 
 nature (/>., materialism, with the utter rejection of moral responsi- 
 bility, of a present Providence, and of both present and future 
 retribution) may influence the characters and actions of individuals, 
 and even of communities, to a degree that almost does away the 
 distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of the 
 future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dream." 
 
 The reference is to the Systeme de la Nature of d'Hol- 
 bach ; and the pretence is that its doctrine caused the 
 Terror in the Revolution. The man who could thus 
 rant for vulgar orthodoxy had held by the Revolution 
 till after the Terror was over ; had denounced the 
 English Christians who urged an exterminating war 
 with France in the name of Christianity:* and 
 was wont to confess in abject remorse that his own 
 life, with all its religion, had been ruined and shamed 
 by self-indulgence. And he was later to say to his 
 friend : 
 
 " The law of God and the great principles of the Christian religion 
 would have been the same had Christ never assumed humanity. It 
 is for [saying] these things and such as these, for telling unwelcome 
 truths, that I have been called an Atheist. It is for these opinions 
 that William Smith assured the Archbishop of Canterbury that I 
 was (what half the clergy are in their lives) an Atheist. Little do 
 these men know what Atheism is. Not one man in a thousand has 
 either strength of mind or goodness of heart [enough] to be an 
 Atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in ten thousand has goodness of 
 heart or strength of mind to be an Atheist. And were I not a 
 Christian, and that only in the sense in which I am a Christian, I 
 would be an Atheist with Spinoza." f 
 
 * See the note to Religious Musings in Mr. Campbell's ed., p. 56. 
 t Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, edited by 
 Thos. Allsop, 3rd ed., p. 47. 
 
 146 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 But yet again the opium drunkard would speak of 
 the sturdy and wholesome Richard Carlile as *'that 
 wretched man," and compare his mind to a hell ; this 
 perhaps within a day or two of adjuring the same 
 interlocutor : 
 
 " Pray for me, my dear friend, that I may not pass such another 
 night as the last. While I am awake and retain my reasoning 
 powers, the pang is gnawing ; but I am, except for a fitful moment or 
 two, tranquil ; it is the howling wilderness of sleep that I dread." * 
 
 To use one of his own phrases, he is the vassal of 
 vicissitude, such vicissitude as makes the idea of a 
 continuous personality behind it seem more fantastic 
 than a dream of the changing of souls. 
 
 V 
 
 How far this discontinuity of thought is to be set 
 down to the opium habit, which would as it were double 
 the swing of the pendulum, and how much to constitu- 
 tional irrelation, is a matter for mere guess and sugges- 
 tion. It stands to reason that a physiological process 
 which yielded such artistic fruits as the Rime and Kuhla 
 Khan would affect to some extent the more abstract 
 states of the intelligence, and certainly the state of the 
 more intellectual emotions, thus developing his critical 
 perceptions, which ran less risk than the poetic afflatus 
 of being soon worn out. But he is discontinuous by 
 nature. His intellectual life from first to last is that of j 
 an inefTectually gifted man, with inspired moments and j 
 much vain fluency. The outstanding characteristics of 
 his style at all times are its uncommon copiousness and 
 its frequent kindlings into either luminous theory or 
 
 '^ lUd. pp. 42, 49. See also the letter to Wade (cited by Mr. 
 Campbell, p. x. c. ii.)i in which Coleridge compares himself to a 
 "spirit in hell." 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 vital freshness of phrase and argument. To educated 
 or uneducated readers and hearers, we can see, he must 
 always have been a remarkable performer in speech : 
 even a hostile reader must admit the general security 
 and masterliness of his hold of language, in comparison, 
 for instance, with the performance of Hazlitt, whose 
 command of right expression, at times noticeable, is 
 on the whole so unoriginal. Coleridge's prose utter- 
 ance, wisdom apart, has the dignity which his char- 
 acter lacked. There is no better expression either of 
 the effect his talk generally produced on new hearers, 
 or of the impression often set up by his writing, than 
 his own striking paragraph on the wonderfulness of 
 prose, itself one of the best illustrations of his style : 
 
 " It has just struck my feelings that, the Pherecydean origin of 
 prose being granted, prose must have struck men with greater 
 admiration than poetry. In the latter, it was the language of 
 passion and emotion ; it was what they themselves spoke and heard 
 in moments of exultation, indignation, etc. But to hear an evolving 
 roll, or a succession of leaves, talk continually the language of 
 deliberate reason in a form of continued preconception, of a Z already 
 possessed when A was being uttered — this must have appeared god- 
 like. I feel myself in the same state when, in the perusal of a sober 
 yet elevated and harmonious succession of sentences and periods, I 
 abstract my mind from the particular passage, and sympathise with 
 the wonder of the common poople, who say of an eloquent man — 
 He talks like a book ! " * 
 
 But save for the points of light and solidity his prose 
 is unedifying and unconvincing. '* Glorious islets in 
 the haze " is Carlyle's most favourable hint of his philo- 
 sophic monologuing ; and the description holds pretty 
 well of all his prose works. His dilatoriness and dis- 
 cursiveness are not to be matched in serious literature 
 of good standing; and his most formal and concise 
 reasoning, as in the theses and scholia of the twelfth 
 
 * Given in the Remains and in Ashe's vol. of Miscellanies, p. 183. 
 
 148 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 chapter of the Biographia Literaria^ can be absolutely 
 incoherent In logic, putting the vaguest analogies for 
 steps in sequence.* If this can happen when he is bent 
 on precision, it is small wonder that his talk should, 
 as Hazlitt put it, " start from no premisses and come to 
 no conclusion ; " that his books should be assortments 
 of fragments ; and that his treatise on Method should 
 be a perfect illustration of methodlessness.t It is vain 
 to claim, as De Quincey did, that there was a cosmic' 
 sweep in his logic : he may at times continue an argu-T 
 ment after a digression, but even then the digression is\ 
 likely to be ''gross as a mountain, open, palpable;"' 
 and often there is no solution, no return. There are | 
 hopeless disjunctions in his mental processes ; it is a * 
 pathological case ; and when he explains that he sus-^ ^ 
 pends his essay on Imagination In the Biographia on the^^ 
 advice of a friend, he is only giving himself an excuse 
 for a stoppage which would have occurred anyhow.:!: 
 His mind was incapable of the steadfast persistence! 
 needed to round a system of philosophy. And so it is ' 
 with his life : Its solutions of continuity are fatally 
 chronic. He would have left Christ's Hospital to be a 
 cobbler's apprentice, which his father, clergyman and 
 pedagogue, would placidly have made of him to begin 
 with ; he was eager again to be a surgeon ; he fled 
 
 * Ferrier pointed out {Blackwood's Magazine. March 1840, p. 295) 
 that several of the theses are copied in whole or in part from 
 Schelling, and worsened in adaptation. This point is discussed 
 below. 
 
 t He complained that the editors of the E^icyclopadia MetropoUtana, 
 for which it was written, "bedeviled, interpolated, and topsy- 
 turvied" his original performance. Campbell's Memoir, p. ciii. ; 
 Brandl, p. 357. It is difficult to believe that they lessened its fitness 
 for its purpose. 
 
 \ As to this, however, see section vi., hereinafter, for a still more 
 damaging explanation. 
 
 149 
 
L- 
 
 COLERTDGE 
 
 from college and enlisted in the dragoons for reasons 
 still only to be guessed at, and went back as inconse- 
 quently ; on a hint from a friend he planned the emigra- 
 tion to the Susquehannah with Southey and the rest ; 
 then he dallied with the idea, dropped it, and resumed it 
 as chance swayed, and finally was bitterly reproachful 
 when the saner Southey, seeing the madness of it, 
 definitely threw it over. He married a girl whom 
 \ chance threw in his society, and soon found he had 
 been all along in love with another. He made friends, 
 good and bad, by good luck or bad, and at one time or 
 other he had a rupture with nearly every one of them — 
 with Lloyd, Lamb, Southey, Stuart, Poole, Words- 
 worth, the Wedgwoods. He longed to be back with 
 his wife when he was away from her in Germany, and 
 could not live with her when he returned. Yet again, 
 when he had gone fortuitously to Malta, and had got a 
 remunerative and easy post there, he grew sick for 
 home, and threw up the situation. Throughout his 
 life we find him drifting all over England, from place to 
 place, from home to home, restless, rootless, impotent. 
 As with his life, so with his opinions. Owing no doubt 
 to the moral support of friends like Poole, who saw how 
 the Terror had been wrought by the machinations of 
 Burke and the noblesse and the Anglo-Prussian coalition 
 against the Republic, he maintained his enthusiasm for 
 the French Revolution when the common run of 
 Englishmen were recoiling at its excesses ; denouncing 
 Pitt and Burke and acclaiming Tooke as late as 1796 : 
 away from his " beloved Poole," in Germany (whither 
 he went in 1798) and elsewhere, he turned commonplace 
 patriot 'and Tory when the Directory and the First 
 Consul proceeded on the path of conquest that had been 
 fatally marked out for the Republic by Its enemies. 
 And at every stage of his progress he was enthusiast!- 
 
 150 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 cally convinced : he read Burke in 1795 with '' horror," 
 and assailed Pitt with fury ; and in later years he was 
 just as horror-stricken and enraged with everything of 
 the nature of Jacobinism. So in his philosophical 
 opinions he was generally the convert of the last philo- 
 sopher he had read, naming one child after Hartley and 
 another after Berkeley, and later successively taking on 
 the colour of one German transcendentalist after another, 
 always more or less unable to say whether a given 
 opinion was theirs or his. It was not mere unscrupu- 
 lousness : he would avow his general debt freely : it 
 was often sheer breach of recollection. Lessing, 
 Herder, Kant, Schiller, Schlegel, furnished him with 
 aesthetic and critical ideas which he far more often ap- 
 propriated than he acknowledged them ; it is impossible 
 to be sure when his thoughts are his own. On the side 
 of his finances, such a man must needs be in a parlous 
 state, however systematically he was helped by friends 
 and admirers. At the height of his fame (1821) he was 
 driven to write MS. sermons "for lazy clergymen, who 
 stipulate that the composition must not be more than 
 respectable for fear they should be desired to publish 
 the visitation sermon."* Always embarrassed, he went 
 on spending hugely on his then costly opium, perpetu- 
 ally failing in his literary promises, planning books 
 which he neither wrote nor could write, announcing 
 series of lectures and beginning a week late or missing 
 a night, unless he was with friends who kept him 
 wound up. For the worst of these things, as for his 
 relapses into opium drinking, he had fits of abject 
 remorse ; but the worst things were only the acute 
 phases of a congenital diathesis, an obscure discon- 
 tinuity of nerve structure. 
 
 * Letter to Allsop, vol. cited, p. 85. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 About his perpetual changes of opinion, on the other 
 hand, though he directly and indirectly sought to pal- 
 liate or justify some of them, he had no shame : no 
 instinct of gravity or self-respect could ever make him 
 look round a new position circumspectly enough to 
 make sure whether he could stand to it. He derided 
 his old opinions as jauntily as he embraced new, ex- 
 claiming against his ^* squeaking penny-trumpet of 
 sedition"* when he began to turn Tory, and contemn- 
 ing all scepticism when he began to turn orthodox. 
 Some of his changes are hardly credible. In Allsop's 
 volume we are told how he sympathetically cited the 
 *' beautiful tale of Tieck " which sets forth that beggars 
 are social blessings inasmuch as they move us to 
 charity ; and we have the note of his own writing in 
 which he praises the *' true and touching words " of the 
 lady who in the story laid down that view, and says he 
 ''cannot refrain from praying Inwardly that the time 
 may be far distant when such sentiment shall be 
 scouted by our women."! Yet in his own notes on 
 Sir Thomas Browne, made in 1802, on a passage 
 laying down the very same doctrine : 
 
 " Statists that labour to contrive a commonwealth without any 
 poverty, take away the object of our charity, not only not under- 
 standing the commonwealth of a Christian, but forgetting the 
 prophecies of Christ," 
 
 he made the comment : 
 
 " O, for shame! for shame! Is there no fit object of charity but 
 abject poverty ? And what sort of a charity must that be which 
 wishe§ misery in order that it may have the credit of relieving a 
 
 * Letter cited by Mr. Campbell (under date 1798), p. xlii, 
 t Letters, etc., as cited, pp. 35-38. This was late in Coleridge's 
 life. 
 
 152 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 small part of it — pulling down the comfortable cottages of inde- 
 pendent industry to build almshouses out of the ruins ! " * 
 
 This earlier and incomparably saner utterance Cole- 
 ridge would in his last years, no doubt, have dismissed 
 as a superficial and shallow view,t proper to the pre- 
 paratory period of Spinozism and heterodoxy, in which 
 he held by Unitarianism because he recoiled from the 
 ethics of the doctrine of the Atonement, later felt by 
 him to be metaphysically sound, inasmuch as it alone 
 could give him comfort on his own account. Allsop, 
 whose sympathy with Coleridge is not very intelligible, 
 insists that '* Coleridge ever retained the convictions of 
 his early earnest youth ; " X and we have seen his re- 
 markable declaration to this friend on the subject of 
 Atheism. But Allsop concedes that *' in later years, 
 when his health failed, when his bodily sufferings were 
 great and constant, he leant to a system, a scheme 
 rather, which should, if it might be, reconcile [ortho- 
 dox] religion with philosophy ; " and his later writings 
 abound in asseverations of utter Christian orthodoxy.§ 
 Then his freethinking protests to Allsop were only 
 one more illustration of his profound temperamental 
 and mental inconstancy, which could permit of vacilla- 
 tion almost to the last. TJoafe-sugh a mind should ever 
 
 * Ashe's ed. of Miscellanies, p. 304. 
 
 t Cp. the note cited in Mr. Campbell's Notes, p. 586, 
 
 X Pref. to work cited, 2nd ed. Compare the equally confident 
 conviction of Dr. Gillman {Life, p. 225, &c.), another intimate, to the 
 contrary. It is plain that Coleridge was always vacillating. 
 
 § Compare the conclusion of the Biographia Literaria, and the 
 Statesman's Manual and its appendices. From protestations of piety 
 he was capable of passing into a peculiarly rabid fanaticism. Thus 
 we have him declaring: "If men .... acknowledge no national 
 unity, nor believe with me in Christ, I have no more personal 
 sympathy with them than with the dust beneath my feet" {Tahle 
 Talk, May 3, 1832). To this complexion came the creed of professed 
 love and brotherhood. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 have acquired for itself a general authority with critical 
 men, as apart from any estimate of its particular 
 \ doctrines, is a proof of the ease with which men can 
 t be impressed where there is a genius for expression : 
 j that such a hfelong turncoat and victim of his own 
 moral Impotence should be to the last ready to hector 
 and lecture on the faults of others, real or Imagined, is 
 a striking proof of the tenacity of the instinct of self- 
 esteem even In a foundering soul, periodically sunk in 
 despair. 
 
 VI 
 
 Not less remarkable, perhaps, is the fact that 
 Coleridge won and for a time kept his philosophic 
 prestige despite of his being convicted of plagiarisms 
 unparalleled in literary history. I have said that his 
 sins in this kind often came of sheer breach of recollec- 
 tion ; and they are so gross that they rather help us to 
 understand his other lapses of memory than become 
 Intelligible from these. They make It clear, indeed, 
 that his own accounts of the growth of his opinions can 
 never be trusted. When he assures us that where he 
 agrees with Schelling and Schlegel he is often only 
 using their words for thoughts he had himself attained 
 to,* we remember how he could announce as ready for 
 the press a book of which nothing was ever written, t 
 and we are forced to conclude that such coincidences 
 as he alleges are hallucinations. The worthlessness of 
 his testimony on disputable points may be sufficiently 
 seen from his explicit allegation ::t — '*No one has 
 
 * Biog. Lit., ch. ix. (Bohn ed. p. 72). 
 
 t Cp. Allsop as cited, pp. 81-3 ; Miscellanies, as cited, p. 18 ; and 
 Campbell's Memoir, p. cxxii. 
 ;;: Biog. Lit., ch. x. p. loC, 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 charged me with tricking out in other words the 
 thoughts of others," when he has in the previous 
 chapter * admitted that he has been charged with 
 plagiarism. Mr. Traill's statement t that Coleridge 
 knew nothing of Schlegel when he coincided with his 
 views of Shakspere, is disproved by documentary 
 evidence. Coleridge himself only claimed that he had 
 anticipated Schlegel in early talk and in his first lectures 
 at the Royal Institution, which (as usual) he misdated 
 when making the claim. They were delivered in 1808, 
 the year of Schlegel's lectures at Vienna.^ But Mr. 
 Traill's denial refers to the preserved reports of the 
 lectures of 1811-12 and the notes of 1818. Now 
 Coleridge himself admits in his ninth lecture of the 
 course of 1811-12 that he had seen Schlegel's book ; 
 and in a letter to Crabb Robinson § he accorded 
 Schlegel unmeasured praise as a commentator. What 
 seems true is that Coleridge as early as 1798 pro- 
 pounded to Hazlitt a view of Hamlet which anticipated 
 Schlegel's. But the view in question was no very 
 recondite reflection, being indeed only a pathetic inter- 
 pretation of Hamlet in terms of Coleridge's own fatal 
 tendency to talk rather than act ; || and the influence of 
 Schlegel is clear on many other points. Robinson 
 noted at the outset of the lecturing (1808) that the 
 discourses '* adopted in all respects the German doc- 
 
 * Biog. Lit. p. 72. 
 
 + Coleridge, p. 165. 
 
 % See Campbell's Memoir, p. Ixxvi. and Ashe's ed. of the Lecture 
 Notes (Bohn), pp. 30, 127, 342-3. 
 
 § See it cited by Brandl, p. 322. 
 
 II The essence of this conception, as it happens, was long before 
 expressed by Henry Mackenzie in his essay on Hamlet in The 
 Mirror (Nos. 99 and 100, under dates April 18 and 22, 1780). This 
 very sane and intelligent criticism anticipates, among other things^ 
 Lamb's explanation of Hamlet's violence towards Ophelia. 
 
U'^^\V'->^ 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 trlnes, clothed with original illustrations and adapted to 
 an English audience."* Again, Dr. Brandl notes 
 how he argued on primeval culture *Mn such close 
 connection with Herder's Kalligone that Crabb Robin- 
 son's notes of the lecture read almost like the index to 
 the first chapter of that work," and that in other 
 lectures of the course he clearly follows Kant's Kritik 
 der Urtheilskraft and Metaphysik der Sitten^ as well as 
 Lessing's Hamhurgische Drmnaturgie, No. 69. 
 
 There can be no doubt that Coleridge owed much to 
 the Dramahirgie in general ; but seeing that number 69 
 is itself mainly a transcription from Wieland, who 
 made a defence of Shakspere which must have occurred 
 to many readers, the particular parallel cannot be 
 pressed, and we are reminded that it is easy to press 
 parallels too far. We may even say with Mr. Lowell : 
 '*He owed much to Lessing, something to Schiller, 
 and more to the younger Schlegel ; but he owed most 
 to his own sympathetic and penetrative imagination, "t 
 In such matters the very plasticity shown by the re- 
 ceptive faculty is itself a kind of originality ; and it is 
 easy to point to luminous criticisms in Coleridge's 
 notes which are all his own. On the other hand, 
 however, Coleridge has made a number of appro- 
 priations in philosophy which cannot be so creditably 
 accounted for ; and we should miss some all-important 
 items in the diagnosis of his mind if we overlooked 
 them. "^ ""' 
 
 We have seen that the charge of borrowing from 
 Schelling and Schlegel had been urged against him 
 during his lifetime ; and it was renewed by De Quincey 
 in 1834 ;:t l^^t it was in Professor Ferrier's paper of 
 
 * Brandl, p. 296. 
 
 t Address on the unveiling of the bust at Westminster Abbey. 
 
 + TaiVs Magazine, Sept, 1834. 
 
 156 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 1840 * that his practices were most damagingly exposed. 
 It undertakes to show, with regard to the Biographia 
 Literarta, that 
 
 "One of the most distinguished English authors of the nineteenth 
 century, at the mature age of forty-five, succeeded in founding by 
 far the greater part of his metaphysical reputation — which was very 
 considerable — upon verbatim plagiarisms from works written and 
 published by a German youth when little more than twenty-five 
 years of age." 
 
 It cannot judicially be questioned that Ferrler made 
 out his case : the answers made by Hare to De 
 Quincey t and by Sara Coleridge to Ferrier break down 
 as vindications. The worst of the case is that Cole- 
 ridge's half admissions of indebtedness, and claims to 
 original attainment of the same Ideas, cover many 
 pages of deliberate translation and adaptation ; and 
 that, as Ferrler from his metaphysical standpoint 
 put it, 
 
 "In every instance in which we meet with remarks more than 
 usually profound, bearing upon the higher mataphysics, it is 
 Schelling and not Coleridge that we are reading." 
 
 Coleridge, indeed, is at times flatly disingenuous, 
 parading the acknowledgment of a trifle when he is 
 borrowing the whole gist of a passage, and professing 
 to translate "in part" a paragraph of forty-nine lines ■ 
 in which his own contribution is only six. It becomes \ 
 difficult to resist Ferrier's destructive suggestion that 
 his alleged reason for stopping short in the chapter on 
 the Imagination Is a feint ; and that the chapter really 
 stopped because the scattered suggestions of Schelling 
 on which Coleridge had begun to work (he re-adopted 
 from Schelllng's Germanlsed-Greek the term '^esem- 
 
 * "The Plagiarisms of S. T. Coleridge," Blackwood's Magazine, 
 March 1840. 
 t British Magazine, Jan. 1835. 
 
 IS7 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 plastic " which he professed to have coined) were not 
 carried to any clear exposition — that the Eng-lish writer, 
 in short, had to stop because his original did not help 
 him out. Yet further, Ferrier, proceeding" on a cue 
 from Hamilton, shows in detail that all the learning on 
 philosophical history paraded in the fifth chapter of the 
 Biographia is silently stolen from the German writer 
 Maass ; and yet again that Coleridge's lecture (xiii) 
 On Poesy and Art is ''closely copied, and many 
 parts of it translated, from Schelling's Discourse upon 
 I the Relatio7i in which the Poetic Arts stand to Nature.^'' 
 » But even this is not all. Hamilton (forgetting that 
 
 Ferrier had given the details as to Maass on his own 
 prompting, and making the general charge as one to 
 be added to Ferrier's list) followed up the charge of 
 plagiarism on this head with one of blundering, 
 declaring that the chapter in the Biographia Literaria 
 on the history of the doctrine of Association, "in so 
 far as it is of any value, is a plagiarism, and a blunder- 
 ing plagiarism, from Maass." Pointing out some of 
 the blunders, Hamilton goes on to characterise Cole- 
 ridge as a 'Miterary reaver, whose ignorance of French 
 alone freed France from contribution." 
 
 "Coleridge's systematic plagiarism," he adds, "is perhaps the 
 most remarkable on record — taking all the circumstances into 
 account, the foremost of which, certainly, is the natural ability of the 
 culprit. But sooth to say, Coleridge had in him more of the ivy 
 than of the oak — was better able to clothe than to create. The 
 publication of his literary Table-Talk, etc., shows that he was in the 
 habit of speaking — as his Biographia, etc., show that he was in the 
 habit of writing — the opinions of others as his own." * 
 
 All this is unhappily true. One other decisive illus- 
 tration may serve, regarding at once the Table-Talk 
 
 * Hamilton's ed. of Reid's Works, 1846, p. 893. 
 
 158 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 and the writing. In the former, under date June 15, 
 1827, we have this remark : — 
 
 " Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first 
 sight, but I am in the habit of realising to myself Magnetism as 
 length ; Electricity as breadth or surface; and Galvanism as depth." 
 
 Now, this theory, whatever It be worth, Is a plain 
 adaptation from Schelling- ; and It Is further embodied 
 at length In Coleridge's so-called Theory of Life — that 
 is. In the essay so entitled, published by Dr. Seth 
 Watson In 1848, and described by him as a joint 
 production of Coleridge and Dr. Glllman, but, In view 
 of the style, probably rightly claimed by Mr. Ashe * as 
 substantially Coleridge's. Glllman may have contri- 
 buted some of the natural-history data ; but It Is 
 Incredible that anybody but Coleridge can have put 
 together without acknowledgment such an undisguised 
 compilation of the published views of another philo- 
 sopher. Its main thesis is the ancient and familiar 
 one, maintained by Goethe as well as Schelling, and 
 adopted Indifferently for their contrary purposes by 
 some Theosophlsts and some Atheists — that "life" is 
 not to be defined in terms of any merely biological 
 data, but is to be regarded as embracing the whole 
 field of things, and Is to be defined as '' the principle of 
 Individuation." This "individuation" Is a character- 
 istic existing in a low degree In a metal, in a higher 
 degree In insects, fishes, and Inferior animals, and in 
 the highest degree in man. Then the principle of 
 Individuation is sought to be brought in line with 
 physics by the generalisation that "a power acting 
 exclusively in length Is (wherever it be found) magnet- 
 ism ; that a power which acts both in length and breadth 
 is (wherever it be found) electricity ; and finally, that a 
 
 * In the prefatory note to the essay in his volume of the 
 Miscellanies. 
 
 159 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 power which, together with length and breadth, In- 
 cludes depth likewise. Is (wherever It be found) construc- 
 tive agency." This last is first Identified with chemical 
 agency, but further affirmed to be at work In organic 
 reproduction ; and the primary magnetism Is declared 
 to be, ''to the same kind of power, working as re- 
 productive, what the root is to the cube of that root." 
 For the rest, the "depth" of Inorganic bodies is pro- 
 nounced to be constituted by their gravity. It is 
 hardly necessary to discuss the scientific value of this 
 theorem, further than to say that It Is a most instructive 
 example of what can be done in the way of sham- 
 definition and make-believe science by an elastic Intelli- 
 gence with great command of utterance and forms of 
 dialectic, great confidence in Its own guesses, and no 
 concern whatever for scientific evidence. But whatever 
 be Its value, It is necessary to put distinctly on record, 
 what Dr. Brandl only hints, that It Is In every detail a 
 simple restatement, albeit with ovei^sights, of views 
 advanced by Schelling in his Ideen zur Philosophie der 
 Natur{i'jg'j), his Von der Weltseele (1798), his Einleitung 
 zii seinem Entwurf eines Systems der Natur-philosophie 
 (1799) and his Darstelltmg des Systems der Philosophie 
 (1801) and later works.* Coleridge certainly does not 
 
 * An excerpt from the impartially made summary of the last- 
 mentioned work in Noack's Philosopliie-Geschichtliches Lexlkon will 
 suffice to show some of the correspondences : " Die Cohasion, als 
 Function der Lange, activ gedacht, ist Magnetismus, und die 
 Materie in Bezug auf sich selbst als Gauzes gedacht, ist ein 
 unendlicher Magnet .... Cohasions-verminderung, absolut be- 
 trachtet, ist Erwarmung ; die Warme wird auf dieselbe Weise 
 
 geleihet und mitgetheilt, wie die Elektricitat Im Licht ist die 
 
 absolute Identitiit selbst, d. h. das Licht ist dieselbe als Thatigkeit, 
 nicht als Kraft. Die Warme ist eine blosse Existenzweise des 
 Lichts .... Weder durch Magnetismus, noch durch Elektricitat 
 wird die Totalifat des dynamischen Processes dargestellt, sondern 
 durch den chemischen Process, welcher jenebeiden in sich aufnimmt, 
 
 i6q 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 fufly expound Schelllng's system : he entirely overlooks 
 the phenomena of Light and Heat, which Schelling 
 included in his formulas ; but it was clearly from 
 Schelling that he took his scheme, such as he made it. 
 The nakedness of the plagiarism is somewhat covered 
 by the early avowal in the Biographia : 
 
 " For readers in general, let whatever shall be found in this or any 
 future work of mine that resembles, or coincides with, the doctrines 
 of my German predecessor, though contemporary, be wholly 
 attributed to him ; provided that the absence of distinct references 
 to his books, which I could not at all times make with truth as 
 designating citations or thoughts actually derived from him, and 
 which I trust would after this general acknowledgment be super- 
 fluous, be not charged on me, as ungenerous concealment or 
 intentional plagiarism," * 
 
 But the avowal, which Ferrier showed to be extremely 
 misleading, is on the face of it equivocal ; and when 
 we remember Coleridge's readiness to impute plagia- \ 
 rism to others,! his singular laxity of practice, which ! 
 extended to his verse translations, :{: becomes an im- \ "^ 
 portant datum in our conception of his character, and 
 
 durch beide vermittelt wird und mit dem Galvanismus identisch ist. 
 Alle so genannten Qualitaten der Materie sind blosse Potenzen der 
 Cohasion," etc. A theorem of Length, Breadth, and Depth is 
 further wrought out in Schelling's work on Bnnio (1802), to the end 
 of rising from the conception of space, the " absolute equality of the 
 three dimensions," to that of a " quadrate " formed in union with 
 the "infinite idea of things." Coleridge's final doctrine of the 
 Trinity, again, may be clearly traced to Schelling's further theorem 
 that the Infinite, the Finite, and the Eternal, form a trinity in unity ; 
 the Finite in itself being equal to the Infinite, though emerging as a 
 suffering and temporarily defeated God, the Infinite being the Spirit, 
 which is the unity of all things, and so on. 
 
 * Ch. ix. p. 74. 
 
 t For instance, Erasmus Darwin and Scott. See Allsop, as cited, 
 pp. 27, 29, and 186 ; and compare the references to Hume in ch. v. 
 of the Biographia, end. 
 
 X See Mr. Campbell's Notes, pp. 614-621, and Ferrier's article. 
 
 161 L 
 
4 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 in our estimate of the value of the esteem accorded to 
 him as a thinker. So is the drift of the Theory of Life 
 in itself. In Schelling's formulas there is an elusive 
 germ of scientific suggestiveness. Of Coleridge's essay, 
 albeit a work of great imaginative grasp, capable of 
 inspiring other minds to more durable work, the main 
 effect is to reduce the word ** life " to utter insignificance 
 by making it stand for the entire universe, as if it were 
 his destiny to turn language positively or negatively to 
 the frustration of real knowledge. 
 
 VII 
 
 Yet the fact of Coleridge's influence over young and 
 other minds in his latter days is one of the salient facts 
 of English intellectual life in the second quarter of the 
 century, and it calls for recognition and explanation. 
 . It is to be understood through parallel cases, and 
 through a study of the historic circumstances. He 
 brought to the task of vindicating the orthodoxies much 
 on the one hand of the verbal or talking gift of Dryden, 
 ^ho, similarly pliable and unmasculine, gave such 
 / ^ fascination to his many changes of faith ; and on the 
 other hand much of the full-toned ratiocinative manner 
 of Burke, who clothed common reactionary prejudice 
 with such lavish trappings of apparently reasoning 
 rhetoric* All three alike made great play with bad 
 cases ; all three were either admittedly or demonstrably 
 
 * It is instructive to compare the portraits of Dryden and Cole- 
 ridge in particular. Both are of lax tissue : and there can be no 
 more complete misconception of Dryden than Mr. Swinburne's 
 likening of him to Browning's great-jawed "crown-grasper" (Mis- 
 ^ qllanics, p, 26). Vascular degeneration is part of the medical 
 
 < diagnosis for both poets, and is apparent in the last illness of Burke 
 1/also. 
 
 162 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 swayed by Influences incompatible with just judgment ; 
 and all three found willing hearers — Dryden latterly in 
 the least degree, but only because his last cause was 
 least luckily chosen, as regards popularity. If Dryden 
 could win adherents for Rome, and Burke could delight 
 the Conservatism of his age by his praise of privileged 
 prescription, Coleridge might well captivate the day of 
 Canning and Wellington, and its immediate posterity, 
 with his copious and cloudy asseveration that the highest 
 philosophic truth coincided with the Athanasian creed — 
 especially seeing that he had proved his genius by his 
 poetry and his gift of criticism by his lectures. A 
 generation seeking port after stormy seas was glad to 
 accept any philosophy that went with church-going. 
 He met the need of belated orthodoxy for a respectable 
 account of itself ; and just as Burke, in Coleridge's 
 words, *' until he could associate his general principles 
 with some sordid interest, panic of property. Jacobinism, 
 etc., was a mere dinner bell,"* so Coleridge himself 
 only became revered when his philosophemes were felt 
 to be necessary to the credit of creed. His literary 
 prestige at once helped and was helped by his vogue as 
 a Christian philosopher, even as it happened at the 
 same period with Chateaubriand in France. To this 
 day, the satisfaction he gives by many of his literary 
 analyses is a lead to sympathetic interest in his sham 
 analyses of knowledge ; and the occasional vivid right- 
 ness of his concrete judgments lends a reflected light to 
 his vain dogmatisings. No writer of any penetration 
 "Equals him in plausibility and the air of secure demon- 
 stration. But neither does any writer of good calibre 
 fall below him in defect of foundation and cohesion. 
 His fluency was his philosophic snare, as happens with 
 
 * Table Talk, April 8, 1833. 
 163 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 a writer of our own day whose gift of copious poignant 
 and original expression Is even greater — Dr. James 
 Martineau ; and his philosophic work, like that of 
 Martineau and Pfleiderer, is simply a protracted circling 
 on the affirmation that men have a decisive and self- 
 authenticating intuition^ of deity. It is the solution of 
 Tennyson: ''The heart answers, I have/t^/A" All the 
 theses and scholia of Coleridge are but embellishments 
 of this assumption : 
 
 " I became convinced that religion, as both the corner-stone and 
 the key-stone of morality, must have a moral origin ; so far, at least, 
 that the evidence of its doctrines could not, like the truths of abstract 
 science, be wholly independent of the will. It were therefore to be 
 expected that its fundamental truth were such as might be denied ; 
 though only by the fool, and even by the fool from the madness of 
 heart alone ! . . . . The belief of a God and a future state .... 
 does not indeed always beget a good heart, but a good heart so 
 naturally begets the belief, that the very few exceptions must be 
 regarded as strange anomalies from strange and unfortunate circum- 
 stances. From these premisses I proceeded to draw the following 
 conclusions. First, that having once fully admitted the existence of 
 an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground 
 the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which 
 would equally prove that to be irrational which we had allowed to 
 be real. . . . " * 
 
 And so on. This, which he represents as the philo- 
 sophy of his Unitarian period, and as yet enabling him 
 to attain to "final reconversion to the whole truth in 
 Christ," is the gist of his latest doctrine ; and it 
 exhibits Coleridge as holding his religion just as a 
 Mohammedan holds his. The very function of philo- 
 sophy is here abdicated in the act of parading it ; and 
 what is offered as a theorem, an explanation of theism 
 in relation with atheism, collapses into an admission 
 that from the theistic standpoint (as is indeed the case) 
 
 * Biog. Lit., ch. X. pp. 96-97. 
 164 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 atheism is inexplicable, and only arbitrarily to be got 
 rid of by epithets, ranging from "fool" and *' bad - 
 heart " to '' anomaly." As if it were not the business \ 
 of a thelstic philosophy of conduct and character to 
 account theistically for follies and resolve anomalies. 
 
 His attitude on subsidiary dogmas is in keeping with ; 
 his method on the cardinal points. Faced by the begin- 
 nings of Egyptology, he flabbily blusters about " French 
 infidels," and predicts that Genesis, as conveying ''the 
 rapid progress in civilisation and splendour from 
 Abraham and Ablmelech to Joseph and Pharaoh," will 
 be found "worth a whole library" of inferences from 
 the monuments.* He contrives to deny In advance the 
 doctrine of evolution, already adumbrated ; f and holds 
 to the mediaeval dogmas that " the earliest Greeks took 
 up the religious and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews," J 
 and that "the sacerdotal religion of Egypt had, during 
 the interval from Abimelech to Moses, degenerated 
 from the patriarchal monotheism." § Wherever his 
 orthodoxy came into play, in his later years, his judg- 
 ment was worthless ; and when he discusses such an 
 issue as that of the gfenuineness of the Mosaic books, 11 
 his reasoning is more disingenuous than that of an 
 average divine. He actually declined to try to translate 
 Fatist because he held much of the language to be \^>^ 
 "vulgar, licentious, and blasphemous."^ On politics 
 he Is more profitable, speaking at times with a wisdom 
 and humanity in advance of his age, as when he protests 
 against the prevailing offensiveness of the tone of 
 English books on America,** perhaps forgetting, but 
 more probably ignoring wisely, the fact that that tone 
 
 * Kssay on the Prometheus. Ashe's ed. of Miscellanies, p. 56. 
 t Ibid. p. 65. t Ibid. p. 62. 
 
 § Ibid. p. 57. II See Table Talk, May 20, 1830. 
 
 IT Ibid. Feb. 16, 1S33. ** Ibid. April 10. 1S33. 
 
 165 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 was a good deal the result of American provocation ; * 
 or when he denounces the English misgovernment of 
 Ireland.! He was sound, too, on the land principle, 
 and sometimes notably acute and original on economics;! 
 but just as often he finds a form of justification for a 
 prejudice or a privilege or a prescription ; and he had 
 no foresight of the healthy development of democracy, 
 any more than he had a biological conception of the life 
 and the correlation of States. His formula of Perma- 
 nence and Progression, which Mill extols, is but an 
 adaptation from Burke ; § and it is quite misleading to 
 credit him, as Mill does, with a really scientific grasp of 
 his doctrine ; though the reminiscence of what he had 
 seen and held in opposition to Burke made his Conser- 
 vatism less nakedly irrational than Burke's ; as the 
 memory of his youthful Nonconformity set him on 
 giving a worthier theory of the Church Establishment 
 than that held by his fellow Tories. His well-known 
 and often quoted defence of Burke, as having proceeded 
 on the same principles in advocating the American and 
 denouncing the French Revolution — a piece of sophistry 
 which has found singularly unanimous acceptance with 
 
 * The prediction of a great strain on the Union, for which Carlyle 
 sometimes gets much credit, was also made by Coleridge {Table 
 Talk, Jan. 4, 1833.) But it was also made by Macaulay, Misc. 
 Writings, ed. 1868, p. 145 (Essay on James Mill, 1829). 
 
 + Table Talk, Feb. 5, 1833. 
 
 X E.g., Table Talk, March 31, 1833, where he approves of a 
 graduated property-tax, but also wants " a large loan," going on to 
 insist rightly enough that much harm was being done by over- 
 accumulation of "capitals." (Cp. May 4, 1833.) Mill's verdict 
 that in political economy he " writes like an arrant driveller," is 
 sufficiently violent, and contrasts significantly with the fashion in 
 which on other matters Mill tries to find disinterested wisdom in 
 Coleridge's personal equation. 
 
 § " The two principles of conservation and correction " {Rejlcciions 
 on the French Revolution, ed. 1790, p. 29). 
 
 166 
 
/, 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 Burke's admirers — was simply an indirect plea for 
 himself. By making out the consistency of Burke, he 
 could give a colour of consistency to his own change of 
 front from hot vituperation to effusive eulogy of that 
 writer. The personal equation always counts for much. 
 Malthus he abused with all the anger of a blind begetter 
 of children : * and when he is partly right in his 
 economics it is rather by reason of sheer antipathy to 
 the new commercialism than by any scientific com- 
 prehension of it, such as Malthus might have helped 
 him to. 
 
 The summary of all his positions is that he follows 
 the channel of the emotion of the time being, never . ^ 
 checking one by another. He has been justly praised j /V 
 by Mr. Traill for his passage on the emotionalism of 
 mobs : 
 
 " The passions, like a fused metal, fill up the wide interstices of 
 thought and supply the defective links ; and thus incompatible 
 assertions are harmonised by the sensation, without the sense of 
 connection." t 
 
 But this holds strictly true of his own philosophy and 
 ethic, in mass and detail. Of principles he could never 
 keep hold ; and in the end his doctrine was nine-tenths ^ 
 the expression of what was left in him in the way of i A 
 **the passions/' to wit, abjection, animosity, and the 
 need for emotional support. Now, there is a truth 
 behind his one-sided advice that ''the best way to 
 bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical 
 and unsettled, to reason, is to make \\\vcvfeel something 
 in any way"! — the truth that just reasoning or judg- 
 
 * Table Talk, August 12, 1832. 
 
 t First Lay Sermon. Compare the passage in TJie Friend (Sect. ii. 
 EsSay iv.) on the Method of Shakspere — which again is in part 
 reproduced in the Essay on Method. 
 
 + Table Talk, May 17, 1830. 
 
 167 
 
^■'•I 
 
 f^ 
 
 ^ [^ COLERIDGE 
 
 ment proceeds from strong impressions or intuitions. 
 But the truth is turned into pure psychological false- 
 hood, to begin with, by the implication that only faith 
 has the basis of feeling, and that doubt or disbelief has 
 no such root ; and, further, the acceptance of feeling as 
 at once motive and criterion, advocate and judge, trans- 
 forms the psychological truth into logical fraud. He 
 who has no strong temperamental basis for his beliefs 
 will be no very powerful thinker ; but he who is not 
 moved to bring his every temperamental impulse to the 
 test of consistency has only half the thinker's outfit. 
 And such a one was Coleridge. In direct antithesis to 
 the glorification of prejudice above cited, we find him 
 formally declaring, in a "confession of belief" dated 
 1817: 
 
 " I reject as erroneous, and deprecate as most dangerous, the 
 motion that our feelings are to be the ground and guide of our 
 actions. I believe the feelings themselves to be among the things 
 that are to be grounded and guided." " 
 
 Again we have the note in the Aids to Reflection con- 
 demning the glorification of prejudice by other people : 
 
 "The indisposition, nay, the angry aversion to think, even in 
 persons who are most wilHng to attend, and on the subjects to which 
 they are giving studious attention — such as Political Economy, 
 Biblical Theology, Classical Antiquities, and the like — is the 
 phenomenon that forces itself on my notice afresh, every time I enter 
 into the society of persons in the higher ranks. To assign a feeling 
 and a determination of their will, as a satisfactory reason for 
 embracing or rejecting this or that opinion or belief, is of ordinary 
 occurrence, and sure to obtain the sympathy and the suffrages of the 
 company. And yet to me, this seems little less irrational than to 
 apply the nose to a picture, and to decide on its genuineness by th,e 
 sense of smell." f 
 
 * Gillman's Life, p. 359. 
 t Note on Aphorism vii. Cp. Aphorism Ixiii, 
 168 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 And yet again in the same book* we are told that 
 Religion flourishes in a country 
 
 "where the Mysteries of Faith are brought within the hold of the 
 people at large, not by being explained aM^ay in the vain hope of 
 accommodating them to the average of their understanding, but by 
 being made the objects of Love by their combination with events 
 and epochs of History .... and above all by early and habitual 
 association with Acts of the Will." 
 
 Thus does the broken intelligence sway helplessly from 
 side to side, as it is stirred to reason by the unreason 
 which provokes it, or terrified into unreason by the 
 reason which outgoes its own. To take either the one 
 mood or the other as typical is to miss the central fact 
 of the case. It is the perpetual oscillation that specially 
 constitutes Coleridge ; and those friends and vindicators 
 who, like Mill and Coleridge's own relatives, make up 
 a personality from one set of his utterances, are only 
 adding to the world's stock of misconceptions. The 
 relatives, of course, could not be expected to give a 
 picture which by its contradictions would recall the 
 character of the man ; and Mill, even in the heat of 
 his zeal for the science of Ethology — which he never 
 grasped save empirically, and never developed as he 
 proposed — discoursed a propos of Coleridge on national 
 character as conditioning ideas, without once seeing 
 how character conditioned the ideas of Coleridge. Yet V 
 never did vacillation of character connect more obviously | 
 witlTvacillation of thought than in the author of Aids to \ 
 Reflection. 
 
 VIII 
 
 All this consists obviously with what we have seen of 
 his physical susceptibility and disconnectedness, his /, 
 .weakness of fibre and lack of stable relatioD. to things 
 
 * Aphorism ex, 
 465 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 concrete. His cues are his cravings, his impulses, his 
 impressions, his temperamental attractions and repul- 
 sions. But it follows that his excellences, his successes, 
 also correlate with his temperament and mould : so 
 much has appeared in the study of the sources of his 
 best poetry, and it must hold good of his other felicities. 
 His outstanding quality of character being impressibility, 
 I and his outstanding mental quality a genius for expres- 
 Ision, he is at his best or strongest didactically where he 
 expresses his sense of literary effect — the gift of per- 
 ception and expression In others. Thus it is that he 
 makes such an impression by his sifting* of the matter 
 \ of the controversy, raised by Wordsworth, on the use of 
 -A the language of ordinary life in poetry — a problem not 
 indeed so difficult of solution as some eulogies would 
 make out, but certainly well solved by him in an age 
 when good analytical reasoning on aesthetics was far 
 to seek. Here his instinct and his reasoning were 
 happily conjoined. He rightly claimed! that his mind 
 was always '^energic," by which he did not mean 
 ''energetic," but that it played reflectively on all 
 things which touched it, seeking spontaneously to 
 relate all impressions to general truths. We have 
 seen that too often the effort was wholly astray, from 
 fault of method and vice of presupposition ; and at 
 times it was astray from aesthetic defect, whether of 
 constitution or culture, as in his judgments on painting. 
 He declared that his three months' stay at Rome gave 
 him more insight into the principles of the fine arts 
 than he could have gained in twenty years in England ; J 
 and it may well have been so ; but his taste in pictures 
 must have been poor, to judge from his laudation of 
 Sir George Beaumont's ; § and though *' he could 
 
 * In the Biograplu'a Literaria. f Campbell's Memoir, p. Ixiv. 
 
 % Table Talk, March i, 1834. § Table Talk, July 24, 1831. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 scarcely contain himself" In listening- to Beethoven, 
 his likening of Rossini to '* nonsense verses "* does not 
 strengthen the claim to musical appreciation which 
 he coupled with the admission that he had no **ear 
 for music." Where he is easily ahead of nearly all 
 his contemporaries, Is In his intelligised perception f 
 of_the equalities of literary masterpieces hitherto only I 
 Vgg"uely enjoyed. When his environment and his \ 
 faculty co-operate, the fruits are delightful. Let the \ 
 limp stem but be upborne by some steady breeze, or 
 by some companion stalk, and It energises at once, so 
 that even though the Initiative be from the outside, the 
 gifted Intellect will of its own virtue work wonderful 
 things. On the stimulus of Wordsworth, coinciding 
 with a new physiological stimulant, Coleridge produces 
 rarer and subtler poetry than Wordsworth's ; on the 
 stimulus of Schlegel, he produces a criticism of Shak- ' 
 spere more suggestive, more Intimate, more finely- 
 fingered than Schlegel's ; on the stimulus of Schelling, 
 he yields ideas for which Schelling Is grateful, f Cole- 1 
 ridge on aesthetics, on poetry, on style. Is always 
 fascinating, always suggestive even when wrong ; It 
 is the perpetual play of mind, on questions where""" 
 mind is for the time unvltiated or untrammelled by 
 temperament and subservience to dogma, or where 
 the good and not the bad In the temperament comes 
 Into effect, that seizes and impresses the young reader 
 of the lectures on Shakspere and Milton and literature 
 generally, the Table Talk, the Biographia Literaria ; 
 
 * Table Talk, Oct. 5, 1830. 
 
 t Sara Coleridge's introd. to the Biographia, 1847, p. xxxviii. See 
 also Clough's Prose Remains (ed. 1888, p. 105), as to Schelling having 
 praised Coleridge to Jowett and Stanley, protesting that it was "an 
 utter shame to talk of his having plagiarised from him, Schelling." 
 It is not clear that Schelling knew all the facts. 
 
 171 
 
 A 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 and it is the natural surmise from such a display of 
 intellectuality that makes the young" reader fain to 
 hold to the religion by which Coleridge held. It is 
 easy to see how the mere distinction of phrase and 
 text and tone, the pervasive suggestion of insight, 
 could capture and convince high-minded young men 
 of that time like Maurice and Sterling, unprepared 
 by solider thinking to appraise the manifold Cole- 
 ridgean doctrine ; and how it could even set up an 
 unfeigned respect in the young Stuart Mill, more 
 sensitive than his hardier elders to the aesthetic charm 
 of Colerldgean exposition, less quick than they to cut 
 through the surface tissues to the feeble substructure, 
 and above all comparatively untouched by the contemp- 
 tuous personal revulsion from Coleridge's weaknesses 
 of life and character which the elder Radicals had felt 
 in standing near him. 
 
 And while we note the unstrung and unerect suscepti- 
 bility to chance and to other minds which makes Cole- 
 ridge's life and work at times seem like a mere series of 
 pulls and pushes from the outside, let us not overlook 
 the per contra^ as regards either his associates or his 
 immediate successors. Mr. Dykes Campbell, noting" 
 the reciprocal influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 has well said : 
 
 " Although Dorothy Wordsworth produced nothing directly, her 
 
 influence on both men was of the highest importance Nor 
 
 was the influence, in action and reaction, of the men on one another 
 less potent. Coleridge's was by far the more active, as well as the 
 finer and more penetrating, and the immense receptiveness of 
 Wordsworth must have acted as a strong incentive to its exercise. 
 And this is true, I believe, notwithstanding that there are more 
 distinct traces of Wordsworth's poetry on Coleridge than the con- 
 verse : for Coleridge, by virtue of his quicker sense, was the more 
 imitative, while in Wordsworth's case influences from without 
 never reacted directly, but permeated his v/hqle being, ancj wire so 
 
 172 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 completely assimilated as to have become part of himself before 
 any of their results came to the surface." * 
 
 And Charles Lamb, who by his prose so strongly sets 
 up the impression that may be made in painting by an 
 Old Master — the sense of a lost and irrecoverable way 
 of doing things, of a remote and inimitable beauty — 
 even he, in his greatest critical work, not seldom sets 
 us wondering how much of that bent to and skill in 
 aesthetic analysis which make him so great and so new 
 a critic, and of that splendid coloration and energy of 
 style which make him so great a writer, was developed 
 in him by the talk of the ever-observing, ever-dis- 
 cussing, ever-reading, and ever-criticising Coleridge. 
 The young Charles Lamb shows small promise of the 
 author of the essays On the Tragedies of Shakspere,\ 
 0?i the Genius and Character of Hogarth, and On the 
 Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions 
 of Modern Art ; and it is impossible not to surmise that 
 but for some special nourishment and stimulation. In 
 that ag'e of raw sensation and wooden prejudice, those 
 rare gifts could not have come to such maturity. 
 Lamb's striking misjudgments, besides. In the case of 
 some of the Elizabethans, suggest that he was helped 
 to his best views. 
 
 * Memoir, p. xxxvii. It is worth noting that the maxim that 
 every great and original author must create the taste by which he is 
 to be enjoyed — a maxim usually credited to Wordsworth — is by him 
 acknowledged to be Coleridge's {Essay, Supplementary to Preface, to 
 2nd ed. of Lyrical Ballads. Works, Morley's ed., p. 874). Much of 
 this Preface and Essay suggests Coleridge. The saying that the 
 true antithesis to Poetry is not Prose but Science [Preface as cited, 
 p. 853) seems to be echoed from Coleridge, who often makes it. 
 {Biog. Lit., ch. xiv. p. 148 ; Lectures, p. 183, etc.) 
 
 + Lamb's thesis that Shakspere is to be read, not acted, seems to 
 have been adopted from Coleridge. See Crabb Robinson's Diary, 
 3rd ed. i. 184. Cp. the passage in Gillman's Life, p. 280, cited on 
 p. 239 of the Bohn ed. of the Lectures. 
 
 173 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 IX 
 
 The service done by Coleridge can hardly be stated 
 more highly than this ; and alongside of the service 
 must be placed the dis-service. Always desultory,* he 
 never followed any of his deeper studies with the 
 patience which alone can yield solid results ; his way of 
 life made continuity impossible for him till he was too 
 frail for steady toil ; and his facility of phrase often led 
 him into mere mock solutions. He gave a superfluous 
 encouragement to verbalism in philosophy all round. 
 Even on his ground of aesthetics he is capable, of 
 making a mere arrangement of formulas pass muster 
 for an analysis. His faculty being one of verbal ex- 
 pression, he tends to make verbal exercise take the 
 place of investigation, especially, of course, in theology, 
 where he was wholly in the air. His reasoning there 
 becomes what Selden declared the doctrine of transub- 
 stantiation to be, "nothing but rhetoric turned into 
 logic ; " and it becomes so at times on ground where he 
 might have done better, the habit of verbal solutians 
 seducing him. Thus in the second essay On the 
 Principles of Sound Criticism f he makes the discrimina- 
 tion that '' the venison is agreeable because it pleases ; 
 while the Apollo Belvedere is not beautiful because it 
 pleases, but it pleases us because it is beautiful." This 
 is plainly a spurious distinction. The venison is not 
 agreeable hecmise it gives pleasure : " giving pleasure " 
 
 * His own early admission: "I seldom read except to amuse 
 myself, and I am almost always reading " (Letter to Thelwall, cited 
 by Mr. Campbell, p. xxix.) may be set against the ..claim in the 
 Biographia: " Seldom have I written that in a day, the acquisition 
 or investigation of which has not cost me the previous labour of a 
 month" (Bohn ed., p. io6). 
 
 t Ashe's ed. oi Miscellanies, -p. ii. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 = *' agreeable : " it gives most of us pleasure of a kind 
 that we agree to put under some such term as " agree- 
 ableness ; " just as the statue gives most of us a 
 pleasure which we agree to put under the term 
 ** beauty." But the venison and the statue may alike 
 fail to give pTeasureTcTsorne persons ; and to say that 
 the statue z*^ beautiful, as if its beauty were non-relative 
 while the agreeableness of the venison is a term of re- 
 lation, is sheer fallacy, and just the kind of fallacy into 
 which Coleridge was always being led Jby his transcen- 
 dentalism, which is essentially an evasion of analysis 
 under the pretext of making it. That the error was 
 inveterate, and not a matter of one loose expression, 
 appears from his further citation * of some traveller's 
 statement that the people of Dahomey have no word 
 for beauty or the beautiful, but merely say of things 
 that they are '' nice " or '* good " — an egregious case of 
 a priori fallacy. It would be possible to show that the 
 Dahomeyans did not call any one thing beautiful, only 
 by showing that they applied the word to some other 
 thing. The pretence that a word in any language ca7i 
 mean only nice and good without its being distinguish- 
 able from a word of greater force, is as bad a paralogism 
 as can readily be produced. The traveller, according 
 to Coleridge (who does not remember his name or his 
 precise words), explains that in Dahomey the sense of 
 beauty *'is as yet dormant, and the idea of beauty as 
 little developed in their minds as in that of an infant ; " 
 which is a mere evasion of the difficulty of difference of 
 standards. _ The Dahomeyans admittedly admire certain 
 types of women for their looks, more than others, and 
 thus have a sense of beauty just as truly as they have a 
 sense of what we call the '*nice" or the **good," in 
 
 * lUd, p. 13. 
 17s 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 both of which categories their judgments are quite as' 
 little *' developed," practically speaking, as in the 
 others. All this blundering, so far as Coleridge is con- 
 cerned, comes of his determination to establish a priori 
 knowledge by way of supporting his religious faith- — or 
 else of his sloth. 
 
 The same tendencies lead him on the other hand into 
 the most gratuitous literary blunders. Of the latter, 
 Macaulay gibbeted (albeit by mistake, and therefore 
 with the wrong evidence) a distressing example, which 
 his biography has given to all the world — a piece of 
 random assertion only to be explained as a case of the 
 fortuitous wish begetting the thought without any 
 resort to facts. Coleridge, recklessly following up a 
 warning against " converting mere persons into abstrac- 
 tions " in the writing of prose, made the strange asser- 
 tion : "I believe you will very rarely find in any great 
 writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an 
 inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent 
 case, as * the watch's hand ' for * the hand of the 
 watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was con- 
 fined to persons, or at least to animated subjects."* 
 Macaulay comments in his journal: ''About twenty 
 lines of Shakspere occurred to me in five minutes ; " 
 and he gives : "In dreadful trial of our kingdom's 
 king" [King John) \ "Nor let my kingdom's rivers take 
 their course " (ibid.)', "The law's delay" [Hamlet) ; " My 
 bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne " [Romeo and 
 Juliet) ; " Why then All Souls' day is my body's dooms- 
 day " [Richard III.) A He might have added, from 
 Milton, "their bellies' sake" [Lycidas) ; "cloister's 
 pale " (// Penseroso) ; " the heaven's wide pathless way" 
 
 * Notes of Lectures on Style, of 1818, printed in the Remains; 
 also in Ashe's ed. of MiscelUmies, p. 183. 
 t Trevelyan's Life, ch. xii. 
 
 176 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 (ibid.)) ''the chimney's length" {L' Allegro)] 'Mife's 
 lease " [Epitaph on the Marchioness of Westminster) ; 
 "tapers' holy shrine " and '* cymbals' ring " {Ode on the 
 Nativity) — all cases ''before the Revolution." But 
 Coleridge's first sentence speaks of " prose ; " and these 
 instances — all save one — are in verse.* It is difficult to 
 see, indeed, what force could be attached to the fact 
 that the old prose-writers seldom gave the Saxon 
 genitive to the name of an inanimate body .The, 
 writers of to-day ,^ and of intermediate generations, do 
 it still seldomer. In the nature of the case, such 
 genitives cannot often occur. But so far from their 
 being vetoed by the old writers, we find them in un- 
 necessarily frequent use. I open Bacon at random 
 and find the line " more by an hour's discourse than by 
 a day's meditation." In the Bible we repeatedly have 
 " a day's journey ;" and the titles "A Winter's Tale," 
 "A Midsummer Night's Dream," &c., cannot be set 
 aside as poetry. Such phrases as " river's bed," " bed's 
 head," "staff's length," "shilling's worth," are all 
 good pre-Revolution English. The statement breaks 
 down as to prose and verse alike. And equally idle is 
 the protest in the Table Talk\ against the "vile and 
 barbarous vocable talented, . . . Why not shillinged, 
 farthinged^ tenpenced^ &c. ? " The analogy here is 
 frivolous. As well denounce "gifted," or "moneyed," 
 which is used by Coleridge himself; | or "landed 
 interest," or "horsed," or "housed," or "cabined," or 
 "kennelled," or "dowered," or "terraced," or "hun- 
 dred-gated Thebes," or "helmeted," not to speak of 
 
 * I must confess to having overlooked the qualification myself in 
 the first issue of this essay. The oversight was brought to my 
 notice by my friend, Mr. T. D. Robb. Macaulay probably noted 
 only the second sentence, which is unqualified. 
 
 t July 8, 1S32. X Table Talk, July 4, 1830. 
 
 177 M 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 ^ 
 
 Milton's '^sworded" cherubim. It happens — as was 
 noted by Macaulay, though he too objected unreason- 
 ably to the word* — that ''talented" came into use 
 first in theology, having reference to the parable of 
 the talents. Had Coleridge known this he would 
 hardly have made his protest, which came ill in any 
 case from a maker of many new words, some of 
 them needless and bad. He had simply carped at 
 random. 
 
 This irresponsible turn of mind affects even the best 
 critical work of Coleridge. His Shaksperean criticism, 
 compared with most of what went before, is so good 
 that we can scarcely grudge him the praise bestowed 
 by Mr. Traill ; but, even setting aside the question of 
 the borrowings from Schlegel, it has plenty of weak 
 places. Mr. Traill's imperishable dictum that he was 
 ''loyally recognitive of the opacity of milestones" will 
 not hold in fact any more than in style. It praises him 
 for exactly what he was not. His criticism at times 
 becomes vicious, as does Schlegel's, from the deter- 
 mination to make out that whatever Shakspere did 
 must be right, as where he refuses to see that Hamlet's 
 "To be" soliloquy is inconsistent with his having just 
 before seen his father's ghost. A rational criticism 
 must recognise that the soliloquy is a literary addition 
 inconsistent with the action ; and this recognition leads 
 up to the knowledge of the play as a series of accre- 
 tions, pre-Shaksperean and Shaksperean, on the 
 nucleus of the primitive tale. That there was a primi- 
 tive tale Coleridge knew,! but he never once takes the 
 fact into critical account. At another time he extols 
 Shakspere for never depicting a miser, on the ground 
 
 * See Trevelyan's Life, ed. 1881, pp. 150, 416. 
 
 t Biog, Lit. : Satyranc's Letters, ii. ; and Lectures, p. 240. 
 
 178 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 that avarice was not a permanent species of passion.* 
 He will always have Shakspere the Uncaused Cause in 
 drama, doing all things well ; f and the same arbitrari- 
 ness enters into his eulogy of Milton, as when he 
 defends the presentment of God the Father against 
 Pope's criticism, after having once admitted its force. | 
 Not even the verdrct of Mr. Lowell i:an put his status 
 as a philosophical critic beyond question ; for it is 
 precisely in philosophical generalisation that Mr. Lowell 
 himself is least satisfying.§ He had too much predilec- 
 tion to Coleridge's own intellectual sins of developing 
 his philosophy uncritically from his sentiments, and of 
 finding in a play of words an account of the constitu- 
 tion of things. 
 
 * Lecture Notes, Bohn ed., p. 99. He actually alleges that "as a 
 passion, avarice has disappeared." See also p. 102. On this 
 ground he pronounced the miser of Plautus and Moliere obsolete. 
 The reader of Eugenie Grandet can supply the comment. 
 
 t " There is not one of the plays of Shakspere that is built upon r 
 anything but the best and surest foundations." Lecture Notes, p. 99. 
 
 X Cp. Lecture Notes on Milton (Bohn ed., p. 520) with Table 
 Talk, Sept. 4, 1833. 
 
 § In the address on the unveiling of Coleridge's bust, Mr. Lowell 
 made the observation : " Many of his hints and suggestions are 
 more pregnant than whole treatises, as where he says that the wit 
 of Hiidihras is the wit of thought." This unfortunate example only 
 serves to confound Coleridge. His dicta are : (i) that wit " consists 
 in presenting thoughts or images in an unusual connection ; " (2) that 
 this connection may be by thoughts, or by iwrds, or by images ; " and 
 (3) that "the first is our Butler's especial eminence; the second, 
 Voltaire's," and the third predominantly Shakspere's. This criti- 
 cism is really a bad confusion of a not very complex psychological 
 problem. And it is followed up by the further vain generalisation 
 that " the wit of thoughts belongs eminently to the Italians, that of 
 words to the French, and that of images to the English " (Ashe's 
 ed. of Miscellanies, p. 122). It would be much truer to say that the 
 wit of words (= puns) belongs eminently to the English, that of 
 thoughts to the French, and that of images to the Italians. But 
 the terms are hopelessly confused and confusing. They are prob- 
 ably misadapted from some German. 
 
 179 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 A less serious fault, arising- from his verbal endow- 
 ment and his defective hold on actuality, is Coleridge's 
 way of repeating or dwelling at serious length on verbal 
 distinctions even where they are in themselves justi- 
 fiable, as when he recurs again and again to the different 
 force of the terms sublime and beautiful, or works out 
 repeatedly his explanation that pedantry consists in an 
 incongruous employment of language, and not in the 
 resort to technical terms for the purpose of precision of 
 statement. In his very argument he falls into that 
 De Quinceyan pedantry which parades its manipulation 
 of terms like a juggler walking round before his per- 
 formance. And here we come back to that lack of 
 personal dignity and considerate reticence which is part 
 of Coleridge's heredity from his father, who likewise 
 exhibited that very habit of expatiating superfluously 
 on the significance of words. The kind of distinction 
 attaching to the work of Coleridge, in common with 
 that of De Quincey, has in it an element of concession 
 to the strain of childishness in them. They are never 
 great as even the homely Wordsworth was great, by 
 force of massiveness and determination. Wordsworth 
 we can hardly help respecting ; Lamb we cannot help 
 loving ; Coleridge and De Quincey we are always some- 
 what moved to pity, even when we are able to take a 
 reverent view of their performance. 
 
 But the period of reverence for either is now probably 
 over. Their prestige stood at its highest in the genera- 
 tion between theirs and ours, when the discredit of 
 their personal weakness had in large measure passed 
 away with their presence, and the literary and religious 
 appreciation of their writings played freely, and not 
 very critically. In both cases, orthodoxy has covered 
 a multitude of sins. The three middle decades of the 
 period from 1800 to 1890 have in England been those 
 
 180 
 

 JV^' 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 of_maxImum orthodoxy, the struggle between all the 
 innovating ideas of the revolutionary period and the 
 general reaction having resulted for the time in the 
 ascendency of the latter ; and at that time the fact that 
 a writer combined Christian faith with literary genius 
 counted for more in his favour than all his vices did 
 against him. The vices of Coleridge have been com- 
 miserated by pietists who would have held them up to 
 disgust had they been those of a "materialist." And 
 yet nothing could be more dubious, more nebulous, 
 than the support given to orthodoxy by the reasonings 
 of Coleridge, as distinguished from his mere declama- 
 tions. His so-called Aids to Reflection^ which be- 
 came the most popular of his prose works in virtue of_ 
 its comforting pretence of giving piety the support of 
 reason in the person of a re-converted Unitarian, only 
 rises above Christian platitude to plunge into mists of 
 logomachy, or to undulate on a switchback voyage of 
 inconclusive criticism. There is no more characteristic 
 section in it than the comment on Aphorism CIX 
 (Taylor's) as to Original Sin. The oscillating analysis 
 ends in a citation and endorsement of an incisive note 
 penned twenty years before, choice in style and valid in 
 statement : 
 
 "This most eloquent treatise [Taylor's Bms J u st iji ca t ii s] ma-y he 
 compared to a Statue of Janus, with the one face, which we must 
 suppose fronting the Calvinistic Tenet, entire and fresh, as from the 
 Master's hand ; beaming with hfe and force, witty scorn on the Lip, 
 • and a Brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason ! — the 
 other, looking towards the ' something to be put in its place,' maimed, 
 featureless, weather-beaten into an almost visionary confusion and 
 indistinctness." 
 
 No better account could be given of Coleridge's own 
 commentary, which, proceeding from a scholastically 
 unphilosophical theorem as to the mysteriousness of 
 Evil, ends in a helpless protest that everybody admits 
 
 i8i 
 

 COLERIDGE 
 
 ^ 
 
 it to be a Fact, and evades the theistic dilemma with 
 the warning, in capital letters : '* Beware of argu- 
 ments AGAINST Christianity which cannot stop 
 
 THERE, and consequently OUGHT NOT TO HAVE COM- 
 MENCED THERE." The absurd second clause exhibits 
 the tactic of the orthodoxy of the time. It was known 
 that, as in the previous century, many people would 
 listen to reason up to the point of impeaching Trini- 
 tarianism and Bibliolatry who would recoil from any 
 xposure of the fallacies of Theism. The cue was, 
 herefore, to warn such minds that the criticism of any 
 art of the creed led up to the dissolution of the whole. 
 Of course it was not a deliberate and dissembling 
 calculation of means to ends, but rather the half-con- 
 scious grasp of weakness at any weapon that seemed 
 likely to avail. Coleridge latterly seems to have held 
 in his heart that arguments against Christianity ought 
 never to be begun at all. In any case, he was too 
 irretrievably broken in his latter years, save in wistful 
 .moments of forlorn lucidity, to follow such arguments 
 out to a scientific end, which would have meant the 
 final negation of all theism ; though, could the worn 
 organism but have seen it, the sanity of creedless 
 science, explaining his own sad journey in terms of his 
 \ congenitally flawed structure, might have given him 
 i the serenest of all resting-places. As it is, the sinking 
 \ wanderer pipes feebly in the market-place for the 
 i sympathetic applause which he needs so much — pipes 
 ditties of strange tone to those whom ever and anon he 
 feels to be incapable of comprehending him, but whose 
 bewildered assent is the complement of his own 
 despairing self-delusion. His theoretic vindication of 
 the doctrine of the Trinity consists in making out that 
 Deity is Trinity only in a metaphysical sense in which 
 every man may be made out a Trinity, and lends no 
 
 182 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 help whatever to the behef in the Incarnation, with 
 which doctrine as a statement of historic fact the 
 Coleridgean formula of the Trinity has no compatibility 
 whatever. The final effect of his teaching on these 
 matters is simply to prove how much respect can be 
 secured for solemn verbiage by a master in verbalism. 
 
 And as a master in verbalism, rather than a philoso- 
 pher, Coleridge finally ranks for students of philosophy. 
 He is perhaps the subtlest of non-German obscuran- 
 tists, but an obscurantist his merely theological purpose 
 always makes of him ; and he could not escape the fate 
 of all such performers, which is self-stultification. He 
 ends in flat contradiction in philosophy as in every- 
 thing else.* The central statement of the elaborate 
 
 * One may, of course, push a charge of inconsistency too far, 
 Mr. Lang has well pointed out (in Letters on Literature) that while 
 laying down the maxim that poetry means " the best words in the 
 best order," Coleridge explicitly disparages Virgil on the score that 
 if you "take away his diction and metre" there is nothing left. 
 But diction and metre are just the words and their order. (Cp. 
 Table Talk, July 12, 1827; July 3, 1833; with May 8, 1824, and 
 August II, 1832.) Coleridge, however, meant to show that Virgil 
 was a great master of verse, but poor in ideas ; and after all it may 
 be worth while to suggest that a poet can be a poor intelligence 
 apart from. his verbaLart. In other passages Coleridge has given 
 definitions (whether or not original) of poetry which supplement the 
 technical formula of " the best words in the best order," and apply 
 to the artistic product tests which grade the poets in terms of the 
 order of thought in which they work. E.g., " As poetry is the 
 identity of all other knowledges,^ so a poet cannot be a great poet 
 but as being likewise inclusively an historian and naturalist, in the 
 light, as well as the life, of philosophy : all other men's worlds are 
 his chaos " (Note on Barry Cornwall, in Ashe's ed. oi Miscellanies, 
 p. 347). In the Biographia (ch. xv., Bohn ed., p. 155) he writes : 
 ^No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time] 
 a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the frag- 
 rancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, 
 emotion, language." (Cp. Wordsworth's " The breath and finer 
 spirit of all knowledge." Pref. to Lyrical Ballads.) Again he 
 
 183 
 
 X 
 
 N^-< 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 system belatedly set forth as his by Mr. Joseph Green 
 is that the human will, distinguished from the Reason 
 or Speculative Intellect or Mind, is the "ultimate fact 
 of consciousness" and the "immovable ground of a 
 philosophy of Realism." But the gist of Coleridge's 
 own attempted rebuttal of what he regarded as 
 Materialism is the insistence that the faculty of know- 
 ing facts and principles as such must be antecedent to 
 or concurrent with their recognition,* and obviously 
 the recognition of Will as Will implies the simultaneity 
 of the percipient intelligence or judgment, so that Mr.. 
 Green's " only tenable base " is a chimera — one texm of 
 a duality verbally separated from^Jthe^otherj without 
 which it cannot be thought. 
 
 
 ^ X 
 
 ^ 
 
 As to the better influence of Coleridge on English 
 thought and literature, it may to a certain extent be 
 compared with that of the so-called pre-Raphaelite 
 school in painting in more recent times. It was the 
 disintegrating and perturbing influence of an appeal 
 to standards at once new and old as against standards 
 
 attempts a definition in terms of the psychological effect of poetry : 
 " The excitement of emotion for the purpose of immediate pleasure, 
 through the medium of beauty " {Essay on the Principles of Criticism ; 
 Miscel. p. lo), This, which is elaborated in one of the lectures of 
 1811 (Ashe's ed. of Lectures, &c., p. 47), is on the whole less happy 
 than the definition given by Poe ; " The rhythmical creation of 
 beauty." It should be noted, by the way, that the formulas of 
 " words in the best order " and " the best words in the best order," 
 as definitions of good prose and poetry, constitute one more Cole- 
 ridgean plagiarism. He always gave them as " my " rule; but the 
 first is only a variation of Swift's " proper words in proper places " 
 (cited at end of Johnson's Life of Swift), and the second is an 
 obvious extension of the first. 
 * See Table Talk, Sept. 21, 1830. 
 
 184 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 merely contemporary and conventional. His own 
 manifold intellectual experience, ranging from one 
 extreme to the other of the fields of opinion, made him 
 a kind of palimpsest, of which the final record was 
 something much more complex and qualified than the 
 dogmas it sought to vindicate, and of which the very 
 confusion was suggestive. Thus he counted negatively 
 or indirectly for much. The bigoted and unconscien- 
 tious critics, the unoriginal versifiers, the Paleyan theo- 
 logians, the brutal or platitudinous politicians of that 
 age are discredited in comparison with him by their 
 rudeness and dulness, their triteness, their shallow 
 barbarity. He brings back the breath of greater times, 
 and brings forward the promise of better times to come. 
 We may say of him what Emerson less truly said of 
 himself, that his fame is the measure of the narrowness 
 of his age. , JBut when we speak thus of his age it must 
 be with regard not to all its forces, but only to those 
 which were predominant ; for around him there were 
 men of very diff"erent types — Keats, Shelley, Byron, 
 Wordsworth, Hallam, Bentham, James Mill, Herschel, 
 Young, Dalton — all of whom were working to make 
 the new age, and most of whom produced a larger body '| 
 of sound work than he. His most ambitious treatises 
 have ceased to occupy the modern intelligence ; his 
 philosophy is lost in mist ; his social gospel, despite its 
 superiority at many points to that of the society to 
 which he appealed, is too inadequate even to be | 
 discussed ; his final orthodoxy is too abject, his mysti- 
 cism too thin, even for the Church. It is significant 
 that, while his works are separately reprinted and 
 accessible, there Js no complete edition of them ; and 
 that the recent decisive edition of the poems is mainly 
 made up of plays and translations which are no longer 
 of any standard repute. Of the thick volume so per- 
 
 185 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 fectly edited by Mr. Campbell, only some twenty pages, 
 by general agreement, are deathless. The translations 
 which bulk so largely were hardly worth reprinting, and 
 will certainly cease to be read by Englishmen before 
 the originals, despite Professor Brandl's strange en- 
 dorsement of the English claim, ascribed first to Scott,* 
 that Coleridge has improved on Schiller. Such versi- 
 fication as this : 
 
 " She seems to have 
 Foreboded some misfortune. The report 
 Of an engagement, in the which had fallen 
 A colonel of the Imperial army, frightened her," f 
 
 is surely worse than anything in Schiller, bad as his 
 versification sometimes is. 
 
 That Coleridge equally failed as a dramatist and 
 writer of dramatic verse on his own account there can 
 no longer be any question. His remark to Allsop| 
 that his own Remorse was a great favourite of his, and 
 that the translation of the Wallenstein § was a specimen 
 of his happiest work during the prime manhood of his 
 
 "" Hazlitt praised the Wallenstein version highly, as does Mr. Glad- 
 stone (Essay on Leopardi) ; and Mr. Lowell pronounced it "What I 
 may call the most original translation in our language, unless some 
 of the late Mr. Fitzgerald's be reckoned such." [Speech on unveilmg 
 of the bust.) The collocation was distinctly unlucky. 
 
 t Act iv. scene 3, in Coleridge's translation, which does not at 
 all correspond with the final text of Schiller. Not only, however, 
 did Schiller alter greatly on the version translated, but Coleridge 
 \ took endless liberties with it (Cp. Gillman, Life, p. 146). Brandl 
 '. makes the extraordinary statement (p. 260) that Coleridge translated 
 so faithfully that the original text could be reconstructed from his 
 version ; and then avows that Coleridge made many alterations and 
 additions (pp. 261-2). One surmises some blunder by the translator 
 of Brandl's own book. 
 
 X Letters, &c., as cited, p. 51. 
 
 § Compare this with his expressions to Wedgwood concerning 
 "the accursed Wallenstein" (cited by Mr. Campbell in his notes, 
 p. 602). 
 
 186 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 intellect, before he was "crossed by fatality," is the 
 proof that his critical appreciation of dramatic excellence 
 and energy in Shakspere was not founded on any 
 capacity for similar things in himself. Of all his 
 personages, not one breathes the breath of life : they 
 ^J are almost as purely personifications of qualities as any 
 '"-^n the plays of Jonson. That he should be thus insen- 
 sitive, with all his fineness of literary palate, is puzzling; < 
 and the only explanation which suggests itself is that ^ 
 he had on the one hand no such new impulsion from the 
 outside to right activity in dramatic writing as he had ;_ ,; 
 in verse and in aesthetics from Wordsworth and the 
 Germans ; while on the other hand his opium did not 
 lend itself to the creation of dramatic character as it ""^ 
 certainly did to the visualising of fantasy, and perhaps 
 did later to the analysis of literary effect. There have 
 been other critical writers with a keen taste for inspi- 
 ration in poetry and an incapacity to write verse com- 
 parable with their prose, e.g., Lamb and Lowell ; but 
 both of these seem to have realised their failure, 
 whereas Coleridge seems not to have done so, save at 
 odd moments, as when he remarked that he had 
 supposed himself to be imitating Shakspere's versifica- 
 tion in the Remorse, and only afterwards found that he 
 had but been tracking Massinger and Beaumont and 
 Fletcher.* 
 
 XI 
 
 h 
 
 What then does the name of Coleridge finally repre- 
 sent for' us in "literature ? Principally, we must say, a 
 handful of poetry with a singular charm ; an abnormal 
 product of an abnormal nature under abnormal con- 
 ditions. The Aiicient Mariner is a triumph of sheer 
 
 * Tabic Talk, Feb. 17, 1833. 
 
 187 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 poetic style ; or more strictly, a triumphant application 
 of a rare method to a strange theme ; and its mere 
 technique and treatment keep it perpetually fascinating. 
 In the handling of a moral fantasy we have enshrined 
 for us a harmony and variety of colours, a wealth of 
 rightly felt and phrased impressions of the real inner 
 and outer world, such as no other poetic work can 
 surpass. The quality which in Coleridge had to serve 
 for strength of character, namely intellectual zeal, here 
 attains to a success of sincerity which is perhaps only 
 possible in virtue of a weak relation to actuality. The 
 mariner's visionary tale is told with a conviction that 
 would be notable in fiction of the most natural kind ; 
 and it is the sincere and simple expression of the unreal 
 tale in terms of the most vivid of real perceptions that 
 gives it its irresistible impressiveness. The psycho- 
 logical method is much the same as that of Poe, that 
 other abnormal neurotic type, ill-compounded with a 
 difference, who, though allowing little praise to Cole- 
 ridge,* was evidently influenced by him, and exhibits 
 the traces in many echoes of phrase and coincidences 
 of opinion as well as in the main movement of his 
 mind. 
 
 What made the artistic success of The Ancient 
 Mariner makes the success of such very different 
 themes as Christahel and Kiihla Khan, It is as beautiful 
 verbal realisations of fantasy, of dream, that they keep 
 their secure dominion over the literary sense. To 
 follow the story of Christahel (in the first part : the 
 second flags) is like following the fortunes of a cloud in 
 a clear and windy sky ; the action, the idea, the aim, is 
 
 * In the Lcttev to B , which constituted a preface to an early 
 
 volume of his poems, Poe called Coleridge " a giant in intellect and 
 learning " {Works, iii. 315, 317), but went on to criticise him. Later 
 he speaks of him disrespectfully enough. Cp. vol. iii. 241, 365. 
 
 18S 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 naught ; the witchery of the form and the movement is 
 continuous. It is not easy to be patient with those 
 who, like Mr. Traill,* adopting Coleridge's own words 
 of depreciation, dismiss Kubla Khan as ** hardly more 
 than a psychological curiosity." That Lamb should at 
 first have felt somewhat thus f is intelligible in respect 
 at once of the essential humanness of his own sym- 
 pathies and of the utter newness of Coleridge's effect, so 
 immeasurably removed from all the forms of literature 
 in which Lamb's genius was steeped, so essentially 
 different from such effects of his own dream-fancy as 
 The Child Angela where human pathos penetrates and 
 perfumes all. Coleridge's poem is the visualising of an 
 opium-dream, a rarity of sensation at least^ as well 
 worth literary immortality as any other experience 
 whatever ; and the feat is accomplished with a magic of 
 sound and thought wholly incomparable. The radiant 
 vision hangs in his words transparent and complete as a 
 rainbow, and permanent as marble. And he who can 
 escape the thrill which comes of the images, and the 
 spell born of the creative art ; he who can miss the 
 mastery of such lines as 
 
 " A savage spot, as holy and enchanted 
 As e'ev beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 By woman wailing for her demon lover," 
 
 — where the convinced assumption of the customariness 
 of the unearthly instantly lends conviction to the picture 
 in hand — such a one must be lacking in some literary 
 nerves, so to say. Those who pronounce the poem 
 incoherent must just have failed to follow the very 
 simple transition between its stanzas. 
 
 These indestructible artistic values, the fortuitous 
 
 * Coleridge, p. 60. See also Brandl, p. 186. 
 
 t Letter to Wordsworth, Ainger's ed. of the Letters, i. 305. 
 
 189 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 fruit of what so many still regard as a merely ruinous 
 vice, remain for us after the analysis alike of the artistic 
 and the philosophical work of the artist. It is indeed 
 not wholly a comforting reflection that a life of manifold 
 aspiration and much serious though desultory effort is 
 at last a human utility in virtue mainly of the chance 
 brain-blooms of a season of physiological ecstasy, the 
 large plans of its succeeding years being traced in sand. 
 But the ill-starred Coleridge in the end comes off not 
 ill beside his friend the well-governed Wordsworth, 
 whom we have learned * to see as the foiled devotee of 
 a vain purpose, '' laying great bases for eternity" with 
 a vast scheme of a poetico-philosophic system, and 
 attaining felicity only in some of the unforeseen by-ways 
 of the task. Nay, a world which at best does but carry 
 from age to age certain saved handfuls of beauty and 
 wisdom to show for an infinity of striving lives, cannot 
 pronounce the case of Coleridge to be very much out of 
 the common way. 
 
 * See the essay of the late Professor Minto in the Nineteenth 
 Century, 1889. 
 
 190 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 (1884) 
 
 I 
 
 The singular strife of critical opinion as to the value of 
 Shelley's poetry — strife hotter to-day, perhaps, than 
 ever before — might almost be said to justify those who 
 define all criticism as a more or less pretentious expres- 
 sion of individual likes and dislikes, among which no 
 canon can ever authoritatively decide. Every famous 
 writer, of course, is to some extent disputed over ; but 
 such extremities of contradiction as are to be found 
 among the comments by leading critics on Shelley it 
 would be difficult to match In connection with any other 
 name. *' When," says Emerson in his essay on Poetry 
 and Imagination^ '^ people tell me they do not relish 
 poetry, and bring me Shelley, or Aikln's Poets, or I 
 know not what volumes of rhymed English, to show 
 that it has no charm, I am quite of their mind." Mr. 
 Arnold^has spoken no less emphatically to similar effect, 
 pronouncing the selections from Shelley in Mr. Pal- 
 grave's Golden Treasury a** gallery of failures." But 
 Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, meets all such 
 judgments^vi^Ith a body of indignant rejoinder and 
 counter-eulogy which, so far as force of language goes, 
 
 191 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 entirely balances the dispraise ; and critics of well- 
 earned reputation are found to take his side. Who is 
 to judge between such disputants ? Are the anarchists 
 of criticism to be left free to proclaim that it has no 
 first principles ? That can hardly be ; but it is very 
 evident that to lay down an efficient and generally con- 
 vincing law in the matter will be extremely difficult ; 
 and that he would be worse than presumptuous who 
 should now affect to dismiss the dispute with a mere 
 \ verdict on one side or the other. If the controversy is 
 I to be anything more than a collision of dogmatic de- 
 traction and hyperbolical praise, it must be conducted 
 with more regard to scientific method than has yet been 
 shown in it. It becomes plainer day by day, indeed, 
 that our criticism will have to be systematised in all 
 directions to meet the needs of a generation with new 
 notions on old themes and but a scanty respect for 
 authority ; and the most humble inquiries will have to 
 \ be conducted with some sense of the changed condi- 
 I tions if they are to justify themselves. The nature of 
 the subject is such, however, that even a restricted 
 study, such as our investigation of the truth about 
 \ I Shelley's poetry, involves the raising of wide issues and 
 ) important principles ; which makes the undertaking of 
 the would-be systematising critic, confronted by old 
 methods and established creeds, a hazardous one indeed. 
 It is probable that much of the Inflexibility of op- 
 position among critics on literary questions is due to 
 their judgments on dead celebrities having begun to be 
 formed at a time of life when the sympathies are much 
 stronger than the critical faculty. Liking for a poet's 
 character and way of thinking determines the attach- 
 ment of young readers rather than deliberate study of 
 his way of wTitIng ; and these early sympathetic attach- 
 ments are very apt to preclude the fuller and more 
 
 192 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 impartial study when the capacity for it comes. On all 
 hands are to be met men who were attracted in their 
 young days to Byron or to Shelley or to Wordsworth 
 by something congenial in the character and teaching 
 of one or other of these poets, and who at maturity are 
 positively unable to read the favourite old poetry in 
 cold blood, so deeply is it associated with early enthu- 
 siasm or passion. And perhaps in no poet's case is this'^ 
 sympathetic tradition so potent as in that of Shelley./ 
 To those who were inspired in youth by his passion fofH 
 liberty and human brotherhood it is apt to seem almost 1 
 heartless to test the old paeans by umjnripa.ssioned >/ 
 critical standards, and analyse the language which had 
 once been too dazzling for unmoved contemplation. 
 But just such appraisement and analysis must be made^ 
 if the problem about Shelley's poetry is to be seen in / 
 any better light than that of prejudice. We must for^ 
 get our partialities, and grant it to be quite an open 
 question whether a poet whose thought and life wey 
 admire is admirable as poet. And by way of helping 
 towards this assumption of the judicial position it may 
 be well to remind the Shelleyite that when Shelley drew 
 up a letter of protest to the editor of the Quarterly 
 Review after its attack on Keats, he indicated that he 
 took up a distinctly critical attitude as to his brother 
 poet's works while calling for fair-play. 
 
 " There was no danger," he said, after claiming con- 
 siderable merit and promise of future excellence for 
 Endyjnion^ '*that it should become a model to the age 
 of that false taste with which, I confess, it is re- 
 plenished ; " and after urging that the greater part of 
 Hyperion is '* surely in the very highest style of poetry," 
 he goes on: "I speak impartially, for the canons of 
 taste to which Keats has conformed in his other com- 
 positions are the very reverse of my own." 
 
 193 ■• N 
 
h-^y^ SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 Keats, who, says Lord Houghton, ''singularly 
 enough, never seems to have had much personal sym- 
 pathy " with Shelley, and who criticised so acutely, 
 might have had something to say as to the faults of his 
 champion's work ; and it is one of the many regrettable 
 things in their lives that these two poets, both fated to 
 die young, and linked in remembrance as they are, 
 should not have known each other and influenced each 
 other's art as they so well might. Shelley, in all pro- 
 
 (bability, would have profited the more. If there is one 
 quality that the mass of his verse lacks it is the element 
 of flesh and blood, of the ''simple, passionate, sensu- 
 ous," to use Milton's unforgettable definition. Nothing 
 will more clearly bring out the special character of 
 ' v' ^Shelley's poetic thought than a comparison of his 
 longest poem. The Revolt of Islavi^ with Endyniion^ and 
 jof Prometheus Unhoimd with Hyperion. There is cause 
 to suspect that by no means all readers of Keats have 
 gone enthusiastically through Endyniion ; but how much 
 more reason is there for doubting whether one reader 
 in twenty has scanned every line of The Revolt of Islam. 
 \ Both poems are away from human life, but how dift'er- 
 ; ently does one poet idealise from the other ! From the 
 ^ first lines the contrast is complete. Keats's foot is firm 
 on the earth, however far his fancy may fly : he half 
 turns old dreams into life, with his ardent sense of 
 earthly beauty : his pulse throbs through all his singing : 
 it is the poesy of warm-blooded youth, dreaming itself 
 alive in the world's spring-time. With Shelley, the 
 \ case is almost precisely the reverse. Brooding on the 
 : present, and inspired by an intellectual idea, he turns 
 I life into a dream, spiritualising his youth and maiden 
 \ into phantoms who move in a world of abstractions and 
 I visions, "where the wild bee never flew." 
 
 Take, again, the poems of Hyperion and Prometheus 
 
 194 
 
 A 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY rJL^ ^ 
 
 Unbound, and see how the two singers deal with the 
 stricken Titans. Hyperion misses final success because 
 it lacks action and has only a pictorial interest where 
 the form promises something more, and because the 
 appeal to our sympathies Is faint ; Prometheus Unbound 
 has action ; and the preliminary appeal to human sym- 
 pathy Is strong ; and yet the figures and the pictures In 
 Hyperion have much the larger measure of definiteness. 
 They are sculpturesque in their stillness : while the 
 moving throng in the lyrical drama are of a shadowy 
 consistency, abstractions mingling with spirits, and all 
 uttering unearthly speech. The jyitaL idea of ._the poem 
 is embroidered with fantasy till it hardly counts with \ 
 us : If we read on it is because we care more for fantasy 
 than for human significance in song. Nothing, of 
 course, is thus far decided as to which kind of poetry is 
 the more to be commended : we have drawn distinc 
 tipns, but have not considered precedence. It may be 
 however, that a Shelleyite Interposes to urge that the 
 poet who at once embodies intellectual ideas In his 
 verse and weaves them on the most imaginative back- 
 grounds, is superior to him who but partially idealises 
 primary passion and finds his inspiration in sense rather 
 than in abstract thought. Shelley, it may be claimed, 
 is great, just In virtue of these qualities of etherealness 
 and devotion to ideas. Here we face one side of „our 
 critical problem. 
 
 I have assumed that Keats, In proportion to his 
 popularity, has more readers for his Ejidymion than 
 Shelley has for The Revolt of Islam, and so much will 
 probably be granted ; but In any case the question to^ 
 be considered is as to which poem a cultured reader 
 ought to find the better worth reading — Keats being 
 thus contrasted with Shelley, it is understood, not with 
 the idea of deciding which Is on the whole the greater 
 
 :1 
 
'^ SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 poet, but merely for purposes of elucidation. The first 
 point to be examined is that of the comparative attrac- 
 tiveness of the verse-forms ; and there will presumably 
 be no dispute as to the movement by couplets being 
 - much the freer mode of expression. As the question is 
 not which is the finer poet, we will not ask whether 
 Keats in his poems in stanza writes better or worse 
 than Shelley, but simply note that a poem in the less 
 artificial form seems to be more readable than the com- 
 plex. Shelley tells us in his preface that for one thing 
 he has adopted the Spenserian stanza, not because he 
 thinks it a '' finer model of poetical harmony " than 
 blank verse, "but because in the latter there is no 
 shelter for mediocrity ; you must either succeed or 
 fail." Beyond this, however, he was ''enticed also by 
 the brilliancy and magnificence of sound which a mind 
 \ that has just been nourished upon musical thoughts can 
 produce by a just and harmonious arrangement of the 
 pauses " of the stanza. All that is clear here is that 
 Shelley felt the elaborateness of the stanza gave it a 
 certain prestige apart from the quality of the language ; 
 that he saw the freer form demanded better work to 
 make it popularly impressive ; and that he laid great 
 stress on effects of sound. We infer, on the one hand, 
 that he has great wealth of diction ; but, on the other, 
 seeing that he took little more than six months to a 
 poem of 526 Spenserian and several other stanzas, we 
 suspect that he was not very keenly alive to the neces- 
 sity for finish and concision. And in the very first 
 stanza of the poem proper we find that in point of fact 
 he attains neither the one nor the other. Here it is : 
 
 " When the last hope of trampled France had failed, 
 Like a brief dream of unremaining glory, 
 From visions of despair I rose, and scaled 
 The peak of an aerial promontory, 
 
 196 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 Whose caverned base with the vexed surge was hoary, 
 And saw the golden dawn break forth and waken 
 Each cloud, and every wave — but transitory 
 The calm, for sudden the firm earth was shaken 
 As if by the last wreck its frame was overtaken. ' ' 
 
 That is a fair sample of Shelley's stanza verse, and it 
 will hardly be denied that, spasmodic as is the move- 
 ment, it is diffuse in expression and false in its rhymes. 
 *' Like a brief dremn of U7ir emu itmig- gXory^^ is a weak 
 line, and '' Whose caverned base with the vexed surge 
 was hoary " is an unmistakable instance of the process 
 by which a poet gets his idea from the need of a rhyme. 
 Then we must read ^^ promontory ^^ and " transi/^r;/ " 
 to rhyme with *' glory;" and we note again that the 
 poet is constrained to announce the occurrence of an 
 earthquake by the irrational phrase ** transitory the 
 calm," through the sheer necessity of making an effect 
 in sound. Now, by way of clearing the ground, it is 
 right that we should ask ourselves for what reason we i 
 read a poem of this quality — why we should submit to 
 the perusal of thousands of demonstrably irrelevant or 
 supererogatory lines, and to a thousand shocks of mis- 
 pronunciation or false assonance. It is easy to say , 
 why we read the poems we feel to be finished in work- f 
 manship. We get from them the combined pleasures * 
 of perfectly choice expression and exquisite cadence, 
 and, in the case of their being rhymed, harmony of 
 sound. They may express joy or sorrow, or they may 
 describe objects or action ; in any case our delight is 
 essentially one of perfect satisfaction in the manner m\ 
 which the thought is expressed, our special sympathy \ 
 with the thought being an additional factor in our | 
 impression. Take any of the familiar felicities of English 
 poetry : take Shakspere's 
 
 197 
 
/. 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 " Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
 
 Of his bones are coral made ; 
 Those are pearls that were his eyes ; 
 
 Nothing of him that doth fade 
 But doth suffer a sea change 
 Into something rich and strange " — 
 
 who does not feel here the thrill of recognition of the 
 inexpressible fitness of the phrase " a sea change," 
 with its electric suggestion of an infinite range of idea, 
 and the perfect development of the thought into the 
 *' something rich and strange," the poignant note 
 blending into the round and perfect chord ? 
 
 It is from masterpieces that we deduce canons of art, 
 and that lovely snatch of song will carry us a long way. 
 Two laws are illustrated by it : one, that the finest 
 poetic touches are so by reason of a quintessential 
 quality of meaning — a peculiar concentration or cen- 
 trality of significance. *' Poetry," says Emerson, in 
 the essay before cited, '*is the perpetual endeavour to 
 express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body, 
 and search the life and reason which causes it to exist." 
 That is one way of putting the law that the singer must 
 go to the heart of his theme and give us, not catalogue, 
 but typical detail ; not facts, but the intensest general- 
 isation — a law which is always in danger of being mis- 
 conceived when incidentally formulated, and which we 
 shall have to elaborate later on. Our second law is the 
 simple and obvious one that the poet shall have the 
 art to conceal his art — that when he uses the form of 
 rhyme his collocation of ideas shall never suggest his 
 exigencies. Too much stress cannot be laid on this. 
 If the versifier cannot subdue his medium he should 
 leave it alone. We have seen that Shelley felt superior 
 poetic quality was necessary to success in blank verse ; 
 but while that is true, it is also the fact that to write 
 fine verse in stanza demands greater effort than is 
 
 198 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 needed for fine blank verse. The explanation of the 
 apparent contradiction is that '* success" is a relative 
 term, depending for its value on the taste of readers ; 
 and that a poet may ** succeed " with an inferior poem 
 in stanza by reason of the prevailing inherited taste for 
 rhyme, who would not have obtained general attention 
 for a poem without that attraction. To many people 
 mere rhyme gives so much satisfaction that they will 
 overlook any number of false notes for the sake of the 
 true, and pardon any irrelevancles by which the desired 
 effect is reached. Such readers make the *' success " 
 of second-rate rhymed verse ; but the critic knows that 
 as much preparation and skill as go to produce tolerable 
 rhyming poetry would bring forth blank verse of a 
 higher quality, though people might not consent to read 
 the latter. The final trouble Is, however, that not one 
 poet In ten will take half the pains to blank verse that 
 he bestows on rhyme, the comparative easiness of the 
 form almost invariably seducing them into commonness. 
 A poet chooses blank verse for a long poem because It 
 Is easier than rhyme, and, inspired as he Is by a desire 
 to minimise his labour, he probably does not even 
 produce good blank verse. The whole matter has a 
 curiously paradoxical aspect. Rhyme and stanza 
 mean multiplication of diflEiculty ; and yet, the habit of 
 all versifiers being to attempt rhyme, on the one hand 
 the art of doing the difBcult work Is positively more 
 frequently acquired than that of doing the easier, and 
 on the other the ordinary reader will, other things 
 being equal, rather tolerate bad work in the rhyming 
 form than insist on purity In combination with simpli- 
 city. After all, however. It Is an unsettled question 
 whether the precision and subtlety of meaning, In 
 conjunction with ever-varying cadence, which Is attained 
 in some forms of blank verse — for Instance, In some 
 

 ^;y^ -Y/?y^ ' ■ ...-■'- fj 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 poems of Mr. Arnold and Mr. Henley— does not con- 
 stitute as valuable an artistic result as even the choicest 
 work in rhyme. 
 
 Applying all this to Shelley, we decide that, seeing 
 he is so far content to find his account in the primitive 
 love of rhyme for rhyme's sake as to pad out his 
 longest poem with innumerable fa r-fetched chimes and 
 spurious__e£lloes, and seeing he is thus diffuse through- 
 out even in excess of his natural tendency to diffuseness, 
 \the wor k is technicallyJ jad. It is difficult to see how 
 any other critical judgment can be maintained. It may 
 perhaps be urged that every poet makes numbers of 
 bad rhymes, and that constant accuracy is impossible ; 
 and it may be contended that the poem contains much 
 
 A/concise phrasing. To the first plea the answer is that 
 
 ^ Shelley's rhyming in his longer poems is far below the 
 average work of distinguished poets. Spenser, his 
 model, makes far fewer bad shots than he ; indeed, if 
 Shelley is not so reckless as Mrs. Browning, whose 
 rhyming is outrageously and deliberately vicious, he 
 must be ranked next to her in degree of offending 
 
 » among the poets for whom a high rank is claimed. 
 
 I Mrs. Browning held that the merest resemblances in 
 
 I* sound were as legitimate as perfect rhymes — a doctrine 
 concerning which it may here be said that it is repugnant 
 to almost all students of poetry ; but Shelley formulated 
 no such principle, and there is no need to discuss it in 
 his connection. As for his occasional tersenesses, 
 these are for the most part as purely fortuitous as any 
 of his rhymes, and moreover are rarely noteworthy. He 
 hits on such a phrase as '* transitory the calm," bad as 
 it is, by sheer stress of verse-form ; but triumphs of 
 pregnant expression are scarce indeed in T/ie Revolt of 
 Isla?n. The one claim which can be made for the poem 
 as a piece of poetic workmanship is that it at times 
 
 7,00 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 attains a sonorous and impressive rhetorical quality — 
 some of that *' magnificence of sound" at which the 
 poet aimed. It is but fair to quote some of these 
 passages — they are really few. Here is one : 
 
 " The Queen of Slaves, 
 The hood-winked angel of the blind and dead, 
 Custom, with iron mace points to the graves 
 Where her own standard desolately waves 
 Over the dust of prophets and of kings. 
 Many yet stand in her array — ' she paves 
 Her path with human hearts,' and o'er it flings 
 The wildering gloom of her immeasurable wings." 
 
 Canto IV., Sianza 24. 
 
 Here, be it noticed, force is attained by real intensity 
 of phrase, sound rhyme, and fairly natural sequence 
 of Ideas — factors the lack of which wrecks almost every 
 alternate stanza — along with that steady verbal flow 
 which Is so often effected In the poem by dispensing 
 with these. Another passage might be cited from the 
 fifth stanza of Canto XL : 
 
 " Her lips were parted, and the measured breath 
 Was now heard there ; — her dark and intricate eyes. 
 Orb within orb, deeper than sleep or death. 
 Absorbed the glories of the burning skies : " 
 
 but here the effect is less satisfactory, though it arrests 
 attention. Now, if such passages were thrice as 
 numerous as they are, they would surely be an 
 inadequate return for all the hours that a faithful 
 perusal of the poem occupies, an insufficient offset to 
 the long irritation of the wire-drawn phraseology, the 
 vaporous thinking, and the intolerable rhymes. 
 Shelley considered the stanza of Spenser *' a measure 
 inexpressibly beautiful " — an overpltched claim In any 
 case ; but how shall a mere set of recurrent cadences 
 support to Infinity a train of Incoherent and Intangible 
 
 201 
 
iii 
 
 jj^^ 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 ; ideas ? Many people approach all celebrated poetry 
 j with a certain unquestioning" reverence, much as pious 
 I people listen to a sermon ; holding that utterance of 
 t this kind has a peculiar sanction and must be profitable 
 j just because it takes this form. Whatever be the 
 i origin of the feeling as regards the poets, it is 
 emphatically to be cast out in the interest of healthy 
 intellectual life. We must come to a poem as to any 
 other form of human utterance, demanding worthy 
 reward. It is simply foolish to spend our reading 
 hours in absorbing rhythms and rhymes, unless we are 
 all the while obtaining the intellectal food and nerve 
 stimulus of finely worded thought or delightful fancy. 
 That it so ministers to us is the only excuse poetry can 
 offer for its existence. Why should a writer choose 
 the metrical form for what he has to say? That he 
 sings because he must, is a plea which will only avail 
 him when he clearly does well to sing. If he would 
 stand well in the eyes of thoughtful men, he must be 
 able to say that his thought has lost nothing of its 
 weight and force in the process of metricising, but has 
 gained the charm, the incisiveness, and the memorable- 
 ness which verse can give. What are rhyme and 
 rhythm without these attributes ? To prize them for 
 their own sake is playing with toys ; the occupation Is 
 little more respectable on the part of adults than the 
 systematic collection of postage stamps. Around us 
 lie all the garnered knowledge of the ages, all the 
 sciences, all the philosophies, all the captured beauty 
 of the arts : and "yonder all before us lie deserts of 
 vast eternity : " how shall we answer to ourselves and 
 our children for priceless days spent, far from these 
 treasures of our race, listening to fantastic jingle, 
 sterile of all sane significance ? We can but say that 
 we have read all the conventionally accepted poetry 
 
 202. 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY " 
 
 because we heard it was fine ; and that our resulting \ 
 knowledge of its true quality is mainly useful as I 
 enabling us to preserve from waste of time and labour 
 others who have no ambition to be specialists. We , 
 are able to certify that so much verse merely cumbers 
 library shelves, and is no more worth the attention of 
 the general reader, desirous of an all-round culture, 
 than it is worth his while, as a student of science, to 
 repeat for his own edification all the futile experiments 
 of which he finds record in his books. _It^Jstlie^ 
 function of the critic thus to counsel readers; and if 
 men of letters do not so order their department with ' 
 good will, it will be invaded and the work taken out of 
 their hands barbarously enough by workers in other 
 branches of study, justly wroth over the disproportionate \ 
 space still allotted to mere belles-lettres in the culture- I 
 time of the majority. 1 
 
 II 
 
 But we have still to meet the challenge as to the 
 quality of Shelley's thought, apart from any of the defects 
 of his utterance. I have spoken of the ** vaporous think- 
 ing" in The Revolt of Islmn ; and I can conceive a pro- 
 test being made against the expression, as being a 
 begging of the question if nothing worse. Shelley's 
 '^1 imagination " is held by many to be important enough 
 to outweigh all his technical shortcomings ; and it is 
 the character of the ideas in his larger poems that is 
 understood to be founded on by those critics who assert 
 him to have **outsung" all but a few of his tribe. It 
 is necessary to treat such an issue with special vigilance, 
 there being an equal danger of seeming to say too much 
 and of seeming to say too little in setting forth the 
 
 203 
 

 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 *Maws of poetic truth and poetic beauty" In this con- 
 nection. 
 
 Mr. Arnold has laid It down In his essay on Byron 
 that **all the personal charm of Shelley cannot hinder 
 us from at last discovering In his poetry the Incurable 
 want, In general, of a sound subject matter, and the 
 incurable fault, In consequence, of unsubstantlallty." 
 Now, this judgment, while In a sense right, seems to 
 me to open the way for any amount of misconception 
 and unsound criticism, and I cite It as bringing us face 
 to face with the central crux of our subject. The sense 
 in which It Is right, I suspect. Is not that Intended by 
 Mr. Arnold. He has In his essay on Wordsworth 
 depreciated that poet's most famous Ode as lacking the 
 character of poetic truth of the best kind ; the central 
 thought has, he says, no real solidity. I make bold to 
 dispute the principle which is Implied in that judgment, 
 and which, I take it, is reasserted In the passage before 
 quoted, as well as in another sentence in the Byron 
 essay in which Byron Is praised because "his topics 
 were not Queen Mab, and the Witch of Atlas, and the 
 Sensitive Plant," but "the upholders of the old order" 
 which he detested — " George^ the Third and Lord 
 Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington and Southey." 
 Praise of this kind means. If it means anything, that 
 there is a presumption in favour of the poet who 
 chooses the latter rather than the former set of subjects, 
 those by Implication being stigmatised as '* unsound." 
 I have no fear of not having abundant acquiescence in my 
 dissent from a judgment which works such confusion In 
 our notions of poetry as this does. We may set aside 
 the question — sufficiently dealt with by Mr. Swinburne 
 — as to the fairness of placing Shelley's most fanciful 
 poetry against Byron's political verse, saying nothing 
 of Shelley's bold dealings with political problems and 
 
 204- 
 
>r\s 
 
 i 
 
 n 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 U- 
 
 \ 
 
 ignoring Byron's Hours of Idleness and oriental tales. 
 The turn for these unfair contrasts is Mr. Arnold's 
 main critical vice. What most concerns us is the 
 theory he has laid down ; and there can be little doubt 
 that the great majority of lovers of poetry will instantly 
 recoil from it. What, they will be disposed to ask, is 
 the distinction between poetical and prosaic ideas if the 
 satirising of George the Third and Southey is fitter ,^. 
 occupation for a poet than singing about Queen Mab 
 and the Sensitive Plant ? Is politics better poetic matter 
 than fairies and flowers, with or without the introduc- 
 tion of human problems into the fairy world ? Is Shak- 
 spere's finest poetry to be found in his historical plays ? 
 Are w^e to put Heiuy VI. — be it Shakspere's or not — 
 above the Midsummer Nighfs Dream? The chances 
 are that most people who care for poetry would, if con- 
 sulted off'-hand, flatly reverse Mr. Arnold's ruling, and 
 declare that the Witch of Atlas and Queen Mab and the 
 Sensitive Plant are themes for the poet, and that ^J..A 
 Wellingtons and Castlereaghs, regarded as political ^om-*-'" 
 obscurantists, are not. Which side would be right? ^IaX 
 My modest verdict woiild.be — Neither ! Uir 
 
 Let us avoid all heat and carry on our inquiry judlcl- *^ 
 ally : let us go back to our law that poetry is a concen- 
 trated, melodious, incisive, and delightful expression of 
 ideas, and see how far that sanctions a classification of 
 themes into good and bad — sheep and goats, as it were. 
 Evidently it supplies, on the surface, no such sanction 
 whatever, and it will not be an easy matter to extract 
 one by a process of sound inference. All that It entitles 
 us to say is that a theme which cannot be treated at 
 once 'melodiously -'and with penetrating expression is 
 unfit for the poet. Observe, we say '* theme," not 
 *'idea." And where shall we find such a theme? I 
 confess I cannot confidently undertake to name one, 
 
 205 
 
 < 
 

 ^ 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 and till I can I, for one, will not venture to pronounce 
 any ** subject" imStlor a poem. This is a very different 
 thing from saying that a given proposition may or may 
 not be poetical. You may take the most advantageous 
 theme in the world — love, death, memory, beauty, or 
 hope — and fail to say anything poetic about it : I fear 
 the chances are a hundred to one against any one of us 
 writing verse on one of these themes which shall not 
 contain what we call "prosaic" touches, that is, 
 expressions which are neither subtle nor musical, 
 neither weighty nor charming. But that does not affect 
 the fitness of the theme. On the other hand you may, 
 if you are a poet — an exceptionally fine poet— perhaps 
 say something poetic about a button or Sir Richard 
 Cross. Of course the chances are about a million to 
 one against anybody succeeding in such attempts as 
 these. Having regard to the range of human capacity 
 we may say that, in view of the enormous weight of the 
 presumption against anybody writing good poetry on the 
 subject of the multiplication table, a wise man will not 
 make the experiment, oratleastwill not publish the result; 
 but within the ordinary range of poetic attempt we should 
 be slow indeed to taboo subjects. One limitary canon 
 /we may lay down : that it is inconceivable that comic 
 I verse can ever charm so profoundly as the best serious 
 • poetry ; and that to treat a comic theme, however 
 cleverly, is to work deliberately on an inferior plane. 
 But further than that canon — which, be it observed, 
 covers a good deal of ground — we should hesitate to 
 go. Let me fortify these observations by quoting from 
 what an original critic, Mr. Henry James, has recently 
 said concerning the art of fiction in an essay* which, 
 despite lapses in other fields, proves him one of the 
 
 * Longman's Magazine, September 18S4. 
 2o6 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 
 acutest critics in this regard as well as one of the most 
 accomplished writers of his time : 
 
 " We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, what the French 
 call his donnce : our criticism is applied only to what he. inakes,,of 
 it. . . . We may believe that of a certain idea even the most sincere 
 novelist can make nothing at all, and the event may perfectly justify 
 our belief; but the failure -will have been a failure to execute, and it 
 is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. . . . Art 
 derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in / , y 
 the face of presumptions ; and some of the most interesting ex- X^ '^ 
 periments of which it is capable are hidden in the bosom of common 
 things. Gustave Flaubert has written a story about the devotion of 
 a servant-girl to a parrot, and the production, highly finished as it 
 is, cannot on the whole be called a success. . . . Ivan Turgenieff has 
 written a tale about a deaf aud dumb serf and a lap-dog, and the 
 thing is touching, loving, a little masterpiece. He struck the note \ 
 of life where Gustave Flaubert missed it— he flew in the face of a i 
 presumption and achieved a victory." 
 
 It is at once a sad necessity and an instructive one to 
 have to say that Mr. James, while here laying down an 
 eminently just principle, tacks on to it an unjust judg- 
 ment. Flaubert's Coour Simple is a masterpiece ; and I 
 am driven to explain Mr. James's failure to feel this as 
 I have elsewhere ventured to explain his criticism of -/ 
 Flaubert's Education Sentinientaley by Imputing to him 
 a certain languor of perception, a certain slowness to 
 read himself into a sympathy that he does not quite 
 spontaneously fall into. With this necessarily brief and 
 quasi-dogmatic denial of his particular verdict, let me 
 proceed nevertheless to say that the general proposition 
 is strictly scientific, and that it may be applied funda- 
 mentally to the art of poetry, merely noting that* V 
 Mr. James uses the word '* idea" in Its inexact sense of 
 '' subject " or motifs and that the term '' execution " has 
 its special import for workers in each art. 
 
 To show how Mr. Arnold's principle would confuse 
 our judgments, it is sufficient to apply it to his own 
 
 207 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 poetry ; and we may do this without any thought of 
 how he regards his own work. If we adopted his 
 attitude we should say that The Future is a much less 
 ''sound" theme than Haworth Churchyard or Rugby 
 Chapel; that The Scholar Gipsy and Balder Dead are 
 inferior subjects ; and that The Forsaken Merman is 
 desperately unsubstantial. The central ideas of the first 
 and the three last poems are assuredly wanting in 
 "solidity." No instructed man will admit it to be 
 sound anthropology to say that primitive life on this 
 earth was more blessed, more elevated, more peaceful, 
 or more leisurely than the life of to-day, as Mr. Arnold 
 teaches in The Future. Yet which of us will not prefer 
 that poem emphatically to the solidly motived Haworth 
 Churchyard and Rugby Chapel? Which of us does not 
 find in the one the charm of fine music, and in the 
 others failure to attain complete charm and music save 
 for a few lines at a time? How, again, from Mr. 
 Arnold's point of view, shall we tolerate The Forsaken 
 Merman — a poem which we actually find much more 
 admirable than Haworth Churchyard ? Evidently we 
 conform to another canon, the canon which demands, 
 not total or final conformity to reason as the criterion 
 of poetic fitness, but continuity of feeling or thought on 
 the granted assumptions of the poet. It is not scientific 
 or logical justice of doctrine or thesis that secures 
 success : it is faculty for artistic treatment, the faculty 
 of at once interesting and delighting us. I do think, I 
 confess, that The Scholar Gipsy is overrated, in its 
 entirety, by university men ; that its web of ideas is in 
 part neither happily planned nor deftly woven ; and I 
 do not think the fifty pages of Balder Dead satisfactory 
 reading ; but will any one say that either subject — 
 provided it be treated at considerably less length — is 
 not a promising one for a poem ? No more than he 
 
 208 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 would reject Philomela because it sings a myth. We '-.i'^ 
 
 do not go to poetry for arguments and facts : to do 
 so would be to imitate the legendary personage who 
 asked what was proved by Paradise Lost. We certainly , . 
 
 ask that the poet's thoughts shall cohere — that they 'I A 
 shall be the result of his careful thinking ; or that when 
 he.rs5jQ^s to myth and fantasy he shall use his utmost 
 skill to make these melodious and exquisite ; but it no 
 more spoils his poetry for us to know that his serious j i 
 
 thought is after all mistaken than to know that the i ^^-^^'^Z 
 myth is myth. Edgar Allan Poe, in his boyhood, takes 
 up the legend of '*the angel Israfel, whose heart- 
 strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all 
 God's creatures ; " and, juvenile as some of his touches 
 are, he turns the fantasy into one of the choicest of 
 melodies — a thing we remember like an air of Schubert's. 
 The same poet's long juvenile poem, Al Aaraaf, is not 
 more fanciful in motive, but it turns out a failure, simply 
 because of its inferior workmanship. Israfel is rounded 
 off thus : 
 
 If I could dwell 
 Where Israfel 
 
 Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
 He might not sing so wildly well 
 
 A mortal melody, 
 While a bolder note than this might swell 
 
 From my lyre within the sky. 
 
 It is only a young poet's dream ; but just because he 
 has taken the pains and had the genius to turn his 
 dream into quaintly sweet word-music, it endures for 
 us. Certainly we decide that the poet who deals only 
 in fantasy has less cumulative value for us than one who - 
 is not only fanciful but thoughtful, and who sings his 
 thoughts as finely as his fancies. When we look about- 1 
 for our greatest poet we pitch on Shakspere because of 
 
 209 o 
 
 i- 
 
A 
 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 his all-round grasp and mastery ; but in doing so we 
 are sufficiently far from saying that any themes are 
 unworthy because not '' sound," or any poetry faulty as 
 such because ''unsubstantial." Keats's Hyperion is 
 impermanent, not because it deals with myths, but 
 because it does not put them in the right artistic atmo- 
 sphere or give them the right artistic balance, because 
 the great poetic power spent on the theme thus misses 
 >y the final felicity of being *' inevitable," to use Words- 
 worth's word. Milton's mythology, equally ''unsound," 
 has the decisive advantage in treatment. Assuredly, as 
 Mr. James remarks, there will never be an end of the 
 old fashion of "liking" certain kinds of subject and 
 certain methods ; and it is inevitable that, given two 
 poets of about equal technical talent, he who seems to 
 us to think soundly will stand higher in our estimation 
 than he whose reasoning we believe to be faulty ; but if 
 the mistaken thought be choicely sung it remains good 
 poetry, qua poetry. It would be a hard saying indeed 
 that whenever a particular way of thinking is seen to be 
 /practically astray, all artistic expression of it becomes 
 [valueless. One of the strongest attractions the litera- 
 iture of the past has for us is the light it casts on the 
 inner life of vanished generations; and if prose can thus 
 attract us by simply letting us see into effete habits of 
 i thinking, it is very certain that good poetry will con- 
 tinue to charm, no matter what may be its subject- 
 matter. The subject-matter of Dante is tolerably "un- 
 sound ; " but he remains an immensely greater and 
 more readable poet than many subsequent rhymers with 
 much more knowledge and far fewer illusions. And in 
 any one generation there is no security that the right- 
 thinking man will always have the superior power of 
 expression. It might happen in any case that — 
 
 210 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 Mr. Leech made a speech 
 
 Angry, neat, and wrong ; 
 
 while 
 
 Mr. Hart, on the other part 
 Was right, but dull and long. 
 
 Filmer's Patriarcha is a much better written book than 
 Locke's refutation of it. The reason may be that while 
 Locke could see the other man's thesis was unsound he 
 could not at once attain the vividness and precision 
 which his antagonist developed by reason of confidence ; 
 but it might easily be that the mistaken reasoner had by 
 nature the faculty of effective expression to a much 
 greater degree than the other, there being as certainly a 
 varying faculty of expression as a varying height, com- 
 plexion, and weight among men. It is to be hoped \ve 
 can all relish a clever speech by Lord Salisbury or Sir 
 William Harcourt without being disturbed by its falla- 
 cies : nay, may we not relish the literary cleverness the 
 more because we feel the assault on our opinions is 
 innocuous ? One's own party's opinions, sound as we 
 feel them to be, are unhappily not always expressed 
 with literary cleverness. The love of literary '* form " is 
 an inestimable safeguard to the polemist against narrow- 
 ness, whether in regard to the thought of the past or 
 to that of his own day. 
 
 Returning then to Shelley, and continuing our me-_ 
 thodical exploration, let us consider the nature of the 
 ideas — the *' imagination" — of The Revolt of Islam. We 
 have seen reason to abstain from passing judgment 
 against any subject as being unsound or unfit : what we 
 have to do is to examine in what manner the subject is 
 treated, how the poet's "imagination" works. But it 
 will be useful to ascertain from Shelley's preface what it 
 was he aimed at doing. We know from his preface to 
 Prometheus Unboutid that he believed he disliked didactic 
 
 21 I 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 poetry. *' Didactic poetry," he there said, *' is my 
 abhorrence ; " adding, with much truth but doubtful 
 consecutiveness : "nothing can be equally well expressed 
 in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." 
 And of The Revolt of Islayn he gives us the following 
 account : 
 
 " The poem (with the exception of the first Canto, which is purely 
 introductory) is narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of 
 pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind 
 aspiring after excellence and devoted to the love of mankind ; its 
 influence in refining and making pure the most daring and un- 
 common impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the 
 senses ; its impatience at ' all the oppressions which are done under 
 the sun ; ' its tendency to awaken public hope and to enlighten and 
 improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that tendency ; 
 the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degra- 
 dation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom ; the bloodless 
 dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious 
 frauds by which they had been deluded into submission ; the 
 tranquillity of successful patriotism, and the universal toleration and 
 benevolence of true philanthropy ; " 
 
 and so on for a dozen lines more, the list concluding 
 with "the transient nature of ignorance and error, and 
 the eternity of genius and virtue." And this, forsooth, 
 is the scheme of a non-didactic poem ! It is all " narra- 
 tive ! " It is to be feared Mrs. Shelley was too partial 
 when she attributed to the poet a " logical exactness of 
 reason ; " and that he was no less mistaken when he 
 imagined he had a faculty for metaphysics. The fallacy 
 of his distinction between didactic and narrative is 
 transparent to the verge of absurdity ; it recalls that 
 other "fallacy" confessed to by Pepys — the diarist's 
 expedient of paying another man to pay for him at the 
 theatre, by way of circumventing a vow to spend no 
 more money on plays. Impressed, no doubt, by the 
 dulness of the didactic poetry of Wordsworth and 
 Cowper, Shelley hastily concluded that to be didactic 
 
 212 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 was to be dull ; and that the true poetic walk was that) 
 of fantasy — moral lessons becoming poetical in thatf 
 environment and there only. The forrner ^dggixiia.. hasl 
 survived Shelley, and is perhaps to-day one of th( 
 commonest of superstitions In connection with liter- 
 ature ; yet It is falsified by a hundred of the fine passage* 
 in English poetry. Turn to Measure for Measure^ and 
 
 read : 
 
 " Spirits are not finely touched 
 But to fine issues ; nor nature never lends 
 The smallest scruple of her excellence 
 But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines 
 Herself the glory of a creditor, 
 Both thanks and use." 
 
 Turn to The Winter's Tale, and read : 
 
 " Nature is made better by no mean 
 But nature makes that mean ; so, over [even ?] that art 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes." 
 
 Take from Troilus and Cressida one of Ulysses' 
 speeches : 
 
 " Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back 
 Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. . . . 
 Take the instant way 
 For honour travels in a strait so narrow, 
 Where one but goes abreast ; keep, then, the path ; 
 For emulation hath a thousand sons. . . . 
 One touch of nature makes the whole world kin, 
 That all, with one consent, praise new-born gauds, 
 Though they are made and moulded of things past, 
 And give to dust that is a little gilt 
 More laud than gilt [gold ?] o'er-dusted. 
 
 Take the motto from Chapman which Shelley puts 
 at the head of the dedication of his poem, after his 
 preface : 
 
 213 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 " There is no danger to a man that knows 
 What Hfe and death is : there's not any law 
 Exceeds his knowledge : neither is it lawful 
 That he should stoop to any other law." 
 
 What is all this but didactic poetry ? As it happens, 
 the didactic intention of The Revolt of Islam is "gross 
 as a mountain, open, palpable," apart from the naif 
 disclosures in the preface, though the narrative form is 
 I kept up throughout ; but didactic intention and narra- 
 1 tive form alike fail to make the work successful poetry 
 f for us, simply because the poet does not attain to that 
 i clarified expression which is fine poetry. The thinking 
 is, as I have said "vaporous" in terms of its own 
 standards : the fault is not that the poem is fanciful but 
 /that the fancy is ill-managed. In point of fact there is 
 / no reason why narrative verse should be better poetry 
 / than didactic verse, save this, that in the nature of 
 / things it is less difficult to maintain vividness and retain 
 / attention in a long narrative than in a long reflective 
 j poem. But in literature in general there is wofully little 
 I room to choose between the mass of bad narrative 
 \^ poetry and the bad didactic poetry ; and when we 
 examine the outline of Shelley's poem we are far enough 
 from being stimulated to eager attention by the nature 
 of his story. This narrative of spectral tenuity, with its 
 phantasmagoria of dreams and visions, boats and 
 voyages, caves and palaces, is not the kind of thing to 
 repel tedium through five hundred stanzas. Not that 
 we condemn the narrative as such : we simply decide 
 that in default of clear and coherent conception and fine 
 execution the narrative will not maintain our interest. 
 When, however, the execution — that is, the concatena- 
 tion of ideas, the phraseology, and the rhyming, together 
 — is found to be crude, headlong, slipshod, the poem is 
 condemned past all appeal. 
 
 214 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 III 
 
 It may well be that, without some further exposition, 
 this judgment will remain unconvincing to those who 
 feel in all Shelley's verse the presence of a stress of 
 feeling, an intellectual exaltation, which is absent alike 
 from the polished didactic verse of Pope, the narrative 
 of such moralists as Crabbe, and the descriptive verse 
 of writers like Thomson. This sibylline ecstasy, they 
 insist, is something abnormal ; it proceeds from and 
 induces an emotional condition differing in kind from 
 that which belongs to the poetry of the second-rate 
 men ; it means inspiration, genius. And there is un- 
 doubtedly something even in Shelley's unsuccessful 
 poetry which gives colour to these convictions — 
 something which still requires to be analysed and 
 explained. 
 
 It is undoubtedly of the first importance that the poet 
 in the act of writing shall be in a certain state of 
 cerebral excitement : only in that condition is he "in- 
 spired"; and the stress, the intensity of his thinking is 
 of necessity apparent in his poetry. Yet none the less 
 must his emotion be under control of his art, and 
 deliberately directed to the task of stimulating his-^ 
 faculty of expression. This is the law of poetic crea- \ 
 tion, the paradoxical law of all art, that the once I 
 spontaneous feeling or state shall be consciously repro- 1 
 duced to the extent of suggesting the fittest form of '• 
 utterance ; the emotional and the intellectual functions, | 
 or let us say the passive and the active conditions, the | 
 perceiving and the creative faculties, combining to 
 produce the most effective expression. And if the two 
 functions are not duly efficient, if one operates to the 
 complete or partial exclusion of the other, we have 
 
 215 
 
><i 
 
 M/ SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 ; either "Uerse \yhich lacks intensity or verse which lacks 
 ^ form. As a rule we find both defects, in varying- pro- 
 ^ portions, in unsuccessful work, because it is the tendency 
 of each to induce the other. At all events, if inadequacy 
 of artistic faculty does not involve descent in quality of 
 thought, it has the equally disastrous effect of making 
 the poet blind to such descent on his part, which may 
 occur in the most ecstatic states of feeling; while on the 
 other hand, incapacity to feel or imagine intensely limits 
 of necessity a writer's powder to attain concentrated 
 / \ expression. In Shelley's long poems we generally find 
 
 -^ I the thought as impassioned — not to say excited — as we 
 
 ' ^ '\ could wish, but the controlling intellectual function all 
 
 too weak ; though the majority of readers, being more 
 
 emotional than reflective, respond to the poet's excite- 
 
 ^ mentwith little regard to his coherence or intelligibility; 
 
 somewhat as the penitents in a revival meeting are 
 carried away by exhibitions of hysteria around them. 
 It is to be feared the more facile emotionalists will 
 always dislike the critic and his method, but he must 
 persist all the same. 
 
 Shelley, then, fails in The Revolt of Islam because he 
 never masters his thought ; his seeming inspiration 
 being simply cerebral excitement inadequately con- 
 trolled. His hurrying fervour, which, thus unchecked, 
 would have led him to express himself imperfectly even 
 in prose, leads him headlong into all the traps and 
 temptations of verse, which confuse his thought in 
 detail tenfold, and warp his words to his constant 
 artistic discomfiture. He tells us, in his unhappy 
 preface, that he has " exercised a watchful and earnest 
 criticism " on his work as it grew ; but he goes on to 
 say — and the confusion of statement is noteworthy — " I 
 would willingly have sent it forth to the world with that 
 perfection which long labour and revision is said to 
 
 216 
 
t>^t 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY •" 
 
 bestow. But I found that if I should gain somethhig In 
 exactness by this method, I might lose much of the 
 newness and energy of imagery and language as it 
 flowed fresh from my mind." We may infer what the 
 *' watchful and earnest criticism " was worth. Alas for 
 the rarity of patient thinking as of patient work among 
 the gifted ! As if the '' newness " of haste were better 
 than the originality attained by pondering; as if 
 ''energy of imagery and language" were best reached 
 by taking whatever imagery and language came first to 
 hand ! Not thus are great poems produced by young 
 brains ; though young poets and superficial critics will-: 
 doubtless go on for many a day talking about " spon- 
 taneity " and ''inartificiality" as if the qualities pointed 
 to by these terms were the children of carelessness. 
 We find such a critic , as Mr.. R. H. Stoddard deciding 
 that his countryman, Bayard Taylor, possessed "too 
 much rather than too little" art, and missed ''spon- 
 taneity" because he "premeditated" too much. And 
 yet it is many centuries since a critic of poetry struck 
 out the conception of " ars celare artem." A poet may 
 miss spontaneity for want of imagination ; but if his 
 work shows traces of labour it is because he has not art 
 enough, not because he has too much ; because he had 
 nothing particular to premeditate, or because he pre- 
 meditated too little ; never the reverse. The art which 
 goes on niggling to bad purpose is weak art : it is the 
 artistic intention gone astray through timidity or short- 
 sightedness. 
 
 In a letter* written after the publication of the 
 Revolt to a friend who criticised it, Shelley reaches 
 a truer view of his art. After expressing himself as full 
 of confidence about his poem when he compares it with 
 
 * See Mrs. Shelley's note on the poem. 
 217 
 
K 
 
 < 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 ** contemporary productions of the same apparent pre- 
 tensions," he goes on to make this confession : "Yet, j 
 ) after all, I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I | 
 write, of an absence of that tranqtullity which is the ^ 
 attribute and accompaniment of power. ''^ Here was a true 
 { perception. Tranquillity is the condition of the mind 
 / which has attained clearness of thought, is sure of its 
 opinions, and has finally conquered the means of ex- 
 pression ; none of which achievements can be claimed 
 for Shelley in respect of The Revolt of Islam. It is 
 a quality present in all masterly work — in Shelley's fine 
 work as in that of other poets — in the shape not of lack 
 of animation, but of perfect self-possession, whether in 
 serene or emotional writing. You see it in Israfel ; the 
 steady light of the poet's lucid brain shining through his 
 changing fantasy. Shelley, as we shall see, attained such 
 lucidity at times ; but he certainly did not in The Revolt ; 
 and the highest praise we can give him in the matter 
 is that he at length became convinced of his short- 
 \ coming, passing from his first opinion about revision to 
 S the directly contrary declaration: '*I could materially 
 I improve that poem on revision."* Unhappily the 
 ''many corrections" he proposed to make in it were 
 never effected, and it remains a portentous failure, the 
 monument of a poet's fatal facility, a warning to all 
 cultivators of spontaneity so long as it shall remain 
 known in literature. It is hardly worth while to meet 
 the claim of some of Shelley's admirers, that after all he 
 did carefully correct, because his manuscripts are found 
 full of alterations. That fact could prove nothing 
 whatever as to his taking pains in composition, even if 
 there were no specific declarations to set against it. It 
 is simply impossible to write verse, especially in an 
 
 * See Mr. Garnett's Shelley Memorials, pp. 153 and 159. 
 
 218 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 elaborate stanza, without a great deal of balancingf 
 between words and experimenting in rhymes ; and the 
 most headlong versifier may easily have a much more 
 blotted manuscript than the most fastidious, just because 
 he makes his inevitable experiments on his paper instead 
 of in his head. One speculates as to whether Shak- 
 spere's having '' blotted scarce a line " is not a proof of 
 great deliberation in writing — relatively to his presump- 
 tively unparalleled rate of ce'rebration — rather than of 
 carelessness. However that may be, the fact is palpable 
 that whatever correction Shelley bestowed on his work 
 in his longest poem was superficial, and inadequate even 
 at that, seeing that, apart from metrical flaws, the poem 
 is but a weary mass of uncastigated expression, there 
 being hardly a page that has not half-a-dozen forms of 
 bad writing. Bad rhym?i-bad grammar, banal phrase, 
 preposterous figure, fustian rhetoric, confused logic, 
 meaningless collocations of words, extravagant com- 
 parisons, ideas thin-spun to puerility — all these are 
 there in the most fatal abundance, unredeemed by 
 countervailing beauties or by subtle or striking 
 thought. 
 
 IV 
 
 I have dwelt thus long on The Revolt of Islaniy not in 
 the belief that Shelleyites found on it in particular, but 
 in the conviction that when a decisive critical judgment '^ 
 is come to on that poem the relative rank of Jhe others 
 is the more easily settled. If we decide jthat the poet is 
 free^iji_ his choice of a subject, but that he stands or falls 
 by his treatment of it ; that good poetic treatment con- 
 sists in concentrated and charming expression ; and that 
 the work of The Revolt of Is lain is on the whole neither 
 effective nor charming, we should be far on the way to 
 
 219 
 
 ■>i 
 
^^^ SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 oeltling whether Pi'onicthciis Unhoniid, Alasfor, The 
 Ceiici, HcllaSy Epipsychidion, Adonais, The Witch of 
 AtlaSy and the longer of Shelley's remaining* poems, are 
 substantially fine poetry or otherwise. But we shall 
 perhaps decide the more quickly if, instead of continuing 
 uninterruptedly the process of exclusion of bad work, 
 we now turn to certain shorter poems in which we find 
 a marked degree of those qualities of finish, beauty, and 
 condensation for which we have thus far looked in vain. 
 In regard to the more popular of Shelley's short poems 
 there is still much necessity for discrimination. We are 
 probably all agreed, say, that The Cloud, even though a 
 trifle too clever to reach the final charm of simplicity, is 
 a masterpiece of controlled fancy and delicate yet repose- 
 ful art, presenting a combination of beautiful phrase, 
 wealth of imagery, and music, such as had not appeared 
 before in the language. There are one or two doubtful 
 passages — see the eighth line of the third stanza and the 
 last two of the fifth — but the poem is as a whole a 
 marvel of technique and of beauty, equal in technique to 
 Poe's Raven, and more transparent, more free from sus- 
 picion of the mechanical. It is a poem which must have 
 "cost intense, and probably involved long, artistic medi- 
 tation ; and its dazzling finish is the more remarkable 
 in view of the poet's general tendency to helter-skelter. 
 ^ Through all its difficult structure the rhyming is, prac- 
 tically flawless and unforced, and the line of thought 
 •perfectly straightforward. So long as men continue to 
 love rhyme and rhythm and loveliness of phrase and 
 fancy that poem will give them delight. It is not 
 uncommon, however, to hear The Skylark coupled with 
 The Cloud in respect of its finish, while set above it on 
 the score of its intellectual scope ; and The Skylark 
 is distinctly and seriously faulty in the former regard. 
 Whether it is really on a higher intellectual plane need 
 
 220 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 not be discussed when it is asserted, as now, that it Is 
 ruinously defective in point of technique. Of its twenty- 
 one short stanzas, I venture to say, not more than four 
 are fairly sound. Let the reader go over the poem line 
 by line, and see for himself. The second line, **Bird 
 thou never wert," is an entirely infelicitous extension of 
 the '* blithe spirit ; " the ''from heaven or near it^^ is 
 'prentice-work in idea as in rhyme ; and the fifth line 
 will not scan. In the second stanza we have : '' Higher 
 . . . . and higher from the earth thou springest,'^ 
 and "Like 2i cloud oi fire the deep blue thou zmiigest^ 
 What, next, is to be said of the lines : "Thou dost fioat 
 and rim — Like an unbodied [embodied Pj/i^y* whose race 
 IS just begun?" How reconcile such terms? In the 
 next three stanzas we have the rhymes "even" and 
 "heaven," and "clear" and "there," and "cloud" 
 and "overflowed." Then we stumble on the hopeless 
 
 passage : 
 
 " From rainbow clouds there flow not 
 Drops so bright to see 
 As from thy presence shoivers a rain of melody.'^ 
 
 In stanza ninth comes the very forced figure of the 
 maiden's music which " overflows her bower;" and in 
 the next is the curious " bull " of the glowworm 
 
 " Scattering nnheholdcn 
 
 Its aerial hue 
 
 Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view." 
 
 Stanza twelfth, despite a bad rhyme, is really fine : 
 
 * I was much derided by one critic for this suggested emendation, 
 on the first pubUcation of this essay. I have since found, first, that 
 it had before been confidently made by such an ardent Shelleyite 
 as James Thomson (" B. V."), and, secondly, that the point had long 
 before been disputed over, till it was found that Shelley actually 
 wrote " unbodied." I am still fain to say that the other word would 
 have been better. 
 
 221 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 " Sound of vernal showers 
 On the twinkling grass, 
 Rain-awakened flowers, 
 All that ever was 
 Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass." 
 
 But if we praise that, we can hardly tolerate the four- 
 teenth : 
 
 " Chorus hymeneal. 
 
 Or triumphal chaunt, 
 Matched with thine would be all 
 But an empty vaunt 
 A thing ivherein we feel there is some hidden ivant." 
 
 Set aside the twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twen- 
 tieth stanzas, and none is left that will stand careful 
 reading. The phrase ** What objects are the fountains 
 of thy happy strain ; " the line '* waking or asleep;" 
 the whole of stanza nineteenth ; and the three last lines 
 of the twenty-first, are the remaining blemishes. Now, 
 most of these details are capable of being weighed and 
 discussed with as much precision as almost any question 
 in grammar or logic ; and if they are candidly faced 
 there can hardly be any difference of opinion about them. 
 They constitute a series of jarring faults of execution, 
 and effectively take the poem out of the class of master- 
 pieces, despite the quality of the thought, w^hich is 
 attractive if not new or profound. 
 
 Take now one or two of the poet's best lyrics, and 
 see what it is in them that is admirable. I will not 
 quote any of the more familiar, such as Love's Philosophy^ 
 The Hynifi of Pan ^ the lines beginning " One word is 
 too often profaned," Sh^ Lines to an Indian Air ^ ** Music, 
 when soft voices die," or any of the Laments. I will 
 rather cite one brief Dirge, and a stanza To the Mooiij 
 of which the first is rarely noticed and the second even 
 
 222 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 more rarely, Mr. W. M. Rossetti having excluded it* 
 from his unannotated edition. Here is the Dirge : 
 
 " Rough wind, that moanest loud 
 
 Grief too sad for song ; 
 Wild wind, when sullen cloud 
 
 Knells all the night long ; 
 Sad storm, whose tears are vain, 
 Bare woods, whose branches stain, 
 Deep caves and dreary main, 
 
 Wail for the world's wrong ! " 
 
 The discerning reader has doubtless halted over that 
 **when" in the third line, and the "stain" in the 
 sixth. These are certainly stumbling-blocks ; and, 
 despite the invectives of Mr. Buxton Forman against 
 the emendators of his beloved poet, I venture to say 
 that "stain," though retained in all editions, is clearly 
 a misprint for "strain;" while "when" might very 
 plausibly be altered to "who in," and "knells" to 
 " knellst." These changes made, the poem is practi- 
 cally perfect. Read now the lines To the Moon : 
 
 " Art thou pale for weariness 
 
 Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth, 
 Wandering companionless 
 
 Among the stars that have a different birth, 
 And ever changing, like a joyless eye 
 That finds no object worth its constancy ? " 
 
 There are two more lines, suppressed in some editions, 
 which constitute this a fragment ; but they only mar 
 the perfection of the stanza given, which I take to be 
 one of Shelley's finest things. In these two poemlets, 
 as in a number of the better-known short poems, we 
 
 * Mr. Rossetti has a rather puzzling editorial method. I find 
 that the admirable sonnet, " Keen fitful gusts are whispering here 
 and there," is dropped from his Keats. It was bad enough that it 
 should not appear in Mr. Arnold's selection in the English Poets : 
 Mr. Rossetti' s omission is unpardonable. 
 
 223 
 
y>K\<^ "^ ..K„->' ,.,<*'' 
 
 A 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 T 
 
 have choice illustrations of his best poetic qualities, 
 which may be summed up as delicacy and opulence of 
 fancy, and tender, musical, piercing expression of what 
 Mr. Ruskin calls the ''pathetic fallacy" — the reading 
 of human feelinof into the things of nature.* Here 
 (printers' errors apart) we have these attributes without 
 any marring carelessness or racking of language : we 
 are reading subtle, "inevitable," pregnant, memorable 
 poetry. 
 
 Apply, then, the standards here adopted to, say 
 Prometheus Unbound^ and see how far they authorise 
 praise of that work as a whole, or any definite portion 
 of it. Raising no question whatever as to the sub- 
 stantiality of the theme, let us consider how far it has 
 been impressively or subtly handled — how far the result 
 is vivid, clarified, vital, and delightful for us. Is it 
 not the case that, despite great passages, for the most 
 part the subject is wrapt in a kind of " luminous fog ; " 
 that instead of condensing the emotions set in action 
 by the theme the poet wanders off into every kind of 
 diffuse and fantastic digression, creating for us an 
 endless range of " rich windows that exclude the light, 
 and passages that lead to nothing " ? What pathos, 
 what charm, is there in the "pathetic fallacy" as 
 expressed here ? We grant the poet his Spirits, his 
 Echoes, his Spirits of the Hours, his Oceanides, his 
 Jupiter and Phantasm of Jupiter, his Earth and Spirit 
 of the Earth, and all the rest of it ; but he who handles 
 such machinery has laid on himself a heavy burden of 
 
 * Cp. Nordau, as cited above, p. 47. Before Ruskin, Professor 
 Spalding wrote of " those analogies between the mind and the things 
 it lojks on, which are the fountains of genuine poetic feeling," But 
 he gave the highest credit for feeling these analogies to — Thomson 
 of the " Seasons " ! {Hist. Eng. Lit., ed. 1853, p. 338.) Perhaps it 
 would be fair to say that Thomson's failure is one of affected 
 execution. 
 
 224 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 being" at every turn at once intense and fascinating", 
 musical and meaningful. Now there are passages of 
 beautiful if somewhat soprano blank verse in Prometheus 
 Unbound, and some exceedingly melodious lyrics ; but 
 the unhappy fact remains that they are embedded in 
 a large body of falsetto declamation and rhyming 
 verbiage. What are we to make of such singing as 
 this : 
 
 Second Voice {from the springs). 
 
 " Thunderbolts had parched our water, 
 We had been stained with bitter blood, 
 And had run mute, 'mid shrieks of slaughter, 
 Through a city and a solitude." 
 
 * * * * * » 
 
 Fourth Voice {from the whirlwinds). 
 
 ' ' We had soared beneath these mountains 
 Unresting ages ; nor had thunder, 
 Nor yon volcano's flaming fountains. 
 Nor any power above or under 
 Ever made us mute with wonder." 
 
 First Voice [i.e., that of the mountains]. 
 
 " But never bowed our snowy crest 
 As at the voice of thine unrest." 
 
 Second Voice, 
 
 " Never such a sound before 
 To the Indian waves we bore. 
 A pilot asleep on the howling sea 
 Leaped up from the deck in agony, 
 And heard and cried, ' Ah, woe is me ! ' 
 And died as mad as the wild waves be." 
 
 And this : 
 
 Once the hungry Hours were hounds 
 
 Which chased the day like a bleeding deer. 
 
 And it limped and stumbled with many wounds 
 Though the nightly dells of the desert year." 
 
 225 P 
 
f- 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 And this : 
 
 " O gentle moon, thy crystal accents pierce 
 The caverns of my pride's deep universe, 
 Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce 
 Made wounds which need thy balm ? 
 
 There is really no need to quote samples. All the 
 Songs and Choruses of Spirits, and the utterances of 
 Demogorgon generally, may be averaged as sound and 
 fury, signifying nothing. A question has even been 
 raised as to whether the favourite stanza in Asia's song, 
 beginning : 
 
 " My soul is an enchanted boat, 
 Which like a sleeping swan doth float 
 Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing " 
 
 has any particular meaning. I should not be disposed 
 to push that inquiry, seeing that the passage is verballj^' 
 pellucid, extremely musical, and charming in its fancy 
 though a little confused in Its Imagery ; and in the 
 same way I should gratefully accept the semichorus 
 beginning : 
 
 " There the voluptuous nightingales 
 Are awake through all the broad noon-day ; " 
 
 and one or two other lyrical felicities. But a few such 
 
 tuneful passages cannot make Prometheus Unbou7id 
 
 rank as a great work. It is to be noted, indeed, that 
 
 the favourite portions have no real connection with the 
 
 central theme, the "enchanted boat" passage, for 
 
 instance, being worked up from a fragment originally 
 
 entitled by the poet To One Singings just as Byron 
 
 introduced into Manfred a song he had addressed to or 
 
 ^""^-written for his sister. Thus do the poets get their 
 
 ^/fnsplratlons. We do not grudge them their expedients ; 
 
 / but we are entitled to demand that their hoarded gems 
 
 ^ shall be adequately set ; and the more relevant work in 
 
 226 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 "^-^^ 
 
 / 
 
 Prometheus Unbound^ thoug-h less crude in execution 
 than The Revolt of Islam ^ is for the most part unsatisfy- 
 ing. It is a far cry from the thunder and lightning of 
 ^schylus to the Shelleyan aurora borealis. In the 
 blank verse, as in the rhymed, we have a few starry 
 points, as this : 
 
 " As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth 
 Is loosened, and the nations echo round " ; 
 
 And this : 
 
 " Praxitelean shapes, whose marble smiles 
 Fill the hushed air with everlasting love. ' ' 
 
 And there is splendid power in the opening apostrophe. 
 But the true Shelleyite adores Prometlieus Unhoiind in 
 its nebulous entirety ; and when people of culture are 
 found thus fascinated by a coruscating haze we are 
 forced to raise the question whether their own intellectual 
 furniture is of a very substantial kind. Who are the 
 people who find mental nourishment and abiding 
 charm in the soft or strained falsettos of Shelley's 
 nymphs and spirits, and the vapourings of his phantoms? 
 Do they combine .with a critical literary taste a clear 
 vision of the great issues of life ? Are they close 
 students of men and things; and do they ^affect any 
 harder thinking than that of belles-lettres ?\ It would 
 be unwarrantable to say that there are not out-and-out 
 Shelleyites whose intellectual outfit is of the completest 
 kind ; but it may be suspected that a large proportion 
 are to be classified as lovers of the sentimental in philo 
 sophy and the mythical in history ; and that the compe 
 tent minds which delight in Shelley generally set aside 
 as valueless two-thirds of his work, ^hTs^at ail events 
 may be said with confidence, that a reader who finds 
 poetry of the highest kind in Shakspere's tragedies ; 
 who finds a charm in Wordsworth's best distillation of 
 
 227 
 
 Y 
 
K 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 reflection and feeling ; who appreciates both the 
 incomparable art and the deeper emotion of Tennyson ; 
 who is moved by the best verse of Arnold ; who follows 
 and enjoys the psychologising of Browning ; who has 
 assimilated the best European fiction of these genera- 
 tions ; and who, withal, follows with interest the 
 thought of his time and adopts its conceptions of man 
 and nature — that such a reader cannot conceivably find 
 enduring satisfaction in the larger part of Shelley's 
 product. If one feels the fine qualities of the short 
 pieces in which the singer really reaches our heart- 
 strings, the moving naturalness of the thought and the 
 '' simple, passionate, sensuous " quality of the language, 
 one simply cannot accept as successful poetry the 
 spasmodic rhapsodies of the long compositions. 
 
 V 
 
 We shall not, however, rightly understand the case 
 until we fully recognise the remarkable faculty which 
 underlies Shelley's worst as well as his best work — the 
 freedom in the use of words, in which, judgment apart, 
 he excels all previous English poets save Shakspere. 
 It is no doubt this extraordinary capacity for mere 
 verbal movement which overpowers most Shelleyites ; 
 it seems so wonderful, so superhuman, so independent 
 of the ordinary trammels of thought and speech, that 
 men in their surprise cease to be critical, and simply 
 bow down and worship. And it must be acknowledged 
 that his faculty of ecstatic speech is at times exhibited 
 by Shelley in sustained flights which do not get lost in 
 cloudland. If I were asked to say in which of the 
 poems over a few hundred lines he is most successful, I 
 should name Epipsychidion and the Lilies 'written among 
 
 228 
 
,# 
 
 l^'^ 
 
 y 
 
 iA.~ ..4?.*^^ 
 
 SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 the Euganean Hills. In these pieces, though they have 
 not, as it were, gone through the process of gestation » 
 which made possible the ripest of his short poems, hejs j llj^j, 
 working in the stuiT of humaa feeling ; not versifying ! 
 delirious aspirations, but pouring out his own heart ; 
 and though we have agreed that to the poet no subject 
 is tabu, it stands to reason that he has a much better 
 chance of attaining excellence of song when he uses the ^ 
 
 material of his deepest experience than when spinning 
 the cloud-webs of his wandering fantasy. And so 
 the poem written among the Eugmiean Hills, though 
 done in haste and not free from weaknesses, has a 
 touching quality for all lovers of poetry, the throb of 
 the poet's heart running through all its swift transitions. 
 It really attains the indispensable quality of intension, 
 the poet in the stress of his emotion becoming one, as ^ 
 it were, with all he sees, and attaining in his commentary 
 a white heat of thought. So too in Epipsychidion he ' 
 achieves a transfiguration of passion, moving in the 
 process, it is true, towards his favourite cloudland, but 
 never letting the note of his eager passion die away, 
 never getting quite lost sight of. It is a unique poetic 
 faculty which has produced these two poems, with their 
 eager rush of ideas, that *'pard-like, beautiful and 
 swift " motion which charms so many readers into 
 measureless applause ; and we shall do well to take 
 pains to appreciate their fine qualities, for they stand 
 alone among Shelley's poems of more than two hundred 
 lines in respect of combined intensity and finish. With ^ 
 
 the Ode to the West Wind, they represent his highest 
 achievement in the most ambitious forms of lyrical 
 poetry, and give us the measure of his mentality. 
 Wild, passionate yearning, undefined aspiration, ,. 
 expressed with an eagerness always tending towards 1^ 
 incoherence and unintelligibility — this is what Shelley < 
 
 229 
 
•V 
 
 ^ SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 has to give us in the most strenuous of his prosperous 
 flights ; and it may be left to readers to say for them- 
 selves finally whether at his highest such a poet is one 
 of the greatest poets. 
 ^- — It is sometimes contended — it is contended by Mr. 
 Myers in his admirably u^ritten essay in The English 
 Poets, after he has condensed into a cogent argument 
 the ''floating criticism" of those whom Shelley does 
 not satisfy — that the poet was developing, and would 
 
 Zhaye done stronger work had he lived ; but this is going 
 beyond the data. Shelley was indeed becoming a little 
 more self-critical, and he rejected some very bad passages 
 which he had written for Epipsychidion ; but that poem 
 as it stands, and Adonais and Hellas^ give no indication 
 of any real progress on his part towards a firmer grasp 
 of life and thought than he exhibited four years earlier. 
 It is unwarrantable to take Shelley's poetry as the work 
 of a youth whose intellectual powers were only half 
 developed : at twenty-eight as at twenty his thinking is 
 spasmodic, ill-digested, unsubstantial ; and, looking to 
 his precocity, we have some reason to believe that had 
 he lived he would have given the world no solider work 
 than he has done. If people would study the facts of 
 his life dispassionately they would see that though in 
 his moral nature the beauties far outgo the faults, he 
 ^ ^ had not the mental constitution of a sane and profound 
 poet. Hallucinations such as are recorded of him are 
 J not credentials of intellectual greatness : we have only 
 1 to place his pathetic life, with its crazes, its flurries, 
 j and its miseries, beside that of Goethe, without raising 
 ! any question of morals, to see the diff'erence between 
 I abnormality of function such as his and balanced poetic 
 , strength. And even in respect of his art, of his technique, 
 it cannot be claimed for Shelley that his progress was 
 promisingly steady. The Skylark, according to Mrs. 
 
 230 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 Shelley, was written in the same year as The Cloud — 
 182 1 ; and side by side with the metrical perfection of 
 the latter poem and the lilt of the Hymji of Pan we have 
 also the slipshod work of The Sensitive Plants an essen- 
 tially unsuccessful production, were it only in respect of 
 the impossibility of scanning it regularly for any three 
 stanzas together. And in Hellas, also written in 1821, 
 as an offset to the clarion song with which it concludes, 
 we have not only rhyming passages of the most extra- 
 vagantly meaningless description, but quantities of the 
 most prosaic blank verse Shelley ever turned out — much 
 of it mere lumbering transcripts of the gazettes, and 
 much more little better than noisy melodrama. We have 
 Mahmud telling Ahasuerus : 
 
 " Thou art an adept in the difficult lore 
 Of Greek and Frank philosophy ; " 
 
 and bits of chorus such as this : 
 
 " I saw her [Wrong] ghastly as a tyrant's dream, 
 Perch on the trembHng pyramid of night, 
 Beneath which earth and all her realms pavilioned lay 
 
 In visions of the dcm'iiing undelight.'^ 
 
 When we read such propositions as : '* wolfish change, 
 like winter, howls to strip the foliage in which Fame, 
 the eagle, built her aerie;" and such figures as '*the 
 cold, pale Hour, rich in reversion of Impending death," 
 it is Idle to ask us to believe that the poet was develop- 
 ing into a close thinker and truly artistic singer. And, 
 to come to perhaps the most delicate point in our 
 summing up, even AdonatSy one of the poems of 1821, 
 partakes of the nature" of a brilliant failure. It has 
 certainly a comparatively small percentage of quite bad 
 or absurd lines ; but none the more does It exhibit ripe 
 ant or pregnant utterance. The show of passion, the V 
 ** wild and whirling words " in which the poet pours his 
 
 231 
 
 / 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 plaint for his dead fellow singer, have the effect of 
 
 impressing many readers ; and indeed it is impossible 
 
 to be quite cold to such a storm of eloquent wailingx 
 
 but I doubt whether any one of a fairly judicial habit of 
 
 mind can go through the poem thoughtfully and, mindful 
 
 of the actual facts of Shelley's relation to the dead man, 
 
 yet laying no stress on his blunder as to the cause of 
 
 Keats's death, pronounce it the moving expression of a 
 
 sincere human grief. It has neither the symptoms nor 
 
 I the contagious pathos of heartfelt mourning. Milton's 
 
 j Lycidas^ with all its noble beauty, had partly set a 
 
 {precedent for rhetorical requiems; but where Milton's 
 
 : rhetoric is august and golden, Shelley's is shrill, 
 
 'hysterical, almost bombastic. It is not by declamatory 
 
 lamentation of this sort that we are moved to mourn for 
 
 poets or any one else. Take against the whole profuse 
 
 outcry of Adonais a few sad stanzas of In Memorianty 
 
 with their controlled but potent feeling ; or even a few 
 
 such simple lines as these from In the Garden at 
 
 Swainston : 
 
 " Two dead men have I known 
 In courtesy like to thee ; 
 Two dead men have I loved 
 With a love that ever will be ; 
 Three dead men have I loved, 
 And thou are last of the three " ; 
 
 or four mellow, melancholy lines of Arnold's on Clough : 
 
 " Hear it from thy broad lucent Arno vale 
 (For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep 
 The morningless and unawakening sleep 
 Under the flowery oleanders pale) " — 
 
 and Shelley's dirge beside them sounds windy and 
 theatrical. 
 
 They positively will not bear cool criticism from 
 readers of this generation, these lengthy performances 
 
 232 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 _DlJiis.^._he_thexJate^jQi^-eaf4y, The Witch of Atlas may 
 be read with satisfaction by votaries of belles-lettres on 
 the strength of its thin trickle of rhyme and dilettantist 
 fancy-spinning, regardless of such an unspeakable line 
 as that ending in *' dairy " in the sixteenth stanza ; but 
 the weakest of the Idylls of the Kmg is strong and 
 interesting in comparison, fulian and Maddalo some- 
 times has a word said for it by critics who find it 
 impossible to say any good of Rosalind and Heleiiy but 
 no one has yet shown where the general merit of the 
 former poem lies. It has one noteworthy and often- 
 quoted passage ; but what are we to make of such lines 
 
 as these : 
 
 " I recall 
 The sense of what he said, although I mar 
 The force of his expressions " : 
 
 " His child had now become 
 A woman, such as it has been my doom 
 To meet with few " — ? 
 
 And what excuse can be made for the final collapse of 
 the story in the absurd declaration : 
 
 " She told me how 
 All happened— but the cold world shall not know " — ? 
 
 One after one, on examination, the long poems for 
 which so much has been claimed are found to be faulty, 
 diff'use, _,charmjesst. ilUjgonsidered, wearisome — so much 
 ''rhymed English," as Emerson bluntly put it. -Xhe^ 
 Cenci best bears-^tudy, and it must be allowed that 
 SlTeileyTias handled his ill-chosen subject with no small 
 energy and pains. It is sometimes claimed for him that 
 his tragedy places him next to Shakspere among 
 modern English poets ; but to pronounce such a judg- 
 ment on the datum that no tragedy of importance had 
 been produced between Shakspere and Shelley is to use 
 
 233 
 
 V 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 misleading language. The Cenci has indeed a quality 
 of emotion and ^stress not to be found in the inter- 
 mediate work ; but all the same it fails to take rank as 
 an original and successful drama. Half a dozen times 
 over we find direct imitations of Shakspere, but of 
 Shaksperean concision and lifelikeness , there is little. 
 It has the literary faults of the " poetic drama " without 
 that terse intensity of style which in Shakspere seems to 
 fuse the most extravagant imagery into living speech. 
 The plagiarisms might be taken as results of failure of 
 memory, like the repeated use of the word *' wilderness" 
 in Prometheus, and of " islanded " elsewhere ; but these 
 are all symptoms of intellectual defect ; and, for the 
 rest, the shortcomings of the work are of a vital kind. 
 The poet tells us in his preface that he has "avoided 
 with great care in writing this play the introduction of 
 what is commonly called mere poetry ; " but in point of 
 fact the declamation is constantly in Shelley's own 
 poetic style; and he introduces the merest of "mere 
 poetry" just where it is most inadmissible, as when* 
 Camillo is made to say of Marzio : 
 
 " He shrinks from her regard like autumn's leaf 
 From the keen breath of the serenest north." 
 
 Most fatal defect of all, Beatrice is quite imperfectly 
 individualised, being here a personage of all • too 
 Shelleyan fecundity of phrase, who in her supreme 
 
 moments, with one exception, substitutes verbose 
 
 ^ violence for the terrible simplicity of genuine feeling in 
 / extremity. The exception is the last speech of all, 
 which is entirely and astonishingly excellent. These 
 lines and some others, including those introducing 
 Beatrice's song, do recall Shakspere ; and suggest 
 questions as to Shelley's cerebra l variability ; but our 
 
 '■' Act V. scene 2. 
 234 
 
 / 
 
SHELLEY AND POETRY 
 
 final judgment must be that while The Cenci, despite its 
 impracticable subject, is in respect of literary quality 
 more readable than any other of Shelley's longer works, 
 it is not fated to become a classic. In its kind it is 
 superseded by Browning. 
 
 There is little need to review in detail the rest of our 
 poet's large body of work. Those who set him high do 
 not as a rule found to any extent on his political and 
 satirical verse, recognising presumably that while his 
 achievement in those directions is considerable, it is of 
 no particular account in regard to the question of his 
 ran^k among the higher poets. Much of it, however, 
 has the high merit of directness and naturalness — 
 praise which, it should be said, cannot be given 
 to such pieces as the Odes to Liberty and to Naples 
 — and this measure of practical success in the poet's 
 less poetic work ought to be kept in view in our final "^ 
 estimate^f hiln. Mr. Arnold has strikingly described 
 Shelley, in one of his choice phrases, as an *' ineff'ectual 
 angei,__beating in the void his luminous wings in vain;" 
 but when we remember what his political influence has 
 been since his death, the characterisation is felt to bel 
 astray. Its true aspect is, from the point of view of the 
 present criticism, in regard to Shelley's attempts at 
 concentrated poetic criticism of life. But let it be 
 reiterated in conclusion that mere failure to criticise 
 life soundly is not the condemnation of a poet. What \ 
 has been contended in this inadequate inquiry is that ? 
 not the rightness of a poet's thinking but the charm of 
 his expression of it is his title to praise ; and what is \ 
 rightly to be decided against Shelley is that in his longer 
 works his thought, such as it was, is quite inadequately 
 meditated for purposes of beautiful expression. With •, 
 counter arguments to the eff"ect that Shelley's personality \ 
 glorifies his poetry for us we have here nothing to do. I 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 (1884) 
 
 When Mr. Irving-, some ten years ago, made a sensa- 
 tion in London by his remarkable creation of a melo- 
 dramatic Hamlet, it was said that strange questions 
 were known to be put with bated breath in the boxes 
 about the fourth act or so. *' What is the end ? " and 
 ** What becomes of Hamlet?" were among the problems 
 alleged to have been thus propounded by persons who 
 discovered on trial that the social make-believe of 
 knowing Shakspere as a matter of course, somehow did 
 not procure one a thorough familiarity with his works. 
 The story was doubtless in large measure an embellish- 
 ment ; at least it is difficult to believe that any of the 
 numerous patriots who know Shakspere by faith alone 
 would thus break down convention; butit is an effective 
 way of setting forth the tendency of poor humanity to 
 lose hold of literature which everybody is presumed to 
 know ; and it would bear telling in regard to more 
 things than *' Hamlet." In the perusal of some of the 
 many criticisms which have lately appeared on Keats, 
 there is apt to arise a suspicion which can most concisely 
 be expressed in the bold generalisation that it is not the 
 popularity of a poet which produces new editions, but 
 new editions which maintain a poet's popularity. One 
 
 237 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 speculates as to whether Mr. Forman's recent magnifi- 
 cent edition of Keats supplied a feff want, or whether 
 the want came to be Telt after the date of publication ; 
 and whether it was then experienced by many who were 
 unable to satisfy it. And one can hardly resist the 
 conclusion that there is a close relation between the 
 amount of cerebration going on in the critical world, 
 and the size and cost of the new editions with which 
 that world is confronted. 
 
 Whatever be the demerits and motives of the critics 
 singly and in the mass, they have assuredly the merit 
 of stimulating the public to read. It is pretty certain 
 that the production of Mr. Forman's edition has in- 
 directly promoted the sale of others, and also led to 
 much dipping into Endymion. The result must in many 
 cases have been a certain degree of perplexity ; and 
 though Mr. Forman's edition has drawn forth much 
 pertinent and educative criticism, there is perhaps still 
 room for an attempt at a reasoned estimate of the value 
 of Keats's work. The body of criticism on Keats, 
 indeed, is about as difficult to assay conclusively as the 
 poet's performance. There is first to be dealt with the 
 phenomenon of the laborious and costly production of 
 all Keats wrote ; then the explicit and implicit homage 
 paid him by a patient critic like Mr. Forman, and many 
 able writers in the general press ; and against this is to 
 be set the considerable mass of detraction got by adding 
 admissions of admirers to charges of censors. The 
 difficulty presents itself in a peculiarly precise and 
 puzzling form in the critique by Mr. Arnold prefaced to 
 the selections from Keats in Mr. Ward's English Poets, 
 One sentence in that paper begins with: ''We who 
 believe Keats to have been by his promise, at any rate, 
 if not fully by his performance, one of the very greatest 
 of English poets ;" and a page or two further on comes 
 
 238 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 U^-"^- 
 
 ^,<' 
 
 fj^^ v^>"44-< 
 
 ^.^J-VC-*'-*^ 
 
 this final judgment: "His Endymion, as he himself 
 
 well saw, is a failure ; and his Hyperion^ fine things as i- 
 
 it contains, is not a success." How is a guileless reader 
 
 to reconcile such utterances ? Keats's longest poem, 
 
 which may practically be reckoned his most important, 
 
 is pronounced a failure ; the next longest is put in the 
 
 same category, leaving but a small quantity uncon- 
 
 demned ; and this by a critic who thinks he was by his 
 
 promise, and in large measure by his performance, one 
 
 of the very greatest of English poets. JNp^xeasoning 
 
 can well acquit Mr. Arnold of having left ajiiatus in his 
 
 work ; but it is perhaps possible to reach a position t^ ^^ 
 
 from which at least the rationale of both the eulogy and "" 
 
 the detraction may be perceived ; and at which thQ 
 
 admiration of one school may be partly sympathised 
 
 with at the same time as the impatience of their extrem^ 
 
 opponents. 
 
 One dispute about Keats may be settled by approach- 
 ing it straightforwardly and simply. There is a common 
 impression, indicated in Byron's reflection on the erro- 
 neous story of Keats's sufferings from adverse criticism, 
 and in Carlyle's contemptuous reference to him, that 
 the author of Endymion was a feeble creature, seriously 
 lacking in self-control. That view of him is strongly 
 supported by some of the letters to Fanny Brawne, one 
 of which, written before his illness, is singled out by 
 Mr. Arnold with much severity, if not altogether 
 without justice, as having "in its relaxed self-abandon- 
 ment something underbred and ignoble." Mr. Arnold, 
 however, goes too far when he says it is "the sort of 
 love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice which one might 
 hear read out in a breach of promise case or in the 
 Divorce Court." Foolish surgeons' apprentices do not 
 say such things as this : "I have been astonished that 
 men could die martyrs for religion — I have shuddered 
 
 239 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 at it. I shudder no more — I could be martyred for my 
 religion — Love is my religion — I could die for that." 
 The matter can best be seen round by contrasting these 
 passionate outbursts with Keats's protestations at other 
 times of his disposition to regard women as he did roses 
 and sweetmeats, as '* children to whom I would rather 
 give a sugar-plum than my time." Now, the passion 
 and the puppyism are alike natural consequences of 
 British social arrangements, which at once discounten- 
 ance the sexual instincts, and tend — then greatly and 
 still much — to develop in women only the sexual attrac- 
 tions. It is the result of our asceticism that we both 
 find passion ignoble and are capable of being ignobly 
 passionate. The chances are that Keats did not do 
 more ''underbred" things than the average "well 
 brought-up " young man whom Mr. Arnold would cite 
 as a model. 
 
 Here, then, there need be no confusion. Keats, let 
 us agree, could be both masculinely superior to the 
 sexual instinct and masculinely slave to it ; and it con- 
 sists with either fact that he should before his illness 
 show so much ''flint and iron," as Mr. Arnold puts it, 
 such a haughty and secure superiority to popular 
 opinion. Nor is it astonishing that he should at one 
 time speak slightingly about poetry and the popular 
 appetite for it ; and at another proclaim his thirst for 
 glory and his devotion to poetry, or proudly declare the 
 public his debtors for his verses : such changeableness 
 being as well ascertained a quality of young manhood 
 as any species of fickleness is of the other sex. If any 
 insist on being rigorous, let them remember that Keats 
 was probably a diseased organism long before he began 
 to spit blood ; that phthisis goes with both erotic and 
 intellectual precocity ; and that precocity is in itself 
 disease, 
 
 240 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 If it be settled that apparently conflicting views of 
 Keats's character are simply contemplations of him in 
 different aspects, it may be possible to come to a satis- , 
 factory decision about the value of his poetry without \ 
 pronouncing any school of criticism to be out of court— ^ 
 to harmonise the judgment that Endymion and Hyperion 
 are failures, with the verdict of an Athenceiun critic that 
 ** not in English Hterature, nor perhaps in any literature, 
 is rapidity combined with steadiness of growth so 
 astonishingly as in Keats's case." After much theoris- 
 ing it is beginning to be generally understood that_ a 
 poet is really, as old maxims had it^ a specialist ; that 
 he start's with a peculiar gift of expression, "and that he 
 cultivates that gift. Carlyle, who of all critics possess- 
 ing genuine insight is about the least patient, the least 
 careful to check himself, is responsible for some amount 
 of misconception on the subject. The passage in the 
 essay on Burns, in which he contemns Keats and 
 dogmatises on the nature of poetry, is worth remember- 
 ing in this connection : 
 
 " Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole 
 consists in a weak-eyed maudHn sensibility, and a certain vague 
 random tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which 
 can be superadded to the rest or disjoined from them, but rather the 
 result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the 
 gifts that exist in the Poet are those that exist, with more or less 
 development, in every human soul : the imagination which shudders 
 at the Hell of Dante is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which 
 called that picture into being." 
 
 There is just enough truth here to carry the error. If 
 poetry is no separate faculty, how is it that such a 
 strong imagination as Carlyle's own, even when united 
 with a keen sense of literary art and a considerable 
 mastery of language, could not produce good verse? 
 He has everything but the final felicity of being at home 
 in metre — a case scarcely to be paralleled save in that of 
 
 241 Q 
 
\ ^^ f 
 
 / 
 
 - THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 \,i 
 
 Charles Lamb. Two such cases, however, are amply 
 J\ sufficient to prove that besides u nderstandi ng- and 
 Vyimagination the pDet^must possess-three .special apti- 
 tudes, full commanid o^jvvords, a ^ubtle^ feeling- for 
 
 :adence, and an equally subtle sensibilijtyj,_ by force of 
 j vhich last he is for ever attracted to the uncommon, 
 |(vhether beneath the common or beyond it. Having 
 these, he may, by reason of other endowments or 
 limitations, be either a great poet or only a charming 
 one ; but, great or limited, his function as poet is to see 
 and say things in the finest way rather than to teach ; 
 and in point of fact, instead of having all his faculties 
 in harmony, he must cultivate his gift partly at the 
 expense of his other faculties, and best succeeds when- 
 most possessed by that one. Now, Carlyle spoke 
 ignorantly when he allowed Keats nothing but a 
 \ ** weak-eyed maudlin sensibility." Keats's criticaljudg- 
 ment at times shows itself as robust as that of Burns^ 
 and considerably more subtle. There is not in English 
 literature anything closer^ firmer, or more clear-headed 
 in the way of terse self-criticisnTThan the preface to 
 Endymion. To call the writer of that merely maudlin 
 is absurd. The remarkable thing is that a young poet 
 should combine such a power of rigorous judgment 
 with such a capacity and passion for painting cloudland. 
 What we must believe is that Keats had the intellectual 
 endowment to make a great poet in time, though so 
 much of his work is of the kind we should expect from 
 one less than great. 
 
 But the first thing to be set forth is the measure in 
 which he possessed the poetic faculty proper. That 
 instead of possessing a mere "random tunefulness of 
 nature " he had a singular aptitude for cadence and a 
 marvellous capacity of exquisite phrase, is now pretty 
 universally felt. Mr. Arnold goes so far as to say that 
 
 24.2 
 
V 
 
 THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 *' no one else in English poetry, save Shakspere, has in 
 expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his 
 perfection of loveliness." Carlyle's '* random" may be 
 defended by some on the score that Keats's good things /^ 
 are found among so many bad, but that does not seem 
 to be what Carlyle meant ; and if he really could appre- 
 ciate the goodness of the good things it was his ^ 
 business to confess distinctly their existence. A con- 
 clusive illustration of Keats's power of melody and 
 choice phrase is the Ode to a Nightingale, certainly one 
 of the most beautiful poems in any language ; and one ^ 
 stanza is about as decisive as the entire poem : 
 
 " Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird ! 
 
 No hungry generations tread thee down ; ; 
 
 The voice I hear this passing night was heard ; 
 
 In ancient days by emperor and clown : \ 
 
 Perhaps the self-same song that found a path \ 
 
 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
 
 She stood in tears amid the alien corn ; 
 
 The same that oft-times hath \ 
 
 Charmed magic casements opening on the foam -. 
 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 
 
 It must be confessed indeed— even Mr. Forman allows 
 it — that the logic of the stanza is wrong; and it will., 
 scarcely do to argue, as Mr. Forman does in regard tee- 
 the faulty first stanza, thatjhe obscurity is appropriate; 
 but, setting aside the fourth line above quoted, which 
 has a rhyme-making ring, there can be no debate what- 
 ever as to the bewitching beauty of the lines and the 
 strange charm of their '/cloudy companionship." Nor 
 can there be found in our language more "melodious 
 pain " than this : 
 
 . . . That I might drink, and leave the world unseen. 
 And with thee fade away into the forest dim : 
 
 243 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 Fade far away, dissolve and quite forget 
 
 What thou amongst the leaves hast never known, 
 The weariness, the fever, and the fret 
 
 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan ; 
 Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 
 
 Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies ; 
 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow 
 And leaden-eyed despairs ; 
 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, 
 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 
 
 Nothing more musically melancholy has been done 
 before or since ; and here no touch could be wished 
 different. Had Keats always or often written thus his 
 position to-day would be triumphantly secure ; but 
 unhappily only a very small proportion of his work can 
 be put beside the Ode to a Niglitivgale. That he has 
 nevertheless ranked since his death as a generally suc- 
 cessful poet is the result of two causes, one the scarcity 
 of perfect work, the other the inability of most readers 
 to discriminate clearly between good work and bad. It 
 may seem presumptuous to say it, but it must be said that 
 the most prominent critics still distinguish ill between 
 Keats's fine and inferior workmanship. There is a very 
 general recognition of the admirable character of the 
 sonnet On First Looking into Ctiapinan''s Homer ; but 
 very little reference to a finer sonnet of his still, which I 
 will here quote : 
 
 Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there 
 Among the bushes, half leafless and dry ; 
 The stars are very cold about the sky, 
 
 And I have many miles on foot to fare. 
 
 Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air, 
 Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily. 
 Or of those silver lamps that burn on high, 
 
 Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair ; 
 
 For I am brimful of the friendliness 
 That in a little cottage I have found ; 
 244 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 Of fair-haired Milton's eloquent distress, 
 And all his love for gentle Lycid drowned ; 
 
 Of lovely Laura in her light green dress, 
 And faithful Petrarch, gloriously crowned. 
 
 That, I make bold to think, is the best sonnet Keats 
 wrote, though, strange to say, Mr. Arnold has not had 
 it inserted among the pieces given in the English PoetSy 
 which include eight sonnets.* The Homer sonnet, 
 though distinctly done in the grand style, and terminat- 
 ing, as Mr. Forman observes, *Svith the noblest Greek 
 simplicity," is of a less rare kind of execution. With 
 the exception, perhaps, of the last two lines, it could 
 quite conceivably have been written by, say, Leigh 
 Hunt,t who was capable of the orotund roll of the 
 earlier part, and who might have avoided the two weak 
 lines in the sonnet — 
 
 Round many western islands have I been 
 and 
 
 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. 
 
 The first eight lines, in short, show no incomparable 
 inspiration ; whereas the whole of the sonnet quoted is 
 poetical in the highest degree. It has the crowning 
 
 * And though Mr. Swinburne declares, with evident reference to 
 that on Chapman's Homer, that Keats "has certainly left us one 
 perfect sonnet of the first rank, and as certainly he has left us but 
 one " {Miscellanies, p. 216). 
 
 t Lest any hastily scoff, let me point out that when Leigh Hunt, 
 Shelley, and Keats agreed each to write a sonnet on the Nile, Leigh 
 Hunt's production was decidedly the best of the three. The two 
 opening lines : 
 
 It flows through old, hush'd .^gypt and its sands 
 ■ Like some grave, mighty thought, threading a dream — 
 
 and the line on Cleopatra : 
 
 The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands — 
 
 would have done credit to any English poet. Yet thi:i sonnet, too, 
 is excluded from the English Poets. 
 
 245 
 
» A \ 
 
 THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 grace of an entire, a divine simplicity, beside which the 
 Chapman sonnet savours of artificiality ; and its tiptoe 
 finish is as unmatchable in its way as that of the other, 
 wFieTIier you call it Greek or not. A poet, besides being 
 genius and artist, has his special inspirations, his lucky 
 moments ; and one of these gave birth to the most 
 perfect poem of Keats, in which the one shadow of a 
 spot, the irregularity of the second line, is hardly more 
 of a blemish than a dimple. 
 
 Among Keats's Odes, next to that To a Nightingale I 
 should place that On Melancholy. It perhaps never 
 attains to the perfect music of the other, but It is just 
 as distinctly an emanation of genius, the work not of a 
 clever versifier but of a man whose Imagination lives 
 naturally in another medium than that of prose common 
 sense. It has the incommunicable distinction which 
 comes of the laying on of the poet's hands. The middle 
 [stanza is perhaps a little "precious," a little suggestive 
 \of the weaker developments of a modern aesthetic 
 cultus which makes much of Keats ; yet even in this 
 stanza the workmanship is delicately charming, and the 
 last is both beautiful and massive : ^ 
 
 She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die ; 
 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips, 
 Bidding adieu ; and aching Pleasure nigh. 
 
 Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips ; 
 Ay, in the very temple of Delight 
 
 Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine, 
 
 Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue 
 
 Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine ; 
 His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, 
 
 And be among her cloudy trophies hung. 
 
 * Since this was written I find that Professor Dowden has laid 
 down, evidently with deliberation, the opinion that " Keats has 
 written nothing greater than the last stanza of his * Ode on 
 Melancholy ' " {Fortnightly Review, Sept. 18S7, p. 430). 
 
 246 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 But this choice poem, which is in one respect more 
 successful than the Ode to a Nightingale^ in that it 
 keeps its high level to the very end, while that falls in 
 the closing stanza,,is also carefully excluded from the 
 collection in the E7iglish Poets, while the second-rate 
 To Auttunn finds a place. Mr. Forman^ again, after 
 claiming that **in work later than E7idy7nion there are 
 probably more passages wherein the thought or feeling, 
 whatever it may be, is expressed with an almost 
 absolute felicity than will be found in the like bulk of 
 work by any other modern English poet," observes that 
 *'the odes To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn, and 
 On Indolence, The Eve of St. Mark, and La Belle Dame 
 Sans Merely may be named among the most sustained 
 examples of this lofty felicity." La Belle Dame Sans 
 Merci is certainly a perfect success ; but I will affirm 
 that the Ode on a Grecian Urn Is inferior to that 
 On Melancholy ; and that the Ode on Indolence and 
 The Eve of St. Mark are not to be named in com- 
 parison.* The two latter pieces will not for a moment 
 
 * It is discouraging to find Mr. Swinburne tlius adjudicating on 
 the Odes : — " Perhaps the two nearest to absolute perfection, to tlie 
 triumphant achievement and accompUshment of the very utmost 
 beauty possible to human words, may be that to Autumn and that 
 on a Grecian Urn ; the most radiant, fervent, and musical is that to 
 a Nightingale ; the most pictorial and perhaps the tenderest in its 
 ardour of passionate fancy is that to Psyche ; the subtlest in sweet- 
 ness of thought and feeling is that on Melancholy" {Miscellanies,. 
 p. 216). These distinctions are assuredly not scientific ; indeed they I 
 are well-nigh meaningless. The poetry nearest to absolute per- | 
 fection and to the utmost beauty possible to human words, must be 1 1^' 
 the finest; and few lovers of verse will set the Odes which Mr., 
 Swinburne so describes above that To a Nightingale, which he 
 himself on another page ranks as "one of the final masterpieces of 
 human work in all time and for all ages." My proposition is that; 
 in the "beauty possible to human words" the Ode to Melancholy- 
 stands next this, the loveliest ; that it is such beauty, rightly con-- 
 sidered, that constitutes poetic success ; and that to use the term^ 
 
 247 
 
 / 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 support the claim of absolute felicity made for Keats, 
 with their many prose lines,* their entirely earthly 
 architecture, and their almost complete lack of eminent 
 beauties. Mr. Forman, it is to be feared, has suffered 
 that blunting of the critical sense which is apt to 
 overtake laborious editors. In a note he speaks of 
 ''What I believe I am not alone in regarding as 
 Keats's masterpiece — Isabella.'" The avowal is deci- 
 sive. If La Belle Daine Sans Merely the Ode to a 
 Nightingale^ and the Chapman sonnet are to rank as 
 masterpieces, Isabella is not worthy of the name. Even 
 The Eve of St. Agnes, which Leigh Hunt preferred to 
 it, is far from deserving the title ; but it is a much less 
 
 "radiant," "musical," subtle in sweetness of thought and feeling, 
 and so forth, except in respect of beauty of expression, is merely to 
 darken counsel. Doubtless I shall be blamed for ranking the odes 
 To Autumn and On a Grecian Urn distinctly below that On Melancholy ; 
 and I can but solicit a careful comparison of their workmanship, I 
 say that the last has a much higher average of felicitous phrase and 
 cadence and a less percentage of the alloy of commonplace term and 
 prosaic association than the others. In all probability it is the 
 motive and the line of exposition that have hindered the Ode on 
 Melancholy of its due appreciation among English readers, who are 
 wont to call such sentiments " morbid," and so to dismiss them. I 
 may here note that in his article on Keats, Mr. Swinburne has 
 been somewhat careless in alleging that the Ode to a Nightingale " is 
 immediately preceded in all editions now current by some of the 
 most vulgar and fulsome doggerel ever whimpered by a vapid and 
 effeminate rhymester in the sickly stage of whelphood," In the 
 Aldine edition, edited by Lord Houghton, and important to the 
 student for its chronological arrangement, the Nightingale is 
 immediately preceded by Melancholy. And when we are discussing 
 the art of expression, it may be observed that such tumid rhetoric 
 as that quoted could in any case be spared by readers of Ency- 
 clopaedias. 
 
 * Such as these, in the Ode on Indolence : 
 
 " For I would not be dieted with praise 
 A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce — " 
 
 " farce" rhyming with " grass." 
 
 248 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 crude piece of work than Isabella, which, though it 
 contains some stanzas of wonderful pictorial and 
 dramatic power, is simply swarming with desperately 
 bad lines. Take a handful : 
 
 If Isabel's quick eye had not been wed 
 To every symbol on his forehead high — 
 
 Though young Lorenzo in warm Indian clove 
 Was not embalmed — 
 
 O Isabella ! I can half perceive 
 
 That I may speak my grief into thine ear— 
 
 And many once proud-quivered loins did melt 
 In blood from stinging whip — 
 
 When 'twas their plan to coax her by degrees 
 To some high noble and his olive-trees — 
 
 They dipp'd their swords in the water and did tease 
 Their horses homeward with convulsed spur, 
 Each richer for his being a murderer. 
 
 To-day thou wilt not see him, nor to-morrow, 
 And the next day will be a day of sorrow. 
 
 There is little fine work here ; no concision ; no pains- 
 taking ; the number of vile and far-fetched rhymes, and 
 further-fetched ideas, is overwhelming ; and to quote 
 all the passages vitiated in the process of rhyming 
 would fill pages. Nothing could be worse than the 
 bankrupt line with which the poet crowns the crowning 
 
 picture : 
 
 At last they felt the kernel of the grave, 
 And Isabella did not stamp and rave. 
 
 Some of us have since remedied the omission. 
 
 Not long ago a writer in a leading London journal 
 spoke of The Eve of St. Agnes as one of the most perfect 
 poems in the language ; a judgment fitted to make one 
 despair of newspaper criticism. That poem is not nearly 
 so faulty as The Pot of Basil ; but it has sufficient faults 
 
 249 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 to ruin it. It has one or two great lines — this, for 
 
 instance : 
 
 The music yearning like a god in pain — 
 
 but a deplorable number of commonplace or bad ones, 
 of which let these samples suffice : 
 
 And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan, 
 
 Along the chapel aisle by sloiv degrees. 
 
 The sculptured dead on each side seem to freeze. 
 
 Whose heart had brooded all that wintry day 
 
 On love, and wing'd St. Agnes' saintly care 
 
 As she had heard old dames full many times declare. 
 
 Supperless to bed they must retire 
 And couch supine their beauties lily white. 
 
 The hallow'd hour was near at hand, she sighs : 
 Amid the timbrels, and the throng'd resort 
 Of whisperers in anger or in sport ; 
 'Mid looks of love, defiance, hate, and scorn. 
 
 Hot-blooded lords 
 Whose very dogs would execration howl 
 Against his lineage : not one breast affords 
 Him any mercy in that mansion foul 
 Save one old beldame weak in body and soul. 
 
 — all from the first ten stanzas. What constitutes 
 perfection in poetry if such workmanship does not 
 negate it ? 
 
 Isabella^ or The Pot of Basil ^ The Eve of St. Agnes^ 
 and LanitUy it must be said, are all as distinctly failures 
 as Endymion. Lamia^ which Lord Houghton calls 
 ** quite the perfection of narrative poetry," will perhaps 
 be the last defended. It, too, has its fine pas^sages, 
 
 such as : 
 
 ever, where she willed, her spirit went 
 Whether to faint Elysium, or where 
 Down through tress-lifting waves the Nereids fair 
 
 A 
 
 and 
 
 Wind into Thetis' bower by many a pearly stair ; 
 
 Like a young Jove with calm nneager face ; 
 250 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 but, like , Isabella and T/te Eve of St. Agnes, beside 
 having many artistic blemishes it has the fatal, all 
 penetrating fault of entirely s u b o r dm ating tb e theme_ 
 to the execution. In all three cases Keats has made "" 
 
 his subject a mere excuse for a long-drawn panorama 
 oi word-painting ; and when the painting is in large 
 part slovenly what is left to be said? The truth is, 
 Keats was a boy, though, truly a marvellous one; and \ 
 
 for a boy to do work that is both extensive and 
 elaborate is hardly possible, be he as precocious as he 
 may. Though he have the most excellent critical taste 
 — and Keats was on the whole an excellent critic — he ' 
 
 cannot yet have sufficiently co-ordinated his creative 
 and critical faculties. He can r areiy_p.rQiiuC-e_Jthe most 
 ^thrillino^efEect^- which are those got by the effortless 
 distillation of much feeling and experience. If he is a 
 born poet his ver y wealth of ima^^es will at first lead him 
 astray. He will ''^ver let the Fancy roam," and if he 
 "attempts large canvases they are sure to be diffusely 
 filled. It is, indeed, an open question whether perfect 
 poetry can ever be got on a large scale — whether Poe 
 was not right in disallowing all long poems. The day 
 of the epic is done ; and in severe moods one grows a 
 little dubious even about The Ring and the Book. How- ; 
 ever that be, the weakness of Keats's long poems is all 
 too obvious. We ^o through Endymion looking idly '^ 
 for sweet things, and finding many, but struggling 
 through much marshy ground ; the tragedy of Isabella's 
 story never really rises on us ; in the Eve of St. Agnes 
 we are chiefly impressed by the bric-a-brac and the con- 
 fectionery ; the pathos of the Lamia's lot, the weird side 
 of the legend, are never reached. Nor can one well gain- 
 
 - say the verdict of Mr. Arnold that Hyperion too comes 
 
 short of l^ing a success^if by a success we mean a ppern/\ 
 to which we often and deiightedly recur- The test is a \ 
 
 2 5 1 |/^^>^ 
 
y"- the art of KEATS 
 
 hard one, no doubt, and it will play havoc with some of 
 Mr. Arnold's work, as well as with most epics ; but 
 ultimately there is no evading it ; and the time has 
 come to apply it here. For one reason or another, a 
 dozen once famous volumes of verse, Thomson's 
 SeasonSy Akenside's Pleasures of Imagiiialion, Young-'s 
 Night Thoughts^ Campbell's Pleasures of Hope^ not to 
 mention other names, have failed to stand the test, and 
 passed to the lumber-room of literature. If Hyperion 
 holds its ground better, it must be because of the 
 peculiar sympathy we give to Keats ; the work itself, 
 with all its merit, misses the accent of immortality, the 
 intense Dantean vibration of inward life which defies, 
 the numbing fingers of oblivion. They do not stay with 
 us, those Titans in reduced circumstances, strong as is 
 much of the poet's versification in comparison with his 
 previous things. One regards the poem involuntarily 
 as a piece of technique, and finds it indeed very remark- 
 able as such; but that is all. It leaves us cold, Shelley's 
 and Byron's admiration notwithstanding. Certainly 
 there was no finer modern blank verse than the opening 
 description of Saturn ; and as a single picture that will 
 probably live as long as anything of the kind in litera- 
 ture ; but a few admirable passages cannot so vitalise 
 a long and difi'use and unprogressive poem as to make 
 it enduringly attractive to readers beckoned by an 
 increasing multitude of choice performances in all liter- 
 atures. It was very like Shelley^ who could see that 
 Endymion was '* replenished " with faults and disfigured 
 with false taste, to pronounce Hyperion in large part 
 written ''in the very highest style of poetry." It was 
 high-toned, it breathed enduring defiance of tyrannous 
 power, and it was done in the grand style ; all shining 
 excellences in Shelley's eyes. But the fatal fact remains 
 that it is elaborate to no purpose, a kind of feat of 
 
 252 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 artistic training, which could at best serve to put the 
 artist in ''condition." A long mythological poem, to 
 be enjoyable, must have an interesting action ; and 
 what action could be got here, save of that kind which, 
 in the language of the horse-mart, means '* no go''? 
 
 And yet, failures as his elaborate works were, hope- 
 less failure as is the long Cap and ^^//^,Jhere remains 
 ample ground for saying that Keats was a great poet, 
 prematurely cut off. His failures were the inevitable 
 and instractive failures of a boy of genius aiming at 
 great things. To have failed as he did at his years was 
 to show greatness ; to succeed to the extent he did was 
 hardly a better proof. It may be set down as an axiom 
 that only a great poet can do a perfect piece of work, 
 however small, of a great kind ; and Keats really did. 
 this. Though of course it must be kept in view that; 
 had he not carried in him the seeds of disease wej 
 probably should not have had from him such precocious 
 work, we yet constantly feel that had he lived he would ■ 
 have produced poetry which would have superseded all 
 his early productions, as the mature works of other 
 great poets have done theirs. The very faults of his 
 long poems (setting aside the Cap ajid Bells) ^ and of his 
 early work generally, are , the faults^of aluxuriant and . 
 not of a deficient gift ; he riots in utterance as the young 
 Shakspere did, perhaps in part by reason of lacking like 
 him a strict or full schoohng, but clearly also by virtue 
 of an intoxicating sense of new power over language. 
 Beside all the great poets of his time, beside Words- 
 worth and Coleridge and Shelley, he stands at least as 
 original and as self-centred as they, and he sounds as 
 new a note in song. From his first vehement assault, 
 in Sleep and Poetry y on the mechanical host who followed 
 the "decrepit standard" of Boileau, to his last nobly 
 tender sonnet, he is a unique and inspired artist, great 
 
 253 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 of heart and sincere in speech. He was no mere 
 sensualist, despite the strong sensuous tendency recog- 
 nisable in his features. He had a true heart, great 
 sympathies, noble aspirations.* In politics he was as 
 definitely democratic as his friends, Hunt and Shelley ; 
 and he could not die in peace amid the despotism of 
 Naples.! He was resolutely determined to get know- 
 ledge ; he made the keenest appraisement of his con- 
 temporaries ; he was relentlessly self-critical ; and he 
 saw his way to great things. *' One of my ambitions," 
 he writes, *'is to make as great a revolution in modern 
 dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting." Boyish, 
 no doubt ; but though Otho the Great is a failure, it is 
 certainly not so very bad as Mr. Lowell would make 
 out ; indeed to my mind its opening lines, and still 
 more those of the fragment King Stephen^ suggest not 
 altogether feebly the thick thunder of Shakspere,! whose 
 technique, one can surmise, Keats perceived and assimi- 
 lated as readily as he did that of Milton. This quick 
 intelligence is powerfully suggestive of great capacities. 
 At an age when most poets and blank verse play- 
 writers are, as it were, but beginning to see that there 
 is such a thing as technique, he had a delighted and 
 
 * This, written in 1884, was put with much less fulness of 
 recognition than is set up in every reader of Mr. Colvin's Keats 
 (1887) and Mr. Sharp's Life oj Severn. 
 
 t Houghton writes (Memoir in Aldine ed., p. xv.) that "there is 
 nothing in his letters or his recorded conversation to show that he 
 took even an ordinary interest in the public discussions of his time." 
 But see the Vision version of Hyperion, lines 147-181. 
 
 :J: Since this was written, I find that Mr. Swinburne had before 
 put forward a similar opinion in his article on Keats in the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, reprinted in his Miscellanies, 1886 : " In this 
 boyish and fantastic play of Otho the Great there are such verses as 
 Shakspere might not without pride have signed at the age when he 
 wrote and even at the age when he rewrote the tragedy of Roinco 
 and Juliet.'' 
 
 254 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 confident appreciation of it. See with what an expert's 
 ecstasy he dilates on Milton's art : 
 
 " Milton has put vales in Heaven and Hell with the very utter 
 affection and yearning of a great Poet. It is a sort of Delphic 
 abstraction, a beautiful thing made more beautiful by being reflected 
 and put in a mist." "The light and shade, the ebon diamonding, 
 the Ethiop immortality, the sorrow, the pain, the sad sweet melody, 
 the phalanges of spirits so depressed as to be ' uplifted beyond 
 hope,' the short mitigation of misery, the thousand melancholies 
 and magnificences of the following lines [he quotes Book 1. 1. 533-567], 
 leave no room for anything to be said thereon, but 'so it is.'" 
 " Book VI. line 58. Reluctant, with its original and modern meaning 
 combined and woven together, with all its shades of signification, 
 has a powerful effect." 
 
 And his criticism of his own work, when once it is 
 fairly out of his hands, is just as certain. There is the 
 ring of perfect sincerity in his avowal of the faulty 
 c\\^.Y3.ctQY oi Eiidyinioiii his admission that it is ''slip- 
 shod," his final remark to Shelley that he *' would 
 willingly take the trouble to unwrite it, if possible."* 
 And not the ripest of critics ever passed a more pene- 
 trating comment than that in his own preface : 
 
 " The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination 
 of a man is healthy ; but there is a space of life between, in which 
 the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life 
 uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted : thence proceeds mawkish- 
 ness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must 
 necessarily taste in going over the following pages." 
 
 The rapidity of his advance is indisputable. In the 
 first Book of Endymion he had originally written a 
 passage of six lines describing Peona's song, in which 
 there were such touches as "the fainting tenors of a 
 thousand shells," ''a million whisperings of lily bells," 
 and " the nightingale's complain, caught in its hundredth 
 echo " — characteristic work, and not without charm, as 
 
 * Shelley Memorials, 3rd ed. p. 142. 
 255 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 Mr. Forman indicates ; but the florid strokes were all 
 
 struck out, and a marginal alteration left the passage 
 
 thus : 
 
 'Twas a lay 
 More subtle-cadenced, more forest-wild 
 Than Dryop&s lone lulling of her child — 
 
 the finest couplet in Endyrnion* Lamia, Lord 
 Houghton's note tells us, Keats " wrote with great care, 
 after much study of Dryden's composition " ; and the 
 poet writes of his work on it : "I have great hopes of 
 success, because I make use of my judgment more 
 deliberately than I have yet done ; f but in case of 
 failure with the world I shall find my content." There 
 is as little of Dryden in Lainia as of Spenser in the 
 early Imitation of Spenser : failure as it is, it attains a 
 much more advanced versification as well as a subtler 
 poetry than Dryden's. And the poet's *' I shall find 
 my content " is memorable. His long poems will in 
 . ^ course of time be left to the reading of the literary 
 M specialists : there will be no time for people of all-round 
 
 * A partial exception to this rule of improvement is the pro- 
 duction of Hyperion : A Vision, after the Hyperion which begins with 
 the marble massiveness of form we have all admired. It must 
 reluctantly be granted that Mr. Colvin has proved the Vision to be a 
 recasting, and not the first version, as Lord Houghton's and later 
 editions taught us all to believe. But though by general consent 
 the clean-cut and quasi-Miltonic piece be the more impressive, the 
 later poem is in its way also a notable performance ; and some 
 ardent admirers of Keats find in its far ampler expression of his own 
 way of thought and feeling a greater because a more individual 
 performance. It is clear that he swerved back from the first as " too 
 Miltonic," and lacking in spontaneity. But it has not been noted, I 
 think, that the influence of Gary's Dante, seen at times in the first 
 version, is more abundantly visible in the second. 
 
 t A little earlier he had said of the Ode to Psyche that it was the 
 " first and only" poem with which he had " taken even moderate 
 pains." This was in February of 1819, after he had written his two 
 finest sonnets, and just before the Ode to a Nightingale, 
 
 256 
 
THE ART OF KEATS 
 
 culture to go through the inferior work of all the poets : 
 but now that we have them, and think of the poet's 
 grave, we cannot wish they had not been written. 
 Were they nothing else, they are noteworthy documents 
 in the history of literary evolution. , All our subsequent 
 poets take something from Keats. Tennyson's debt 
 has long been recognised ;* we find pieces of pure Tenny- 
 son in Hyperion y as — 
 
 Until at length old Saturn lifted up 
 His faded eyes, and saw his kingdom gone, 
 And all the gloom and sorrow of the place 
 And that fair kneeling goddess ; and then spake 
 As with a palsied tongue. 
 
 Our other great poet, too, is singularly forestalled in 
 the remarkable song, not to be found in the English Poets^ 
 which Keats wrote to the Spanish air Miss Reynolds 
 -used to play him : those lines — 
 
 Lift the latch ! ah gently ! ah tenderly, sweet ! 
 We are dead if that latchet gives one little clink ! 
 
 and the *Mips pulp'd with bloom," are very Browning. 
 And here in Hyperion spoke Mrs. Browning before her 
 
 time — 
 
 Leave the dinned air vibrating silverly. 
 
 Not in water, assuredly, is Keats's name written. 
 *'What porridge had John Keats ? " asks Mr. Browning, 
 sardonically pointing to the success of subsequent 
 mediocre imitators. Well, one is glad to think of the 
 " I shall find my content." 
 
 * Tennyson himself declared late in his life that Keats, though a 
 " great master," had not been his model. That is true, but still he 
 learned from him. Cp. Mr. Colvin, Keats, p. 219. 
 
 257 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 (188+) 
 
 The spectator of the new Burns statue on the 
 Thames Embankment who considers closely its literary 
 as well as its artistic significance, is apt to be led to 
 some reflections which were not suggested in the 
 course of the unveiling proceedings. His first feeling, 
 of course, is one of pleasure in view of such a pro- 
 clamation that the realm of literature is universal. 
 Everything which tends to bring the note of culture ^ 
 into the environment of the mass, everything which [ 
 helps to extend the intellectual life through the region , 
 of the ceaseless social struggle, makes for the general , 
 well-being, and is to be welcomed by the lovers of. - 
 light. Considering the straits of orators in these 
 matters, too, it would not be fair to examine narrowly 
 the various reasons laid, down fpr^be-statuing a given rxifM>^ 
 celebrity— reasons of which, in the case of Burns, the ,^f2^^<^^ 
 sum-total is something like this: That Burns, in a s^. 
 
 general way, did not need a statue ; that in Scotland, 
 where he is best known, it is natural that he should 
 have many statues ; and that in London and other 
 cities where he is not so well known, it is desirable to 
 bring him into universal notice by means of statues. 
 Such peculiarities of reasoning need not disturb those 
 
 259 
 
 4^ 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 who realise how rarely it is that an act prompted by 
 disinterested emotion can successfully be made to appear 
 a highly utilitarian proceeding. 
 
 A priori approbation, however, gives place to 
 scrutiny and reflection, and the process is not altogether 
 tranquillising. Here is a statue in which the sculptor 
 has expressed his idea of the poetic function by seating 
 his poet on a tree-stump, with a pen in his hand and a 
 scroll at his feet, looking into the sky for a word. 
 Did Sir John Steell, one wonders, ever hear of a poet's 
 definition of poetry as ** emotion recollected in tran- 
 quillity " ? It would appear not. His poet is exhibited 
 as a creature in whom emotion and expression are 
 simultaneous, and who carries about his writing 
 materials in order to catch his inspirations ere they 
 go. The circumstance goes to deepen a despondent 
 feeling about the future of British statuary — an opinion 
 reinforced by an examination of the feeble and valueless 
 Alexander and Bucephalus ^ an early work of Sir 
 John Steell's, recently added by subscription to the 
 mob of bad statues in Edinburgh ; and by the recollec- 
 tion that the demand for statues of Burns appears to 
 set blindly in the direction of this sculptor, whose 
 reputation Is the result of long practice in fulfilling such 
 commissions, and who Is thought to rise perfectly to 
 the occasion when, instead of producing an absolute 
 replica of a previous statue, he somewhat alters the 
 pose of the figure. It may be urged that the sculptor, 
 planning a statue for the public street, is bound to 
 represent in some conventional form the known 
 function of the person he Images ; and though this 
 principle cannot be allowed to justify a convention 
 which is demonstrably a violation of artistic principles 
 of a higher scope, it may be allowed that the British 
 statuary is, perhaps, to some extent coerced by his 
 
 260 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 conditions. That granted, however, there remains 
 the question as to the condition of taste and culture 
 among those who are the sculptor's judges — those who 
 are delighted by these representations of Burns in a 
 poetic ecstasy, and who cheer the declaration that he is 
 one of the great poets of the world. 
 
 It is the peculiar feature in the fame of Burns that 
 whereas other renowned poets are being for ever freshly 
 laurelled by studious critics, not only do his praises 
 come mainly from the inexpert multitude, but the voices 
 of the few critics who deal with him carefully are 
 ignored. The name of Carlyle is in these days hardly 
 less universally known than that of Burns, but the 
 number of admirers of Burns who have fully reckoned 
 with Carlyle's criticism is probably very small indeed. 
 That essay of fifty-six years ago remains, on the whole, 
 the soundest judgment that has yet been passed on the 
 poet. Despite its labouredness and Its lack of unity, 
 it gives on the whole a much fairer estimate of the 
 man than does the able paper of Mr. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson ; while it still presents the most outspoken 
 verdict the public have heard on the literary value of 
 Burns's work. It is a signal proof of Carlyle's critical 
 power and originality that at the time of the publication 
 of Lockhart's Life he was already able to see that the 
 current estimate of some of Burns's most popular pieces 
 was wrong ; and that he did not hesitate to pronounce 
 Tarn O'Shanter a merely brilliant rather than a great 
 production. His remarks on that poem, like the essay 
 as a v^^hole, lack unity, as if they had been penned 
 piecemeal before the whole matter was thought out : 
 first the poet Is blamed for not giving poetical life to 
 the story, as Tieck might, and then it is admitted that 
 **for strictly poetical purposes not much was to be 
 made of It ; " but the judgment that Tarn O'Shav.ter is 
 
 261 
 
THE ART OF BURNS .^ 
 
 ** not so much a poem as a piece of sparkling rhetoric " 
 / may judiciously be set against that of admirers who, 
 /] ^^Ith Alexander Smith, pronounce it ** immortal, un- 
 U approachable," and ''the crowning glory and master- 
 piece of its author." We have in it a farcical narrative 
 ^„.^V* treated at best in the spirit of Aristophanic farce ; and 
 no amount of force and dexterity of execution can gain 
 for such a poem those associations of subtle delightful- 
 ness which references to fine poetry call up for us. It 
 is apt to create confusion, however, to say as Carlyle 
 does that such a production is unpoetical, and that 
 The Jolly Beggars is the most poetical of Burns's 
 " poems," as distinguished from his songs. The pre- 
 cise explanation — so far as Carlyle's decision is justi- 
 fiable — is that while metrical writing, of which the 
 generic term is poetry, may at times be less exalted in 
 its strain of thought than certain samples of the non- 
 metrical writing we term prose, the former as a rule Is 
 the outcome of, and tends to communicate, a feeling of 
 mental exaltation, while the latter, more often than not, 
 expresses and induces unemotional states of mind ; and 
 we accordingly use the term poetry as connoting ex- 
 alted feeling, and prose as implying something more 
 ordinary. Now Tavi O^Shanter is a story such as 
 ^ ministers to rustic fun ; and though Burns gives it a 
 certain Aristophanic quality, the story as a whole re- 
 mains on the rustic level, while TJie Jolly Beggars^ 
 despite the nature of the theme, is infused with a 
 " world-humour" that takes it above the merely rustic 
 range ; and is, indeed, to this day the less appreciated 
 poem among the populace. Carlyle's verdict on The 
 Jolly Beggars is worth quoting : 
 
 "The subject truly is among the lowest in Nature, but it only the 
 more shows our poet's gift in raising it into the domain of art. To 
 our minds this piece seems thoroughly compacted — melted together, 
 
 262 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 refined — and poured forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is 
 Hght, airy, soft of movement, yet sharp and precise in its details ; 
 every face is a portrait ; that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of 
 Mays, are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at once a dream, and the 
 very Ragcastle of ' Poosie-Nansie.' Further, it seems in a con- 
 siderable degree complete, a real self-supporting whole, which is the 
 highest merit in a poem. . . . Apart from the universal sympathy 
 with man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration 
 and no inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. ... It 
 would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's writings ; 
 we mean to say only that it seems to us the most perfect of its kind, 
 as a piece of poetical composition strictly so called." 
 
 The last sentence brings us to the main critical ques- 
 tion in regard to Burns : Was he, after all, one of the 
 world's greatest poets ? Carlyle's final judgment is 
 that he was not, and, what is specially to be noted, 
 that he could not be in his circumstances ; and seeing 
 that Carlyle on the whole admired and liked Burns, his 
 judgment, as that of a great Scottish man of letters, must 
 be allowed to deserve close consideration. The critic 
 veers and hesitates a good deal, certainly, on the ques- 
 tion whether Burns, living the life he did, could possibly 
 have done great poetic work. On one page he pro- 
 nounces all Burns's writings '* imperfect fragments" 
 '* that wanted all things for completeness ; culture^ 
 leisure^ true effort, nay, even length of life ; " on another 
 he insists in opposition to those who prescribe culture 
 for poor poets, that poetry lies in the heart, not in the 
 tongue ; and, again, that Burns, without any more cul- 
 ture, might have found blessedness in poetry. But the 
 distinct purport of the essay is that Burns's verse is 
 valuable mainly on account of the poet's genuineness ^ 
 and practicality, not of his art. *' We can look on but 
 few of these pieces," it says, ''as in strict critical 
 language deserving the name of poems ; they are 
 rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet 
 seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical." And 
 
 263 
 
/ ..fe' 
 
 THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 though Carlyle goes on to speak of Burns as by far the 
 best of British song-writers, it is evident that he is 
 regarding the song as something less Than a^^oein. 
 CTrue, he lays it down that the-^on§~ilr£.qiiij::e^ nothing 
 ]^t^;^o much for its perfection as genume poetic feehng, 
 genuine music of heart," and as yet having "its rules 
 equally with the tragedy ; " which leaves us in some 
 perplexity as to the critic's fundamental principles ; but 
 seeing that he all along distinguishes between the song 
 and the poem, we must conclude that he does not 
 reckon Burns a great poet on the strength of his lyrics. 
 Now, what the majority of the admirers of Burns do is 
 to feel with Carlyle the spontaneity pf^Bu^ns's songs ; to 
 take vigour of versification for high poetic art, ignoF-' 
 ing the critical distinction ; and to pronounce Burns 
 accordingly one of the greatest of poets. 
 
 As against this popular verdict, and in partial dis- 
 tinction from Carlyle's finding, there has to be formu- 
 lated the explicit principle that a song is either good 
 poetry or bad, and deserves to rank as literature or not, 
 in respect of the quality of its ideas and the charm with 
 which they are expressed. The judgment which begins 
 by separating songs from the department of poetry 
 amounts practically to a declaration that songs as such 
 fall below the level of literature proper ; which even the 
 coolest critic of Burns cannot explicitly allow. What 
 has to be done is to judge his songs, like his longer 
 poems, on their literary merit. In point of fact, how- 
 ever, most Scotchmen of critical taste — and these must 
 be the final judges — will admit to-day that the majority 
 of Burns's songs have no permanent literary value; that 
 very few indeed can rank as quite successful poems ; 
 and that, all things considered, this could not well be 
 otherwise. 
 
 Perhaps the best way to establish this somewhat 
 
 264 
 
THE ART OF BURNS f^"% yjJ-^-^ 
 
 dangerous-looking proposition is first to take up one of 
 the_few of Burns's lyrics \^iiiHf ' may~Be~pronGunced 
 perfect ; the first version of the song, The Banks of 
 Doon. I quote it in full, as it is chiefly known in the 
 shape of the later version, which appears to have been 
 produced in order to suit the air to which it is sung. 
 
 Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon 
 
 How can ye blume sae fair ! 
 How can ye chant, ye little birds, 
 
 And I sae fu' o' care ? 
 
 Thou'U break my heart, thou bonie bird, 
 
 That sings upon the bough ; 
 Thou minds me o' the happy days 
 
 When my fause love was true. 
 
 Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird, 
 
 That sings beside thy mate ; 
 For sae I sat, and sae I sang, 
 
 And wist na o' my fate. 
 
 Aft hae I rov'd by bonie Doon 
 
 To see the woodbine twine ; 
 And ilka bird sang o' its love. 
 
 And sae did I o' mine. 
 
 Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose 
 
 Frae aff its thorny tree ; 
 And my fause lover staw' the rose. 
 
 But left the thorn wi' me. 
 
 I have substituted the first line of the second version 
 for the original one, which was "Ye flowery banks o' 
 bonie Doon," the alteration being obviously intended 
 by the poet as an improvement, as it is not required for / 
 the music. He felt, there can be no doubt, that 
 "flowery" was not genuine Scots. Perhaps, had he 
 been rigorous, he would have altered the third stanza ; 
 to my Scotch ear, at all events, "thy mate" and "my 
 fate " do not ring absolutely true ; but they do not 
 amount to a real flaw ; and there is no other suggestion 
 
 265 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 of one. Here then is a l}'ric which will compare with 
 one by Shakspere, by Goethe, by Heine, by De Musset, 
 or by Tennyson. The motif \s one which is as perfectly 
 poetic in the case of a rustic as of a high-born maiden ; 
 a woman's wounded love demanding a refined treatment, 
 which Burns by no means always gives to expressions 
 of more prosperous attachment, even when the singer 
 is a woman. We find such a song worth reading and 
 remembering for certain distinct reasons. A few other 
 songs of Burns's approach this in sustained serious 
 delicacy and choice expression, as for instance The 
 Posie^ of which this is the first stanza — 
 
 O love will venture in whar' it daurna weel be seen, 
 O love will venture in whar' wisdom ance has been ; 
 But I will down yon river rove, amang the wood sae green, 
 And a' to pu' a Posie to my ain dear May. 
 
 Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bledy too, is a noble lyric as 
 it now stands. Originally the fourth lines of the 
 stanzas were longer by two syllables than they are in 
 the received version : the terse, fierce '' Let him turn 
 and flee ! " for instance, having at first read, *' Traitor ! 
 coward ! turn and flee ! " while '* Let him follow me ! " 
 has taken the place of ** Caledonian ! on wi' me!"* 
 In regard to almost all of the other favourite songs of 
 Burns, however, I venture to dispute the popular 
 verdict, which is given with almost no attention to 
 details of workmanship. Thus it is the fashion, in 
 Scotland at least, to praise Highland Mary in entire 
 disregard of the fact that every one of its rhymes is 
 vicious, and some atrocious ; and even Carlyle seems to 
 join in the admiration of the lyric To Mary in Heaven, 
 of which every line is in the conventional, obsolete 
 
 . * The old readings are retained in Alexander Smith's editions (of 
 which the "Globe" is one); mistakenly, I think, though Burns is 
 said to have made the improvements reluctantly under pressure, 
 
 266 
 
THE ART OF BURNS j^f^''' 
 
 English taste of last century. It has hardly one truly 
 felicitous phrase. Take again the early song Mary 
 Morisouy which Alexander Smith pronounces "ex- 
 quisite," and which has indeed one fine quatrain — 
 
 Yestreen, when to the trembling string 
 
 The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha', 
 To thee my fancy took its wing ; 
 
 I sat, but neither heard or saw — 
 
 here the effect of the fortunate lines is marred by 
 several conventional English phrases, as ''make the 
 miser's treasure poor," *'the rich reward secure," and 
 ** wreck his peace." So, in Wandering Willie^ the line 
 *'The simmer to nature, my Willie to me" — on which 
 Christopher North, in \\\q Nodes Ambrosiance, makes the 
 Shepherd bestow a eulogy that is rather high-pitched, 
 considering that no rustic Scotch girl would talk of 
 Nature — is followed by these lines of turgid English — 
 
 Rest, ye wild storms, in the cave of your slumbers ; 
 How your dread howling a lover alarms ! 
 
 Between incongruity or conventionality of diction on 
 the one hand,-.aud^comic quality or J,aek- of delicacy on 
 the other, the great Imass"" oT Burns's songs miss fair 
 literaryjjnish or serious value, with the result that they 
 will not bear reading by people of trained taste who are- 
 familiar with Scots. This is a judgment verifiable by 
 citation of stanzas and passages innumerable which all 
 persons of literary culture, at least all experts In the 
 study of poetry, will admit to betray thoroughly inferior 
 workmanship. Just as we find a few of Burns's songs 
 exquisite In respect of tenderness of feeling and melodv 
 and simple grace of phrase,_we find the mass faulty i^ • / 
 respect of literary crudity when they are not pitched orT; k^ 
 the lower range of the comic. If we take his drlnklng\ 
 and other humorous songs into account we shall of \ 
 
 267 
 
 \ 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 course find more which are successful in their kind. It 
 is obviously easier for a poet writing* in a popular 
 ^^ialect to make a good humorous song than one 
 ' which shall well express deep feeling, for the reason 
 that most words in his vocabulary have commonplace 
 associations, thus lending themselves for the most part 
 rather to broadly humorous than to refined ideas. It 
 has often been pointed out that when Burns is deeply 
 r- serious he almost invariably writes in English ; see, for 
 instance. To Mary in Heaven ^ the latter part of The 
 Cotter's Saturday Nighty Man was made to Mourn^ the 
 greater part of The Vislojiy the prayers, the latter half 
 of To a Monntain Daisy — in fine, all his serious verse 
 except a few of the tender love-songs. The reason is 
 plain. For the Scottish peasant the language of serious 
 ideas is that of the Bible and of serious books — all 
 written in English. He may express domestic griefs 
 
 iand universal emotions in the vernacular ; but if he rises 
 to the utterance of abstract thoughts which are refined 
 or dignified, he must think them in English. For a 
 hundred years before Burns, the language of Scottish 
 prose writers was that of Englishmen, and the associa- 
 tions of Fergusson's and Ramsay's Doric verse are 
 mainly of an every-day order. It was inevitable that 
 Burns should think of his English models (he knew 
 Pope, Shenstone, and Thomson, it appears, before 
 Fergusson) when he dealt with the themes he had in 
 common with the English poets. Now, it is generally 
 conceded, even by his most devoted admirers, that 
 t Burns tends more or less to be stiflf and artificial when 
 \ he writes English, that is to say, that he conformed to 
 the English style then in fashion, instead of expressing 
 his own individuality, as he did when he wrote Scots ; 
 "" though the national clericalism has the effect of blinding 
 the orthodox to the stiltedness of one-half of The 
 
 268 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 Cotter's Saturday Nighty and the pedestrian quality of 
 the other, and it is assumed that To Mary in Heaven^ \ \ 
 must be fine because of the nature of the subject. > 
 
 If, then, Burns's lot in life was so conditioned that 
 Ijis most ambitious poetry had to be cast in an idiom 
 which was not that of his daily speech, and in which he 
 had no spontaneous felicity ; if his happiest verse deals 
 for the most part with ideas which are not subtle ; if his / 
 culture and leisure were scanty; if his songs are mostly \ 
 for the singing of the illiterate — to what conclusions are / 
 we led in regard to his permanent place in literature ?y 
 Of necessity to those of Carlyle, that he cannot rank, in 
 respect of poetic achievement, with the great singers of 
 the world ; that his song is as a '* little Valclusa Foun- 
 tain " beside the great rivers of poetry. But to see and 
 state the case truly, we must impress upon ourselves 
 that Burns's shortcoming is emphatically the result of 
 unfortunate conditions ; that, poetry being an art, its j 
 successful pursuit calls for leisure and culture ; and 
 that, with the exception of his rural surroundings, all 
 the outside details of Burns's lot made against the best 
 development of his gifts. In denying him the highest 
 rank, we are not making light of these gifts ; we are 
 simply asserting the immutable truth that every organ- 
 ism is profoundly influenced by its environment. 
 
 To realise this law fully In regard to Burns, we have 
 only to study the cases of those poets whom we may 
 consider him to have rivalled in respect of natural 
 powers — say Tennyson or Heine. Heine is, perhaps, 
 overrated as a mere lyrist ; on that head only the 
 closest familiarity with the German language can justify 
 a positive opinion ; but there need be no hesitation in 
 saying that Tennyson's songs are almost Invariably of 
 a perfect finish, while Burns's are so very seldom ; and 
 this is so, in the main, because Tennyson has been able 
 
 269 
 

 
 J ^ k; JU far 
 
 ■'^^' THE ART OF BURNS ,^, 
 
 to give his whole Ufe to his art, while Burns coulcf only 
 give the spare hours of a life whose toil began in boy- 
 hood and lasted till death. And it will be found that 
 every great poet of whose life we have any knowledge 
 was so because he was able to give his best hours to 
 the cultivation of his genius. If Shakspere stands 
 
 f alone among the great poets in respect of the restricted- 
 ness of his early education, he none the less made 
 writing the main business of his life. In short, the 
 
 f idea that a working Scottish farmer, no matter what 
 his gifts, could produce a body of poetry that would 
 
 \ entitle him to rank with the greatest poets of the world, 
 t can only be sincerely harboured by people who conceive 
 of a poet as a creature of entirely abnormal intelligence, 
 going about habitually with pen and paper, in the open 
 air, and having fits of inspiration, in which his words 
 came to him. And, to put it plainly, it is because of 
 the still primitive condition of the taste of the majority 
 that Burns is still so frequently and fervently praised, 
 gnorance rarely begets modesty of literary judgment ; 
 and every member of a Burns club, however little he 
 knows of the poetry of the world or even of the English- 
 speaking people, is unhesitating in proclaiming that 
 Burns's poetry is unexcelled. In connection with no 
 other poet, perhaps, is there such a body of merely 
 prejudiced admiration, accompanied with so much 
 random publication of eulogy that has no critical value 
 whatever. A rich enthusiast gives the poet a new 
 statue, and some popularly respected amateurs of 
 literature pronounce opinions which the crowd echo, 
 and which have just the value of the crpwd!s literary 
 judgment. 
 
 The importance of Burns in literature and in history 
 is, after all, to be tested rather by those "Poems " which 
 Carlyle finds, on the whole, unpoetical, than by even the 
 
 270 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 best of the songs. The lyrical faculty is rare and 
 precious, but it does not necessarily imply a powerful 
 understanding ; and Burns's poetry, as a whole, does 
 imply this. Nay, more ; the style of these vernacular 
 poems of "rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed 
 sense," is excellent in its kind, the satirical poems { 
 especially possessing a pith and pungency not excelled ' 
 by Butler, Swift, Pope, or Dryden. To a Scotch reader 
 the force and vividness of their style are perhaps 
 more apparent than to an Englishman, just as an 
 English ear can perhaps hardly appreciate* the full 
 felicity of such lines as — 
 
 We twa hae run aboot the braes, 
 And pu'd the gowans fine — 
 
 lines which must have been written by Burns, though 
 he said most of Auld Lang Syne was old. The songs — 
 the handful of pure gems and the mass of the others 
 with their flaws, their touches of careless beauty, and 
 their spontaneous, homely exuberance — ^^are- proofs of a 
 born lyrical power which with culture might have done 
 splendid things : the body of verse which deals with 
 the Scottish life of the time testifies to an intelligence of 
 rare vigour and penetration. In these pieces, indeed, 
 Burns outgoes all other British literature of the kind. 
 Not since Swift has there been written satirical verse oft 
 such sinewy terseness and idiomatic energy ; and Burns 
 is above Swift exactly as humour is above bitterness.! 
 Questions of poetic art aside, then, it is right to recog- 
 nise tTie reasons for the exceptional devotion to Burns 
 prevailing in Scotland. It is difficult to over-estimate 
 what he has done to save his countrymen from the 
 
 ■^ Arnold has, however, spoken feelingly of the " almost intolerable 
 pathos" of the AuU Lang Syne stanzas. See the Introd. to the 
 English Poets. 
 
 271 
 
THE ART OF BURNS 
 
 extremities of fanaticism, Pharisaism, and Philistinism ; 
 and it is certain that his influence among the English- 
 speaking nations has been mighty for democracy. But 
 it is well finally to keep in view that his poetry, as such, 
 belongs to a comparatively early stage of literary- 
 development, and that it is popular in the ratio of its 
 primitiveness. The fact that he is the poet of the 
 uninstructed merely proves that he is not, in the main, 
 on a high plane of poetic art. Let him be recognised as 
 the Scottish people's poet, and the poet of popular 
 instincts, by all means ; and let him have his statues in 
 virtue of his popularity — statues in a primitive taste, if 
 needs must. But let the student, instead of joining in 
 the acclamations of the people over their poet, point out 
 ' to the people that their poet, like themselves, misses 
 half the right fruition of life because the world is so 
 evilly ordered. 
 
 272 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 (1896) 
 
 I 
 
 The platitudes of the Burns centenary in Scotland have 
 been ruffled in a not unwholesome way by a sharp 
 breeze of dispute, unwittingly raised by Lord Rosebery, 
 when after doing finished homage to the memory of 
 Burns he proposed that Scotland should raise a memorial 
 to Stevenson. That proposal evoked from a Scotch 
 member of Parliament, not ill-qualified to speak on 
 Scotch questions of any kind, an emphatic protest. 
 Dr. Robert Wallace, the member in question, sits for a 
 division of Edinburgh, and is in many ways an excellent 
 type of Scotch capacity, though perhaps not of Scottish 
 conduct. He began public life as a minister of the 
 Church of Scotland ; ranked high in Edinburgh as an 
 intellectual preacher ; was made Professor of Church 
 History in the University; did very well in that capacity 
 also ; took to preaching heterodoxically on such matters 
 as prayer ; was duly arraigned ; was gingerly let off ; 
 found a way out of his uncongenial position in the 
 proffer of the editorial chair of the Scotsman^ vacated by 
 the death of his friend Russel ; gave, however, dissatis- 
 faction in that capacity, having only the literary taste 
 
 273 s 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 without the practical productiveness which constitutes 
 the writing editor ; and at length, when well on in 
 middle life, came to London to study for the bar and 
 begin life again as an English barrister. It was after 
 attaining that status that he was triumphantly elected a 
 member for the city of his former career, being indeed a 
 very capable platform performer ; and he has kept the 
 seat through several administrations, despite some 
 friction set up by his occasional indocility to the crack 
 of the official whip. He thus possesses the now rare 
 qualification of doctor utriusqtie juris ; and in his time 
 has played many educative parts. I mention these 
 matters in advance to show that what the hon, 
 gentleman may say, rightly or wrongly, on the merits 
 of Stevenson's treatment of Burns, is not the mere 
 unqualified prattle of a politician on a literary question 
 quite out of his sphere, but a judgment worth listening 
 to, and probably worth discussing. It represents a 
 good deal of Scottish opinion, not all of the commonest 
 sort. 
 
 II 
 
 Still, newspaper letters of protest against proposed 
 memorials are not the best ways of handling delicate 
 questions of literary and ethical criticism ; and Dr. 
 Wallace's censure of Stevenson's essay on Burns is 
 more effective as a bomb than as an argument. It 
 runs : — 
 
 " I admit all that can be said in favour of Stevenson. He was 
 not an original or stupendous genius, but he was undoubtedly a 
 perfect stylist. But he did one thing which no Scotsman, and, for 
 that matter, no true critic, can ever forgive. He pubHshed, and 
 republished, a mean, Pharisaical, gratuitous, and utterly inaccurate 
 attack on the memory and character of Burns, a man worth a 
 hundred of him. When I read it I said to myself, this man may 
 
 274 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 have, and does have, abiHty, but he is essentially a middle-class 
 prig, in my opinion the most contemptible section of existing 
 humanity, but to which some of the loudest admirers of Stevenson 
 belong. Besides, Stevenson sneered at most things Scotch. I 
 object to the proposed memorial, without some qualification." 
 
 The conclusion is lame and laming, not to say impotent 
 and paralysing. If Stevenson really sneered at most 
 things Scotch, that alone would be a very sufficient 
 reason against giving him a Scotch monument, whether 
 with or without *' some qualification, "though It would 
 not quite settle the„question of his judicial capacity. 
 The final note of mere patriotism overcrows the note of 
 criticism, though the criticism to start with is extremely 
 loud, not to say uproarious. Hence the whole has been 
 stigmatised, by one of the few Scottish journalists who 
 correct rather than flatter the national foibles, as **the 
 sort of havering which renders Scotland and Scotsmen 
 ridiculous." Dr. Wallace, however, has replied with 
 adroitness and good humour, pointing out that he does 
 not, as he had seemed to do, asperse Stevenson the 
 man as priggish and Pharisaical, but meant these 
 epithets to bear expressly on the offending essay. Thus 
 narrowed down, and when further relieved of the un- 
 profitable issue as to Stevenson's having dared to sneer 
 or smile at things Scotch, the question is perhaps worth 
 looking into as one of pure criticism ; though it seems 
 also worth w^hile to take it up, as is here done, on the 
 side of the relation of Burns and Stevenson to Scotch 
 sentiment. Some of us have long felt that the uncritical 
 and not seldom maudlin adoration of Burns in Scotland 
 has come to be a species of national fanaticism, repre- 
 senting no longer to any great extent the sunny 
 influence of Burns's humanity on a frost-bitten and 
 Pharisaical society, but the virtual restriction of popular 
 thought and culture to one round and one stage. As 
 
 275 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 a matter of fact, despite some literary adjuncts, the 
 worship of Burns in Scotland is the one literary occupa- 
 tion of the unliterary, the anniversary sentiment of the 
 classes who do not read. Hence those of us who think 
 as aforesaid have small sympathy with Dr. Wallace 
 when he says : — 
 
 " Burns's influence, not only literary but moral, political, and 
 religious, is a matter of national, perhaps wider, importance, and 
 whatever recklessly and wrongly impairs it should, I think, be duly 
 resented by every true Scotsman. I think Stevenson's attack tends 
 strongly this way .... essentially an improper, disrespectful, 
 wrong-headed performance." 
 
 There is really not the least likelihood of Burns's prestige 
 In Scotland being shaken by any criticism, Scottish or 
 other ; and it is not going too far to say that it is much 
 better for the average Scotch mind to be seriously 
 perturbed by Stevenson's essay than to stay in the state 
 of unintelligent worship which is kept up by the bulk of 
 Scotch writing on the subject. Dr. Wallace's style of 
 patriotism says more for his generosity than for his 
 wisdom. It is distinctly more profitable for the con- 
 ventional entity ** Scotland" to wake up to the fact — 
 scantily recognised there till America and England had 
 abundantly proclaimed it — that in Stevenson she has 
 unexpectedly produced a new man of genius, than to 
 be further established in the faith that she once had 
 one in Burns, whom she let die in hugger-mugger for 
 lack of patient contemporary sympathy. If patriots of 
 Dr. Wallace's way of thinking would but think out 
 their creed, they could scarcely miss seeing that, 
 supposing Stevenson's attitude to Burns be really 
 priggish and Pharisaical, the attitude towards Burns in 
 his lifetime of average Scotland, as represented by 
 average Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire, clerical and lay, 
 was incomparably more so. Then to " sneer at Scotch 
 
 276 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 history," as Dr. Wallace says Stevenson did, would so 
 far be a fairly justifiable proceeding. If a large part of 
 last century Scotland stoned her prophet, it is not 
 clear why we should respectfully cherish all Scottish 
 memories. 
 
 This much said, however, Dr. Wallace's outburst 
 has something left in it for the unbiased, or let us say 
 the less biased critic to muse upon. Stevenson's 
 trial of Burns is not quite a decisive performance. It 
 carries us out of the region of platitude, which is a 
 great matter ; but, to use the safe old phrase, it '* does 
 not say the last word." It is a fresh and vivacious 
 etHical effort, but it raises more problems than it takes 
 account of. Perhaps, then, it may help us to a 
 judgment of .ajnore scientific albeit of a much duller 
 character. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There are in truth two aspects of Stevenson's essay 
 on Some Aspects of Robert Burns which, though not 
 fitly to be attacked in such terms, are not utterly 
 incongruous with the bald epithets of ** middle-class," 
 and "priggish," and ** Pharisaical." But before 
 applying any epithets at all, we have to realise that the 
 essay was a young man's work. It was wTitten before 
 Stevenson had accumulated that kind of sympathetica 
 knowledge of human nature which later fitted him to 1 
 ^ive a deep interest of character to motives of romance ; I «<^ 
 and for lack of that acquirement some of the stories he \ 
 wrote about the same time were, to the thinking of 
 some of us who already admired him greatly as a 
 writer, perplexingly poor. Already in 1882, when 
 reprinting it with his other critical essays, he prefixed an 
 essay which not only warmly repudiates in particular the 
 
 277 
 
 y 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 crudely hostile view of Burns which some journalist 
 had superimposed on his, but indicates a new critical 
 perception of the truth that criticism in general is very 
 much a matter of a *' point of view" that is either 
 arbitrary or empirical, or both. His remarks on this 
 head, made with his own peculiar candour, go far to 
 qualify the whole estimate by implication, if not 
 explicitly. '* The writer of short studies," he explains, 
 *' having to condense in a few pages the events of a 
 whole lifetime, and the effect on his own mind of many 
 various volumes, is bound, above all things, to make 
 that condensation logical and striking. ... By the 
 necessity of the case, all the more neutral circumstances 
 are omitted from his narrative ; and that of itself, by 
 the negative exaggeration of which I have spoken in 
 the text, lends to the matter in hand a certain false 
 and specious glitter. . . . The proportions of the sitter 
 must be sacrificed to the proportions of the portrait ; 
 the lights are heightened, the shadows overcharged ; 
 the chosen expression, continually forced, may 
 degenerate at length into a grimace ; and we have at 
 best something of a caricature, at worst a calumny." 
 (Preface by way of criticism to Familiar Studies of Men 
 and Books y 1882, pp. ix-xii.) This must be pronounced 
 an imperfect excuse for leaving unrectified a given 
 blend of caricature and calumny ; but at least it 
 constitutes a partial retractation. And when we come 
 to compare his treatment of Burns with his handling 
 of some phases of character in his later romances, we 
 shall see that these imply a certain new breadth of 
 perception which involves a sweeping revision of the 
 old verdict. This being so, the essay as a whole is to 
 be adjudged immature; the work of a man at "the 
 merciless age," the age before he has, as the Scotch 
 Mr. Campbell-Bannerman has so pleasantly put it, 
 
 278 
 

 STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 '' come to the time of life at which he almost begins 
 to believe he has faults of his own." And if those 
 who care mainly about the literary sparkle of the 
 thing will not hear of a criticism so founded, they 
 have only to study the essay as a substantive piece of 
 exposition and argument, in order to ^ee that it was 
 not properly thought out. Like Carlyle, Stevenson 
 was more of an artist than of a thinker ; and like 
 Carlyle he has failed to co-ordinate his comments on 
 Burns. It is something of a pity that the two most 
 important essays by Scotsmen on Burns, containing 
 as they do some of the soundest, freshest, and most 
 outspoken criticism of Burns's work, should yet be 
 inconsistent alike in their literary and their ethical 
 argument, and should further be inconsistent with 
 each other on the literary point. Ow the ethical side, 
 CaFIyfe vacillated between jeers at the society which set 
 a Burns to gauge beer-barrels and a George the Third 
 upon the throne, and moralisings on the fault of Burns 
 in being so disposable ; with a further lurch towards 
 resentment of the pitying and censorious view where 
 entertained by small-brained people. On the literary 
 side he swung still more confusedly between wrath at 
 those who thought culture necessary for a poet, '*as if 
 poetry was of the tongue and not of the heart," and 
 the assertion on his part of that very view, that culture 
 might have been an enormous advantage to Burns's 
 performance. 
 
 In his concrete estimate, Carlyle, finding the bulk 
 of Burns's work, however admirable, to be Aristophanic 
 rather than strictly poetic, decides that it is in respect 
 of his songs that he is strictly a poet ; and finally 
 figures him as a "little Valclusa fountain," as beside 
 the great rivers of poetry. Such an estimate clearly 
 needed technical justification and support, which 
 
 279 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 Carlyle did not and probably could not give. Steven- 
 son on the other hand takes the surely sounder critical 
 view that the bulk of the songs are of no great value, 
 but speaks of them with undiscriminating disesteem, 
 even though incidentally calling one '* immortal." It 
 is, he says, ** melancholy that a man who first attacked 
 literature with a hand that seemed capable of moving 
 mountains, should have spent his later years in 
 whittling cherry-stones." To this hardy criticism we 
 shall return later, in connection with Stevenson's 
 ethical estimate of the singer ; and then, too, we shall 
 be better able to weigh his very original judgment 
 that Burns, after his blaze of success and his un- 
 satisfactory marriage, was really grown incapable of 
 great work. 
 
 "He had lost his habits of industry, and formed the habits of 
 pleasure .... he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare 
 instances, of that superior effort of concentration which is required 
 for serious literary work. He may be said, indeed, to have worked 
 no more, and only amused himself with letters. The man who had 
 written a volume of masterpieces in six months, during the re- 
 mainder of his life rarely found courage for any more sustained 
 effort than a song." 
 
 Keeping In view the connection of the literary judg- 
 ment here with the ethical, which last is for the present 
 our main concern, we have to note, before analysing 
 that, the lack of correlation above spoken of. A 
 number of passages in the essay strike such different 
 keys of temper, without any resolving modulation 
 between, that they must be pronounced to need re- 
 writing. For instances : 
 
 " He [Burns] had no genteel timidities in the conduct of his life. 
 He loved to force his personality upon the world. He would please 
 himself, and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1830, and joined 
 his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive him writing Jehan for 
 
 280 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 Jean, swaggering in Gautier's red waistcoat, and horrifying bourgeois 
 in a public cafe with paradox and gasconnade." 
 
 " . . . . his admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct 
 from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a country 
 dancing school, completed [in Edinburgh society] what his poems 
 had begun. ..." 
 
 " This strong young ploughman, who feared no competitor with 
 the flail, suffered like a fine lady from sleeplessness and vapours ; he 
 would fall into the blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse 
 for the past and terror for the future. He was still not perhaps 
 devoted to religion, but haunted by it ; and at a touch of sickness 
 prostrated himself before God in what I can only call unmanly 
 penitence." 
 
 " Country Don Juan as he was, he had none of that blind vanity 
 which values itself on what it is not ; he knew his own strength and 
 weakness to a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, 
 except in moments of hypochondria, declared himself content." 
 
 " Burns, on his part, bore the elevation [of his Edinburgh success] 
 with perfect dignity ; and with perfect dignity returned, when the 
 time had come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense 
 never deserted him. . . . He was always ready to sacrifice an 
 acquaintance to a friend, although the acquaintance were a duke. 
 He would be a bold man who should promise similar conduct in 
 equally exacting circumstances. It was, in short, an admirable 
 appearance on the stage of life — socially successful, intimately self- 
 respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last." 
 
 " He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had grasped at temporary 
 pleasures, and substantial happiness and solid industry had passed 
 him by." 
 
 These touches are clearly not congruous. The portrait 
 thus painted lacks underlying unity of colour. To 
 make your white very white, and your black very black, 
 is not the way to get a good likeness, or a good picture 
 in words any more than in pigments. Nor does it 
 suffice to paint-in one element as it looks by itself, and 
 then the others as they look by themselves ; for the 
 colours of things in company modify each other. 
 Th.ere must be correlation ; which is the artistic side of 
 demonstration, of reasoning. Carlyle seems to have 
 written his essay in spurts, as different views of the 
 
 281 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 case came to him, without testing their coherence ; such 
 being his habit of mind and of work. Stevenson may 
 or may not have done this ; but it will be found that his 
 criticism is put out of tone by the chronic forcing of one 
 of the notes sounded above. 
 
 IV 
 
 This jarring note is the recurring phrase ''village 
 Don Juan," "professional Don Juan." It might be 
 called the key-note of the essay, if the essay were true 
 to any key. And yet, on Stevenson's own showing, 
 the phrase is false. Against all his iterations of it, 
 there stands this decisive admission : " He remained 
 to the last imperfect in his character of Don Juan, and 
 lacked the sinister courage to desert his victim." That 
 is to say. Burns was not a professional Don Juan at 
 all. The name means for us, in literature, not the 
 Don Juan of Byron but the Don Juan of Moli^re and 
 Mozart ; the entirely non-moral male, incapable of real 
 passion or compassion. Burns at his worst is perhaps 
 less near the Don Juan type than was the Duke of 
 Wellington, as we see him in the singular account 
 published a few years ago of his relations with " Miss 
 
 J ," and in the classic anecdote of his reply to the 
 
 lady who threatened to publish his letters: "Dear 
 Fanny, Publish away and be damned." Yet nobody 
 would think it accurate to describe the Duke of Welling- 
 ton as a professional Don Juan. His "victims" seem 
 to have come more than half-way to him ; as Stevenson 
 admits was done in several cases by those of Burns. 
 After telling how the poet, vacillating violently between 
 contrary courses, suddenly married Jean Armour, 
 Stevenson writes : 
 
 28z 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 " He was, as he truly says, ' damned with a choice only of different 
 species of error and misconduct.' To be a professional Don Juan, to 
 accept the provocation of any lively lass upon the village green, may 
 thus lead a man through a series of detestable words and actions, 
 and land him at last in an undesired and most unsuitable union for 
 life." 
 
 Then is it the professional Don Juan who lands himself 
 and stays in an undesired and unsuitable union ? Is it 
 the professional Don Juan who waits for the ''provo- 
 cation of any lively lass " before laying serious siege to 
 her ? And is it the characteristic of the average man, 
 not a milksop, to resist philosophically such provo- 
 cation ? The epithet, it is clear, will not stand : we 
 may indeed surmise that Stevenson, with his faculty 
 of self-criticism, would have admitted as much on 
 pressure in his later life. 
 
 But his criticism of Burns's conduct, of course, does 
 not stand or fall with the epithet. There remain the 
 facts dealt with, the passages in Burns's letters. 
 Sooth to say, it is not so much the things Burns did 
 as what he said about them that lays him open to the 
 worst kind of blame. His actions were those of a man 
 of strong passions, woefully apt to be carried away by 
 them, but not a cold-blooded wrong-doer. Esau in the 
 myth sells his birth-right for a mess of pottage ; but the 
 traditional censure of him, in the mouth of those who 
 never knew fierce hunger, and who have besides been 
 primed with the moral lesson, such as it is, which he 
 was invented merely to illustrate, is not very impressive 
 to thoughtful people. Unfortunately Burns is in worse 
 ethical case than the hirsute Hebrew, in that he was a 
 letter-writer. There is no denying that his tone in his 
 letters to men about some of his affairs with women is 
 extremely offensive. He was not only ready to kiss and 
 tell (a proceeding which even in his age an old Scotch 
 lady of the anti-Puritan school pronounced to be that of 
 
 283 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 a*'dawmed villain" in the case of the heir to the 
 throne), he talks of his seductive tactics in a way which 
 would justify our calling him — not a Don Juan ; the 
 tone is far too crude and fatuous to suggest any real 
 mastery of the business — but a very detestable lady- 
 killer indeed ; were it not that we can so easily see the 
 letter to be mostly bravado, the fatuity of the im- 
 pressionable man posing as Lovelace after having in 
 reality half lost his head. It is after quoting the letter 
 in which Burns speaks of being "an old hawk at the 
 sport" that Stevenson writes: *'I avow a carnal 
 longing, after this transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk 
 about the ears." And indeed a moral buffet from the 
 recipient of the letter, an expression of quiet contempt, 
 might have done its writer a world of good. But it is 
 just here, curiously enough, where Stevenson's censure 
 is not unjustified, that it in some distant measure justi- 
 fies Dr. Wallace's epithet of *'prig." The previous 
 injustice of calling Burns a professional Don Juan is 
 injustice pure and simple, the use of an unjustifiable 
 epithet. It is the not so unjust but more pretentious 
 denunciation of the poet's real offence that raises a 
 certain suspicion of youthful priggishness. 
 
 All of us who choose to criticise Burns have this huge 
 advantage over him, that his Life and Letters have been 
 published with absolute unreserve, while ours have not 
 been, and are not likely to be. Stevenson made a not 
 very generous use of that advantage ; as Arnold did of 
 the love-letters of Keats to Fanny Brawne, when he 
 said they were those of a mawkish apothecary's appren- 
 tice. No access has been given to the love-letters of 
 Arnold, and rightly so ; but one of his biographical 
 poems, in the group entitled "Switzerland" — a poem 
 v»^hich has called out some not unwarrantable animad- 
 version — suggests that some of Arnold's youthful follies 
 
 284 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 may have been of a more unamiable kind than those of 
 Keats. Stevenson, again, in one of his youthful essays 
 talks with not a little frankness, though still under safe 
 cover, of the sensations of repeated "sinning;" and 
 his friend Mr. Henley, in a piece of verse understood to 
 be a portrait of him, partly describes him as " lover and 
 sensualist." But I do not at all mean to suggest that 
 Stevenson could ever have incurred such blame as he 
 passes on Burns. In such matters he was sure to be 
 chivalrous, chivalrous in the sense in which Burns was 
 not. What I do suggest is, first, that even he might 
 have come in for somebody's vituperation if his life lay 
 as naked to the light as does that of Burns ; and, further, 
 that he made a certain semblance of ''pose" of his 
 chivalry on this particular side. He has told how he 
 once flung out of a French theatre exclaiming at the 
 baseness of the ^^ Idche^^ who was hero of the piece; 
 and how the old gentleman to whom he addressed him- 
 self assured him that he was "very young." That 
 performance of his was not mere pose, not mere priggish- 
 ness ; but, taken in the light of one other avowal as to 
 one of his youthful doings, it gives a basis for some less 
 crude characterisation. It is in his bright biography 
 of the late Fleeming Jenkin that he has told how he 
 over persuaded that Professor to give him a certificate 
 of attendance at the university class of Engineering 
 when he had not made any proper attendance. Steven- 
 son wanted the certificate to satisfy his father, who had 
 specially desired that he should attend the course. 
 Professor Jenkin was displeased, and at first refused the 
 certificate, but Stevenson was coaxingly importunate, 
 and the Professor gave way. To some of us, the story, 
 frankly as it is told, is not quite pleasant. There are 
 various ways of being unchivalrous ; and I think it not 
 unlikely that Burns, if similarly placed, would have 
 
 285 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 refused to take that particular way. And if that esti- 
 mate be right, it would follow that the very righteous 
 tone taken by the youthful Stevenson in regard to 
 Burns's special derelictions tends just a little towards 
 the Pharisaical. 
 
 Let me hasten to explain that this suggestion is not 
 
 a mere /// quoque. The answer to Stevenson's criticism 
 
 of Burns goes much further than that. It involves a 
 
 challenge not merely to Stevenson's practice but to his 
 
 and a great many other people's moral code, to their 
 
 whole philosophy of conduct : it impeaches, indeed, at 
 
 some points the moral code normally acted on by all of 
 
 lus. The complete answer, in fine, raises the question 
 
 iwhether the ordinary conventions of social ethics are 
 
 ■not as often as not scientifically absurd, and, what is 
 
 'more, cowardly. 
 
 V 
 
 Let us agree, to begin with, that Burns was immoral 
 in his treatment of some women, and off"ensively un- 
 chivalrous in some of his talk about it. The question 
 is, are his deviations from rightness and chivalry really 
 greater than those committed by, let us say, anybody 
 else, in some other direction ? And let us push the 
 question, raised as it is by Stevenson's criticism, in the 
 light of others of Stevenson's writings. In his essay on 
 Burns he has been very severe on the physical side of 
 the sex passion. In his stories of Kidnapped and The 
 Black Arrow he has given us glimpses of another 
 physical passion, the passion of fighting ; and in his 
 story of The Wreckers he has given us two lurid 
 pictures, first of the same passion as expressing the 
 instinct of self-preservation, and again of the passion of 
 money-making. All alike are ethically interesting. In 
 
 286 
 

 rt^^tf^ 
 
 STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 Kidnapped we have the brilliant figure of Alan Breck, 
 perhaps the most original figure in Stevenson's gallery. 
 Alan is very vain, very rusdy very boastful, very quarrel- 
 some, very gleeful over a successful bout of killing; yet 
 he is generally found very likeable. Why? Partly 
 because he is spontaneous, warm-blooded, at bottom 
 unselfish and '* good-hearted ; " partly because a social 
 and a literary convention unite to treat the love of 
 fighting and the act of killing, in a great many circum- 
 stances, as rather fine things. Such things a man may 
 do, and yet not only escape our criticism, Stevenson's 
 criticism, but keep our liking, Stevenson's liking. So 
 with his acts of deceit ; so with his readiness to shed a 
 friend's blood on a quarrel of punctilio. For all these 
 acts there is boundless indulgence. Why, then, not for 
 the faults of Burns? There can be no question of utili- 
 tarian test ; for the fighter, the rufiler, works far more j 
 unmitigated evil than the uncalculating amorist. There i 
 has been no scientific or rational comparison at all. ; 
 There is a convention, a tradition, which denounces 
 *'sins a£ the flesh," and singles out one sort of act as 
 such ; there is a tradition, a convention, which gloses or 
 glorifies certain kinds of bloodshed and the lust there- 
 for ; and there an end. 
 
 All this comes out quite unconsciously In Stevenson's 
 earlier stories — all, that Is, that his sexless romances 
 allow to appear. It has been said of him that he 
 ** compounds the sins he is inclined to, by damning 
 those he has no mind to — introduce in his narrative." 
 Though the subtlest and finest of his books, Prince Otto, 
 is a masterly study of sex motives, he has been on the 
 whole singularly indifferent to them as a romancer, 
 giving the zest of his Imagination to the themes of 
 adventure which thrilled his boyhood. And on these, 
 in his earlier work, he is boyishly unethical ; as indeed 
 ^ " 287 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 the romance of adventure had need be.. In The Black 
 Arrow f certainly, there is a touch of side Hght, of second 
 thought, as when the heroine in boy's attire cries out on 
 the fierce fashion in which the boy-hero has killed a 
 man, and the hero defends his act : *' I ran me in upon 
 his bow." But in the vivid picture of Richard Crook- 
 back panting for battle — *'his face was pale as linen, 
 but his eyes shone in his head like some strange jewel " 
 — there is the tacit understanding that, barring all 
 *' crimes" commonly so-called, the spectacle of the fierce 
 young warrior hewing his way in the press is stirring 
 and superb. All these outbreaks of the beast within us 
 are not merely condoned but paraded. The animal side 
 of hate, of malignity, is all right. It is only the animal 
 side of love, of sympathy, that is wrong. As for un- 
 intended wrong-doing, there is a moving passage over 
 the incurableness of the wrong done by Dick to the old 
 shipmaster whose vessel he caused to be lost ; but there 
 is no suggestion that Dick was thus a miserable sinner. 
 It is only in such a case as Burns's that the unintended 
 ill results of thoughtless actions are righteous penalties, 
 and the acts purely detestable. 
 
 In T/ie Wreckers, however, we seem to feel that 
 Stevenson has awakened to the real complexity of 
 ethics, and the utter futility of the conventional codes. 
 He gives us two very singular problems.* First there 
 is the young American who vainly tries to be an artist 
 in Paris, and goes back to make money as a ship- 
 knacker in San Francisco. He is virginally chaste ; and 
 in Paris he is infuriated by the brutality with which a 
 young Frenchman casts off an elderly mistress. In San 
 Francisco, still sexually exemplary, he trades in con- 
 
 * The book is written in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, 
 whose work can at times be confidently distinguished ; but the 
 scheme of the whole— a bad scheme, no doubt — is joint. 
 
 288 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 demned ships, buying them cheap, patching them up to 
 pass muster, loading them, insuring them, and sailing 
 them in the full expectation that they will sink with their 
 crews. Stevenson cannot have drawn or assisted in 
 drawing that picture without realising what a comment 
 it was on the very code which he had so confidently 
 applied to the case of Burns. The virginally chaste 
 man Is personally loyal to his friends, Is kindly. Is really 
 self-sacrificing, and yet he sends whole crews to their 
 death without a scruple, for mere gain. The case is 
 perfectly possible, as human nature goes ; similar cases 
 have been known ; and Stevenson probably knew of one 
 such as he describes. Yet he shows no sign of feeling 
 about Jim Pinkerton as he had felt and written about 
 poor Burns. 
 
 Then we have the extraordinary episode of the beastly 
 massacre of a whole crew by Carthew and his com- 
 panions. Mr. Lang, in reviewing the book, protested a 
 little against that episode, which he found needlessly 
 sanguinary. He was perhaps not as much shocked by 
 it as by Burns's sending of the present of carronades to 
 the French Government ; but still he was shocked. 
 Other people might go so far as to say that the episode 
 Is abominable. But it Is quite clear that Stevenson did 
 not feel there was anything so detestable in It as he had 
 found in Burns's amours and vulgarities. Would he 
 then have written the Burns essay in the same strain in 
 his latter years as he gave to It in his youth ? If so, we 
 should be perfectly entitled to say that his ethics were 
 finally farcical, and that his dispraise need matter 
 nothing to anybody. But, all things considered, it 
 seems extremely unlikely that he could have spoken In 
 his thirties as he had done In his twenties. His later 
 work seems to negate the possibility. 
 
 In any case, we are entitled to say that not only the 
 
 289 T 
 
\/^^m; 
 
 STEVENSON ON BURNS ' 
 
 moral implication of his later work but our own moral 
 reason annuls the authority of his sentence of pillory 
 against Burns the amorist. Burns was very far from 
 being a bad man. He was not anti-social. He did not 
 callously cause suffering. He had very little capacity 
 for sustained malignant emotion. He was generally 
 and practically benevolent, from his youth up. He was 
 abnormally sympathetic ; which amounts to saying that 
 he was abnormally moral. In spontaneously sympa- 
 thising as he did alike with the American Revolution 
 and the French Revolution, he showed himself to be 
 morally far above the average of the respectable people 
 of his generation. He was a better and truer man than 
 Burke, revered by that generation and the next as the 
 champion of political righteousness ; he was a far truer 
 man than Coleridge, revered by many of his generation 
 and more of the next as the champion of Christian 
 mysteries and Christian morals. And to say these 
 things is not merely to make an illi quoque defence : it is_ 
 to point to the only principle that can rationalise ethical 
 judgment, the principle of comparison. The ordinary 
 criticism of prominent literary men is as a rule on a par 
 with the moral tone of the theatre gallery over a melo- 
 drama. There is a preposterous assumption of virtue 
 on all hands, every sinner in the house being free to 
 indemnify himself for his own occasional misdeeds by 
 hissing those of the bold bad man of the play, who is 
 made to figure in the capacity of sinner pure and 
 simple. In biography, save where the contrary licence 
 is taken to make the subject blameless, there is little 
 field for the simple symmetries of the melodramatist ; 
 but when the biographer has done his work it is still 
 possible for the critic to supervene, and place the sins of 
 the biographee, or some of them, in duly unjust isolation, 
 trying them by a code which covers only a few sins in 
 
 290 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 particular instead of sinning In general ; and appealing 
 for the verdict to a jury which has hardly pondered the 
 first principles of morals. 
 
 From such procedure, even when undertaken by a 
 man of genius, himself on the way to an uncommon 
 subtlety of moral Insight, and already capable of much 
 discrimination, we turn to the spectacle presented by 
 the lives of the judges and jury — say, the actual lawyers, 
 unblamed of society, who have earned their bread by 
 the sweat of their brow-beating, their prevention of 
 justice and their promotion of injustice ; the actual 
 judges, who, after that preparation, sit qualified to 
 sermonise wretches on their unprofitable sins ; the 
 traders whose rule of life has been to get the most 
 possible for the least possible ; the company-jobbers, 
 who live by exploiting credulity ; the clergy, who do that 
 with a difference ; the politicians — but stay. It will be 
 answered that the classes of citizen thus in return 
 impeached are as a rule, as men go, despite their devia- 
 tions from ideal righteousness, good fellows enough. So 
 be it : that is the criterion we want : and it need only 
 be said further that Burns was at least as good in his 
 way, genius apart ; and that any arrangement by which 
 he Is pilloried for that jury to pelt is not to be endured. 
 And now let us come straight to the prosecuting counsel 
 himself, and put the straight question : Is it any less 
 blameworthy to be unable to resist the temptation to 
 call a dead man unjustly by an evil name than to 
 be unable to "resist the provocation of any lively lass 
 on the village green " ? And Is it more or Is It less 
 chivalrous ? At least the poet seems to have faced his 
 risks. Stevenson, with plenty of chivalrous sentiment, 
 did not exactly do as much. After having spoken of 
 Burns's touch of brutality, he himself penned at least one 
 brutal page, concerning which, as it is aimed at an 
 
 291 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 unnamed man, we can do no more than note that it 
 7nay possibly have signified a worse yielding to a low 
 temptation than the open shot at the dead Burns. 
 
 But, once more, the purpose of this criticism is not to 
 cast rejoinders at a humanist whom few could read, and 
 still fewer could know, without an ever-growing good- 
 will. It is to challenge a prevailing moral code which 
 Stevenson in his youth rather echoed than expounded ; 
 and to say that some of us at least, having looked into 
 the matter and found the code a chaos of unreasoned 
 convention and mindless tradition, will not be bluffed by 
 either literary or religious solemnities into treating it 
 ^with respect. The question is not one of the due or 
 ' undue influence of Burns over Scotch or any other life. 
 It is one of pure ethics and pure criticism, to which the 
 nationality of the critic and the criticised has no rele- 
 vance. And so far it must be decided against the 
 critic. 
 
 VI 
 
 /The ethical issue, then, being disposed of on ethical 
 ^principles, there remains the critical, in so far as we 
 ''^have seen that bound up with the other. And here it 
 must be remarked that Stevenson did oddly in combining 
 his criticism of Burns's character with the doctrine that 
 *' There is indeed only one merit worth considering in a 
 man of letters^that he should write well ; and only one 
 damning fault — that he should write ill." As the classic 
 Don Juan was damned, a man of letters would seem to 
 be somewhat damned in being called a professional Don 
 Juan. But apart from that, there is the aesthetic dam- 
 nation dealt in the above-quoted estimate of Burns's 
 later work, the songs, as a whittling of cherry-stones. 
 Perhaps there is here again a giving way to the tempta- 
 
 292 
 

 STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 ^ 
 
 tion to say a telling thing* without anxious regard to 
 justice. A song is scarcely so trivial a thing as Steven- 
 son's sentence would imply; and it is really_ not clear 
 howjie decided on the merits of poetic work when he 
 could thus make light of the lyric as such, while bestow- 
 ing such high praise on verse of which much is un-i 
 impassioned, comic, or didactic. As one of those who 
 maintain that Burns's song-writing is over-estimated by 
 his countrymen, I cannot indeed entirely demur to the 
 judgment on its literary side. But it is excessive and 
 indiscriminate, lumping in the category of cherry-stone^ 
 one performance elsewhere admitted by the judge to be 
 ''immortal," and taking no account of a number of 
 Burns's non-lyrical poems which compare favourably 
 enough even with the accredited *' masterpieces " of hii 
 first volume. When Stevenson speaks of Burns having' 
 at first shown a hand capable of moving mountains, he 
 must refer to such pieces as The Twa Dogs, The 
 Jolly Beggars, The Holy Fair, and Holy Willie's Prayer, 
 all of them masterpieces of humanism, humour, and 
 satire, though none of them attains to the quality of 
 pure poetry. But in respect of the qualities which 
 niafk these as masterly, the later Ta7n O' Shanter, 
 Captain Grose's Peregrinations, the Second Epistle to 
 Davie, the lines To Dr. Blacklock, and A Man's a Man 
 for a' That — all written after Burns's marriage — are 
 masterly also ; to say nothing of a number of serious 
 poems in English, not masterpieces, but not at all of 
 the nature of carved cherry-stones. Stevenson's high 
 general praise of the poet's powers is that "There was 
 never a man of letters with more absolute command of 
 his means ; and we may say of him without excess, that 
 his style was his slave." This surely had not ceased to 
 be true when Burns wrote his best songs. 
 
 Still, there is a certain element of truth in Steven- 
 
 293 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 son's summing-up ; and we shall best reach the heart 
 of his criticism by coming to that and letting the other 
 issues go. It is to a certain extent true that Burns, 
 after his marriage, fell away from his poetic stature : it 
 is true that his work towards the end shows less alike 
 of concentration and of energy than before. What 
 then ? Stevenson, after describing the poet's appear- 
 ance in Edinburgh society as *' admirable" and ** per- 
 fectly successful," summarily decides that Burns had 
 been spoiled by his taste of pleasure and idleness, and 
 further that the uncongeniality of his wife's mind com- 
 pleted the upset. It is perhaps this part of Stevenson's 
 criticism which comes nearest giving colour to Dr. 
 Wallace's violent account of it as the work of a middle- 
 class prig. For it gives no sign of a gleam of percep- 
 tion of the vital fact that Burns soon after his marriage 
 became an over-driven man, who could not possibly have 
 written as theretofore had he been ever so indifferent to 
 "pleasure," and ever so congenially mated. Steven- 
 son writes as one who not only had no notion of what 
 it would mean to earn a living as a travelling gauger, 
 with a wife and a family to support, but had not even 
 seen that it was fitting to have a notion on the subject. 
 He wrote, in fact, from the point of view of a rather 
 inconsiderate idler ; and while he objects to Professor 
 Shairp's treatment of Burns that it is so unsympathetic, 
 he himself is but unsympathetic with a difference. We 
 have his own avowal that he was the head of a house- 
 hold before he had succeeded in supporting himself by 
 his own work for a single year. To an invalid, and one 
 with a high standard of workmanship, that is not the 
 least bit of a discredit ; but it is unfortunate that 
 Stevenson was not able to put himself in imagination 
 in the place of a man who had to earn every penny he 
 spent, and that by hard and preoccupying work ; and 
 
 294 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 who could accordingly give at best only his tired even- 
 ings to the literary tasks either of moving mountains or 
 of whittling cherry-stones. According to Stevenson, he 
 had 'Most the habit of solid industry" — this when he 
 was gauger for the Dumfries district, riding two hundred 
 miles a week. It is true that Burns in his youth had 
 been an extraordinarily hard worker, showing in his very 
 ploughing how a superior nervous and cerebral structure 
 means superior energy ; and it is true that his work as 
 an exciseman was more irregular than had been his 
 farm-work, at least in summer. But the fact that after 
 thirty he showed less capacity for the twofold travail of 
 the brain and the muscles might suggest to a critic a 
 better explanation than simple spontaneous and cause- 
 less deterioration of character. The truth is that 
 Burns's physique was prematurely worn out, and this 
 not by drinking or ''debauchery," as we are sometimes 
 told, J^uLbj^undue^toil. He has himself told how from 
 the age of thirteen he had to undergo "the unceasing 
 moil of the galley-slave " on his poor father's farm, and 
 we further know that from his 'teens onward he was 
 subject to occasional palpitations of the heart. That 
 after such a boyhood he did the work he did in ado- 
 lescence, is a double proof of his native faculty ; but the 
 proof carries with it the presumption that his whole 
 powers were early overstrained, or of a nature to be 
 early exhausted. In any case, no man could long go on 
 doing some of the most concentrated literary work of 
 his time while also doing either farm work or excise 
 work enough to keep a family ; and if, instead of seek- 
 ing in the tavern some of the recreation that such a 
 nature as his needed more than most, Burns had 
 industriously plodded away o' nights at systematic 
 "poetry" with a tired body at his fireside, supposing 
 Clarinda's self to be opposite and all the children 
 
 295 
 
'■ V"'" a^ 
 
 STEVENSON ON BURNS |J> 
 
 always quiet in bed, he would but have produced un- 
 inspired common sense and common sentiment — doses 
 of the domestic didactic, more of the English verse in 
 which he always tended to be undistinguished, more 
 
 ^JjLA - Cottar's Saturday Nights ^ more Prayers^ more monodies 
 
 on the deaths of public personages, than which perhaps 
 
 even two or three perfect songs are a more durable 
 
 monument. Great poetry is verily not to be produced 
 
 J by mere "solid industry;"* and there is not one 
 
 ' leading poet of Burns's generation or the next who did 
 
 inot have for his work better chances, better Intellectual 
 
 \ circumstances, than his. Wordsworth had always an 
 
 i^ unearned Income ; so had Cowper ; so had even Cole- 
 ^ ridge during a large part of his life ; so had Shelley ; 
 
 I so had Keats ; so had Byron ; even the hard-worked 
 
 ' . Southey had his time of youthful leisure ; and each and 
 
 all of these, like Goethe and Schiller and Richter and 
 Chenler and Goldsmith and Browning and Tennyson 
 and so many another, had a good culture-preparation, 
 ^ with no burden of premature labour save in the 
 partially exceptional cases of Cowper and Keats. And 
 the most Industrious of all, Southey, did but prove by 
 his Industry that the delicate flowers of genius are not 
 to be reared by the methods of the kitchen garden. It 
 
 /y^^^ belongs to the common way of superficial thtnking to 
 overlook such conditioning facts In the lives of men of 
 letters ; most of us being taught by convention to take 
 genius as something transcending all causation ; but It 
 might have been looked for that a man of genius should 
 
 * It seems just possible that before the end, when composing the 
 more factitious chapters of Wciv of Ilcvmistoiui, Stevenson realised 
 what it was to produce with overtasked and failing powers. Some 
 of his last letters express some such consciousness. Yet family 
 accounts, equally trustworthy, represent him as much pleased with 
 some of his last work which cannot please his critical readers. 
 
 296 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 have had some intuition of the conditions that genius 
 needs. 
 
 Perhaps it was that Stevenson, with his constant 
 ill-health from youth up, took it that where there was 
 physical strength such as Burns's to begin with, all 
 other disadvantages must be of little account : a pathetic 
 excuse and explanation, disarming censure, but leaving 
 us noting that he was wrong. He has in fact judged 
 Burns throughout with hardly a hint that he realises 
 what Burns's burdens and obstacles were, or how much 
 it signifies that the scantily cultured crofter's son did 
 his life's work without any serious respite from the 
 labour which poverty entails. He does not seem to see 
 how much culture means morally as well as intellectu- 
 ally ; how much it helps a man to be a gentleman, to be 
 a good Stoic, to burn his own smoke, to escape ugly, 
 stumbles, as well as to choose his work, his media, his 
 ends. Above all, as I have said, he makes not a jot of 
 comparative allowance for the invidious lime-light that 
 an exorbitant nationalism has made to beat on Burns's 
 life ; and wherever Burns says a light word or does a 
 blundering action, it is treated by the critic in vacuo, as 
 if the surrounding air were not all the while vibrating 
 with such words and such actions. In one of his own 
 essays Stevenson has protested against a naturalism 
 which picks out for illumination certain items of life ; 
 declaring that he is glad to have the truth if it be the 
 whole truth, but rejects as mere falsity a truth which 
 tells only a fraction of a fact. That criticism is more 
 valid as against his own handling of Burns than against 
 Zola's handling of life ; for Zola does suggest averages, 
 and Stevenson's critique does not. He tries Burns 
 more often than not by the standard of the exemplary 
 abstract man, who has eluded biography ; and he so 
 gives to his estimate, despite touches of justice and 
 
 297 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 mercy, a certain patronisingness which, as we have 
 seen, evokes sharp comments. When he has to tell 
 how the marriage-lines which Burns gave Jean Armour 
 were thrown back on his hands, and how Burns then 
 turned to Highland Mary, he does it with the air of 
 impeccability hesitating between pity and contempt : — 
 
 " . . . . with his head down, this poor, insulted poet ran once 
 more upon his fate. There was an innocent and gentle Highland 
 nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family : and he had soon 
 battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret engage- 
 ment." 
 
 The '' battered " of this passage has reference to Burns's 
 humorously candid avowal that in his youth he was 
 always battering himself into a tender passion for some 
 girl or other : the light word is none too candidly ap- 
 plied by the critic, at a century's distance, to an episode 
 of an essentially different kind. In the same way the 
 affair of Burns's sending the carronades to the French 
 Government, his official snubbing and his wounded cry, 
 is discussed by Stevenson with some such condescend- 
 ing compassion as might be expressed at the time by a 
 *' person of quality," rather than with a thinker's or an 
 artist's sense of the pity of it all, and of the ugliness of 
 a world so out of joint. To the nobility of Burns's sym- 
 pathy with the French and the American Revolutions, 
 Stevenson does show a passing susceptibility ; but not 
 so much as to make us feel that he is not of the political 
 school of Mr. Lang, who biographically rejoices that 
 Burns came later to write his ditty ^' Does haughty 
 Gaul invasion threat," and so put himself right with 
 the mess-room. 
 
 In fine, save for the before suggested explanation, 
 which leaves us fitly sympathetic with Stevenson, we 
 should be moved to pronounce his treatment of Burns 
 surprisingly unsympathetic, and thus in a way surpris- 
 
 298 
 
 I 
 
STEVENSON ON BURNS 
 
 ingly unintelligent, despite its intellectuality. And it is 
 only, as aforesaid, the sense of the cathartic virtue of 
 such an essay, in a Scotland where centennial and 
 perennial infatuation does not blench even at the raising 
 of a monument to Highland Mary,* that can withhold 
 us from feeling that with all its brilliance the essay had 
 better not have been written. He has well said of 
 another Scottish critic : ^'The point of view was im- 
 posed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in his writ- 
 ings with an austerity not only cruel, but almost stupid. 
 They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean 
 bed ; they are probably always disfigured. The rheto- 
 rical artifice of Macaulay is easily spied ; it will take 
 longer to appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle."! For 
 many people, unfortunately, Ft will take still longer to 
 appreciate the moral bias of Stevenson's own essay on 
 Burns, even though they may dislike its drift. 
 
 * It is impossible not to feel, now that Highland Mary has been 
 thus commemorated, the better title of Lowland Martha, to wit, 
 Mrs. Burns, who bore the heat and burden of the poet's day as few 
 women would. 
 
 t Preface to Familiar Studies, pp. xiii.-xiv. 
 
 299 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 (1887) 
 
 To some readers of the various appreciative criticisms 
 which have been passed upon Arthur Hugh Clough, it 
 must have seemed odd that the friendly writers should 
 have so little to say of the poet's measure of success in 
 a pursuit which bulfced largely In his artistic work — the 
 writing, in the verse form, of what is none the less 
 analytic fiction. Setting aside the Mari Magno : or^ 
 Tales on Boards which are also character studies, about 
 half his verse is made up simply of The Bothie of Tober- 
 na-Vnolich and Amotcrs de Voyage; and to the critic of 
 fiction the latter production cannot well fail to be at 
 least interesting, while the former is known to have 
 interested a good many readers who would not profess 
 to be specially critical. So silent^ however, has criticism 
 been on the subject, that there is probably an air of 
 extravagance about an attempt to show that Clough 
 was a great and original artist in fiction. 
 
 When, in 1848-9, Clough wrote his Bothie and 
 AmourSy* the leading English novelists were Lytton, 
 
 * The latter seems to have been completed in 1849, though not 
 published till 1857-8. It was then a pecuniary success, which the 
 Bothie had not been. " In a commercial point of view, the publica- 
 tions of the Amours has been a great event to me. This is the first 
 
 301 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 Thackeray, and Dickens ; and of these the last, being at 
 work on David Copperfield (1849), had yet to write 
 Little Dornty Great Expectations^ the Tale of Tim Cities^ 
 Bleak House y and Our Mutual Friend ; while Thackeray 
 was but beginning to produce his masterpieces. Vanity 
 Fair dating from 1846-8, and Pendennis from 1849-50. 
 Charlotte Bronte had conquered fame by Jane Eyre ; 
 but Shirley only appeared in 1849, and Villette was not 
 to come till 1853. George Eliot, again, had not yet 
 dreamt of fiction ; and across the Atlantic Hawthorne 
 had thus far produced only his short tales ; so that 
 English fiction, on the whole, might be said to have 
 reached only the beginnings of its greatest development. 
 Such a division is, of course, arbitrary, just as, though 
 in a much greater degree, it is arbitrary to make divi- 
 sions between Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Modern 
 Times ; but when simply put forward for what it is 
 worth, it may serve usefully to emphasise the fact that 
 before the time in question English novelists had done 
 very little in the direction of what is coming to be 
 recognised as the main work of the modern novel, the 
 serious, analytical presentment of normal types of 
 character. The terms here used must be taken as 
 strictly definitive ; or, rather, they had better be them- 
 selves defined to prevent misconception ; and this can 
 best be done by first noting the limitations of the art of 
 the earlier novelists. It will probably not now be gene- 
 rally disputed that, while Defoe once for all gave 
 English prose fiction a bias to circumstantial verisimili- 
 tude ; and while Richardson, with all his limitations, 
 gave the lead in the direction of a true analysis of 
 character ; Jane Austen was practically the first English 
 novelist to attain real success in the rendering of normal 
 
 money 1 ever received for verse-making, and it is really a very 
 handsome sum." Letter in Prose Remains, ed. 1888, p. 245. 
 
 302 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 life — that is to say, the first who gives us no impression 
 of inadequacy., wit hin t he limits of her undertaking. 
 Richardson is far too much occupied with his thin-spun 
 psychologising to hit off with any vividness the objective 
 totality of his personages as it might conceivably appear 
 to a keen onlooker ; for ever pulling the strings, he 
 never seems to get a view of his own drama ; and thus 
 the very freshness of method which gave his letter- 
 writing characters, with their serious conformity to the 
 literary conventions of the time, such a hold on the 
 interest of his contemporaries, is for us to-day the great 
 bar to the assimilation of his work. Fielding, again, is 
 unquestionably at his best where his types are neither 
 serious nor normal — that is, where he is giving us genre 
 studies, an Adams, a Squire Western, a woman of the 
 people, a sketch in satire, or an effect in comedy. 
 Tom Jones is pixly-inferentially rgal, and Sophia never 
 becomes more than a suggestion, like Amelia, of a type 
 of young lady which Fielding adored. As for Goldsmith, 
 the general truth of suggestion, the value of the lighter 
 detail, in The Vicar of Wakefield is not more obvious 
 than the conventionality of much of the framework and 
 much of the posing ; while Scott, finally, hardly once 
 contrives to give true vitality to a character which does 
 ^pt depend for^its-^ffec^ oa^Kwelty. There is none the 
 less genius in his projection of the fresh types, as Davie 
 Deans, Cuddie Headrigg, Monkbarns, the Bailie, Dandle 
 Dinmont, and the rest ; or in the skill with which the 
 action of Jeanie Deans is made to enshrine her in our 
 memory ; but the fact remains that_Jiis_normal_.p£r- 
 sp.nagesj those hypothetically interesting figures round 
 whom his really observed characters are grouped, are 
 the merest ** walking gentlemen" and gentlewomen. 
 As to this there was no real doubt among competent 
 readers in his own time ; his fame, in so far as it did 
 
 303 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 not depend on the gratitude of ordinary novel-readers 
 for a fresh kind of excitement, being based on the 
 general sense of the felicity with which he drew what 
 were nominally his minor personages. No reader could, 
 in the nature of things, imagine Captain Brown, or 
 Waverley, or Mr. Francis Osbaldistone, anything like 
 as vividly as he did even Counsellor Pleydell or Saunders 
 Mucklebackit ; and while the wizard's young ladies are 
 a little more thinkable than his heroes, Diana being 
 admittedly a substantial success, their society is far 
 indeed from having any such fascination for the reader 
 of to-day as it had for the '* male of their species " with 
 whom their chivalrous creator provided them. JBut 
 Jane Austen, as no one saw better than Scott, achiey^ed 
 ju^t such a success ill drawmg the people of the English 
 upper-middle and middle-upper classes as he had done 
 with the types he had observed in the Scotch peasantry. 
 Here, in a young woman's novels, were people such as 
 every reader met every day, somehow made as real as 
 Borderers and Highlanders ; more persistently real, as 
 it happened, by virtue of the writer's general method ; 
 and somewhat inexplicably entertaining by virtue of 
 one's very perception that there was nothing irresistibly 
 entertaining in these same people in actual life. It was 
 the triumph of pure art : the commonplace had been 
 made immortal by sheer felicity of reproduction. Not 
 that the new comer at once attained her due classic 
 authority. While the few good readers — who included, 
 let us remember, not only Scott, but, in the next gene- 
 ration, the much-maligned Macaulay — felt that there 
 was here something quite new in fiction, something not 
 attained to by Miss Burney any more than by Richard- 
 son, yet the habit of finding the truer touches of 
 novelists mainly in their grotesques, or ostensible 
 comedy-types, was of such long standing that readers 
 
 304- 
 

 CLOUGH 
 
 still had a tendency to esteem Jane Austen, even as they 
 did Fielding and Smollett, for her more emphasised 
 studies, which were, by the conditions of her art- world, 
 her fools ; and the very perfection of her fools tended 
 somewhat to strengthen the bias. Hence, when 
 George. Eliot much later sought to present people of all 
 grades of mind, she could still be met by a criticism 
 which found her Mrs. Poysers and Aunt Gleggs 
 admirable but thought her less piquant studies little 
 worth having in comparison. 
 
 In Jane Austen, then, we might almost say, we have 
 the first of the moderns in fiction. He, or she, who 
 does not delight in her cannot be credited with a true 
 taste ; or, let us say (remembering Charlotte Bronte's \f 
 inappreciation), is one-sidedly developed. This being 
 duly premised, a devout admirer may with a clear 
 conscience go on to say that Jane Austen left un- 
 attempted the application of the naturalist method to { 
 normal character in its relation to the deeper issues of \ 
 lifg._ Her art played on the normal in individual 
 experience as well as on the normal in individuality : 
 slie drew not only the people who belong to the ordinary 
 drawing-room, but the drawing-room section of their 
 inner life, so to say ; and some will probably have it, 
 with Mr. Harrison, that these were her fixed limits. 
 As I must not overload a note on Clough with a study 
 of Jane Austen, I will not here discuss the matter, but 
 simply posit the fact that her performance was defined 
 as has been said ; and, that when she had done there 
 was still left to be achieved in fiction that adequate 
 stTrdy^rf TTOt only the weightier natures, but the more 
 intellectual sides of these, which later thinking tends to 
 demand from the professed student of character. Not 
 less certain is it, however, that before the middle of the 
 century the further step had not been fully taken. 
 
 305 u 
 
i}^ 
 
 CLOUGH 
 
 Setting aside the Ivlarryats and Levers, who never 
 turned to the intellectual side of things at all, we are 
 bound to decide that Lytton lacks truth, and that 
 Dickens, whatever may be thought of his later work, 
 A had certainly not so far mastered the serious side of 
 life in his earlier period as to yield a product which 
 will satisfy a cultured reader to-day. But did even 
 Thackeray fully succeed in his earlier work, or in his 
 later, in giving us such an artistic treatment x>f the 
 intellectual life as can be said worthily to complement 
 his pictures of the simply social life ? I cannot better 
 indicate the precise issue involved than by asking how 
 far, say, Pendennis now satisfies us as a sketch of a 
 young man with a deep intellectual experience, and 
 how far Thackeray now impresses us as a man able to 
 describe or transcribe such an experience. It implies 
 no touch of detraction from the praise due to 
 Thackeray's consummate and incomparable talent, to 
 say that at this particular point he falls short ; that his 
 scope did not permit him to reach those sides of mental 
 life at which he has ineffectually hinted in Pendennis 
 (and this is the conclusion pointed to by the later work 
 in Philip) ; or, alternatively, that on this as on one or 
 two other points he wrote down to the standards of 
 the British parlour of his time. 
 
 If, then, British fiction in 1848-9 was on the whole 
 thus imperfectly intellectual, so much the more would 
 be the merit of any man who at one stride attained the 
 higher level ; and this achievement it is that I venture 
 to claim for Clough, in respect of these two works of 
 his which are in form hexameter poems, but are in 
 essence works of narrative, analytical, psychological 
 fiction. Little read as they still are in proportion to 
 their merits, I will rather assume them to be known to 
 my readers than recapitulate their contents, as the 
 
 306 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 mere telling of their simple stories would reveal 
 nothing- of their charm and power, which can only be 
 gathered from a deliberate perusal. Wh3i_jrealiy 
 needs to be pressed is the relation that such works 
 bear^to the contemporary novel, and the faculty for 
 fiction to which they testify. In the criticism of 
 Clough's own generation one finds indeed some tribute 
 to the power of the character-sketching in both the 
 Bothie and the A^iiours ; but — and this is the special 
 point — no clear perception that just this merit, in the 
 circumstances, took the two works out of the list of 
 poetic successes and placed them high among the a^A-eJi^ 
 JB^ctional, whf re alone could any analogous art be found, '^ 
 
 and where, further, it would be hard to find anything 
 equally subtle in the same line. Doubtless it was the 
 simple fact of Clough's having written in hexameters 
 that stood mainly in the way of the proper classification ; 
 and it will be necessary to consider what that fact 
 substantially amounts to. 
 
 What seems to me to have been done by those who 
 say that Clough proved we could have good English 
 poetry in hexameters is : having found that a work in 
 hexameters may be entirely successful in its art, to 
 assume that it is therefore first-rate hexameter verse. 
 Now, the literary question raised by Clough's hexa- 
 meters is rather too complex to be so simply disposed 
 of. It includes, to begin with, the old question as to \^ 
 what the technical *' values" of poetry really are ; and j 
 on this there is need to guard against obscuring the 
 issue by discussing the kind of impression we get from 
 those classic poets to whom the hexameter was native. 
 Asking rather what are the constituent elements of our 
 own best poetry, we find that they may be resolved 
 into effects of cadence, consonance^ and concentrated 
 andcharming verbal expression ; that without these 
 
'/ 
 
 CLOUGH 
 
 the verse form has no value, whatever be its metre ; 
 and that no metrical form, as such, gives the least 
 permanent security for their presence. It almost 
 follows from this that true poetic values, unalloyed by 
 effects which are not such as to justify the verse form, 
 can only be had from short poems — that all lengthy 
 works in verse inevitably involve much inferior 
 performance, and that such works must rely for their 
 acceptance on the reader's pleasure in the successful 
 passages inducing him to tolerate the others. For a 
 variety of reasons, I believe that Clough quite felt all 
 this, at least in his younger days ; and I accordingly 
 do not believe that in writing the Bothie and the 
 Amours he was aiming at strictly poetical effects at,all.* 
 This opinion has been ere now expressed ; Mr. 
 Swinburne having suggested in his essay on Mr. 
 Arnold's poems, that Clough meant his hexameters to 
 be regarded as ** graduated prose " and not as poetry ; 
 on which Professor Masson rejoins to the effect that 
 such a view is quite out of the question. But if, 
 instead of saying anything about "graduated prose," 
 a phrase which simply raises the further question why 
 Clough did not write graduated prose pure and simple, 
 if that were the kind of effect he wanted — if rather we 
 say that he aimed at an effect which was not poetic, I 
 think we should be stating the plain truth. On the 
 face of the matter, very much of the Bothie and of the 
 Amours is humorous ; in fact, humour, buoyant in 
 the first and sombre and subtk in the second, pervades 
 the whole conception of the two works ; which is as 
 
 * The source of his impulse is noteworthy : " Will you convey to 
 Mr. Longfellow," he writes to Emerson in 1849, " the fact that it 
 was a reading of his ' Evangeline,' aloud to my mother and sister, 
 which, coming after a reperusal of the ' Iliad,' occasioned this out- 
 break of hexameters ? " {J:'yosc Remains, p. 140,) 
 
 308 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 much as to say that they are not to be classed as poetry 
 proper, if indeed they are to be called poetry at all. I 
 am, however, sufficiently conscious of the psychological 
 difficulties of the problem to prefer waiving the last 
 challenge, and simply to say that where verse is 
 humorous its effects, granting them to have certain 
 analogies with those strictly poetic, certain properties 
 which clearly belong to the verse form, are nevertheless 
 of a distinctly different order from those others. This 
 may seem at bottom a truism, but on the acceptance 
 of it there depends such a point of practice as the 
 deciding not to give the same name to horse and ass 
 because both are cattle for riding. Humorous verse 
 has undoubtedly this quality in common with beautiful 
 vei^, that when it is quite successful we return to It 
 on the sheer strength of the fascination of the words, 
 in their kind ; and such charm over us Is assuredly a 
 special credential of the finest verse. It is the words, 
 and the order of the words, that make the poetry ; not 
 the idea as it might be paraphrased in any prose form, 
 however accurately. Well, one cannot help being 
 repeatedly charmed with those lines of Peacock's : "^' 
 
 " The mountain sheep are sweeter, 
 But the valley sheep are fatter ; 
 We therefore deemed it meeter 
 To carry off the latter "— 
 
 for their happy fusion of rhyme and humour, which 
 would be utterly lost in a prose statement ; whereas It 
 is just a fusion of rhyme and beauty that perpetually 
 captures us In the lines : 
 
 " Music that genther on the spirit Hes 
 Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes " ; 
 
 and a charm of pure quintessential beauty of choice 
 expression, absolutely dependent upon phrase and 
 cadence, that conquers memory in those of Arnold's : 
 
 309 
 
 a4^' 
 
 ^^^j{ 
 
^^ 
 
 CLOUGH 
 
 " As the pale waste widens around him, 
 As the banks fade dimmer away, 
 As the stars come out, and the night-wind 
 Brings up the stream 
 Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." 
 
 But since the ** rhythmical creation of beauty," to use 
 Poe's phrase, has thus so inexpressibly different an 
 effect from that of the rhythmical creation of amuse- 
 ment, an effect so much more different from the latter 
 than from that of fairly elevated prose, one hardly cares 
 to give the name of poetry to both. I would finally say, 
 then, that Clough wrote in hexameters because there 
 was a certain artistic effect he was able to get from 
 hexameters, which served his purpose, but which he 
 never regarded as the same in kind with that which he 
 aimed at in his finer rhymed poetry. And this particular 
 artistic effect, accruing to the hexameter as he handled 
 it, was not, as I take it, a strictly metrical or cadencial 
 L> r- -r effect at all, but one of delicately humorous parody — so 
 ^'' delicate that while the humour was often effusive it 
 could be refined away at need till it put no check on a 
 perfectly serious intonation and purpose. Clough, in 
 short, wrote in hexameters not because he thought 
 that special metre, qua metre, tractable to serious 
 verse, but because the hexameter was the metre of 
 Homer and Virgil to begin with, and thus afforded 
 endless opportunities for jests of style that would 
 appeal to academic readers ; and because further there 
 was no blank measure in which pungency and 
 piquancy could be better maintained at less cost of 
 enforced dignity. He had thus the two resources of 
 parody of classic manner and parody of rhythm in 
 general ; a combination, I suppose, the more difficult 
 to analyse and describe truly because it is so unique. 
 For the rest, it is needless to renew the other dispute 
 
 310 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 as to whether dough's verses were true hexameters 
 after all. Mr. Swinburne says not ; and Poe, to judge 
 from his assaults on Longfellow's attempts, would 
 probably extend his ban to Clough's. As to the latter, 
 it may perhaps be agreed that, deliberate quaintness 
 apart, they are '* about as good as they make 'em," as 
 the youth of London say ; and no more needs to be 
 granted.* Clough's own opinion on the subject is 
 difficult to gather ; the only clues being this brief 
 **Note" on the back of the title-page of the first 
 edition of the Bothie : 
 
 " The reader is warned to expect every kind of irregularity in 
 these modern hexameters ; ' spondaic ' t lines, so called, are almost 
 the rule ; and a word will often require to be transferred by the 
 voice from the end of one line to the beginning of the next ; " 
 
 and some passages in the first of his Letters oj 
 Parepide?jtiiSy as this : 
 
 " Homer's rounded line, and Virgil's smooth verse, were both of 
 them (after more puzzling about it than the matter deserves, I have 
 convinced myself) totally unlike those lengthy, straggling, irregular, 
 uncertain slips of prose mesiiree which we find it so hard to measure, 
 so easy to read in half a dozen ways, %vithout any assurance of the 
 right one, and which, since the days of Voss, the Gothic nations 
 consider analogous to classic hexameter." X 
 
 It may be added that his careful translations from 
 Homer in hexameter, though extremely interesting, do 
 
 * Mr. Arnold considered (Lectures On Translating Homer, p. 79) 
 that " Mr, Clough's hexameters are excessively, needlessly rough." 
 The tu quoqiie cannot be foregone. Mr. Arnold's own hexameters are 
 insupportable — neither classic nor English. 
 
 t I do not quite understand what Clough here meant by 
 "spondaic." Surely Poe was right in deciding that the ancient 
 hexameter was spondaic, and that English hexameters fail just for 
 lack of spondees. Clough's hexameters are just about as trochaic 
 and dactyllic as other people's. 
 
 X Works; i. 397. 
 
 311 
 
CLOUGH X 
 
 
 not make good English verse ; while his other Essays 
 ill Classical Metres are entirely afflictive. 
 
 There will still be put by some, perhaps, the further 
 question. Why did Clough write in verse at all if his 
 purpose was to any extent serious fiction ? I would 
 say, on that, that he happened at a particular period 
 to be steeped in Greek verse, and at the same time 
 overflowing with ''criticism of life" as he saw it 
 around him ; and that he found in these works of his 
 the fittest expression possible for him at the moment. 
 It so happened that he could write elastically and 
 spontaneously at the given time in the given manner ; 
 the manner being in itself a stimulus peculiarly fit in 
 his case. He seems never to have written pr^se witli_ 
 any such facility as is shown in the Bothie^ which 
 would appear to have taken only somewherd about a 
 month in the writing : his prose essays are mostly 
 laboured and ineffectual ; heavily packed with culled 
 passages of Latin verse ; never seeming to kindle all 
 along the line, or to be written because of a clear sense 
 of something to say. They never write themselves : 
 they are composed ; and smack of Carlyle and I know 
 not how many other intellectual fashions of his young 
 days. But in the Bothie we seem to have the exuber- 
 ance of a holiday-making undergraduate with the keen 
 judgments, the wide observation, and the musings, of 
 the ripening man. Hence, an artistic success without 
 parallel in its kind. There is, I venture to say, no 
 piece of fiction in the language, within similar compass, 
 which can compare with this for quantity and quality, 
 in its combination of truth, force, and variety of 
 character-drawing, truth of environment, depth of 
 suggestion, and range of association and sympathy. 
 No English writer has yet appeared who has shown the 
 skill to pack such a picture and commentary as that of 
 
 312 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 the opening banquet-scene into anything like the same 
 space of prose. Told in prose at the same length, 
 indeed, the multifold description and episode would 
 have an air of crowding, of willed terseness, such as we 
 have in Flaubert's Salammho ; whereas the verse, with 
 all its load of significance, seems positively to loiter by 
 the way, in the mock-Homeric and Miltonic iterations 
 of epithets and dallyings with phrases and descriptions. 
 It seems to be written for the sheer humour of the 
 thing ;~and yet Thackeray could not have better have 
 turned the humour to the account of the portraiture. 
 Admiring notice has been taken by Mr. W. M. Rossetti 
 of one line which conveys a whole story : 
 
 " Pipers five or six, among them the young one, the drunkard " 
 
 — a touch even more simply effective now than it was 
 in the first edition, where the epithet ** drunken " came 
 again in the line further on, about the small piper nod- 
 ding to Lindsay ; but the section is full of similarly 
 weighty strokes. The tutor, " the grave man, nick- 
 named Adam," so admirably exhibited by a series of 
 incidental, effortless dramatic touches as the story goes 
 on, is already permanently outlined by that phrase and 
 the lines on his dress; the ''shrewd ever-ciphering 
 factor" is as it were henceforth identifiable; the 
 whole cast of character of each of the students seems 
 to be known definitely once for all ; even the attache 
 and the Guardsman are individualised by an impercep- 
 tible touch ; the Marquis of Ayr gesticulates before us ; 
 and Sir Hector, in particular, is at once photographed 
 and permanently revealed by a few lines of burlesque 
 comment and the incomparable report of his toast- 
 speech on The Strangers^ the entire creation being ac- 
 complished in a sort of unconscious addendum to the 
 scholar's smiling apostrophe : 
 
 313 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 " Bid me not, grammar-defying, repeat from grammar-defiers 
 Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean." 
 
 — the last epithet a paragraph in itself.* There lacks 
 nothing- to indicate the entire Highland environment ; 
 and with the all-round allusion there is thrown in one 
 entirely sufficient vignette of the student's living-place 
 and bathing-place : 
 
 " Where over a ledge of granite 
 Into a granite basin the amber torrent descended, 
 Only a step from the cottage, the road and the larches between them. " 
 
 So matchlessly vivid is it all that one could almost 
 swear it a faithful transcript from actual fact ; but the 
 chances are that the total opening section^ like the 
 piece as a whole, is an artistic combination of various 
 recollections and various fancies. In the first edition 
 the ** pastoral " Is thus dedicated : '' My long-vacation 
 pupils will I hope allow me to inscribe this trifle to 
 them, and will not, I trust, be displeased if in a fiction, 
 purely fiction, they are here and there reminded of 
 times we enjoyed together." It could be wished that 
 some of these pupils had put on record, for the en- 
 lightenment of future critics, some note as to the 
 element of traceable fact in the artistic whole. 
 
 The easily evolving story of the Bothie is so steadily 
 
 pregnant from first to last that to touch on all its good 
 points would be to make a commentary much longer 
 than the book ; and it must suffice me here to touch on 
 one or two points only before turning to the Amours de 
 Voyage. One is, the success with which Clough has 
 
 I given us, in Hewson, a type of hot-headed young en- 
 thusiast. In such a way as to secure abundant sympathy 
 
 ■* The general reader will perhaps excuse an elucidatory reference 
 to a choice sample of Anglo-Thucydidese in the footnote on page 300 
 of Marsh and Smith's SUidenVs Mayiual of the, English Language. 
 
 3H 
 

 ' CLOUGH 
 
 and full understanding, without for a moment turning"! 
 him into a hero and challenging our homage. Where^ 
 before had anything of the kind been done ? I cannot 
 recall a youthful Radical in English fiction who is not 
 either intellectually magnified, or handled with a hos- 
 tile animus, or thrust down our throats. In Clough 
 there is no such malpractice : the lad is treated with 
 absolute insight and absolute kindliness, yet without a 
 shade of flattery, and becomes for us, enthusiast as he 
 is, as absolutely real as Sir Hector, or as any observed 
 personage in any novel ; and how much fictional skill 
 went to doing this can only be indicated by suggesting 
 a comparison of Hewson with any other imagined young 
 democrat the reader can think of, Felix Holt included. 
 Another noteworthy feature is the presentment of the 
 girl Elspie Mackaye, a study which may be suspected 
 of idealism, but which is yet wonderfully true, as those 
 who have known the Highlands at all widely or inti- 
 mately can testify. Elspie is perhaps specifically the 
 Highland girl of a fine type as one sees her in vacation- 
 time ; but, granting that, she is charmingly well 
 drawn ; and the proportion of idealisation is, it may be 
 said without hesitation, much below that infused in 
 Dorothea Brooke or Maggie Tulliver, not to speak ot 
 Myra and Romola. It may be doubted, indeed, if she is 
 not to the full as true as Ethel Newcome. Now, this 
 again constitutes a great success, when it is considered 
 how lightly, how dramatically, Clough has laid his 
 touches on. Girls of the people we have had in abun- 
 dance in more recent fiction ; but one so estimable and 
 yet so little idealised, or one drawn with such strong 
 simplicity, it will not be easy to call to mind ; and I can 
 think of nothing so good of earlier date. 
 
 A power to paint women of another type might very 
 safely have been inferred from the sketch of Elspie in 
 
 315 
 
V 
 
 CLOUGH 
 
 the Bothie ; but the Amours de Voyage furnishes the 
 decisive proof. Having the encouragement of the 
 judgment of most of his readers to consider the Bothie 
 a success, Clough made his next attempt at fiction an 
 essay in hexameters likewise ; this time, however, so 
 obviously disclaiming a poetic purpose, by throwing 
 his story into the form of letters, that the fact of its not 
 having been generally dealt with as a novel Is a little 
 surprising. The power of the character studies in the 
 Amours^ as In the Bothie^ has not been overlooked ; 
 but what has been awanting is the distinct recognition 
 that In both works the versifier has surpassed the ex- 
 isting prose fiction on Its own ground. For the whole 
 work of these Italian letters is no less fine, If less bril- 
 liant in form, than that of the earlier composition ; the 
 quieter tone being In fact the outcome of the greater 
 subtlety of the study. What he attempted In this case 
 was a study of the mind of a cultured and original 
 Englishman In Rome, as acted upon on the one hand 
 by the historic associations of the city and the contem- 
 porary problems connected with that history, and on 
 the other by his intercourse with the inevitable person 
 of the other sex, with whom he gradually falls In love, 
 though the aff"alr, so far as the story goes, comes to 
 nothing. Told in its scanty detail, the narrative Is 
 about as slight as a fiction could well be ; but it is just 
 I the Investing of such a plot with permanent Interest 
 that makes the work the masterpiece it is. As in the 
 earlier piece, the workmanship Is perfect nearly all round. 
 There is no Inadequacy. The commentary on Rome 
 and Its history ; the sketch of the acquaintances whose 
 appearance on the scene begins the story ; the man's 
 self-criticism and self-satire ; the woman's reticent self- 
 revelation ; the prattle of the sister ; the Interludes on 
 the Roman political situation ; the chimes of half- 
 
 316 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 
 i 
 
 ! 
 
 elevated song that seem to lend themselves subtly to 
 the note of passion, at first obscure, afterwards 
 swelling to something of a lyric strain, only to die away 
 finally in the minor — it is all masterly, as perfect as 
 it is original. . We shall not see just such another per- 
 formance. Hexameter stories in imitation of Clough 
 would be by many degrees more unsatisfactory than 
 imitations of Whitman, for the simple reason that his 
 work is so infinitely more difficult to equal ; but it 
 seems to me to-day, looking first at Clough's work and 
 then at the developments fiction has taken and is 
 taking in Russia, France, and America, that here 
 in England this merely privately famous man of the 
 schools had curiously anticipated later tendencies and 
 achievementslBy a whole generation. All that is most 
 characteristic of the best new work — the graded half- 
 tints, the simple drawing, the avoidance of glare and 'v. 
 melodrama, the search for the essential interest of the 
 normal — all of it belongs to these experiments in hexa- 
 meters. There has been no equally good portraiture of 
 feminine character vi mzmmis and in whole before or 
 since. But, what is more, Clough had really philoso-^^ 
 phised his fiction in a style quite beyond the faculty of 
 all but one or two of the moderns ; contriving to make 
 an intellectual man both ideally impressive and artisti- 
 cally true ; a rare feat in the novel, where the anatomy 
 of the higher grades of mind has hitherto been at- 
 tempted with so little real success. The forceful sim- 
 plicity of the unpretentious drawing of Claude can be 
 best appreciated when contrasted with the labour be- 
 stowed on Daniel Deronda — and the result. Clough's 
 work has the masculine weight and precision that in 
 Turguenief make a short story live in the reader's 
 mind like a great experience. Much tolerable work- 
 manship will be forgotten before this. 
 
 317 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 There is, indeed, an air of paradox in saying that one 
 of the ablest performances in modern fiction, which at 
 its best is above all things naturalistic, is one cast in the 
 artificial form of letters in verse ; and certainly the 
 phenomenon is fitted to make us very careful how we 
 theorise about right and wrong in art forms. Say what 
 we will about hexameters, it is clear that these verse- 
 novels of Clough's are ** idealised" work as beside 
 prose realism : so far as treatment goes, the method is 
 obviously not that of naturalist fiction. In fact, Clough 
 is at times not careful to preserve verisimilitude even 
 within his artistic limits ; as when he makes one of 
 Mary Trevellyn's letters to Miss Roper* begin thus : 
 
 You are at Lucca baths, you tell me, to stay for the summer ; 
 Florence was quite too hot ; you can't move further at present. 
 Will you not come, do you think, before the summer is over ? 
 
 Since the letter could obviously have been made to read 
 in a less impossible manner and yet convey all the facts 
 required, the workmanship here must be pronounced 
 faulty. But, making allowance for such faults of detail, 
 which belong to inexperience in an uncommon method, 
 what could be more essentially naturalistic than the 
 whole presentment of the women's cast of mind and way 
 of taking things ? It is singular how perfectly the 
 contents of actual letters are suggested in Clough's 
 hexameters ; so scrupulously sunk to the strictly prosaic 
 level, wherever necessary, as to stop just short of the 
 flavour of burlesque. Lines which in themselves are 
 absolutely haiialy conveying epistolary phrases also 
 hanal in themselves, yet curiously retain just the needful 
 artistic value for the suggestion of a girl's femininely 
 veiled emotions and hopes and fears ; the commonplace 
 letter becomes alive for us by its burden of narrative 
 
 * Canto V. 3. 
 318 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 implication, very much as it would in a novel as realistic 
 as sifted prose could make it. Indeed we may search a 
 hundred prose novels in vain for such delicate fidelity of 
 suggestion. The touches in the portrait are as refined 
 as any of Mr. Henry James ; and yet how much more 
 real is the lady than some of that artist's present- 
 ments ! 
 
 But no less essentially true, on the other hand, does 
 the painting remain when it rises above the common- 
 place into shee^poeiry, as in these fine lines * in which 
 Claude comments on the failure of the Italian rising : 
 
 Whither depart the souls of the brave that die in the battle, 
 Die in the lost, lost fight, for the cause that perishes with them ? 
 Are they upborne from the field on the slumberous pinions of angels 
 Unto a far-off home, where the weary rest from their labour. 
 And the deep wounds are healed, and the bitter and burning moisture 
 Wiped from the generous eyes ? or do they linger unhappy, 
 Pining, and haunting the grave of their bygone hope and endeavour ? 
 
 If there were any danger of this apostrophe lessening 
 our sense of the reality of the sceptical, critical young 
 Englishman, unrestfully musing at Rome, it would be 
 sufficiently averted by the unflinching fall of key and 
 pitch that follows : 
 
 All declamation, alas! though I talk, I care not for home nor 
 Italy ; feebly and faintly, and but with the lips can lament the 
 Wreck of the Lombard youth, and the victory of the oppressor. 
 Whither depart the brave ?— God knows; I certainly do not. 
 
 The snatch of poetry, equally with the half-real half- 
 afTected cynicism, and with the general mordant criticism 
 on Rome and humanity and its ways, is part of the^ 
 presentation^jJ;he young man's mind ; a true product! 
 of the century in its restless analysis of its instincts. 
 Nothing in the story is more dramatically convincing- 
 than the hero's passage from the analytical mood to 
 
 * Canto V. 6. 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 that of charmed surrender to the feminine attraction he 
 had just been analysing. Half-way, we have this : — 
 
 Allah is great, no doubt, and Juxtaposition his prophet. 
 Ah, but the women, alas ! they don't look at it in that way. 
 Juxtaposition is great ; — but, my friend, I fear me, the maiden 
 Hardly would thank or acknowledge the lover that sought to obtain 
 
 her, 
 Not as the thing he would wish, but the thing he must even put up 
 
 with .... 
 Ah, ye feminine souls, so loving, and so exacting, 
 Since we cannot escape, must we even submit to deceive you ? 
 Since, so cruel is truth, sincerity shocks and revolts you, 
 Will you have us your slaves to lie to you, flatter and — leave you ? 
 
 The girl indeed did not " look at it that way ; " the one 
 sex being as faithfully reproduced as the other. Her 
 first judgment is perfectly ** observed " : 
 
 I do not like him much, though I do not dislike being with him. 
 He is what people call, I suppose, a superior man, and 
 Certainly seems so to me ; but I think he is terribly selfish. 
 
 Later we learn from the silly sister that 
 
 Mary allows she was wrong about Mr. Claude being selfish ; 
 He was most useful and kind on the terrible thirtieth of April. 
 
 And in a postscript : 
 
 Mary has seen thus far. — I am really so angry, Louisa — 
 Quite out of patience, my dearest ! What can the man be intending ? 
 I am quite tired ; and Mary, who might bring him to in a moment, 
 Lets him go on as he likes, and neither will help nor dismiss him. 
 
 He indeed did not make rapid progress, for before the 
 doctrine of Juxtaposition we had this : 
 
 I am in love, you declare. I think not so ; yet I grant you 
 
 It is a pleasure indeed to converse with this girl. Oh, rare gift. 
 
 Rare felicity, this ! she can talk in a rational way, can 
 
 Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking 
 
 Yet in perfection retain her simplicity .... 
 
 320 
 
 I 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 No, though she talk, it is music ; her fingers desert not the ke5's ; 'tis 
 Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded, 
 Syllabled singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning. 
 I am in love, you say ; I do not think so, exactly. 
 
 And still the woman is woman, as in this postscript to a 
 letter of the silly sister : 
 
 .... All I can say for myself is, alas ! that he rather repels me. 
 There ! I think him agreeable, but also a little repulsive. 
 So be content, dear Louisa ; for one satisfactory marriage 
 Surely will do in one year for the family you would establish ; 
 Neither Susan nor I shall afford you the joy of a second. 
 
 To which the silly sister adds a post-postscript : 
 
 Mr. Claude, you must know, is behaving a little bit better ; 
 He and Papa are great friends; but he really is too sJiiUy-shally, 
 So unlike George ! Yet I hope that the matter is going on fairly. 
 I shall, however, get George, before he goes, to say something. 
 Dearest Louise, how delightful to bring young people together ! 
 
 And yet again the girl, after a *'let us say nothing further 
 about it " as to a deviation of Mr. Claude from the 
 agreed-on travelling plan of the party, half opens her 
 heart thus : 
 
 Yes, my dear Miss Roper, I certainly called him repulsive ; 
 
 So 1 think him, but cannot be sure I have used the expression 
 
 Quite as your pupil should ; yet he does most truly repel me. 
 
 Was it to you I made use of the word? or who was it told you ? 
 
 Yes, repulsive ; observe, it is but when he talks of ideas 
 
 That he is quite unaffected, and free, and expansive, and easy ; 
 
 I could pronounce him simply a cold intellectual being. — 
 
 When does he make advances ? — He thinks that women should woo 
 
 him ; 
 Yet, if a girl should do so, would be but alarmed and disgusted. 
 She that should love him must look for small love in return ; like 
 
 the ivy, 
 On the stone wall, must expect but a rigid and niggard support, and 
 E'en to get that must go searching all round with her humble 
 
 embraces. 
 
 And he too had his reasons : 
 
 321 X 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 Is it my fault, as it is my misfortune, my ways are not her ways ? 
 It is my fault that my habits and ways are dissimilar wholly ? 
 'Tis not her fault ; 'tis her nature, her virtue, to misapprehend them ; 
 'Tis not her fault ; 'tis her beautiful nature not ever to know me. 
 Hopeless it seems— yet I cannot, though hopeless, determine to 
 
 leave it : 
 She goes— therefore I go ; she moves — I move, not to lose her. 
 
 And then comes the swerving aside, the result of the 
 silly sister's George having said 
 
 Something to Mr. Claude about what they call his attentions ; 
 
 and Mary's postscripts multiply, and Miss Roper 
 explains, and Mr. Claude eagerly decides to follow and 
 propose ; and the travellers journey at cross purposes 
 and never meet ; and the foiled lover, half content to 
 accept the decision of Fate, decides to winter in Egypt, 
 while the now heart-sore Mary returns with her party 
 to England. There is something peculiarly modern in 
 this ending that is no ending ; something indefinitely in 
 advance, technically speaking, of the symmetrical 
 deno{l7nents of previous fiction ; something artistically 
 in advance of much good fiction of our own time. Alike 
 artistically and philosophically the whole is closed by 
 one of the half-lyric strains which begin and end the 
 cantos : 
 
 So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil ! 
 Go little book ! thy tale, is it not evil and good ? 
 
 Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer. 
 Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age, 
 
 Say ' / am fitting about many years from brain unto brain oj 
 Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days : 
 
 But,' so finish the ivord, 'I was writ in a Roman chamber, 
 When from Janicnlan heights thundered the cannon of France. ' 
 
 The end is thus fittingly on the plane of idealist art ; 
 and yet who will say that the whole has not been as 
 rigorously true a presentment of the literal life as the 
 most determined naturalist could achieve? It is English 
 
 322 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 
 naturalism, certainly : Clough, whose " name is handed 
 down in William Arnold's R^iles of Football as the best 
 goal-keeper on record," was substantially English in his 
 tastes. But all the same he had here succeeded in ^ 
 putting into an unlikely enough and ostensibly idealist / 
 art-form a piece of character fiction more essentially 
 naturalistic than anything produced anywhere up to his '[ 
 time ; nay, more deeply so than anything done in the t 
 forty years since, for he had contrived to handle a man's 
 philosophy and a woman's emotions in a love-story with 
 equal ease and verisimilitude, and to give his tale in 
 hexameters a philosophic ripeness without a tinge of , 
 pedantry. The critical lesson is the old one that there \^^ 
 are no rules for geniuses ; that, as it has been put afresh 
 by a gifted though faulty fictionist of our own day, Mr. 
 Moore, '*artis eternal; that it is only the artist that 
 changes ; and that the two great divisions — the only 
 possible divisions — are, those who have talent, and those 
 who have no talent."* 
 
 For most men verisimilitude in fiction and drama will 
 be best attainable by the most strictly natural media; 
 _but Shakspere, again, could put more reality into blank 
 verse dialogue than the Nashes and Lylys could put into 
 prose ; and there is no calculating the capacity of an 
 ^Qrigin_al faculty^ to innovate in method, or to lead captive 
 the^^aptivity of form. And I do not scruple to risk 
 derision by thus mentioning Clough in the same breath 
 with Shakspere, being satisfied that he had some 
 measure of Shakspere's endowment ; though the scanty 
 recognition of it among his countrymen promises small 
 acceptance for such a view. 
 
 It may well be that it is the smallness of Clough's pro-l 
 
 _duct that has hindered the recognition of his real greats 
 
 ness ; mere volume counting for so much in the impres- 
 
 * Confessions of a Young Man, p. 121. 
 
 323 
 
V 
 
 Si^"^ CLOUGH 
 
 sion made on the world even by fine work ; and it may 
 be too that his comparative failure in serious poetry has 
 affected the general attitude toward his whole remains. 
 I say comparative failure; for his poetry well-nigh 
 makes up by its deep intellectual interest for its lack of 
 Uhe true poetic charm. Dipsychus and the rest of it is 
 indeed better worth reading than a good deal of verse 
 of much wider vogue.* It has not, however, truly 
 caught either the trained or the untrained ear; and this, 
 with the habit of treating his hexameters as being 
 equally with the rest essays in the poetic art, goes far 
 to account for the limited character of his reputation. 
 Then his Mart Magno : or^ Tales on Board must have 
 helped to subdue the critical tone in his regard, for here, 
 there can be no doubt, the artistic failure is as complete 
 as the earlier success. To account for it, we must fall 
 back on the accounts we have of Clough's mental 
 constitution — the slowness of his mind to set to work 
 at all times, and the conditions of his health in his later 
 years. He had written his good things under the two 
 strong impulses of physical vigour and Italian travel ; 
 and in the absence of similarly happy conditions he 
 produced nothing more that could be ranked beside 
 
 * Mr. Lowell has twice spoken very highly of Clough's poetic 
 merit, but with significant differences of expression. One passage 
 runs : — " Clough, whose poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be 
 found to have been the hest utterance in verse of this generation " 
 (Essay " On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners," My Study 
 Windows, 6th ed., p. 56). The other is, " We have a foreboding that 
 Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and dying before he 
 had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements 
 of his art, will be thought a hundred years hence to have been the 
 truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt 
 and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period in which he 
 lived'' (Essay on "Swinburne's Tragedies," ibid. p. 157). The 
 latter verdict will doubtless hold good of Clough's total product, but 
 it in effect gives up the point of his strictly poetic success. 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 them. In the Man Magno we have an all too decisive 
 test of the fitness of rhymed verse as a vehicle for 
 narrative that aims at being serious without being 
 archaic ; and a proof of Clough's wisdom in choosing the 
 hexameter even where his purpose was not tinged with 
 humour. In that, the freedom of the medium allowed 
 him to be serious and impressive when he wanted ; in 
 the rhymed pentameter, applied to fictional purpose, 
 verisimilitude was far harder to reach ; and even the 
 simple seriousness that was all he now had in his 
 mind is continually turned to absurdity by the pitfalls of 
 the rhyme. When a man gravely writes in the couplet 
 measure of " A beauteous woman at the table d'hote ; " 
 and tells how, on board ship, he 
 
 " amid a dream 
 Of England, knew the letting-off of steam " — 
 
 artistic charm is over and done with. The couplet, like 
 the hexameter, might have been used humorously ; but 
 for a sober, matter-of-fact tale, as Crabbe had suffi- 
 ciently shown, it is the fatallest of all metrical convey- 
 ances. 
 
 And yet in these hopeless verses are contained two 
 tales which, in their structure and detail, ^tiUL betray. the 
 mind of a born fictionist ; a mind which sees characters^ 
 instantaaeously as organic wholes, and has no more 
 difficulty in presenting them with all their.specific diff'er- 
 ences than a good portraitist has In giving the lines of 
 diff'erent faces. We are told that Clough had a wonder- 
 ful eye for scenery, remembering the hang and lie of 
 roads and hills, streams and valleys. In a fashion that 
 surprised his friends. He had just such a faculty for 
 discriminating character. The slightly-sketched tale- 
 tellers In the Mari Magno are like drawings by Keene ; 
 and through the racking couplets the people of the 
 stories, especially of the second, keep their form and 
 
 325 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 colour with the same steadiness that is seen in the 
 hexameter novels. The old curious felicity of indicating 
 a character by a few touches is not gone ; and the reader, 
 when he can forget the versification, seems to have 
 gained some new knowledge of life from the few pages 
 he has turned over. The people are ''observed : " we 
 feel that we have been reading transcripts from actual 
 private histories. And we can understand how different 
 from ordinary biographical eulogy is Professor Shairp's 
 reminiscence, a propos of Clough's unsuccessful try for 
 a Balliol Fellowship in 1842 : *' I remember one of 
 [the examiners] telling me at the time that a character 
 of Saul which Clough wrote in that examination was, I 
 think he said, the best and most original thing he had 
 ever seen written in any examination." Why, with this 
 genius for a great art, Clough did so little in it, anB", 
 never seemed even to realise clearly where his genius 
 lay — this is a question the answering of which raises 
 divers points as to his total idiosyncrasy, his training, 
 and his intellectual environment. 
 
 Something has to be allowed for a constitutional lack 
 of productive energy, otherwise definable as intellectual 
 fastidiousness, the physical side of which is perhaps to 
 be looked for by the clue of the paralysis which finally 
 struck him down after a fever. Of his character as seen 
 in childhood his sister testifies : '* One trait I distinctly 
 remember, that he would always do things from his own 
 choice, and not merely copy what others were doing." 
 And again: ''Arthur even then was too fastidious to 
 take off his shoes and stockings and paddle about as we 
 did."* The child was father to the man. Nor was 
 native fastidiousness the only force at work. In his 
 prime he gives, in a letter to a friend, this account of his 
 hard schooling : 
 
 * Memoir in Poems and Prose Remains, 1869, i. 4, 6 
 326 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 " I may, perhaps, be idle now ; but when I was a boy, between 
 fourteen and twenty-two throughout, I may say, you don't know 
 how much regular drudgery I went through. Holidays after 
 holidays, when I was as school, after a week or so of recreation, 
 which very rarely came in an enjoyable form to me, the whole re- 
 maining five or six weeks I used to give to regular work at fixed 
 hours. That wasn't so very easy for a schoolboy spending holidays, 
 not at home, but with uncles, aunts, and cousins. All this and 
 whatever work, less rigorous though pretty regular, that has followed 
 since during the last ten years has been, so far as external results 
 go, perhaps a mere blank and waste ; nothing very tangible has 
 come of it ; but still it is some justification to me for being less 
 strict with myself now. Certainly, as a boy, I had less of boyish 
 enjoyment of any kind whatever, either at home or at school, than 
 nine-tenths of boys, at any rate of boys who go to school, college, 
 and the like ; certainly, even as a man I think I have earned myself 
 some title to live for some little interval, I do not say in enjoyment, 
 but without immediate devotion to particular objects, on matters as 
 it were of business." * 
 
 And to that picture of destructive education he adds 
 another touch in the Passage on Oxford Studies extracted 
 in the '* Prose Remains," describing the sickness of heart 
 that overtook him on going to the university, at the 
 prospect of endless classics : ** An infinite lassitude and 
 impatience, which I saw reflected in the faces of others, 
 quickly began to infect me." Such a youthful experience 
 must have told on the adult man, laming the springs of 
 creative energy and dispiriting the abnormal genius, f 
 But it is with a sense of fresh exasperation that one 
 thinks of such a faculty being further weakened for 
 practical performance by; the effemina.te, _ecdesiaotical 
 atmosphere of the Oxford of the Newman epoch, when 
 currents of febrile mysticism and timorous scepticism 
 drew young men this way and that ; not one in a 
 hundred of those affected being able to attain a stable 
 
 * FoQms and Prose Remains, i. 
 
 t At Oxford, according to Clough, who was, however, probably 
 exaggerating, the verdict on the Bothie was that it was " indecent 
 and profane, immoral and (!) communistic." 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 and virile philosophy. Clough himself said afterwards 
 that for two years he had been '' like a straw drawn up 
 the draught of a chimney " by the Newman movement ; 
 and it would not be going too far to say that if he were 
 not one of those '' wrecks " declared by Mr. Gladstone 
 to have been ** strewn on every shore " by the academic 
 tempest in question, he was at least left less seaworthy 
 for life. It has become a little difficult to think either 
 of the mystics or of the half-hearted sceptics as men of 
 high intellectual power: it seems a trifle strange in these 
 days that one such as Clough, having once realised the 
 force of the rational criticism of the popular creed, 
 should be unable robustly to readjust his life to the sane 
 theory of things. But so it was. The character- 
 student suffered as much from the disintegration of his 
 inherited faith as did any hectic disciple of them all ; 
 and when he found he could be neither Catholic nor 
 Protestant he seemed to lapse into a sense of intellectual 
 homelessness. The English universities, in which the 
 nation's best educational endowments are turned mainly 
 to the account of training men to preach to the illiterate 
 or the unquestioning the religious system of the Dark 
 Ages, seem to unfit men systematically for any indepen- 
 dent appraisement or application of their natural powers. 
 The reigning theory of things in these venerable halls — 
 at least till just the other day — was that a scholar, 
 having undergone the venerable curriculum. Is to be a 
 clergyman or a barrister, or possibly a doctor, or 
 alternatively a private gentleman or politician or orna- 
 mental man of business, agreeably conscious, through a 
 gentlemanly middle life, of once having studied the 
 classics. Thackeray only took to literature for sheer 
 need of money ; Lytton is almost our only other novelist 
 who had an academic preparation, and as an artist he 
 gained Httle enough by it, though one can see that the 
 
 328 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 same preparation can be very valuable in many ways, 
 apart from the mere instruction it nominally implies. 
 Spencer, Grote, Mill, and Lewes — not to speak of 
 Gibbon — almost seem to owe their power of working on 
 original lines to the accident of missing the university 
 stamp ; Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, to judge by 
 results, need never have entered a college door. Even 
 the late Professor Balfour remains a promise of possi- 
 bilities. 
 
 But this by the way. The relevant facts for us here 
 are that Clough, missing what seemed his natural career 
 as a priest, had yet been so permeated by the ecclesi- 
 astical and university view of hum.an activity as to be 
 in a measure unfitted to apply his powers in any other 
 way. He could not settle down peacefully in inter- 
 course with men who had definitively turned their backs 
 on an impossible faith : there is evidence that he found 
 such men uncongenial in their decided rationalism, as 
 they doubtless found him in his melancholy retrospec- 
 tiveness. One feels that just twenty years earlier the 
 same Clough could have quietly found his way into the 
 clerical grooves, like many another man of potential 
 genius, leaving no literary legacy of any importance to 
 his countrymen, and living to face alike Strauss and 
 Newman with the sheathing prejudices of profession and 
 habit. In fine, we may say that he stood in religion and 
 philosophy as he did in his fiction — between two widely- 
 different generations ; sunderedJVoml^he past^ but slow 
 to begin to face the future. But whereas his religion 
 had been a profound prepossession, the removal of which 
 taxed his whole moral nature and left him lamed with 
 the struggle, his spontaneous and hardly purposive 
 excursion into the field of intellectual art yielded a 
 remarkable result, suggestive no less of the manifold 
 intellectual forces that he cramped or latent around us, 
 
 329 
 
CLOUGH 
 
 than of the power of certain institutions and conven- 
 tions to keep them down. 
 
 It is not fitting, however, that the last word on such 
 a personality as Clough's should be a suggestion of 
 frustration. Frustration, after all, is a matter of com- 
 parison, and whatever impression he may make on later 
 readers, he was to his own generation, which in that 
 way could best judge him, an impressive and not a weak 
 figure. Let us remember him by the words of one 
 whose name will live with his longer than these com- 
 ments : 
 
 " I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed 
 these two invaluable qualities — a true sense for his object of study, 
 and a single-hearted care for it. He had both, but he had the 
 second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed 
 the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, 
 or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for 
 his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it any- 
 thing accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself ; 
 and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which 
 kept him so free from all taint of littleness. In the saturnalia of 
 ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, 
 in old and crowded communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never 
 mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his 
 enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he 
 despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even 
 with time, those literary arts would never be his. His poem, of 
 which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities— out- 
 of-door freshness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity, , . . But that 
 in him of which I think oftenest, is the Homeric simplicity of his 
 literary life." * 
 
 Homeric simplicity is perhaps not the description which 
 would suggest itself to most men ; but whatever words 
 can serve the literary memory of the author of The 
 Bothie of Toher-na- Vuolich and Amours de Voyage will be 
 ungrudgingly allowed by those who can appreciate the 
 singular independence of his work. 
 
 * Matthew Arnold, On Translating Hcmer ; Last Words, ad fin. 
 
CONCERNING ACCENT, QUANTITY, 
 AND FEET 
 
 AN APPENDIX TO "POE" 
 
 It may not be without interest, for some readers, to look into 
 the dispute as to the scansion of classic verse, which one critic 
 (see p. 105) has settled, so far as Poe is concerned, by the easy 
 method of charging with ignorance the challenger of orthodox 
 practice. The dispute, which one would suppose must have 
 tended to arise chronically even in the Dark Ages, is apparently 
 at least as old as the "revival of learning," and seems to have 
 been freshly embroiled when the Byzantine Greeks handed over 
 to Western Europe the enigma, helplessly contemplated by 
 them, of a classic Greek verse marked by accents which were 
 neither those of living and spoken Greek, nor those needed to 
 make the verse scan rhythmically. Already it was hard 
 enough to scan many of the Latin classics ; and many earlier 
 grammarians would have answered to the picture drawn by 
 Montaigne of the pedant bent on leaving to posterity the true 
 measure of the verse of Plautus, which was still to seek. But 
 the Greek problem was still more obscure : being in fact 
 unsolved for most students to this day, the mere historical 
 data as to the entrance of the present marks into the manuscripts 
 being awanting. I am not aware that any systematic survey of 
 the whole discussion has yet been made,* and I can only 
 pretend here to glance at the main features, which, indeed, are 
 as much as most readers will care to contemplate. 
 
 * See a helpful sketch of one hne of the discussion on verse principles 
 in the preface to the late Sydney Lanier's Science of English Verse, 1880. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 I 
 
 According to Foster,* though ScaHger had objected to 
 certain Greek accents in particular, there was no general dispute 
 about the "faithfulness and propriety of the Greek accentual 
 marks" till the time of Isaac Vossius (1618-16S8), the previous 
 wrangles of scholars having been mainly over the sounds of the 
 letters taken singly. Vossius flatly declared that the accentual 
 marks, not being even nearly coeval with the script, deser\'ed no 
 attention ; and as nobody could reconcile them with any 
 tolerable scansion, his view was welcomed by "several of the 
 learned, particularly in Holland and Germany." — Henninius 
 for instance, published a book in support of it in 1684, and he 
 in turn was supported by other scholars, at intervals, down till the 
 issue in i754of an anonymous" Dissertation against pronouncing 
 the Greek language according to accents," which was known to 
 be the work of tiie Rev. Dr. Henry C^ally, a scholarly cleric, son 
 of a French Protestant refugee. Gally's thesis was that the 
 Greek language^ from the time of Alexander, had been gradually 
 corrupted ; and that though at first accents may have been 
 placed according to quantity, they gradually followed the cor- 
 ruption of pronunciation, till they finally represented that 
 alone.f " No manuscripts that are one thousand years old and 
 upwards have any accents;";];; therefore the marks had no 
 authority. This was the main position of Vossius and Henninius, 
 sustained however by an independent argument on grounds of 
 reason and the essentials of rhythm. At the same time, here 
 also following previous opinion. Gaily laid it down that 
 originally the accent marks "were musical ;"§ without however 
 doing anything to develop the point, or to connect it with his 
 main argument as to the corruption of the spoken tongue. 
 The argument was thus substantially negative ; but in this 
 form it made considerable headway in England, as it had 
 already done on the continent. So far did the movement go 
 that Greek editions began to appear without accentual marks ; 
 and in a collection of verses presented by the University of 
 Oxford to the king, no accents appeared. It was at this point 
 
 * A71 Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity, 2nd ed. 
 Eton, 1763, p. vii. 
 
 f Dissertation cited, pp. 109, 139, 145. % Ibid. p. 3. § Ibid. p. 2. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 that Foster undertook, a propos of Gally's essay, to vindicate 
 them by a theory which, though he put it as antagonistic to the 
 Vossian view, was really in a measure reconcilable with that, 
 his contention being that the Greek accent marks stocd for rise 
 and fall oi pitch or to7ie in utterance. 
 
 His attitude towards Gaily, however, was specifically hostile, 
 his aim being at once to vindicate the antiquity and genuineness 
 of the accent marks, and on the other hand to show that Gaily 
 was wrong in assuming that a raised tone ( = acute accent) 
 necessarily involved a stress. Admitting that stress generally 
 accompanied the raised or "acute" pitch in England, Foster 
 pointed out that it did not in Scotland, where the voice is 
 frequently raised on the weak final syllable of a word ; and he 
 cited various expressions from ancient authorities to show that 
 the "aciited" syllable was rather quickened than made longer. 
 Gally's position was, broadly, that acute accent meant stress, 
 that stress meant more time, and that time meant quantity. 
 Foster's was that the acute accent meant simply raised pitch, 
 and was essentially different from time and quantity. For the 
 rest, both writers held by the old idea that certain vowels must 
 always have long values, because they are naturally " long," or 
 capable of prolongation ; though by thus making, say, goad a 
 long syllable and God a short, they were shutting out the 
 possibility of a consistent scheme of rhythm. Nor did either 
 draw any light from the datum, accepted by both, that prosody 
 was originally a matter of music. Gaily replied with asperity 
 to the asperities of Foster, who replied in turn ; and there the 
 matter was left. In practice it was settled by an adoption of 
 both doctrines in so far as they were compatible. Foster, 
 making the accentual marks signs of pitch, left the student free 
 to do what Gaily proposed— scan the verse without them. 
 He had further opened up a new hope for rational prosody by 
 proceeding to show that, despite a conventional maxim to the 
 contrary, English verse was as much a matter of quantities as 
 Greek or Latin. Quantity had here the intelligible meaning of 
 syllable-stress. Foster claimed to stand upon reason and 
 common sense, as Vossius and Henninius and Gaily had done. 
 But there remained, it appears, an unfailing source of dispute in 
 the simple fact that the universities remained seminaries of 
 tradition, keeping their eyes fixed on the past instead of relating 
 themselves to the present. The manipulation of one dead 
 
 333 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 language and literature was occupation enough for even a lively 
 intelligence ; but the universities held by two ; and Greek and 
 Latin verse alike had thus to be read by one abstract theory, 
 deduced from half-comprehended documents, or merely framed 
 on the tradition set up by these. Thus the accommodation of 
 Greek verse to the supposed Latin accents of Quintilian goes 
 on to this day, despite the fact, insisted on by Foster,* that 
 Quintilian and Servius declared the verse accentuation of the 
 two tongues to be different. 
 
 Nor does it seem possible to solve the problem by mere 
 resort to the documents. Every point in the inquiry is open to 
 dispute. The Romans, who did not use accent marks as a rule, 
 had a mark, the apex^^ a short horizontal line, apparently meant 
 to distinguish long syllables from short, in cases where the 
 same word form had different meanings according to pronun- 
 ciation; and this mark seems later to have been actually 
 confused with marks of pitch in late Roman inscriptions, j; But 
 then Quintilian also indicates that in Roman pronunciation 
 " acute " {acuta), or " circumflex " {Jlexa\ implied a long 
 syllable, and "grave" {gravis), a short one. That is, a short 
 syllable was to be pronounced with a lowered tone, and a long 
 one with a raised or a changing tone. Difficult as it is for 
 moderns to conceive this fastening down of articulation to tones 
 of voice as well as to stresses, there seems no escape from the 
 conclusion that such was the ancient practice as regards the 
 delivery of verse. On the other hand it appears from several 
 authorities among the Greeks that for them "acute" (o^us) 
 pitch meant a quick syllable, and "grave" {^apvs) a long one.§ 
 There is thus absolute uncertainty in the terms from the 
 moment at which the two prosodies come together. 1| And the 
 difficulty was doubled by the fact that the Greek correlative 
 terms arsis and t/iesis, a.pp\ied to stress and ease of syllables, 
 came each to have the two contrary meanings. Arsis meant the 
 raising of the hand or foot in counting or beating time, and 
 thesis the setting of it down ; but as either movement might 
 
 * Dissertation cited, p. 301. f Quintilian, Inst. Orat., i. 7. 
 
 X Foster, pp. 117-119. 
 
 § Aristotle, Dc Anima, c. 7; Problemata, xxix. 37 ; Plutarch, QiKzstiones 
 PlatofiiccB (cited by Foster, p. 278). 
 
 II Macrobius suggests a further perplexity by noting that an acute so7md is 
 made by rapid vibration. I?i Somn. Scip. ii. 4. 
 
 334 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 serve to mark stress, and people would tend to mark it in 
 different ways, the words came to be absolutely ambiguous.* 
 All the while they continued to signify rise and fall of tone ; so 
 that a problem in which there was need for very exact dis- 
 crimination of terms, was rendered desperate by a peculiar 
 confusion of them. 
 
 It is thus nearly as hard to guess how the mediaeval gram- 
 marians read the classic verse as to divine how the ancients 
 spoke it. Aristotle,t analysing speech, speaks of stress and 
 lightness of breathing, length and shortness of sound, and of an 
 acute, a grave, and a medium sound ; a classification which 
 seems to provide simply for verse scansion in the modern 
 "accentual" sense. So with Priscian's doctrine J that '"'' habet 
 guide m litem altitiidinem in prommciatione^ latitiidinem in 
 spiritu^ loitgittidinem in tempore^ It would seem to express 
 simply the facts of pitch or tone, openness or closeness of vowel 
 formation, and length or brevity of stress in pronunciation. 
 But the giving of these attributes to qiiidem litem on the one 
 hand, and the giving of equal importance to pitch and vowel 
 form, leave open opportunities of endless dispute ; and when 
 Scahger defined "quantity" as the "triple dimension of length, 
 breadth, height," he left to the schools as elastic a conundrum 
 as heart could wish. What resulted was, for one thing, a 
 fantastic discrimination between a stressed syllable and a long 
 syllable — a distinction fatal to all realisation of rhythm.§ Thus 
 Melanchthon wrote : 
 
 Time and tone are by no means the same qualities of a syllable. Ac- 
 cordingly the terms of one are not applicable to the other. You err if you 
 
 * Cf. Du M^ril, Essai philosophique sur le principe et les formes de la 
 versification, 1841. Du M^ril attributes the confusion to the double con- 
 nection of poetry with music and dancing. It is to be noted that in our 
 own day the orchestra leader raises his wand to mark a note, where the 
 foot, or the hand in counting, is struck down for the emphasis. 
 
 f Poetics. XX. 
 
 % Cited by Foster, p. 19. 
 
 § We shall see later that in our own and other modern verse there is a 
 subtle element of quantity in the sense that among both stressed and 
 unstressed syllables there are diflFerences of shortness or facility of enuncia- 
 tion — that, apart from stress, syllables alter in facility of utterance accord- 
 ing to their consonantal content and context. But this is not what the old 
 prosodists were after, or at least not what they brought out. It clearly 
 represents only their element of doubtful syllables, 
 
 335 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 say that acute and long, or grave and short, are the same. I must dwell 
 upon this because the mob of grammarians speak of it unintelligently. 
 
 Not all long syllables are acute ; in Virgilius the vir is long, but not 
 acute. Not all acutes are long ; in Virgilius Xh^ gi is acuted, although the 
 syllable is short. Many of us in Latin make the i in philosophia acute ; 
 and the same with theologia, prosodia, not that we suppose the i to be long, 
 but that it is to be acuted and pronounced in the Greek manner, not in the 
 Latin. The words being Greek have not been so adapted to Roman 
 tongues as to lose their native tone.* 
 
 Foster apparently supposes this to be an assertion that in 
 Virgilius the stress was laid on the first syllable, while the 
 second was merely pronounced in a higher tone. This is surely 
 not the meaning. What is asserted is that though the stress is 
 laid on the second syllable it remains short — the short sound of 
 z, as distinguished from the sound (in English ee) which can be 
 prolonged — while the vir^ having the sound of the long Latin z*, 
 counts as long though it be not emphasised. This is borne out 
 by the rest of the sentence, which shows that " acute " meant 
 "stressed" as regards the Greek words cited. Melanchthon's 
 prosody was a confused convention.f 
 
 On such bases, despite the impression made by Foster on 
 many readers, no durable doctrine could be raised ; and Foster 
 himself, by acquiescing in Johnson's working rule for English 
 prosody, virtually gave away his cause. Johnson pronounced 
 "acute tone" and ''long quantity" in English to be "equivalent 
 by acting together ; " and this Foster cited as a " confirmation " 
 of his doctrine.! Johnson's rule was of course a mere evasion of 
 difficulty. It must have struck many readers that not only were 
 the Scotch capable, as Foster said, of raising the voice on a 
 short final syllable, but the English were capable of lowering it 
 on a stressed syllable. The word " impossible," for instance, is 
 often begun on a high note, with a drop on the rest of the word ; 
 and in verse the phrase "to be or not to be" falls as naturally 
 from a high note on the " to be " to a lower on the " not " as 
 vice versa. It might have been supposed that these consider- 
 ations would ha\'e suggested to Foster's own generation the 
 
 * Cited by Foster, pp. iig-120. 
 
 t Foster cites Erasmus [Dialog, de prominc. ling. Grczc. et Lat., p. 124), 
 Beza [Alphabet. Gro'c, p. 72), and Gerard Vossius [Aristarch. ii, c. 10), 
 as coinciding with Melanchthon, on the difference between accent and 
 quantity. 
 
 X As cited, p. 48, 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 need for carrying the explanation of the Greek accents further, 
 especially as it was agreed that these accents had originally 
 been musical signs. But no further step was taken in that age. 
 Walker, writing his Observations on the Greek and Latin Accent^ 
 early in the present century, admits that the difficulty about 
 accent and quantity has long been the opprobrium et crux grani- 
 maticoruni^ and notes that " Vossius, Henninius, and Dr. Gaily 
 produce a great number of quotations which seem to confound 
 accent and quantity, by making the acute accent and long 
 quantity signify the same ; " while " White, Michaelis, Melanch- 
 thon, Foster, Primat, and many other men of learning, produce 
 clouds of witnesses from the ancients to prove that accent and 
 quantity are essentially different." Walker — who says so many 
 just and forcible things that the final nullity of his treatise is 
 surprising — complains of the lack of careful analysis of the 
 subject matter ; but himself leaves it confused for lack of such 
 care. Thus he fixes the meanings of " long " and " short " to 
 what may much better be described as open and close vowels, 
 and leaves the meaning of " accent " in that equivocal state in 
 which it was left by Foster and Gaily. These laxities quite 
 preclude the settlement of the dispute. Walker cannot see that 
 "y"^/," with its close or limited vowel sound, is in a very practical 
 sense as "long" as "y^?r," with its open or prolongable vowel ; 
 since in ''''fatness''^ the first syllable normally bulks more to the 
 ear than the second, whether or not it actually takes longer to 
 sound ; and an open-vowelled syllable, as against any other, 
 can do no more.t It may easily happen, and it very often does 
 happen, that a syllable with a so-called short vowel is harder to 
 sound quickly, by reason of an awkward collocation of con- 
 sonants, than one with a so-called long vowel ; and a verse- 
 maker has much more need to look to this circumstance, next 
 to that of stress, than to the alleged quantitative value of vowels. 
 
 * Published with his Key to the Pronunciation of Classical Proper Names. 
 
 t The fallacious line of investigation was led up to by Dionysius of 
 Halicarnassus, who laid it down truly enough that longs and shorts differed 
 among themselves, some longs being longer than others. Foster accord- 
 ingly (p. 33) shows how the same thing occurs in English and Latin. 
 This was a valid plea as against the dogma that a long was exactly the 
 length of two shorts ; but it does not take note of the essential fact that 
 variations of length in accentuated syllables — variations which, in any case, 
 are not measurable — leave scansion unaffected, and tell only on expression. 
 
 337 Y 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Quantity, in fact, in spoken verse, consists of stress and of the 
 consonantal total of syllables. The presupposition that certain 
 vowel sounds are in themselves "long" is the ruin of a discus- 
 sion in which the nature or meaning of syllabic length is the 
 problem to solve. And it lands Walker in hopeless contra- 
 dictions. He writes (§ 24): "As to the long quantity arising 
 from the succession of two consonants, which the ancients are 
 uniform in asserting, if it did not mean that the preceding vowel 
 was to lengthen its sound, as we should do by pronouncing the 
 a in scalier as we do in skaler, I have no conception of what it 
 meant ; for if it meant that only the time of the syllable was 
 prolonged, the vowel retaining the same sound, I must confess 
 as utter an inability of comprehending this source of quantity in 
 the Greek and Latin as in English." It is strange that such a 
 scholar should not see the point. The a in inelal is in every 
 sense short ; but it clearly becomes longer in vielaWc^ before 
 the doubled consonant — a rule of spelling not indeed always 
 observed, but fairly general. Now, Walker's own nomenclature 
 makes the a in mclallic a. " short" vowel ; so that the a in melal 
 must rank as extra-short. The hopelessness of that crux may 
 have been Walker's reason for not seeing the point raised in the 
 rule he cites, which, for the rest, goes far to show that ancient 
 quantity (chanting apart) was just modern quantity ; and that as 
 a rule a long syllable was for the later " ancients," as for us, just 
 a stressed syllable. When Walker tells us that the in Cicero^ 
 in Latin and English, is " long," though unaccented, and the i 
 short, though accented, he shows the utter irrelevance of the 
 school terminology to questions of scansion. But worse remains. 
 While thus taking accent as = stress, Walker finally agrees with 
 Foster in making it mean voice pitch or inflexion. He detects 
 the confusions of Foster, " that excellent scholar," who makes 
 " acute accent " = close vowel (as in inati) and " grave accent " 
 = open vowel (as in mane) ; but he himself (like Foster) finds 
 (§ 27) "the strongest reason to suppose that the Greek and 
 Latin acute accent was the rising inflexion, and the grave accent 
 the falling inflexion, in a lower tone." Yet he had just before 
 (note on § 22) accepted Foster's remark that the old accent 
 marks could not mean sentence inflexions (= "oratorical 
 accent'') ; since such inflexions constantly vary according to the 
 context. The confusion could have been at once got rid of by 
 recognising that quantity in speaking viusl amount substantially 
 
 338 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 to the same thing as stress — the remaining elements of quantity 
 counting for something as regards euphony, but not enough to 
 affect scansion — and by surmii?ing that the Greek accent-marks 
 represented mainly the survival of a knowledge of the old 
 fashion of chanting the verse, in which length would sometimes 
 coincide with stress and sometimes not. But Walker, laying 
 too much weight on his own very acute dictum that singing and 
 speaking differ as leaping and sliding, or motion and rest, 
 rejected the already proffered explanation that the " speech " of 
 the ancients was " a kind of singing ; " and while deciding (§ 28) 
 that the Greek and Latin verse must have been extremely 
 monotonous, he would not consider the possibility of a state of 
 transition from the primitive to the subtiHsed. Finally, having 
 disparaged the rhythm of the ancient verse without accounting 
 for its crudity, and contradicted himself as well as all the other 
 writers on both sides, he leaves the subject in confessed con- 
 fusion, expressing the hope that " some future philosophical 
 inquirer, with more learning, more leisure, and more credit with 
 the world than I have," will solve the problem, on the basis of 
 his own " entire conviction that the ancients had a notation of 
 speaking sounds." 
 
 The hope has not been fulfilled as regards EngHsh research. 
 Coleridge glanced at the matter as he glanced at so many 
 matters, seeing into it acutely, but lacking the patience and the 
 grip needed to settle it, or to solve his own contradictions.* 
 The passage in his Table Talkf begins by declaring that "the 
 distinction between accent and quantity is clear ; " the third 
 sentence runs : " I do not think it possible to talk any language 
 without confounding the quantity of syllables with their high 
 or low tones " — a deliverance deriving from Foster's school, and 
 sounding strangely in the mouth of a man who must have known 
 how to scan verse by his inner ear, without any use of tones 
 whatever. The matter is at bottom not one of tone but of time 
 and stress, since one may talk monotonously if one will. Changes 
 
 * His surprising claim in the preface (i8i6) to Christahel, that he had 
 introduced a "new principle" in "counting in each line the accents, not 
 the syllables," suggests that with all his assumption of learning on metres, 
 he had made no very close investigation of the subject. 1 he kind of line 
 he claims to have originated abounds in Shakspere and in Milton, to men- 
 tion no others. 
 
 t August 23, 1833. 
 
 339 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 of pitch are in a measure coincident with changes of stress ; that 
 is all. For the rest, Coleridge's own admission that common 
 conversation must have been accentual carries with it the con- 
 clusion that when verse ceased to be customarily chanted it 
 must inevitably gravitate to accentual bases. Yet he thus 
 concludes, after showing well enough that the old accentual 
 marks must have had reference to a conventional chant 
 rhythm : 
 
 Besides, can we altogether disregard the practice of the modern Greeks ? 
 Their confusion of accent and quantity in verse is of course a barbarism, 
 though a very old one, as the versus politici of John Tzetzes in the twelfth 
 century * and the Anacreontics prefixed to Prochis will show ; but these 
 very examples prove a fortiori what the common pronunciation in prose 
 then was. 
 
 There is no "barbarism" in the matter. What the modern 
 Greeks have done, as we shall see, is to lose hold of a certain 
 cherished barbarism of the ancients. They identify accent with 
 quantity because to separate them is to maintain a barbarism 
 that has nothing but its antiquity to recommend it. Whether 
 the significance of the old accent marks be discoverable or not, 
 the modern Greeks have clearly done well to cast in their lot 
 with the tendencies of living speech. 
 
 II 
 
 Some approach to a solution of the problem begins to be 
 made when the inquiry is turned on the psychological sources 
 of whatever prosodical system the Greeks had — the origins of 
 their poetic art. And this step is completely taken for the first 
 time, so far as I have seen, in the Essai philosophique sur le 
 principe et les formes de la versificalioii of M. Edelestand du 
 Meril, published in 1841, one of the most learned books ever 
 written on the subject. At the outset M. Du Meril lays his 
 finger on the evolutionary character of the whole body of classic 
 verse : 
 
 The Greek metric has reached us only in a state of perfection which sup- 
 poses many changes ; and we do not know what causes have successively 
 
 * As to these see Foster, pp. 202-207. Coleridge probably had his 
 attention called to the whole subject by a reprirt of Foster's and Gaily 's 
 essays, published in 1820. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 produced them ; we do not even know whether the need of harmony which 
 so rapidly perfected the language acted independently on the versification, 
 or whether the imitation of any foreign poetry exercised also an influence 
 on its developments. That even its nature is not entirely known to us is 
 proved by the differing explanations of scholars ; and it may be added that 
 the insufficiency of the data prevents our fully understanding it. With the 
 Greeks, as with all peoples in the early ages of their history, music was 
 inseparable from poetry ; declamation was a chant, which for a long time 
 made the main difference between verse and prose ; and when the profes- 
 sion of the poet and that of the musician were separated, they were still 
 called by the same name. A knowledge of the music is thus necessary to 
 the thorough comprehension of the ancient versification ; and the docu- 
 ments which time has spared us are too few, and seem too contradictory, 
 to let us draw any conclusions. If, like music, poetry finally had a sepa- 
 rate existence and developments peculiar to itself, the power of custom 
 would still be ap^ to preserve the ancient declamation in its most essential 
 points, and the metric doubtless would not wholly clear itself of the conse- 
 quences of its origin. It was no less closely connected with dancing. On 
 that it was, perhaps, even more dependent ; several of its technical expres- 
 sions were derived thence, and it was describable by the same name. The 
 rhythm of the dance then was not unconnected with the developments of 
 versification, and we are quite ignorant concerning it.* 
 
 Further, he concludes that 
 
 When words had not syllables enough to strike the ear strongly, the 
 Greeks and Latins usually lengthened the last. More often, however, 
 quantity seems to go by no principle whatever ; we can only explain it by 
 the necessities of the rhythm, or the convenience of the poet.f Causes so 
 diverse led to so many anomalies that writers of the most undoubted erudi- 
 tion have found in prosody no other reason than a usage, which was not 
 
 * Essai cited, pp. 2-6. In support of his statements, M. Du M^il gives 
 an abundance of references. Among others he points to the choruses of 
 Aristophanes and the popular songs in Athenaeus, BB. vii. and viii., as 
 perhaps giving some clue to an early popular versification. He suggests 
 also a possibility of Egyptian and Persian influences (Herod, ii. 79 ; Plato, 
 Laws, ii. ; Plutarch, Is. et Os. 2^) ; and points to the Egyptian representa- 
 tion (Wilkinson, ch. vi.) of a singer who beats his measure, with an instru- 
 mentalist accompanying him. Of the poets and singers he notes that both 
 were called sopkistae (^Eschylus ap. Athen. 1. xiv. ) ; and he points out that 
 among the dances the prosodia, the dithyrambs, and the parthenias exacted 
 dancing (Athen. xiv. ; Aristot. Poet. iv. ). For the view that the term 
 "foot" came from the dance, he refers to Aristotle, De Anima, and 
 Suidas, remarking that certain feet — the pyrrhic, the trochee, the chorea, 
 the anapaest, and the iambus — certainly were named from dances. Both 
 dancing and poetry, he notes, were called emmeleia. 
 
 t P. 78. 
 
 34T 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 even universal, and did not always affect pronunciation. Vainly do we 
 seek any systematic i-egulariiy.* 
 
 And he acutely reasons that the absokite ambiguity of the words 
 ars2s and thesis came of the double connection of poetry with 
 music and the dance. But while thus relegating the subject to 
 uncertainty, M. Du M(jril here and there attempts constructive 
 solutions, which naturally clash. In one notet he observes that 
 " the Greeks seem even to have sought to put in opposition the 
 accent of the verse and that of the words." Elsewhere,| while 
 arguing that originally all Greek rhythms were fixed by music, 
 he claims that " all the syllables had thus a musical value which 
 conformed to the natural tendencies of the pronunciation." And 
 yet again he refers§ to a passage in the 14th Book of Athenasus 
 as proving that " the verses of the Homerids have not come 
 down to us as they composed them." Seeing that he had also 
 noticed the fatal confusion set up by the counter-senses of arsis 
 and thesis, it might have been supposed that he would have 
 seen the possibility that the accent marks may at times reve^^se 
 the syllable values, an acute standing for short, and a grave 
 for long. But this possibility is not recognised even in the 
 latest and ablest treatise on the subject, the Essai comparatif 
 stir Vorigijift et rhistoi7'e des rhythiues of M. Maximilien 
 Kawczynski (1892). This learned and ingenious work, which 
 goes over the old ground of Vossius and Foster without refer- 
 ence to their theses, and which has probably profited by the 
 earlier research of M. Du Mdril, arrives at the old conclusion 
 that the Greek accent marks had really a musical signification. 
 Noting that Bentley, Ritschl, Huemer and others, argue that 
 the ancients sought to make the metrical ictus coincide with the 
 natural accent, and that Lucian Miiller argued (as we have seen 
 M. Du Meril did) that they sought on the contrary not to let 
 them coincide, M. Kawczynski asks " How reconcile opinions so 
 contrary ? In rejecting both." || Like M. Du Mdril ^ he rejects ** 
 the German a priori method of solving the problem, pronouncing 
 that Bentley and Hermann alike resorted to a priori sophisms 
 for lack of knowledge of the bases of ancient rhythm. His 
 positive conclusions may be best understood by the line of 
 primitive music to which he sets the first line of the Iliad'. 
 
 * Pp. 98-99. t P. 38, n. 2. X P. -je. § P. 43, ;/. 3. 
 
 II Rssai cited, p. 57. "F As cited, pp. 38-39, note. ** P. 58. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Mri - VLV a. - SL - Se 6e - a ITrj - Kiq'C ■ a - 8e - to 'A-xi - Arj - o? 
 
 "It was very much thus," says M. Kawczynski,* "that the 
 aedes sang the wrath of Achilles, obliged as they were, willy 
 nilly, by the rhythm, to change the awexrjs (continuous) prosody 
 for a prosody e'/c diacrrrjixdrcov" (determined by intervals). I 
 confess to a difficulty in grasping M. Kawczynski's theory of the 
 process of transition ; and must content myself with citing his 
 important suggestion that a new upset of the system was 
 effected by the development of the lyre : 
 
 As long as the Greek musical system was contained in the limits of a 
 tetrachord, the melody had need accord with the accents ; but when it 
 developed the greater system .... the melodies began to pass beyond 
 their original limit, and no longer accorded with the accents, which wei-e 
 finally disregarded.f 
 
 It is to be feared that M. Kawczynski's able argumentation on 
 the Greek musical system, by way of settling the problem of 
 prosody, will seem to some readers a case of explaining obscm-us 
 per obscurior J and it remains finally puzzling how he can be 
 sure, with M. Du Meril, that the musical system of the Greeks 
 "derives from the system of their accentuations." | But it 
 seems reasonable to conclude with him § that 
 
 The ancient accents were of an essentially melodic character ; which 
 disposes at once of all the contradictions in which modern philology has 
 lost itself. The ancients sought neither to make the accents coincide with 
 the ictus, as some would have it, nor to avoid that coincidence, as others 
 argue. The accents had no connection with either the ictus or the rhythm. 
 
 It is interesting to set beside this the line of mediaeval intona- 
 tions to which Scaliger long ago || set the first line of the 
 ^neid : 
 
 ^^^l-,| 
 
 — 
 
 
 ^H — ■-^-♦— ■-*- 
 
 ♦ ni- 
 
 --■- 
 
 H ■ ■ $ s ■ ■ :: 
 
 r^ 
 
 ... 
 
 
 Ar - ma vi-rum-que ca - no Tro - jae qui pri-mus ab o - ris 
 
 As cited, p. 66. f P. 71. % P. 73- § P- 72. 
 
 Cited by Foster, p. 297. 
 
 343 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 This combination of highs and lows with longs and shorts 
 Foster held to coincide with the directions for scansion given 
 by Bentley in his tract de nietris Terentianis, where the open- 
 ing lines of the ^neid are marked 
 
 Arma virumque cano Tr6jae qui prfmns ab 6ris 
 Itdliam fdto pr6fugus, Lavinaque vdnit 
 Littora ; multum ille et t^rris jactdtus et dlto 
 Vi siiperum sdevae m(5morem Jun6nis ob iram ; 
 
 with the comment : 
 
 He that reads those verses properly and tunefully will pronounce them 
 according to those accentual marks ; not as schoolboys scanning them, and 
 placing the accents at the beginning of each foot, as, 
 
 Italidm fato profugus, La — 
 
 but according to the rhythm of the whole verse ; in which not one word has 
 the accent on the last syllable except viriiin, and that properly on accoimt 
 of the enclitic que. 
 
 Foster points out that Lavinaque should be accented on the a 
 for the same reason, but is otherwise quite satisfied that Bentley 
 and Scaliger mean the same thing ; though Scaliger evidently 
 makes long the notes which Bentley says the schoolboys accent, 
 and it is hardly to be supposed that Bentley meant that the 
 schoolboys raised thei}' tone at the beginning of each foot. 
 Schoolboys, like other people, stress syllables in a special 
 degree to mark scansion, and they are more likely to lower 
 than to raise their tone on the stressed syllables, even though 
 it be their habit to make stress coincide with raised tone in 
 ordinary speaking and reading. As for Bentley's marking, if it 
 merely means a rule for raising and lowering the voice it is a 
 vain device ; and if it is meant as a rule for stressing, I at least 
 cannot scan by it. In M. Kawczynski's musical marking of the 
 first line of the Iliad, again, I find a workable scansion (setting 
 aside the pitch of the notes and taking longs for stresses) ; but 
 that scansion makes a long syllable of a grave accent and a 
 short of an acute, which brings us back to the old conviction of 
 the futility of the accent marks. All that can be safely inferred 
 is that the accent marks did once have some musical signifi- 
 cance.* As M. Kawczynski remarks, they were still in use for 
 
 * This was partly recognised by Vossius and Henninius, who surmised 
 that the accents were borrowed by the grammarians from the musicians. — 
 Foster, p. 179. 
 
 344 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 musical notation in the middle ages. " M. de Caussemaker 
 shows us this as regards mediaeval Latin, in v/hich the signs of 
 the acute, grave and circumflex accents were employed as 
 fundamental 7teumes. Of these three signs combined together 
 are composed all the other neiwies^ " * 
 
 III 
 
 In fine, on every line of research we are led to admit that Poe 
 was perfectly justified in pronouncing the classic tradition, as 
 given in the universities, a hopeless medley of contradictions 
 and unintelligible dogmas. A dozen discussions before and 
 since his time bear him out. Every now and then a wind of 
 inquiry shakes the conventions of the schools, and reveals 
 nescience, dissidence, chaos, where use and wont had seemed 
 to rest on intelligent agreement. Eminent philologists offer 
 elucidations, and are forthwith denounced for heresy. Niebuhr, 
 dealing with the '''' ho7Tidtis numerus Satur7tms^^ idM^ foul of the 
 ancient grammarians. 
 
 Atilius Fortunatianus and others among them, being ignorant of its real 
 nature, confined their remarks to a couple of lines that were extant, 
 especially to the following : 
 
 Malum dabunt Metelli Naevio poetae, 
 n which according to the opinion of the time a hypercatalectic senarius 
 appears. Terentianus Maurus, who belongs to the end of the third cen- 
 tury, speaks of it in treating of the Anacreontic verse, because the first part 
 of the Saturnian resembles it. But the true Saturnian verse is quite 
 different, ... It is capable of a variety of forms, and is quite independent 
 of Greek metres. The Latin expression for rhythm, which was not applied 
 to Greek metres till a later time, is tiitmeri. The Greek metre is based 
 upon music and time, but the Romans actually counted syllables and rarely 
 if at all measured them ; a certain number of syllables was necessary to 
 constitute rhythm. Our [German] forefathers, too, had no 'dea of long or 
 short syllables after the Greek fashion ; in the old hymns of the Latin 
 Church likewise short syllables are used as long, and vice versa. Plautus 
 and Terence in their iambic and trochaic verses in reality observe the 
 rhythm only and not the time. The same is the case with all Northern 
 nations, t 
 
 * Caussemaker, LArt Harmoniqtte a^ix Xlle et Xllle Siecles, p, 160, 
 planche 37, cited by Kawczynski, pp. 72, 73. 
 
 f Lectures on the History of Rome, 3rd Eng. ed., pp. 64-5. Who will 
 may go into the Saturnian controversy in Ramsay {Manual of Latin 
 Prosody, 5th ed., App, x.). Niebuhr was right as to the verse not being on 
 a Greek metre. 
 
 345 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 It is not surprising to learn from an editorial note Jiat 
 another German scholar, Professor Schneidewin, " severely 
 criticised Niebuhr's expressions respecting the Saturnian 
 verse;" for his remarks on Roman verse in general are 
 ostensibly in flat contradiction of the common scholastic 
 doctrine. To me they are barely intelligible ; but it will not do 
 to reject them on the mere ground of common consent. 
 Within the sphere of the (theoretic) common consent there is 
 really as much practical contradiction as between Niebuhr and 
 the schools ; and successive discussions among English 
 scholars have left the entire subject in blank uncertainty. 
 
 A famous modern instance is the discussion which arose out 
 of Mr. Arnold's Lectures on Translating Hojuer. The lecturer, 
 differing from Heyne and Liddell and Scott as to an accent in 
 Homer, took occasion to remark* that "if we disregard 
 quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also 
 disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We 
 read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but 
 to a Greek the accent muzt have hindered many dactyls from 
 sounding as pure dactyls." On this Mr. Spedding, moved by 
 Mr. Arnold's arguments and experiments to write a clever 
 paper on English Hexameters^^ not only pulled to pieces 
 English hexameters in general and Mr. Arnold's in particular, 
 but ventured on certain generalisations concerning the hexa- 
 meter of antiquity. In logic the reviewer had every way the 
 advantage of the lecturer, with whom that was never a strong 
 point ; but the reviewer was in turn challenged on his prosody. 
 He had declared that " verses in which the accent falls on 
 every one of the six long syllables (that is, on the first syllable 
 of every foot) are rare even in Homer ;" whereupon Mr. 
 Munro, the Bentley of his generation, announced that " such 
 verses, instead of being rare, are among the very commonest 
 types of Homeric rhythm," J and that he had counted sixteen 
 or seventeen of them between verses 78 and 178 of the Iliad. 
 '• I suppose," comments Mr. Spedding on this later, " he does 
 not read Homer as I was taught to do ; " which seems highly 
 probable. 
 
 * On Trafislaiing Homer., p. 95. 
 f Reprinted in his Reviews and Discussions. 
 
 % Paper on the Inscription at Cirta, Camb. Philos. Soc. , Feb. 13, i860, 
 cited by Spedding, Reviews arid Discussions, p. 337. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 rllut the matter did not end here. Mr. Spedding, making 
 soirse very classic-sounding hexameters of his own, said some- 
 thing about accent and quantity ; whereon, as Mr. Spedding 
 records for us, Mr. Munro further dissented. " ' The old 
 Greeks and Romans (he [Munro] tells us, p. 30) had an 
 instinctive feeling for and knowledge of quantity^ upon which 
 instinct depended the whole force and meaning of their 
 rhythmical measured verse.' But in the course of the third 
 century 'quantity perished '—perished so completely from the 
 earth that ' it does not exist even potentially in any modern 
 language.' No modern ear can recognise it ; we know it ' only 
 by the rules of prosody.' Consequently ' cur English reading 
 of Homer and Virgil has m itself no meaning.' " On the first 
 head Mr. Spedding confesses that he does not know on what 
 evidence Mr. Munro's dictum as to the loss of quantity is 
 founded, and can therefore offer no criticism ; a course which I 
 in the present connection may well follow ; * but as against the 
 proposition that quantity "does not exist even potentially in any 
 modern language," I am struck by the statement of that excel- 
 lent hnguist the late Viscount Strangford f that " Eastern [/.^., 
 Persian or Turkish], like classical metre, is quantitative, not 
 accentual " at the present moment. I am struck also by the 
 statement of Professor Newman that many scholars have 
 
 no wWid feeling of the difference between Accent and Quantity ; and this is 
 the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually //d'ar^f quan- 
 titative verse, I have ; by listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by 
 my friend Mr. Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a 
 single page before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied : 
 " So do we complain of it " ; and then showed me, by turning the pages, 
 
 * See, however, the explanation given by M. Charles Defodon, in his 
 article on Prosodie in the Dictio?inaire de Pedagogic. M, Defodon, em- 
 bodying in part Foster's view, lays it down that Latin verse had, apart 
 from longs and shorts, an accc7it tonique consisting in a raised pitch on 
 certain syllables independently of their quantity ; that there arose thus " a 
 sort of struggle between the accentuated and the metrical {sic) syllable;" 
 and that in the ages of decadence the "exclusive predominance of the 
 accent tonique'" obhtcrated the old " distinction between longs and shorts 
 which had constituted quantity." I confess I cannot follow M. Defodon's 
 thesis, which seems to me to confuse accent tonique, so called, with normal 
 stress. M. Defodon ends by saying, with Munro, that the cadence of the 
 ancient verse cannot be caught by our ears. 
 
 f Selected Writings of Viscount Strangford, 1869, i. 269. 
 
 347 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 that the poet cut the knot which he could not untie, by frequent changes of 
 his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic 
 senarian to Iambic dimeter, or implied a fundamental change of tune, as 
 in music from canon to minuet time, I cannot say. But to my ear, nothing 
 but a tune can ever save a quantitative metre from hideous monotony.* 
 
 So that there would seem to be modern quantitative verse in the 
 strictest technical sense, in those nations whose literature is 
 least modern. When scholarly authority is thus nonplussed, is 
 it too madly presumptuous an adventure of common sense to 
 suggest that quantitative scansion may after all have been, in 
 classic as in Eastern verse, the only partially determinate 
 natural accentuation succeeding on the primitive practice of 
 chanting ; t and that Horace's protest against the leniency of 
 his countrymen to the lax metres of his poetic predecessors 
 gives a clue to this transition? Not every amateur, says 
 Horace, can detect ill-modulated verses ; and to Roman poets 
 is given an unworthy licence. Past generations have praised 
 alike the numbers and the point of Plautus — very tolerantly, 
 not to say foolishly, in the poet's opinion. He, protesting, will 
 not take the Hcence he might, but will beat out his rhythms 
 digltis et aic7'e^ regardful of the Greeks. Is it extravagant to 
 say that this points to a transitional structure of verse reaching 
 towards that precision of accent which seems to have been 
 attained "in the third century ;" and that even Horace's verse 
 would be read in his day with a measure of accent, though with 
 a certain artificiality of syllabification, the result not of any 
 
 * Hoyneric Translation i?i Theory and Practice, 1861, p. 14. 
 
 f Professor Newman himself points to this solution. "No accentual 
 metre can reproduce the sound, rhythm, ' movement,' of a quantitative 
 metre, made primarily for musical time and for singing." — Preface to his 
 translation of Iliad, 2nd ed., p. viii, Cf. preface to his translation of 
 Horace, p. ix. He there declares that it is absurd to attempt to translate 
 in the original metres, that being impossible. Professor Ellis, on the other 
 hand, claims to have translated Catullus in the original metres. But the 
 very fact that Professor Newman confesses himself unable to reproduce the 
 quantitative scansion after hearing it, leaves his negative verdict somewhat 
 weak. M. Du M^ril (as cited, p. 9) offers a simpler explanation than that 
 of M, Defodon, saying merely that the ancients had no difficulty about the 
 value of longs and shorts, which were settled by the recurrence of words in 
 different verses ; and that this valuation became impossible when versifica- 
 tion came to be based on real pronunciation. But this ignores the antece- 
 dent influence of chanting, elsewhere admitted by M. Du M^ril. 
 
 X De Arte Poetica, 263-4. Note the whole passage, 251-274. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 occult sense of quantity but of primitive usages of chanting 
 declamation ? * 
 
 On this let us again hear the scholarly opinion of Professor 
 Newman. He declares that Mr. Arnold's way of reading 
 Homer 
 
 begins by wiKully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws oi Latin 
 accent,! and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. 
 Virgil has compromised between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, 
 by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally forbid- 
 ding it in the second and third foot. What is called the "feminine 
 caesura" gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our 
 extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate 
 recurring sounds, and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by 
 reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the antepenultima in spite 
 of a long penultima, totally resists all such compromise ; and proves that 
 particular form of melody which our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an un- 
 historic imitation of Virgil. J 
 
 Homer apart, then, the versification of Virgil — and why then 
 not that of Horace ? — was a transitional species, passing from 
 primitive and quantitative to accentual. On such a view, 
 Horace and Virgil (not to speak of Homer) could not well have 
 the subtle continuity which belongs to modern verse as to 
 modern music ; and this would doubtless sound blasphemy to 
 the schools, where the musical perfection of classic verse is a 
 dogma held irrespectively of agreement as to how the verse 
 should be read. "Though every classical scholar readily 
 admits the superiority of Latin versification over that of 
 modern languages," wrote Dr. Nuttall sixty years ago,§ "still 
 there is no branch of education less profitably cultivated or less 
 
 understood Unfortunately iho. practice of modern teachers 
 
 and professors is contrary to their theory^ Similarly Mr. 
 
 * Compare Coleridge : " The distinction between accent and quantity is 
 clear, and was, no doubt, observed by the ancients in the recitation of verse. 
 But I believe such recitation to have been always an artificial thing, and 
 that the common conversation was regulated entirely by accent." — Table 
 Talk, August 23, 1833. See the whole passage and the editor's note in 
 comment. 
 
 f On this obscure point compare Niebuhr, as cited above, with Ramsay, 
 who endorses the general view that the Romans adopted the elaborated 
 Greek system [Manual, as cited, p. 309). But see also Foster, as cited, 
 chapters viii. and x. 
 
 X Homeric Translation, p. 15. § Ed. of Juvenal, 1836, p. xxvi. 
 
 349 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Munro alluded to a "wondrous harmony we feel" in the verse 
 whose rhythmic principle we cannot i^rasp, a suggestion which 
 in Mr. Spedding's quiet analysis gets to look little like non- 
 sense. The acute and versatile Dr. Latham, in his turn, ceases 
 to be clear when he takes up this theme. " Professional 
 grammarians," he writes,* "men who deal with the purely 
 philological questions of metre and syllabification, with few 
 exceptions confound accent and quantity." For himself, he 
 goes on to explain that " in English Latin there is in practice no 
 such thing as quantities, or rather English quantities are not 
 Latin quantities," inasmuch as "in Latin the length of the 
 syllable is determined by the length of the vowels and con- 
 sonants combined." But there is no physiological or psycho- 
 logical explanation, no attempt to explain the implied statement 
 that in English the quantities are vocalic merely. 
 Professor Newman, as usual, speaks emphatically: 
 
 Our English pronunciation even of Virgil so often ruins Virgil's own 
 quantities, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our 
 scholars' self-complacency in the rhythm which they ehcit.f 
 
 But Professor Newman speaks even more plainly than that on 
 the subject of ancient metres, in a passage which ought to be 
 brought to common knowledge : 
 
 I have the conviction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another- 
 that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move 
 in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an 
 African of the Gold Coast ; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should 
 complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral expression : and should 
 judge the style to be as inferior to our own oratorical metres as the music 
 of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request, 
 instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of 
 well-marked time and the ascendency reassumed by the prose accent, we 
 should be as helplessly unable to hearzxiy metre in them, as are the modern 
 Greeks.^ 
 
 This from {pace the manes of Mr. Arnold) the ablest modern 
 translator of Homer. And finally even Mr. Munro, despite his 
 deliverances as to quantity, and his denial that the ancients 
 had any accent such as ours, confesses that " neither his ear 
 nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity, 
 except that which is produced by accentuated and unaccentuated 
 
 * Opuscula, i860, p. 75. t Homeric Translation, p. 16, 
 
 X Homeric Translation, p. 14. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 syllables," so that ear and reason alike leave us with a " mean- 
 ingless" scansion of the classic hexameter. That was the 
 view tranquilly reposed in at last by Mr. Spedding, who genially 
 confessed to having just discovered that all his life he had been 
 reading three favourite lines of Virgil with five false quantities ! 
 He was willing to allow that "we know as little about Virgil's 
 pronunciation" in one "particular as in others — that we know, 
 in fact, nothing whatever about it."* Alike with the "false" 
 quantities and the " true," Mr. Spedding still found his Virgil 
 very delightful. Doubtless ; but such phenomena promise ill 
 for any settlement of classic rhythm. 
 
 It will be observed that the majority of our scholars thus far 
 have not even taken note of the problem of musical complica- 
 tions, though that had been repeatedly pointed to. Incon- 
 sistencies apart, Coleridge had pointed to the solution of the 
 mystery of accent and quantity, as others had done before him, 
 and as Professor Newman and M. Kawczynski have done since ; 
 but as the later discussions show, the clue went fur nothing 
 with the schools, which went on as before, either hammering 
 out the crude classic rhythms by rule of thumb or reading with 
 no sense of rhythm at all, but all the while asserting that there 
 is no verse-melody like that of the classics. The stiff rhythms 
 of Horace are supposed to exemplify the same laws as the 
 living lilts of Catullus, who proceeded on an original genius for 
 rhythm ; and the measure of Virgil is assimilated by brute 
 force, as Professor Newman indicates, to that of Homer. 
 Finally, the superstition of quantity holds its ground like a 
 creed ; and those who, like Walker and Munro, admit that 
 they can only conceive of quantity in terms of accent = stress, 
 go on alleging what Foster and Walker scouted— a lost and 
 mysterious power of rhythmic discrimination among the 
 nations which handled verse rhythm in its earliest develop- 
 ments. The general outcome is that classic verse is read with 
 little real enjoyment by the few who do read it, and is made a 
 mere nightmare for most of the youth to whom it is taught. 
 
 Everywhere we have the same confession ; sometimes from 
 sceptics, sometimes from teachers confident that they can put 
 
 * Reviews and Discussions, p. 338. Compare, on this question generally, 
 the opinion of Clough on the classic hexameter, Works, i. 397, (Cited in 
 this volume, p. 311.) 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 matters right. M. Manoury, Chanoine of S^ez, a good Grecian, 
 writes that 
 
 Les etudes Grecques ont fait d'heureux progres en France depuis une 
 soixantaine d'ann^es. La langue Grecque n'a pas 6t6 seulement enseign^e 
 dans tous les colleges de I'Etat et du clerg6, mais on a vu briller, dans 
 rUniversitc et dans I'Eglise, des hellenistes d'un merite incontestable. Et 
 pourtant, chose singuliere, plusieurs de ces savants qui lisaient et admiraient 
 Homere ne savaient pas scander les vers d'Homere ! '"'' 
 
 M. Manoury thinks he can put matters right ; and so does his 
 Latinist colleague, M. Lejard, who notes as regards Latin that 
 
 Des critiques d'ailleurs estimables avaient enseign^ de vive voix et im- 
 prim^ dans leurs ouvrages que les incorrections de mdirique, dans Virgile, 
 se comptaient par centaines. D'autres avaient expliqu^, par des raisons 
 que nous ne saurions admettre, ce qu'ils appelaient les irregularit^s de sa 
 versification. Cependant il est indubitable, disons-nous, que les vers les 
 plus irr^guliers en apparence, chez le grand poete latin, suivent des regies 
 fixes emprunt^es a Homere. Nous avons donne la clef de ces difficult^s, et 
 desorn:ais nos jeunes amis des Muses n'ont plus trouv^ un seul vers dans 
 Virgile, Horace, Ovide, Lucain, Juvenal, &c., dont ils ne pussent ais6ment 
 se rendre compte.f 
 
 I will not attempt to discuss the explanations of M. Lejard, 
 beyond saying that on the face of them they only carry back the 
 trouble to Homer, and that in practice they have the effect of 
 reducing verse to " rules " which seem to negate versification as 
 ordinarily conceived. He leaves us diffident, as he found us. 
 
 And the best of our own professional prosodists, by their 
 confident affirmation of things unintelligible, only deepen our 
 distrust. The learning and the scholarly judgment of Ramsay 
 are, I believe, alike undisputed ; and yet it is impossible to 
 study his Latin Prosody without feeling that it reaches no 
 scientific principle. It sets out, as needs must, with mere rules 
 for practice, resting on no generalisation, syllable-values being 
 treated in detail before we are told anything of verse ; and the 
 treatment of "Accent, Quantity, Emphasis, Metre, Rhythm, 
 Metrical Ictus, Arsis, Thesis," is relegated to an appendix, 
 which begins with the confession : " It is not our intention to 
 enter into any lengthened discussion with regard to these 
 
 * Prosodie Grecque, 1883, p. 27. 
 
 t Nouveau traiti de prosodie lati/ie, 1884, preface. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 topics, upon which many volumes have been written to little 
 purpose."* 
 
 They cannot well be to less purpose than the doctrines here 
 set forth by Professor Ramsay. Following Foster, without 
 recognising that, despite Foster, EngHsh usage has made 
 "accent" in verse mean stress, he bluntly defines it as variation 
 in pitch or note ; and goes on to observe that " much confusion 
 has arisen from the circumstance that in English long quantity 
 is always or almost always accompanied by an elevation of 
 pitch." Now, what we all now mean by accent in scansion t is 
 not at all a pitch but stress, and it is the coincidence of stress 
 and real quantity that sets up the insoluble problem of the 
 classicists, with their factitious discrimination between vowel 
 sounds of equal stress, as in fat and fate. Stress, as we have 
 seen, may as well go with lowered or unchanged as with raised 
 pitch. The confusion is twice confounded when Ramsay goes 
 on to declare that '''"Emphasis is perfectly distinct both from 
 Accent and Quantity, and signifies the comparative energy or 
 
 fulness of the voice in pronouncing different syllables 
 
 Emphasis is not confined to single syllables, but may be 
 employed in the enunciation of words, or sentences, or para- 
 graphs." Here we have emphasis first defined in the sense of 
 syllable- stress, which is what quantity resolves itself into in 
 reading ; and then defined as general meaning-stress, a totally 
 different thing. Nor is this all. We are further told that 
 " different from any of these is the Metrical Accent or Ictus 
 Metricics, the name given by grammarians to the stress which 
 must be laid upon particular syllables in repeating verse, in 
 order that the rhythm of the measure may be made perceptible 
 to the ear." This is the fourth bogus conception made out of 
 the one fact of syllable-stress, which is all that we can find 
 beneath. A metrical accent there certainly is, but it is not 
 
 * Manual of Latin Prosody, 5th ed. p, 268. 
 
 f Ramsay was specially misled by the fact that when we speak of, say, 
 "a Scotch accent " we mean a number of details of intonation and pronun- 
 ciation, of which voice inflection is one. But this is not the " accent" of 
 verse or of syllables separately. Foster expressly pointed out that the word 
 accent was used by one writer " in four very wide and different senses, ex- 
 pressing sometimes elevation, sometimes prolongation of sound, sometimes 
 a stress of voice compounded of the other two, and sometimes the artificial 
 accentual mark." — Introd. p, xiii. 
 
 353 z 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 "different from" syllable-stress, being simply a selection of the 
 main syllable-stresses in a line when it is not the whole series of 
 these. But confusion becomes chaos when we yet further learn 
 that the ictus falls either on the first or on the second syllable 
 of a spondee according as the verse is trochaic or iambic. Who 
 shall utter to us the spondees of this theory ? The word has no 
 other meaning than "(a foot of) two syllables of equal stress," 
 as "good God." We are hard pressed to find spondees in 
 English on the quantitative definition ; but on the ictus theory 
 we may find plenty. They would merely be awkward trochees 
 or iambs. 
 
 It is with something like gratitude that we find the Professor, 
 instead of alleging fresh significances for arsis and thesis, 
 contenting himself with saying that the syllables on which ictus 
 falls are in arsis, and the others in thesis. Thus at least ictus 
 is admittedly arsis for us to-day, whatever arsis may have 
 meant for the ancients of different periods ; though the Professor 
 will not admit that thesis is short quantity. He finally bequeaths 
 to English prosody a system of accent marks which combines 
 in placid confusion the two notations of pitch and stress, by 
 marking thus the words 
 
 " leeberty of conscience " 
 
 to represent them as " uttered by a lowland Scotchman." What 
 he meant was that, as Foster had pointed out,* a lowland 
 Scotchman of the past, while scanning just as an Englishman 
 does, tended to raise his voice on the final syllables of words. 
 But even this tendency is no longer general — if it ever were — 
 among lowland Scotchmen, even in their native land ;t so that 
 the values of accentual marks have been confused in a" 
 standard Prosody to no better purpose than that of commem- 
 orating one varying provincial intonation. 
 
 IV 
 
 It was in the face of this unending discussion that Poe, con- 
 vinced of the hopelessness of resort to academic tradition, 
 
 * As cited, p. 69. 
 
 t The prevailing voice inflection in Glasgow, for instance (a bad result of 
 the blend of the Scots and Gaelic intonations in a busy community), would 
 be the exact reverse of that noted by Ramsay. And Glasgow is the largest 
 Scotch city. 
 
 354 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 proposed to construct a metrical system on purely rational 
 grounds. As it happens, he is not the only modern metrist 
 who has ventured to overrule traditional prosody at a pinch 
 altogether. M. Lurin, an avocat of Lyons, published in 1854, 
 after but independently of Foe, a scheme of rhythm which 
 seems to have passed out of notice.* Like so many other 
 scholars, M. Lurin confessed the deadlock in practice. 
 
 Tous les faits n^cessaires a 1' intelligence de cette podsie ont ete reunies, 
 et cependant une obscurity profonde reste encore dtendue sur elle. Pour- 
 quoi, d'ordinaire, ceux qui scandent ces metres n'en comprennent-ils pas le 
 rhythme ? pourquoi ne les sentent-ils pas, meme dans les vers composes par 
 eux ? On pent avouer plusieurs raisons de cette singuliere anomalie : 
 Les principes des anciens sur le rhythme ne nous sont point parvenues ; 
 des notions pratiques, seules, nous ont ete transmises, et, comme telles, elles 
 ne sont ni definies ni classees. 
 
 And he resorted to drastic measures, as did Foe. 
 
 Les auteurs venus avant nous, et qui nous ont guide pas a pas dans cette 
 carriere, out reproduit les divisions donndes par les grammairiens latins : 
 nous les avons discutees et r^form^es lorsqu'elles etaient contraire a des 
 principes qui sont de tous les temps parcequ'ils derivent de I'organisation 
 meme de I'homme. 
 
 But the method of M. Lurin does not seem to have 
 influenced the text-books ; and neither, of course, has Foe's. It 
 is perhaps only as apart from the question of classic prosody 
 that it is worth while to discuss it now. 
 
 To my mind, the Rationale of Verse is a brilliant essay to- 
 wards the simplification and logicalisation of a prosodical method 
 which is essentially incapable of reduction to scientific bases ; 
 and in that sense its failure is its success.t That is to say, we 
 
 * Mithode pour restituer a la poesie Latine sa veri table harmonie. 
 
 f The late Sidney Lanier, in his very able Science of English Verse 
 (1880), declares that Poe's essay is " permeated by a fundamental mistake, 
 quite fatal to the usefulness of even the shrewd detached glimpses occurring 
 here and there" — the mistake, "namely, that the accent makes every 
 syllable /c?//^ — a conception wholly unaccountable to the musician, and so 
 absurd as to render a large proportion of existent music and verse theoreti- 
 cally impossible." The value of Mr. Lanier's verdict on this one point 
 may be gathered from the fact that (p. 123) he actually scans the triplets of 
 Tennyson's 
 
 Half a league, half a league, half a league onward 
 
 355 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 have here a close and lucid argument, which, by doing nearly 
 all that can be done to reorganise the analysis of verse into 
 " feet " on the old plan, proves once for all that the primitive 
 expedient of the " foot " is impotent to solve the psychological 
 problem which verse presents. Whether or not we agree with 
 Poe in rejecting the old scansions of Horace, we can all see 
 that "feet" are purely arbitrary divisions of the complex 
 rhythms of modern verse, and leave half of even the rhythmic 
 phenomena uncodified. Poe's bold undertaking to "scan 
 correctly any of the Horatian rhythms, or any true rhythm that 
 human ingenuity can conceive," while " employing from the 
 numerous ^ ancienf feet the spondee, the trochee, the iambus, 
 the anapsest, the dactyl, and the csesura, alone " — this is but a 
 short cut to the proof that neither these nor the other " feet" 
 can really analyse verse as we read it to-day. That he, reputed 
 a fine reader, should fail to see this, is puzzling to the extent of 
 suggesting that there is extreme presumption in thus dismissing 
 his argument. But, feeling as I do the pellucid clearness and 
 almost flawless unity of the Rationale as a composition — 
 qualities which are the special stamp of Poe's literary work — I 
 cannot but think that he has acquired his confidence in his 
 conclusions at the cost of ignoring the deeper issues. He has 
 
 as a series of absolutely equal short syllables, and that he was capable (p. 
 174) of scanning thus the great Hne in Emerson's Brahma : 
 
 When me | they fly | I am \ the wings — 
 
 a crudely bad reading, in a case where his own principle of ' ' sounds and 
 silences " (treated of below) should have led him to the true rhythm, which is; 
 
 When me they fly T am the wings. 
 
 In the same way he declares (p. 71) that in the line 
 
 Rhythmical roundelays wavering downward 
 
 all the syllables are equally long, though four are stressed ; but that if we 
 alter "rhythmical" to "rhythmic," the first syllable at once becomes 
 longer than before. It obviously does not. What happens is simply a brief 
 pause in the place of the dropped syllable " al." I can only conclude that 
 Mr. Lanier's devotion to musical practice led him often to hear verse with 
 the musical instead of the inward ear, and so to sacrifice sense to sound. 
 His attack on Poe is a complete fiasco, which connects with the worst error 
 in his own book. Poe's identification of stress with length is perfectly 
 sound ; and it was the vitiation of Mr. Lanier's ear by analogies drawn 
 from music that led him to dispute it. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 assumed that all verse gives, even to an alien, the key to its 
 proper pronunciation ; whereas it is quite certain that we may 
 mispronounce foreign verse while making it yield a consistent 
 rhythm.* He has disposed of some of the confusions of his 
 predecessors by overlooking some of the problems which con- 
 fused them. As he says, and as we have seen, "there is 
 perhaps no topic in polite literature which has been more 
 pertinaciously discussed, and there is certainly not one about 
 which so much inaccuracy, confusion, misconception, mis- 
 representation, mystification, and downright ignorance on all 
 sidesjf can be fairly said to exist ; " and, that being so, it is too 
 much to suppose that a mere return to the simpler " feet " will 
 settle everything. In his own critique on Longfellow's ballads 
 we have the pregnant deliverance : "In short, the ancients 
 were content to read as they scanned, or nearly so. It may be 
 safely prophesied that we shall never do this : and thus we 
 shall never admit English hexameters." Very true and sound ; 
 but how, on that view, can we proceed to chop our verse into 
 old scansions ? 
 
 We must distinguish between Foe's sound conception of the 
 nature of rhythm, and his view that all rhythm resolves itself 
 into feet of equal values. The two are equally approved of by 
 
 * See, for instance, Mr. Hamerton's account of the results got by a 
 studious Frenchman from the verse of Tennyson {Human Intercourse, p. 
 89). Many of us have similarly found that our a priori reading of French 
 alexandrines would not square with French declamation of them. It is 
 thus difificult to gainsay Mr. Hamerton when he insists (p. 90), that "we 
 are all of us disqualified, by our profound ignorance of the pronunciation of 
 the ancient Romans, for any competent criticism of their verse," 
 
 f As one proof that Foe did not exaggerate, take the fact that in such a 
 standard English compilation as Brande and Coy^ 's> Dictionary of Science, 
 Literature and Art, we have the statement, under the article Metre, that 
 " a line is said to be acatalectic when the last syllable of the last foot is 
 wanting" ; whereas that is the definition of catalectic, an acatalectic line 
 being one with its full complement of syllables. In an earlier compilation, 
 Brande s Dictionary, the same blunder is found, and a line with a super- 
 fluous syllable is there said to be " hypercatale/tic. " Catalectic is mis- 
 applied, too, by Professor Jenkin, following Mr. Goold Brown. {Papers, i. 
 150. ) If Poe had done such things, there would be some excuse for charging 
 him with ignorance of his subject. But indeed the scientific nullity of the 
 terms thus gravely presented as throwing light on the subject of metre, is 
 one of the strongest proofs of the futility of what passes for verse analysis 
 in the schools. 
 
 357 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Dr. Sylvester in his vivacious volume on The Laivs of 
 Verse : 
 
 I am satisfied that .... Edgar Poe is perfectly right in the principles 
 laid down by him in his Ratiojiale of Vcrsificatioji, that the substratum of 
 measure is time ; that an accented syllable is a long syllable, and that an 
 unaccented syllable is a short one of varying degrees of duration ; and that 
 feet ill modem metre are of equal letigtk. Professor Newman is of an oppo- 
 site opinion, and goes the length of saying that accent is so far from 
 lengthening that it even tends to shorten syllables, instancing the first 
 syllable in " female '' as shortened by the accent, and of course implying 
 that it is shorter in female than it would be in femdle ; to argue against 
 such an assertion (which, I think, no one who is not time-deaf will be found 
 to concur with) would be like reasoning upon colours with one who is 
 colour-blind. ■"■ 
 
 We need not stay to discuss the blunder of Professor Newman, 
 who for this once has certainly tripped. But we must pause 
 over the categorical assertion that "feet in modern metre are 
 of equal length." This proposition, which is inconsistent with 
 Dr. Sylvester's own previous remarks on syllable-groupings,t 
 assumes that feet are real segments, organic divisions, of a 
 line ; and that there are no feet save those which Poe allows — 
 
 no bacchius (u ), no cretic ( - u - ), no amphibrach (u - u), 
 
 no antibacchius ( u), and no molossus ( ) or tribrach 
 
 (.^ u u), to name no others of the old list. Now, it happens 
 that the asserted equality even of the feet accepted by Poe and 
 Sylvester breaks down at the very outset, seeing that in the 
 terms of the case a spondee is longer than either an iambus or 
 a trochee, while the " caesura " of Poe is shorter than these. 
 But we may waive this checkmate and still show that Dr. 
 Sylvester is wrong. Unless Ave merely beg the question as to 
 the length of feet by refusing to recognise any that are longer 
 than the spondee, it will be found impossible to adhere in 
 practice to this canon. If we measure our feet by natural 
 pauses or stresses, we must at times recognise others. Take 
 Tennyson's line 
 
 * The Laws of Verse, 1870, pp. 64-5. 
 
 f ' ' No one seems to have drawn special attention to the distinct charac- 
 ter and aspect attaching to every different form of syllable-groupings in a 
 ine. The working out of this theory belongs to the subject of rests, there 
 being an incalculably small but still perfectly sensible interruption of 
 breathing between every \^o groups of syllables " (p. 36). These groups of 
 syllables cannot be pretended to be equal feet. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Oh art thou | sighing for | Lebanon 
 
 The only natural divisions are those I have marked ; and the 
 third foot here is not a dactyl like the others, but a cretic. 
 And in the next line : 
 
 In the long breeze that streams to thy dehcious East 
 
 we may just as fairly make the divisions thus : 
 
 In the I long breeze | that streams { to thy | deli | cious East, 
 
 or thus : 
 
 In the long breeze | that streams | to thy delicious East 
 
 as in any other way. Poe, I suppose, would divide " Lebanon" 
 into a trochee and a caesura, and would divide the second line 
 thus : 
 
 In the long | breeze | that streams | to thy | deli [ cious East, 
 
 calHng "breeze" a caesura. But the cassura and the iambus 
 "deli" cannot be pretended to be as long as the opening 
 anapaest. I maintain that Dr. Sylvester, if he were to pro- 
 nounce "deli-"' as long a foot as "that streams" or "-cious 
 East " or " In the long," would lay himself open to some such 
 vivacity of denunciation as he has allowed himself towards 
 Professor Newman ; and though some of his verdicts as to 
 verbal beauty are startling, I can hardly think he would 
 venture to dispute that the line as a whole is rhythmically 
 beautiful. So with the fine line in Browning's version of the 
 Aga7nemno7i : 
 
 Through the delicately pompous curtains that pavilion well : 
 
 it may be divided mechanically into trochees which disguise its 
 rhythm, or into syllabically unequal bars which reveal it. 
 
 One illustration from Poe's own essay suffices to raise the 
 issue in a decisive form. Analysing the rhythm of the opening 
 lines of Byron's Bride of Abydos, and deriding the attempts to 
 formulate it by the mechanical methods of the grammarians, he 
 proceeds to show how the flow is not properly to be measured 
 by single lines, and how, on the contrary, it pulses from verse to 
 verse, only making a structural pause at intervals of several 
 lines. Accordingly he prints the passage continuously, to show 
 that it is a series of dactyls broken only at these points ; as 
 thus : 
 
 359 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Know ye the | land where the | cypress and | myrtle Are | emblems of | 
 deeds that are | done in their | clime Where the | rage of the | vulture the | 
 love of the | turtle Now j melt into | softness now | madden to ] crime \ 
 Know ye the | etc. 
 
 The word "crime" is here classed as a caesura, or long syllable 
 constituting a foot of equal length with the dactyls ; later on the 
 syllables "fume Wax," "twine. And," and "done. Oh," are 
 similarly italicised as spondees, also equivalent in time to the 
 dactyls ; and finally " tell " is another caesura. Now, in another 
 essay, the criticism of Longfellow's ballads,* Foe treated the first 
 line of this very passage as consisting of " three dactyls and a 
 caesura," observing that " myrtle" "is a double rhyme, and must 
 be understood as one syllable." He might as well have called 
 it a trochee with the value of a spondee or a dactyl ; since the 
 final effect of his analysis is to show that all rhythm is a matter 
 of relative time or stress values, and not of syllables ; but in any 
 case his earlier decision showed that the first line oi XhQ Bride of 
 Abydos might be read as one of dactyls ending with a caesura, 
 and the second as one of amphibrachs equally ending in a 
 long iambus of the value of a caesura or amphibrach, as thus : 
 
 Know ye the | land where the | cypress and | myrtle 
 Are emblems | of deeds that | are done in | their clime 
 
 Dr. Sylvester, applauding the " exceedingly interesting observ- 
 ation that all these lines run into one another," f objects that Poe 
 " makes a difficulty, for which there is no occasion, about the 
 words ' twine, And,'| which he says ' is false in point of melody,' 
 for that we must force " And " into a length which it will not 
 naturally bear.' " Dr. Sylvester argues, rightly enough so far, 
 that " twine," ending a line, takes after it a slight pause, which 
 with the "and" would make out the value of a dactyl. But he 
 oddly fails to see that the same principle of pause upsets else- 
 where the alleged dactyls in which line-ending pauses occur. 
 We pause after "turtle" and "clime" just as we pause with 
 
 * Works, Ingram's ed., iv. 362. 
 
 f It should be noted that Bentley applied the same principle to classic 
 anapaestic verse (Jebb's Bentley, p. 14). 
 
 % In the hnes " Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine, And 
 all, save the spirit of man, is divine" — where the movement may as fairly 
 be called anapaestic as dactylic, with long iambs at the end of the first and 
 the beginning of the second Une. 
 
 360 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Dr. Sylvester after "twine," and — with Poe — after "crime." 
 Then " clime " should be for Dr. Sylvester, with its pause, a 
 trochee, and for Poe a c^sura ; while for both the next line 
 must begin with an anapaest. And I, in turn, might as fairly 
 call it a cretic. So, after " turtle," which with its pause equals a 
 dactyl, we may resolve the next four words into two amphibrachs. 
 In fine, even if we could scan all kinds of verse with the few 
 kinds of feet on which Poe proposed to proceed, these feet 
 themselves often indicate no corresponding facts of verse 
 structure, being but variable ways of marking beats in a given 
 rhythm. Rhythmal pleasure being, as he rightly says, a percep- 
 tion of more or less complicated equalities (the pleasure tending 
 to refine with the complication), the process of counting, if it is 
 to give any assistance beyond broadly describing a lilt, should 
 either be complicated with the refinement of the rhythm itself, 
 or be reduced to some underlying psychological principle. 
 There is no time-unit ; and if a dactyl in a given line is to have 
 the same time-value as a trochee — which Poe allowed, going on 
 to call an anapaest in an iambic line a bastard iambus, and a 
 paeon primus in a trochaic line (as " Many are the ") a quick 
 trochee — it becomes plain that our feet are a pure convention, 
 that the sole rhythmic fact is the fluctuant relativity of long and 
 short, or stress and slur,* in verse movement ; and that of such 
 
 * The late Professor Shairp has left an interesting account of some 
 counsel given him on the subject of scansion by Clough, which is worth 
 ^, reproducing here : — " He repeated in his melodious way several lines " [of 
 the Bothie, then about to be publisl\ed] ' ' intended to show me how a verse 
 might be read so that one syllable should take up the time of two, or con- 
 versely two of one. The line which he instanced (altered, I think, from 
 Evaiigeline) was this : 
 
 White I naked ] feet on the | gleaming | floor of her | chamber. 
 
 This was new to me, as I had not risen beyond the common notion of 
 spondees, dactyls, and the rest. ... He bade me scan the first line of the 
 Paradise Lost. I began : ' " Of man's : " iambus, ' ' Yes. ' ' " First 
 dis — " ' — There I was puzzled. It did not seem an iambus or a spondee 
 it was nearly a trochee, but not quite one. He then explained to me his 
 conception of the rhythm. The two feet ' first disobe — ' took up the time 
 of four syllables, two iambic feet : the voice rested awhile on the word 
 ' first' ; then passed swiftly over ' diso — ', then rested again on ' be — ' so 
 as to recover the previous hurry. , . . A clue it was in the fullest sense of 
 the term : it gave me an insight into rhythm which I had not before, and 
 which has constantly been my guide since, both in reading and writing." — 
 
 361 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 movement as a whole the final criterion is just its pleasurable- 
 ness, or agreeableness to a constitutional need for a jerkless 
 continuity in scansion as in motion. Poe would quash the 
 pyrrhic, or foot of two short syllables, on the ground that short- 
 ness is only the negation of length, and that two shorts therefore 
 mean nothing ; but equally, longness is only the negation of 
 shortness, so that the caesura and the spondee are disallowed by 
 the same reasoning. If it was worth while to show analytically 
 that the line is an arbitrary measure, much more was it to show 
 the essential arbitrariness of the foot, even for the classic metres, 
 which after all must have allowed a variety of modulations of 
 which the most complex foot scansions can give no account. 
 Not only are long and short correlatives, but scansion like 
 musical tempo admits of rallejitando and accelerando ; and if, 
 further, accent is in our own verse so irretrievably bound up with 
 length of syllable, how shall we serve ourselves with the expedi- 
 ents that were inadequate for tongues that are held to have 
 reckoned their verse originally by conventional vowel quantities ? 
 Whatever may have been the case in Greek and Latin verse 
 in their later stages, when reading had taken the place of 
 chanting, it is quite certain that in our own verse a rhythmic 
 effect is often partly dependent on certain variations of pause or 
 'ivcTi't-space between syllables * — a factor of which foot-scansion 
 takes no account. For instance, in Tennyson's song, "A spirit 
 haunts the year's last hours," the general iambic movement is 
 always varying into anapaestic and dactylic, and trochaic, and 
 into yet another which might be called (after Poe) caesural ; and 
 that all this variation is never rugged or jarring is due to the fact 
 
 (Clough's Poems and Prose Remains, Memoir, i. 32.) Cloughwas evj^ently 
 reasoning on the same lines as Poe, and laying his finger (as we shall see 
 below) on the rhythmic essentials of verse as against mere syllable-counting. 
 He, too, therefore, was tending to discredit the " foot." The line quoted 
 by Professor Shairp could obviously have been marked thus : 
 
 White I naked | feet | on the gleaming | f!oor | of her chamber. 
 * I had written this before meeting with Sidney Lanier's Science of Eng- 
 lish Verse (1880), which clearly and fully lays down the principle that 
 rhythm is a series of "sounds and silences." I believe that his is the first 
 clear statement of the principle, though, as we have seen, Clough and Poe 
 both pointed towards it. It will be seen below that Lanier, in my opinion, 
 sometimes fails to apply his principle aright. It will be seen, too, that the 
 principle as I apply it does not square with the exposition of the late 
 Professor Fleeming Jenkin in his essay of 1883 On Rhythfn in English 
 
 362 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 that the verse as it were insists on variations of time-spacing 
 or tempo, which perfectly unify it. For instance, in the lines : 
 
 My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves 
 At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves, 
 
 And the breath 
 Of the fading edges of box beneath, 
 
 And the year's last rose — 
 
 no pedal marking whatever can tell the total rhythm. The first 
 line, by academic doctrine, may be said to contain an amphi- 
 brach, a spondee, a pyrrhic and a molossus. Foe would perhaps 
 have said that it is made up of two iambs, a caesura, an anapaest 
 and a spondee, making "faints" the caesura; but this would 
 obscure the facts of the rhythm of " my whole soul grieves.'' 
 What really happens in that phrase is a very minute pause 
 before the third and fourth words, with the result of giving each 
 so nearly the time-value of " my whole " as to keep the move- 
 ment fluent ; and the same thing happens before " faints," so 
 that the whole movement is essentially iambic, with the slight 
 real variation of the anapaest " and my whole." So, in the last 
 line, the scansion essentially is 
 
 And the year's last rose, 
 
 the blanks being more marked than in the first line. 
 
 Doubtless this rhythmic fact is what is pointed to in the 
 principle of the caesura ; but then the idea of the caesura, which, 
 as Poe protests, is "grossly misrepresented in the classic 
 prosodies," has hardened into a prescription of pause for one 
 form of verse and one length of metre ; and though Poe's 
 adoption of it as a principal element in scansion brings us a 
 long way nearer science, and though this partly justifies him 
 in writing as he does of Coleridge's "nonsensical system of what 
 he calls ' scanning by accents ' — as if ' scanning by accents' were 
 anything more than a phrase" — he himself does not logically 
 carry out the true principle. He defines the caesura as a foot of 
 "a single long syllable," whose leiigth however varies. In truth 
 the caesura is neither a long nor a short syllable, but partly a 
 lengthening of a syllable and partly an element of time between 
 
 Verse (reprinted in his Papers, vol. i.). His pauses are often irrelevant to 
 rhythm, and often quite arbitrary in themselves. His essay, however, is 
 an effective refutation of the false metric of Dr. E. Guest's History of 
 English Rhythms. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 syllables. It clearly is so in the line which Poe gives as con- 
 sisting of three caesuras : 
 
 March ! iriarch ! march ! 
 as again in Tennyson's 
 
 Break ! break ! break ! " 
 When, however, we come to 
 
 On thy cold gray stones, O sea ! 
 
 we have long syllables enough ; and on Poe's principle we 
 might scan it as an anapaest followed by either two spondees or 
 four caesuras ; but there is no such element of pause as arises in 
 the first line, or at least the pauses are much more minute. 
 Again, Poe gives us this scansion : 
 
 A breath | can make | them as | a breath [ has made, 
 
 making five iambs. This is rhythmically false : no good reader 
 would scan so. He would read, pedally speaking : 
 
 A breath can make Them | as a breath has made, 
 
 and if we are to be logical in pedal notation we should make 
 the line one of two feet of five syllables each, as some of the 
 ancient grammarians would actually have made it. What has 
 really happened is a pause after " them," making the real scan- 
 sion run 
 
 A breath can make them as a breath has made, 
 
 and so keeping up an iambic movement, with the slight variation 
 of one anapcEst. And this is the cue to the rhythmical essence 
 of the first line of Paradise Lost. The total rhythn*^ 
 
 Of man's first disobedience and the fruit. 
 
 That is to say, the movement is essentially iambic, with the easy 
 variation of two anapaests. In Hamlet^ again, the notation of 
 the most famous line is 
 
 To be or not to be ; that is the question, f 
 
 * Lanier, I find, had notated this very line with music-rests (Work cited 
 p. 138). 
 
 t To my surprise I find that Lanier measures the line thus, using how- 
 ever music-notes (Work cited, p, 172) ! — 
 
 To be 1 or not | to be | that is | the question. 
 364 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 the pause sparing us the jar of stepping from an iamb straight 
 into a trochee (as in " away, rascal") a much less agreeable 
 shuffle than that from a trochee into an iamb (as in " Or to take 
 arms," or " Heavily hangs"). 
 
 It may be argued that this method of analysis will serve to 
 certificate the most unrhythmical verse at will as rhythmical ; but 
 that is a needless fear.* A bad verse is so because it puts in a 
 
 In the same way he scans 
 
 Whether | 'tfs no | bier in | the mind | to suffer 
 and 
 
 The sUngs | and ar | rows of | outra | geous fortune 
 
 He goes on, it is true, to stipulate that the pauses of stage delivery will 
 necessarily interrupt the movement he has marked out ; but he gives 
 these scansions as " a scheme of that rhythmic intention upon which the 
 wi-iter projected his work." Now Shakspere cannot have intended to stress 
 "is" and " in " and " of." He must have intended a pausation ; and it is 
 odd that Lanier did not here see an application of his own principles of 
 " sounds and silences." Lanier again puzzles me by, in his own words, 
 (p. 173) " passing Milton with the single remark that Paradise Lost is 
 written in the same typic form of 3-rhythm with Shakspere's plays," that is 
 
 in the rhythm of 
 
 In maiden meditation fancy free. 
 
 The very first line of Paradise Lost should strike on the sense of any metrist 
 by its new resort to the principle of pauses, in modification of the simple 
 rhythm. As for Tennyson's " Haifa league" hne, before referred to, it is 
 clear that the rhythm goes thus : 
 
 Haifa league,... Half a league,... Half a league onward ; 
 
 the movement being made inwardly iambic by the pauses, till the third 
 triplet, fusing with the final trochee, becomes a dactyl, preparing for the 
 dactyllic movement of the next line : 
 
 All in the valley of death rode the six hundred. 
 
 ^'' I find, however, that Lanier, after forgetting to apply his principle to 
 cases where it clearly comes into play, overstretches it in defence of Shak- 
 spere's oft-discussed line {Measure for Measure, ii. 2) : 
 
 Splitt'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak 
 Than the soft myrtle ; but man, proud ??iafi. 
 
 Lanier agrees with Coleridge that the pause needed after " myrtle" keeps 
 the rhythm right, pointing out (p. 193), that if we read— 
 
 Than the soft myrtle tree ; but man, proud man — 
 
 it is faultless. Here he forgets, as did Coleridge, that the proposed 
 
 365 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 continuous run diversities of step which disconcert us ; and no 
 aid from pauses can cure such jars. We may, by pausation, 
 make a risky Hne of Milton nearly quite rhythmical, as in 
 
 Burns after them to the bottomless pit ; 
 
 where the undue stress on "them" is now the only flaw. But 
 no pausation can cure such lines as Mr. Lowell's 
 
 Forty fa | thers of free | dom of whom | twenty bred .... 
 Each has six | truest pat | riots four discov | erers of e | ther, 
 
 where the anapaestic intention stumbles as if in epilepsy. 
 
 When we go to the root of the matter we find that already 
 among the ancients there was glimpsed the fundamental truth 
 that metrical divisions are not the constituents of rhythm but 
 artificial derivatives from it. This is implied in the maxim 
 Merpov Trarrjp pvdfxos, " rhythm is the father of metre ; " * and 
 in the saying of the grammarian Charisius, " Nihil est enim 
 inter rhythmon et metron nisi quod rhythuws est inetrum flue )is^ 
 inetriini aiitein sit rhythinos chmsiisP Gaily, last century, also 
 put it well when he said that " Metre differeth from rhythm as 
 the Species from the Gentis.^^ The right account is given by 
 M. Kawczynski, who, rejecting f " the grave error of German 
 philology, which consists in considering rhythmic as essentially 
 different from metric," sums up (p. 52) that " there exists no differ- 
 ence of principle between metre and rhythm : on the contrary, 
 metre .... is only a measure, a certain dividing " {coupiire). 
 Then feet are arbitrary divisions, not equipollent units constitu- 
 ting a rhythm. 
 
 All this may sound like emptying Poe's essay of all import- 
 ance, but I am fain to repeat that its value lies in carrying 
 
 rhythmic pause comes in where there is already a pause ?iecessltated by the 
 sense ; so that the ear is balked anyhow. Either there is a pause of two 
 stresses (= a spondee), which disorders the movement, or the sense-pause 
 (which would have to be made even after tree) cancels the rhythm-pause. 
 The ear cannot solve the double difficulty. The verse, lacking an essential 
 syllable, is thus really imperfect, though I do not doubt that Shakspere so 
 wrote it, seeing that in the rest of the passage he tries rhythmical experi- 
 ments. 
 
 * Ascribed by M. Kawczynski (p. 52) to Longinus ; and by Dr. Gaily (as 
 cited, p. 81) to the Scholiast on Aristophanes, Nub, 638. 
 
 t P- 139- 
 
 366 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 analysis so far that the omitted final step is easy. It struck at 
 the endless series of academic " feet," of most of which not one 
 man in a thousand now knows the names, forcibly enough to 
 make plain the expediency of throwing foot measurement aside. 
 Even while standing for feet, and so leaving foothold to the test 
 of absolute number of syllables, it effectually puts out of 
 countenance the benighted pedantry which would read and 
 print "silv'ry sea" and " th' eternal." It contains many acute 
 and suggestive ideas on the origin of verse* and rhyme, which 
 I do not think have yet been superseded. And it supplied the 
 first t and almost the only reasoned indictment of what com- 
 monly pass for English hexameters. 
 
 V 
 
 The most questionable passage I find in its close packed 
 exposition is the statement that " comparatively the French 
 have 710 accentuation ; and there can be nothing worth the 
 name of verse without ; " and that the French heroic is "the 
 most wretchedly monotonous verse in existence." But such 
 partially mistaken judgments on French poetry are too common 
 in English Hterature to permit of Poe's receiving more than 
 qualified blame. He is countenanced by Ramsay % and by the 
 
 * Poe's theory that verse began with the spondee is well worth investiga- 
 tion in connection with the rhythmic chants of the uncivilised races ; and 
 his suggestions on this and other heads are curiously supported by research 
 in other directions. Compare his remarks on primitive variations of verse 
 form with the early notions of Rabbi Azarias on Hebrew poetry, cited in 
 Lowth's Preliminary Dissertation on Isaiah, and later conclusions, as set 
 forth, for instance, in G. G. Bradley's Lectures on the Book of Job, p. ii. 
 Hennequin remarks {Ecrivains Fraticisds, p. 137), that Poe's views on metre 
 have been " since confirmed by German researches." 
 
 t I ought perhaps to except Foster, who (p. 64) pointed to the scarcity 
 of spondees in English, though without explicit reference to the question ot 
 hexameters. 
 
 X Ramsay, affirming that in French " quantity is unknown," proceeds to 
 allege that " the correct pronunciation of that tongue can only be attained 
 by abstaining from dwelling longer upon any one syllable than upon any 
 other ; and it is precisely this very peculiarity which renders it so difficult 
 for us to enunciate it with accuracy." This is simply hopeless nonsense, 
 and Ramsay evidently could not have intelligently noticed the pronunciation 
 of a single line of French verse. If there were no other difficulty in French 
 for British tongues than that he imagines, we should all be boulevardiers. 
 
 367 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 startling- proposition of Mr. Lowell * that Diderot's choice of 
 prose for his dramas was " dictated and justified by the 
 accentual poverty of his mother tongue." Yet Mr. Lowell 
 would surely not have set the verse of Lessing, which he 
 disparageSjf above Hugo's ; and it is hardly conceivable that 
 he would deny to Hugo's and Musset's and Baudelaire's verse, 
 meaning apart, great rhythmic resource. Mr. Arnold has like- 
 wise spoken of the monotony of the French alexandrine ; but 
 he is answered by Mr. F. W. H. Myers, J who points out 
 that 
 
 There is no normal arrangement of feet to which a French alexandrine 
 tends to ream-. All that is necessary is that there should be an accent (and 
 consequently the end of a word) in the sixth place, and again in the twelfth 
 place, at the end of the line. It is therefore a mistake to try to read French 
 alexandrines as if they were to be referred to an iambic type. The number 
 of accented syllables in a French alexandrine varies, and their position 
 varies also. Sometimes the line has no marked accents except in the sixth 
 and twelfth places ; sometimes it has a marked iambic character, sometimes 
 an anapaestic character. 
 
 Still, the opinion that French verse is accentless is continually 
 heard. It is expressed by a very competent critic of verse, Mr. 
 William Larminie, in a very intelligent recent study on The 
 
 * Essay on Lessing, in English Pods, Camelot ed, , p. 305, n. 
 
 f When so much is being made of the supposed monotony of the French 
 alexandrine, it is worth while to cast a glance at the German management 
 of pentameter blank verse, which normally makes that measure as mono- 
 tonous as any, despite its capacities. Lessing secures pause-variety by 
 losing all fluidity ; and Schiller, in preserving fluidity, often becomes un- 
 bearably monotonous. The vice of sing-song inheres deeply in his dramatic 
 verse. Coleridge said " it moved like a fly in a glue-pot," but that is inex- 
 pressive exaggeration. It moves in a rut, Schiller being bent on imitating 
 Shakspere, but unable to catch the nervous ever- varying pulse of Shak- 
 spere's versification ; so that he gives us the echo of Shakspere's orotundity 
 without the oceanic diversity of vibration which in Shakspere almost always 
 vitalises the rhetoric. He resorts at times to desperate devices by way of 
 varying his rhythm, such as ending lines alternately with words of one and 
 two syllables ; but the effect is only to reveal his failure to seize the higher 
 secrets of blank verse. Perhaps there never will be first-rate German blank 
 verse (for English ears) on the English model. German is, perhaps, too 
 polysyllabic for the finer effects, just as French seems too clean cut for the 
 rolling effects. German tragedies should be in prose (even Heine fails to 
 make nervous blankverse), and German epics in Vossian hexameters. 
 
 X Essays: Modern, p. 123. Compare the remarks of Mr. George Moore, 
 Confessions of a Young Man, pp. 308-g, to similar effect. 
 
 368 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Development of English Metres. Mr. Larminie undertakes to 
 show, and does show, what Foster showed long ago, and 
 others have shown since, that, despite endless assertions to the 
 contrary, English verse contains an element of quantity operat- 
 ing through a?td conditioning stress. He makes out his case by 
 noting what Gaily and Foster alike noted, that syllables differ 
 in length in respect not merely of vowel-lengths but of the 
 varying difficulty of combining certain consonants quickly. We 
 need not go anew into that point, further than to note that Mr. 
 Larminie does not recognise the complexity of the problem as 
 to ancient quantities, which he unduly simplifies. The 
 specially challengeable part of his doctrine is what follows : 
 
 The language, however, has other resources [than quantity]. How do 
 they compare with those of other languages? Latin, which has a nwch 
 more perfect quantity, has no stress. But English has stress of a very 
 energetic kind, which greatly helps out the quantitative deficiencies. Italian 
 has no quantity, but it has stress. French has 7ieither* 
 
 This is one more proof of what Mr. Larminie himself remarks, 
 that questions of versification in general are still very un- 
 settled. I really do not understand how he can illustrate his 
 doctrine as to either Italian or French verse. To say that 
 Italian verse has no quantity, but only stress, in terms of Mr. 
 Larminie's own definitions, is to imply that its syllables vary 
 only in respect of stress and non-stress. Now it clearly varies 
 also in respect of the varying values of the non-stressed 
 syllables. In the second line of the Divina Commedia^ 
 
 Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, 
 
 we Kave the a in selva not merely unstressed but passed over 
 more quickly than the a in ima^ the final a in selva and the o in 
 oscura being pronounced together in something like the time 
 given to the a in una. In the fifth line : 
 
 Questa selva selvdggia ed aspra e forte, 
 
 we have a similar shortening twice. Then in Italian verse 
 some syllables, apart from stress, are pronounceable more 
 quickly than others ; which characteristic is exactly what Mr. 
 Larminie has shown quantity to consist-in in English. The fact 
 that the leading quantitative features in the two languages are not 
 
 * Article cited, Contetnporary Review, November, 1894, pp. 725-6, 
 
 369 2 A 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 the same — that in English we often find syllables made harder to 
 enounce by collocation of consonants, while in Italian we only 
 find syllables made specially easy by collocation of vowels — 
 does not alter the essentials of the case. In English we do 
 find the Italian phenomenon, if not vice versa. And it was 
 doubtless perception of the common quantitative element 
 or possibility in the verse of the two languages that led Milton 
 to his boldest innovations in blank verse, as in the opening 
 line of the Paradise Lost, which instantaneously upsets the 
 commonplace iambic model and creates an English verse with 
 a Dantean freedom of scansion. 
 
 As to the statement that French, again, has neither stress 
 nor quantity, let us take, from a contemporary authority on 
 French prosody, a few samples of scansion of alexandrines of 
 
 Racine : 
 
 Oui, je viens dans son tem^^le. a.dorer VKternei, 
 Je vieus selon Tu^^ge an//que et solen?/^/, 
 C€[6hrer avec vous la fsLjneuse jour«/e 
 Ou sur le mon^ Si/ia la loi nous fut don«^e. 
 
 Here we have, with four marked stresses in each line, two 
 distinct rhythms, that of the first and third lines being anap^stic, 
 that of the second and fourth iambic — to use the old terms 
 where they really have a descriptive value. But though the 
 iambic movement, mechanically scanned, gives six feet or beats 
 where the anapaestic movement gives only four, yet the habit of 
 giving four marked metrical stresses brings it about that two of 
 the iambs [selon and et sol) are relatively short ; so that though 
 quantity is indeed a less noticeable factor in French verse than 
 in either English or Italian, there is here a certain included 
 element of quantity, while the element of stress is salient and 
 all-important. I confess that for me the sudden and sharp 
 transition from the anapaestic to the iambic movement, line by 
 line, is somewhat disconcerting and unenjoyable ; but for 
 Frenchmen it is evidently otherwise.* The truth is that French 
 
 * M. Castil-Blaze, in his L' Art des Vers Lyriques (1858), p. 18, warmly 
 denounces the vers antipathiques in which the movement trips vip and 
 changes ; but he seems to resent them only on behalf of the singers who 
 have to sing them. For an English reader the objection holds equally 
 good against verse for reading, where iambic lines alternate with anapoestic, 
 and where a single line may alter its stride after the caesura. It would 
 seem, however, that whereas the greater elasticity of rhythm and range of 
 
 370 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 heroic verse, though unfortunately fixed rather closely to a 
 tradition in the limitary period associated with the name of 
 Malherbe, has been gradually suppled like every other, 
 especially where it is handled by masters. Frenchmen go 
 back to-day with pleasure to Racine because he had the gift of 
 varying his rhythm, thus meeting the fundamental craving set 
 up by all marked monotonies. He even deviated from the 
 main rule that the stress in French verse shall fall on the last 
 syllable of all words not ending in e mute, as in the lines (thus 
 scanned by M. Defodon) : 
 
 Dieu p^7/;Ta vous vaontrcr par ^'wxx^oxtants bienftz/Vi 
 Que sa parc>/^ est j.vzble et ne Xxoxnpe ']a.mais ; 
 
 and again in this, in Andromaque : 
 
 Non, non, il les veiva triompher sans obstacle ; 
 II se ^ardera bien de troubler ce spectacle, 
 
 \\here triompher can only be stressed on the last syllable by 
 
 changing abruptly from iambus to anapaest, and where gardera 
 
 can only be read as a dactyl, in complete contravention of the 
 
 dogma of the final syllable. So too Boileau, disregarding the 
 
 normal stress in French on the second syllable of " Florence," 
 
 has written 
 
 Dans Flo'ence jaJis v'wait un m^derm. 
 
 An English taste, indeed, is surprised to find that the French 
 ear does not allow a latitude of another kind. M. Defodon, 
 insisting on the rule of four main stresses or beatSj rejects as 
 prosaic the second of these fines of Moli^re, because of its six 
 
 stresses : 
 
 Quel avant(7^(? Q.-i-07i qu'un /lomme vous car<5i-se 
 Vousy'z^re amit/V./c/, z^le, esfime, tendresse 
 
 — where, there being no jostling change in the rhythm, an 
 English ear would be disposed to find an agreeable variation, 
 somewhat as in that line of Tennyson cited for its newness by 
 Mr. Watson : 
 
 Sucked from the dark heart of the long hills roll 
 The torrents. 
 
 accentuation in English gives us the requisite variety of movement, without 
 resort to abrupt alterations, and so leaves us hostile to them, the old 
 alexandrine, at least, either needed abrupt transitions to relieve it, or only 
 admitted of such when framed by the rules. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 As '.vas pointed out ages ago by commentators on Virgil, 
 variation q{ pause in a given rhythm is one of the secrets of the 
 best versification, at least in blank verse : and it was shown at 
 least as early as last century, by an English critic of somewhat 
 precarious insight,* that in Latin and English alike the great 
 artist, Virgil or Milton, is marked off from the inferior artist, 
 Ovid or Cowley, by this very faculty of pause variation f 
 among other things. Ronsard, a man of genius, felt \ the 
 tendency to monotony in the alexandrine, and wrote his 
 Franciade in another measure by way of protest. This alone, 
 however, would not have cured the trouble even if the new 
 metre had been generally adopted. Part of the harm lay in 
 the common lack of pause-variation— a lack which is nearly as 
 obvious in the English heroic couplet, in most hands, as in the 
 French alexandrine. Pope's skill partly consisted in varying 
 its stresses. As Foster noted,§ there is an element of special 
 vivacity in his verse, in respect that the iambic line there 
 frequently begins with a trochee, as in 
 
 Die of a rose in aromatic pain — 
 
 a variation which does not disorder the movement, seeing that 
 the line-pause prevents any shock. And while Englishmen 
 were generally complacent over their rhymed couplet, many 
 critical Frenchmen were complaining of the monotony of their 
 classic alexandrine, the special trouble of which is the median 
 caesura, or central pause. It is certainly a little difficult to 
 explain how the French have been so long fettered by that 
 when they have secured so much variation of stress in other 
 ways, especially seeing that in this regard also freedom 
 anciently existed. Dr. Nordau is not without justification when 
 he jeers, II in his very Teutonic manner, at the young French 
 
 * Letters concerning Poetical Translations, and Virgil' s and Milton's 
 Art of Verse, 1713. Attributed to William Benson, This writer avowedly 
 owes much to Erythrosus (J. V. Rossi), who anticipated Poe in pointing out 
 the element of rhyme in classic Latin verse, and Mr. Lanier in dwelHng on 
 vowel-colour. 
 
 t " The sense variously drawn out from one verse to another" (Milton, 
 pref. note to Par. Lost). 
 
 X See the preface to his Franciade. 
 
 § As cited, p. 59. It is to be noted that Foster also recognised the 
 rhythmic supremacy of Milton. 
 
 li La Di^g^Tu'rescence, French trans., i. 24^-^. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 poets who exult so much in the discovery of a freedom which 
 other literatures had attained long ago. As a matter of fact it 
 had once belonged to French verse as to others. M. Quicherat 
 cites* from Jean de Meung (1260-1320) the alexandrine : 
 Quand I'entr^e est mauvaise du bien spirital ; 
 
 and from Clement Marot the decasyllabic line : 
 Par sainte eglise christianissime, 
 
 where the csesural stress falls in the middle of a word, thus 
 prohibiting a pause. As regards verse of ten syllables, where 
 the problem arises in the same way as in that of twelve, he is 
 able to cite f from the anonymous fifteenth-century poem I' An 
 des sept dames a whole series of lines in which the bondage of 
 the Ccesura is shunned : 
 
 Je te supplie, 6 toi plaisante Muse 
 Que les poetes nomment Ar^thuse .... 
 Et vous, naiades, dresses tres belles .... 
 Parnii les ivches et resonnans bois, 
 
 and so on. Indeed M. Quicherat declares the disregard ot 
 Ccesural pause to have been one of the characteristic traits of the 
 French versification of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 
 Lost to the alexandrine in the classic period, the early freedom 
 was partly preserved in pentameters even by Voltaire, as in the 
 
 Hnes 
 
 II ne re/ose point, car je I'entends .... 
 Elle vous traht mal, mais la nature. 
 
 Why the liberty should have been held permissible in the 
 shorter verse and not in the longer is not quite easy to guess. 
 It would seem as if the latter, being the nearest analogue to the 
 ancient hexameter, fell specially under the ferule of the pedants ; 
 whose verse-sense had as a rule been racked to atrophy by the 
 traditional classic prosodies, till at length, reducing all the 
 antique range of cadences to one type, they made the alex- 
 andrine the very model of monotony. They refused to allow 
 even the device of slurring the c^sura by continuity of syntax 
 and sense, as in the line 
 
 Ce dieu dent le courroux brulant est si terrible, 
 
 * TraiU de versifica{io)i francalse, 2e ^dit,, 1850, note 2, p. 323. 
 t Id. ib. 
 
 373 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 in vetoing which M. Quicherat joins with the Port Royal, 
 though the most magistral of rebukes to their fanaticism 
 lay under their eyes in the very first verse of the Georgics : 
 
 Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram. 
 
 Under such tyranny lay the alexandrine during ages in which 
 all other tyrannies were shaken. Perhaps the latter fact suffi- 
 ciently explains the former; but whatever be the explanation of 
 the delay, it has at last come about that, whereas Racine gave 
 variety of accent to the alexandrine short of meddling with the 
 middle pause,* and Ch^nier gave a new variety of stops and 
 clause-pauses, Hugo went far to break down the middle C£e5ura,t 
 till at length some contemporary poets (notably Verlaine and 
 his school) boldly put the "sixth place" once more in the middle 
 of a word. So that even Mr. Myers is now wrong in saying 
 that the alexandrine must have its middle caesura on the last 
 syllable of a word : that rule too is going by the board. It is 
 further (we have seen) a mistake to say even as regards verse, 
 as Mr. Myers does, that " in the French tongue the accent 
 always falls on the last syllable of a word except when that 
 syllable has a mute e for its only vowel." There is the final a to 
 be allowed for, as in the pourra of Racine's line above cited. 
 Mounet-Sully in Zaire, too, scans one line thus : 
 
 Et le rest | e du jour | sera tout | a Zaire, 
 
 CO _ 
 
 making sera tout an anapaest like the other " feet." I do not see 
 how the line could well be scanned otherwise. 
 
 As regards accentuation in prose, again, the old formula is 
 still more exceptionable. It is to be noted, indeed, that French- 
 men themselves have in recent times come to new views as to 
 the nature of their accent. The all-learned Littr^ attributes to 
 
 * He may indeed be said to have meddled with it in the sense that he 
 sometimes made it doubly marked, as in these verses of MithrUate : 
 
 Je ne le croirai point ? Vain espoir qui me flatte ! 
 Tu ne le crois que trop, malheureux Mithridate. 
 
 Either the first of these lines is bad, making " vain espoir " an anapaest, or 
 we must read it with such a pause as to make five stresses, 
 
 Je ne le crc^trai point ? Vain espoir qui nxo, flatXA, 
 
 which comes pretty near Arma viruinque cano in total rhythm, 
 t Ch. Renouvier, Victor Hugo: lepoHe, ch, xiii. 
 
 374 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 our own century the discovery or the demonstration of the fact 
 that French verse is accentual : 
 
 C'est un italien, M. Scoppa, et apr^s lui, M. Quichdrat, dans son traits de 
 Versijication fra?iqaise, qui ont fait voir que notre vers est construit, comma 
 la plupart de ceux des langues modernes, sur le principe de I'accent. La 
 langue fran9aise est accentu^e comme toutes les langues ses soeurs ; seule- 
 ment I'accent au lieu d'occuper des places variables est toujours sur la 
 derni^re syllabe, quand la terminaison est masculine, et sur I'avant-derniere, 
 quand la terminaison est feminine. . . . Objectera-t-on que, I'accentuation 
 se faisant sentir k une place toujours la meme, il en r^sulte uniformity et 
 monotonie? Cela n'emp^cherait pas I'accent d'exister ; mais il n'y a ni 
 monotonie ni uniformity, les mots rdunis en phrases fournissent les combi- 
 naisons d'accents les plus varices. Voyez ces vers de Racine, ou je souligne 
 les syllabes accentudes : 
 
 ]a.mais vsiisseaux par/?j des rzves du Scamandre 
 Aux champs Thessaliefis osirent-ils des^^«dre ? 
 Et ia.mazs dans Lamse un Idche rayisseur 
 Me vmt-il en\ever ou ma/emme ou ma sceur? 
 
 II est impossible de trouver une intonation plus marquee : elle ne Test plus 
 davantage dans le grec ou I'italien.* 
 
 But Littrd, if one may presume to say so, has overlooked a 
 very explicit declaration by Turgot, last century, as to the 
 accentual character of French speech. In contravention of 
 some of Rousseau's dicta on French music, he wrote : 
 
 II n'est point vrai que I'essence de la langue franpaise est d'etre sans 
 accent. Point de conversation anim^e sans beaucoup d'accent ; mais 
 I'accent est libre et determine seulement par I'affection de celui qui parle, 
 sans etre fixe par des conventions sur certaines syllabes, quoique nous ayons 
 aussi dans plusieurs mots des syllabes dominantes qui seules peuvent §tre 
 accentu^es.f 
 
 This deliverance implies, inasmuch as it outgoes, the proposition 
 that French verse is accentual ; and it gives an alien the 
 courage to point out that in a great many French words of 
 three and more syllables the accent falls neither on the last 
 syllable nor on the penultimate to an e mute. In the above 
 passage itself we have conversation^ conve7ztioft, affection^ where 
 the antepenult either has the main stress, as in the first case, or 
 is at least equally stressed with the last syllable. And this 
 brings us to face with the fact that the French verse of the past 
 
 * Histoire cic la langue fi'ancaise , ^dit. 1863, i. 328-30. 
 f Letter to Caillard, CEuvres de Turgot, ii. 827. 
 
 375 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 limited the accentual resources of the language partly by choice 
 of words and partly by limitation of cadence. When Voltaire, 
 explaining the foreign unpopularity of the French music of his 
 day, wrote that " la prosodie frangaise est differente de toutes 
 celles de I'Europe. Nous appuyons toujours sur la derniere 
 syllabe ; et toutes les autres nations pesent sur la pdnultieme ou 
 sur I'antep^nultieme, ainsi que les Italiens," he wrote quite 
 inaccurately of foreign prosodies, as he did when he further 
 went on to say, "notre langue est la seule qui ait des mots 
 terminus par des e muets." * But he was further misleading 
 even as to his own verse (over and above the omission to except 
 words ending in e mute) inasmuch as he does not note that in 
 words of over three syllables there is often an earlier as heavily 
 stressed as the final. For instance, in his own lines in 
 
 Zaire : 
 
 D'effacer Orosmane en ginirosiU. . . . 
 Je la plains : mais pardonne k la nicessiti 
 Rappeler des Chretiens le culte incorruptible. . . . 
 Au h^ros dont tu viens 6! assassiner la fille, . . . 
 
 Again, no theory of final stress could be fully applied to lines 
 ending in Hon and ment^ as in these of the Philosophe Marid of 
 
 Destouches : 
 
 Plus je vous considere, avec attention, 
 Plus je vois que je cause ici d'^motion. . . . 
 Finette sous ses doigts sourit malignement. 
 
 So zealously, however, have the rule-makers set their faces 
 against the least relief to the classic cadence that we have 
 M. Du M^ril condemning Roucher's line 
 
 Les biches attendaient silencieusement. 
 
 " Dans les langues veritablement accentuees," he declares, "la 
 voix varie plusieurs fois ses intonations dans les mots qui ont 
 plus de trois syllabes, et cela lie pent avoir lieu en franqais : 
 c'est la cause du peu d'harmonie des vers ou se trouvent de trop 
 longs mots." t It is difficult not to feel that this is a merely 
 fanatical or pedantic denial to French verse of facilities which 
 are freely taken in ordinary speech, and that the line above 
 condemned is really more and not less '" harmonious " than the 
 average alexandrine. And when we turn to one of the later 
 
 * Sibcle de Louis XIV. Artistes CdUbres, ad init. 
 f Work before cited, p. 57. 
 
 376 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 poets who have given a new canorousness to French verse while 
 keeping all that is best in the classic spirit, we find these limitary 
 principles once for all set aside. M. Leconte de Lisle, for 
 instance, gives us : 
 
 Et de sa propre gloire un pur rayonnement 
 Environnait son front majestueusement. 
 
 Poemes Antiques. Bhagavat. 
 
 On the first page of the Poemes Antiques^ again, we have the 
 
 verse 
 
 L'abime primitif ruisselle lentement, 
 
 where the last word must bear at least as much stress on the 
 first as on the last syllable, with an effect that for an English 
 ear, at least, is admirable. French poets and French thinkers, 
 in fine, overthrow the tabus of French pedants and regulators,* 
 and warn us afresh that there is no mortmain in art. 
 
 Clearly, then, the problems of metres are intricate and full of 
 traps ; and no man is to be put out of court for even a real 
 stumble. But between normal fallibility and entire incompe- 
 tence there are all stages ; and the latter seems to have been the 
 state of many of the scholars with whose tradition Dr. Browne 
 would silence Foe. "As a proof of the total want of ear in 
 a great Greek scholar," Walker cites this from Lord Mon- 
 boddo : 
 
 Our accents differ from the Greek in two material respects. First, they 
 are not appropriated to particular syllables of the word, but are laid upon 
 different syllables, according to the fancy of the speaker, or rather as it 
 
 * As a matter of fact, no foreign critics have more sharply attacked tlie 
 rhythmical faults of average French verse than Frenchmen themselves have 
 done. M, Castil- Blaze speaks of " cette prose rim^e des Franpais, objet 
 d'une incessante derision, cette prose bafouee, vilipendee, a bon droit, par 
 des autres nations et meme par la notre !" and describes the French ear as 
 " perverti, corrompu des I'enfance par la doctrine de I'Universit^, par la 
 doctrine de I'Acad^mie " {L Art des vers lyrigues, pp. 20, 27). And he could 
 cite from Regnier, Saint-Amant, and Marmontel, as mottoes to his treatise, 
 similar attacks on past practice, winding up with a citation from the Essai 
 de rhytkmique francalse of M. Ducondut {1856), who declared that 
 
 Sans rivale notre scene 
 
 Fait envie aux nations ; 
 
 Mais sa lyre m^pris^e, 
 
 De r Europe la ris^e, 
 
 N'a qu'un son d'aigre fausset. . . . 
 
 377 ^E 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 happens : for I believe no man speaking English does, by choice, give an 
 accent to one syllable of a word different from that which he gives to 
 another. 
 
 It is not clear here, indeed, whether by "accent" Monboddo 
 meant voice-pitch or stress. If the former — which was Walker's 
 own definition, and Foster's — Monboddo was quite right, since 
 there is no invariable pitch in any man's utterance of any words. 
 Indeed it is difficult to beheve that he meant anything else. 
 But a clear proof of a learned Frenchman's difficulty in realising 
 the freedom of scansion arising out of the element of pause in 
 Enghsh verse, take these scansions of three English lines by 
 M. Du Mdril : 
 
 The treach'rous coloui's the fair art betray .... 
 In words as fashions the same rule will hold. 
 
 Pope [Essay on Criticisni). 
 
 Still to the last it rankles, a disease. 
 
 Byron [Childe Harold). 
 
 M. Du Mdril, scanning purely by equal feet, misses the time- 
 value of the clause-pauses. Into this error, however, he was 
 led by an English authority. Dr. Guest, who marks these very 
 lines in this way,* condemning them for misplacing stresses 
 instead of noting that they are to be read with special pauses 
 which save the rhythm. After that view of English verse-stress 
 from a scholarly Frenchman, misled by an English scholar and 
 specialist, no account of French accent from an Englishman can 
 well be surprising. And when it is so easy for instructed men 
 to err as to the verse of their living neighbours, it behoves us 
 all to eschew confidence in a confused tradition as to the nature 
 of the verse of dead languages. 
 
 * History of English Rhythms, Skeat's ed., pp. 82, 83. 
 
 378 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 NOTE 
 
 The foregoing discussion, tedious as it may be found, deals but 
 cursorily with many important questions of verse technique. 
 Those interested in carrying the investigation further will find 
 much instructive matter in the above-cited works of MM. Du 
 M^ril and Kawczynski (of whom the latter often coincides with 
 the former), and in that of Sidney Lanier, on the subject of the 
 sources of rhythm. As to French verse in particular, the 
 student should consult the recent and noteworthy work of 
 M. Robert de Souza, Le Rhythnie Poetique (Perrin et Cie., 1892), 
 and the treatise of the late E. O. Lubarsch, Ueber Dekla7nation 
 und Rhythnms der fraiizbsischeit Verse (Oppeln and Leipzig, 
 1888) — a rejoinder to R. Sonnenburg's Wie sind die franzosis- 
 chen Verse zu lesen ? (Berlin, 1885.) Dr. Lubarsch had pre- 
 viously written a Franzosische Verslehre (Berlin, 1879), ^^^ ^"^ 
 Abriss of that. 
 
 In the essay of Mr. Larminie, above cited, it is suggested that 
 English verse should seek new resources in assonance. Mr. 
 Larminie has not noted that the experiment has actually been 
 made more than once by Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. It has 
 also been made by some of the younger French poets. Mr. Lar- 
 minie's suggestion that the alternative to assonance, as a 
 widening of the field of verse, is the resort to prose, has been 
 emphatically anticipated by Walt Whitman. But, as M. Du 
 Meril notes (p. 21), it was anticipated by several critics of last 
 century, and in a manner by Goethe and Schiller. 
 
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